SmolVLA fine-tuned twice, once on viamrobotics/box-opener as released and once on an edited version with the 19 fastest-paced episodes removed. Same budget, same rollout suite, 510 rollouts per arm. The edited version scored 5.7 points higher.
The release carries one task string, open box flaps, so the rollout suite grades that task against held-out episodes drawn from each third of the recording session. A same-size random cut scored 21.9%, so the gain is from which episodes were removed, not from removing episodes.
The session-end third is where the cut concentrated and it is where the gain lands. The pooled lift clears zero, the single conditions at 170 rollouts each mostly do not, and the chart says so.
Measured on all 110 episodes of the release. Each episode gets one number, the commanded joint pace, which is the total absolute travel of the six joint targets across the episode divided by that episode's own duration. Every episode carries the same task string, open box flaps, yet pace runs from 29.6 to 73.6 degrees per second, and it climbs as the session goes on while episode length falls 27% from the first half of the session to the second, correlation -0.72 between episode index and length. The 19 episodes at 58 degrees per second or faster average 19.9 seconds against 28.6 seconds for the 91 kept, and 16 of those 19 sit in the last 36 episodes recorded.
| Removed | episodes | mean pace |
|---|---|---|
| rushed and clipped, under 18 seconds | 5 | 63.5 deg/s |
| rushed, 18 to 21 seconds | 8 | 63.9 deg/s |
| rushed at ordinary length, 21 seconds and over | 6 | 61.8 deg/s |
| Removed | 19 | 63.1 deg/s |
| Kept | 91 | 46.5 deg/s |
Measured on the release. Each clip is one episode of the scene camera, cut at that episode's own from_timestamp inside the packed video. The last number in every caption is that episode's commanded joint pace, against a corpus median of 48.8 degrees per second.