GPT-6-Astra Understands Touch and Outperform Vision--Tactile--Language--Action Models

Ziyong Wang, Yupei Lin, Runxuan Huang, Liang Lin, Dongyu Zhang +1

General-purpose multimodal models have shown promise as direct robot action policies, yet whether they grasp the physics underlying real-world interactions and can apply that understanding to guide action remains underexplored. We investigate this question using contact-rich manipulation as a representative testbed, examining tactile understanding as a concrete instance of this broader capability. Contact-rich manipulation requires interpreting tactile feedback and adjusting actions after obstruction. Existing learned tactile policies acquire these capabilities through specialized pretraining and per-task optimization, with substantial data and training costs. We present GPT-as-Tactile-Policy, which summarizes expert demonstrations into task guidance and tactile references for contact assessment and corrective action. GPT-6-Astra combines this context with multimodal observations and interaction history to generate control commands and adjust actions through contact feedback. Without additional robotics-specific pretraining or per-task policy fine-tuning, our method achieves 93.8\% mean success across five UniVTAC tasks. Overall performance is comparable to state-of-the-art…