HBVLA: Pushing 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13710v1
• Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:23:45 GMT
• Title: HBVLA: Pushing 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models
• Authors: Xin Yan, Zhenglin Wan, Feiyang Ye, Xingrui Yu, Hangyu Du, Yang You, Ivor Tsang,
• Abstract summary: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following embodied control.<n>Current methods fail to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights.<n>We propose HBVLA, a VLA-tailored binarization framework.
• Score: 11.913553037277472
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following embodied control, but their large compute and memory footprints hinder deployment on resource-constrained robots and edge platforms. While reducing weights to 1-bit precision through binarization can greatly improve efficiency, existing methods fail to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights, causing quantization errors to accumulate under long-horizon closed-loop execution and severely degrade actions. To fill this gap, we propose HBVLA, a VLA-tailored binarization framework. First, we use a policy-aware enhanced Hessian to identify weights that are truly critical for action generation. Then, we employ a sparse orthogonal transform for non-salient weights to induce a low-entropy intermediate state. Finally, we quantize both salient and non-salient weights in the Harr domain with group-wise 1-bit quantization. We have evaluated our approach on different VLAs: on LIBERO, quantized OpenVLA-OFT retains 92.2% of full-precision performance; on SimplerEnv, quantized CogAct retains 93.6%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art binarization methods. We further validate our method on real-world evaluation suite and the results show that HBVLA incurs only marginal success-rate degradation compared to the full-precision model, demonstrating robust deployability under tight hardware constraints. Our work provides a practical foundation for ultra-low-bit quantization of VLAs, enabling more reliable deployment on hardware-limited robotic platforms.

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