On the Efficiency of LoRA Fine-Tuning for Vision-Language-Action Models in Industrial Robotic Manipulation
Deploying billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on industrial hardware requires fine-tuning to bridge the embodiment gap. Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) provides maximal plasticity but requires data centre-grade GPUs. We present a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for $\pi_0$, a flow-matching VLA, evaluated on four precision assembly tasks with a UR5e robotic manipulator. Across a sweep of LoRA ranks (r=8 to 256), allocation strategies, and component-freezing ablations, we find no statistically significant advantage of FFT over certain LoRA configurations. Performance saturates at r=32, and uniform allocation across the Vision-Language-Model (VLM) backbone and action expert proves sufficient. Freezing the VLM or restricting the vision encoder to LoRA significantly degrades performance, indicating that embodiment adaptation requires both semantic and visual plasticity. These results suggest that LoRA at r=32 with full vision encoder fine-tuning is a practical approach, reducing static peak VRAM from 36.2 to 10.8 GiB (parameters and optimizer states, activation memory excluded) without detectable performance loss.