RhinoVLA Technical Report

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation, but real-time deployment on edge hardware remains challenging. In this work, we identify VLM visual and context tokens as a major source of deployment latency: for GEMM-dominated projection operators, computation grows linearly with the number of input tokens when model dimensions are fixed. Motivated by this observation, we propose RhinoVLA, a deployment-oriented VLA model co-designed with the Huixi R1 edge SoC. RhinoVLA adopts a token-efficient Qwen3-VL backbone and a continuous Action Expert, reducing the VLM-side token and computation burden while preserving pretrained multimodal capability. To support cross-robot learning, RhinoVLA further introduces a unified interface that combines View Registry, 72D physical state-action slot space, and robotinstance LoRA, allowing heterogeneous robot observations and action schemas to be aligned under a shared policy. On the deployment side, RhinoVLA is optimized through hardware-aware compilation, mixed-precision execution, and parallel visual encoding. Experiments show that RhinoVLA achieves downstream performance comparable to π0.5 at a similar parameter scale, while reaching 11.69 Hz end-to-end inference on Huixi R1, meeting the 10 Hz real-time closedloop control target. The project will be open-sourced at https://github.com/HuixiAI/RhinoVLA.

Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting with Neural Sorting and Axis-Oriented Rasterization

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently gained significant attention for high-quality and efficient view synthesis, making it widely adopted in fields such as AR/VR, robotics, and autonomous driving. Despite its impressive algorithmic performance, real-time rendering on resource-constrained devices remains a major challenge due to tight power and area budgets. This paper presents an architecture-algorithm co-design to address these inefficiencies. First, we reveal substantial redundancy caused by repeated computation of common terms/expressions during the conventional rasterization. To resolve this, we propose axis-oriented rasterization, which pre-computes and reuses shared terms along both the X and Y axes through a dedicated hardware design, effectively reducing multiply-and-add (MAC) operations by up to 63%. Second, by identifying the resource and performance inefficiency of the sorting process, we introduce a novel neural sorting approach that predicts order-independent blending weights using an efficient neural network, eliminating the need for costly hardware sorters. A dedicated training framework is also proposed to improve its algorithmic stability. Third, to uniformly support rasterization and neural network inference, we design an efficient reconfigurable processing array that maximizes hardware utilization and throughput. Furthermore, we introduce a $\pi$-trajectory tile schedule, inspired by Morton encoding and Hilbert curve, to optimize Gaussian reuse and reduce memory access overhead. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed design preserves rendering quality while achieving a speedup of $23.4\sim27.8\times$ and energy savings of $28.8\sim51.4\times$ compared to edge GPUs for real-world scenes. We plan to open-source our design to foster further development in this field.

Efficient and Accurate Quantized Image Super-Resolution on Mobile NPUs, Mobile AI & AIM 2022 challenge: Report

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.