SemanticVLA: Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced in robotic manipulation, yet practical deployment remains hindered by two key limitations: 1) perceptual redundancy, where irrelevant visual inputs are processed inefficiently, and 2) superficial instruction-vision alignment, which hampers semantic grounding of actions. In this paper, we propose SemanticVLA, a novel VLA framework that performs Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation. Specifically: 1) To sparsify redundant perception while preserving semantic alignment, Semantic-guided Dual Visual Pruner (SD-Pruner) performs: Instruction-driven Pruner (ID-Pruner) extracts global action cues and local semantic anchors in SigLIP; Spatial-aggregation Pruner (SA-Pruner) compacts geometry-rich features into task-adaptive tokens in DINOv2. 2) To exploit sparsified features and integrate semantics with spatial geometry, Semantic-complementary Hierarchical Fuser (SH-Fuser) fuses dense patches and sparse tokens across SigLIP and DINOv2 for coherent representation. 3) To enhance the transformation from perception to action, Semantic-conditioned Action Coupler (SA-Coupler) replaces the conventional observation-to-DoF approach, yielding more efficient and interpretable behavior modeling for manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world tasks show that SemanticVLA sets a new SOTA in both performance and efficiency. SemanticVLA surpasses OpenVLA on LIBERO benchmark by 21.1% in success rate, while reducing training cost and inference latency by 3.0× and 2.7×.