Fast and Accurate: An Adaptive VLA Inference Framework through Environment-aware Model Selection

arXiv:2608.06434 · cs.RO, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-06 · Read on arXiv

Yuewei Sun, Lang Qin, Zechuan Tian, Jingwen Li, Guiqin Wang, Shengzeng Huo, Wenxin Ren, Tao Fang, Xiaochen Zhang, Guanqing Deng, Xiang Wang, Xiaowen Dong, Qinghai Guo, Yuxin Ma

cs.RO, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-06

Updated: 2026-08-10

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Embodied intelligence demands both long-horizon reasoning and real-time closed-loop responsiveness.

Terminology

Abstract

Embodied intelligence demands both long-horizon reasoning and real-time closed-loop responsiveness. Recent dual-system Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures combine fast reactive control with slow deliberative reasoning to balance inference speed and task success rate. However, existing dual-process VLAs tightly couple the fast module to intermediate representations of the slow module, necessitating end-to-end joint training and limiting modularity, extensibility and flexible system switching. In this paper, we propose Environment-aware Model Selection (EMS), an adaptive VLA inference framework that switches between two fully decoupled systems of different scales through environment-aware model selection. The large-scale deliberative system provides globally consistent trajectory planning to ensure task success, while a lightweight reactive system enables high-frequency closed-loop control. A reinforcement-learning-based switching policy dynamically selects which system to invoke based on real-time feedback, enabling sparse use of the slow system and thereby balancing pretrained knowledge utilisation with runtime efficiency. Our design offers three key advantages over prior hierarchical VLA frameworks: (1) a fully decoupled and modular dual-system architecture that supports plug-and-play model replacement; (2) an adaptive, environment-aware switching strategy; (3) high-frequency inference for responsive closed-loop control. We extensively evaluate EMS in both simulation and real-world environments. On the LIBERO benchmark, EMS achieves success rates comparable to the large-scale baseline while increasing the effective action frequency to 93.4 Hz. The framework further demonstrates strong extensibility in real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks, where it accelerates task completion while maintaining robust performance.

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