用分路推理加速自动驾驶视觉语言动作模型的思考步骤。
Reasoning-aware Speculative Decoding for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving

- 将推理分为常规路径和深思路径,分别处理历史轨迹和新情况。
- 运行时间缩短约4倍,关键在位置编码与奖励设计创新。
- 适合追求低延迟自动驾驶系统的研发者参考。
现代自动驾驶的视觉-语言-动作(VLA)规划器在生成轨迹前会输出一串因果链(CoC)推理步骤。该推理过程为自回归生成,占用了主要推理时延,而轨迹头则并行且计算廉价。由于自动驾驶对延迟敏感,加速推理步骤成为核心挑战。我们观察到,CoC推理有两种不同需求:多数词元延续基于自身轨迹历史的自然流程,少量词元则需根据当前视觉证据应对突发情况。为此,我们提出双路径推理架构:常规推理器专注历史轨迹,不依赖视觉输入;深思推理器(即原VLA目标模型)则基于最新视觉信息处理异常情况。两者通过推测解码框架协同工作。不同于标准推测解码中草稿模型为小版本,本方案中两个推理器专精于读取不同提示部分。我们提出两项技术实现:第一,引入 extbf{FlatRoPE},一种1D旋转位置编码,打破目标模型3D M-RoPE的旋转对称性,引导注意力从视觉词元转向轨迹历史词元;第二,引入 extbf{Action-aware RL (AARL)},一种后训练阶段,使用动作质量奖励结合静态参考KL锚点。整体系统使推理步骤运行时间相比原始Alpamayo规划器降低约4倍。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) planners for autonomous driving emit a chain-of-causation (CoC) reasoning step \emph{before} producing a trajectory. The reasoning is autoregressive and dominates inference latency, while the trajectory head is parallel and cheap. Latency is an operational constraint in autonomous driving, so accelerating the reasoning step is the central problem we address. We observe that CoC reasoning has two qualitatively different needs: most tokens continue routine setup that follows naturally from the ego-trajectory history, and a small fraction encode commitments that require fresh visual evidence about an unexpected situation. We split this reasoning into two specialized paths: a \emph{routine reasoner} that handles the predictable continuation by attending to trajectory history, and a \emph{deliberative reasoner} (the unmodified VLA target) that handles novel cases by attending to current visual evidence, using the speculative decoding framework as the architectural template for how the two paths cooperate. Unlike standard speculative decoding, our routine reasoner is not a smaller replica of the target; the two reasoners are deliberately specialized to read different parts of the prompt. We propose two techniques to realize this. First, we introduce \textbf{FlatRoPE}, a 1D rotary positional embedding in the draft that breaks the rotational symmetry of the target's 3D M-RoPE, redirecting attention away from visual tokens and onto trajectory-history tokens. Second, we introduce \textbf{Action-aware RL (AARL)}, a post-training stage that uses an action-quality reward together with a static-reference KL anchor. Together, our two-reasoner system reduces the reasoning-step running time by approximately $4\times$ relative to the original Alpamayo planner.
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