arXiv Machine Learning

Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 13

Learning More from Less: Reinforcement Learning from Hindsight

arXiv:2607. 09042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train vision-language-action (VLA) models, but every update consumes robot rollouts that are slow and costly to collect, making sample efficiency a central concern.

By Iris Xu, Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Thomas Liu, Zexue He, Yuheng Zhi, Alex Pentland, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
arXiv AI
Jun 9

BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Models

arXiv:2605. 30226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation.

By Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.

By Yang Yang, Bingjie Chen, Zihan Wang, Yizhe Li, Guoping Pan, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

arXiv:2511. 18960v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep.

By Lei Xiao, Jifeng Li, Juntao Gao, Feiyang Ye, Yan Jin, Jingjing Qian, Jing Zhang, Yong Wu, Xiaoyuan Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

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
arXiv AI
Jun 3

See Less, Specify More: Visual Evidence Budgets for Generalizable VLAs

arXiv:2606. 02735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control.

By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Simple-to-Complex Structured Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.