Policy-Aligned Predictive Verification for Adaptive VLA Action-Chunk Execution

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate action sequences that reduce repeated inference, but deciding how much of each sequence to execute is critical to task success. Existing adaptive methods make this decision using generation stability or prediction agreement, yet these signals do not establish whether executing a candidate prefix preserves the ability to complete the task. We introduce a policy-aligned predictive verifier (PAV) that anticipates the consequences of candidate action prefixes and evaluates their compatibility with successful continuation before execution. Rather than using future prediction to generate actions, our method evaluates existing proposals in the VLA's internal task-conditioned representation space. To learn local judgments from terminal task outcomes, we combine trajectory-level survival supervision with a localization prior that preserves useful behavior within failed rollouts. The resulting validity scores guide execution-horizon selection. Evaluations with pi_0 and pi_0.5 across LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world manipulation show improved success-query trade-offs. These findings point toward a different role for future prediction in robotics, using it to assess how far to trust a policy's proposed actions rather than to generate new ones.