Don't Run with Scissors: Pruning Breaks VLA Models but They Can Be Recovered

Understand

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic capabilities but remain challenging to deploy on resource-limited hardware.

• Pruning has enabled efficient compression of large language models (LLMs), yet it is largely understudied in robotics.
• Surprisingly, we observe that pruning VLA models leads to drastic degradation and increased safety violations.
• We introduce GLUESTICK, a post-pruning recovery method that restores much of the original model's functionality while retaining sparsity benefits.