English

Device-Conditioned Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Robotics 2026-04-14 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

The growing complexity of visuomotor policies poses significant challenges for deployment with heterogeneous robotic hardware constraints. However, most existing model-efficient approaches for robotic manipulation are device- and model-specific, lack generalizability, and require time-consuming per-device optimization during the adaptation process. In this work, we propose a unified framework named \textbf{D}evice-\textbf{C}onditioned \textbf{Q}uantization-\textbf{F}or-\textbf{A}ll (DC-QFA) which amortizes deployment effort with the device-conditioned quantization-aware training and hardware-constrained architecture search. Specifically, we introduce a single supernet that spans a rich design space over network architectures and mixed-precision bit-widths. It is optimized with latency- and memory-aware regularization, guided by per-device lookup tables. With this supernet, for each target platform, we can perform a once-for-all lightweight search to select an optimal subnet without any per-device re-optimization, which enables more generalizable deployment across heterogeneous hardware, and substantially reduces deployment time. To improve long-horizon stability under low precision, we further introduce multi-step on-policy distillation to mitigate error accumulation during closed-loop execution. Extensive experiments on three representative policy backbones, such as DiffusionPolicy-T, MDT-V, and OpenVLA-OFT, demonstrate that our DC-QFA achieves 2-3×2\text{-}3\times acceleration on edge devices, consumer-grade GPUs, and cloud platforms, with negligible performance drop in task success. Real-world evaluations on an Inovo robot equipped with a force/torque sensor further validates that our low-bit DC-QFA policies maintain stable, contact-rich manipulation even under severe quantization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.10170,
  title  = {Device-Conditioned Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Robotic Manipulation},
  author = {Yiming Wu and Huan Wang and Zhenghao Chen and Ge Yuan and Dong Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10170},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:04:18.287Z