# ResMerge: Residual Policy Learning and Merging for Continual Adaptation of Pre-trained Robot Policies

**Authors:** Kefei Zhu, Lingyun Xu, Yue Xin, Xiaoqi Li, Caixin Guo, Xincheng Du, Yuanpei Chen, Yaodong Yang, Hao Dong  
**Published:** 30 Oct 2026  
**Links:** [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41663) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.41663) · [This page](https://omen-bit.github.io/ai-paper-daily/paper/2610.41663.html)

## Abstract

Continual adaptation to new tasks is essential for robots deployed in the real world, but adapting pre-trained policies remains challenging due to parameter growth and the need for continual demonstration collection. Parameter-Efficient Continual Fine-Tuning (PECFT) isolates task-specific updates, but adapter-per-task designs require demonstrations and grow with the task set. We propose ResMerge, a two-stage framework that learns mergeable residual policies atop a frozen pre-trained policy: residual reinforcement learning (RL) acquires task-specific corrections without additional expert demonstrations during adaptation, and parameter-space merging consolidates compatible residuals to reduce stored parameters. We introduce Residual-Field Consistency (RFC), a simple, bounded, and interpretable metric that assesses compatibility in residual action-field space by comparing correction direction and magnitude. Experiments on LIBERO across two backbones and on a real-world Franka robot show improved continual learning performance over strong PECFT baselines, while selective merging reduces the residual-parameter footprint. Project website: https://resmerge.github.io/.

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