MambaAct: Efficient Mamba Action Experts for Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong promise for generalist robotic manipulation, but their inference cost remains a major bottleneck for real-time control. This limitation is especially pronounced in flow-matching VLAs such as ${\pi }_{0.5}$, where the action expert is evaluated repeatedly during iterative denoising. We introduce MambaAct, an efficient Mamba action expert for flow-matching VLA policies. MambaAct retains the pretrained visual-language prefix encoder of ${\pi }_{0.5}$, while replacing its transformer-based action expert with a compact Mamba-based action expert. Within this expert, Mamba serves as the action mixer that models dependencies across the noisy continuous-action sequence. To preserve visual-language conditioning without repeated token-level cross-attention, MambaAct uses a lightweight Context Compressor to map Vision-language model (VLM) prefix tokens into a compact conditioning signal that gates and modulates each Mamba action block. MambaAct uses a $10\times$ smaller action expert and reduces flow-matching denoising latency by $64.8\%$ on LIBERO and $58.8\%$ in real-world deployment, while improving mean LIBERO success by $1.08$ percentage points across three independent fine-tuning seeds and maintaining gains on LIBERO-Plus and real-world benchmarks. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/giakhuyendihoc/MambaAct.