RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation
The paper proposes RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled Vision-Language-Action model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo teacher into a compact student, achieving significant inference latency reductions (up to 44.8x) while maintaining competitive closed-loop performance and enabling real-time control with post-hoc explainability.