Fewer Tokens, Better Action: GPT-6 Astra Robot Agents with 14% Higher Success Rate but 65% Fewer Tokens

Abstract

Vision-language model (VLM) agents can control robots through visual feedback and action primitives, but repeated LLM calls and redundant observations incur substantial token overhead. We introduce PyRUA-Lean, an interactive code-execution framework in which the agent composes robot primitives, including vision-language-action (VLA) policies, into Python cells that check and retry locally and return only the images and state they request. Across 700 simulated task instances from LIBERO-PRO, RoboTwin 2.0, and RoboCasa365, it raises success from 63.1% to 71.7% over tool calling with the same GPT-6 Astra planner and primitives, using 49% fewer LLM calls and 65% fewer input tokens on jointly solved instances. On RoboDojo, without any VLA policy or privileged information, it reaches 51.6% average success rate (Score 58.2), 19.4 points above the top entry of the public leaderboard. Based on the PyRUA-Lean framework, we train PyRUA-Lean Coder v0.1-4B, an open 4B model, with GRPO on 45 LIBERO-PRO instances; it improves from 18.8% to 44.1% on unseen task instances, surpassing the Qwen3.5-27B base model.