Beyond In-Distribution Preservation: Recovering Generalization in Quantized VLAs via Vulnerability-Oriented Tuning

Abstract

Post-training quantization has been shown to preserve VLA performance under standard evaluation conditions, but whether it preserves the full-precision model's robustness and generalization remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically study the robustness and generalization of post-quantized VLA policies under environmental disturbances. Empirical results show that quantized policies can become fragile to subtle environmental variations despite retaining comparable in-distribution performance. We further observe that action discrepancies are concentrated in a small subset of rollout states, while teacher guidance has opposite effects depending on discrepancy: it improves generalization at high-discrepancy states but can degrade it at low-discrepancy states. These findings reveal that effective post-quantization recovery requires selectively intervening on vulnerable states rather than globally distilling the student. We therefore propose Policy-Induced Vulnerability-Oriented Tuning (PIVOT-Q), a vulnerability-aware On-Policy Distillation (OPD) framework that selectively corrects vulnerable states encountered during quantized-student rollouts using the frozen full-precision policy as a teacher. PIVOT-Q identifies vulnerable states using discounted accumulated discrepancies over a short horizon, applies phase-balanced sparse supervision, and uses a Behavioral Anchor to prevent unnecessary changes. Experiments under seven LIBERO-Plus environmental variations demonstrate consistent recovery across multiple VLA backbones and quantization methods. Notably, PIVOT-Q consistently outperforms full-state distillation across all settings while using only 7.4% of its state-level distillation budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruanruan-andy/PIVOT-Q.