arXiv AI

VLA-HWBench: Where the Time Goes When VLA Models Run on Edge Hardware

arXiv AI
Aug 18

Efficient Block-Layer Parallel Inference for Vision-Language-Action on Hybrid Architectures

arXiv:2608. 14586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are becoming a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, but their deployment on existing vehicle platforms remains difficult because they introduce both high inference latency and strong GPU-side resource pressure.

By Haibo HU, Lianming Huang, Qiao Li, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
arXiv AI
Aug 5

PhyAI: Real-Time Physical AI at the Edge, Scalable Rollouts in the Cloud

arXiv:2608. 03682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical AI policies require inference throughout their lifecycle, including model evaluation, cloud reinforcement learning rollout, edge GPU serving, and onboard deployment.

By Chenghua Wang, Daliang Xu, Dongqi Cai, Duojin Sun, Hao Zhang, Haoze Qian, Huaiyuan Zhang, Jinshuo Cui, Kezhao Zhao, Longxi Gao, Mengwei Xu, Rongjie Yi, Tianyue Zhang, Weikai Xie, Xiyuan Tan, Xuanzhe Liu, Yingying Qin, Yiwen Lu, Yuan Yao, Yuezhi Zu, Yunhan Guo, Ziqi Guo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Decoupled Early Exits for Task-Dependent Compute Allocation in Flow-Matching VLAs

The paper introduces a framework for Flow‑Matching Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that allows independent adjustment of backbone depth, action expert depth, and denoising steps. Lightweight Exit Transformers are added at intermediate layers to enable early exits, and a KV Cache synthesis mechanism manages skipped layers so the action expert can exit deeper than the backbone. Experiments on SmolVLA and π0.5 across LIBERO and Meta‑World show that joint tuning of these compute axes reduces latency by 79.2 % and FLOPs by 31.8 %, while improving mean success rate by 5.6 %.

By Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Matteo Matteucci, Alessandro Suglia
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

VLA-ULAP: Interleaving Cloud VLA Calls with Ultra-Lightweight Local Action Prediction at the Edge

The paper introduces VLA-ULAP, a lightweight local action predictor that interleaves remote vision–language–action (VLA) calls with on‑edge inference. ULAP, with only 7.4 M parameters, predicts action chunks in a single pass using current views, proprioception, and action history, eliminating the need for VLA hidden states or server round‑trips. Experiments on Jetson Orin Nano and simulated benchmarks show that VLA-ULAP can remove 48.8–76.7 % of VLA calls while preserving 95–97.5 % of baseline success, and it outperforms local VLA‑acceleration alternatives in both inference time and energy consumption.

By Deyu Cao, Ryuji Oi, Kosuke Matsushima, Yuxuan Pan, Ziheng Wang, Daichi Fujiki, Atsutake Kosuge
arXiv AI
Sep 18

StarVLA-$\alpha$: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systems

StarVLA-α is a streamlined Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model that reduces architectural and pipeline complexity to facilitate systematic study of VLA design choices. By employing a strong VLM backbone and minimal design, it achieves competitive performance across multiple benchmarks (LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, RoboCasa) and outperforms the baseline π₀.₅ by 20% on the RoboChallenge benchmark. The authors plan to release the code to support future VLA research.

By Jinhui Ye, Ning Gao, Senqiao Yang, Jinliang Zheng, Zixuan Wang, Yuxin Chen, Pengguang Chen, Yilun Chen, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

What Makes an Efficient VLA? Navigating Action-Head Design, Scaling, and Latency

arXiv:2609.13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models combine a pretrained vision encoder, a language backbone, and an action head, but their relative contribution has...

By Luoyang Sun, Guoyang Xia, Fengfa Li, Lei Ren, Xinyu Cui, Haifeng Zhang, Fangxiang Feng, Kaike Zhang, Kun Zhan, Yan Xie, Jun Wang, Cheng Deng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Efficient Vision-Language-Action Management and Serving for Robot Factories

Robion is a new serving and management system designed to run Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models on multi‑GPU edge servers for robot factories. It splits the VLM and ADiT stages within a single GPU, shares streams across multiple models, and prioritizes requests by remaining SLO time, enabling high robot load while meeting strict latency requirements. In experiments, Robion achieves 6.7× higher robot load than vLLM‑Omni and 1.5× higher than a monolithic pipeline, and can serve 64 robots on a 4‑GPU server with 98% SLO attainment.

By Dionysios Adamopoulos, Nattapol Chanpaisit, Basel Fakhri, Christina Giannoula
arXiv AI
Oct 15

OxyGen: Unified KV Cache Management for VLA Inference under Multi-Task Parallelism

OxyGen introduces a unified KV cache management system for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that run multiple tasks in parallel, such as manipulation, conversation, and memory construction. By treating the KV cache as a shared resource, it eliminates redundant prefill operations and enables cross‑frame continuous batching, leading to significant speedups—up to 3.7× faster than isolated execution—while maintaining high language throughput and action frequency on both RTX 4090 and Jetson AGX Thor platforms. The approach is validated across several backbones and expert configurations, including deployment on a humanoid robot with on‑board Jetson hardware.

By Xiangyu Li, Huaizhi Tang, Xin Ding, Weijun Wang, Ting Cao, Yunxin Liu