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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot locomotion and manipulation, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 64 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot locomotion and manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-locomotion-and-manipulation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09477/) (2018)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06169/) (2021)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13301/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00177/) (2019)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12114/) (2018)
- [When to Trust Your Model: Model-Based Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08253/) (2019)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09359/) (2020)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14759/) (2025)
- [WoVR: World Models as Reliable Simulators for Post-Training VLA Policies with RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13977/) (2026)
- [RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23073/) (2026)
- [Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23703/) (2025)
- [ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19980/) (2026)
- [TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19313/) (2026)
- [SOP: A Scalable Online Post-Training System for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03044/) (2026)
- [Learning While Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00416/) (2026)
- [chi0: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09021/) (2026)
- [Failure-Aware RL: Reliable Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Self-Recovery for Real-World Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07821/) (2026)
- [Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16065/) (2026)
- [EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25477/) (2026)
- [From Prior to Pro: Efficient Skill Mastery via Distribution Contractive RL Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10263/) (2026)
- [LIBERO-Safety: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Physical and Semantic Safety in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23686/) (2026)
- [RESample: A Robust Data Augmentation Framework via Exploratory Sampling for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17640/) (2025)
- [TwinRL: Digital Twin-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09023/) (2026)
- [Simulation Distillation: Pretraining World Models in Simulation for Rapid Real-World Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15759/) (2026)
- [E2HiL: Entropy-Guided Sample Selection for Efficient Real-World Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19969/) (2026)
- [PolicyFlow: Policy Optimization with Continuous Normalizing Flow in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01156/) (2026)
- [ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11643/) (2026)
- [What Makes Value Learning Efficient in Residual Reinforcement Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10539/) (2026)
- [RoboPocket: Improve Robot Policies Instantly with Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05504/) (2026)
- [TORL-VLA: Tactile Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09337/) (2026)
- [RedFlow: Redirect Failure into Action-Level Corrections for Flow-matching VLA Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27782/) (2026)
- [SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28730/) (2026)
- [When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05172/) (2026)
- [TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12236/) (2026)
- [Beyond Action Residuals: Real-World Robot Policy Steering via Bottleneck Latent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19919/) (2026)
- [Preference-Calibrated Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03949/) (2026)
- [SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10305/) (2026)

## 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.