arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

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.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
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
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
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

RL-VLA$^3$: A Flexible and Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning Framework for VLA Training

RL-VLA$^3$ is a fully asynchronous distributed reinforcement learning framework designed for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model training. It allows fine‑grained asynchronous interaction between simulation, inference, and training via dynamic batching schedulers and flexible environment sharding, addressing the variable, resource‑intensive latencies of physical simulators. Experiments across multiple simulation backends, VLA architectures, and RL algorithms show throughput gains of up to 85.2% over synchronous baselines while preserving sample efficiency, and the system scales from 8 to 256 GPUs.

By Haoran Sun, Yongjian Guo, Zhong Guan, Shuai Di, Xiaodong Bai, Jing Long, Tianyun Zhao, Mingxi Luo, Hongke Zhao, Likang Wu, Xiaotie Deng, Xu Chu, Xi Xiao, Sheng Wen, Yicheng Gong, Junwu Xiong
arXiv AI
Jul 14

EvoCUA-1.5: Online Reinforcement Learning for Multi-turn Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2607. 09773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents must solve long-horizon tasks through repeated interaction with partially observable, multimodal desktop environments.

By Mianqiu Huang, Taofeng Xue, Chong Peng, Jinrui Ding, Sicheng Fan, Jiale Hong, Yufei Gao, Xiaocheng Zhang, Linsen Guo, Xin Yang, Dengchang Zhao, Yuchen Xie, Peng Pei, Xunliang Xie, Xipeng Qiu
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
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.

By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
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