Robot Learning

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Overview

Robot learning studies how robots can turn observations and experience into actions, from precise manipulation and locomotion to navigation and human-robot interaction. Common approaches include imitation learning from human or robot demonstrations, reinforcement learning through interaction, model-based control, and vision-language-action models that connect instructions and images to actions. Researchers also use reusable skills, structured physical representations, tactile sensing, and simulation or world models to improve transfer across tasks, objects, and robot bodies. A central challenge is making policies reliable beyond their training data: larger and more varied datasets can help, but physical feasibility, sim-to-real transfer, long-horizon recovery, and evaluation that predicts real-world success remain open concerns.

Latest papers

CardsList

316 papers73 papers in the last four weeks, up 74% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. DynaSlots: Slot-Centric 3D Dynamics Pretraining for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 23, 2026Meng Li, Lijiang Chen, Qi Zhao +4Robot LearningRobot Dynamics Learning

    Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China. +1

  2. Robot Generalization Beyond Volume: The Diversity Path via Zero-Shot Capabilities

    Oct 21, 2026Rafael Felix, Flavia YanaseRobot Policy GeneralizationRobot Learning

    runibiLABS

  3. Post-hoc Epistemic Uncertainty for Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Oct 21, 2026Johannes Keller, Albrecht M. Bloße, Adrian Lindenmeyer +2Uncertainty Estimation for VLA ModelsRobot Learning

    Innovation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS), Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

  4. Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in Physical AI

    Oct 21, 2026Meng Luo, Zechen Bai, Shanqing Xu +9Recursive Self-ImprovementRobot Learning

    National University of Singapore · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  5. From Association to Decision Value: Testing Paired Instruction Dependence for VLA Corpus Selection

    Oct 21, 2026Nurmukhambet Serikbayev, Abdul Basit, Muhammad ShafiqueRobot LearningRobotic Policy Evaluation

    eBRAIN Lab, Division of Engineering, NYUAD, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  6. Distance Field Driven Reinforcement Learning for Reactive and Robust Collision Avoidance

    Oct 21, 2026Taiga Ikeshima, Sheila Sutjipto, Lan Wu +5Robot Collision AvoidanceRL for Robotics

    Tokyo University of Science, Japan. · the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. · Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. +1

  7. Training in Deployment: Human-in-the-loop Online Post-Training for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Chun Gu, Xiaofei Wei, Yiming Chen +4Robot LearningHuman-in-the-Loop AI

    School of Data Science, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Logos Robotics Group +1

  8. GGraph: A GPU-Accelerated Library for Graph-Based Robot Deployment and Learning

    Oct 20, 2026Yash Rampuria, Rohan Garg, Daniele Gammelli +1Robot LearningRobotic RL

    Stanford University, CA

  9. inr2action: Encoding Robot Episodes as Neural Implicit Representations for Recall and Action

    Oct 20, 2026Leann Alhashishi, Christos Margadji, Sebastian William PattinsonLong-Term Memory for Embodied AgentsMemory-Augmented Agents

    Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge · Matta Labs, 77 East Road, London, United Kingdom

  10. Human-Robot Interaction via Meta-Learning Based Mode Recognition and Adaptive Control

    Oct 20, 2026Nuo Chen, Ya-Jun PanHuman-Robot InteractionRobotic Control

    Advanced Control and Mechatronics Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, B3H 4R2, Canada

  11. Learning from Fleet Experience: Collective Experience Learning Across 96 Robots

    Oct 19, 2026Chao Yu, Shu'ang Yu, Hao Lin +41Robot Policy LearningRobot Learning

  12. TransNav: Transformer-Based End-to-End Navigation Method for Static and Dynamic Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance

    Oct 16, 2026Jianghan Zhu, Zhuo Li, Yanjun Zhang +1Robot NavigationAerial Robotics

    The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

  13. Scaling Online Exploration for Robot Agents

    Oct 15, 2026Runhan Huang, Xiangcheng Zhang, Haoyu Chen +17Robot LearningContinual Robot Learning

    Harvard University · NVIDIA · UC Berkeley +2

  14. PlayPolicy: Dexterity from Supervised Play

    Oct 15, 2026Botao He, Yiming Dou, Yiannis Aloimonos +3Robot LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR). · University of Maryland, College Park.

  15. Asking Smarter Questions: Targeted Active Preference Learning for Underspecified Rewards

    Oct 15, 2026Helena Merker, Nick Walker, Andreea BobuActive Preference LearningPreference Learning

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  16. LICOA: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Optical Actions for Mobile Spatial Augmented Reality

    Oct 15, 2026Yuchen Deng, Shunkai Zhou, Ruixuan Zhu +2Augmented RealityRobot Learning

    Southwest University · Peking University · Westlake University

  17. Tactile-Guided Robot Learning: From Representation Learning to Foundation Models

    Oct 14, 2026Kiyanoush Nazari, Luchen Li, Haoshu Fang +4Robot Skill LearningRobot Learning

    School of Computer Science, University College London · MIT CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Department of Robotics, University of Michigan +1

  18. DexMimic: A Generalist Dexterous Hand-Object Tracking Policy via Value-Guided Reset Allocation

    Oct 13, 2026Zhexi Luo, Zhixuan Xu, Rui Yang +3Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    National University of Singapore (NUS) · RoboScience

  19. What Matters in Quality-Aware VLA Pretraining: A Benchmark and Empirical Study

    Oct 13, 2026Mingxuan Yan, Litian Gong, Dihong Huang +19VLA Model TrainingVision-Language-Action Models

    Georgia Institute of Technology · University of California, Riverside · Axis Robotics +6

  20. ForceWAM: Decoupling Future and Response Learning from Demo and Play Data for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Oct 13, 2026Zijun Xu, Wendi Chen, Xinkai Wang +16Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +3

  21. SEAR: Self-Evolving Agentic Robotics

    Oct 13, 2026Xinyi Wang, Bangzheng Li, Hanyu Wang +5Agentic AI for RoboticsRobot Learning

    Luma AI

  22. Cross-Embodiment Affordance Transfer for Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 13, 2026Sawera Yaseen, Serge Thill, Rekha RajaAffordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobotic Affordance Inference

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Donders Centre for Cognition, Department of Human-Centred Intelligent Systems, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

  23. Agentic Robot Creation through Generation, Verification, and Revision

    Oct 13, 2026Xuebing Li, Yibo He, Sitong Liu +2Agentic AI for RoboticsRobotics

    ShanghaiTech University

  24. The Human--VLA Communication Gap: What Humans Leave Implicit and What Policies Cannot Recover

    Oct 13, 2026Yiqing Xu, Jiajun WuHuman-Robot InteractionLanguage-Conditioned Robot Control

    Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

  25. Phase-Conditioned Affordance Fields for SE(3)-Equivariant Visuomotor Policies

    Oct 12, 2026Xinzhe Chen, Liqi Huang, Sihua Ren +5Visuomotor Policy LearningRobot Learning

    National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

  26. Chronos Policy: Learning Robot Policies on Physical Time

    Oct 9, 2026Changhao Wang, Jaden Clark, Shuran SongRobot Policy LearningRobot Learning

    Stanford University

  27. Robot-WATCHDOG : failure detection through object-centric graph representation

    Oct 9, 2026Quentin Rolland, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso, Jean-Baptiste MouretRobot Failure DetectionRobotic Anomaly Detection

    Universit´e Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, F-91120, Palaiseau, France · Inria, CNRS, Universit´e de Lorraine, LORIA, F-54000 Nancy, France · Bleu Robotics, Paris, France

  28. Evo-RL: Iterative Robot Reinforcement Learning from Selective Experience

    Oct 9, 2026Kai Ye, Yifan Jin, Qianhang Luo +7Robotic RLRobot Learning

    School of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Central South University · South China Normal University +1

  29. Grounded-Dreamer: Robot Learning from World Model Synthetic Data with Physical Grounding

    Oct 9, 2026Feng Jiang, Shu Chen, Yuanfei Wang +7Robot LearningSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

    Peking University · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Lightwheel

  30. ReAT: Residual Action Tokenization for Autoregressive Robot Policies

    Oct 9, 2026Dijia Zhan, Zhuo Li, Xuemiao Xu +4Robot Policy LearningRobot Learning

    South China University of Technology (scut.edu.cn) · The Chinese University of Hong Kong (cuhk.edu.hk) · Hong Kong Polytechnic University (polyu.edu.hk)