让机器人在异步执行中实时优化策略,兼顾稳定与流畅控制。
SmoothRL: Online Reinforcement Learning During Asynchronous Execution

- 在异步推理循环中直接用动作价值梯度更新策略参数。
- 仅对执行阶段的动作传播梯度,确保优化与实际轨迹一致。
- 适用于高精度和动态复杂的现实机器人任务,提升部署稳定性。
将机器人策略部署于物理世界需兼顾可靠性与实时平滑执行。然而,当前通用模型在两方面均面临挑战:实现真实场景所需的精度与鲁棒性,要求样本高效的在线强化学习(RL)来微调预训练模型;同时,机器人基础模型规模增大导致推理延迟升高。为满足高延迟下的实时约束,现代系统采用异步推理与动作分块策略,通过重叠策略计算与动作执行来隐藏延迟,实现平滑控制。尽管二者互补,但将异步执行与基于梯度的在线RL结合仍缺乏研究。本文提出SmoothRL,一种在异步推理循环中微调预训练策略的在线RL框架。SmoothRL采用价值-梯度范式,直接利用动作价值函数对策略动作的梯度更新参数。为确保异步执行下优化正确性,该框架显式建模异步推理过程:每个动作分块按帧索引分为三区——已承诺区(前一周期确认的动作)、执行区(当前新生成并执行的动作)、被丢弃区(被下一周期覆盖的动作)。仅执行区的梯度被反向传播,确保策略优化与异步执行诱导的轨迹分布一致。我们在需要高精度的真实机器人任务以及需异步执行的高动态任务上评估了SmoothRL。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deploying robot policies in the physical world requires satisfying two fundamental desiderata: reliability and smooth real-time execution. However, deploying state-of-the-art generalist models presents challenges on both fronts. Achieving the precision and robustness required for real-world deployment necessitates sample-efficient online reinforcement learning (RL) to adapt pretrained models. Meanwhile, the increasing scale of robot foundation models has led to higher inference latency. To satisfy real-time constraints under high latency, modern systems adopt asynchronous inference with action chunking, overlapping policy computation with chunk execution to hide latency and enable smooth control. Despite their complementary roles, integrating asynchronous execution with gradient-based online RL remains underexplored. We present SmoothRL, an online RL framework that fine-tunes a pretrained policy within an asynchronous inference loop. SmoothRL follows a value-gradient paradigm, directly updating policy parameters using gradients of the action-value function with respect to policy actions. To enable correct optimization under asynchronous execution, SmoothRL explicitly models the asynchronous inference process during training. Specifically, each generated action chunk is partitioned by frame index into three regions: a committed region, consisting of actions committed by the previous inference cycle; an execution region, containing newly generated actions executed by the robot; and a discarded region, containing actions superseded by the next inference cycle. Gradients are propagated only through the execution region, ensuring policy optimization aligns with the trajectory distribution induced by asynchronous execution. We evaluate SmoothRL on real-world robotic tasks requiring high precision, as well as highly dynamic tasks that necessitate asynchronous execution.
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