RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8× memory reduction and 2.3× inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment.