arXiv Machine Learning

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

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.

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
arXiv AI
Sep 24

BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models

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 AI
Sep 7

VLA-Precision: Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping for Efficient Real-World Online RL of Vision-Language-Action Models

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
arXiv AI
Oct 23

PaceVLA: Adaptive Temporal Action Quantization in Vision-Language-Action Models

PaceVLA introduces adaptive temporal action quantization for Vision‑Language‑Action models, enabling faster robot execution by aggregating low‑level actions into coarser steps when appropriate. The framework combines mode‑specific action decoders with a quantizability‑guided mode selection and a context‑conditioned router to decide execution granularity at each inference step. Experiments on simulation benchmarks and real‑world tasks demonstrate that PaceVLA improves execution efficiency while preserving task success rates across diverse embodiments.

By Hojin Jeon, Jimin Lee, Taekwan Kim, Nayoung Oh, Taeyoung Kim, Myungkyu Koo, Jinmo Koo, Joonwoo Ahn, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv AI
Jul 7

DSWAM: A Dual-System World Action Foundation Model for Fine-Grained Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 04927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) provide a promising alternative to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies by using video-based world modeling as dense supervision for robot action learning.

By Jian Zhu, Jianjun Zhang, Taiyi Su, Tianbin Liu, Zhangyuan Wang, Kai Xie, Zitai Huang, Chong Ma, Youzhang He, Tianjian Wang, Hanyang Wang, Weihao Ding, Yi Xu