VLA-Retain: Benchmarking Cross-Dimension Effects of Vision Tuning in VLAs

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models transfer knowledge from large-scale pretraining into robot control, but their manipulation performance remains sensitive to changes in observation conditions, which recent work addresses by fine-tuning the visual module on target-domain data. However, it remains unclear how such adaptation affects robustness beyond the target condition, as existing robustness benchmarks only evaluate models without fine-tuning and adaptation studies only report the target gain. Measuring this cross-dimension effect requires separating target gains from off-target changes, isolating adaptation effects from architectural differences, ruling out generic forgetting, and comparing tuning choices. Therefore, we introduce VLA-Retain, a benchmark that compares five open VLA models, tuned on Camera-view or Sensor-noise data, with their own base checkpoints on LIBERO-Plus dataset spanning seven perturbation dimensions. Our study reveals four findings. First, targeted vision tuning is not local, and its target gain does not predict retention. Mean off-target gain is negative in 8 of 10 model--domain configurations. Under Camera-view tuning, X-VLA gains $69.4$ percentage points on the target but loses $4.6$ points on average elsewhere, whereas OpenVLA-OFT gains $39.3$ and $1.4$ points, respectively. Second, these regressions are not explained only by performance loss on the same tasks without perturbations. Third, broader training coverage raises overall gain over target-specific training but does not eliminate dimension-level regressions. Fourth, tuning strategies are model-dependent, as DELTA-style feature preservation raises X-VLA's mean off-target gain to $+1.2$ points but lowers OpenVLA-OFT's to $-23.1$. Overall, these findings show that target-domain success alone is insufficient and highlight cross-dimensional retention as a key criterion for targeted VLA adaptation.