💡 The paper introduces TurboVLA, a new vision-language-action model that achieves real-time performance at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with less than 1 GB VRAM. The conventional approach to vision-language-action models involves using a large language model as the central interface between perception and action, which incurs substantial computational and memory overhead. In contrast, TurboVLA reformulates the conventional pathway as a direct vision-language-action mapping, where visual observations and language instructions are independently encoded and directly exchanged through lightweight bidirectional vision-language interaction. This simplified design constructs task-conditioned representations directly from visual and linguistic features, significantly reducing computational and memory costs.

The TurboVLA model achieves 97.7 percent average success with only 0.2 billion parameters, 31.2 ms inference latency, and 0.9 GB inference VRAM on a consumer-grade RTX 4090, matching or outperforming substantially larger vision-language-action policies. The results establish TurboVLA as a simple and effective alternative to the prevailing language-centric vision-language-action paradigm, offering a new perspective on how vision, language, and action can be connected for efficient robotic manipulation. The code for TurboVLA is available online, making it accessible for further research and development. Overall, the paper presents a significant contribution to the field of vision-language-action modeling, demonstrating the potential for real-time and efficient robotic manipulation using a novel and simplified approach.