Fast-ThinkAct: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Verbalizable Latent Planning

🤗 Upvotes: 41 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO

Authors:
Chi-Pin Huang, Yunze Man, Zhiding Yu, Min-Hung Chen, Jan Kautz, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Fu-En Yang

Title:
Fast-ThinkAct: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Verbalizable Latent Planning

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09708v1

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3\% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.