Retrieve to Act: Motion Primitive Graph Retrieval for Robust VLA Execution

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies demonstrate remarkable semantic generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) visual shifts during execution. While existing test-time methods attempt to suppress spurious visual cues, they fundamentally overlook the rich, uncorrupted kinematic priors embedded in the policy's own training experience. We introduce Retrieve to Act (R2A), a test-time scaling framework that formulates OOD robustness purely as a geometric motion primitive retrieval problem. R2A bypasses fragile visual features by structuring successful training demonstrations into an offline spatiotemporal motion primitive graph. During inference, a query-dependent Graph Neural Network dynamically localizes the robot's ongoing execution within this graph, retrieving structurally compatible future motion primitives. These retrieved geometric priors are then seamlessly harmonized with the frozen VLA's predicted actions via a learned, dimension-wise gating mechanism, adaptively rectifying erroneous spatial trajectories while preserving the policy's local reactivity. Extensive experiments across three state-of-the-art VLA architectures, GR00T N1.7, $\pi_{0.5}$, and StableVLA, demonstrate that R2A consistently and significantly enhances robustness against diverse contextual perturbations. R2A achieves absolute success rate improvements of up to +12% in simulation benchmarks (LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin2.0-Plus) and +40% in real-world deployments, without requiring any finetuning of the base policies. Project page: https://retrieve2act.github.io/r2a/