Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills. We show this failure mode in residual reinforcement learning (RL) over a frozen VLA base policy: constant sparse success rewards improve each subtask in isolation yet yield little or no gain when skills are chained, because terminal state quality is uncontrolled. We propose Foresight Residual RL, which optimizes handoff quality by augmenting each subtask's sparse success reward with an offline-estimated foresight value -- the probability of future subtask success conditioned on the terminal state of the current subtask. Concretely, we (i) train a visual foresight predictor from images of terminal states of the base policy, labeled using downstream rollout statistics, and (ii) train residual policies via backward foresight induction, using the predictor output as a reward multiplier. On a three-phase wrench-based nut-tightening assembly task in Isaac Gym (grasp, move-insert, rotate), our method achieves 85.6% full-task success, outperforming standard subtask residual RL (54.5%) and VLA baselines, while leaving per-subtask success unchanged. These results highlight that improving long-horizon performance requires shaping which successful states are produced at each sub-task, not only whether success occurs.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments