BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models
TL;DR
BEE is introduced, an intervention-adaptive framework for real-world RL on a frozen VLA that lets the policy go BEyond Expert imitation, and a Correction Model predicts how a human would correct a given VLA proposal and how consistent the correction is along each action dimension.
Abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models handle long-horizon manipulation, yet success hinges on a few precision-critical phases where millimeter-scale errors undo all prior progress. Online reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize exactly these actions, but free exploration is far too costly on real robots, which makes human corrections indispensable. However, existing online RL methods for VLAs either cannot incorporate such corrections or fold them into undifferentiated supervision. Yet human corrections are not uniformly noisy but reliable along some action dimensions and variable along others. Building on this, we introduce BEE, an intervention-adaptive framework for real-world RL on a frozen VLA that lets the policy go BEyond Expert imitation. We formulate human corrections not as actions to reproduce but as evidence about a constraint: a Correction Model predicts how a human would correct a given VLA proposal and how consistent the correction is along each action dimension. This predicted consistency sets the per-dimension tightness of a constraint on policy optimization. Where corrections are consistent the policy stays close to the human, and where they vary, the constraint relaxes. We evaluate BEE on three real-world manipulation tasks and one LIBERO-Pro simulation task at a matched online-data budget. BEE attains the highest success rate on every task, 91.2% on average against 57.5% for RLT and 42.1% for DSRL, and the lowest human intervention rate on all real-world tasks.
