Discrete diffusion policies act as natural asynchronous executors for robotics by treating action generation as iterative unmasking, yielding higher success rates and lower computation than flow-matching real-time chunking in dynamic tasks.
StarVLA-$\alpha$: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systems
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abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for building general-purpose robotic agents. However, the VLA landscape remains highly fragmented and complex: as existing approaches vary substantially in architectures, training data, embodiment configurations, and benchmark-specific engineering. In this work, we introduce StarVLA-$\alpha$, a simple yet strong baseline designed to study VLA design choices under controlled conditions. StarVLA-$\alpha$ deliberately minimizes architectural and pipeline complexity to reduce experimental confounders and enable systematic analysis. Specifically, we re-evaluate several key design axes, including action modeling strategies, robot-specific pretraining, and interface engineering. Across unified multi-benchmark training on LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, and RoboCasa, the same simple baseline remains highly competitive, indicating that a strong VLM backbone combined with minimal design is already sufficient to achieve strong performance without relying on additional architectural complexity or engineering tricks. Notably, our single generalist model outperforms $\pi_{0.5}$ by 20\% on the public real-world RoboChallenge benchmark. We expect StarVLA-$\alpha$ to serve as a solid starting point for future research in the VLA regime. Code will be released at https://github.com/starVLA/starVLA.
years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2representative citing papers
A 3D-thinking-guided co-training method disentangles geometry perception and spatial reasoning to inject latent 3D priors into VLA models via adapters, achieving SOTA on manipulation benchmarks while running on 2D images only.
citing papers explorer
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DiscreteRTC: Discrete Diffusion Policies are Natural Asynchronous Executors
Discrete diffusion policies act as natural asynchronous executors for robotics by treating action generation as iterative unmasking, yielding higher success rates and lower computation than flow-matching real-time chunking in dynamic tasks.
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3DThinkVLA: Endowing Vision-Language-Action Models with Latent 3D Priors via 3D-Thinking-Guided Co-training
A 3D-thinking-guided co-training method disentangles geometry perception and spatial reasoning to inject latent 3D priors into VLA models via adapters, achieving SOTA on manipulation benchmarks while running on 2D images only.