cs.ROSep 25, 2026

Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models

Authors: Yuan Fang, Zechu Li, Haolei Tong, Puze Liu, Georgia Chalvatzaki

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 π0.5π_{0.5} VLA and residual off-policy RL. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, the independent human-assessed success rate improves from 55%55\% to 71.9%71.9\%. 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

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Object-Centric Residual RL for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Enhancement

    Jun 17, 2026Kinam Kim, Namiko Saito, Heecheol Kim +3Reinforcement LearningZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

  2. Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

    Apr 15, 2026Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini +1RL for RoboticsData-Efficient Robot Learning

  3. Self-Correcting VLA: Online Action Refinement via Sparse World Imagination

    Feb 25, 2026Chenyv Liu, Wentao Tan, Lei Zhu +4Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobotic RL