JevVLA: Jev-Inspired Energy-Based Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can select among discrete candidates for pick-and-place manipulation or generate continuous action chunks for motion control. Improving both forms of decision making through a common mechanism while retaining the capabilities of a pretrained policy is an important adaptation problem. Inspired by Jev's structured, probabilistic decision interface, we propose JevVLA, a lightweight energy-based adaptation framework for VLA policies. JevVLA instantiates this inspiration by modeling the relative quality of action proposals: with the base policy frozen, it learns a differentiable scalar energy conditioned on observations, task context, and actions, using execution feedback, expert corrections, or demonstration-derived preferences. JevVLA uses this single learned action preference function in two ways: its values compare discrete candidates, while its action gradients correct continuous actions or guide their generation. Candidate selection and continuous control thus share one trainable decision core. Each benchmark uses independently trained weights and fixed input/output encodings, while retaining the same core network with approximately 80,000 trainable parameters. On the held-out test sets, JevVLA improves task success over the respective matched base-policy controls by 1.28, 2.31, 1.60, 1.52, and 1.28 percentage points on MetaWorld MT50, VIMA, LanguageTable, LIBERO Plus, and CLIPort, respectively. These results support the feasibility of a lightweight, Jev-inspired energy model for adapting both discrete action selection and continuous action guidance. The JevVLA implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/ZJU4EmbodiedAI/JevVLA.