TISED decomposes inference optimization effects on embodied tasks and identifies paradoxical outcomes where faster per-step inference can increase task completion time on static tasks or raise success rates on dynamic tasks.
Characterizing Vision-Language-Action Models across XPUs: Constraints and Acceleration for On-Robot Deployment
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising for generalist robot control, but on-robot deployment is bottlenecked by real-time inference under tight cost and energy budgets. Most prior evaluations rely on desktop-grade GPUs, obscuring the trade-offs and opportunities offered by heterogeneous edge accelerators (GPUs/XPUs/NPUs). We present a systematic analysis for low-cost VLA deployment via model-hardware co-characterization. First, we build a cross-accelerator leaderboard and evaluate model-hardware pairs under CET (Cost, Energy, Time), showing that right-sized edge devices can be more cost-/energy-efficient than flagship GPUs while meeting control-rate constraints. Second, using in-depth profiling, we uncover a consistent two-phase inference pattern: a compute-bound VLM backbone followed by a memory-bound Action Expert, which induces phase-dependent underutilization and hardware inefficiency. Finally, guided by these insights, we propose DP-Cache and V-AEFusion to reduce diffusion redundancy and enable asynchronous pipeline parallelism, achieving up to 2.9x speedup on GPUs and 6x on edge NPUs with only marginal success degradation. The example leaderboard website is available at: https://vla-leaderboard-01.vercel.app/.
fields
cs.RO 2years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2representative citing papers
Distillation from frontier VLMs plus E-RLVR regularization produces a 4B local model that achieves 34.5% SR on OVON while cutting inference latency by 82.8%.
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The Speedup Paradox: Rethinking Inference Speed-Quality Trade-off in Embodied Tasks
TISED decomposes inference optimization effects on embodied tasks and identifies paradoxical outcomes where faster per-step inference can increase task completion time on static tasks or raise success rates on dynamic tasks.
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LocalNav: Distilling Frontier VLMs and Embodied RL for On-Device Object Goal Navigation
Distillation from frontier VLMs plus E-RLVR regularization produces a 4B local model that achieves 34.5% SR on OVON while cutting inference latency by 82.8%.