Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ji, Kangye, Meng, Yuan, Cui, Hanyun, Li, Ye, Zhou, Jianbo, Hua, Shengjia, Chen, Lei, Wang, Zhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ji, Kangye
Meng, Yuan
Cui, Hanyun
Li, Ye
Zhou, Jianbo
Hua, Shengjia
Chen, Lei
Wang, Zhi
author_facet Ji, Kangye
Meng, Yuan
Cui, Hanyun
Li, Ye
Zhou, Jianbo
Hua, Shengjia
Chen, Lei
Wang, Zhi
contents Diffusion Policy has demonstrated strong visuomotor modeling capabilities, but its high computational cost renders it impractical for real-time robotic control. Despite huge redundancy across repetitive denoising steps, existing diffusion acceleration techniques fail to generalize to Diffusion Policy due to fundamental architectural and data divergences. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{B}$lock-wise $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{C}$aching ($\textbf{BAC}$), a method to accelerate Diffusion Policy by caching intermediate action features. BAC achieves lossless action generation acceleration by adaptively updating and reusing cached features at the block level, based on a key observation that feature similarities exhibit non-uniform temporal dynamics and distinct block-specific patterns. To operationalize this insight, we first design an Adaptive Caching Scheduler to identify optimal update timesteps by maximizing the global feature similarities between cached and skipped features. However, applying this scheduler for each block leads to significant error surges due to the inter-block propagation of caching errors, particularly within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) blocks. To mitigate this issue, we develop the Bubbling Union Algorithm, which truncates these errors by updating the upstream blocks with significant caching errors before downstream FFNs. As a training-free plugin, BAC is readily integrable with existing transformer-based Diffusion Policy and vision-language-action models. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that BAC achieves up to 3$\times$ inference speedup for free. Project page: https://block-wise-adaptive-caching.github.io.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13456
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy
Ji, Kangye
Meng, Yuan
Cui, Hanyun
Li, Ye
Zhou, Jianbo
Hua, Shengjia
Chen, Lei
Wang, Zhi
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Diffusion Policy has demonstrated strong visuomotor modeling capabilities, but its high computational cost renders it impractical for real-time robotic control. Despite huge redundancy across repetitive denoising steps, existing diffusion acceleration techniques fail to generalize to Diffusion Policy due to fundamental architectural and data divergences. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{B}$lock-wise $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{C}$aching ($\textbf{BAC}$), a method to accelerate Diffusion Policy by caching intermediate action features. BAC achieves lossless action generation acceleration by adaptively updating and reusing cached features at the block level, based on a key observation that feature similarities exhibit non-uniform temporal dynamics and distinct block-specific patterns. To operationalize this insight, we first design an Adaptive Caching Scheduler to identify optimal update timesteps by maximizing the global feature similarities between cached and skipped features. However, applying this scheduler for each block leads to significant error surges due to the inter-block propagation of caching errors, particularly within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) blocks. To mitigate this issue, we develop the Bubbling Union Algorithm, which truncates these errors by updating the upstream blocks with significant caching errors before downstream FFNs. As a training-free plugin, BAC is readily integrable with existing transformer-based Diffusion Policy and vision-language-action models. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that BAC achieves up to 3$\times$ inference speedup for free. Project page: https://block-wise-adaptive-caching.github.io.
title Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy
topic Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13456