arXiv AI

ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

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.

By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
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 Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv AI
3d ago

Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.

By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

By Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
arXiv AI
4d ago

F4R: Failure-Driven Recognition, Reconstruction, Refinement, and Redeployment for Continual Robot Self-Improvement

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 AI
Sep 21

Prompt-Driven Exploration: Language as an Exploration Space for VLA Reinforcement Learning

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 Machine Learning
Aug 19

Prism-GRPO: Faster VLA Policy Optimization via Splitting Same-outcome Groups

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