Same Path, Less Time: Training-Free Fast Execution of Vision-Language-Action Models under Inference Latency

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions, yet deployed robots waste time in two ways that are independent of model capability: they halt while the next chunk is inferred, and they move at the speed of slow, cautious demonstrations. Existing remedies remove one loss each, and stacking them fails, because asynchrony and speed-up each change the correspondence between planned progress and executed motion. We present Path-preserving Time Scaling (PTS), a training-free execution layer for frozen action-chunking policies built on one principle: the robot's motion is a time reparameterization of a reference path, and the path changes only in response to new observations. A path layer decodes every replan deterministically in one step and enters it at the progress consumed during inference. A time layer sums the planned increments, keeps the arm at 1x while the gripper moves, and caps the rate by the actuator's linear range and by chunk feasibility under latency. We show that misaligned entry and stochastic sampling add a bias and a variance to the continuation error, and derive a break-even success rate that states when speeding up pays off. On LIBERO with two frozen VLAs under injected inference latency, PTS raises task throughput over the strongest deployable baseline by 33% for pi0.5 and 104% for SmolVLA while matching or improving the success rate, is best on all six model-suite combinations, and exceeds zero-latency 1x execution. Against asynchronous 1x execution with the same one-step decoder, the time layer alone adds 28% and 38%. On LIBERO-Dynamic it improves on stop-and-wait execution by 38% and is comparable to asynchronous 1x execution.