A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews efficient vision-language-action models, categorizing recent advancements into design, training, and data collection, to address computational challenges and guide future research in embodied intelligence.

Contribution

It introduces a unified taxonomy for efficient VLAs, consolidating diverse methods and providing a foundational reference for the community.

Findings

Categorizes techniques into three core pillars: design, training, data collection.

Summarizes state-of-the-art methods and applications.

Identifies key challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) represent a significant frontier in embodied intelligence, aiming to bridge digital knowledge with physical-world interaction. Despite their remarkable performance, foundational VLAs are hindered by the prohibitive computational and data demands inherent to their large-scale architectures. While a surge of recent research has focused on enhancing VLA efficiency, the field lacks a unified framework to consolidate these disparate advancements. To bridge this gap, this survey presents the first comprehensive review of Efficient Vision-Language-Action models (Efficient VLAs) across the entire model-training-data pipeline. Specifically, we introduce a unified taxonomy to systematically organize the disparate efforts in this domain, categorizing current techniques into three core pillars: (1) Efficient Model Design, focusing on efficient architectures and model compression; (2) Efficient Training, which reduces computational burdens during model learning; and (3) Efficient Data Collection, which addresses the bottlenecks in acquiring and utilizing robotic data. Through a critical review of state-of-the-art methods within this framework, this survey not only establishes a foundational reference for the community but also summarizes representative applications, delineates key challenges, and charts a roadmap for future research. We maintain a continuously updated project page to track our latest developments: https://evla-survey.github.io/.