arXiv AI

${M}^2$Tok: Multi-head Multi-codebook Discrete Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces ${M}^2$Tok, a Multi-head Multi-codebook Action Tokenizer that reduces reconstruction loss in discrete action tokenization for Vision‑Language‑Action models. By decomposing latent action features into multiple heads and assigning independent codebooks to each, the tokenizer expands representational expressivity and improves policy performance. Experiments on RoboTwin, Simpler‑Env, and zero‑shot real‑world tasks show superior reconstruction fidelity and higher success rates compared to prior methods.

arXiv AI
1d ago

ActionPiece: Rethinking Action Tokenization for Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action Models

ActionPiece rethinks how actions are tokenized for autoregressive vision‑language‑action models by introducing physical rank consistency (PRC) to evaluate relational fidelity of reconstructed actions. The method jointly supervises representation learning and quantization to preserve local physical distance rankings, improving both PRC and policy success. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, SimplerEnv, and VLA‑Arena show significant gains over baseline tokenizers.

By Shijie Lian, Bin Yu, Zhaolong Shen, Xiaopeng Lin, Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Laurence T. Yang, Kai Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

IMLE‑VLA replaces the iterative action head in vision‑language‑action policies with a single‑step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). This eliminates multi‑step sampling, boosting inference frequency by 3.67× (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz) and achieving the highest average success rate (98.0 %) on the 40‑task LIBERO benchmark while maintaining robustness under perturbations. Real‑world tests on a Franka Emika Panda show smoother, faster motions and a 3.9×–6.6× reduction in inference time per episode.

By Kian Hosseinkhani (Simon Fraser University), Qinhe Peng (University of Pennsylvania), George Shramko (Simon Fraser University), Mehran Aghabozorgi (Simon Fraser University), Jianing Qian (University of Pennsylvania), Tristan Engst (Simon Fraser University), Alireza Moazeni (Simon Fraser University), Dinesh Jayaraman (University of Pennsylvania), Ke Li (Simon Fraser University, Canada CIFAR AI Chair)
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

TurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM

Vision-language-action (VLA) models commonly adopt an LLM-centric $V \to L \to A$ pathway, where visual observations are projected into the representation space of a large language model before being decoded into robot actions. Although effective, this design incurs substantial computation and memory overhead at every policy invocation.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Continuous Actions from Discrete Minds: Latent-Aligned Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces LaPla, a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that uses a latent‑aligned planning approach to convert discrete semantic reasoning into continuous, physics‑constrained driving actions. It employs a residual VQ‑VAE to encode vehicle kinematics into a structured latent space, then projects multimodal inputs—images, past actions, and text—directly into this latent space, allowing a frozen decoder to generate physically plausible trajectories without quantization errors. Experiments on nuScenes and NVIDIA AlpaSim show LaPla reduces long‑horizon L2 error by 15.52% and improves closed‑loop success rates by 33.34 percentage points while cutting inference latency.

By Ruoyu Yao, Yusen Xie, Qingzhao Liu, Pei Liu, Zewei Yang, Yipeng Zhu, Xiaolong Wang, Jun Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 19

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

LoopVLA introduces a recurrent Vision‑Language‑Action architecture that learns to refine multimodal representations, predict actions, and estimate when further refinement is unnecessary. By iteratively applying a shared Transformer block and producing a sufficiency score at each step, it decouples refinement from fixed layer indices and aligns confidence scores with action quality through a self‑supervised objective. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, and VLA‑Arena demonstrate that LoopVLA reduces model parameters by 45% and boosts inference throughput up to 1.7× while matching or surpassing strong baselines in task success.

By Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang