As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/m/smolvla/

# SmolVLA (450M)

Hugging Face, LeRobot family. Status: current. Type: robotics model. Released: 2025-06-03.

## How to call it

| Provider | Model id | Endpoint | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | `lerobot/smolvla_base` |  | https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/smolvla https://huggingface.co/lerobot/smolvla_base |
| GitHub (LeRobot) |  |  | https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot |

## Pricing

- Price not published.
- Last checked: 2026-09-29

## Specs

- Input: image, text
- Output: action
- Context window: not published
- Max output: not published
- Open weights: yes
- Licence: apache-2.0

## Where it stands

- Newer robotics models in the registry since its release: 25. The 5 newest:
  - Praxis-1 (2026-09-30) https://postcutoff.com/m/praxis-1/
  - Helix 2.5 (2026-09-17) https://postcutoff.com/m/figure-helix-2-5/
  - UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 (2026-09-10) https://postcutoff.com/m/unifolm-wla-1-0/
  - Skild S1 (Skild Brain) (2026-08-25) https://postcutoff.com/m/skild-s1/
  - Generalist GEN-1.5 (2026-08-19) https://postcutoff.com/m/generalist-gen-1-5/
- Weights are public under a permissive licence (Apache-2.0).

## What stands out

- VLA small enough for a laptop: 450M params (SmolVLM2-500M backbone + flow-matching action expert); trains on a single GPU and runs on consumer hardware incl. MacBooks. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvla
- Trained on community-shared data: Pretrained on ~10M frames from 487 community LeRobot datasets (<30k episodes, an order of magnitude less than other VLAs); 78.3% success on real SO-100 tasks. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvla
- Asynchronous inference: Decouples action prediction from execution: ~30% faster task completion and 2x throughput. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvla

## Notes

Designed for low-cost arms (SO-100/SO-101). HF repo still updated in Sept 2026; variants lerobot/smolvla_libero, lerobot/smolvla_robotwin. NVIDIA announced it would acquire Hugging Face (see 2026-09-03 entry).


Model page: https://postcutoff.com/m/smolvla/