Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models
Organizations: TU Darmstadt · University of Augsburg · Tongji University · Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Abstract
Vision--language--action (VLA) models provide strong priors for robotic manipulation but are typically deployed as frozen policies, unable to improve from their own failures. Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to continued improvement, yet manual environment resets and task-success supervision hinder autonomous learning. We introduce FIND, an agentic real-world RL framework that closes the loop between scene understanding, weakness-aware practice, self-evaluation, and policy improvement in a persistent workspace. FIND reframes autonomous practice as a scene-conditioned, performance-aware task-selection problem: instead of restoring a predefined scene after each rollout, it uses the resulting scene to determine what to practice next. A vision--language agent identifies feasible tasks from a predefined library, prioritizes those with lower recent success rates, and evaluates outcomes using paired pre- and post-execution observations. We instantiate FIND with a frozen VLA and residual off-policy RL. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, the independent human-assessed success rate improves from to . A representative run completes 456 autonomous episodes within 6 hours of interaction, requiring 30 scene-recovery interventions and no human-provided reward labels during online learning. Ablations and systematic evaluations further examine key design choices, agent evaluation accuracy, and human intervention requirements. Our website is made publicly available at: FIND.github.io.
Figures & tables
| Task | Episodes | Transitions |
|---|---|---|
| Put a cube into the bowl | 50 | 6,573 |
| Take the cube out of the bowl | 50 | 5,922 |
| Stack one cube on the other cube | 50 | 8,228 |
| Take the top cube off the other cube | 50 | 6,364 |
| Open the drawer | 50 | 6,534 |
| Close the drawer | 50 | 3,974 |
| Operation statistics | Value |
| Total interaction time | 6 h |
| Total episodes | 456 |
| Episodes without human intervention | 426 |
| Manual scene-recovery interventions | 30 |
| Object dropped in unfavorable pose | 21 |
| Difficult-to-separate objects | 7 |
| Task Selection | Success Evaluation | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Acc. (%) | Lat. (s) | Acc. (%) | Lat. (s) |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | 96 | 100 | ||
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 88 | 98 | ||
| Claude Fable 5 | 96 | 97 | ||
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | 94 | 95 | ||
| Kimi K3 | 93 | 96 | ||