Think Twice, Act Once: Token-Aware Compression and Action Reuse for Efficient Inference in Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tan, Xudong, Yang, Yaoxin, Ye, Peng, Zheng, Jialin, Bai, Bizhe, Wang, Xinyi, Hao, Jia, Chen, Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tan, Xudong
Yang, Yaoxin
Ye, Peng
Zheng, Jialin
Bai, Bizhe
Wang, Xinyi
Hao, Jia
Chen, Tao
author_facet Tan, Xudong
Yang, Yaoxin
Ye, Peng
Zheng, Jialin
Bai, Bizhe
Wang, Xinyi
Hao, Jia
Chen, Tao
contents Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for general-purpose robot control through natural language instructions. However, their high inference cost-stemming from large-scale token computation and autoregressive decoding-poses significant challenges for real-time deployment and edge applications. While prior work has primarily focused on architectural optimization, we take a different perspective by identifying a dual form of redundancy in VLA models: (i) high similarity across consecutive action steps, and (ii) substantial redundancy in visual tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose FlashVLA, the first training-free and plug-and-play acceleration framework that enables action reuse in VLA models. FlashVLA improves inference efficiency through a token-aware action reuse mechanism that avoids redundant decoding across stable action steps, and an information-guided visual token selection strategy that prunes low-contribution tokens. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that FlashVLA reduces FLOPs by 55.7% and latency by 36.0%, with only a 0.7% drop in task success rate. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FlashVLA in enabling lightweight, low-latency VLA inference without retraining.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21200
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think Twice, Act Once: Token-Aware Compression and Action Reuse for Efficient Inference in Vision-Language-Action Models
Tan, Xudong
Yang, Yaoxin
Ye, Peng
Zheng, Jialin
Bai, Bizhe
Wang, Xinyi
Hao, Jia
Chen, Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for general-purpose robot control through natural language instructions. However, their high inference cost-stemming from large-scale token computation and autoregressive decoding-poses significant challenges for real-time deployment and edge applications. While prior work has primarily focused on architectural optimization, we take a different perspective by identifying a dual form of redundancy in VLA models: (i) high similarity across consecutive action steps, and (ii) substantial redundancy in visual tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose FlashVLA, the first training-free and plug-and-play acceleration framework that enables action reuse in VLA models. FlashVLA improves inference efficiency through a token-aware action reuse mechanism that avoids redundant decoding across stable action steps, and an information-guided visual token selection strategy that prunes low-contribution tokens. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that FlashVLA reduces FLOPs by 55.7% and latency by 36.0%, with only a 0.7% drop in task success rate. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FlashVLA in enabling lightweight, low-latency VLA inference without retraining.
title Think Twice, Act Once: Token-Aware Compression and Action Reuse for Efficient Inference in Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21200