Complementary Future Token Pruning for World Action Models
TL;DR
The key insight is that future visual predictions support action generation and therefore need not preserve every visual detail required for high-fidelity video synthesis, and CF-Prune, a training-free framework for pruning future-frame tokens in pretrained WAMs, is proposed.
Abstract
World action models (WAMs) jointly predict future visual states and robot actions, but processing dense future-frame tokens incurs substantial inference latency. We propose CF-Prune, a training-free framework for pruning future-frame tokens in pretrained WAMs. Our key insight is that future visual predictions support action generation and therefore need not preserve every visual detail required for high-fidelity video synthesis. CF-Prune combines instruction and action attention to identify task-relevant tokens during the initial denoising forward pass, even when future-frame and action representations remain highly noisy. An entropy-based phase identification mechanism further retains dense computation during precision phases to mitigate pruning-induced performance degradation. Experiments on RoboLab, RoboCasa, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate consistent inference speedups. At a 35% pruning ratio, CF-Prune achieves average speedups of 1.19-1.27x while improving task success rates. At a 50% pruning ratio, it achieves 1.29-1.33x average speedups on both simulation benchmarks, with overall success rates within 1.0 percentage point of the baseline.