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SmolVLA - Powerful robotics VLA that runs on consumer hardware

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SmolVLA is a compact (450M) open-source Vision-Language-Action model for robotics. Trained on community data, it runs on consumer hardware & outperforms larger models. Released with code & recipes.

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Hunter
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Hi everyone! I think there are a few really important ingredients for bringing AI agents into the physical world. First, they need to be able to interact with real environments. Second, due to the limits of on-robot hardware, the models need to be lightweight and efficient. And third, for the good of the community and wider adoption, these foundational models should ideally be open-source. SmolVLA is an exciting new release because it squarely addresses these points. It's a compact (450M) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that runs on consumer-grade hardware, is fully open-source, and was trained entirely on open, community-contributed robotics datasets from the LeRobot project. Despite its small size, SmolVLA outperforms much larger VLAs on both simulation and real-world tasks. The team has also implemented things like asynchronous inference to make it even more responsive. This is a fantastic contribution for making capable, real-world robotics research more accessible to everyone.

 Running a 450M parameter model that outperforms larger ones and supports async inference is impressive.

Love that SmolVLA was trained on open, community datasets and is itself fully open-source. Transparency and collaboration like this will really push robotics research forward.

Hugging Face is doing incredible work! Their open-source model hub—packed with thousands of pre-trained models—makes it a breeze to dive into NLP, vision, and generative AI. I love how the community and APIs make complex AI feel so accessible and fun. Huge kudos to the team for building such a welcoming ecosystem!

This is incredibly cool.

SmolVLA is a great example of efficient design meeting real-world usability — compact, open-source, and high-performing. Love that it’s accessible to the broader robotics community right out of the box.

Hugging Face's 9th launch with SmoIVLA? 🤖🔥 Running powerful robotics VLA (Vision-Language-Action) on consumer hardware is a breakthrough! Must be using heavy quantization techniques or distilled multi-modal models to achieve this. The "View more ->" tease suggests edge-compute optimizations - possibly ROS 2 integration? Game-changer for indie robotics devs!

This initiative is truly inspiring! By advancing and democratizing artificial intelligence through open source and open science, it’s making AI accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or resources. I’m excited to see how it fosters innovation, collaboration, and progress in the AI community, empowering people around the world to contribute to and benefit from AI advancements!

Great to see this. Right application of AI. Way to go!

Interesting mission! How does open science translate into practical tools for users? 🤔

Love the mission of making AI more accessible! How are you planning to balance open-source values with sustainability? 🚀