CronusVLA: Towards Efficient and Robust Manipulation via Multi-Frame Vision-Language-Action Modeling

TL;DR

CronusVLA introduces a multi-frame vision-language-action framework that enhances robotic manipulation by leveraging temporal information efficiently, resulting in improved robustness and performance in simulated and real-world tasks.

Contribution

It extends single-frame VLA models to a multi-frame paradigm with a two-stage training process, improving robustness and efficiency in robotic manipulation.

Findings

Achieves 70.9% success rate on SimplerEnv benchmark.

Outperforms OpenVLA by 26.8% on LIBERO.

Demonstrates superior robustness under observational disturbances.

Abstract

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation. However, these models remain constrained by the single-frame image paradigm and fail to fully leverage the temporal information offered by multi-frame histories, as directly feeding multiple frames into VLM backbones incurs substantial computational overhead and inference latency. We propose CronusVLA, a unified framework that extends single-frame VLA models to the multi-frame paradigm. CronusVLA follows a two-stage process: (1) Single-frame pretraining on large-scale embodied datasets with autoregressive prediction of action tokens, establishing an effective embodied vision-language foundation; (2) Multi-frame post-training, which adapts the prediction of the vision-language backbone from discrete tokens to learnable features, and aggregates historical information via feature chunking. CronusVLA effectively addresses the existing challenges of multi-frame modeling while enhancing performance and observational robustness. To evaluate the robustness under temporal and spatial disturbances, we introduce SimplerEnv-OR, a novel benchmark featuring 24 types of observational disturbances and 120 severity levels. Experiments across three embodiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that CronusVLA achieves leading performance and superior robustness, with a 70.9% success rate on SimplerEnv, a 26.8% improvement over OpenVLA on LIBERO, and the highest robustness score on SimplerEnv-OR. These results highlight the potential of efficient multi-frame adaptation in VLA models for more powerful and robust real-world deployment.