CLASP: Language-Driven Robot Skill Selection and Composition using Task-Parameterized Learning

Language-conditioned Imitation Learning (IL) is essential for enabling robots to perform complex tasks following natural language instructions. However, generalizing to multi-step compositional tasks remains a significant challenge. While hierarchical approaches attempt to address this by decomposing tasks into atomic skills, existing methods often suffer from training instability and codebook collapse due to the tight coupling between high-level skill reasoning and low-level action generation in joint training paradigms. Inspired by the Dual-Process Theory of cognition, we propose Dual-Process Atomic Skill Learning (DASL), a novel asynchronous hierarchical imitation learning framework that decouples slow semantic reasoning from fast, real-time motion control. DASL comprises a Slow-Frequency Policy that predicts interpretable, discrete skills via Vector Quantization, and a High-Frequency Policy that leverages a latent diffusion model and a Decision Transformer to generate precise actions conditioned on these latent skills. By asynchronously coordinating these modules and utilizing diffusion to structure the latent space, our framework mitigates the skill codebook interference problem common in joint training paradigms. Evaluations across simulation benchmarks and experiment demonstrate that DASL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, excelling in skill acquisition and compositional generalization to unseen instructions. GitHub page: https://github.com/Hatakekaka/DASL

Vision-language-action (VLA) models excel at robot manipulation via imitation learning, but adapting them to new tasks often requires additional human demonstrations, which can be costly or infeasible. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) offer semantic task understanding but lack the physical grounding required for execution. To bridge this gap, we present InSight, a framework for self-guided skill acquisition that uses a VLM to identify primitives missing from a VLA's repertoire, grounds the VLM's proposals through robot execution, and distills new primitives from successful rollouts into the VLA. Primitive steerability, the ability to execute and terminate primitives on command, enables the robot to reuse known primitives while collecting training data for missing primitives without requiring full-task human demonstrations for each new task. InSight has two stages: (1) a VLM automatically segments existing demonstrations into primitive-labeled trajectories to fine-tune a primitive-steerable VLA, and (2) the VLM plans a sequence of known primitives executed by the VLA and new primitives attempted by VLM-parameterized low-level controllers. New-primitive segments from successful task rollouts are added to the training data, and the VLA is retrained. The adapted VLA can then reliably execute new skills using the acquired primitives, without per-primitive VLM calls. We evaluate InSight on six simulated and real-world tasks with no human demonstrations of target skills, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring. On hardware, acquired twisting and pouring skills achieve 92% and 96% success, versus 32% and 16% for a zero-shot CaP-X baseline. Composing both skills into a 14-primitive task achieves 80% success with no combined-task demonstrations. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io/ .

As robot fleets become more heterogeneous, including humanoids, rovers, quadrupeds, and drones, selecting the right robot for a task becomes a core systems problem. We study robot skill prediction: mapping a natural-language task description to the physical capabilities required to execute it, such as fly, wheels, legs, surface water, under water and hands. Since labelled data that maps natural-language task descriptions to robot's physical capabilities does not exist, we construct a synthetic task-to-skill dataset using LLM-assisted generation and targeted label auditing. Trained on this data, a ~133M-parameter ensemble of two fine-tuned sentence encoders (mpnet + MiniLM) reaches 83.5% task-to-skill matching on a stratified 200 task dataset, outperforming Kimi K2 (1T MoE) at 72.0%, GPT-OSS-120B at 71.5%, and Llama-4-Scout-17B at 69.0% under the same zero-shot prompt. These results suggest that, for fixed robot skill taxonomies, small specialized models trained on synthetic data can outperform much larger general-purpose LLMs for fleet-level task routing.