VLA-ULAP: Interleaving Cloud VLA Calls with Ultra-Lightweight Local Action Prediction at the Edge
Abstract: Billion-parameter vision--language--action (VLA) policies demand substantial onboard power, while communication delays in remote inference hinder timely responses. We propose VLA-ULAP, which interleaves remote VLA calls with an Ultra-Lightweight Local Action Predictor (ULAP). With approximately 7.4M parameters including the frozen vision encoder, ULAP combines current views, proprioception, and executed action history to predict chunks in one pass. Trained independently, it requires no VLA hidden states, online verification, or server round trips. On Jetson Orin Nano, ULAP takes 19.9 ms and 0.183 J per inference, compared with 284.3 ms and 50.55 J for GR00T on RTX A6000. Across three simulated base-policy/benchmark pairs, selected operating points remove 48.8--76.7\% of VLA calls while retaining 95.0--97.5\% of the baseline success rate. Against local VLA-acceleration alternatives on VLA-JEPA, ULAP uses an estimated 49.2\% less inference time and 51.0\% less GPU energy per successful episode than ACT at comparable success rates, and 77.1\% less time and 79.9\% less energy than SP-VLA at equal success rates. Physical SO-101 experiments retain 95.2--100\% of the baseline success rate across seen and held-out placements while reducing inference time by an estimated 47.9--58.0\% and inference-device energy by 52.1--62.5\%, based on successful-episode call counts and measured device costs. Faster responses also improve dynamic-task success rates: in latency-aware LIBERO-Safety simulation, VLA-ULAP exceeds $π_{0.5}$ by 11.0 and 15.5 percentage points on two tasks while approximately halving VLA calls.