GS-VLA: Plug-and-Play Viewpoint Canonicalization for Frozen VLA Policies via Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

This paper proposes a lightweight, plug-and-play framework that improves robustness to viewpoint shifts in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies without policy retraining. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to directly leverage 3D Gaussian-based novel-view synthesis for observation-space adaptation in VLA policies. Current VLA performance relies on the implicit assumption that training and deployment camera configurations are identical. Our experiments show that even a small displacement of the camera mount can reduce the success rate on the LIBERO benchmark from about 90% to about 10% in the worst case. Prior approaches, such as large-scale fine-tuning or generative data augmentation, are computationally expensive and risk catastrophic forgetting. To address this, viewpoint shifts are reformulated as a localized novel-view synthesis problem. Under a Locality assumption, that camera perturbations remain within a small bounded region relative to the workspace, viewpoint normalization reduces to a scene- and policy-independent disocclusion task. Our work implements this idea with a 4M-parameter 3D-Gaussian canonicalizer prepended to a frozen VLA policy. Without modifying policy weights, GS-VLA improves performance across three orthogonal axes: (1) Policy architectures, (2) Unseen task suites, and (3) Perturbation scales. These results show that a lightweight visual module can recover a large fraction of the performance lost under viewpoint shift, without policy retraining.