Embodied Chain-of-Thought (ECoT) reasoning enhances vision-language-action (VLA) models by improving performance and interpretability through intermediate reasoning steps. However, its sequential autoregressive token generation introduces significant inference latency, limiting real-time deployment. We propose Fast ECoT, an inference-time acceleration method that exploits the structured and repetitive nature of ECoT to (1) cache and reuse high-level reasoning across timesteps and (2) parallelise the generation of modular reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce an asynchronous scheduler that decouples reasoning from action decoding, further boosting responsiveness. Fast ECoT requires no model changes or additional training and integrates easily into existing VLA pipelines. Experiments in both simulation (LIBERO) and real-world robot tasks show up to a 7.5% reduction in latency with comparable or improved task success rate and reasoning faithfulness, bringing ECoT policies closer to practical real-time deployment.

The Emotional Generation is a subset of emotional intelligence, which aims to output an emotional response based on emotional conditions as input. Emotion generation has a wide range of applications, including emotion chat, emotional visual caption, and emotional rewriting. However, it faces challenges such as a lack of interpretability and poor evaluability. In this paper, we propose the Emotional Chain-of-Thought (ECoT), a plug-and-play prompting method that enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on various emotional generation tasks by aligning with human emotional intelligence guidelines. To assess the reliability of ECoT, we propose an automated model-based evaluation method called EGS. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ECoT and EGS. Further,we discuss the promise of LLMs in the field of sentiment analysis and present key insights into the LLMs with the ECoT in emotional generation tasks.