VLA Handover: Failure-Prediction-Based Switching from On-Robot to Server VLA Models

Abstract

Large vision-language-action (VLA) models generalize well but are difficult to run in real time on a robot, and small VLAs that run there fail more often. Remote inference over beyond-5G and 6G networks lets a robot use a large VLA on a server, but querying the server for every action chunk limits the number of robots per server. We propose VLA handover: the robot runs a small VLA (S-VLA) and switches to a large VLA (L-VLA) on a server only when the S-VLA is likely to fail. We formulate the switching as minimizing the request cost under a required success probability and, since this problem cannot be solved directly, propose a heuristic framework that retrains neither VLA. In simulation with SmolVLA and $π_{0.5}$ on three of the four LIBERO suites, VLA handover raised the success rate by 11-22 percentage points over the S-VLA alone and sent 49-77% fewer requests than server-only control at a 2-4 percentage-point lower success rate, and its completion time grew less with the network latency.