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MoLe-VLA: Dynamic Layer-skipping Vision Language Action Model via Mixture-of-Layers for Efficient Robot Manipulation

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arxiv 2503.20384 v2 pith:LULZF3BO submitted 2025-03-26 cs.RO cs.AI

classification cs.ROcs.AI
keywords mole-vlalanguagelayermodelmoletasksactionbrain
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in understanding complex language and visual data, enabling generalist robotic systems to interpret instructions and perform embodied tasks. Nevertheless, their real-world deployment is hindered by substantial computational and storage demands. Recent insights into the homogeneous patterns in the LLM layer have inspired sparsification techniques to address these challenges, such as early exit and token pruning. However, these methods often neglect the critical role of the final layers that encode the semantic information most relevant to downstream robotic tasks. Aligning with the recent breakthrough of the Shallow Brain Hypothesis (SBH) in neuroscience and the mixture of experts in model sparsification, we conceptualize each LLM layer as an expert and propose a Mixture-of-Layers Vision-Language-Action model (MoLe-VLA, or simply MoLe) architecture for dynamic LLM layer activation. We introduce a Spatial-Temporal Aware Router (STAR) for MoLe to selectively activate only parts of the layers based on the robot's current state, mimicking the brain's distinct signal pathways specialized for cognition and causal reasoning. Additionally, to compensate for the cognitive ability of LLMs lost in MoLe, we devise a Cognition Self-Knowledge Distillation (CogKD) framework. CogKD enhances the understanding of task demands and improves the generation of task-relevant action sequences by leveraging cognitive features. Extensive experiments conducted in both RLBench simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of MoLe-VLA in both efficiency and performance. Specifically, MoLe-VLA achieves an 8% improvement in the mean success rate across ten tasks while reducing computational costs by up to x5.6 compared to standard LLMs.

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Cited by 23 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Revisiting Parameter Redundancy in Vision-Language-Action Models: Insights from VLM-to-VLA Adaptation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    VLA models from VLM adaptation can be pruned 12-30% via multi-module joint scheme based on divergence signals while keeping ~90% performance on LIBERO without post-pruning recovery, unlike standard criteria that collapse.

  2. HeiSD: Hybrid Speculative Decoding for Embodied Vision-Language-Action Models with Kinematic Awareness

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    HeiSD delivers up to 2.45x faster inference for embodied VLA models by hybridizing speculative decoding with kinematic boundary detection and error-mitigation tricks while preserving task success rates.

  3. KERV: Kinematic-Rectified Speculative Decoding for Embodied VLA Models

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    KERV integrates kinematic Kalman Filter predictions with speculative decoding in VLA models to achieve 27-37% faster inference while maintaining nearly the same task success rates.

  4. QuantVLA: Scale-Calibrated Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.LG 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    QuantVLA is the first post-training quantization framework for VLA models that quantizes the diffusion transformer action head and reports higher task success rates than full-precision baselines with roughly 70% memor...

  5. ActionCache: Training-Free Acceleration for Vision-Language-Action Models with Action Caching and Refinement

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ActionCache accelerates flow-based VLA models up to 34× by retrieving and refining cached intermediate actions from similar past contexts, without retraining.

  6. ActionCache: Training-Free Acceleration for Vision-Language-Action Models with Action Caching and Refinement

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A training-free cache of intermediate actions, retrieved by random-projected VLM embeddings, cuts flow-based VLA action-head latency up to 40× in tests while keeping success rates near base-model levels.

  7. SAFE-Pruner: Semantic Attention-Guided Future-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    cs.CV 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SAFE-Pruner forecasts deep-layer visual-token saliency from historical attention maps and refreshes at subtask boundaries, enabling up to 1.89x faster VLA inference with minimal success-rate drop.

  8. ConsisVLA-4D: Advancing Spatiotemporal Consistency in Efficient 3D-Perception and 4D-Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    ConsisVLA-4D adds cross-view semantic alignment, cross-object geometric fusion, and cross-scene dynamic reasoning to VLA models, delivering 21.6% and 41.5% gains plus 2.3x and 2.4x speedups on LIBERO and real-world tasks.

  9. A1: A Fully Transparent Open-Source, Adaptive and Efficient Truncated Vision-Language-Action Model

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    A1 is a transparent VLA framework achieving state-of-the-art robot manipulation success with up to 72% lower latency via adaptive layer truncation and inter-layer flow matching.

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

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    OxyGen unifies KV cache management in MoT VLAs to enable cross-task KV sharing and cross-frame continuous batching, delivering up to 3.7x speedup with 200+ tokens/s language and 70 Hz action on on-device platforms.

  11. TIDAL: Temporally Interleaved Diffusion and Action Loop for High-Frequency VLA Control

    cs.RO 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    TIDAL raises VLA control feedback from ~2.4 Hz to ~9 Hz by caching semantic intent and interleaving one-step flow generation with execution, doubling dynamic interception success in simulation.

  12. Continually Evolving Skill Knowledge in Vision Language Action Model

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Stellar VLA achieves continual learning in VLA models by maintaining a growing knowledge space and routing tasks to specialized experts conditioned on semantic relations, delivering strong LIBERO benchmark results wit...

  13. ActDistill: General Action-Guided Self-Derived Distillation for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.CV 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ActDistill transfers action knowledge from heavy VLA teacher models to lightweight students via graph-encapsulated hierarchies and action-guided dynamic routing, delivering over 50% computation reduction and 1.67x spe...

  14. CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsification

    cs.CV 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    CogVLA pairs instruction-conditioned visual-token aggregation (EFA-Routing) with transformer-layer pruning (LFP-Routing) and bidirectional action decoding (CAtten), reporting LIBERO 97.4%, real-world 70.0%, 2.5x less ...

  15. World Pilot: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models with World-Action Priors

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    World Pilot augments VLA policies with world-action priors through latent and action steering pathways, reporting 84.7% success on LIBERO-Plus zero-shot OOD and top real-robot results across four tasks.

  16. SAFE-Pruner: Semantic Attention-Guided Future-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    SAFE-Pruner forecasts deep-layer token saliency in VLA models via semantic attention consistency and adaptive subtask detection to achieve up to 1.89x speedup with under 1.7% success rate loss.

  17. ElegantVLA: Learning When to Think for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    ElegantVLA accelerates VLA models up to 3.77x by dynamically scheduling compute across vision, language, and action components without retraining the base model.

  18. RoboECC: Multi-Factor-Aware Edge-Cloud Collaborative Deployment for VLA Models

    cs.DC 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    RoboECC delivers up to 3.28x speedup for VLA model inference via co-aware segmentation and network-aware adjustment with 2.55-2.62% overhead.

  19. The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    FLUX.1’s VAE latent space contains an interpretable Hue–Saturation–Lightness structure that enables training-free color prediction and control via closed-form latent edits.

  20. Align-Then-stEer: Adapting the Vision-Language Action Models through Unified Latent Guidance

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A plug-and-play fine-tuning method using two VAEs and a latent-distance guidance loss improves cross-embodiment and cross-task success rates of diffusion- and flow-based VLA policies.

  21. Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey

    cs.RO 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    This survey organizes large VLM-based VLA models for robotic manipulation into monolithic and hierarchical paradigms, reviews their integrations and datasets, and outlines future directions.

  22. Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied Manipulation: A Systematic Survey

    cs.RO 2025-10 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey that groups VLA efficiency techniques into four categories: model architecture, perception features, action generation, and training/inference strategies.

  23. Large Model Empowered Embodied AI: A Survey on Decision-Making and Embodied Learning

    cs.RO 2025-08 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A review that categorizes large-model-empowered embodied AI into hierarchical and end-to-end decision-making, imitation and reinforcement learning, and world models.

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