mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models

arXiv 2609.32069 ↗First posted 25 Sep 2026cs.ROcited by 0

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

  1. 2026RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Models24 Apr
  2. 2025Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL30 Oct

Other references · 32

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  2. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  4. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  6. 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,037
  7. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  8. 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,172
  9. 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
  10. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 733
  11. 2023Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesiscited by 307
  12. 2023Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Plannerscited by 298
20 more
  1. 2021Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning: Learning Fast Without a Modelcited by 278
  2. 2018Residual Reinforcement Learning for Robot Controlcited by 242
  3. 2026Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligencecited by 99
  4. 2021Reset-Free Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Task Learning: Learning Dexterous Manipulation Behaviors without Human Interventioncited by 90
  5. 2017Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learningcited by 86
  6. 2023Grounded Decoding: Guiding Text Generation with Grounded Models for Embodied Agentscited by 66
  7. 2023Robot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learningcited by 49
  8. 2026ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Roboticscited by 44
  9. 2024RLDG: Robotic Generalist Policy Distillation via Reinforcement Learningcited by 42
  10. 2025Residual Off-Policy RL for Finetuning Behavior Cloning Policiescited by 42
  11. 2021Autonomous Reinforcement Learning via Subgoal Curriculacited by 32
  12. 2021Fully Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Mobile Manipulationcited by 30
  13. 2023Self-Improving Robots: End-to-End Autonomous Visuomotor Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
  14. 2024Practice Makes Perfect: Planning to Learn Skill Parameter Policiescited by 22
  15. 2022Demonstration-Bootstrapped Autonomous Practicing via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
  16. 2024Agentic Skill Discoverycited by 5
  17. 2025Robot Trains Robot: Automatic Real-World Policy Adaptation and Learning for Humanoidscited by 3
  18. 2026When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  19. 2026Nautilus: From One Prompt to Plug-and-Play Robot Learningcited by 3
  20. 2026HARBOR: A Harness Framework for Agentic Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 2

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  1. 2026Agentic-VLA: Efficient Online Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models
  2. 2025VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2025A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2025Towards Deploying VLA without Fine-Tuning: Plug-and-Play Inference-Time VLA Policy Steering via Embodied Evolutionary Diffusion
  5. 2026AC^2-VLA: Action-Context-Aware Adaptive Computation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2026Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents
  7. 2026Self-Correcting VLA: Online Action Refinement via Sparse World Imagination
  8. 2026VLaRL: Augmenting Vision-Language-Action Models with Simulation-Trained Latent-Conditioned Residual RL