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OpenHelix: A Short Survey, Empirical Analysis, and Open-Source Dual-System VLA Model for Robotic Manipulation

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arxiv 2505.03912 v1 pith:N4KIGEJW submitted 2025-05-06 cs.RO cs.CV

OpenHelix: A Short Survey, Empirical Analysis, and Open-Source Dual-System VLA Model for Robotic Manipulation

classification cs.RO cs.CV
keywords dual-systemopen-sourcearchitectureswillanalysisempiricalexistingfurther
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Dual-system VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architectures have become a hot topic in embodied intelligence research, but there is a lack of sufficient open-source work for further performance analysis and optimization. To address this problem, this paper will summarize and compare the structural designs of existing dual-system architectures, and conduct systematic empirical evaluations on the core design elements of existing dual-system architectures. Ultimately, it will provide a low-cost open-source model for further exploration. Of course, this project will continue to update with more experimental conclusions and open-source models with improved performance for everyone to choose from. Project page: https://openhelix-robot.github.io/.

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Cited by 27 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. BlockVLA: Accelerating Autoregressive VLA via Block Diffusion Finetuning

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    BlockVLA accelerates autoregressive VLA models by 3.3x using block diffusion finetuning, with faster training convergence and better early performance on long-horizon robotic tasks.

  2. AT-VLA: Adaptive Tactile Injection for Enhanced Feedback Reaction in Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AT-VLA proposes adaptive tactile injection and a dual-stream tactile reaction mechanism to enhance VLA models for contact-rich robotic manipulation with real-time responses.

  3. DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 7.0

    DFM-VLA uses discrete flow matching to iteratively refine action tokens in VLA models, outperforming autoregressive and diffusion baselines with 4.44 average success length on CALVIN and 95.7% success on LIBERO.

  4. Towards Generalizable Robotic Manipulation in Dynamic Environments

    cs.CV 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DOMINO dataset and PUMA architecture enable better dynamic robotic manipulation by incorporating motion history, delivering 6.3% higher success rates than prior VLA models.

  5. KERV: Kinematic-Rectified Speculative Decoding for Embodied VLA Models

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    KERV integrates kinematic Kalman Filter predictions with speculative decoding in VLA models to achieve 27-37% faster inference while maintaining nearly the same task success rates.

  6. Towards Generalizable Robotic Manipulation in Dynamic Environments

    cs.CV 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.5

    DOMINO supplies 110K+ dynamic dual-arm trajectories across 35 tasks, and PUMA’s optical-flow history plus object-centric future queries raise dynamic success rate by 6.3 points over strong VLA baselines.

  7. Hierarchical Policy Learning via Spectral Decomposition

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Causal Spectral Policy decomposes actions spectrally into coarse motion from obs/language and conditional fine corrections, outperforming baselines on precision manipulation tasks.

  8. UniFS: Unified Fast-to-Slow Hierarchical Architecture for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    UniFS achieves 98.3% success on LIBERO with 2.1x lower latency than prior fast-slow VLA models by stratifying VLM layer update frequencies, inverting latent interactions, and applying multi-level supervision.

  9. APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    APT pretrains the action expert as a vision-action prior on frozen VLM features then adds language through gated fusion to improve OOD instruction generalization in continuous-action VLA policies.

  10. AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AffordanceVLA proposes a VLA model with affordance-aware modules (Which2Act, Where2Act, How2Act) in a Mixture-of-Transformer trained in three stages to improve robotic manipulation.

  11. RoboMemArena: A Comprehensive and Challenging Robotic Memory Benchmark

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RoboMemArena is a new large-scale robotic memory benchmark with real-world tasks, and PrediMem is a dual VLA system that outperforms baselines by managing memory buffers with predictive coding.

  12. AT-VLA: Adaptive Tactile Injection for Enhanced Feedback Reaction in Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AT-VLA introduces adaptive tactile injection and a dual-stream tactile reaction mechanism to integrate real-time tactile feedback into pretrained VLA models for contact-rich robotic manipulation.

  13. $M^2$-VLA: Boosting Vision-Language Models for Generalizable Manipulation via Layer Mixture and Meta-Skills

    cs.RO 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Freezing a VLM backbone and routing its layers through Mixture-of-Layers plus a Meta-Skill memory yields higher success and stronger zero-shot generalization than fine-tuned VLAs on LIBERO and real robots.

  14. $M^2$-VLA: Boosting Vision-Language Models for Generalizable Manipulation via Layer Mixture and Meta-Skills

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    M²-VLA shows that generalized VLMs can serve as direct backbones for robotic manipulation by selectively extracting task-critical features via Mixture of Layers and adding Meta Skill Modules for efficient trajectory learning.

  15. HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HEX is a new framework with humanoid-aligned state representation, mixture-of-experts proprioceptive predictor, history tokens, and residual-gated fusion that achieves state-of-the-art success and generalization on re...

  16. HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HEX introduces a state-centric framework with humanoid-aligned representations and mixture-of-experts proprioceptive prediction for coordinated whole-body control on bipedal humanoids.

  17. A1: A Fully Transparent Open-Source, Adaptive and Efficient Truncated Vision-Language-Action Model

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A1 is a transparent VLA framework achieving state-of-the-art robot manipulation success with up to 72% lower latency via adaptive layer truncation and inter-layer flow matching.

  18. AsyncMDE: Real-Time Monocular Depth Estimation via Asynchronous Spatial Memory

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    A lightweight fast path fusing foundation-model spatial memory reaches 237 FPS monocular depth, recovering 77% of the accuracy gap with bounded lag degradation and 161 FPS on Jetson Orin.

  19. Optimization landscapes of variational quantum algorithms

    quant-ph 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    For multi-term VQA objectives (M>1), false traps can emerge from loss of spectral-order compatibility among terms, even with parameter-sufficient ansatze, unlike the trap-free M=1 case under standard assumptions.

  20. DeepThinkVLA: Enhancing Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.LG 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DeepThinkVLA shows CoT improves VLA models only under decoding and causal alignment, delivering 97% success on LIBERO and 21.7-point gains via hybrid attention and SFT-RL training.

  21. Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A controllable world model trained on the DROID dataset generates consistent multi-view robot trajectories for over 20 seconds and improves generalist policy success rates by 44.7% via imagined trajectory fine-tuning.

  22. TS-Mask VLA: 2D Temporal-Spatial Masking for Vision-Language-Action Model with Effective Bridging

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    A 0.5B VLA with bridge-conditioned discrete diffusion and 2D temporal–spatial action masking reaches 95.7% LIBERO success and 4.19 CALVIN average length.

  23. Rethinking VLM Representation for VLA Initialization

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Experiments indicate original VLM representations are crucial for VLA performance, LoRA outperforms full finetuning, and staged robot-data pretraining yields the strongest initialization.

  24. PokeVLA: Empowering Pocket-Sized Vision-Language-Action Model with Comprehensive World Knowledge Guidance

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    PokeVLA is a lightweight VLA model pre-trained on 2.4M samples for spatial grounding and reasoning, then adapted via multi-view semantics and geometry alignment to achieve state-of-the-art robot manipulation performance.

  25. Fast-dVLA: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion VLA to Real-Time Performance

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Parameter differences from two training runs on a small task set are treated as auxiliary capability vectors that are merged into a pretrained VLA model, yielding auxiliary-task gains at the cost of ordinary supervise...

  26. Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey

    cs.RO 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    This survey organizes large VLM-based VLA models for robotic manipulation into monolithic and hierarchical paradigms, reviews their integrations and datasets, and outlines future directions.

  27. Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI

    cs.AI 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey of physical AI that distinguishes theoretical physics reasoning from applied understanding and synthesizes advances in symbolic reasoning, embodied systems, and generative models to advocate for physics-groun...