How Many Demonstrations Does a VLA Need? On the Sample Efficiency of VLA Finetuning

원문 초록

Pretrained vision language action (VLA) models show strong zero-shot performance but they are rarely deployed directly and are often first post-trained on demonstrations from the target setting. Yet VLAs are typically compared by zero-shot or full-data fine-tuned success which reveals little about the data and compute required for downstream adaptation. We study adaptation efficiency for six VLAs ($\pi_0$, $\pi_{0.5}$, and GR00T N1-N1.7) on four LIBERO suites, varying both demonstrations and training steps. This reveals differences hidden by full-data fine-tuning: models which are within two points on the full LIBERO-Spatial dataset differ by up to 3$\times$ in success with 50 demonstrations. $\pi_{0.5}$ needs 2-5$\times$ fewer demonstrations than $\pi_0$ and is the most sample-efficient model at every budget, with the largest gap on the long-horizon suite. Within GR00T, N1.5 adapts more efficiently than N1.6 and N1.7 on three of four suites, despite their stronger zero-shot performance. We also study one pretraining factor behind these differences by freezing the VLM during finetuning: this severely degrades the $\pi$ models whose VLM is jointly trained with the action expert during pretraining, but barely affects GR00T models.