mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

RDGen: Demonstration Generation for High-Quality Robot Learning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2605.30957 ↗First posted 29 May 2026cs.ROcited by 1

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reinforcement learning and post-training

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robot control. However, their performance remains fundamentally constrained by the availability of high-quality robot trajectory data. In current robot learning practice, such data are primarily collected through human teleoperation, which is labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose RDGen, a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for generating high-quality robot demonstrations. Rather than employing reinforcement learning solely as the final control policy, RDGen leverages trained RL policies as a structured trajectory generator. The system consists of a VLM-based task parser that identifies task-relevant objects, a Grounding DINO-based object localizer, and an RL policy transferred from simulation to the real robot. Successful rollouts are then harvested as clean, high-quality demonstrations for downstream VLA training, while the simulation stage further provides a scalable source of additional trajectories at little marginal cost. Experiments on a pick-and-place task demonstrate that the transferred RL policy achieves a high task success rate. Compared with human teleoperation, RDGen produces significantly smoother trajectories and yields superior downstream VLA performance. These results indicate that RL-generated demonstrations can serve as more reliable and consistent supervisory signals for robot policy learning.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning and post-training, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 24 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

Builds on

24 of 28 references.

References · 24

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12 more
  1. 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,210
  2. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,035
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  12. 2021Minimum Jerk Trajectory Generation for Straight and Curved Movements: Mathematical Analysiscited by 1

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2026DREAM: Deployment-Time Demonstration Generation via Real-to-Sim for Scalable Policy Adaptation
  2. 2025VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2025Beyond Human Demonstrations: Diffusion-Based Reinforcement Learning to Generate Data for VLA Training
  4. 2025A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026SynthDemo-RL: Breaking the Zero-Reward Barrier in VLA Adaptation with LLM-Guided Synthetic Demonstrations
  6. 2026RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Models
  7. 2025Genie Centurion: Accelerating Scalable Real-World Robot Training with Human Rewind-and-Refine Guidance
  8. 2026VLaRL: Augmenting Vision-Language-Action Models with Simulation-Trained Latent-Conditioned Residual RL