Controlling Action-Head Co-Adaptation to VLM Representation Anisotropy

Abstract

Modern learning systems increasingly combine pretrained models with downstream heads. Despite the growing importance of such modular designs, how the downstream model co-adapts to the geometry of pretrained representations remains relatively underexplored. We study this problem through vision-language-action models (VLAs), where a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) conditions an action model for control. We find that the action model progressively concentrates its sensitivity on high-variance dimensions of the VLM outputs. Through controlled experiments across different backbone-head models, we further show that counteracting this sensitivity concentration can be beneficial under representation–task mismatch settings. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Adaptive Interface Equalizer (AdaIE), a parameter-free mechanism that reweights pretrained representations according to the evolving downstream sensitivity during training. AdaIE improves VLA success rates on simulation benchmarks, with gains of up to $+5.28$ percentage points (pp) on RoboCasa-GR1 and $+1.68$ pp on RoboTwin 2.0, and achieves an average gain of $+19$ pp across five real-world manipulation tasks. It further generalizes to diffusion policies and world models, improving downstream performance in both settings. Our results highlight interface co-adaptation as an important optimization problem when coupling pretrained representations with downstream models.