Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04161v2
• Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:28:01 GMT
• Title: Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models
• Abstract summary: Action chunking is a key technique to improve robotic manipulation abilities.<n>A large chunk size reduces the model's responsiveness to new information, while a small one increases the likelihood of mode-jumping.<n>We propose a novel Adaptive Action Chunking (AAC) strategy, which exploits action entropy as the cue to adaptively determine the chunk size.
• Score: 22.3720651624276
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, action chunking (i.e., executing a sequence of actions without intermediate replanning) is a key technique to improve robotic manipulation abilities. However, a large chunk size reduces the model's responsiveness to new information, while a small one increases the likelihood of mode-jumping, jerky behavior resulting from discontinuities between chunks. Therefore, selecting the optimal chunk size is an urgent demand to balance the model's reactivity and consistency. Unfortunately, a dominant trend in current VLA models is an empirical fixed chunk length at inference-time, hindering their superiority and scalability across diverse manipulation tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel Adaptive Action Chunking (AAC) strategy, which exploits action entropy as the cue to adaptively determine the chunk size based on current predictions. Extensive experiments on a wide range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks have demonstrated that our approach substantially improves performance over the state-of-the-art alternatives. The videos and source code are publicly available at https://lance-lot.github.io/adaptive-chunking.github.io/.

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