TEMPO: Semantic-Action Decoupled RL Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

원문 초록

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are commonly adapted to downstream manipulation tasks via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or online reinforcement learning(RL) post-training. SFT is prone to distribution mismatch, and existing RL approaches typically optimize all trainable components within a single RL loop at a uniform update rate, although these components play distinct functional roles. We propose TEMPO, a semantic-action decoupled, two-timescale RL post-training framework for VLA models. TEMPO freezes the pretrained vision-language backbone and adapts two components with dedicated RL loops: the semantic projection layer, which produces the latent action conditioning the action expert, and the low-level action expert itself. The semantic projection layer is updated infrequently and the action expert frequently, which aims to limit latent-action drift while allowing the action expert to learn from online feedback. Our analyses show that, compared with equal update frequencies, less frequent semantic updates reduce latent-action drift and improve policy performance. Experiments on the CALVIN benchmark and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that TEMPO outperforms both pretrained state-of-the-art VLA models and the RL post-training baseline, while reaching and maintaining higher evaluation rewards on three real-world tasks.