SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillation
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models based on flow matching -- such as pi0, pi0.5, and SmolVLA -- achieve state-of-the-art generalist robotic manipulation, yet their iterative denoising, typically 10 ODE steps, introduces substantial latency: on a modern GPU, denoising alone accounts for 80% of end-to-end inference time. Naively reducing the step count is unreliable, degrading success on most tasks due to the velocity field being uncalibrated for single-step jumps. We present SnapFlow, a plug-and-play self-distillation method that compresses multi-step denoising into a single forward pass (1-NFE) for flow-matching VLAs. SnapFlow mixes standard flow-matching samples with consistency samples whose targets are two-step Euler shortcut velocities computed from the model's own marginal velocity predictions, avoiding the trajectory drift caused by conditional velocities, as we analyze theoretically. A zero-initialized target-time embedding lets the network switch between local velocity estimation and global one-step generation within a single architecture. SnapFlow requires no external teacher, no architecture changes, and trains in ~12h on a single GPU. We validate on two VLA architectures spanning a 6x parameter range, with identical hyperparameters: on pi0.5 (3B) across four LIBERO suites (40 tasks, 400 episodes), SnapFlow achieves 98.75% average success -- matching the 10-step teacher at 97.75% and slightly exceeding it -- with 9.6x denoising speedup and end-to-end latency reduced from 274ms to 83ms; on SmolVLA (500M), it reduces MSE by 8.3% with 3.56x end-to-end acceleration. An action-step sweep on long-horizon tasks reveals that SnapFlow maintains its advantage across execution horizons, achieving 93% at n_act=5 where the baseline reaches only 90%. SnapFlow is orthogonal to layer-distillation and token-pruning approaches, enabling compositional speedups.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
HybridFlow: A Two-Step Generative Policy for Robotic Manipulation
Limited by inference latency, existing robot manipulation policies lack sufficient real-time interaction capability with the environment. Although faster generation methods such as flow matching are gradually replacing d…
Robot ManipulationImage GenerationMean-Flow based One-Step Vision-Language-Action
Recent advances in FlowMatching-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks have demonstrated remarkable advantages in generating high-frequency action chunks, particularly for highly dexterous robotic manipulation tas…
Fast protein backbone generation with SE(3) flow matching
We present FrameFlow, a method for fast protein backbone generation using SE(3) flow matching. Specifically, we adapt FrameDiff, a state-of-the-art diffusion model, to the flow-matching generative modeling paradigm. We s…
Protein DesignHigh-Fidelity One-Step Generative Visuomotor Policy via Recursive Correction, Frequency Consistency, and Contrastive Flow Matching
Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have advanced robotic visuomotor policies by modeling multimodal action distributions, but their multi-step sampling or ODE solving introduces inference latency. Exis…
Perceptual Flow Matching for Few-Step Generative Modeling
We propose Perceptual Flow Matching (PFM), a simple yet effective framework for few-step generation in flow-matching models. Rather than performing velocity regression in the conventional VAE latent space, PFM supervises…
Image GenerationVideo GenerationImage Editing