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This paper introduces Progress Field Reinforcement Learning (PF-RL), a method designed to enhance Vision-Language-Action models by converting intermediate task progress into dense feedback for policy optimization. By leveraging geometric distance in a goal-conditioned space, PF-RL addresses the credit assignment problem inherent in long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks without requiring explicit scalar predictions. The approach demonstrates consistent performance improvements over existing reinforcement fine-tuning baselines on both simulated and real-world bimanual manipulation benchmarks.
PF-RL: Progress Field Reinforcement Learning via Goal-Conditioned Value Geometry for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv:2609.32634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning~(RFT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving Vision-Language-Action~(VLA) policies, yet sparse task-level outcomes provide limited credit for intermediate transitions, especially in long-horizon manipulation. A natural approach is to model intermediate task progress and use it as dense feedback for policy improvement. Despite their architectural differences, existing progress-aware methods commonly formulate task progress as an explicit scalar prediction, providing limited structure for modeling how intermediate observations relate to the task goal, which may hinder effective transition-level credit assignment. We introduce Progress Field Reinforcement Learning (PF-RL), which learns a structured goal-conditioned progress representation over pretrained VLA features and converts it into dense credit for policy optimization. A lightweight shared Progress Field head maps current and goal representations into a compact progress space, where geometric distance induces goal-conditioned value, while complementary temporal and goal-structure objectives shape the learned geometry. Transition-level value changes naturally yield dense progress advantages, enabling fine-grained credit assignment for both offline policy improvement and online reinforcement fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks show that PF-RL consistently improves policy performance over strong supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement fine-tuning, and progress-aware baselines.
Abstract:Reinforcement Fine-Tuning~(RFT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving Vision-Language-Action~(VLA) policies, yet sparse task-level outcomes provide limited credit for intermediate transitions, especially in long-horizon manipulation. A natural approach is to model intermediate task progress and use it as dense feedback for policy improvement. Despite their architectural differences, existing progress-aware methods commonly formulate task progress as an explicit scalar prediction, providing limited structure for modeling how intermediate observations relate to the task goal, which may hinder effective transition-level credit assignment. We introduce Progress Field Reinforcement Learning (PF-RL), which learns a structured goal-conditioned progress representation over pretrained VLA features and converts it into dense credit for policy optimization. A lightweight shared Progress Field head maps current and goal representations into a compact progress space, where geometric distance induces goal-conditioned value, while complementary temporal and goal-structure objectives shape the learned geometry. Transition-level value changes naturally yield dense progress advantages, enabling fine-grained credit assignment for both offline policy improvement and online reinforcement fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks show that PF-RL consistently improves policy performance over strong supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement fine-tuning, and progress-aware baselines.
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2609.32634 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.32634v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32634 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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