DySL-VLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model Inference via Dynamic-Static Layer-Skipping for Robot Manipulation

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable success in robotic tasks like manipulation by fusing a language model's reasoning with a vision model's 3D understanding. However, their high computational cost remains a major obstacle for real-world applications that require real-time performance. We observe that the actions within a task have varying levels of importance: critical steps demand high precision, while less important ones can tolerate more variance. Leveraging this insight, we propose DySL-VLA, a novel framework that addresses computational cost by dynamically skipping VLA layers based on each action's importance. DySL-VLA categorizes its layers into two types: informative layers, which are consistently executed, and incremental layers, which can be selectively skipped. To intelligently skip layers without sacrificing accuracy, we invent a prior-post skipping guidance mechanism to determine when to initiate layer-skipping. We also propose a skip-aware two-stage knowledge distillation algorithm to efficiently train a standard VLA into a DySL-VLA. Our experiments indicate that DySL-VLA achieves 2.1% improvement in success length over Deer-VLA on the Calvin dataset, while simultaneously reducing trainable parameters by a factor of 85.7 and providing a 3.75x speedup relative to the RoboFlamingo baseline at iso-accuracy. Our code is available on https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/DYSL_VLA.