VLASH: Real-Time VLAs via Future-State-Aware Asynchronous Inference
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are becoming increasingly capable across diverse robotic tasks. However, their real-world deployment remains slow and inefficient: demonstration videos are often sped up by 5-10x to appear smooth, with noticeable action stalls and delayed reactions to environmental changes. Asynchronous inference offers a promising solution to achieve continuous and low-latency control by enabling robots to execute actions and perform inference simultaneously. However, because the robot and environment continue to evolve during inference, a temporal misalignment arises between the prediction and execution intervals. This leads to significant action instability, while existing methods either degrade accuracy or introduce runtime overhead to mitigate it. We propose VLASH, a general asynchronous inference framework for VLAs that delivers smooth, accurate, and fast reaction control without additional overhead or architectural changes. VLASH estimates the future execution-time state by rolling the robot state forward with the previously generated action chunk, thereby bridging the gap between prediction and execution. Experiments show that VLASH achieves up to 2.03x speedup and reduces reaction latency by up to 17.4x compared to synchronous inference while fully preserving the original accuracy. Moreover, it empowers VLAs to handle fast-reaction, high-precision tasks such as playing ping-pong and playing whack-a-mole, where traditional synchronous inference fails. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/vlash
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Jiaming Tang
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Yufei Sun
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Yilong Zhao
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Shang Yang
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Yujun Lin
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Zhuoyang Zhang
claimed_verified
2026-03-02T09:41:48.875Z
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Zhuoyang Zhang
zhuoyang20
user
zhuoyang20
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James Hou
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Yao Lu
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Zhijian Liu
claimed_verified
2025-12-02T08:40:49.518Z
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Zhijian Liu
zhijianliu
user
zhijianliu
692e552137312eaa83fd875e
Song Han
VLASH: Real-Time VLAs via Future-State-Aware Asynchronous Inference
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are becoming increasingly capable across diverse robotic tasks. However, their real-world deployment remains slow and inefficient: demonstration videos are often sped up by 5-10x to appear smooth, with noticeable action stalls and delayed reactions to environmental changes. Asynchronous inference offers a promising solution to achieve continuous and low-latency control by enabling robots to execute actions and perform inference simultaneously. However, because the robot and environment continue to evolve during inference, a temporal misalignment arises between the prediction and execution intervals. This leads to significant action instability, while existing methods either degrade accuracy or introduce runtime overhead to mitigate it. We propose VLASH, a general asynchronous inference framework for VLAs that delivers smooth, accurate, and fast reaction control without additional overhead or architectural changes. VLASH estimates the future execution-time state by rolling the robot state forward with the previously generated action chunk, thereby bridging the gap between prediction and execution. Experiments show that VLASH achieves up to 2.03x speedup and reduces reaction latency by up to 17.4x compared to synchronous inference while fully preserving the original accuracy. Moreover, it empowers VLAs to handle fast-reaction, high-precision tasks such as playing ping-pong and playing whack-a-mole, where traditional synchronous inference fails. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/vlash
VLASH is an asynchronous inference framework for Vision-Language-Action models that achieves high speed and low latency without sacrificing accuracy, enabling precise robotic tasks like ping-pong and whack-a-mole.
asynchronous inference synchronous inference temporal misalignment prediction intervals action instability reaction latency action chunk robot state high-precision tasks