{"id":1155896,"date":"2025-11-18T07:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T15:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1155896"},"modified":"2026-02-17T16:56:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T00:56:47","slug":"twinvla-data-efficient-bimanual-manipulation-with-twin-single-arm-vision-language-action-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/twinvla-data-efficient-bimanual-manipulation-with-twin-single-arm-vision-language-action-models\/","title":{"rendered":"TwinVLA: Data-Efficient Bimanual Manipulation with Twin Single-Arm Vision-Language-Action Models"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vision-language-action models (VLAs) trained on large-scale robotic datasets have demonstrated strong performance on manipulation tasks, including bimanual tasks. However, because most public datasets focus on single-arm demonstrations, adapting VLAs for bimanual tasks typically requires substantial additional bimanual data and fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce TwinVLA, a modular framework that composes two copies of a pretrained single-arm VLA into a coordinated bimanual VLA. Unlike monolithic cross-embodiment models trained on mixtures of single-arm and bimanual data, TwinVLA improves both data efficiency and performance by composing pretrained single-arm policies. Across diverse bimanual tasks in real-world and simulation settings, TwinVLA outperforms a comparably-sized monolithic RDT-1B model without requiring any bimanual pretraining. Furthermore, it narrows the gap to state-of-the-art model, \\(\\pi_0\\) which rely on extensive proprietary bimanual data and compute cost. These results establish our modular composition approach as a data-efficient and scalable path toward high-performance bimanual manipulation, leveraging public single-arm data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vision-language-action models (VLAs) trained on large-scale robotic datasets have demonstrated strong performance on manipulation tasks, including bimanual tasks. However, because most public datasets focus on single-arm demonstrations, adapting VLAs for bimanual tasks typically requires substantial additional bimanual data and fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce TwinVLA, a modular framework that composes two copies of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"ICLR 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