MINERVA: How Small Can a Manipulation Policy Be and Still Solve LIBERO?

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models with billions of parameters now dominate the LIBERO manipulation benchmark, but the model capacity actually required by the benchmark remains unclear. We introduce MINERVA (MINimal Efficient Robotic Vision-Action policy), a family of deliberately compact visuomotor policies designed to measure this task-specific capacity floor. A 0.54M-parameter policy achieves 95.1% average success over 2,000 rollouts on the four standard LIBERO suites, only 2.4 points below the reported LeRobot $π_{0.5}$ result despite using 7,700$\times$ fewer parameters. Performance saturates near 1M parameters and collapses below 0.25M. Across broad architectural, training, and inference sweeps, only action-chunk length and vision capacity consistently exceed a $\pm$1-point training-seed band. Flow matching provides no detectable advantage over direct L1 regression across three seeds, while regression is up to 3.8$\times$ faster on GPU. A task-ID permutation probe shows that standard LIBERO instruction conditioning primarily selects among memorized tasks: changing only the task-ID mapping reduces success to near chance. The same recipe achieves 94.6% success across 89 LIBERO-90 tasks, while LIBERO-Plus perturbations reduce performance to 46--56%, with near-zero robustness to photometric shifts. The 0.54M policy replans every control step in 5--9 ms per chunk on a laptop CPU, 113$\times$ faster than SmolVLA and 1,400$\times$ faster than $π_{0.5}$, without a GPU. These results establish a first empirical estimate of LIBERO's task-specific capacity floor and motivate capacity-aware design and distillation for deployment-efficient robot policies.