Emergent Dexterity via Diverse Resets and Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning
Organizations: University of Washington · NVIDIA · Microsoft Research
Abstract
Reinforcement learning in massively parallel physics simulations has driven major progress in sim-to-real robot learning. However, current approaches remain brittle and task-specific, relying on extensive per-task engineering to design rewards, curricula, and demonstrations. Even with this engineering, they often fail on long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks and do not meaningfully scale with compute, as performance quickly saturates when training revisits the same narrow regions of state space. We introduce OmniReset, a simple and scalable framework that enables on-policy reinforcement learning to robustly solve a broad class of dexterous manipulation tasks using a single reward function, fixed algorithm hyperparameters, no curricula, and no human demonstrations. Our key insight is that long-horizon exploration can be dramatically simplified by using simulator resets to systematically expose the RL algorithm to the diverse set of robot-object interactions which underlie dexterous manipulation. OmniReset programmatically generates such resets with minimal human input, converting additional compute directly into broader behavioral coverage and continued performance gains. We show that OmniReset gracefully scales to long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks beyond the capabilities of existing approaches and is able to learn robust policies over significantly wider ranges of initial conditions than baselines. Finally, we distill OmniReset into visuomotor policies which display robust retrying behavior and substantially higher success rates than baselines when transferred to the real world zero-shot. Project webpage: https://weirdlabuw.github.io/omnireset/
Figures & tables
| Metric | Peg | Leg | Drawer |
|---|---|---|---|
| State RL Success Rate (Sim) | 94.97% | 93.94% | 89.60% |
| Distilled Image Policy Success Rate (Sim) | 55.45% | 43.69% | 84.00% |
| Distilled Image Policy Success Rate (Real) | 85.37% | 56.36% | 15.38% |
| Distilled Image Policy First-Try Success Rate (Real) | 21.95% | 43.64% | 5.77% |
| Distilled Image Policy Throughput (success/min, Real) | 1.49 | 0.63 | 0.31 |
| Real-Only BC (100 demos) Success Rate (Real) | 2.44% | 1.82% | 1.92% |
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Category | Parameter | Range / Distribution |
| Dynamics | Robot friction (static) | |
| Robot friction (dynamic) | ||
| Insertive object friction | (static), (dynamic) | |
| Table friction | (static), (dynamic) | |
| Robot mass scale | ||
| Insertive object mass | kg |
Robotic RL
Robotic reinforcement learning uses trial-and-error learning to help robots control, navigate, and manipulate objects.
See all 299 papers