Humanoid Loco-Manipulation With Discrete VLA Model

arXiv:2609.35709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models using discrete action tokens have proven effective for controling robotic arms on manipulation tasks. For a humanoid, however, the whole-body action space -- legs, torso, arms, and hands -- is far higher-dimensional and heterogeneous, raising tokenization, training, and real-time inference challenges that the previous VLA models do not address. We present Holo-M, to our knowledge the first discrete VLA model for humanoid loco-manipulation that intrinsically exploits the language model by extending its vocabulary with action tokens. In this model, we devise a unified action tokenizer that decomposes the humanoid action space into four body-part-specific tokenizers -- end-effector, body, hand, and kinematics -- enabling training across drastically different embodiments and data sources, including humanoid teleoperation, ego-centric human video, and simulation. By extending the language model's vocabulary with these action tokens, we avoid the knowledge-insulation problem inherent to the models that use separate continuous action experts. To meet real-time control requirements, we decode each body part's action tokens through grouped discrete diffusion decoding, rather than using autoregression on the action tokens. We have conducted extensive experiments on the SIMPLE humanoid loco-manipulation benchmark, in which Holo-M achieves the highest success rates in both the generalist and specialist evaluations, leading the second best by significant margins. We will release all the code and model weights.

Abstract:Vision-language-action (VLA) models using discrete action tokens have proven effective for controling robotic arms on manipulation tasks. For a humanoid, however, the whole-body action space -- legs, torso, arms, and hands -- is far higher-dimensional and heterogeneous, raising tokenization, training, and real-time inference challenges that the previous VLA models do not address. We present Holo-M, to our knowledge the first discrete VLA model for humanoid loco-manipulation that intrinsically exploits the language model by extending its vocabulary with action tokens. In this model, we devise a unified action tokenizer that decomposes the humanoid action space into four body-part-specific tokenizers -- end-effector, body, hand, and kinematics -- enabling training across drastically different embodiments and data sources, including humanoid teleoperation, ego-centric human video, and simulation. By extending the language model's vocabulary with these action tokens, we avoid the knowledge-insulation problem inherent to the models that use separate continuous action experts. To meet real-time control requirements, we decode each body part's action tokens through grouped discrete diffusion decoding, rather than using autoregression on the action tokens. We have conducted extensive experiments on the SIMPLE humanoid loco-manipulation benchmark, in which Holo-M achieves the highest success rates in both the generalist and specialist evaluations, leading the second best by significant margins. We will release all the code and model weights.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.35709 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.35709v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35709 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Humanoid Loco-Manipulation With Discrete VLA Model

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