EXIMO: VLM Guided Exploration of VLA Policies

TL;DR - EXIMO is a three-stage method for efficiently fine-tuning large vision-language-action robot policies on new manipulation tasks. It combines VLM-guided task decomposition, imitation learning on newly orchestrated data, and residual off-policy reinforcement learning to improve sample efficiency and final performance.

• A vision-language model plans by decomposing long-horizon tasks into shorter subproblems for the VLA policy.
• The planner-policy combination collects an orchestrated dataset, reducing reliance on costly human teleoperation.
• The VLA first learns from this dataset through imitation, then receives further refinement via residual off-policy RL.
• Ablation experiments attribute gains to the explore, imitate, and optimize stages and report significant improvements over existing approaches.