Start Right, Arrive Right: Asynchronous Execution via Initial Noise Selection

Action chunking enables robot policies to produce temporally coherent behavior, but generating multi-step action sequences with flow-based policies incurs latency that is incompatible with real-time control. Under asynchronous execution, the robot continues executing the current chunk while the next one is generated, causing even minor delays to create inconsistencies at chunk boundaries. Existing methods address this problem by steering generation toward the already executed action prefix. We instead show that prefix consistency can be achieved by selecting an appropriate initial noise before generation begins, allowing the unmodified flow ODE to produce a coherent next chunk. This reframes asynchronous inference as a noise selection problem rather than a trajectory steering problem. We introduce \textbf{PAINT}, a training-free method that finds this noise via backward Euler inversion and constructs the final chunk through a repainting rule. In summary, \texttt{PAINT} requires no gradients, retraining, or policy modification; yet it improves execution consistency and task performance across \textit{12 simulated benchmarks} and \textit{6 real-world manipulation tasks} spanning single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid embodiments. Website: ~\href{https://paint-action-chunking.github.io}{\texttt{https://paint-action-chunking.github.io}}.

EquiVLA: A General Framework for Rotationally Equivariant Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generalist robot manipulation, yet they lack geometric inductive biases: policies trained at specific orientations require substantially more data to generalize across rotational configurations. We present \textsc{EquiVLA}, the first general framework for end-to-end $\mathrm{SO}(2)$-equivariant VLA models, applicable to any architecture coupling a frozen vision-language backbone with a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer action head. \textsc{EquiVLA} introduces \textsc{EquiPerceptor}, which produces approximately $\mathrm{SO}(2)$-equivariant visual representations from frozen ViT features; and \textsc{EquiActor}, an exactly $\mathrm{SO}(2)$-equivariant flow-matching Diffusion Transformer action head. Together, they establish an approximate $\mathrm{SO}(2)$ equivariance chain from camera observations to predicted action sequences. Instantiated on GR00T~N1.5 and evaluated across four LIBERO suites, CALVIN ABCD$\to$D, and five real-robot tasks on Mobile ALOHA, \textsc{EquiVLA} achieves $92.6\%$ average success on LIBERO (vs. $78.1\%$ baseline), an average sequence length of $4.03$ on CALVIN (vs. $3.45$), and improves real-robot success from $54\%$ to $72\%$.