让流匹配视觉语言动作模型一步生成动作,速度提升9.6倍
SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillation

- 通过自蒸馏将多步去噪压缩为单步前向传播
- 在pi0.5上达98.75%成功率,比10步原模型还高
- 无需改架构、不依赖外部模型,单卡12小时可训练
基于流匹配的视觉语言动作模型(如pi0.5、SmolVLA)虽在机器人操作任务中表现领先,但其典型10步常微分方程求解引入显著延迟:现代GPU上仅去噪就占端到端推理时间的80%。直接减少步数不可靠,因速度场未校准单步跳跃。本文提出SnapFlow,一种即插即用的自蒸馏方法,将多步去噪压缩为单次前向传播(1-NFE)。SnapFlow混合标准流匹配样本与一致性样本,后者目标为模型自身边缘速度预测的两步欧拉捷径速度,避免条件速度引起的轨迹漂移(理论分析支持)。零初始化的目标时间嵌入使网络在同一架构内切换局部速度估计与全局单步生成。SnapFlow无需外部教师模型、无需结构改动,单卡训练约需12小时。在覆盖6倍参数范围的两个VLA架构上验证:pi0.5(3B)在四个LIBERO套件(40任务,400集)上平均成功率98.75%,超过10步教师模型的97.75%,去噪速度提升9.6倍,端到端延迟从274ms降至83ms;SmolVLA(500M)使均方误差降低8.3%,端到端加速3.56倍。长时序任务的行动步数扫描显示,SnapFlow在n_act=5时仍保持优势,达93%成功率,基线仅90%。该方法与层蒸馏、令牌剪枝正交,可组合提速。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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.
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