HBVLA: Pushing 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces HBVLA, a novel binarization framework tailored for vision-language-action models, significantly reducing model size and computation while maintaining high performance for deployment on resource-limited platforms.

Contribution

We propose a policy-aware Hessian-based weight importance measure and a sparse orthogonal transform for effective 1-bit quantization of VLA models, addressing distribution gap issues.

Findings

Quantized models retain over 92% of full-precision performance.

HBVLA outperforms existing binarization methods in accuracy.

Demonstrates robust deployment on real-world robotic platforms.

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following embodied control, but their large compute and memory footprints hinder deployment on resource-constrained robots and edge platforms. While reducing weights to 1-bit precision through binarization can greatly improve efficiency, existing methods fail to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights, causing quantization errors to accumulate under long-horizon closed-loop execution and severely degrade actions. To fill this gap, we propose HBVLA, a VLA-tailored binarization framework. First, we use a policy-aware enhanced Hessian to identify weights that are truly critical for action generation. Then, we employ a sparse orthogonal transform for non-salient weights to induce a low-entropy intermediate state. Finally, we quantize both salient and non-salient weights in the Harr domain with group-wise 1-bit quantization. We have evaluated our approach on different VLAs: on LIBERO, quantized OpenVLA-OFT retains 92.2% of full-precision performance; on SimplerEnv, quantized CogAct retains 93.6%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art binarization methods. We further validate our method on real-world evaluation suite and the results show that HBVLA incurs only marginal success-rate degradation compared to the full-precision model, demonstrating robust deployability under tight hardware constraints. Our work provides a practical foundation for ultra-low-bit quantization of VLAs, enabling more reliable deployment on hardware-limited robotic platforms.