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Samsung Research

Big techSouth Korea

Corporate R&D organisation of Samsung Electronics whose robotics researchers published the Shallow-π distillation method for flow-based VLAs.

Overview

Samsung Research is the research organisation of Samsung Electronics, with R&D centres in Korea and abroad listed on its website. In January 2026 three Samsung Research authors in South Korea published Shallow-π, a knowledge-distillation framework that reduces flow-based VLA models from 18 to 6 transformer layers for on-device robot inference.

Sources: research.samsung.com (19 Oct 2026) · arxiv.org (28 Jan 2026)

Type
Big tech

Key people

  • Boseong JeonFirst author, Shallow-πarxiv.org, 28 Jan 2026
  • Taehan KimCo-author, Shallow-πarxiv.org, 28 Jan 2026

Funding history

Corporate division · Research division of Samsung Electronics; no separate funding.

Ranking

#39 of 104 model companies · score 40.7 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026

  • Published benchmarks 35%96%
  • Open weights 20%0%
  • Adoption 20%0%
  • Released models 15%20%
  • Disclosed funding 10%n/a

Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 0 of 1 listed models have open weights.

How we rank model companies

The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.

InputWeightHow it is measured
Published benchmarks35%For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating).
Open weights20%Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download.
Adoption20%GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero.
Released models15%Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5.
Disclosed funding10%The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion.

Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.

Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.

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Closed or unreleased-weights models (1)

Samsung Research logo

Shallow-π

Closed weightsVLA

Knowledge-distillation framework that cuts the transformer depth of flow-based VLAs (π0/π0.5) from 18 to 6 layers, reporting over 2x faster inference with under 1 point success-rate drop; validated on Jetson Orin and Thor.

Released
28 Jan 2026
Parameters
n/a
License
n/a
Embodiments
humanoid
GitHub stars
n/a
HF downloads (all time)
n/a
Published benchmark results for Shallow-π
BenchmarkResultSource
LIBEROAverage success rate across LIBERO-Spatial/Object/Goal/Long (%)95%arxiv.orgPaper table, π0.5-L6 distilled student (6 layers); π0.5-L9 scores 97. As of 28 Jan 2026