Wenqi Lou

Yuntao Dai, Hang Gu, Teng Wang et al.

Vision-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 hin dered by high inference latency. While smooth robotic interaction requires control frequencies of 20 to 30 Hz, current VLA models typi cally 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 plat forms. At the core of ActionFlow is a Cross-Request Pipelin ing 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 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 2.55x improvement in FPS on the OpenVLA-7B model without retraining, enabling real-time dy namic manipulation on edge hardware. Our work is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ActionFlow-1D47.

Yixuan Zhu, Bo Zhang, Yinkang Gao et al.

In real-time systems, both individual task execution and data propagation must meet strict timing constraints. Cause-effect (CE) chains are widely used to analyze such behaviors by end-to-end latency. However, timing anomalies (TAs) can distort it, where a local reduction in execution times leads to an increase in the overall end-to-end latency. As a result, precisely analyzing the upper bounds of the latency becomes challenging, and such systems typically exhibit larger upper bounds than TA-eliminated systems. Existing studies either eliminate TAs by completely sacrificing average latency to simplify analysis or, despite adopting complex safe analysis methods, do not eliminate TAs effectively, still having high latencies. To address this issue, we identify two basic causes of TAs in end-to-end latency. Based on these causes, we propose the first treatment that eliminates TAs in the latency with negligible average latency loss using Deterministic Data Flow (DDF). We further formally prove its TA-free property. Therefore, we can get a precise upper bound for latency when all jobs execute with their worst-case execution times. Experimental results show that it effectively reduces the maximum end-to-end latency, the average latency, and latency jitter compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method.