Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pei, Xiaohuan, Chen, Yuxing, Xu, Siyu, Wang, Yunke, Shi, Yuheng, Xu, Chang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pei, Xiaohuan
Chen, Yuxing
Xu, Siyu
Wang, Yunke
Shi, Yuheng
Xu, Chang
author_facet Pei, Xiaohuan
Chen, Yuxing
Xu, Siyu
Wang, Yunke
Shi, Yuheng
Xu, Chang
contents Robotic manipulation with Vision-Language-Action models requires efficient inference over long-horizon multi-modal context, where attention to dense visual tokens dominates computational cost. Existing methods optimize inference speed by reducing visual redundancy within VLA models, but they overlook the varying redundancy across robotic manipulation stages. We observe that the visual token redundancy is higher in coarse manipulation phase than in fine-grained operations, and is strongly correlated with the action dynamic. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{A}ction-aware \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{ADP}), a multi-modal pruning framework that integrates text-driven token selection with action-aware trajectory gating. Our method introduces a gating mechanism that conditions the pruning signal on recent action trajectories, using past motion windows to adaptively adjust token retention ratios in accordance with dynamics, thereby balancing computational efficiency and perceptual precision across different manipulation stages. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO suites and diverse real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces FLOPs and action inference latency (\textit{e.g.} $1.35 \times$ speed up on OpenVLA-OFT) while maintaining competitive success rates (\textit{e.g.} 25.8\% improvements with OpenVLA) compared to baselines, thereby providing a simple plug-in path to efficient robot policies that advances the efficiency and performance frontier of robotic manipulation. Our project website is: \href{https://vla-adp.github.io/}{ADP.com}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22093
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
Pei, Xiaohuan
Chen, Yuxing
Xu, Siyu
Wang, Yunke
Shi, Yuheng
Xu, Chang
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Robotic manipulation with Vision-Language-Action models requires efficient inference over long-horizon multi-modal context, where attention to dense visual tokens dominates computational cost. Existing methods optimize inference speed by reducing visual redundancy within VLA models, but they overlook the varying redundancy across robotic manipulation stages. We observe that the visual token redundancy is higher in coarse manipulation phase than in fine-grained operations, and is strongly correlated with the action dynamic. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{A}ction-aware \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{ADP}), a multi-modal pruning framework that integrates text-driven token selection with action-aware trajectory gating. Our method introduces a gating mechanism that conditions the pruning signal on recent action trajectories, using past motion windows to adaptively adjust token retention ratios in accordance with dynamics, thereby balancing computational efficiency and perceptual precision across different manipulation stages. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO suites and diverse real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces FLOPs and action inference latency (\textit{e.g.} $1.35 \times$ speed up on OpenVLA-OFT) while maintaining competitive success rates (\textit{e.g.} 25.8\% improvements with OpenVLA) compared to baselines, thereby providing a simple plug-in path to efficient robot policies that advances the efficiency and performance frontier of robotic manipulation. Our project website is: \href{https://vla-adp.github.io/}{ADP.com}.
title Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22093