Saliency-Aware Quantized Imitation Learning for Efficient Robotic Control

Deep neural network (DNN)-based policy models, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models, excel at automating complex decision-making from multi-modal inputs. However, scaling these models greatly increases computational overhead, complicating deployment in resource-constrained settings like robot manipulation and autonomous driving. To address this, we propose Saliency-Aware Quantized Imitation Learning (\method), which combines quantization-aware training with a selective loss-weighting strategy for mission-critical states. By identifying these states via saliency scores and emphasizing them in the training loss, \method preserves decision fidelity under low-bit precision. We validate \method's generalization capability across extensive simulation benchmarks with environment variations, real-world tasks, and cross-domain tasks (self-driving, physics simulation), consistently recovering full-precision performance. Notably, a 4-bit weight-quantized VLA model for robotic manipulation achieves up to 2.5$\times$ speedup and 2.5$\times$ energy savings on an edge GPU with minimal accuracy loss. These results underline \method’s potential for efficiently deploying large IL-based policy models on resource-limited devices.