提出 FASTER 方法,让机器人响应环境变化快十倍。
FASTER: Rethinking Real-Time Flow VLAs
- 用感知-行动分块新思路,动态调整动作采样顺序。
- 在 X-VLA 等模型上将即时反应时间压缩至单步,提速十倍。
- 适合部署在消费级显卡的实时机器人系统,尤其动态任务中表现突出。
实时执行对视觉-语言-动作(VLA)模型在物理世界中的部署至关重要。现有异步推理方法主要优化轨迹平滑性,却忽视了对环境变化的响应延迟。本文重新思考动作分块策略中的响应机制,系统分析了影响响应时间的因素。研究表明,响应时间服从由首次动作时间(TTFA)与执行视野共同决定的均匀分布。此外,我们发现流式 VLA 中采用固定调度的常规做法效率低下,迫使系统完成全部采样步骤后才能开始动作,成为响应延迟的瓶颈。为此,我们提出快速动作采样以实现即时反应(FASTER)。通过引入视野感知调度,FASTER 在流式采样中自适应优先处理近期动作,将即时反应的去噪过程压缩至单步(如 π₀.₅ 与 X-VLA 模型),提速十倍,同时保持长视野轨迹质量。结合流式客户端-服务器架构,FASTER 显著降低真实机器人上的有效响应延迟,尤其在消费级 GPU 上表现优异。实验证明,在高度动态的乒乓球任务中,FASTER 显著提升通用策略的实时响应能力,实现快速、准确且平滑的轨迹生成。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Real-time execution is crucial for deploying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in the physical world. Existing asynchronous inference methods primarily optimize trajectory smoothness, but neglect the critical latency in reacting to environmental changes. By rethinking the notion of reaction in action chunking policies, this paper presents a systematic analysis of the factors governing reaction time. We show that reaction time follows a uniform distribution determined jointly by the Time to First Action (TTFA) and the execution horizon. Moreover, we reveal that the standard practice of applying a constant schedule in flow-based VLAs can be inefficient and forces the system to complete all sampling steps before any movement can start, forming the bottleneck in reaction latency. To overcome this issue, we propose Fast Action Sampling for ImmediaTE Reaction (FASTER). By introducing a Horizon-Aware Schedule, FASTER adaptively prioritizes near-term actions during flow sampling, compressing the denoising of the immediate reaction by tenfold (e.g., in $π_{0.5}$ and X-VLA) into a single step, while preserving the quality of long-horizon trajectory. Coupled with a streaming client-server pipeline, FASTER substantially reduces the effective reaction latency on real robots, especially when deployed on consumer-grade GPUs. Real-world experiments, including a highly dynamic table tennis task, prove that FASTER unlocks substantially improved real-time responsiveness for generalist policies, enabling rapid generation of accurate and smooth trajectories.
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