Asynchronous Fast-Slow Vision-Language-Action Policies for Whole-Body Robotic Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper presents DuoCore-FS, an asynchronous vision-language-action framework for robotic manipulation that improves real-time control and task success by decoupling high-frequency action generation from slower semantic reasoning.

Contribution

The novel asynchronous architecture with a latent buffer and action tokenizer enables faster whole-body robot control while maintaining end-to-end training of the policy.

Findings

Achieves 30 Hz action generation with a 3B-parameter VLM.

Improves task success rates in real-world manipulation.

Enhances responsiveness over synchronous models.

Abstract

Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems integrate a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for semantic reasoning with an action expert generating continuous action signals, yet both typically run at a single unified frequency. As a result, policy performance is constrained by the low inference speed of large VLMs. This mandatory synchronous execution severely limits control stability and real-time performance in whole-body robotic manipulation, which involves more joints, larger motion spaces, and dynamically changing views. We introduce a truly asynchronous Fast-Slow VLA framework (DuoCore-FS), organizing the system into a fast pathway for high-frequency action generation and a slow pathway for rich VLM reasoning. The system is characterized by two key features. First, a latent representation buffer bridges the slow and fast systems. It stores instruction semantics and action-reasoning representation aligned with the scene-instruction context, providing high-level guidance to the fast pathway. Second, a whole-body action tokenizer provides a compact, unified representation of whole-body actions. Importantly, the VLM and action expert are still jointly trained end-to-end, preserving unified policy learning while enabling asynchronous execution. DuoCore-FS supports a 3B-parameter VLM while achieving 30 Hz whole-body action-chunk generation, approximately three times as fast as prior VLA models with comparable model sizes. Real-world whole-body manipulation experiments demonstrate improved task success rates and significantly enhanced responsiveness compared to synchronous Fast-Slow VLA baselines. The implementation of DuoCore-FS, including training, inference, and deployment, is provided to commercial users by Astribot as part of the Astribot robotic platform.