通过提前退出解码加速机器人多模态决策,速度提升4倍以上。
CEED-VLA: Consistency Vision-Language-Action Model with Early-Exit Decoding
- 用一致性蒸馏预测多步动作,减少推理迭代次数
- 混合标签监督降低蒸馏过程中的错误累积
- 放宽收敛条件实现提前退出,适合高速精密操作
近年来,视觉-语言-动作(VLA)模型因其出色的多模态理解与泛化能力,成为机器人研究的重要方向。然而,其实际部署受限于推理速度瓶颈,尤其在高频、灵巧操作任务中更为显著。尽管已有研究尝试使用雅可比解码替代传统自回归解码以提高效率,但因迭代次数过长,实际收益有限。为此,本文提出一致性蒸馏训练,使每轮迭代预测多个正确动作令牌,从而实现加速;同时设计混合标签监督机制,缓解蒸馏过程中的误差累积。尽管蒸馏已带来可接受的提速效果,我们仍发现部分低效迭代仍是关键瓶颈。为此,提出早退出解码策略,适度放松收敛条件,进一步提升平均推理效率。实验表明,该方法在不同基线模型上均实现超过4倍的推理加速,同时在仿真与真实机器人任务中保持高任务成功率。结果验证了本方法在机器人多模态决策加速方面具有高效且通用的潜力。项目主页见:https://irpn-eai.github.io/CEED-VLA/
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a vital research direction in robotics due to their impressive multimodal understanding and generalization capabilities. Despite the progress, their practical deployment is severely constrained by inference speed bottlenecks, particularly in high-frequency and dexterous manipulation tasks. While recent studies have explored Jacobi decoding as a more efficient alternative to traditional autoregressive decoding, its practical benefits are marginal due to the lengthy iterations. To address it, we introduce consistency distillation training to predict multiple correct action tokens in each iteration, thereby achieving acceleration. Besides, we design mixed-label supervision to mitigate the error accumulation during distillation. Although distillation brings acceptable speedup, we identify that certain inefficient iterations remain a critical bottleneck. To tackle this, we propose an early-exit decoding strategy that moderately relaxes convergence conditions, which further improves average inference efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves more than 4 times inference acceleration across different baselines while maintaining high task success rates in both simulated and real-world robot tasks. These experiments validate that our approach provides an efficient and general paradigm for accelerating multimodal decision-making in robotics. Our project page is available at https://irpn-eai.github.io/CEED-VLA/.
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