TwinBrainVLA: Unleashing the Potential of Generalist VLMs for Embodied Tasks via Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers
Authors: name: Bin Yu, name: Shijie Lian, name: Xiaopeng Lin, name: Yuliang Wei, name: Zhaolong Shen, name: Changti Wu, name: Yuzhuo Miao, name: Xinming Wang, name: Bailing Wang, name: Cong Huang, name: Kai Chen
Organization: Zhongguancun Academy

Standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically fine-tune a monolithic Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone explicitly for robotic control. However, this approach creates a critical tension between maintaining high-level general semantic understanding and learning low-level, fine-grained sensorimotor skills, often leading to "catastrophic forgetting" of the model's open-world capabilities. To resolve this conflict, we introduce TwinBrainVLA, a novel architecture that coordinates a generalist VLM retaining universal semantic understanding and a specialist VLM dedicated to embodied proprioception for joint robotic control. TwinBrainVLA synergizes a frozen "Left Brain", which retains robust general visual reasoning, with a trainable "Right Brain", specialized for embodied perception, via a novel Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (AsyMoT) mechanism. This design allows the Right Brain to dynamically query semantic knowledge from the frozen Left Brain and fuse it with proprioceptive states, providing rich conditioning for a Flow-Matching Action Expert to generate precise continuous controls. Extensive experiments on SimplerEnv and RoboCasa benchmarks demonstrate that TwinBrainVLA achieves superior manipulation performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines while explicitly preserving the comprehensive visual understanding capabilities of the pre-trained VLM, offering a promising direction for building general-purpose robots that simultaneously achieve high-level semantic understanding and low-level physical dexterity.