arXiv:2610.33650v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Online distillation of vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly relies on teacher action scores that an inference-only interface may not expose. Trajectory-only Adversarial Distillation (\gad{}) instead turns a fixed bank of teacher joint-position features into adaptive feedback: a discriminator compares feature marginals from teacher and student rollouts and supplies rewards for on-policy learning. The student interacts with the environment without online teacher queries or environment task rewards. On ManiSkill \texttt{PutOnPlateInScene25Main}, \gad{} improves OpenVLA-OFT (7B) from $26.2\%$ to $76.6\%$ \successonce{} ($+50.4$ percentage points) and from $20.3\%$ to $58.6\%$ \successend{}. It trails white-box on-policy distillation (OPD) at $81.6\%$ / $59.4\%$ by $5.0$ / $0.8$ percentage points ($n{=}256$ evaluation trajectories per checkpoint). The tested four-epoch continuation achieves the highest \gad{} result without additional teacher data. This best run uses $5\times$ OPD's student interaction budget and $12.5\times$ its complete-rollout batch-passes. The comparison demonstrates online VLA improvement without teacher scoring while quantifying unequal interaction and optimization budgets.
Abstract: Online distillation of vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly relies on teacher action scores that an inference-only interface may not expose. Trajectory-only Adversarial Distillation (\gad{}) instead turns a fixed bank of teacher joint-position features into adaptive feedback: a discriminator compares feature marginals from teacher and student rollouts and supplies rewards for on-policy learning. The student interacts with the environment without online teacher queries or environment task rewards. On ManiSkill \texttt{PutOnPlateInScene25Main}, \gad{} improves OpenVLA-OFT (7B) from $26.2\%$ to $76.6\%$ \successonce{} ($+50.4$ percentage points) and from $20.3\%$ to $58.6\%$ \successend{}. It trails white-box on-policy distillation (OPD) at $81.6\%$ / $59.4\%$ by $5.0$ / $0.8$ percentage points ($n{=}256$ evaluation trajectories per checkpoint). The tested four-epoch continuation achieves the highest \gad{} result without additional teacher data. This best run uses $5\times$ OPD's student interaction budget and $12.5\times$ its complete-rollout batch-passes. The comparison demonstrates online VLA improvement without teacher scoring while quantifying unequal interaction and optimization budgets.
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TAD: Distilling Vision-Language-Action Policies from Teacher Trajectories Alone