DriftOPD: Sequence-Level Reverse-KL Distillation for One-Step VLA Policies

Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models increasingly rely on action experts that generate short action chunks under receding-horizon control. While chunk-level training is convenient across robot embodiments, it optimizes local action likelihood without explicitly accounting for long-horizon task success. Sequence-level reinforcement learning can address this limitation, but typically requires policy rollouts and closed-loop interaction, which are costly for real-robot manipulation. We introduce DriftOPD, a teacher-free, rollout-free framework for sequence-level on-policy distillation of continuous VLA action experts. We show that the sequence-level reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence decomposes into a chunk-level reverse-KL term and a future-potential term that captures the long-horizon effect of the current action. DriftOPD optimizes these two terms using a one-step drifting objective and a Q-function critic learned from offline demonstrations, respectively, enabling sequence-level optimization with only offline data and one-step action generation. Across multiple VLA architectures in simulation and real-world manipulation, DriftOPD generally outperforms existing one-step distillation baselines while achieving task success performance comparable to multi-step teacher policies. These results demonstrate that long-horizon behavior can be effectively distilled into one-step VLA action experts without online interaction or a separate teacher.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.00317 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.00317v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00317 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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