Project Page

SMILE

Smooth Motion for Improved Long-Horizon VLA Execution

Jongwoo Park, E-Ro Nguyen, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Cristina Mata, Xiang Li, and Michael S Ryoo

Contact: jongwopark@cs.stonybrook.edu

SMILE vs. Baseline VLA

SMILE-VLA (Success)

Baseline VLA (Fail)

SMILE avoids contact with surrounding objects.

<Lift the grape and place it in the basket.>

SMILE-VLA (Success)

Baseline VLA (Fail)

SMILE keeps the target object securely grasped without dropping it.

<Lift the orange and place it in the basket.>

SMILE-VLA (Success)

Baseline VLA (Fail)

SMILE picks up the target object within a few attempts.

<Lift the apple and place it in the basket.>

SMILE-VLA (Success)

Baseline VLA (Fail)

SMILE picks up the target object while staying inside the valid boundary.

<Lift the kiwi and place it in the basket.>

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models reduce inference cost by executing multiple actions per call, but longer horizons often degrade accuracy because raw chunks contain jitter and outliers. We introduce SMILE, an architecture-preserving interface that predicts B-spline coefficients and decodes them into smooth action sequences. SMILE changes only the action representation, enabling longer fixed horizons while retaining each baseline's backbone and model scale. We apply SMILE to SmolVLA, Evo1, VPP, and DAWN, improving accuracy and amortized inference efficiency across LIBERO, CALVIN, and real-world experiments. SMILE-Evo1 reaches 98.0% with a 1.1x speedup on LIBERO, while SMILE-VPP reaches an average length of 4.42 with a 1.5x speedup on CALVIN. At a matched execution horizon of 10, SMILE-SmolVLA reduces non-boundary acceleration by 78.6% and velocity sign-change rate by 42.3%. Real-world xArm tests show higher success, fewer drops, and fewer contacts. These results establish smooth coefficient-space generation as a route to accurate, efficient long-horizon VLA execution.

Architecture

SMILE architecture overview showing B-spline coefficient tokens and coefficient heads replacing the raw action sequence interface.
SMILE replaces only the action-side raw sequence interface with B-spline coefficient tokens and coefficient heads that decode to smooth micro-actions. The original VLA backbone, conditioner, and main denoising action-expert block are retained.

Accuracy-Efficiency Comparison

Accuracy-efficiency comparison on LIBERO showing success versus amortized inference latency per action.
Accuracy-efficiency comparison on LIBERO. Marker size denotes model scale; SMILE improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off at comparable model size.

Additional Successful SMILE Demos

Cluttered Setting

Plain Setting