SPAR: Structural Pruning and Action Recovery for Vision-Language-Action Models

Overview & Synopsis

The limited onboard computing resources of robots make the inference demands of vision-language-action (VLA) models costly to accommodate. Reducing these demands through aggressive compression, however, can degrade manipulation performance beyond what supervised fine-tuning alone recovers. We present SPAR (Structural Pruning and Action Recovery), which simultaneously prunes the hidden and feed-forward intermediate dimensions of the large language model (LLM) backbone through pruning-aware tuning, then applies reinforcement learning (RL) to recover policy performance. Applied to $π_{0.5}$, SPAR reduces the language backbone from 2.34B to 0.09B parameters and the full model from 3.37B to 1.12B, removing approximately 96% and 67% of their parameters, respectively. At this compression level, RL raises average success across the four LIBERO suites from 84.55% to 93.45%, an 8.90-percentage-point gain. The compressed policy achieves a $1.98\times$ full-policy inference speedup over the unpruned model. These results identify substantial intermediate-dimension redundancy and show that post-pruning RL can recover manipulation performance in compact policies.