Domain Arithmetic: One-Shot VLA Adaptation under Environmental Shifts
Authors: name: Taewook Kang, name: Taeheon Kim, name: Donghyun Shin, name: Jonghyun Choi
Organization: Seoul National University

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often fail to perform the same learned tasks under environmental shifts, such as changes in camera pose and shifts to a different but similar robot (e.g., from Panda to UR5e). Adapting these models to the shifted environment (i.e., target domain) often requires training on multiple demonstrations for each task, which are costly to collect. To reduce the burden of data curation and training, we propose an analogy-based method that adapts VLA models under environmental shifts through weight vector arithmetic with domain-specific information addition, named Domain ARiThmetic (DART). Unlike prior approaches, DART requires collecting only a single demonstration, enabling efficient adaptation. To accurately isolate domain-specific information for addition, DART performs subspace alignment between singular components in weight vectors to filter out noisy components. In both simulated and real-world experiments, DART outperforms existing VLA adaptation methods in one-shot scenarios across diverse visual and embodiment shifts. Code is available at https://github.com/snumprlab/dart.