ACCRUE is a continual off‑policy reinforcement learning framework designed for robot foundation models. It keeps lightweight actor and critic networks across tasks, reusing behavioral and value knowledge from previous RL stages while preserving prior behavior through actor distillation on a small set of retained episodes. Experiments on contact‑rich assembly tasks in simulation and on real robots show that ACCRUE speeds up learning of new tasks, nearly eliminates forgetting, and cuts real‑robot training time by 31.0% to 68.5%.
arXiv:2607. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
By Mao-Lin Luo, Zhe-Xu Wang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Bo Ye, Jian Zhao, Min-Ling Zhang, Tong Wei
arXiv:2603. 11653v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments.
By Jiaheng Hu, Jay Shim, Chen Tang, Yoonchang Sung, Bo Liu, Peter Stone, Roberto Martin-Martin
RIFAR is a new continual learning method for robots that uses reliability screening and drift-aware replay to mitigate forgetting while keeping storage low. It reconstructs past trajectories from short demonstration prefixes and employs a frozen inverse-dynamics model to verify action‑visual consistency. In experiments on LIBERO suites and real‑world tasks, RIFAR outperforms previous generative replay approaches, achieving high performance with only a small fraction of stored steps.
By Zirong Song, Zheng Lu, Haoran Liao, Wanqi Zhong, Yunhe Ni, Lijie Wang, Xiuying Chen
arXiv:2610.18038v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: World action models (WAMs) built on pretrained video generation models adapt quickly to new robotic tasks, but they forget previously learned...
By Kaipeng Fang, Hangxu Liu, Chaojian Shi, Yunsong Zhou, Hongzi Zhu, Minyi Guo, Jingkuan Song, Lianli Gao
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
The paper introduces a compositional continual learning benchmark for world models in robot manipulation, designed to isolate knowledge reuse from learning speed and capacity. Tasks are curated to combine previously seen action and perception components, allowing analysis of how different modalities affect reuse. Experiments show that modular world models better balance reuse and forgetting than conventional methods, yet none fully solve the challenge, highlighting the need for models explicitly built to reuse knowledge without forgetting.
By Haoyu Zhou, Joe Watson, Anson Lei, Ingmar Posner
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:2606. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in language-conditioned robotic manipulation.
By Ziyang Chen, Shaoguang Wang, Weiyu Guo, Qianyi Cai, He Zhang, Pengteng Li, Yiren Zhao, Yandong Guo
arXiv:2601.22475v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Building a generalist robot policy requires continuously integrating new skills while preserving previously acquired behaviors. Directly optimizing...
By Qijun He, Yuxuan Li, Mingqi Yuan, Xiaoquan Sun, Wen-Tse Chen, Jeff Schneider, Jiayu Chen
arXiv:2610.14406v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: It is widely appreciated that robotic policies require long-term memory to perform complex tasks. However, directly conditioning policies on all past...
By Yilin Wu, Rutav Shah, Shuaiyi Huang, Sumedh A. Sontakke, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Andrea Bajcsy, Max Simchowitz, Guanya Shi
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