Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide broad, instruction-conditioned manipulation behaviors, but their physical execution can remain imprecise during contact-rich interaction. Residual reinforcement learning (RL) can correct such errors while keeping the VLA frozen, but real-robot RL is costly and safety-critical. We propose VLA Latent-Conditioned RL (VLaRL), which enables residual RL for frozen VLAs to be trained in simulation and deployed on real robots without real-world RL or online adaptation. The key challenge is transferring the learned residual policy despite the visual gap between simulation and reality. Rather than requiring pixel-level visual correspondence, VLaRL uses the VLA’s internal vision-language latent representation to condition residual control and as the sim-to-real transfer interface, and learns a lightweight mapper that transforms simulation-derived latents toward the real latent distribution. Across four contact-rich manipulation tasks and two VLA backbones, VLaRL improves real-world success in all task-backbone combinations, while controlled ablations demonstrate the importance of both latent conditioning and latent alignment for transferring simulation-trained residual control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide broad, instruction-conditioned manipulation behaviors, but their physical execution can remain imprecise during contact-rich interaction. Residual reinforcement learning (RL) can correct such errors while keeping the VLA frozen, but real-robot RL is costly and safety-critical. We propose VLA Latent-Conditioned RL (VLaRL), which enables residual RL for frozen VLAs to be trained in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Namiko Saito","user_id":"43853"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Kinam Kim","user_id":"44211"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Heecheol Kim","user_id":"43949"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Katsushi Ikeuchi","user_id":"32500"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Yasuyuki 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