Tsinghua and others propose ART framework: plug-and-play tool use for VLA models, boosting success rate by about 20%

Tsinghua University and other institutions have proposed the ART (Agentic Robot with Tool-use) framework, which can fine-tune any end-to-end VLA model into an agent capable of plug-and-play use of external tools. The method uses 30,000 tool-call trajectories and two-stage LoRA fine-tuning, achieving average success rates of about 75% in LIBERO simulation and about 62% on a real Astribot S1 robot, an improvement of about 20% over baselines such as OpenVLA and π0.