See What Matters: Differentiable Grid Sample Pruning for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable promise in robotics manipulation, yet their high computational cost hinders real-time deployment. Existing token pruning methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off: aggressive compression using pruning inevitably discards critical geometric details like contact points, leading to severe performance degradation. This forces a compromise, limiting the achievable compression rate and thus the potential speedup. We argue that breaking this trade-off requires rethinking compression as a geometry-aware, continuous token resampling in the vision encoder. To this end, we propose the Differentiable Grid Sampler (GridS), a plug-and-play module that performs task-aware, continuous resampling of visual tokens in VLA. By adaptively predicting a minimal set of salient coordinates and extracting features via differentiable interpolation, GridS preserves essential spatial information while achieving drastic compression (with fewer than 10\% original visual tokens). Experiments on both LIBERO benchmark and a real robotic platform demonstrate that validating the lowest feasible visual token count reported to date, GridS achieves a 76\% reduction in FLOPs with no degradation in the success rate.