Efficient VLA Inference via Retrieval-Based Speculation and Hardware Acceleration

arXiv:2611.11098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and execute complex instructions, but their autoregressive (AR) action generation introduces significant latency on resource-constrained robotic platforms. Speculative decoding can accelerate AR-based inference by parallelizing action generation and verification; however, existing approaches rely on costly draft models, which are inefficient on edge platforms. In this paper, we propose Zora, a hardware-software co-design framework for accelerating AR-based VLA inference. Specifically, Zora introduces a lightweight retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based draft model that exploits robotic dynamics without additional neural draft models.