Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Zhixuan Liang, Yizhuo Li, Tianshuo Yang, Chengyue Wu, Sitong Mao, Tian Nian, Liuao Pei, Shunbo Zhou, Xiaokang Yang, Jiangmiao Pang, Yao Mu, Ping Luo

Keywords: Embodied manipulation, Discrete diffusion, Vision-language-action model

Abstract: Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models adapt large vision–language backbones to map images and instructions into robot actions. However, prevailing VLAs either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order or attach separate MLP or diffusion heads outside the backbone, leading to fragmented information pathways and specialized training requirements that hinder a unified, scalable architecture. We present Discrete Diffusion VLA, a unified-transformer policy that models discretized action chunks with discrete diffusion. The design retains diffusion's progressive refinement paradigm while remaining natively compatible with the discrete token interface of VLMs. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves easy action elements before harder ones and uses secondary re-masking to revisit uncertain predictions across refinement rounds, which improves consistency and enables robust error correction. This unified decoder preserves pretrained vision-language priors, supports parallel decoding, breaks the autoregressive bottleneck, and reduces the number of function evaluations. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.3% avg. success rates on LIBERO, 71.2% visual matching on SimplerEnv-Fractal and 54.2% overall on SimplerEnv–Bridge, improving over autoregressive, MLP decoder and continuous diffusion baselines. These findings indicate that discrete-diffusion VLA supports precise action modeling and consistent training, laying groundwork for scaling VLA to larger models and datasets.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 6223