Reflex: Fast Robot Policy Serving by Reusing and Correcting Past Actions
Modern robot policies often perform expensive inference to generate action chunks, making serving a latency bottleneck for real-time control and a throughput bottleneck for multi-robot serving. Building on the success of caching in image, video, and audio generation, recent robot-policy advances have reported promising speedups by reusing intermediate denoising states to avoid redundant computation. Surprisingly, we find that such reuse often offers little advantage over simply running fewer denoising steps from fresh noise, without any cache. Moreover, accelerating denoising leaves the expensive policy backbone intact, which can account for 70% of GPU time. We present Reflex, a serving layer that turns past policy executions into a backbone-free path for future decisions. Rather than reusing intermediate computations, Reflex caches complete action chunks to bypass both the backbone and action head. This introduces two challenges: similar observations can demand different actions, and small action deviations (errors) in reuse can compound into execution stalls. Reflex addresses these through two-level cache correction. At the action level, it learns action-aware similarity from past policy decisions, assembles compatible chunks, and applies lightweight residual correction to limit action mismatch. At the execution level, it captures task progress and adaptively refreshes the original policy to limit accumulated errors and balance inference cost. Without modifying the underlying policy, Reflex improves inference latency by 1.4x to 11x and throughput by 2.0x to 2.2x on representative workloads and real robots, while preserving comparable task success.