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Bridging the Semantic-Action Gap in Visual Token Pruning for Efficient VLA Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great potential for embodied AI by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and action execution. In real-time deployment, these models must process continuous visual streams, incurring substantial computational overhead. Visual token pruning -- a mainstream technique for accelerating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by retaining salient tokens while discarding redundant ones -- offers a natural candidate solution to this challenge. However, directly applying VLM-oriented pruning methods to VLA inference can cause severe degradation in manipulation performance. Our analysis attributes this degradation to a key mismatch: VLA inference exhibits distinct attention patterns between the vision-language prefill stage and the action-decode stage, so pruning based only on context-prefill semantic salience is biased toward semantic cues and may remove action-critical visual tokens. Motivated by this observation, we propose VLA-Pruner, an effective plug-and-play token pruning method grounded in the visual requirements of VLA inference, further exploiting the temporal continuity of robot manipulation. Specifically, VLA-Pruner estimates visual-token importance from both semantic prefilling and temporally smoothed action relevance, and then applies a Combine-then-Filter strategy to retain compact, non-redundant tokens under the compute budget. Experiments show that VLA-Pruner outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across multiple VLA architectures, achieving up to 1.99x speedup with comparable manipulation quality.

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