DiTEA: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in Robotic Manipulation

Abstract The current diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have faster inference speed and the ability to solve the action muti-modality problem in robot manipulation tasks compared to traditional autoregressive models after large-scale pre-training and post-training. However, the diffusion-based VLA models were found to have poor instruction-following ability, and after fine-tuning training on multiple tasks, them often suffer from "skill forgetting" due to conflicting model weights on each task. To address this problem, we propose DiTEA, a Diffusion Transformer-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) VLA model. Specifically, it fuses the MoE module into the action head of VLA to form Action MoE, and in addition, we design the Task-Instruction Gate, which uses language instructions to select specific experts for tasks they specialize in, in order to improve the VLA's instruction-following ability. We conducted comprehensive experiments and ablation study to evaluate the efficacy of our model under different designs. Experimental results from simulation and real-world show that our DiTEA has excellent improvement in multi-task compared to baseline and other VLAs.