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

arXiv:2609.32069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 extbf{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 pi_{0.5} 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.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-09-29