ExRL: Sample-Efficient Online Adaptation of Long-Chunk Policies via Execution Length Control

Predicting long action chunks, often spanning dozens of timesteps, has become a key ingredient in increasingly capable robot policies. In this paper, we find that adapting these long-chunk policies with existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods can require many online samples due to the high dimensionality of the action chunks being optimized, making such adaptation impractical in real-world scenarios where interaction data are costly to collect. Our key insight is to shift adaptation from optimizing actions to optimizing how long to execute each predicted action chunk. This keeps the adaptation space low-dimensional while its expressivity grows with the chunk size. We thus introduce Execution at the Right Length (ExRL), a simple approach which augments the base policy with a lightweight adapter that predicts the execution length of each chunk and is trained using off-policy RL algorithms. Across simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks, ExRL enables sample-efficient adaptation of a diverse range of long-chunk policies with minimal task-specific hyperparameter tuning.