FORCE: Efficient VLA Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Value-Calibrated Warm-up and Self-Distillation
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often constrained by the imitation ceiling imposed by sub-optimal data. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning can surpass this limit, it is notoriously sample inefficient. This challenge arises from two core issues: (1) catastrophic initial unlearning due to an unstable Q-function and (2) inefficient policy updates caused by low-quality exploration data, often forcing a reliance on costly human interventions. We introduce FORCE, a 3-stage framework that stabilizes fine-tuning by tackling both issues. FORCE first incorporates a Value-Calibrated Warm-Up phase, utilizing on-policy rollouts to mitigate the distributional shift of the Q-function....
| Authors | Shuyi Zhang, Yunfan Lou, Hongyang Cheng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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