Yi Zhou

Yuhui Chen, Shuai Tian, Shugao Liu et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown substantial potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, fine-tuning these models through supervised learning struggles to achieve robust performance due to limited, inconsistent demonstrations, especially in contact-rich environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforced fine-tuning approach for VLA models, named ConRFT, which consists of offline and online fine-tuning with a unified consistency-based training objective, to address these challenges. In the offline stage, our method integrates behavior cloning and Q-learning to effectively extract policy from a small set of demonstrations and stabilize value estimating. In the online stage, the VLA model is further fine-tuned via consistency policy, with human interventions to ensure safe exploration and high sample efficiency. We evaluate our approach on eight diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 96.3% within 45-90 minutes of online fine-tuning, outperforming prior supervised methods with a 144% improvement in success rate and 1.9x shorter episode length. This work highlights the potential of integrating reinforcement learning to enhance the performance of VLA models for real-world robotic applications. Videos and code are available at our project website https://cccedric.github.io/conrft/.

Tingting Liao, Chongjian Ge, Guangyi Liu et al.

Imagine Mr. Bean stepping into Tom and Jerry--can we generate videos where characters interact naturally across different worlds? We study inter-character interaction in text-to-video generation, where the key challenge is to preserve each character's identity and behaviors while enabling coherent cross-context interaction. This is difficult because characters may never have coexisted and because mixing styles often causes style delusion, where realistic characters appear cartoonish or vice versa. We introduce a framework that tackles these issues with Cross-Character Embedding (CCE), which learns identity and behavioral logic across multimodal sources, and Cross-Character Augmentation (CCA), which enriches training with synthetic co-existence and mixed-style data. Together, these techniques allow natural interactions between previously uncoexistent characters without losing stylistic fidelity. Experiments on a curated benchmark of cartoons and live-action series with 10 characters show clear improvements in identity preservation, interaction quality, and robustness to style delusion, enabling new forms of generative storytelling.Additional results and videos are available on our project page: https://tingtingliao.github.io/mimix/.

Haodi Zhang, Zihang Gao, Yi Zhou et al.

Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully used in many dynamic decision making domains, especially those with very large state spaces. However, it is also well-known that deep reinforcement learning can be very slow and resource intensive. The resulting system is often brittle and difficult to explain. In this paper, we attempt to address some of these problems by proposing a framework of Rule-interposing Learning (RIL) that embeds high level rules into the deep reinforcement learning. With some good rules, this framework not only can accelerate the learning process, but also keep it away from catastrophic explorations, thus making the system relatively stable even during the very early stage of training. Moreover, given the rules are high level and easy to interpret, they can be easily maintained, updated and shared with other similar tasks.