Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces an RL-based sim-real co-training framework for vision-language-action models that improves real-world performance, generalization, and data efficiency by combining supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning in simulation.

Contribution

It proposes a two-stage RL-co-training method that enhances sim-to-real transfer for VLA models, surpassing traditional supervised fine-tuning approaches.

Findings

+24% success on OpenVLA tasks

+20% success on π_{0.5} tasks

Improved generalization and data efficiency

Abstract

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which treats simulation as a static source of demonstrations and does not exploit large-scale closed-loop interaction. Consequently, real-world gains and generalization are often limited. In this paper, we propose an \underline{\textit{RL}}-based sim-real \underline{\textit{Co}}-training \modify{(RL-Co)} framework that leverages interactive simulation while preserving real-world capabilities. Our method follows a generic two-stage design: we first warm-start the policy with SFT on a mixture of real and simulated demonstrations, then fine-tune it with reinforcement learning in simulation while adding an auxiliary supervised loss on real-world data to anchor the policy and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our framework on four real-world tabletop manipulation tasks using two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $\pi_{0.5}$, and observe consistent improvements over real-only fine-tuning and SFT-based co-training, including +24% real-world success on OpenVLA and +20% on $\pi_{0.5}$. Beyond higher success rates, RL co-training yields stronger generalization to unseen task variations and substantially improved real-world data efficiency, providing a practical and scalable pathway for leveraging simulation to enhance real-robot deployment.