English

VLA Foundry: A Unified Framework for Training Vision-Language-Action Models

Robotics 2026-04-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning Software Engineering

Abstract

We present VLA Foundry, an open-source framework that unifies LLM, VLM, and VLA training in a single codebase. Most open-source VLA efforts specialize on the action training stage, often stitching together incompatible pretraining pipelines. VLA Foundry instead provides a shared training stack with end-to-end control, from language pretraining to action-expert fine-tuning. VLA Foundry supports both from-scratch training and pretrained backbones from Hugging Face. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we train and release two types of models: the first trained fully from scratch through our LLM-->VLM-->VLA pipeline and the second built on the pretrained Qwen3-VL backbone. We evaluate closed-loop policy performance of both models on LBM Eval, an open-data, open-source simulator. We also contribute usability improvements to the simulator and the STEP analysis tools for easier public use. In the nominal evaluation setting, our fully-open from-scratch model is on par with our prior closed-source work and substituting in the Qwen3-VL backbone leads to a strong multi-task table top manipulation policy outperforming our baseline by a wide margin. The VLA Foundry codebase is available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/vla_foundry and all multi-task model weights are released on https://huggingface.co/collections/TRI-ML/vla-foundry. Additional qualitative videos are available on the project website https://tri-ml.github.io/vla_foundry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.19728,
  title  = {VLA Foundry: A Unified Framework for Training Vision-Language-Action Models},
  author = {Jean Mercat and Sedrick Keh and Kushal Arora and Isabella Huang and Paarth Shah and Haruki Nishimura and Shun Iwase and Katherine Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19728},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

32 pages, 16 figures, technical report

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:28:53.347Z