VLA-0: Building State-of-the-Art VLAs with Zero Modification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Goyal, Ankit, Hadfield, Hugo, Yang, Xuning, Blukis, Valts, Ramos, Fabio
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Goyal, Ankit
Hadfield, Hugo
Yang, Xuning
Blukis, Valts
Ramos, Fabio
author_facet Goyal, Ankit
Hadfield, Hugo
Yang, Xuning
Blukis, Valts
Ramos, Fabio
contents Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) hold immense promise for enabling generalist robot manipulation. However, the best way to build them remains an open question. Current approaches often add complexity, such as modifying the existing vocabulary of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with action tokens or introducing special action heads. Curiously, the simplest strategy of representing actions directly as text has remained largely unexplored. This work introduces VLA-0 to investigate this idea. We find that VLA-0 is not only effective; it is surprisingly powerful. With the right design, VLA-0 outperforms more involved models. On LIBERO, a popular benchmark for evaluating VLAs, VLA-0 outperforms all existing methods trained on the same robotic data, including $π_0.5$-KI, OpenVLA-OFT and SmolVLA. Furthermore, without large-scale robotics-specific training, it outperforms methods trained on large-scale robotic data, like $π_0.5$-KI, $π_0$, GR00T-N1 and MolmoAct. These findings also translate to the real world, where VLA-0 outperforms SmolVLA, a VLA model pre-trained on large-scale real data. This paper summarizes our unexpected findings and spells out the specific techniques required to unlock the high performance of this simple yet potent VLA design. Visual results, code, and trained models are provided here: https://vla0.github.io/.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13054
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLA-0: Building State-of-the-Art VLAs with Zero Modification
Goyal, Ankit
Hadfield, Hugo
Yang, Xuning
Blukis, Valts
Ramos, Fabio
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) hold immense promise for enabling generalist robot manipulation. However, the best way to build them remains an open question. Current approaches often add complexity, such as modifying the existing vocabulary of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with action tokens or introducing special action heads. Curiously, the simplest strategy of representing actions directly as text has remained largely unexplored. This work introduces VLA-0 to investigate this idea. We find that VLA-0 is not only effective; it is surprisingly powerful. With the right design, VLA-0 outperforms more involved models. On LIBERO, a popular benchmark for evaluating VLAs, VLA-0 outperforms all existing methods trained on the same robotic data, including $π_0.5$-KI, OpenVLA-OFT and SmolVLA. Furthermore, without large-scale robotics-specific training, it outperforms methods trained on large-scale robotic data, like $π_0.5$-KI, $π_0$, GR00T-N1 and MolmoAct. These findings also translate to the real world, where VLA-0 outperforms SmolVLA, a VLA model pre-trained on large-scale real data. This paper summarizes our unexpected findings and spells out the specific techniques required to unlock the high performance of this simple yet potent VLA design. Visual results, code, and trained models are provided here: https://vla0.github.io/.
title VLA-0: Building State-of-the-Art VLAs with Zero Modification
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13054