VLA Knows Its Limits: Adaptive Execution Horizons for Robot Policies
For robotic manipulation using VLA models, this work addresses the underexplored problem of execution horizon selection, offering a practical adaptive solution.
The paper identifies that execution horizon in flow-based VLA models significantly affects performance, with an optimal point. It proposes AutoHorizon, a test-time method that dynamically adjusts the horizon based on attention weights, achieving improved performance across simulated and real-world tasks with negligible overhead.
Action chunking has recently emerged as a standard practice in flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, the effect and choice of the execution horizon - the number of actions to be executed from each predicted chunk - remains underexplored. In this work, we first show that varying the execution horizon leads to substantial performance deviations, with performance initially improving and then declining as the horizon increases. To uncover the reasons, we analyze the cross- and self-attention weights in flow-based VLAs and reveal two key phenomena: (i) intra-chunk actions attend invariantly to vision-language tokens, limiting adaptability to environmental changes; and (ii) the initial and terminal action tokens serve as stable anchors, forming latent centers around which intermediate actions are organized. Motivated by these insights, we interpret action self-attention weights as a proxy for the model's predictive limit and propose AutoHorizon, the first test-time method that dynamically estimates the execution horizon for each predicted action chunk to adapt to changing perceptual conditions. Across simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, AutoHorizon is performant, incurs negligible computational overhead, and generalizes across diverse tasks and flow-based models.