When to Ask for Help: A Decision-Theoretic Account and Measurement Standard for Slow-Module Scheduling in Dual-System Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract:Dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) models pair a high-frequency fast policy with a slow, expensive module, and published trigger mechanisms for invoking it lack a shared objective, measured costs, and any standard separating schedule quality from module quality. We provide the missing account: invocation is formalized as a calibrated decision problem whose fixed-ratio, fixed-budget, and history-gated schedules are degenerate cases of one quantity, the Value of Intervention (VoI); a renewal baseline proves the optimal schedule periodic under state-independent collapse, with adaptive gains governed by the cost ratio $\rho$ and the dispersion of collapse. Measured systems span three orders of magnitude in $\rho$ (FiS-VLA $0.95$; RoboICL about $10^3$), and a direct test confirms the low-$\rho$ prediction: calibrated gains vanish under homogeneous collapse and grow with heterogeneity. Fourteen closed-loop arms on LIBERO test the contested middle of the continuum ($\rho=1.53$): the adaptive trigger allocates its queries exactly as the threshold rule predicts, yet the language-rewrite channel cannot convert them into success on either suite, and a revert actuator that undoes a failed rewrite is the only intervention with zero net downside on both LIBERO-Spatial and LIBERO-Goal, where the rewrite deficit deepens from thirteen to forty-two points. A four-measure leak-free protocol cuts apparent early-warning AUC from $0.93$ to $0.62$ on $929$ deployment traces, a detection-limited frontier theorem converts detection quality into a schedulability statement, and a compilation loop turns measured value functions into per-task refresh periods within $2.4\%$ of the closed-loop oracle. Together these results turn slow-module invocation from a design opinion into a measured decision.

41 pages, 7 figures. Preprint

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.21160 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.21160v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21160 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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