Presentation
Actionflow: A Pipelined Action Acceleration for Vision Language Models on Edge
DescriptionVision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a unified paradigm for robotic perception and control, enabling emergent generalization and long-horizon task execution. However, their deployment in dynamic, real-world environments is severely hindered by high inference latency. While smooth robotic interaction requires control frequencies of 20--30 Hz, current VLA models typically operate at only 3--5 Hz on edge devices due to the memory-bound nature of autoregressive decoding. Existing optimizations often require extensive retraining or compromise model accuracy.
To bridge this gap, we introduce ActionFlow, a system-level inference framework tailored for resource-constrained edge platforms. At the core of ActionFlow is a Cross-Request Pipelining strategy, a novel scheduler that redefines VLA inference as a macro-pipeline of micro-requests. The strategy intelligently batches memory-bound Decode phases with compute-bound Prefill phases across continuous time steps to maximize hardware utilization. Furthermore, to support this scheduling, we propose a \textbf{Cross-Request State Packed Forward} operator and a Unified KV Ring Buffer, which fuse fragmented memory operations into efficient dense computations. Experimental results demonstrate that ActionFlow achieves a 2.55 times improvement in FPS on the OpenVLA-7B model without retraining, enabling real-time dynamic manipulation on edge hardware.
Our work is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ActionFlow-1D47.
To bridge this gap, we introduce ActionFlow, a system-level inference framework tailored for resource-constrained edge platforms. At the core of ActionFlow is a Cross-Request Pipelining strategy, a novel scheduler that redefines VLA inference as a macro-pipeline of micro-requests. The strategy intelligently batches memory-bound Decode phases with compute-bound Prefill phases across continuous time steps to maximize hardware utilization. Furthermore, to support this scheduling, we propose a \textbf{Cross-Request State Packed Forward} operator and a Unified KV Ring Buffer, which fuse fragmented memory operations into efficient dense computations. Experimental results demonstrate that ActionFlow achieves a 2.55 times improvement in FPS on the OpenVLA-7B model without retraining, enabling real-time dynamic manipulation on edge hardware.
Our work is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ActionFlow-1D47.
Event Type
Research Manuscript
TimeWednesday, July 291:55pm - 2:08pm PDT
LocationMtg Room 203C
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