PLAY PODCASTS
VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators
Episode 1219

VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

Daily Paper Cast

October 3, 202526m 50s

Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (media.transistor.fm) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.

Show Notes

🤗 Upvotes: 52 | cs.RO, cs.CV

Authors:
Hengtao Li, Pengxiang Ding, Runze Suo, Yihao Wang, Zirui Ge, Dongyuan Zang, Kexian Yu, Mingyang Sun, Hongyin Zhang, Donglin Wang, Weihua Su

Title:
VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00406v1

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues yet typically demands costly real-world interactions or suffers from sim-to-real gaps. We introduce VLA-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that leverages a data-driven world model as a controllable simulator. Trained from real interaction data, the simulator predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions, allowing policy rollouts with dense, trajectory-level rewards derived from goal-achieving references. This design delivers an efficient and action-aligned learning signal, drastically lowering sample requirements. With fewer than 400 fine-tuning steps, VLA-RFT surpasses strong supervised baselines and achieves greater efficiency than simulator-based RL. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness under perturbed conditions, sustaining stable task execution. Our results establish world-model-based RFT as a practical post-training paradigm to enhance the generalization and robustness of VLA models. For more details, please refer to https://vla-rft.github.io/.