SkipVLA: Skipping VLA Steps with Classical Planning for Fast Robot Manipulation

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a class of generalist robot policies that map camera images and language instructions directly to robot actions. While promising, these models remain slow at test time, particularly for long-horizon tasks that require many queries to the policy. Recent efforts reduce VLA latency by distilling smaller models, overlapping asynchronous action chunks, or pairing the VLA with a fast low-level policy, but still run a learned policy for the entire task. In contrast to VLA, classical motion planners quickly find collision-free motions, but require an explicit goal and have no semantic understanding of the task. In this work, we present SkipVLA, a hybrid policy that combines a pretrained VLA with a classical motion planner, using the planner for free-space motion and querying the VLA only for contact-rich skills such as grasping and placing. SkipVLA reuses the frozen vision-language backbone of the VLA to predict a target pose for each planned motion, and learns this predictor without additional demonstrations introduced into the system by using what was already learnt by the large VLA. We evaluate SkipVLA with three VLAs on 13 LIBERO tasks in simulation and three pick-and-place tasks on a physical 6-DoF YAM arm, demonstrating up to 2.5x faster task completion and significantly lower energy consumption while achieving the same task success rate.