Organizations: Key Laboratory of AI Safety of CAS, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China
While skill-centric approaches leverage foundation models to enhance generalization in compositional tasks, they often rely on fixed skill libraries, limiting adaptability to new tasks without manual intervention. To address this, we propose Uni-Skill, a Unified Skill-centric framework that supports skill-aware planning and facilitates automatic skill evolution. Unlike prior methods that restrict planning to predefined skills, Uni-Skill requests for new skill implementations when existing ones are insufficient, ensuring adaptable planning with self-augmented skill library. To support automatic implementation of diverse skills requested by the planning module, we construct SkillFolder, a VerbNet-inspired repository derived from large-scale unstructured robotic videos. SkillFolder introduces a hierarchical skill taxonomy that captures diverse skill descriptions at multiple levels of abstraction. By populating this taxonomy with large-scale, automatically annotated demonstrations, Uni-Skill shifts the paradigm of skill acquisition from inefficient manual annotation to efficient offline structural retrieval. Retrieved examples provide semantic supervision over behavior patterns and fine-grained references for spatial trajectories, enabling few-shot skill inference without deployment-time demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings verify the state-of-the-art performance of Uni-Skill over existing VLM-based skill-centric approaches, highlighting its advanced reasoning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization across a wide range of novel tasks.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Uni-Skill facilitates the generalization of the planning process beyond predefined skills with self-augmented skill descriptions. By organizing extensive unstructured robotic videos with the hierarchical skill repository, SkillFolder, we enable efficient retrieval of skill demonstrations and automatic implementation of newly defined skills at deployment.
Fig. 2 : The automatic skill annotation pipeline. Skill functions derived from procedural descriptions are aligned with the video segments and iteratively involved in the construction of SkillFolder.
Fig. 3 : (a) Skill examples are retrieved from SkillFolder hierarchically at deployment. (b) Semantic constraints and action flows serve as in-context examples for waypoints generation, which are further lifted to 6-DoF poses with rotational patterns.
Models
setting
Push Buttons
Stack Blocks
Close Jar
Stack Cups
Sweep Dirt
Slide Block
Screw Bulb
Put in Board
Avg.
CaP (GPT-3.5) [ 5 ]
ICL
0.76 ±0.04
0.12 ±0.11
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.43 ±0.14
0.04 ±0.00
0.03 ±0.02
0.04 ±0.04
0.18 ±0.01
CaP (GPT-4o) [ 36 ]
ICL
0.84 ±0.00
0.31 ±0.06
0.03 ±0.02
0.01 ±0.02
0.64 ±0.00
0.21 ±0.02
0.13 ±0.02
0.08 ±0.04
0.28 ±0.02
Uni-Skill (ours)
ZSL
0.77 ±0.02
0.39 ±0.05
0.48 ±0.04
0.05 ±0.02
0.64 ±0.00
0.67 ±0.06
0.31 ±0.02
0.08 ±0.04
0.42 ±0.01
TABLE I : Success rate on 8 RLBench tasks covered by the basic skills.
Models
Close Micro
Close Fridge
Seat Down
Close Laptop
Close Drawer
Press Switch
Water Plants
Open Door
Unplug Charger
Lift Number
Avg.
CaP [ 5 ]
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.09 ±0.05
0.04 ±0.04
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.01 ± 0.01
MOKA [ 13 ]
0.05 ±0.02
0.17 ±0.06
0.23 ±0.08
0.07 ±0.05
0.19 ±0.05
0.33 ±0.06
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.00 ±0.00
0.10 ±0.02
Uni-Skill (ours)
0.49 ±0.06
0.57 ±0.05
0.68 ±0.04
0.33 ±0.02
0.56 ±0.00
0.40 ±0.04
0.05 ±0.02
0.33 ±0.02
0.39 ±0.02
0.31 ±0.02
0.41 ±0.01
TABLE II : Success rate on 10 RLBench tasks out of the basic skill set.
Fig. 4 : Example scene arrangement for real-world tasks.
Task
CaP [ 36 ]
MOKA [ 13 ]
Uni-Skill (ours)
Pick Place
0.80
0.60
0.90
Stack Blocks
0.20
0.10
0.50
Clean Table
0.80
1.00
1.00
Fold Cloth
0.00
0.20
0.70
Shake Bell
0.50
0.60
0.60
Close Door
0.00
0.10
0.80
TABLE III : The zero-shot success rate of Uni-Skill and baselines across 8 real-world manipulation tasks.
Fig. 5 : Ablation Results on RLBench.
Data Source
VerbNet class
Skill count
Success Rate
DROID [ 35 ]
106
1659
0.41 ±0.01
sth2sth [ 41 ]
122
1432
0.29 ±0.02
TABLE IV : Comparison on different raw data sources.
Fig. 6 : Failure modes of Uni-Skill out of the basic skill set.
School of Artificial Intelligence, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, China · School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, China