Cooperative Multi-Agent Vision-Language-Action Models via Reinforced Fine Tuning

arXiv:2609.36588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study reinforcement learning (RL) methods for cooperative multi-agent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. This problem is challenging because VLAs are pretrained on large-scale single-agent data and therefore lack the fine-grained coordination skills required for inter-robot collaboration. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on multi-robot demonstrations partially bridges this gap, but its performance is bounded by the demonstration data and cannot improve from its own experience. We present a three-stage reinforced fine-tuning (RFT) pipeline for multi-agent VLAs. First, initialization-aware data collection sweeps over initial configurations and invokes human demonstrations only when the pretrained VLA repeatedly fails, yielding robustness to initialization shift with reduced human cost. Second, offline credit-filtered tuning assigns credit to individual agents and fine-tunes on per-agent trajectories with positive advantage rather than on entire joint rollouts. Third, we find existing online RL for VLAs are less effective for hard multi-agent tasks, which we attribute to noisy co-exploration and unstable updates. We instead use online latent-space fine tuning, which freeze the VLA and perform RL in its latent noise space. We evaluate our multi-agent VLA with both pi_0 and pi_{0.5} backbones across 11 tasks in RoboTwin, RoboFactory and real-world manipulation with two Franka robots. Our multi-agent VLA improves the average success rate by +23.1%, +16.4%, and +44% on RoboTwin, RoboFactory, and real-world tasks, respectively. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mavla_rft-2BC0/.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-30