mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RL-100: Performant Robotic Manipulation with Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2510.14830 ↗First posted 16 Oct 2025cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 47

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Cited by 21 in Vision-language-action models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world robotic manipulation in homes and factories demands reliability, efficiency, and robustness that approach or surpass those of skilled human operators. We present RL-100, a real-world reinforcement learning framework built on diffusion visuomotor policies. RL-100 unifies imitation and reinforcement learning under a single clipped PPO surrogate objective applied within the denoising process, yielding conservative and stable improvements across offline and online stages. To meet deployment latency requirements, a lightweight consistency distillation method compresses multi-step diffusion into a one-step controller for high-frequency control. The framework is task-, embodiment-, and representation-agnostic, and supports both single-action and action-chunking control. We evaluate RL-100 on eight diverse real-robot tasks, from dynamic pushing and agile bowling to pouring, cloth folding, unscrewing, multi-stage juicing, and long-horizon box folding. RL-100 attains 100 percent success across evaluated trials, for a total of 1000 out of 1000 episodes, including up to 250 out of 250 consecutive trials on one task. It matches or surpasses expert teleoperators in time to completion. Without retraining, a single policy attains approximately 90 percent zero-shot success under environmental and dynamics shifts, adapts in a few-shot regime to significant task variations (86.7 percent), and remains robust to aggressive human perturbations (about 96 percent). Notably, our juicing robot served random customers continuously for about seven hours without failure when deployed zero-shot in a shopping mall. These results suggest a practical path to deployment-ready robot learning by starting from human priors, aligning training objectives with human-grounded metrics, and reliably extending performance beyond human demonstrations.

Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 64 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

Builds on

64 of 83 references.

References · 64

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38 more
  1. 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,778
  2. 2020Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,777
  3. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  4. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,490
  5. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,406
  6. 2021Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learningcited by 1,245
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  12. 2019Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learningcited by 750
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  14. 2018QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulationcited by 730
  15. 2017Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrationscited by 685
  16. 2022R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulationcited by 678
  17. 2020AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasetscited by 647
  18. 2023BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scalecited by 634
  19. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 543
  20. 2022Is Conditional Generative Modeling all you need for Decision-Making?cited by 504
  21. 2023DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 431
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  35. 2024Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning via Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimizationcited by 99
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 44.

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  1. 2025π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experiencecited by 280
  2. 2026WoVR: World Models as Reliable Simulators for Post-Training VLA Policies with RLcited by 46
  3. 2026RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 43
  4. 2025Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulationcited by 37
  5. 2026ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real Worldcited by 31
  6. 2026TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Roboticscited by 29
  7. 2026SOP: A Scalable Online Post-Training System for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 19
  8. 2026Learning While Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policiescited by 12
  9. 2026chi0: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistenciescited by 11
  10. 2026Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Modelscited by 11
  11. 2026From Prior to Pro: Efficient Skill Mastery via Distribution Contractive RL Finetuningcited by 8
  12. 2026LIBERO-Safety: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Physical and Semantic Safety in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 8
35 more
  1. 2026EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 7
  2. 2026Failure-Aware RL: Reliable Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Self-Recovery for Real-World Manipulationcited by 6
  3. 2025RESample: A Robust Data Augmentation Framework via Exploratory Sampling for Robotic Manipulationcited by 5
  4. 2026PolicyFlow: Policy Optimization with Continuous Normalizing Flow in Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  5. 2026TwinRL: Digital Twin-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Robotic Manipulationcited by 5
  6. 2026TORL-VLA: Tactile Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 4
  7. 2026What Makes Value Learning Efficient in Residual Reinforcement Learning?cited by 3
  8. 2026ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learningcited by 3
  9. 2026RoboPocket: Improve Robot Policies Instantly with Your Phonecited by 3
  10. 2026Simulation Distillation: Pretraining World Models in Simulation for Rapid Real-World Adaptationcited by 3
  11. 2026When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  12. 2026TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuningcited by 3
  13. 2026RedFlow: Redirect Failure into Action-Level Corrections for Flow-matching VLA Policycited by 3
  14. 2026E2HiL: Entropy-Guided Sample Selection for Efficient Real-World Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
  15. 2026SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulationcited by 2
  16. 2026Robot Self-Improvement via Human-Video Dynamics Modelscited by 2
  17. 2026FORCE: Efficient VLA Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Value-Calibrated Warm-up and Self-Distillationcited by 2
  18. 2026GeMPO: Generalized Measure Matching for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  19. 2026SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  20. 2026OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policiescited by 1
  21. 2026BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Modelscited by 1
  22. 2026Potential-Guided Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Policy Improvementcited by 1
  23. 2026HALO-WA: Hybrid-Attention Latent-Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for World-Action Modelscited by 1
  24. 2026HAF: Adapting Generalist VLAs to Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-manipulation via Hierarchical Action Flow and Spectral Latent RLcited by 1
  25. 2026Facet-0: A Robotic Foundation Model for Contact-Rich Precise Manipulationcited by 1
  26. 2026Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Sigmoid-Bounded Entropy for Real-World Robot Learningcited by 0
  27. 2026Scaling by Diversified Experience for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
  28. 2026ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  29. 2026HiL-ResRL: A Model-Agnostic Finetuning Adapter via Human-in-the-loop Residual Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  30. 2026A Hierarchical Approach to Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Requiring Time Varying Forcescited by 0
  31. 2026SCQ: Stabilizing Conservative Q-Learning with Sigmoid-Bounded Entropycited by 0
  32. 2026Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policiescited by 0
  33. 2026From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Interventioncited by 0
  34. 2026BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
  35. 2026Learning from Mixed-Quality Deployment Experience for Robot Manipulationcited by 0