Robots Learn to Allocate Inference Compute on Demand

CSProfKGD · x · 2026-07-13

This repost introduces a robotics study: ELASTIC teaches robots "when to think harder and when to think less."

The core idea is that diffusion/flow-based robot policies have two test-time scaling methods:

Both improve performance but increase robot latency, so actions shouldn't be treated equally. The paper uses RL to learn how to allocate compute across different contexts: e.g., using fewer steps for free-space movement, and more samples during grasping to explore different grip modes.

Related event: ELASTIC Enables Robots to Adaptively Allocate Inference Compute(2 posts)→

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