SurgVLA-Bench supplies a hierarchical task taxonomy and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for VLA models in laparoscopic robotics simulation, showing autoregressive models excel at semantics while flow-matching models achieve higher precision but all fall short due to endoscopic view constraint
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SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics
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abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal datasets encode rich visual and linguistic knowledge, making them a strong foundation for robotics. Rather than training robotic policies from scratch, recent approaches adapt VLMs into vision-language-action (VLA) models that enable natural language-driven perception and control. However, existing VLAs are typically massive--often with billions of parameters--leading to high training costs and limited real-world deployability. Moreover, they rely on academic and industrial datasets, overlooking the growing availability of community-collected data from affordable robotic platforms. In this work, we present SmolVLA, a small, efficient, and community-driven VLA that drastically reduces both training and inference costs, while retaining competitive performance. SmolVLA is designed to be trained on a single GPU and deployed on consumer-grade GPUs or even CPUs. To further improve responsiveness, we introduce an asynchronous inference stack decoupling perception and action prediction from action execution, allowing higher control rates with chunked action generation. Despite its compact size, SmolVLA achieves performance comparable to VLAs that are 10x larger. We evaluate SmolVLA on a range of both simulated as well as real-world robotic benchmarks and release all code, pretrained models, and training data.
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- abstract Vision-language models (VLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal datasets encode rich visual and linguistic knowledge, making them a strong foundation for robotics. Rather than training robotic policies from scratch, recent approaches adapt VLMs into vision-language-action (VLA) models that enable natural language-driven perception and control. However, existing VLAs are typically massive--often with billions of parameters--leading to high training costs and limited real-world deployability. Moreover, they rely on academic and industrial datasets, overlooking the growing availability of comm
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representative citing papers
World models introduce a stealthy poisoning vector into robot learning pipelines where malicious prompts or dynamics in teleoperated data activate only during synthetic trajectory generation, enabling backdoors in downstream policies.
PhAIL provides an open benchmark and distributional evaluation method for real-robot VLA policies using time-to-success CDF, HRT scoring, and KS significance tests.
Benchmarking ACT, Diffusion Policy, SmolVLA, and π0 on suture following yields 50-75% success under ideal conditions and 92% stitch completion with π0 in a surgeon-robot trial.
VLA architectures exhibit architecture-specific failure signatures at the motor-command level, with direction reversal as a universal predictor and velocity monitoring ineffective for continuous models.
JOPAT jointly models pixels, point tracks, and actions in a diffusion transformer and reports gains over pixel-only baselines on long-horizon robot tasks with occlusion and off-screen motion.
The paper identifies distinct failure mechanisms: excessive posterior-prior regularization erases mode information in latent policies, while smooth base-to-action maps limit mode coverage in generative policies.
Pion modifies Muon's Newton-Schulz iterations into a controllable high-pass filter that anchors dominant singular values at 1 while suppressing noisy tails, outperforming Muon and AdamW in VLA and RLVR regimes.
A new speculative inference system speeds up diffusion VLAs to 19.1 ms average latency (3.04x faster) on LIBERO by replacing most full 58 ms inferences with 7.8 ms draft rounds while preserving task performance.
Test-time sparsity with a parallel pipeline and omnidirectional feature reuse accelerates action diffusion by 5x to 47.5 Hz while cutting FLOPs 92% with no performance loss.
MoLA infers a mixture of latent actions from generated future videos via modality-aware inverse dynamics models to improve robot manipulation policies.
Premover enables VLA policies to act on partial instructions by precomputing focus maps from intermediate backbone layers, reducing wall-clock time 13.6 percent on LIBERO while preserving 95 percent success rate.
GridS is a plug-and-play differentiable module for geometry-aware visual token resampling in VLA models that achieves under 10% token retention and 76% FLOPs reduction with no success-rate loss.
Pace-and-Path Correction decomposes a quadratic cost minimization into orthogonal pace and path channels to correct chunked actions in VLA models, raising success rates by up to 28.8% in dynamic settings.
VLATIM benchmark reveals large VLMs excel at high-level planning in physics puzzles but struggle with precise visual grounding and mouse control, so they lack human-like problem-solving capabilities.
LoopVLA adds recurrent refinement and learned sufficiency estimation to VLA models, cutting parameters 45% and raising throughput 1.7x while matching baseline task success on LIBERO and VLA-Arena.
GuardVLA embeds a stealthy backdoor watermark in VLAs via secret messages in visual data and uses a swap-and-detect mechanism for post-release ownership verification that preserves task performance.
Reducing visual input to one token per frame in VLA world models maintains or improves long-horizon performance on MetaWorld, LIBERO, and real-robot tasks.
NoiseGate learns per-latent timestep schedules as an information-gating policy in diffusion-based world action models, yielding consistent gains on RoboTwin manipulation tasks.
OA-WAM uses persistent address vectors and dynamic content vectors in object slots to enable addressable world-action prediction, improving robustness on manipulation benchmarks under scene changes.
VLA models exhibit a compute-bound VLM phase followed by a memory-bound action phase on edge hardware; DP-Cache and V-AEFusion reduce redundancy and enable pipeline parallelism for up to 6x speedup on NPUs with marginal task degradation.
GeCO replaces time-dependent flow matching with time-unconditional optimization, enabling adaptive inference and intrinsic OOD detection for robotic imitation learning.
QuantVLA is the first post-training quantization framework for VLA models that quantizes the diffusion transformer action head and reports higher task success rates than full-precision baselines with roughly 70% memory savings on the quantized components.
RL-VLA³ is an asynchronous RL framework for VLA training that delivers up to 85.2% higher throughput than synchronous baselines while preserving identical sample efficiency and scaling to 256 GPUs.
citing papers explorer
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PriorVLA: Prior-Preserving Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models
PriorVLA preserves pretrained priors in VLA models through a frozen Prior Expert and trained Adaptation Expert, delivering better robot manipulation performance than full fine-tuning with only 25% of the parameter updates.