reflex-vla 0.3.0

Deploy any VLA model to any edge hardware. Now with reflex chat — natural-language CLI.

Reflex

by FastCrest — deployment infrastructure for vision-language-action models.

The deployment layer for VLAs — take a Vision-Language-Action model off the training cluster and onto a robot. Now with reflex chat — talk to your robot fleet in plain English.

Verified parity across ALL four major open VLAs. Reflex's monolithic ONNX export matches the reference PyTorch policy to cos = +1.000000 end-to-end on SmolVLA, pi0, pi0.5 (canonical 10-step flow-matching unrolled) and GR00T N1.6 (canonical 4-step DDIM loop external to the ONNX). Per-model first-action max_abs: SmolVLA 5.96e-07, pi0 2.09e-07, pi0.5 2.38e-07, GR00T 8.34e-07 — all at machine precision, shared seeded inputs. Full claim ledger in reflex_context/measured_numbers.md.

One CLI, seven verbs, plus a chat agent.

Install

pip install reflex-vla

For GPU serving + monolithic export (production path):

pip install 'reflex-vla[serve,gpu,monolithic]'

Quickstart — chat to it

reflex chat

you › what version am I running and what hardware can I deploy to?

  → show_version({})    → reflex --version    → "reflex 0.2.0"
  → list_targets({})    → reflex targets      → [orin-nano, orin, orin-64, thor, desktop]

You're running reflex 0.2.0. Supported targets:
  - orin-nano — Jetson Orin Nano: 8 GB, fp16
  - orin — Jetson AGX Orin 32GB: 32 GB, fp16
  - orin-64 — Jetson AGX Orin 64GB: 64 GB, fp16
  - thor — Jetson Thor: 128 GB, fp8
  - desktop — Desktop GPU (RTX 4090 / A100 / H100): 24 GB, fp16

Want me to show which models support each target, or run reflex doctor?

Chat understands 16 reflex commands (export, serve, bench, eval, distill, finetune, traces, doctor, etc.) and runs them as subprocess on your behalf. Powered by GPT-5 Mini through a proxy hosted at chat.fastcrest.com — free tier is 100 calls/day per machine, no signup, no API key.

Bring your own key? export FASTCREST_PROXY_URL=https://api.openai.com/v1 (coming in v0.3 — for now, the hosted proxy is the path).

Quickstart — explicit deploy

# Browse the curated model registry
reflex models list

# One command — probe hardware → resolve model → pull → serve
reflex go --model smolvla-base --embodiment franka

# Or with explicit hardware override + Python client
reflex go --model pi05-libero --embodiment franka --device-class a10g

Then from your code:

from reflex.client import ReflexClient

with ReflexClient("http://localhost:8000") as client:
    with client.episode() as ep:                       # auto episode_id, RTC reset
        result = ep.act(image=numpy_frame, state=[0.1, 0.2, ...])
        print(result["actions"])                       # list of action chunks
        # 503-warming retried automatically; guard violations surface as fields

Or with curl:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/act -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"instruction":"pick up the red cup","state":[0.1,0.2,0.3,0.4,0.5,0.6]}'

{
  "actions": [[...], [...], ...],          // 50 × action_dim chunk
  "latency_ms": 11.9,                      // smolvla on A10G, 10-step denoise
  "inference_mode": "onnx_trt_fp16",       // automatic — no engine flags needed
  "guard_clamped": false                    // ActionGuard didn't have to clamp anything
}

reflex go auto-detects your hardware (NVIDIA GPU / Jetson / CPU), picks the right model variant for that device, downloads weights from HuggingFace, and starts the /act endpoint. No editing configs, no separate reflex export step, no manual variant selection. For models that ship as raw PyTorch weights, you get the export command to run next.

The verb surface

reflex chat             # NEW — natural-language interface to every command below
reflex go               # one-command-deploy: probe → resolve → pull → serve
reflex serve            # explicit-config server (full flag surface)
reflex doctor           # diagnose env + GPU + per-deploy issues
reflex models {list, pull, info, export}    # curated registry + lifecycle
reflex train  {finetune, distill}           # training operations
reflex validate {dataset, export}           # pre-flight checks
reflex inspect {bench, replay, targets, guard, doctor}   # diagnostics + forensics

Hidden legacy commands (export, bench, replay, etc.) stay callable for one release as alias bridges. Removed in v0.3.

Install notes

• [monolithic] extra is required for the cos=+1.000000 verified export path (pins transformers==5.3.0)
• CPU-only: pip install 'reflex-vla[serve,onnx,monolithic]'
• GPU install needs the FULL cuDNN 9 system library (not just the pip wheel). Easiest path: NVIDIA's container docker run --gpus all -it nvcr.io/nvidia/tensorrt:24.10-py3, then apt-get install -y clang (for lerobot→evdev), then the pip install
• reflex serve errors loudly if cuDNN can't load — no silent CPU fallback
• First reflex go downloads weights (~1-14 GB depending on model) — cached on subsequent runs
• First serve takes 10-70s warmup; /health returns HTTP 503 until ready, HTTP 200 after — load balancers correctly skip the server during warmup
• reflex chat works on the base install — no extras required. Network access required (calls FastCrest's hosted proxy).

Docker — zero-install serve

# x86_64 CUDA runtime (cloud GPUs, dev workstations)
docker pull ghcr.io/rylinjames/reflex-vla:latest
docker run --gpus all \
  -v $(pwd)/p0:/exports \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  ghcr.io/rylinjames/reflex-vla:latest

# Jetson Orin / Orin Nano / Thor (arm64 + nvidia container runtime)
docker pull ghcr.io/rylinjames/reflex-vla:latest-arm64
docker run --runtime=nvidia \
  -v $(pwd)/p0:/exports \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  ghcr.io/rylinjames/reflex-vla:latest-arm64

The container's default command is reflex serve /exports --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000. Override with any reflex subcommand: docker run ... ghcr.io/rylinjames/reflex-vla:latest export <hf_id> etc.

Jetson arm64 image: built via QEMU cross-compile on tag push (v*). Bring-your-own-CUDA — the image deliberately doesn't bundle CUDA/cuDNN/TensorRT (those live on the Jetson under /usr/local/cuda and are ABI-locked to the host's JetPack version; the nvidia container runtime exposes them into the container).

ROS2 — reflex ros2-serve

Wraps the inference loop as a ROS2 node. Subscribes to sensor_msgs/Image, sensor_msgs/JointState, and std_msgs/String; publishes action chunks as std_msgs/Float32MultiArray at a configurable rate.

# rclpy is NOT pip-installable. Install ROS2 via apt or robostack first:
source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash   # or iron / jazzy

# Hidden alias — kept for back-compat through v0.2; will fold into
# `reflex serve --transport ros2` in a future release.
reflex ros2-serve ./my_export \
  --image-topic /camera/image_raw \
  --state-topic /joint_states \
  --task-topic  /reflex/task \
  --action-topic /reflex/actions \
  --rate-hz 20

Inference respects --safety-config (same limits file as HTTP serve).

When onnxruntime-gpu ships with the TensorRT execution provider (it does in v1.20+), reflex serve uses TRT FP16 automatically and caches the engine in <export_dir>/.trt_cache so subsequent server starts skip the engine-build cost. The first reflex serve takes ~30-90s to warm up; restart is ~1-2s.

Pre-flight validation

Before deploying, validate your dataset (will it train?) and your export (does it serve cleanly?):

# Dataset: 8 falsifiable checks against your LeRobot v3.0 corpus
reflex validate dataset /path/to/lerobot_data --embodiment franka --strict

# Export: round-trip ONNX vs PyTorch parity at machine-precision threshold
reflex validate export ./p0 --model lerobot/pi0_base --threshold 1e-4

Sample passing output (abbreviated):

Per-fixture results
fixture_idx  max_abs_diff  mean_abs_diff  passed
0            3.21e-06      8.40e-07       PASS
1            2.98e-06      7.92e-07       PASS
...
Summary
max_abs_diff_across_all  3.21e-06
passed                   PASS

Exit codes: 0 pass, 1 fail (any fixture above threshold), 2 error (missing ONNX, bad config). Pipe --output-json for CI consumption, or run reflex validate --init-ci to scaffold a GitHub Actions workflow at .github/workflows/reflex-validate.yml.

Composable wedges

Every wedge is a flag on reflex serve:

reflex serve ./p0 \
  --safety-config ./robot_limits.json \   # joint-limit clamping + EU AI Act audit log
  --adaptive-steps \                       # stop denoise loop early when velocity converges
  --deadline-ms 33 \                       # return last-known-good action if over budget
  --cloud-fallback http://cloud:8000      # edge-first with cloud backup

The response JSON surfaces telemetry from each enabled wedge so you can see what's actually happening (safety_violations, deadline_exceeded, adaptive_enabled, etc.).

Supported VLA models

Model	HF ID	Params	Export status
SmolVLA	lerobot/smolvla_base	450M	ONNX + validated (max_diff=3.3e-06)
pi0	lerobot/pi0_base	3.5B	ONNX + validated (max_diff=6.0e-08)
pi0.5	lerobot/pi05_base	3.62B	ONNX + validated (max_diff=2.38e-07)
GR00T N1.6	nvidia/GR00T-N1.6-3B	3.29B	ONNX + validated (max_diff=8.34e-07, live VLM conditioning)
OpenVLA	openvla/openvla-7b	7.5B	optimum-cli export onnx + reflex.postprocess.openvla.decode_actions

reflex models list browses the curated registry; reflex models info <id> shows benchmarks; reflex models pull <id> downloads. OpenVLA is a vanilla Llama-2-7B VLM — there's no custom action expert to reconstruct, so we defer to the standard HuggingFace export path and ship only the bin-to-continuous postprocess helper.

Hardware targets

Target	Hardware	Memory	Precision
orin-nano	Jetson Orin Nano	8 GB	fp16
orin	Jetson Orin	32 GB	fp16
orin-64	Jetson Orin 64	64 GB	fp16
thor	Jetson Thor	128 GB	fp8
desktop	RTX / A100	40 GB	fp16

Memory fit (monolithic ONNX on disk, FP32): SmolVLA 1.6GB, pi0 12.5GB, pi0.5 13.0GB, GR00T 4.4GB. SmolVLA fits comfortably on Orin Nano 8GB; pi0 realistically needs Orin 16GB+ or a desktop NVIDIA GPU — the 12.5GB monolithic ONNX cannot load on the 8GB Orin Nano even in FP16 (~6GB weights plus activations + OS). FP16 engine rebuild + Orin Nano fit work is tracked for v0.3.

reflex inspect targets lists current profiles.

Composable runtime wedges

Each wedge is a flag on reflex serve (also flowed through reflex go):

reflex serve ./p0 \
  --embodiment franka \                   # per-robot action ranges + ActionGuard clamping
  --safety-config ./robot_limits.json \   # URDF-derived joint limits + EU AI Act audit log
  --adaptive-steps \                      # stop denoise loop early on velocity convergence
  --deadline-ms 33 \                      # return last-known-good action if over budget
  --cloud-fallback http://cloud:8000 \    # edge-first with cloud backup
  --inject-latency-ms 0 \                 # synthetic delay (B.4 A2C2 gate methodology)
  --record /tmp/traces \                  # JSONL request/response capture for replay
  --max-consecutive-crashes 5             # circuit breaker (503 + Retry-After: 60 on trip)

Every response surfaces telemetry from each enabled wedge (guard_clamped, guard_violations, injected_latency_ms, inference_mode, etc.).

What Reflex is and isn't

Is: the deployment layer between a trained VLA and a real robot. Cross-framework export verified at cos=+1.0000000 on all four major open VLAs — SmolVLA + pi0 + pi0.5 (flow-matching, num_steps=10) + GR00T N1.6 (DDPM DiT, num_steps=4, with Eagle 2.5 VL backbone producing live image+language KV) — plus a composable runtime (serve + safety + turbo + split), edge-first design targeting Jetson + desktop NVIDIA GPUs.

Isn't: a training framework (PyTorch/JAX own that) or a cloud inference provider (vLLM/Baseten own that). Reflex's moat is the deployment toolchain: cross-framework ONNX with verified numerical parity, composable safety wedges, ROS2 + Docker + HTTP serving, and a deterministic export receipt (VERIFICATION.md) your QA team can audit.

Verified parity (the only load-bearing numbers)

Four ONNX artifacts in production, measured against PyTorch on shared seeded inputs:

Artifact	Reference	first-action max_abs	verdict
SmolVLA ONNX, num_steps=10 (production default)	sample_actions(num_steps=10)	5.96e-07	✅ machine precision
pi0 ONNX, num_steps=10 (production default)	sample_actions(num_steps=10)	2.09e-07	✅ machine precision
pi0.5 ONNX, num_steps=10 (production default)	sample_actions(num_steps=10)	2.38e-07	✅ machine precision
GR00T N1.6 ONNX, single-step DiT (DDPM, loop external)	GR00TFullStack.forward	8.34e-07	✅ machine precision
GR00T N1.6 end-to-end 4-step denoise loop	Python loop over PyTorch ref	4.77e-07	✅ machine precision
GR00T N1.6 Eagle VLM ONNX (SigLIP + Qwen3 + mlp1, 1.87B)	EagleExportStack PyTorch	4.25e-04	✅ machine precision
GR00T N1.6 DiT with real VLM KV (5-input expert_stack_with_vlm.onnx)	GR00TFullStack(state, vlm_kv)	1.78e-05	✅ machine precision
GR00T N1.6 end-to-end two-ONNX chain (Eagle → DiT)	same chain in PyTorch	1.90e-05	✅ parity + image-driven sensitivity verified (max_abs=0.21 on actions when input image changes)
SmolVLA ONNX, num_steps=1	sample_actions(num_steps=1)	1.55e-06	✅ machine precision
pi0 ONNX, num_steps=1	sample_actions(num_steps=1)	1.43e-06	✅ machine precision

Plus PyTorch-level native-path sanity checks (SmolVLAPolicy with DecomposedRMSNorm swap vs reference = cos=1.0; PI0Policy.predict_action_chunk vs raw sample_actions = bit-exact).

About the production defaults: flow-matching VLAs (SmolVLA, pi0, pi0.5) canonically integrate the velocity field with 10 Euler steps — the ONNX bakes in the unrolled loop. GR00T is DDPM-style diffusion with 4 canonical steps — the ONNX exports one velocity step, and reflex serve wraps it in the loop. All four match canonical PyTorch to machine precision. Getting pi0 / pi0.5 there required three interacting patches under torch.export (F.pad causal mask, frozen DynamicLayer.update, past_kv.get_seq_length() for mask assembly); GR00T's simpler DiT graph (no DynamicCache, no PaliGemma masking) traces cleanly via plain torch.onnx.export(opset=19) — no patches needed. Details in reflex_context/01_architecture/pi0_monolithic_wrap_pattern.md.

Full ledger: reflex_context/measured_numbers.md.

Latency numbers are intentionally not in the README yet — earlier TRT FP16 tables were measured on a now-abandoned decomposed-ONNX path. Desktop GPU + Jetson latency re-measurement is tracked for v0.3. reflex bench <export_dir> reproduces on any hardware.

Reproduce on your own GPU with one command:

reflex bench ./pi0 --iterations 100

Multi-robot batching (reflex serve --max-batch N)

Continuous batching on the HTTP layer: each /act request enters an asyncio queue; the server flushes the queue every --batch-timeout-ms (default 5ms) into one batched ONNX inference. Earlier measurements on the decomposed-ONNX path showed 2.3-2.9× throughput scaling at batch sizes 4-16; those numbers are being re-measured on the monolithic path for v0.3.

License

Apache 2.0

Status

v0.3 — reflex chat ships. Active development. Install, kick the tires, open issues loudly. We're looking for the first 20 robotics teams actually deploying this; your feedback shapes v0.4.

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Reflex is built by FastCrest. Apache 2.0, no signup, no telemetry by default.