Flow-based policies for language-conditioned multi-task manipulation commonly share a single $\textit{Gaussian}$ source prior and a common linear transport path across tasks. However, reliably executi...
The paper introduces a framework for Flow‑Matching Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that allows independent adjustment of backbone depth, action expert depth, and denoising steps. Lightweight Exit Transformers are added at intermediate layers to enable early exits, and a KV Cache synthesis mechanism manages skipped layers so the action expert can exit deeper than the backbone. Experiments on SmolVLA and π0.5 across LIBERO and Meta‑World show that joint tuning of these compute axes reduces latency by 79.2 % and FLOPs by 31.8 %, while improving mean success rate by 5.6 %.
By Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Matteo Matteucci, Alessandro Suglia
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)
HybridFlow is a generative policy for robotic manipulation that uses a three‑stage inference procedure requiring only two network function evaluations (2‑NFE). The policy first generates a coarse action trajectory with a Global Jump based on MeanFlow, then refines the state using a parameter‑free ReNoise interpolation, and finally performs a Local Refine to query the instantaneous‑velocity limit. Experiments on RoboMimic and five real‑robot settings show that HybridFlow achieves high success rates and improves task performance over a 16‑step Diffusion Policy while reducing action‑generation latency by roughly eightfold.
By Zhenchen Dong, Fulin Chen, Jinna Fu, Jiaming Wu, Qingran Wu, Shengyuan Yu, Hongyu Yu, Yide Liu
arXiv:2609.21216v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies based on flow matching generate action chunks through repeated evaluations of an action expert. Increasing the...
By Zhipeng Tang, Xinda Chen, Weining Rao, Xiao Li, Wenting Tan, Yuning Wang, Xiao Shi, Xiaofang Zhao
The paper investigates whether using non‑Gaussian priors improves fine‑tuning of large behavior models (LBMs) for robot imitation learning. Across more than 100,000 simulation rollouts and 1,250 hardware trials on diverse tasks, the authors find that non‑Gaussian priors do not yield better fine‑tuning performance than standard Gaussian priors, except possibly at very low data fractions. Diagnostic analyses reveal that encoder training dominates fine‑tuning outcomes, while prior choice has minimal impact.
By Chen Xu, Rishi Shah, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina
arXiv:2610.08183v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multi-task manipulation policies differ in architecture, scale, and pretrained priors all at once, so published comparisons cannot attribute performa...
By Nanhe Chen, Runqiu Yang, Jiawei Tang, Sichao Liu, Yuquan Wang
arXiv:2604.05656v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models with flow-matching action heads, such as {\pi}0 and {\pi}0.5, have become a standard recipe for generalist robo...
By Wuyang Luan, Junhui Li, Weiguang Zhao, Rui Ma, Tieru Wu
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao
arXiv:2607. 29235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although world-action models (WAMs) enhance long-horizon robot control by predicting visual evolution before acting, long-horizon reliability demands repeated re-grounding in real observations--not recursive rollout.
By Peize Li, Ruimeng Zhang, Ru Zhang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen, Shanghang Zhang
Multi-task manipulation policies differ in architecture, scale, and pretrained priors all at once, so published comparisons cannot attribute performance to any single component. We argue that most of...
The paper introduces Kinematic MeanFlow (K-MF), a one‑step action generation policy for Robotic Foundation Models that addresses instability in the MeanFlow framework. By decoupling the time derivative into two sub‑interval terms, K-MF captures early and late denoising dynamics separately, reducing error amplification. Experiments show K-MF achieves faster inference—reducing action‑head latency by 67.5%–74.4% and overall end‑to‑end latency by 30.3%–54.9%—while outperforming multi‑step flow matching on various tasks.
By Jiawei Fan, Sifeng Wang, Yuqing Hou, Anbang Yao