Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL

Abstract

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become the de facto post-training strategy for large vision-language-action (VLA) models, but its reliance on costly human demonstrations limits scalability and generalization. We propose Probe, Learn, Distill (PLD), a plug-and-play framework that improves VLAs through residual reinforcement learning and distribution-aware data collection. In Stage 1 (specialist acquisition), we freeze the VLA backbone and train lightweight residual actors via off-policy RL. These specialists take over in states where the base policy fails, thereby probing failure regions of the generalist. In Stage 2 (data collection), we employ a hybrid rollout scheme that biases residual interventions toward states frequently visited by the base policy, aligning collected trajectories with the generalist’s deployment distribution while capturing recovery behaviors. In Stage 3 (fine-tuning), these curated trajectories are distilled back into the generalist with standard SFT, applicable to both flow-matching and autoregressive heads. We evaluate PLD across diverse settings: it achieves a near-saturated 99% task success rate on the LIBERO benchmark, delivers over 50% performance gains in SimplerEnv, and demonstrates practicality on real-world Franka arm manipulation tasks. We further provide ablations showing that residual policy probing and distribution-aware replay are key to collecting deployment-aligned data that improves VLAs’ capabilities on both seen and unseen tasks. Our results demonstrate that RL-generated, policy-aligned data can surpass teleoperation-only demonstrations, offering a scalable path toward self-improving VLA models.