UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions
Authors: name: Qingwen Bu, name: Yanting Yang, name: Jisong Cai, name: Shenyuan Gao, name: Guanghui Ren, name: Maoqing Yao, name: Ping Luo, name: Hongyang Li

A generalist robot should perform effectively across various environments.
However, most existing approaches heavily rely on scaling action-annotated data
to enhance their capabilities. Consequently, they are often limited to single
physical specification and struggle to learn transferable knowledge across
different embodiments and environments. To confront these limitations, we
propose UniVLA, a new framework for learning cross-embodiment
vision-language-action (VLA) policies. Our key innovation is to derive
task-centric action representations from videos with a latent action model.
This enables us to exploit extensive data across a wide spectrum of embodiments
and perspectives. To mitigate the effect of task-irrelevant dynamics, we
incorporate language instructions and establish a latent action model within
the DINO feature space. Learned from internet-scale videos, the generalist
policy can be deployed to various robots through efficient latent action
decoding. We obtain state-of-the-art results across multiple manipulation and
navigation benchmarks, as well as real-robot deployments. UniVLA achieves
superior performance over OpenVLA with less than 1/20 of pretraining compute
and 1/10 of downstream data. Continuous performance improvements are observed
as heterogeneous data, even including human videos, are incorporated into the
training pipeline. The results underscore UniVLA's potential to facilitate
scalable and efficient robot policy learning.