Hugging Face Blog

SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data

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 Machine Learning
Sep 11

HuRo: Robotizing Human Videos for Scalable VLA Pretraining

The paper introduces HuRo, a dataset of 630K robotized episodes derived from diverse human videos, created via a pipeline that aligns observations and actions for robotic use. Experiments on four real‑world manipulation tasks show that scaling robotized pretraining boosts task completion from 51.5% to 80.3% and improves out‑of‑distribution performance under spatial and visual shifts. Ablation studies reveal that visual robotization enhances robustness and that end‑to‑end pretraining with retargeted actions outperforms visual‑only transfer.

By Jinho Jeong, Se June Joo, Jaehyun Kang, Dongyun Kim, Yena Kim, Hanjung Kim, Seon Joo Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

arXiv:2606. 14409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this report, we present Hy-Embodied-0.

By He Zhang, Lingzhu Xiang, Haitao Lin, Zeyu Huang, Minghui Wang, Dingyan Zhong, Yubo Dong, Yihao Wu, Yongming Rao, Dongsheng Zhang, Wanjia He, Ling Chen, Kai Huang, Jiahao Chen, Sichang Su, Xumin Yu, Ziyi Wang, Chengwei Zhu, Xiao Teng, Yuchun Guo, Yufeng Zhang, Yuandong Liu, Rui Wang, Zisheng Lu, Han Hu, Zhengyou Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 9

VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting

arXiv:2507. 05116v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language.

By Juyi Lin, Amir Taherin, Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Lei Lu, Guangyu Chen, Taskin Padir, Xiaomeng Yang, Weiwei Chen, Yiqian Li, Xue Lin, David Kaeli, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

MaskVLA: Visual Masking Against Trajectory Overfitting of Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv:2609.23565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate vision-language understanding with executable robot actions, enabling end-to-end learning for robot contr...

By Yuxuan Jiang, Jiaying Huang, Ge Wang, Shenhao Yan, Jiahao Yang, Chengsi Yao, Qi Liu, Qing Zhao, Shuguang Cui, Yiming Zhao, Yatong Han, Zhen Li
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
Jul 3

VLAFlow: A Unified Training Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models via Co-training and Future Latent Alignment

arXiv:2607. 01586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation, yet the effects of different robot-data pre-training paradigms remain difficult to compare because existing models often differ in architecture, data, action space, and evaluation protocol.

By Guoyang Xia, Fengfa Li, Hongjin Ji, Lei Ren, Fangxiang Feng, Kun Zhan, Yan Xie
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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control.