TacForcing: Streaming Action Generation with Execution-Time Tactile Feedback
Abstract
Contact-rich manipulation requires adapting to contact states that can evolve substantially within an action horizon. However, chunk-based vision-language-action models predict complete action chunks from observations collected before execution, leaving tactile conditioning stale during execution. Existing tactile-reactive approaches typically rely on separate high-frequency controllers, which increase both architectural and training complexity. In this paper, we introduce TacForcing, a streaming action-generation framework incorporating execution-time tactile feedback. TacForcing replaces the standard action expert with a streaming expert that generates action blocks sequentially while preserving intermediate states of unfinished blocks. After each block is executed, the expert resumes generation from these states using newly acquired tactile feedback. To better align tactile conditioning with action execution, we further introduce Execution-Aware Tactile Attention (EATA), which restricts direct access to each tactile update to the next block scheduled for execution. Across six UniVTAC simulation tasks and six real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks on two robot platforms, TacForcing achieves average success rates of 65% in simulation and 66% in the real world, outperforming the strongest baselines by 6 and 15 percentage points, respectively.
