A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) represent a significant frontier in embodied intelligence, aiming to bridge digital knowledge with physical-world interaction. Despite their remarkable performance, foundational VLAs are hindered by the prohibitive computational and data demands inherent to their large-scale architectures. To this end, a surge of recent research has focused on enhancing the efficiency of VLAs, conceptualized here as the multidimensional optimization of resource footprints across the entire developmental lifecycle, spanning real-time inference responsiveness, training computational thrift, and data acquisition scalability. To this end, recent studies improve VLA efficiency from different views, e.g., real-time inference, training computation, and scalable data collection. However, these efforts are mostly studied separately. A unified view is still missing for understanding how efficiency should be optimized across the full VLA lifecycle. To bridge this gap, this survey presents the first comprehensive review of Efficient Vision-Language-Action models (Efficient VLAs) across the entire model-training-data pipeline. Specifically, we introduce a unified taxonomy to systematically organize the disparate efforts in this domain, categorizing current techniques into three core pillars: (1) Efficient Model Design, focusing on efficient architectures and model compression; (2) Efficient Training, which reduces computational burdens during model learning; and (3) Efficient Data Collection, which addresses the bottlenecks in acquiring and utilizing robotic data. Through a critical review of state-of-the-art methods within this framework, this survey provides an organized reference for the community and summarizes representative applications, delineates key challenges, and charts a roadmap for future research. We maintain a continuously updated project page to track our latest developments: https://evla-survey.github.io/.