Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) policies offer strong expressivity for action generation, but suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: multi-step inference is required to recover action structure from uninformative Gaussian noise, leading to a poor efficiency-quality trade-off under real-time constraints. We address this issue by rethinking the role of the starting point in generative action modeling. Instead of shortening the sampling trajectory, we propose CF-VLA, a coarse-to-fine two-stage formulation that restructures action generation into a coarse initialization step that constructs an action-aware starting point, followed by a single-step local refinement that corrects residual errors. Concretely, the coarse stage learns a conditional posterior over endpoint velocity to transform Gaussian noise into a structured initialization, while the fine stage performs a fixed-time refinement from this initialization. To stabilize training, we introduce a stepwise strategy that first learns a controlled coarse predictor and then performs joint optimization. Experiments on CALVIN and LIBERO show that our method establishes a strong efficiency-performance frontier under low-NFE (Number of Function Evaluations) regimes: it consistently outperforms existing NFE=2 methods, matches or surpasses the NFE=10 $π_{0.5}$ baseline on several metrics, reduces action sampling latency by 75.4\%, and achieves the best average real-robot success rate of 83.0\%, outperforming MIP by 19.5 points and $π_{0.5}$ by 4.0 points. These results suggest that structured, coarse-to-fine generation enables both strong performance and efficient inference. Our code is available at https://github.com/EmbodiedAI-RoboTron/CF-VLA.
翻译:基于流的视觉-语言-动作(VLA)策略为动作生成提供了强大的表达能力,但存在根本性的低效问题:从无信息的高斯噪声中恢复动作结构需要多步推理,这导致在实时约束下效率与质量难以兼顾。我们通过重新思考生成式动作建模中起始点的作用来解决这一问题。本文提出CF-VLA——一种粗到细的两阶段框架,旨在不缩短采样轨迹的前提下,将动作生成重构为两个步骤:首先进行粗初始化,构建一个感知动作的起点;随后进行单步局部细化,修正残余误差。具体而言,粗阶段通过学习终点速度的条件后验分布,将高斯噪声转化为结构化的初始化状态;细阶段则基于该初始化状态执行固定步数的细化。为稳定训练,我们引入了一种逐步策略:先学习受控的粗预测器,再进行联合优化。在CALVIN和LIBERO上的实验表明,我们的方法在低NFE(函数评估次数)设置下建立了强大的效率-性能边界:它持续优于现有NFE=2的方法,在多项指标上达到或超过NFE=10的π₀.₅基线,动作采样延迟降低了75.4%,并在真实机器人任务中实现了83.0%的最佳平均成功率,比MIP高出19.5个百分点,比π₀.₅高出4.0个百分点。这些结果表明,结构化的粗到细生成能够同时实现强性能和高效推理。我们的代码已开源:https://github.com/EmbodiedAI-RoboTron/CF-VLA。