SmolVLA SO-101 Multi-Task — V5 Full

SmolVLA fine-tuned on all four tasks using SmolVLA's default settings — notably with the vision encoder frozen. Superseded by V6 Full.

Part of Project-IRA — Interactive Robotic Arm. Code: https://github.com/Project-IRA/interactive-robotic-arm

Quality

Works, but noticeably worse than V6. Best checkpoint 100000.

The characteristic failure was the arm missing objects entirely with no directed motion toward them — the expected symptom when the vision encoder never adapts to the scene. This diagnosis is what motivated V6.

Training

SLURM job 2163390. Single L40S GPU.

lerobot-train \
    --policy.path=lerobot/smolvla_base \
    --dataset.repo_id=TPSoSe2026_Dataset_Full_Merged_Final_LeRobot_SO101 \
    --batch_size=64 --steps=100000 --save_freq=5000 \
    --num_workers=16 --tolerance_s=0.01 \
    --output_dir=outputs/train/smolvla_full \
    --job_name=smolvla_full \
    --policy.device=cuda --policy.push_to_hub=false --wandb.enable=false \
    --rename_map='{"observation.images.wrist_left": "observation.images.camera1", "observation.images.desk_view": "observation.images.camera2"}'

Kept for comparison — the frozen/unfrozen vision encoder contrast against V6 is the clearest ablation in the project.

Usage

[!CAUTION] This model expects renamed camera keys. Training used --rename_map to remap the dataset's camera features:

Dataset feature	What the policy expects	Physical camera
observation.images.wrist_left	observation.images.camera1	wrist
observation.images.desk_view	observation.images.camera2	desk

If you feed this policy wrist_left / desk_view it will fail or silently misbehave. Name your cameras camera1 (wrist) and camera2 (desk) at inference time, or apply the same --rename_map when re-training. The Pi0.5 models do not do this — they use the native wrist_left / desk_view names.

[!IMPORTANT] Model files are nested under outputs_V5/, so from_pretrained on the repo ID will not work:

outputs_V5/train/smolvla_full/checkpoints/<step>/pretrained_model/

Checkpoints present: every 5000 steps from 005000 to 100000. Use 100000. Repo total ~27.7 GB.

hf download Project-IRA/TPSoSe2026_SmolVLA_LeRobot_SO101_Finetuning_V5_Full \
  --include 'outputs_V5/train/smolvla_full/checkpoints/100000/pretrained_model/*' \
  --local-dir ./smolvla_v5

import torch
from lerobot.policies.smolvla.modeling_smolvla import SmolVLAPolicy

policy = SmolVLAPolicy.from_pretrained("Project-IRA/TPSoSe2026_SmolVLA_LeRobot_SO101_Finetuning_V5_Full")
policy = policy.to("cuda").eval()

On-robot rollout:

lerobot-record \
  --robot.type=so101_follower \
  --robot.port=/dev/ttyACM0 \
  --robot.id=$ROBOT_ID \
  --robot.cameras='{
      camera1: {type: opencv, index_or_path: /dev/v4l/by-path/$WRIST_PATH, width: 640, height: 480, fps: 30},
      camera2: {type: opencv, index_or_path: /dev/v4l/by-path/$DESK_PATH,  width: 640, height: 480, fps: 30}
  }' \
  --policy.path=Project-IRA/TPSoSe2026_SmolVLA_LeRobot_SO101_Finetuning_V5_Full \
  --dataset.repo_id=$HF_USER/eval_run \
  --dataset.single_task="Sort the lego by color" \
  --episodes=10

Use one of the exact training prompts (see the dataset card) as the task string. Both cameras run at 640x480 at inference time even though desk_view was recorded at 800x600.

Robot setup

Inference note: both cameras are run at 640x480 during inference, not at their recording resolutions, to reduce the payload sent to the inference server.

Environment notes

All training ran on a SLURM cluster with L40S GPUs. Two environment details were required and are easy to miss when reproducing:

• ffmpeg libraries for torchcodec. A minimal conda env supplies the shared libraries that torchcodec discovers at runtime: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$CONDA_PREFIX/envs/ffmpeg_libs_v8/lib:<venv>/lib/python3.12/site-packages/nvidia/npp/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
• --tolerance_s=0.01 on every run, to accommodate timestamp jitter in the recorded episodes.

Multi-GPU runs additionally set PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True. Datasets and the virtualenv were copied to node-local /scratch before training rather than read from shared storage.

No Weights & Biases logging was enabled for any run (--wandb.enable=false), so there are no public training curves — the job.*.err SLURM logs are the record.

Tasks and prompts

The model is conditioned on English natural-language instructions. Prompt phrasing was varied roughly every 10 episodes during recording, giving 93 distinct prompts in the merged dataset. Use one of the training prompts verbatim for best results — the full lists are on the dataset card.

Limitations

• Behaviour cloning. The policy imitates teleoperated demonstrations and has no notion of recovery beyond what was demonstrated. It is susceptible to covariate shift and can fail to recover from states outside the demonstration distribution.
• Recovery data is incidental, not systematic. Recovery behaviour appears in the data only where the operator happened to make and correct a mistake during recording; no recovery episodes were scripted deliberately.
• Single environment. All data comes from one lab desk with one lighting setup, one camera geometry, and one set of physical objects. Expect degradation elsewhere.
• Prompt sensitivity. Language conditioning was trained on a fixed set of phrasings (listed in the dataset card). Prompts far from those phrasings may behave unpredictably.
• No formal evaluation. Quality assessments below are qualitative, from operators observing rollouts on the physical arm. There are no success-rate numbers.
• Not safety-rated. Supervise all physical execution and keep the workspace clear.

Upstream licensing & attribution

This model is a derivative work of Apache-2.0 licensed components:

Apache-2.0 permits relicensing derivative works. We retain the upstream copyright notices, license text, and NOTICE files for the incorporated material, as Apache-2.0 Section 4 requires. The upstream components remain under Apache-2.0 — only this project's own contributions (the fine-tuned weights and training configuration) are offered under CC BY-SA 4.0.

CC BY-SA 4.0 was chosen because it is share-alike: derivatives must be released under the same licence, so this work cannot be taken closed-source. The project's source code lives in a separate repository under its own licence — see https://github.com/Project-IRA/interactive-robotic-arm.

Citation

@misc{project_ira_2026,
  title        = {Project-IRA: Interactive Robotic Arm},
  author       = {Baten, Cleo and Keppler, Bela and Sapper, Jonas},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/Project-IRA}},
  note         = {Code: \url{https://github.com/Project-IRA/interactive-robotic-arm}}
}