{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T03:00:13Z","timestamp":1773802813098,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"22","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced in robotic manipulation, yet practical deployment remains hindered by two key limitations: **1) perceptual redundancy**, where irrelevant visual inputs are processed inefficiently, and **2) superficial instruction-vision alignment**, which hampers semantic grounding of actions.\nIn this paper, we propose **SemanticVLA**, a novel VLA framework that performs Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation. Specifically:\n**1)** To sparsify redundant perception while preserving semantic alignment, **Semantic-guided Dual Visual Pruner (SD-Pruner)** performs: Instruction-driven Pruner (ID-Pruner) extracts global action cues and local semantic anchors in SigLIP; Spatial-aggregation Pruner (SA-Pruner) compacts geometry-rich features into task-adaptive tokens in DINOv2.\n**2)** To exploit sparsified features and integrate semantics with spatial geometry, **Semantic-complementary Hierarchical Fuser (SH-Fuser)** fuses dense patches and sparse tokens across SigLIP and DINOv2 for coherent representation.\n**3)** To enhance the transformation from perception to action, **Semantic-conditioned Action Coupler (SA-Coupler)** replaces the conventional observation-to-DoF approach, yielding more efficient and interpretable behavior modeling for manipulation tasks.\nExtensive experiments on simulation and real-world tasks show that SemanticVLA sets a new SOTA in both performance and efficiency. SemanticVLA surpasses OpenVLA on LIBERO benchmark by **21.1%** in success rate, while reducing training cost and inference latency by **3.0\u00d7** and **2.7\u00d7**.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i22.38904","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:59:23Z","timestamp":1773795563000},"page":"18397-18405","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["SemanticVLA: Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Wei","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Renshan","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Rui","family":"Shao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Zhijian","family":"Fang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Kaiwen","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Zhuotao","family":"Tian","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Liqiang","family":"Nie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38904\/42866","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38904\/42866","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:59:23Z","timestamp":1773795563000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/38904"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"22","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i22.38904","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}