AtomicVLA is a unified planning-and-execution framework that generates task-level plans, atomic skill abstractions, and fine-grained actions for robotic manipulation. It builds a scalable atomic skill library using a Skill‑Guided Mixture‑of‑Experts (SG‑MoE) and a flexible routing encoder that assigns new skills to dedicated experts, enabling continual learning. Experiments show that AtomicVLA outperforms baseline models on both simulated and real‑world long‑horizon tasks, achieving significant improvements in task performance and learning efficiency.
By Likui Zhang, Tao Tang, Zhihao Zhan, Xiuwei Chen, Zisheng Chen, Jianhua Han, Jiangtong Zhu, Pei Xu, Hang Xu, Hefeng Wu, Liang Lin, Xiaodan Liang
The paper introduces PARTS, a real‑world subtask reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes a pretrained robot policy by focusing on critical bottleneck subtasks while keeping the base policy frozen. It uses agent‑generated selectors and success verifiers to provide local rewards, enabling learning even when full‑task successes are rare. Experiments on bimanual YAM and single‑arm Franka robots show that PARTS raises complete‑task success from 32% to 61% and from 50% to 95%, respectively, with only tens of minutes of real‑world RL rollouts and minimal human intervention.
By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun
arXiv:2604. 13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment.
By Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini, Loris Roveda
EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
The paper introduces Success Guided Sampling (SGS), an adaptive sampler that focuses reinforcement learning on task configurations near the policy’s current frontier, thereby reducing wasted experience in massively parallel simulation. SGS enables large‑scale RL to solve complex quadruped locomotion and contact‑rich assembly tasks that previous methods could not, using up to one million parallel environments. The authors also distill the learned policies into RGB‑based models that transfer zero‑shot to real‑world assembly tasks.
By Octi Zhang, Mateo Guaman Castro, Patrick Yin, Ignacio Dagnino, Abhishek Gupta, Rosario Scalise, Byron Boots
HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.
By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2602. 09430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic laboratories play a critical role in autonomous scientific discovery by enabling scalable, continuous experimental execution.
By Yiwen Pang, Bo Zhou, Changjin Li, Xuanhao Wang, Shengxiang Xu, Deng-Bao Wang, Peng Cheng, Shimin Di, Jingkuan Song, Min-Ling Zhang
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
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: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
VLA-Precision introduces an efficient real‑world online reinforcement learning framework for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models, featuring the Asymmetric Co‑Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB‑Stream architecture. ACoB uses asymmetric co‑bootstrapping across timescales to rapidly improve policy performance while refining value estimates, thereby reducing policy drift. ACoB‑Stream enables large VLA models to run with up to 10.9× higher throughput and computational efficiency, achieving a 98.3 % mean success rate on nine high‑precision chemistry tasks in under 46 minutes per task.
By Chenyu Su, Zhaolong Shen, Yuan Qian, Chen Qian, Rui Zhang, Feng Yan, Weixing Chen, Fei Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Shuang Cong, Weiwei Shang