ForceRFT: Refining VLA Actions through Force-Guided Residual Reinforcement Learning

Engineering notes

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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

Force-conditioned vision-language-action (VLA) policies can respond to contact, but when trained solely on demonstrations, their recovery behavior may be limited by demonstration coverage, and they do not learn from deployment outcomes. Human corrective imitation provides additional recovery examples, but its objective matches local action targets without explicitly optimizing task return. We present ForceRFT, a force-guided residual reinforcement learning framework that learns contact-dependent corrections from human supervision and autonomous task outcomes. A frozen, demonstration-trained SmolVLA-based prior generates force-conditioned action chunks, while a lightweight residual actor refines individual end-effector pose commands using wrist feedback acquired during chunk execution. The decision-time wrist wrench, its temporal change, and the selected base motion condition both residual correction and value estimation. Human corrections supervise the residual actor, while verified autonomous transitions train the twin critics and support value-guided updates to the same actor. Bootstrapping is restricted to autonomous segments, preventing TD credit from crossing human-intervention boundaries. Real-robot experiments on plug insertion, ring-on-peg assembly, and whiteboard wiping show higher autonomous success rates than the evaluated demonstration-trained and residual-imitation baselines. Comparisons with residual imitation support value-guided residual optimization, while plug-insertion ablations indicate the benefit of direct execution-time wrist feedback.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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