FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pertsch, Karl, Stachowicz, Kyle, Ichter, Brian, Driess, Danny, Nair, Suraj, Vuong, Quan, Mees, Oier, Finn, Chelsea, Levine, Sergey
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pertsch, Karl
Stachowicz, Kyle
Ichter, Brian
Driess, Danny
Nair, Suraj
Vuong, Quan
Mees, Oier
Finn, Chelsea
Levine, Sergey
author_facet Pertsch, Karl
Stachowicz, Kyle
Ichter, Brian
Driess, Danny
Nair, Suraj
Vuong, Quan
Mees, Oier
Finn, Chelsea
Levine, Sergey
contents Autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformer-based vision-language action (VLA) policies, can be tremendously effective for capturing complex and generalizable robotic behaviors. However, such models require us to choose a tokenization of our continuous action signals, which determines how the discrete symbols predicted by the model map to continuous robot actions. We find that current approaches for robot action tokenization, based on simple per-dimension, per-timestep binning schemes, typically perform poorly when learning dexterous skills from high-frequency robot data. To address this challenge, we propose a new compression-based tokenization scheme for robot actions, based on the discrete cosine transform. Our tokenization approach, Frequency-space Action Sequence Tokenization (FAST), enables us to train autoregressive VLAs for highly dexterous and high-frequency tasks where standard discretization methods fail completely. Based on FAST, we release FAST+, a universal robot action tokenizer, trained on 1M real robot action trajectories. It can be used as a black-box tokenizer for a wide range of robot action sequences, with diverse action spaces and control frequencies. Finally, we show that, when combined with the pi0 VLA, our method can scale to training on 10k hours of robot data and match the performance of diffusion VLAs, while reducing training time by up to 5x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09747
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Pertsch, Karl
Stachowicz, Kyle
Ichter, Brian
Driess, Danny
Nair, Suraj
Vuong, Quan
Mees, Oier
Finn, Chelsea
Levine, Sergey
Robotics
Machine Learning
Autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformer-based vision-language action (VLA) policies, can be tremendously effective for capturing complex and generalizable robotic behaviors. However, such models require us to choose a tokenization of our continuous action signals, which determines how the discrete symbols predicted by the model map to continuous robot actions. We find that current approaches for robot action tokenization, based on simple per-dimension, per-timestep binning schemes, typically perform poorly when learning dexterous skills from high-frequency robot data. To address this challenge, we propose a new compression-based tokenization scheme for robot actions, based on the discrete cosine transform. Our tokenization approach, Frequency-space Action Sequence Tokenization (FAST), enables us to train autoregressive VLAs for highly dexterous and high-frequency tasks where standard discretization methods fail completely. Based on FAST, we release FAST+, a universal robot action tokenizer, trained on 1M real robot action trajectories. It can be used as a black-box tokenizer for a wide range of robot action sequences, with diverse action spaces and control frequencies. Finally, we show that, when combined with the pi0 VLA, our method can scale to training on 10k hours of robot data and match the performance of diffusion VLAs, while reducing training time by up to 5x.
title FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09747