arXiv Computation and Language

Spike-driven Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

StreamPI: Streaming Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

StreamPI introduces a streaming multimodal temporal modeling framework that enhances Vision‑Language‑Action models by adding temporal reasoning without extra parameters. It anchors each visual observation and language instruction pair as a temporal unit, using bidirectional attention for cross‑modal fusion and causal attention for autoregressive streaming inference. The method employs random‑interval streaming training to improve robustness and leverages the LLM backbone’s length extrapolation to inherit pretrained weights, achieving superior performance over pi0.5 on real‑robot and simulation tasks.

By Zhe Liu, Jinghua Hou, Yuxiang Lu, Zhenya Yang, Xianzhe Fan, Junwei Luo, Junyi Li, Ruihua Han, Zhi Hou, Hengshuang Zhao
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
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
Aug 28

Parameter Efficient Continual Learning for Sparse Event-Based Transformers

The paper introduces sLoTh, a parameter‑efficient continual learning framework for sparse event‑based vision transformers. sLoTh freezes the backbone and limits plasticity to low‑rank attention updates (seLoRA) and shared neuronal threshold modulation, updating less than 1% of parameters without replay buffers. Experiments on CIFAR‑100, Tiny‑ImageNet, ImageNet‑100, and ImageNet‑R show competitive rehearsal‑free performance across up to 100 tasks while achieving roughly 6.5× lower energy consumption than dense vision transformers.

By Vaishnavi Nagabhushana, Kartikay Agrawal, Ayon Borthakur
arXiv AI
Sep 17

rMuscle: Robotic Muscle Memory for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model Inference

The paper introduces rMuscle, a real‑time Vision‑Language‑Action inference framework that mimics human muscle memory to accelerate robotic decision making. By exploiting repeated task similarity, rMuscle uses a dual‑phase cache: a Context Cache reuses visual‑token outputs and an Action Cache reuses neuron activation patterns, reducing computation and weight accesses. Experiments on RTX 4090 and Jetson Thor show 1.29–1.42× speedups on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and physical manipulation tasks while preserving success rates on real robots.

By Kaijun Zhou, Zhiyang Li, Le Chen, Jinyu Gu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Large Language Models with At Most One Spike per Neuron

The paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) approach that uses time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding to limit each neuron to at most one spike per time window, enabling energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). A reference-based strategy is introduced to encode the four core LLM components—embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations, and dropout—allowing the construction of a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture trained end-to-end. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 show performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while achieving a 1.5‑billion‑parameter spiking LLM and providing an estimate of spike-related energy consumption.

By Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud