arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv:2606. 09630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for language-conditioned manipulation, but remain brittle in off-nominal states requiring targeted recovery.
By Haodi Hu, Chung-Ta Huang, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, Matthew Brand, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
arXiv:2606. 29892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become indispensable for pushing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) beyond static imitation learning.
By Siyao Chen, Jiakang Yuan, Jiaxin Wang, Tao Chen
Prism‑GRPO enhances the GRPO reinforcement‑learning algorithm for vision‑language‑action policies by adding a weighted trajectory‑level execution‑quality score to binary success rewards. This approach splits groups with identical outcomes into a quality spectrum, preserving training signal while ensuring successes always outrank failures. Experiments on four RoboTwin tasks show Prism‑GRPO achieves higher success and quality at matched rollout budgets, reaching target success rates with up to 56% fewer rollouts and mitigating reward‑hacking behaviors that transfer to real‑robot deployment.
By Zeyun Deng, Yuzhe Lu, Yawei Wang, Linbo Liu, Qing Ping, Han Ding, Guande Wu, Panpan Xu, Jun Huan
The paper introduces QWM, a framework that integrates world models with standard Q‑learning to perform test‑time search over imagined trajectories. By training the policy and value function solely on real transitions, QWM avoids compounding model bias while still benefiting from predictive search. Experiments on the Robomimic and LIBERO manipulation benchmarks show that QWM outperforms strong prior state‑of‑the‑art methods in both sample efficiency and performance.
By Perry Dong, Yueru Jia, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
arXiv:2606. 31846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising framework for robotic manipulation by connecting language instructions, visual observations, and continuous control.
By Lang Cao, Renhong Chen, Luyi Li, Peng Wang, Mofan Peng, Yitong Li
arXiv:2608. 19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to efficiently finetune robot policies to learn new tasks on the fly?
By Bhavya Sukhija, Oliver Groth, Mohit Shridhar, Tim Hertweck, Michael Bloesch, Markus Wulfmeier, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Martin Riedmiller
arXiv:2609.35575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrat...
By Zhuoyuan Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Liu, Yihua Ren, Peng Yu, Chen Bai, Ziheng Zhang, Yufei Jia, Jindou Jia, Yuhang Zhang, Xinrui Zhang, Shang Yujing, Yuxiang Chen, Chuhao Zhou, Tiancai Wang, Jianfei Yang
arXiv:2607.08837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject...
By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
arXiv:2609.27450v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models handle long-horizon manipulation, yet success hinges on a few precision-critical phases where millimeter-scale er...
By Weihui Zhao, Xiaohan Yan, Zunian Wan, Xuan Du, Zhaozhan Chi, Jianbo Mao, Ruipu Wu, Rushuai Yang, Houlin Li, Shukai Yang, Jing Wu, Yuxiang Yan, Yongcheng Liu, Chuankang Li, Guanghui Ren, Wei Shan, Maoqing Yao
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
arXiv:2608. 02958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies trained by behavior cloning fail silently: from the action stream alone, a collapsing rollout looks much like one making clean progress, because imitation supplies no notion of progress.
By Inkyu Sa, Konstantin Stulov, Rajat Bhageria