arXiv Machine Learning By Mehmet Turan Yard{\i}mc{\i}, Yunus Emre \c{C}o\u{g}urcu

Uncertainty-Gated Exploration Noise Suppresses Task Collapse in Online RL Fine-Tuning of a Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Policy

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The paper investigates task collapse—a failure mode where online RL fine‑tuning of a pretrained flow‑matching vision‑language‑action policy erodes performance on individual tasks—using a 450M‑parameter SmolVLA policy on LIBERO‑10. Three exploration‑noise strategies are compared: a fixed noise scale, a learned noise network, and an uncertainty‑gated controller that reallocates exploration based on novelty and competence signals without task labels. The uncertainty‑gated controller prevents task collapse across all tested seeds, whereas the other two approaches consistently cause collapse, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving task performance during fine‑tuning.

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