Title: RoVer: Robot Reward Model as Test-Time Verifier for Vision-Language-Action Model
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: Vision-Language-Action(VLA) Model, Test-Time scaling, Reward Modeling

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a prominent paradigm for embodied intelligence, yet further performance improvements typically rely on scaling up training data and model size -- an approach that is prohibitively expensive for robotics and fundamentally limited by data collection costs. We address this limitation with $\mathbf{RoVer}$, an embodied test-time scaling framework that uses a $\mathbf{Ro}$bot Process Reward Model (PRM) as a Test-Time $\mathbf{Ver}$ifier to enhance the capabilities of existing VLA models without modifying their architectures or weights.
Specifically, RoVer (i) assigns scalar-based process rewards to evaluate the reliability of candidate actions, and (ii) predicts an action-space direction for candidate expansion/refinement. During inference, RoVer generates multiple candidate actions concurrently from the base policy, expands them along PRM-predicted directions, and then scores all candidates with PRM to select the optimal action for execution. Notably, by caching shared perception features, it can amortize perception cost and evaluate more candidates under the same test-time computational budget. Essentially, our approach effectively transforms available computing resources into better action decision-making, realizing the benefits of test-time scaling without extra training overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoVer consistently improves success rates across diverse manipulation tasks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a general, plug-and-play test-time scaling framework for VLAs; (2) a PRM that jointly provides scalar process rewards and an action-space direction to guide exploration; and (3) an efficient direction-guided sampling strategy that leverages a shared perception cache to enable scalable candidate generation and selection during inference.

TL;DR: RoVer boosts Vision-Language-Action models by using a Process Reward Model to score and refine candidate actions, converting extra test-time compute into higher success without extra training.