VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

🤗 Upvotes: 52 | cs.RO, cs.CV

Authors:
Hengtao Li, Pengxiang Ding, Runze Suo, Yihao Wang, Zirui Ge, Dongyuan Zang, Kexian Yu, Mingyang Sun, Hongyin Zhang, Donglin Wang, Weihua Su

Title:
VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00406v1

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues yet typically demands costly real-world interactions or suffers from sim-to-real gaps. We introduce VLA-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that leverages a data-driven world model as a controllable simulator. Trained from real interaction data, the simulator predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions, allowing policy rollouts with dense, trajectory-level rewards derived from goal-achieving references. This design delivers an efficient and action-aligned learning signal, drastically lowering sample requirements. With fewer than 400 fine-tuning steps, VLA-RFT surpasses strong supervised baselines and achieves greater efficiency than simulator-based RL. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness under perturbed conditions, sustaining stable task execution. Our results establish world-model-based RFT as a practical post-training paradigm to enhance the generalization and robustness of VLA models. For more details, please refer to https://vla-rft.github.io/.