Residual Policy Learning

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Overview

Residual policy learning studies how to improve an existing controller or learned policy by adding a smaller corrective policy, rather than replacing the whole system. Common approaches use reinforcement learning, imitation or human feedback to train bounded action corrections, often on top of frozen vision-language-action policies, classical controllers, or simulation-trained skills. These methods are applied to settings such as robot locomotion, contact-rich manipulation, and adaptation to faults or changing dynamics, with evaluation spanning simulation benchmarks and real-robot trials. A central challenge is giving corrections enough authority to handle unfamiliar conditions while preserving the base policy’s competence, safety, and stability.

Latest papers

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67 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, down 21% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. When, Where, and What to Correct: Human-Guided Adaptive Residual Correction for Robot Policies

    Oct 27, 2026Anukriti Singh, Maxime Caniot, Pratap Tokekar +1Robot Policy AdaptationResidual Policy Learning

    University of Maryland, College Park College Park, MD · Work done during internship at Enchanted Tools. · Enchanted Tools Paris, France

  2. GRAFT: Geometry-Aware Residual Adaptation for Foundation Trackers

    Oct 27, 2026Liang Li, Guoyao Zhang, Xingyu Chen +6Humanoid Robot LocomotionTerrain-Aware Robot Locomotion

    Xiaomi Robotics Lab. · HKUST(Guangzhou).

  3. Dual Gradient Consensus for Adaptive Learning to Transient Out-of-Distribution Disturbances in Quadrotor Control

    Oct 25, 2026Mingtian Tan, Vasileios TzoumasQuadrotor ControlDisturbance Rejection

  4. Tilt-Rotor Quadcopter with Learned Residual Control and Mode-Dependent State Estimation

    Oct 22, 2026Ninad Joshi, Prabhat KumarQuadrotor ControlFeedback Control

    Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India

  5. Learning to Absorb Corrections: Critic-Weighted Residual Flow for Vision-Based Insertion

    Oct 21, 2026Yiqing Yuan, Zhi Li, Jinrong Yang +5Robotic InsertionResidual Policy Learning

    Sun Yat-sen University. · CVTE.

  6. OmniInteract: Towards Unified Whole-Body Interaction Control for Dual Humanoids

    Oct 19, 2026Yinghao Li, Tianyu Zhang, Zhuohao Li +4Humanoid Robot ControlHuman-Robot Collaboration

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · Beijing Institute of Technology +1

  7. Learning When to Adapt: Reactivity-Conditioned Residual Adaptation under Human-Robot Distribution Shift

    Oct 18, 2026Immanuel R. Santjoko, Benedictus C. G. Cinun, Jing Chen +1Robot Policy AdaptationSocial Robot Navigation

    Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Houston · Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University · Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston

  8. Compliant GMT: Making General Motion Tracking Compliant via Residual Reference Adaptation

    Oct 15, 2026Venki Parsuram, Michelle Wang, Jin-Hyuk Hong +1Compliant Robot ControlRobotic Control

  9. Hierarchical Residual Policy Learning for Real-World Mobile Manipulation with Sparse Human Guidance

    Oct 14, 2026Zhefei Gong, Hefeifei Jiang, Zehao Wang +1Mobile ManipulationRobotic RL

    Northeastern University · University of California, Riverside · Georgia Institute of Technology

  10. Beyond Kinematic Tracking: Preserving Expressive Characteristics in Humanoid Whole-Body Control

    Oct 14, 2026Lingfan Bao, Hanshang Zhu, Yan Pan +6Whole-Body ControlHumanoid Motion Tracking

    Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK.

  11. OATH: Object-Agnostic Tracking for Dexterous Hands, Enabling Rapid Physics-based Retargeting

    Oct 9, 2026Solvin Sigurdson, Prasanna Sriganesh, Juan Borbon +3Motion RetargetingRobotic Manipulation

    Multiply Labs, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA · Department of Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  12. LocoWM: High-Precision Locomotion through World-Model-Guided Residual Adaptation

    Sep 30, 2026Zijie Zhao, Shengqian Chen, Xiaoxu Wang +3Robot Policy AdaptationWorld Models for Robotics

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications +1

  13. FailPatch: Failure Residual Patching for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 28, 2026Peng Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Ziheng Zhang +6Robot Policy LearningRobot Policy Adaptation

    Xi’an Jiaotong University · Dexmal · Nanjing University

  14. RSD-Poker: Structure-Adaptive and Shift-Robust Risk-Utility Certification for Residual Policies in Imperfect-Information Games

    Sep 27, 2026Miaobo Hu, Shuhao Hu, Xiaobo Guo +4Distribution Shift RobustnessImperfect-Information Games

    School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  15. SwingRL: Adaptive Observation Reinforcement Learning with World-Model Prediction for Cable-Suspended Hoisting Control

    Sep 27, 2026Guangming Wang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yucheng Xin +8Robotic ControlFeedback Control

    Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, U.K. · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Cardiff, U.K. +1

  16. Residual Denoising Enables Sample-Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination on Demand

    Sep 26, 2026Dayi Dong, Maulik Bhatt, Aayushi Shrivastava +2Multi-Agent CoordinationRobot Policy Adaptation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA

  17. Res-HIL: Human-Guided Residual Reinforcement Learning for Sample-Efficient Dexterous Manipulation

    Sep 24, 2026Mariia Iavorskaia, Christian Dietz, Sebastian Albrecht +1Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationHuman-in-the-Loop AI

    Siemens AG, Research and Predevelopment, Germany. · Technical University of Munich, Germany.

  18. CereVLA: Cerebellum-Inspired Consequence-Aware Residual Governance for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Execution

    Sep 23, 2026Shuai Zeng, Yuxuan Liang, Hangmiao Hu +4Efficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

  19. DynaForge: Planning-Guided Residual Learning for Dynamic Manipulation Demonstration Generation

    Sep 22, 2026Yiyang Jin, Yu Zheng, Xiao He +1Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobot Motion Generation

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · LandSpace Technology Co.,Ltd., China

  20. HABILIS Brain 0: Geometry-Change Supervision for Vision-Language-Action and Residual Flow Recovery

    Sep 22, 2026Jinu Pahk, Jesoon Kang, Taegeon Park +4Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Tommoro Robotics

  21. ForceRFT: Refining VLA Actions through Force-Guided Residual Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 19, 2026Yichen Wang, Chaoyang Zhang, Xuqi Su +3Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    College of Information Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, Ningbo 315200, China. · Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China. · School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. +3

  22. Stability-aware Residual Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robotic Manipulator Disturbance Compensation

    Sep 18, 2026Jihong Kim, Joonhyuk Kwon, Hwa Soo Kim +2Input-to-State StabilityRobotic Control

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea · Department of Mechanical System Design, Kyonggi University, Suwon 16227, South Korea · School of Electrical Engineering, Kookmin University, Seoul 02707, South Korea

  23. Hybrid Residual Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Book Insertion

    Sep 17, 2026Tianyuan Liu, Rutherford Agbeshi Patamia, Benjamin Champion +2Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic RL

    Deakin University, Australia

  24. Gated Residual Body-Hand Coordination for Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation

    Sep 16, 2026Ruiming Wu, Shuang Li, Liding Zhang +2Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobot Teleoperation

    Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-time Systems, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Agile Robots SE, Munich, Germany

  25. ForceDelta-VLA: Distilling Force-Conditioned Action Corrections for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Ju Dong, Yu Fu, Jian Chen +9Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

    TAMS (Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems), Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. · University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. · Technical University of Munich, Germany.

  26. Residual Fault Adaptation for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation Under Runtime Joint Faults

    Sep 15, 2026Linan Deng, Xing Liu, Lin Hong +4Dexterous ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China · School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, MOE Key Lab of Intelligent Control and Image Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

  27. ResSafe: Learning Safety Filtering with Residual Reinforcement Learning for Humanoids

    Sep 14, 2026Gechen Qu, Tong Zhang, Bike Zhang +4Safety-Critical ControlHumanoid Robot Control

    University of California, Berkeley · University of California, Los Angeles

  28. Residual Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Computed Torque Control for a Cable-Driven Lower-Limb Rehabilitation Robot under Disturbances and Parametric Uncertainties

    Aug 27, 2026Mohammad-Hossein Fakouri, Ali Keymasi-KhalajiRobotic ControlRobot Trajectory Tracking

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

  29. ORPA: Online Residual Policy Adaptation for Robot Manipulation Control with Human Feedback

    Aug 18, 2026Muhammad A. Muttaqien, Tomohiro Motoda, Ryo Hanai +1Robotic ControlRobot Policy Learning

    Embodied AI Research Team · National Institute of AIST · Tokyo, Japan

  30. ViTaR: Visuo-Tactile Residual Adaptation for Foundation VLA Manipulation

    Aug 16, 2026Yi Wang, Renjun Wu, Jinyan Liu +1Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationTactile-Vision-Language-Action Models

    Beijing Institute of Technology