MAST-VLA: Skill-Conditioned Adaptation with Trajectory-Affordance Priors for Multi-Skill Robot Manipulation

Overview & Synopsis

Generalist robot manipulation requires a single vision-language-action (VLA) policy to execute diverse skills across scenes and instructions. However, current multi-skill VLA policies often leave two aspects of an instruction insufficiently modeled: which primitive skill to execute and where/how to contact and move objects. We propose MAST-VLA (Multi-skill Adaptation with Skill-conditioned experts and Trajectory-affordance priors), a dual-conditioning framework for robot manipulation. MAST-VLA introduces skill-conditioned LoRA Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) adapters in the LLM backbone, where skill-query tokens and routing biases guide low-rank expert specialization, and converts a predicted affordance heatmap into a patch-level trajectory-affordance spatial prior for the action head. On the CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D long-horizon multi-skill cross-scene generalization setting, MAST-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an Avg. Len of 4.65 over five-subtask evaluation sequences. Real-robot multi-skill sequence experiments further validate its deployability under real perception and control noise.