Speedup Patch: Learning a Plug-and-Play Policy to Accelerate Embodied Manipulation

arXiv cs.RO / 3/24/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces Speedup Patch (SuP), a plug-and-play, policy-agnostic method that accelerates embodied manipulation policies using only offline data.
  • SuP adds an external scheduler that adaptively downsamples action chunks to remove redundancies, formulated as a constrained Markov decision process to preserve task performance.
  • Because offline evaluation cannot directly measure success, SuP uses a world-model-based “state deviation” surrogate to enforce safety constraints via counterfactual trajectory prediction.
  • Experiments on simulation benchmarks (Libero, Bigym) and real-world tasks show an overall 1.8× execution speedup across diverse policies with success rates preserved.
  • The approach aims to improve scalability for large-scale foundation models by avoiding policy retraining and costly online interactions.

Abstract

While current embodied policies exhibit remarkable manipulation skills, their execution remains unsatisfactorily slow as they inherit the tardy pacing of human demonstrations. Existing acceleration methods typically require policy retraining or costly online interactions, limiting their scalability for large-scale foundation models. In this paper, we propose Speedup Patch (SuP), a lightweight, policy-agnostic framework that enables plug-and-play acceleration using solely offline data. SuP introduces an external scheduler that adaptively downsamples action chunks provided by embodied policies to eliminate redundancies. Specifically, we formalize the optimization of our scheduler as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) aimed at maximizing efficiency without compromising task performance. Since direct success evaluation is infeasible in offline settings, SuP introduces World Model based state deviation as a surrogate metric to enforce safety constraints. By leveraging a learned world model as a virtual evaluator to predict counterfactual trajectories, the scheduler can be optimized via offline reinforcement learning. Empirical results on simulation benchmarks (Libero, Bigym) and real-world tasks validate that SuP achieves an overall 1.8x execution speedup for diverse policies while maintaining their original success rates.