Paper · arXiv 2605.00416
Learning while Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies
Yi Wang, Xinchen Li, Pengwei Xie, Pu Yang, Buqing Nie, Yunuo Cai, Qinglin Zhang, Chendi Qu, Jeffrey Wu, Jianheng Song, Xinlin Ren, Jingshun Huang, Mingjie Pan, Siyuan Feng, Zhi Chen, Jianlan Luo
Learning While Deploying framework enables continuous improvement of Vision-Language-Action policies through fleet-scale offline-to-online reinforcement learning with distributed robot experience and human interventions.
Abstract
Generalist robot policies increasingly benefit from large-scale pretraining, but offline data alone is insufficient for robust real-world deployment. Deployed robots encounter distribution shifts, long-tail failures, task variations, and human correction opportunities that fixed demonstration datasets cannot fully capture. We present Learning While Deploying (LWD), a fleet-scale offline-to-online reinforcement learning framework for continual post-training of generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies. Starting from a pretrained VLA policy, LWD closes the loop between deployment, shared physical experience, policy improvement, and redeployment by using autonomous rollouts and human interventions collected across a robot fleet. To stabilize learning from heterogeneous, sparse-reward fleet data, LWD combines Distributional Implicit Value Learning (DIVL) for robust value estimation with Q-learning via Adjoint Matching (QAM) for policy extraction in flow-based VLA action generators. We validate LWD on a fleet of 16 dual-arm robots across eight real-world manipulation tasks, including semantic grocery restocking and 3--5 minute long-horizon tasks. A single generalist policy improves as fleet experience accumulates, reaching an average success rate of 95%, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks.