Post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models into policies that can be reliably deployed on real robots remains a major bottleneck. SFT and DAgger exploit failure signals only indirectly, and reward-based RL is bottlenecked by the difficulty of real-world reward design and of training reliable critics. We present FlowPRO, a reward-free offline reinforced fine-tuning framework for flow-matching VLAs. Algorithmically, we propose RPRO (Robotic Flow-matching Proximalized Preference Optimization), a preference-optimization objective tailored to the flow-matching action head of VLA models. RPRO pairs a contrastive optimizer with an explicit proximal regularizer that anchors the absolute magnitude of the implicit reward, thereby eliminating the reward-hacking failure mode of plain Flow-DPO. On the data side, a teleoperated intervention-and-rollback paradigm produces naturally paired positive and negative trajectories (τw, τl) on a real robot from a single operator action; a Smooth Interpolation procedure, combined with batch mixing, then converts these sparse corrections into dense per-state supervision while preserving the base policy's capabilities. On four long-horizon bimanual tasks, FlowPRO attains the highest success rate, outperforming four representative baselines, and ablations confirm the contribution of each loss component.
FlowPRO is a two-stage framework. Stage 1 performs supervised fine-tuning on a task-specific dataset to obtain a base policy from a flow-matching VLA backbone. Stage 2 then runs an iterative offline-RL loop on top of it for K rounds. In each round, three components work together:
We evaluate FlowPRO on four long-horizon bimanual tasks on a Dobot XTrainer platform — Pack (cosmetic packaging), Cap (pen-cap assembly), USB (USB insertion), and Case (pencil-case packing) — each evaluated with 100 rollouts on top of two flow-matching VLA backbones (π0 and π0.5).
Demo videos will be released alongside the paper. The grid below previews where the rollouts of the four tasks will appear.
@inproceedings{wu2026flowpro,
title = {FlowPRO: Reward-Free Reinforced Fine-Tuning of Flow-Matching VLAs via Proximalized Preference Optimization},
author = {Wu, Yihao and Zhang, He and Tan, Junbo and Wang, Xueqian and Zhang, Zhengyou},
year = {2026},
note = {Under review}
}