Developing efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies is crucial for practical robotics deployment, yet current approaches face prohibitive computational costs and resource requirements. Existing diffusion-based VLA policies require multi-billion-parameter models and massive datasets to achieve strong performance. We tackle this efficiency challenge with two contributions: intermediate-modality fusion, which reallocates capacity to the diffusion head by pruning up to \\(50\\%\\) of LLM layers, and action-specific Global-AdaLN conditioning, which cuts parameters by \\(20\\%\\) through modular adaptation. We integrate these advances into a novel 950 M-parameter VLA called FLOWER. Pretrained in just 200 H100 GPU hours, FLOWER delivers competitive performance with bigger VLAs across $190$ tasks spanning ten simulation and real-world benchmarks and demonstrates robustness across diverse robotic embodiments. In addition, FLOWER achieves a new SoTA of 4.53 on the CALVIN ABC benchmark. Demos, code and pretrained weights are available at https:\/\/intuitive-robots.github.io\/flower_vla\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Developing efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies is crucial for practical robotics deployment, yet current approaches face prohibitive computational costs and resource requirements. Existing diffusion-based VLA policies require multi-billion-parameter models and massive datasets to achieve strong performance. We tackle this efficiency challenge with two contributions: intermediate-modality fusion, which reallocates capacity to the diffusion head by pruning up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Moritz Reuss","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Hongyi Zhou","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Marcel Ruhle","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Omer Erdincc Yaugmurlu","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Fabian Otto","user_id":"43173"},{"type":"text","value":"Rudolf 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