Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation
Overview
The field aims to train robot policies that handle many manipulation tasks, rather than requiring a separate controller for each one. Common approaches include imitation learning with transformers or diffusion policies, vision-language-action models, reusable skill libraries, and reinforcement learning; some methods add geometric representations, world models, or structured task plans. Benchmarks such as LIBERO, RoboTwin, and RoboCasa test performance across task variations, while real-robot studies examine transfer, collaboration, and recovery from failures. A central challenge is balancing broad generalization and robustness with limited demonstrations, efficient models, and dependable performance outside the training setup.
Latest papers
57 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 150% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
SkillPlug: Unsupervised Skill Mining for Few-Shot Adaptation in Robotic Manipulation
GeoProp: Grounding Robot State in Vision for Generalist Manipulation
A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation
ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics
Sequential Planning via Anchored Robotic Keypoints
VQActFlow: Vector-Quantized Action Mode Steering for Multi-Task Robot Manipulation
Duet: Dual-Robot Understanding via Efficient Teaching
EBench: Elemental Diagnosis of Generalist Mobile Manipulation Policies
Robots that Collaborate: Sequential Asymmetric Imitation for Learning Coupled Robot Policies
SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation
Semantically Structured Mixture-of-Experts for Compositional Robotic Manipulation
HCLM: A Hierarchical Framework for Cooperative Loco-Manipulation with Dual Quadrupeds
Decompose and Recompose: Reasoning New Skills from Existing Abilities for Cross-Task Robotic Manipulation
CoEnv: Driving Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration via Compositional Environment
SpatialVAM:Spatial-Aware Multi-View Video Diffusion as a Data-Efficient Robot Policy
Knowledge-Guided Manipulation Using Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
SG-VLA: Learning Spatially-Grounded Vision-Language-Action Models for Mobile Manipulation
ATG-MoE: Autoregressive trajectory generation with mixture-of-experts for assembly skill learning
ReSteer: Quantifying and Refining the Steerability of Multitask Robot Policies
put the bowl in the sink" when moving towards the oven, executing close the oven", even though it can complete both tasks when executed separately. We propose ReSteer, a framework to quantify and improve task steerability in multitask robot policies. We conduct an exhaustive evaluation of state-of-the-art policies, revealing a common lack of steerability. We find that steerability is associated with limited overlap among training task trajectory distributions, and introduce a proxy metric to measure this overlap from policy behavior. Building on this insight, ReSteer improves steerability via three components: (i) a steerability estimator that identifies low-steerability states without full-rollout evaluation, (ii) a steerable data generator that synthesizes motion segments from these states, and (iii) a self-refinement pipeline that improves policy steerability using the generated data. In simulation on LIBERO, ReSteer improves steerability by 11% over 18k rollouts. In real-world experiments, we show that improved steerability is critical for interactive use, enabling users to instruct robots to perform any task at any time. We hope this work motivates further study on quantifying steerability and data collection strategies for large robot policies.