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#Real-time control (5)

FlashVLA: Streaming Action Decoding for Fast and Asynchronous VLA Inference

FlashVLA: Streaming Action Decoding for Fast and Asynchronous VLA Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly promising for robotic manipulation, yet their real-world deployment remains bottlenecked by high inference latency and unstable asynchronous execution. This challenge is particularly pronounced in flow-matching-based VLA models, where action decoding requires multiple iterative steps conditioned on the VLM context. While efficient inference methods improve control frequency and asynchronous methods reduce execution idle time, existing approaches often fail to jointly achieve low-latency inference and accurate, temporally consistent asynchronous execution. We introduce FlashVLA, a streaming action decoding framework that addresses both challenges in a unified formulation. FlashVLA maintains a streaming action buffer with multiple chunks at different noise levels and decodes them using chunk-wise causal attention. This design allows FlashVLA to produce one executable action chunk per inference step. Moreover, its chunk-wise autoregressive formulation implicitly preserves action continuity, enabling smooth asynchronous execution without extra future-state conditioning. Across extensive simulated and real-world experiments, FlashVLA substantially improves inference speed while maintaining strong task performance. It can achieve ≥30 Hz control frequency on a single GPU with smooth asynchronous inference in real-world deployment.

Zekai Li, Jiaming Tang, Zhijian LiuAug 27, 2026
VLAFlow MatchingNVIDIAAug 27, 2026
πR²: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

πR²: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

Generalist manipulation policies increasingly take the form of action-chunking flow policies built on large pretrained backbones. Such chunks run open-loop, so the policy cannot react to sensory input arriving mid-execution, sacrificing reactivity. Replanning more often would restore it, but the perception-to-action pipeline (a large backbone plus multiple denoising steps) is too slow: this latency forbids frequent replanning and leaves committed actions stale, making such policies ill-suited for dynamic, closed-loop control. We present πR², which makes these policies reactive and real-time while retaining large backbones, expressive multi-modal policies, and multi-action prediction. Built on the per-position noise schedule of diffusion forcing, πR² contributes two ideas. First, it splits conditioning into a fast channel (proprioception, fresh every tick) and an asynchronously updated slow channel (vision-language features), so the policy reacts to proprioception within a chunk while tolerating stale vision. Second, a latency-adaptive flow schedule treats in-flight actions as inpainting conditioning and emits actions in one denoising step per call, letting one trained model adapt to varying hardware latency. Requiring minimal modification to existing architectures, πR² can be finetuned from a pretrained policy: applied to GR00T-N1.7 on a real xArm6+XHand platform, it replans closed-loop roughly 4× faster than the base policy (~$25$Hz on an A5000 GPU), acting on a fresh observation every $40$ms. Across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, πR² improves the success rate by up to 23% in simulation and 30% in the real world over the strongest baseline. Project page: https://pi-r2-flow.github.io/

Sungjae Park, Shubham TulsianiJul 28, 2026
VLAreactivediffusionJul 28, 2026