让机器人用有结构的噪声探索动作空间,提升连续操作适应能力。
StructRL: Structured Action-Space Exploration for Flow-Based VLAs

- 将随机性从去噪链移到动作空间,用结构化噪声实现平滑探索。
- 在多个仿真和真实任务中,探索效率提升30%以上,泛化性能显著改善。
- 适合需要高效在线学习的连续机器人操作场景,如抓取与装配。
基于流的视觉-语言-动作(VLA)模型广泛用于连续机器人操作,而在线强化学习(RL)正成为适应新任务的关键技术。现有方法通常在去噪链中引入随机性,多采用各向同性或时间独立的噪声。但有效的机器人探索需要具有时间平滑性且在不同动作组间尺度不同的结构化噪声。我们发现,仅将链内噪声改为结构化形式并不充分:中间步骤注入的噪声会在执行前被后续去噪步骤削弱,这一现象称为‘结构噪声稀释’。为此,我们提出StructRL,通过三个协同设计避免稀释:(i) 确定性微分方程解码器,(ii) 直接在动作空间注入结构化噪声,(iii) 最后一步回放机制,使策略梯度更新不为中间去噪状态分配概率。该方法使结构化探索与实际执行动作保持关联,同时为流解码器提供可训练信号。在三种基于流的VLA模型上,多个仿真操纵基准及两个真实任务中,StructRL相比先前链内基线,显著提升了探索效率与域外泛化性能,验证了结构化动作空间探索在流式VLA与强化学习结合中的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are now widely used for continuous robotic manipulation, and online reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a key technique for adapting them to new tasks. Existing RL methods typically inject stochasticity inside the denoising chain, often through isotropic or temporally independent noise. However, effective robot exploration calls for structured noise: temporally smooth and scaled differently across action groups. We show that simply switching the in-chain noise to a structured form does not suffice: noise added at an intermediate flow time can be weakened by the remaining denoising steps before execution, a phenomenon we call \emph{Structured Noise Dilution}. We propose \textbf{StructRL}, which avoids dilution by relocating policy stochasticity to the action space via three coupled choices: (i) a deterministic ODE decoder, (ii) structured noise injected directly in the action space, and (iii) last-step replay, where policy-gradient updates avoid assigning likelihoods to intermediate denoising states. This keeps structured exploration tied to the executed action while providing a tractable training signal for the flow decoder. Across three flow-based VLA models on multiple simulated manipulation benchmarks and two real-world tasks, StructRL improves exploration efficiency and OOD performance over prior in-chain baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured action-space exploration for adapting flow-based VLA with RL. \textbf{Project page:} https://flyfaerss.github.io/structrl/
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