ActECC: Action Chunk Temporal Harnessing for Edge-Cloud Collaborative VLA Inference System

Abstract

VLA models have emerged as the mainstream for embodied intelligence, which decouples reasoning and execution via action chunks. To enable real-time deployment of VLA models, existing studies investigate edge-cloud collaborative inference, which pose two challenges to the action chunk mechanism. (1) Edge-cloud collaboration complicates system latency components, hindering the determination of valid ranges for action chunks. (2) Latency fluctuations in cross-edge update links under edge-cloud scenarios make it difficult to schedule replanning requests. To address these, we analyze the key factors affecting action chunk usable ranges and replanning request timing, revealing phase dependence and edge-cloud latency constraints. Based on these insights, we propose ActECC, which enables Action Chunk Temporal Harnessing through kinematics-guided usable range assessment and delay-aware replanning scheduling. Experiments show that ActECC reduces per-action latency by up to 27.4% and cloud calls by up to 45.1%, while lowering average execution error compared with existing edge-cloud collaborative.