SRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fei, Senyu, Wang, Siyin, Ji, Li, Li, Ao, Zhang, Shiduo, Liu, Liming, Hou, Jinlong, Gong, Jingjing, Zhao, Xianzhong, Qiu, Xipeng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Fei, Senyu
Wang, Siyin
Ji, Li
Li, Ao
Zhang, Shiduo
Liu, Liming
Hou, Jinlong
Gong, Jingjing
Zhao, Xianzhong
Qiu, Xipeng
author_facet Fei, Senyu
Wang, Siyin
Ji, Li
Li, Ao
Zhang, Shiduo
Liu, Liming
Hou, Jinlong
Gong, Jingjing
Zhao, Xianzhong
Qiu, Xipeng
contents Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but are constrained by their heavy reliance on expert demonstrations, leading to demonstration bias and limiting performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a vital post-training strategy to overcome these limits, yet current VLA-RL methods, including group-based optimization approaches, are crippled by severe reward sparsity. Relying on binary success indicators wastes valuable information in failed trajectories, resulting in low training efficiency. To solve this, we propose Self-Referential Policy Optimization (SRPO), a novel VLA-RL framework. SRPO eliminates the need for external demonstrations or manual reward engineering by leveraging the model's own successful trajectories, generated within the current training batch, as a self-reference. This allows us to assign a progress-wise reward to failed attempts. A core innovation is the use of latent world representations to measure behavioral progress robustly. Instead of relying on raw pixels or requiring domain-specific fine-tuning, we utilize the compressed, transferable encodings from a world model's latent space. These representations naturally capture progress patterns across environments, enabling accurate, generalized trajectory comparison. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate SRPO's efficiency and effectiveness. Starting from a supervised baseline with 48.9% success, SRPO achieves a new state-of-the-art success rate of 99.2% in just 200 RL steps, representing a 103% relative improvement without any extra supervision. Furthermore, SRPO shows substantial robustness, achieving a 167% performance improvement on the LIBERO-Plus benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15605
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Fei, Senyu
Wang, Siyin
Ji, Li
Li, Ao
Zhang, Shiduo
Liu, Liming
Hou, Jinlong
Gong, Jingjing
Zhao, Xianzhong
Qiu, Xipeng
Robotics
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but are constrained by their heavy reliance on expert demonstrations, leading to demonstration bias and limiting performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a vital post-training strategy to overcome these limits, yet current VLA-RL methods, including group-based optimization approaches, are crippled by severe reward sparsity. Relying on binary success indicators wastes valuable information in failed trajectories, resulting in low training efficiency. To solve this, we propose Self-Referential Policy Optimization (SRPO), a novel VLA-RL framework. SRPO eliminates the need for external demonstrations or manual reward engineering by leveraging the model's own successful trajectories, generated within the current training batch, as a self-reference. This allows us to assign a progress-wise reward to failed attempts. A core innovation is the use of latent world representations to measure behavioral progress robustly. Instead of relying on raw pixels or requiring domain-specific fine-tuning, we utilize the compressed, transferable encodings from a world model's latent space. These representations naturally capture progress patterns across environments, enabling accurate, generalized trajectory comparison. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate SRPO's efficiency and effectiveness. Starting from a supervised baseline with 48.9% success, SRPO achieves a new state-of-the-art success rate of 99.2% in just 200 RL steps, representing a 103% relative improvement without any extra supervision. Furthermore, SRPO shows substantial robustness, achieving a 167% performance improvement on the LIBERO-Plus benchmark.
title SRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Robotics
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15605