arXiv Machine Learning

What Does It Take For A Generalist Robot Policy To Adapt Using Minimal Data?

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

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 AI
6d ago

Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Policy Improvement via Flow-Reversed Action Anchors

The paper introduces AnchorQ, a method that improves sample-efficient reinforcement learning for policy refinement by using flow-reversed action anchors. AnchorQ maps reference behaviors to state-conditioned latent anchors, samples local particles around these anchors, and employs value-guided sampling to explore promising refinements. Experiments on simulated and real-world manipulation tasks show that AnchorQ outperforms state-of-the-art post-training baselines, achieving a 37% higher real-world success rate and 97% greater simulated task throughput within the same interaction budget.

By Carl Qi, Weijun Dong, Xiaojie Wang, Peiyi Chen, Rahul Sajnani, Mingyuan Zhang, Amy Zhang, Jose Barreiros, Manikatan Nambi, Lillian J. Ratliff, Dylan Randle
arXiv AI
Oct 12

OGPO: Offline Goal-conditioned Policy Optimization for Recoverable Vision-Language-Action Models

OGPO is an Offline Goal‑conditioned Policy Optimization framework designed to improve Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation. It replaces traditional step‑wise action imitation with adaptive relabeling of trajectories using semantic key states and goal‑conditioned rewards, enabling policies to reach task‑progress states even from off‑demonstration states. Experiments on LIBERO, MetaWorld, LIBERO‑Plus, and the proposed LIBERO‑ReAct benchmark show that OGPO consistently outperforms standard supervised fine‑tuning in terms of robustness and recoverability under distribution shifts.

By Xule Gao, Xi Wang, Zehua Zang, Rui Wang, Changwen Zheng, Chuxiong Sun
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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
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
Aug 19

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

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