CSO: Refining Robotic Policies via Skill Distribution Alignment and Skill-Grained Optimization

Summary

Discretizing continuous actions into discrete skills using methods like VQ-VAE has emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. However, quantization errors yield a suboptimal distribution for the skill prior, degrading its performance. While reinforcement learning offers a path for refinement, its direct application faces unstable encoder updates and a granularity dilemma in importance sampling. To address these challenges, we introduce Cascaded Skills Optimization (CSO), a two-stage post-training framework. First, Rejection-Sampling Supervised Fine-tuning aligns the model's observation-to-skill mapping with the distribution of successful online trajectories via supervised fine-tuning. Second, with the observation encoder frozen, Skills Policy Optimization computes an independent, clipped importance ratio for each complete skill, enabling stable and efficient updates. With a lightweight QueST-style policy, CSO raises overall LIBERO success from 80.1% to 97.5%, improves performance on RoboTwin2.0, and achieves 61.0% success across five physical single-arm tasks. Additional comparisons with FAST, discrete BEAST, and fixed-buffer IQL further validate the effectiveness of our two-stage post-training strategy.