Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models
On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reinforcement learning and post-training also fits: Failure recovery and robustness
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Abstract (arXiv)
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 π0.5 VLA and residual off-policy RL. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, the independent human-assessed success rate improves from 55% to 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.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning and post-training, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 34 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2026.
Builds on
34 of 40 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2026RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Models24 Apr
- 2025Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL30 Oct
Other references · 32
- 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
- 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,037
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
- 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,172
- 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
- 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 733
- 2023Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesiscited by 307
- 2023Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Plannerscited by 298
20 more
- 2021Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning: Learning Fast Without a Modelcited by 278
- 2018Residual Reinforcement Learning for Robot Controlcited by 242
- 2026Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligencecited by 99
- 2021Reset-Free Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Task Learning: Learning Dexterous Manipulation Behaviors without Human Interventioncited by 90
- 2017Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learningcited by 86
- 2023Grounded Decoding: Guiding Text Generation with Grounded Models for Embodied Agentscited by 66
- 2023Robot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learningcited by 49
- 2026ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Roboticscited by 44
- 2024RLDG: Robotic Generalist Policy Distillation via Reinforcement Learningcited by 42
- 2025Residual Off-Policy RL for Finetuning Behavior Cloning Policiescited by 42
- 2021Autonomous Reinforcement Learning via Subgoal Curriculacited by 32
- 2021Fully Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Mobile Manipulationcited by 30
- 2023Self-Improving Robots: End-to-End Autonomous Visuomotor Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
- 2024Practice Makes Perfect: Planning to Learn Skill Parameter Policiescited by 22
- 2022Demonstration-Bootstrapped Autonomous Practicing via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
- 2024Agentic Skill Discoverycited by 5
- 2025Robot Trains Robot: Automatic Real-World Policy Adaptation and Learning for Humanoidscited by 3
- 2026When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
- 2026Nautilus: From One Prompt to Plug-and-Play Robot Learningcited by 3
- 2026HARBOR: A Harness Framework for Agentic Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
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- 2026Agentic-VLA: Efficient Online Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models
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- 2025A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning
- 2025Towards Deploying VLA without Fine-Tuning: Plug-and-Play Inference-Time VLA Policy Steering via Embodied Evolutionary Diffusion
- 2026AC^2-VLA: Action-Context-Aware Adaptive Computation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
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- 2026VLaRL: Augmenting Vision-Language-Action Models with Simulation-Trained Latent-Conditioned Residual RL