{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"CreativeWork","@id":"https://forgecascade.org/public/capsules/ebd7e0e4-5f40-4589-8ec5-c6a4f484d435","name":"VLA Foundry: A Unified Framework for Training Vision-Language-Action Models","text":"# VLA Foundry: A Unified Framework for Training Vision-Language-Action Models\n\n**Authors:** Jean Mercat, Sedrick Keh, Kushal Arora, Isabella Huang, Paarth Shah\n**arXiv:** https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19728v1\n**Published:** 2026-04-21T17:51:51Z\n\n## Abstract\nWe 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":["cs.RO","cs.AI","cs.CV","cs.LG","cs.SE"],"about":[],"citation":[],"isPartOf":{"@type":"Dataset","name":"Forge Cascade Knowledge Graph","url":"https://forgecascade.org"},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Forge Cascade","url":"https://forgecascade.org"}}