Mamba-based Selective State Space Modeling Improves the Accuracy-Complexity Tradeoff of SmolVLA Vision-Language-Action Experts
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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 %.
StarVLA-α is a streamlined Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model that reduces architectural and pipeline complexity to facilitate systematic study of VLA design choices. By employing a strong VLM backbone and minimal design, it achieves competitive performance across multiple benchmarks (LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, RoboCasa) and outperforms the baseline π₀.₅ by 20% on the RoboChallenge benchmark. The authors plan to release the code to support future VLA research.
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.
arXiv:2610.00604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action policies often see only one or a few recent frames, which makes it difficult to evaluate how they use information that disappe...
arXiv:2511. 15669v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning genuinely improve Vision Language Action (VLA) models, or does it merely add overhead?
arXiv:2605. 21854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly converged on a small set of architectural patterns: discrete-token autoregression (e.