arXiv Machine Learning

Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2508. 20072v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions into robot actions.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models often inherit the image-generation view: actions are generated by iterative denoising. We argue that VLA action generation has a different condition-target structure: the policy is conditioned on rich observations, language, and state, but predicts only a compact, low-dimensional action chunk.

arXiv AI
Jul 14

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

arXiv:2607. 09818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to understand natural-language instructions and visual observations, and to generate and execute corresponding actions as embodied agents.

By Shengzhuo Yang, Ronghao Yu, Chuanjie Lv, Linpeng Peng, Hang Yu, Jie Ren, Jiajun Lv, Yong Liu
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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin‑Robotics introduces an omnimodal masked‑diffusion backbone, Dynin‑Omni, that jointly represents language, visual observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. By conditioning on different spans, the same model learns action prediction, next‑observation prediction, goal‑state prediction, and trajectory‑to‑instruction reconstruction, enabling test‑time scaling through goal prediction and action‑candidate evaluation. The system, pretrained on 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X‑Embodiment datasets, achieves competitive performance on LIBERO, zero‑shot LIBERO‑Plus, and a 78.4 % success rate on a Franka Research 3 robot, while a block‑parallel implementation speeds up action decoding by up to 29.2×.

By Hoeun Lee, Jaeik Kim, Jusang Oh, Jinhyeok Kim, Geon Choi, Hyeonggeun Kim, Jaeyoung Do
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Alignment-Guided Flow Transformer for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Policy Learning

The paper introduces Alignment‑Guided Flow Transformer (AGFT), a framework for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that explicitly enforces tri‑modal alignment among vision, language, and action through a dedicated alignment loss. AGFT bridges representational gaps across modalities, improving task adaptation and robustness, and employs a flow‑matching objective to reduce inference steps compared to diffusion‑based policies. Experiments on a large benchmark demonstrate that AGFT achieves higher success rates and lower inference latency than state‑of‑the‑art baselines, highlighting tri‑modal alignment as crucial for scalable VLA manipulation.

By Shengchao Hu, Peng Wang, Qiyang Zhou, Guodong Zheng, Yuqi Huang, Li Shen, Ya Zhang, Dacheng Tao
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces VLAct, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that focuses on representation‑centric continued pre‑training rather than merely scaling robot data. VLAct is trained on diverse, multi‑embodiment robot data and preserves a broad VLM prior while encouraging shared action semantics across embodiments. Experiments across simulation, real‑world, and unseen‑embodiment settings show that VLAct consistently outperforms existing industrial VLA systems, achieving high success rates with only a modest compute budget and open‑source data.

By Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen, Zixuan Wang, Longxiang Tang, Haokun Gui, Jinhui Ye, Changsheng Lu, Xiaoyang Wu, Mingkang Zhu, Pengguang Chen, Shu Liu, Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

RotVLA: Rotational Latent Action for Vision-Language-Action Model

RotVLA introduces a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that replaces discrete latent action encoding with a continuous rotational latent action representation on the group SO(n). This design provides continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry that better capture real‑world action dynamics, and a triplet frame learning scheme enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while preventing degeneration. Trained with 1.7 B parameters on large cross‑embodiment datasets, RotVLA achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin2.0 benchmarks and shows strong real‑world manipulation results.

By Qiwei Li, Xicheng Gong, Xinghang Li, Peiyan Li, Quanyun Zhou, Hangjun Ye, Jiahuan Zhou, Yadong Mu
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606. 20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference.

By Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Tung M. Luu, Trung Le, Tran Nguyen Le, Minh Vu, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.

By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian