What to Ignore, What to React: Visually Robust RL Fine-Tuning of VLA Models
Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges. A key difficulty is that standard task rewards supervise task success, but offer limited guidance on whether a visual change is task-irrelevant or changes the behavior required for manipulation. We propose PAIR-VLA (Paired Action Invariance & Sensitivity for Visually Robust VLA), an RL fine-tuning framework to address this difficulty by adding two auxiliary objectives over paired visual variants during PPO optimization: an invariance term that reduces the discrepancy between action distributions for a task-preserving pair (e.g., different distractors), and a sensitivity objective that encourages separable action distributions for a task-altering pair (e.g., target object in a different pose). Together, these objectives turn visual variants from mere observation diversity into behavior-level guidance on policy responses during RL fine-tuning. We evaluate on ManiSkill3 across two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$, under diverse out-of-distribution visual shifts including unseen distractors, texture changes, target object pose variation, viewpoint shifts, and lighting changes. Our method consistently improves over standard PPO, achieving average improvements of 16.62% on $π_{0.5}$ and 9.10% on OpenVLA. Notably, ablations further show generalization across visual shifts: invariance guidance learned from distractor and texture variants transfers to target-pose and lighting shifts, while adding sensitivity guidance on target-pose variants further improves robustness to nuisance shifts, highlighting the broader transferability of behavior-level RL guidance.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Seeing through the Human Reporting Bias: Visual Classifiers from Noisy Human-Centric Labels
When human annotators are given a choice about what to label in an image, they apply their own subjective judgments on what to ignore and what to mention. We refer to these noisy "human-centric" annotations as exhibiting…
Image Captioningimage-classificationImage ClassificationCountEx: Fine-Grained Counting via Exemplars and Exclusion
This paper presents CountEx, a discriminative visual counting framework designed to address a key limitation of existing prompt-based methods: the inability to explicitly exclude visually similar distractors. While curre…
Visual Reaction: Learning to Play Catch with Your Drone
In this paper we address the problem of visual reaction: the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are not necessarily caused by the agent itself. Visual reaction entails pred…
The Emotional Alignment Design Policy
According to what we call the Emotional Alignment Design Policy, artificial entities should be designed to elicit emotional reactions from users that appropriately reflect the entities' capacities and moral status, or la…
Multistability of Small Reaction Networks
For three typical sets of small reaction networks (networks with two reactions, one irreversible and one reversible reaction, or two reversible-reaction pairs), we completely answer the challenging question: what is the …