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: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:2601.19969v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Human-in-the-loop guidance has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world manipulatio...
By Haoyuan Deng, Yudong Lin, Yuanjiang Xue, Haoyang Du, Qianzhun Wang, Boyang Zhou, Zhenyu Wu, Ziwei Wang
arXiv:2606. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots trained on real world data tend to be imprecise, slow, and brittle to perturbations.
By Raymond Yu, William Huey, Mustafa Mukadam, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv:2607. 09866v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning is promising for generalizable robotic manipulation, yet its full-stack complexity obscures reproduction and diagnosis.
By Wenke Xia, Pei Ren, Wenbo Yu, Yizhuo Zhang, Jifan Li, Yixue Zhang, Yinuo Zhao, Qingyang Gao, Jianlong Fu, Jian Tang, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhengping Che, Di Hu
arXiv:2606. 17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
By Wei Xiao, Weiliang Tang, Yuying Ge, Hui Zhou, Yao Mu, Li Zhang, Yixiao Ge
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:2608. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
DriftOPD is a teacher‑free, rollout‑free framework that performs sequence‑level on‑policy distillation of continuous Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) action experts. It decomposes the sequence‑level reverse‑KL divergence into a chunk‑level reverse‑KL term and a future‑potential term, optimizing them with a one‑step drifting objective and a Q‑function critic learned from offline demonstrations. Experiments on multiple VLA architectures in simulation and real‑world manipulation show that DriftOPD outperforms existing one‑step distillation baselines while matching the task success of multi‑step teacher policies.
By Youngjun Jun, Kyumin Choi, Youngmin Kim, Seonghyun Jin, Sunwoo Park, Jangho Park, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv:2607. 02431v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) can overcome the demonstration-coverage limitation of imitation learning (IL) by allowing robots to improve through trial-and-error interaction beyond the states observed in demonstrations.
By Yuquan Xue, Le Xu, Zeyi Liu, Zhenyu Wu, Zhengyi Gu, Xinyang Song, Bofang Jia, Ziwei Wang
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
arXiv:2407. 21359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imagining potential outcomes of actions before execution helps agents make more informed decisions, a prospective thinking ability fundamental to human cognition.
By Liangliang Liu, Yi Guan, BoRan Wang, Rujia Shen, Yi Lin, Chaoran Kong, Lian Yan, Jingchi Jiang