Simple Recipe Works: Vision-Language-Action Models are Natural Continual Learners with Reinforcement Learning
Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments. However, conventional wisdom from continual learning suggests that naive Sequential Fine-Tuning (Seq. FT) leads to catastrophic forgetting, necessitating complex CRL strategies. In this work, we take a step back and conduct a systematic study of CRL for large pretrained VLAs across diverse lifelong RL benchmarks. We find that, contrary to established belief, simple Seq. FT with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is remarkably strong: it achieves high plasticity, exhibits little to no forgetting, and retain...
| Authors | Jiaheng Hu, Jay Shim, Chen Tang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 July 2026 |
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