RouterVLA: Budgeted Commissioning and Expert Onboarding for Growing VLA Pools

Abstract

Robotic teams often maintain several vision-language-action policies but still deploy one global winner. We study two recurring decisions: which expert to deploy for a new condition and which candidate to add to the pool. RouterVLA combines a split-clean prior and outcome-disjoint probes with onboarding that credits only failures the incumbent pool cannot handle. Under an exactly cost-matched probe budget, it reaches 60.53\% held-out success, a $+1.64\pp$ gain over a semantic shortlist. Both criteria independently converge on the same five experts, confirming that the candidates best positioned to cover the base pool's blind spots are also broadly capable.