arXiv AI By Hiroaki Kingetsu, Hiroaki Kurihara, Kaoru Yokoo, Kenji Fukumizu, Manohar Kaul

SynthDemo-RL: Breaking the Zero-Reward Barrier in VLA Adaptation with LLM-Guided Synthetic Demonstrations

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SynthDemo‑RL introduces a teacher‑student framework that uses an automated teacher to generate successful manipulation trajectories from simulator‑privileged state, which are then distilled into a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) student via supervised fine‑tuning. The student is further refined with PPO using binary task‑success rewards. On the LIBERO‑PRO benchmark, SynthDemo‑RL rescues all 27 previously unsolvable tasks and achieves near‑perfect success rates, matching performance that would otherwise require human demonstrations.

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