VLRLA: Deployment-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models through In-Context Reinforcement Learning

Diyuan Shi, Yiqi Tang, Hongyin Zhang, You Wu, Donglin Wang

Vision-language-action (VLA) models connect visual perception and language understanding with robot control, providing a foundation for instruction-conditioned manipulation. However, conventional pretrained VLA policies lack a mechanism for gradual adaptation through accumulated interaction experience during deployment. We therefore propose VLRLA, a general framework that equips existing VLA models with \textit{in-context reinforcement learning} capabilities for deployment-time adaptation. Our approach augments a VLA model with a reinforcement learning module that learns from historical observations, actions, rewards, and termination signals. During deployment, the policy gradually refines its action generation and progressively improves task success while keeping model parameters fixed. Our approach is also designed for general applicability and compatibility with diverse learning history construction strategies and model training pipelines. Finally, through extensive experiments, we systematically investigate the learning properties of VLRLA in simulation and demonstrate its ability to adapt to unseen scenarios during real-world deployment.