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VLAgents: A Policy Server for Efficient VLA Inference

Published: January 16, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.11250v1

By: Tobias Jülg , Khaled Gamal , Nisarga Nilavadi and more

Potential Business Impact:

Makes robots understand and do tasks faster.

Business Areas:
Autonomous Vehicles Transportation

The rapid emergence of Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) has a significant impact on robotics. However, their deployment remains complex due to the fragmented interfaces and the inherent communication latency in distributed setups. To address this, we introduce VLAgents, a modular policy server that abstracts VLA inferencing behind a unified Gymnasium-style protocol. Crucially, its communication layer transparently adapts to the context by supporting both zero-copy shared memory for high-speed simulation and compressed streaming for remote hardware. In this work, we present the architecture of VLAgents and validate it by integrating seven policies -- including OpenVLA and Pi Zero. In a benchmark with both local and remote communication, we further demonstrate how it outperforms the default policy servers provided by OpenVLA, OpenPi, and LeRobot. VLAgents is available at https://github.com/RobotControlStack/vlagents

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
3 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Robotics