Model comparison · robotics
SmolVLA 450M vs OpenVLA 7B
Symmetrical, primary-source facts with unknown values left visible. No winner is assigned without comparable measurements.
FieldAt a glance
Hugging Face LeRobot · activeSmolVLA 450MVerified Aug 28, 2026
OpenVLA Research Team · activeOpenVLA 7BVerified Aug 28, 2026
Technical differences
Side-by-side facts
| Field | SmolVLA 450M | OpenVLA 7B |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Hugging Face LeRobot | OpenVLA Research Team |
| Family | SmolVLA | OpenVLA |
| Model | SmolVLA 450M | OpenVLA 7B |
| Version | 450M | 7B |
| Lifecycle | active | active |
| Input modalities | Text, Image, Robot state | Text, Image, Robot state |
| Output modalities | Robot action | Robot action |
| Context window | Unknown | Unknown |
| Total parameters | 450000000 | 7000000000 |
| Active parameters | Unknown | Unknown |
| License | apache-2.0 | Unknown |
| Open weights | Yes | Yes |
| API available | No | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Capabilities | asynchronous-inference, fine-tuning, low-cost-hardware, manipulation | cross-embodiment, fine-tuning, generalist-manipulation |
| Robotics model type | Vision-language-action model | Vision-language-action model |
| Action representation | Continuous action chunks from a flow-matching action expert | Tokenized actions decoded to continuous robot controls |
| Control architecture | SmolVLM2 backbone with flow-matching action expert | Fused SigLIP and DINOv2 visual encoder with Llama 2 7B backbone |
| Inference location | On device | Flexible |
| Native control rate (Hz) | Unknown | Unknown |
| Supported embodiments | SO-100, SO-101, LeKiwi, LIBERO Franka | WidowX, Google Robot, Franka Panda |
| Training data | Compatibly licensed LeRobot community datasets totaling fewer than 30,000 episodes in the cited release. | 970,000 robot manipulation trajectories from Open X-Embodiment described by the authors. |
18 comparable fields · 11 material differences · Editorially curated pair passes the primary-source comparison gate
Primary benchmark evidence
Comparable performance
No protocol-matched benchmark yet.Results appear here only when both models share the same benchmark version, metric, evaluation protocol, and evidence class.
SmolVLA 450M capabilities
Input price—
Output price—
Serving providers0
Canonical IDlerobot/smolvla_base
OpenVLA 7B capabilities
Input price—
Output price—
Serving providers0
Canonical IDopenvla/openvla-7b
Internal comparison graph
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Primary evidence