Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable potential in visuomotor control and instruction comprehension through end-to-end learning processes. However, current VLA models face significant challenges: they are slow during inference and require extensive pre-training on large amounts of robotic data, making real-world deployment difficult. In this letter, we introduce a new family of compact vision-language-action models, called TinyVLA, which offers two key advantages over existing VLA models: (1) faster inference speeds, and (2) improved data efficiency, eliminating the need for pre-training stage. Our framework incorporates two essential components to build TinyVLA: (1) initializing the policy backbone with robust, high-speed multimodal models, and (2) integrating a diffusion policy decoder during fine-tuning to enable precise robot actions. We conducted extensive evaluations of TinyVLA in both simulation and on real robots, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art VLA model, OpenVLA, in terms of speed and data efficiency, while delivering comparable or superior performance. Additionally, TinyVLA exhibits strong generalization capabilities across various dimensions, including language instructions, novel objects, unseen positions, changes in object appearance, background variations, and environmental shifts, often matching or exceeding the performance of OpenVLA. We believe that TinyVLA offers an interesting perspective on utilizing pre-trained multimodal models for policy learning.

In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-φ (LLaVA-Phi), an efficient multi-modal assistant that harnesses the power of the recently advanced small language model, Phi-2, to facilitate multi-modal dialogues. LLaVA-Phi marks a notable advancement in the realm of compact multi-modal models. It demonstrates that even smaller language models, with as few as 2.7B parameters, can effectively engage in intricate dialogues that integrate both textual and visual elements, provided they are trained with high-quality corpora. Our model delivers commendable performance on publicly available benchmarks that encompass visual comprehension, reasoning, and knowledge-based perception. Beyond its remarkable performance in multi-modal dialogue tasks, our model opens new avenues for applications in time-sensitive environments and systems that require real-time interaction, such as embodied agents. It highlights the potential of smaller language models to achieve sophisticated levels of understanding and interaction, while maintaining greater resource efficiency. The project is available at https://github.com/zhuyiche/llava-phi **REMOVE 2nd URL**://github.com/zhuyiche/llava-phi.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks—minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, where unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table heights that were unseen in training data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.

Quaternion singular value decomposition (QSVD) is a robust technique of digital watermarking that extracts high quality watermarks from watermarked images with low distortion. However, the existing QSVD-based watermarking schemes face the obstacle of “explosion of complexity” and have much room for improvement in terms of real-time, invisibility, and robustness. In this paper, we overcome such obstacle by introducing a new real structure-preserving QSVD algorithm and propose a novel QSVD-based watermarking scheme with high efficiency. Secret information is transmitted blindly by incorporating two new strategies: coefficient pair selection and adaptive embedding. The highly correlated coefficient pairs determined by the normalized cross-correlation method reduce the impact of embedding by reducing the maximum modification of the coefficient values, resulting in high fidelity of the watermarked image. Large-size 8-color binary watermark and QR code effectively verify that the proposed watermarking scheme can resist various image attacks in numerical experiments. Two keys designed by Logistic chaotic map ensure the security of the watermarking system. Under the premise of considering the correlation of color channels, the proposed watermarking scheme not only performs well in real-time and invisibility, but also has satisfactory advantages in robustness compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

In the field of autonomous driving, carriers are equipped with a variety of sensors, including cameras and LiDARs. However, the camera suffers from problems of illumination and occlusion, and the LiDAR encounters motion distortion, degenerate environment and limited ranging distance. Therefore, fusing the information from these two sensors deserves to be explored. In this paper, we propose a fusion network which robustly captures both the image and point cloud descriptors to solve the place recognition problem. Our contribution can be summarized as: (1) applying the trimmed strategy in the point cloud global feature aggregation to improve the recognition performance, (2) building a compact fusion framework which captures both the robust representation of the image and 3D point cloud, and (3) learning a proper metric to describe the similarity of our fused global feature. The experiments on KITTI and KAIST datasets show that the proposed fused descriptor is more robust and discriminative than the single sensor descriptor.

In this paper, we address the semisupervised distance metric learning problem and its applications in classification and image retrieval. First, we formulate a semisupervised distance metric learning model by considering the metric information of inner classes and interclasses. In this model, an adaptive parameter is designed to balance the inner metrics and intermetrics by using data structure. Second, we convert the model to a minimization problem whose variable is symmetric positive-definite matrix. Third, in implementation, we deduce an intrinsic steepest descent method, which assures that the metric matrix is strictly symmetric positive-definite at each iteration, with the manifold structure of the symmetric positive-definite matrix manifold. Finally, we test the proposed algorithm on conventional data sets, and compare it with other four representative methods. The numerical results validate that the proposed method significantly improves the classification with the same computational efficiency.