Robot Policies

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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348 papers

Latest in Robot Policies

May 1, 2026cs.LG

Learning to Race in Minutes: Infoprop Dyna on the Mini Wheelbot

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots with fast, nonlinear, and unstable dynamics to reach the limits of their performance. However, most recent advances rely on carefully designed physics-based simulators and domain randomization to achieve successful sim-to-real transfer within reasonable wall-clock time. In this work, we bypass the need for such simulators and demonstrate that Infoprop Dyna, a state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework, can enable robots to learn directly from real-world interactions. Using Infoprop Dyna, the Mini Wheelbot, an underactuated unicycle robot, learns to race around a track within 11 minutes of real-world experience.
Devdutt Subhasish, Henrik Hose, Sebastian Trimpe
May 1, 2026cs.RO

Learning While Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies

Generalist robot policies increasingly benefit from large-scale pretraining, but offline data alone is insufficient for robust real-world deployment. Deployed robots encounter distribution shifts, long-tail failures, task variations, and human correction opportunities that fixed demonstration datasets cannot fully capture. We present Learning While Deploying (LWD), a fleet-scale offline-to-online reinforcement learning framework for continual post-training of generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies. Starting from a pretrained VLA policy, LWD closes the loop between deployment, shared physical experience, policy improvement, and redeployment by using autonomous rollouts and human interventions collected across a robot fleet. To stabilize learning from heterogeneous, sparse-reward fleet data, LWD combines Distributional Implicit Value Learning (DIVL) for robust value estimation with Q-learning via Adjoint Matching (QAM) for policy extraction in flow-based VLA action generators. We validate LWD on a fleet of 16 dual-arm robots across eight real-world manipulation tasks, including semantic grocery restocking and 3--5 minute long-horizon tasks. A single generalist policy improves as fleet experience accumulates, reaching an average success rate of 95%, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks.
Yi Wang, Xinchen Li, Pengwei Xie +13
Apr 30, 2026cs.RO

E2^2DT: Efficient and Effective Decision Transformer with Experience-Aware Sampling for Robotic Manipulation

In reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation, the Decision Transformer (DT) has emerged as an effective framework for addressing long-horizon tasks. However, DT's performance depends heavily on the coverage of collected experiences. Without an active exploration mechanism, standard DT relies on uniform replay, which leads to poor sample efficiency, limited exploration, and reduced overall effectiveness. At the same time, while excessive exploration can help avoid local optima, it often delays policy convergence and leads to degraded efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose E2^2DT, a DT-guided k-Determinantal Point Process sampling framework that enables the model to actively shape its own experience selection. Our framework is experience-aware, allowing E2^2DT to be both efficient, by prioritizing sampling quality, such as high-return, high-uncertainty, and underrepresented trajectories, and effective, by ensuring diversity across trajectory windows to preserve policy optimality. Specifically, DT's internal latent embeddings measure diversity across trajectory windows, while quality is quantified through a composite metric that integrates return-to-go (RTG) quantiles, predictive uncertainty, and stage coverage based on inverse frequency. These two dimensions are integrated into a novel quality-diversity joint kernel that prioritizes the most informative experiences, thereby enabling learning that is both efficient and effective. We evaluate E2^2DT on challenging robotic manipulation benchmarks in both simulation and real-robot settings. Results show that it consistently outperforms prior methods. These findings demonstrate that coupling policy learning with experience-aware sampling provides a principled path toward robust long-horizon robotic learning.
Kaiyan Zhao, Borong Zhang, Yiming Wang +4
Apr 30, 2026cs.RO

World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.
Bohan Hou, Gen Li, Jindou Jia +15
Apr 30, 2026cs.RO

Can Tabular Foundation Models Guide Exploration in Robot Policy Learning?

Policy optimization in high-dimensional continuous control for robotics remains a challenging problem. Predominant methods are inherently local and often require extensive tuning and carefully chosen initial guesses for good performance, whereas more global and less initialization-sensitive search methods typically incur high rollout costs. We propose TFM-S3, a tabular hybrid local-global method for improving global exploration in robot policy learning with limited rollout cost. We interleave high-frequency local updates with intermittent rounds of global search. In each search round, we construct a dynamically updated low-dimensional policy subspace via SVD and perform iterative surrogate-guided refinement within this space. A pretrained tabular foundation model predicts candidate returns from a small context set, enabling large-scale screening with limited rollout cost. Experiments on continuous control benchmarks show that TFM-S3 consistently accelerates early-stage convergence and improves final performance compared to TD3 and population-based baselines under an identical rollout budget. These results demonstrate that foundation models are a powerful new tool for creating sample-efficient policy learning methods for continuous control in robotics.
Buqing Ou, Frederike Dümbgen
Apr 30, 2026cs.RO

Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey

A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing attention in recent years, driven by the abundance of human activity videos and advances in computer vision. This line of research promises to enable robots to acquire skills passively from the vast and readily available resource of human demonstrations, substantially favoring scalable learning for generalist robotic systems. Therefore, we present this survey to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of human-video-based learning techniques in robotics, focusing on both human-robot skill transfer and data foundations. We first review the policy learning foundations in robotics, and then describe the fundamental interfaces to incorporate human videos. Subsequently, we introduce a hierarchical taxonomy of transferring human videos to robot skills, covering task-, observation-, and action-oriented pathways, along with a cross-family analysis of their couplings with different data configurations and learning paradigms. In addition, we investigate the data foundations including widely-used human video datasets and video generation schemes, and provide large-scale statistical trends in dataset development and utilization. Ultimately, we emphasize the challenges and limitations intrinsic to this field, and delineate potential avenues for future research. The paper list of our survey is available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/awesome-robot-learning-from-human-videos.
Junyi Ma, Erhang Zhang, Haoran Yang +4
Apr 30, 2026cs.AI

PRTS: A Primitive Reasoning and Tasking System via Contrastive Representations

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models advance robotic control via strong visual-linguistic priors. However, existing VLAs predominantly frame pretraining as supervised behavior cloning, overlooking the fundamental nature of robot learning as a goal-reaching process that requires understanding temporal task progress. We present \textbf{PRTS} (\textbf{P}rimitive \textbf{R}easoning and \textbf{T}asking \textbf{S}ystem), a VLA foundation model that reformulates pretraining through Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning. By treating language instructions as goals and employing contrastive reinforcement learning, PRTS learns a unified embedding space where the inner product of state-action and goal embeddings approximates the log-discounted goal occupancy, the probability of reaching the language-specified goal from the current state-action, quantitatively assessing physical feasibility beyond static semantic matching. PRTS draws this dense goal-reachability supervision directly from offline trajectories without reward annotations, and folds it into the VLM backbone via a role-aware causal mask, incurring negligible overhead over vanilla behavior cloning. This paradigm endows the high-level reasoning system with intrinsic goal reachability awareness, bridging semantic reasoning and temporal task progress, and further benefits goal-conditioned action prediction. Pretrained on 167B tokens of diverse manipulation and embodied-reasoning data, PRTS reaches state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, LIBERO-Pro, LIBERO-Plus, SimplerEnv, and a real-world suite of 14 complex tasks, with particularly substantial gains on long-horizon, contact-rich, and zero-shot novel-instruction settings, confirming that injecting goal-reachability awareness significantly improves both execution success and long-horizon planning of general-purpose robotic foundation policies.
Yang Zhang, Jiangyuan Zhao, Chenyou Fan +11
Apr 28, 2026cs.RO

Learning-Based Dynamics Modeling and Robust Control for Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots

Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) pose significant modeling and control challenges due to complex nonlinearities, such as frictional hysteresis and transmission compliance. This paper proposes a differentiable learning framework that integrates high-fidelity dynamics modeling with robust neural control. We develop a GRU-based dynamics model featuring bidirectional multi-channel connectivity and residual prediction to effectively suppress compounding errors during long-horizon auto-regressive prediction. By treating this model as a gradient bridge, an end-to-end neural control policy is optimized through backpropagation, allowing it to implicitly internalize compensation for intricate nonlinearities. Experimental validation on a physical three-section TDCR demonstrates that our framework achieves accurate tracking and superior robustness against unseen payloads, outperforming Jacobian-based methods by eliminating self-excited oscillations. For implementation details and source code, please refer to https://github.com/ZiqingZou/ContinuumControl.
Ziqing Zou, Ke Qiu, Fei Wang +3
Apr 27, 2026cs.RO

asRoBallet: Closing the Sim2Real Gap via Friction-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Underactuated Spherical Dynamics

We introduce asRoBallet, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) locomotion policy deployed on a humanoid ballbot hardware platform. Historically, ballbots have served as a canonical benchmark for underactuated and nonholonomic control, which are characterized by a reality gap in complex friction models for wheel-ball-floor interactions. While current literature demonstrates successful handling of 3D balancing with LQR and MPC, transitioning to actual hardware for a humanoid ballbot using RL is currently hindered by critical gaps in contact modeling, actuator latency & jitter, and safe hardware exploration. This study proposes a high-fidelity MuJoCo simulation that explicitly models the discrete roller mechanics of ETH-type omni-wheels, thereby capturing parasitic vibrations and contact discontinuities that have previously been ignored. We also developed a Friction-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework that achieves zero-shot Sim2Real transfer by mastering the coupled rolling, lateral, and torsional friction channels at the wheel-ball and ball-floor interfaces. We designed asRoBallet through subtractive reconfiguration, repurposing key components from an overconstrained quadruped and integrating them into a newly designed structural frame to achieve a robust research platform at low cost. We also developed a generalized iOS ecosystem that transforms consumer electronics into a low-latency interface, enabling a single operator to orchestrate expressive humanoid maneuvers via intuitive natural motion.
Fang Wan, Guangyi Huang, Tianyu Wu +5
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Leveraging Human Feedback for Semantically-Relevant Skill Discovery

Unsupervised skill discovery in reinforcement learning aims to intrinsically motivate agents to discover diverse and useful behaviours. However, unconstrained approaches can produce unsafe, unethical, or misaligned behaviours. To mitigate these risks and improve the practical desireability of discovered skills, recent work grounds the discovery process by leveraging human preference feedback. However, preference-based approaches are feedback-inefficient and inherently ill-equipped to deal with skill spaces composed of a variety of different skills such as running, jumping, walking, etc. To overcome this limitation, we introduce semantic labelling, a novel and feedback-efficient approach that leverages human cognitive strengths to identify and label semantically meaningful behaviours. Based on semantic labelling, we propose Semantically Relevant Skill Discovery (SRSD), a novel human-in-the-loop approach that collects semantic labels from human feedback and learns a reward function to encourage skills to be more semantically diverse and relevant. Through our experiments in a 2D navigation environment and four locomotion environments, we demonstrate that SRSD can improve semantic diversity and discover relevant behaviours while scaling effectively to a large variety of behaviours.
Maxence Hussonnois, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu Rana
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

Adaptive vs. Static Robot-to-Human Handover: A Study on Orientation and Approach Direction

Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This work presents a novel adaptive framework that dynamically adjusts the object's delivery pose in real time based on the user's hand pose and the intended downstream task. By integrating AI-based hand pose estimation with smooth, kinematically constrained trajectories, the system ensures a safe approach and an optimal handover orientation. A comprehensive user study compares the proposed adaptive approach against a static baseline across multiple tasks, evaluating both subjective metrics (NASA-TLX, Human-Robot Trust Scale) and objective physiological data (blink rate measured via wearable eye-trackers). The results demonstrate that dynamic alignment significantly reduces users' cognitive workload and physiological stress, while improving their confidence in the robot's reliability. These findings highlight the potential of task- and pose-aware systems for enabling fluid and ergonomic human-robot collaboration.
Federico Biagi, Dario Onfiani, Simone Silenzi +2
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

Learning-augmented robotic automation for real-world manufacturing

Industrial robots are widely used in manufacturing, yet most manipulation still depends on fixed waypoint scripts that are brittle to environmental changes. Learning-based control offers a more adaptive alternative, but it remains unclear whether such methods, still mostly confined to laboratory demonstrations, can sustain hours of reliable operation, deliver consistent quality, and behave safely around people on a live production line. Here we present Learning-Augmented Robotic Automation, a hybrid system that integrates learned task controllers and a neural 3D safety monitor into conventional industrial workflows. We deployed the system on an electric-motor production line to automate deformable cable insertion and soldering under real manufacturing constraints, a step previously performed manually by human workers. With less than 20 min of real-world data per task, the system operated continuously for 5 h 10 min, producing 108 motors without physical fencing and achieving a 99.4% pass rate on product-level quality-control tests. It maintained near-human takt time while reducing variability in solder-joint quality and cycle time. These results establish a practical pathway for extending industrial automation with learning-based methods.
Yunho Kim, Quan Nguyen, Taewhan Kim +2
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

An LLM-Driven Closed-Loop Autonomous Learning Framework for Robots Facing Uncovered Tasks in Open Environments

Autonomous robots operating in open environments need the ability to continuously handle tasks that are not covered by predefined local methods. However, existing approaches often rely on repeated large-language-model (LLM) interaction for uncovered tasks, and even successful executions or observed successful external behaviors are not always autonomously transformed into reusable local knowledge. In this paper, we propose an LLM-driven closed-loop autonomous learning framework for robots facing uncovered tasks in open environments. The proposed framework first retrieves the local method library to determine whether a reusable solution already exists for the current task or observed event. If no suitable method is found, it triggers an autonomous learning process in which the LLM serves as a high-level reasoning component for task analysis, candidate model selection, data collection planning, and execution or observation strategy organization. The robot then learns from both self-execution and active observation, performs quasi-real-time training and adjustment, and consolidates the validated result into the local method library for future reuse. Through this recurring closed-loop process, the robot gradually converts both execution-derived and observation-derived experience into reusable local capability while reducing future dependence on repeated external LLM interaction. Results show that the proposed framework reduces execution time and LLM dependence in both repeated-task self-execution and observation-driven settings, for example reducing the average total execution time from 7.7772s to 6.7779s and the average number of LLM calls per task from 1.0 to 0.2 in the repeated-task self-execution experiments.
Hong Su
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model

Evaluating robotics policies across thousands of environments and thousands of tasks is infeasible with existing approaches. This motivates the need for a new methodology for scalable robotics policy evaluation. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, which uses a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policies. Specifically, dWorldEval maps all modalities - including vision, language, and robotic actions - into a unified token space, modeling them via a single transformer-based denoising network. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, using a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policy. Specifically, it maps all modalities, including vision, language, and robotics action into a unified token space, then denoises them with a single transformer network. Building on this architecture, we employ a sparse keyframe memory to maintain spatiotemporal consistency. We also introduce a progress token that indicates the degree of task completion. At inference, the model jointly predicts future observations and progress token, allowing automatically determine success when the progress reaches 1. Extensive experiments demonstrate that dWorldEval significantly outperforms previous approaches, i.e., WorldEval, Ctrl-World, and WorldGym, on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and multiple real-robot tasks. It paves the way for a new architectural paradigm in building world simulators for robotics evaluation at scale.
Yaxuan Li, Zhongyi Zhou, Yefei Chen +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.RO

Hi-WM: Human-in-the-World-Model for Scalable Robot Post-Training

Post-training is essential for turning pretrained generalist robot policies into reliable task-specific controllers, but existing human-in-the-loop pipelines remain tied to physical execution: each correction requires robot time, scene setup, resets, and operator supervision in the real world. Meanwhile, action-conditioned world models have been studied mainly for imagination, synthetic data generation, and policy evaluation. We propose \textbf{Human-in-the-World-Model (Hi-WM)}, a post-training framework that uses a learned world model as a reusable corrective substrate for failure-targeted policy improvement. A policy is first rolled out in closed loop inside the world model; when the rollout becomes incorrect or failure-prone, a human intervenes directly in the model to provide short corrective actions. Hi-WM caches intermediate states and supports rollback and branching, allowing a single failure state to be reused for multiple corrective continuations and yielding dense supervision around behaviors that the base policy handles poorly. The resulting corrective trajectories are then added back to the training set for post-training. We evaluate Hi-WM on three real-world manipulation tasks spanning both rigid and deformable object interaction, and on two policy backbones. Hi-WM improves real-world success by 37.9 points on average over the base policy and by 19.0 points over a world-model closed-loop baseline, while world-model evaluation correlates strongly with real-world performance (r = 0.953). These results suggest that world models can serve not only as generators or evaluators, but also as effective corrective substrates for scalable robot post-training.
Yaxuan Li, Zhongyi Zhou, Yefei Chen +5
Apr 23, 2026cs.RO

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.
Yiming Zhong, Yaoyu He, Zemin Yang +5
Apr 23, 2026cs.RO

RPG: Robust Policy Gating for Smooth Multi-Skill Transitions in Humanoid Fighting

Humanoid robots have demonstrated impressive motor skills in a wide range of tasks, yet whole-body control for humanlike long-time, dynamic fighting remains particularly challenging due to the stringent requirements on agility and stability. While imitation learning enables robots to execute human-like fighting skills, existing approaches often rely on switching among multiple single-skill policies or employing a general policy to imitate input reference motions. These strategies suffer from instability when transitioning between skills, as the mismatch of initial and terminal states across skills or reference motions introduces out-of-domain disturbances, resulting in unsmooth or unstable behaviors. In this work, we propose RPG, a hybrid expert policy framework, for smooth and stable humanoid multi-skills transition. Our approach incorporates motion transition randomization and temporal randomization to train a unified policy that generates agile fighting actions with stability and smoothness during skill transitions. Furthermore, we design a control pipeline that integrates walking/running locomotion with fighting skills, allowing humanlike long-time combat of arbitrary duration that can be seamlessly interrupted or transit action policies at any time. Extensive experiments in simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and real-world deployment on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot further validates its robustness and applicability.
Yucheng Xin, Jiacheng Bao, Yubo Dong +5
Apr 22, 2026cs.RO

MOMO: A framework for seamless physical, verbal, and graphical robot skill learning and adaptation

Industrial robot applications require increasingly flexible systems that non-expert users can easily adapt for varying tasks and environments. However, different adaptations benefit from different interaction modalities. We present an interactive framework that enables robot skill adaptation through three complementary modalities: kinesthetic touch for precise spatial corrections, natural language for high-level semantic modifications, and a graphical web interface for visualizing geometric relations and trajectories, inspecting and adjusting parameters, and editing via-points by drag-and-drop. The framework integrates five components: energy-based human-intention detection, a tool-based LLM architecture (where the LLM selects and parameterizes predefined functions rather than generating code) for safe natural language adaptation, Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMPs) for motion encoding, probabilistic Virtual Fixtures for guided demonstration recording, and ergodic control for surface finishing. We demonstrate that this tool-based LLM architecture generalizes skill adaptation from KMPs to ergodic control, enabling voice-commanded surface finishing. Validation on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot at the Automatica 2025 trade fair demonstrates the practical applicability of our approach in industrial settings.
Markus Knauer, Edoardo Fiorini, Maximilian Mühlbauer +10
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

UniT: Toward a Unified Physical Language for Human-to-Humanoid Policy Learning and World Modeling

Scaling humanoid foundation models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of robotic data. While massive egocentric human data offers a scalable alternative, bridging the cross-embodiment chasm remains a fundamental challenge due to kinematic mismatches. We introduce UniT (Unified Latent Action Tokenizer via Visual Anchoring), a framework that establishes a unified physical language for human-to-humanoid transfer. Grounded in the philosophy that heterogeneous kinematics share universal visual consequences, UniT employs a tri-branch cross-reconstruction mechanism: actions predict vision to anchor kinematics to physical outcomes, while vision reconstructs actions to filter out irrelevant visual confounders. Concurrently, a fusion branch synergies these purified modalities into a shared discrete latent space of embodiment-agnostic physical intents. We validate UniT across two paradigms: 1) Policy Learning (VLA-UniT): By predicting these unified tokens, it effectively leverages diverse human data to achieve state-of-the-art data efficiency and robust out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on both humanoid simulation benchmark and real-world deployments, notably demonstrating zero-shot task transfer. 2) World Modeling (WM-UniT): By aligning cross-embodiment dynamics via unified tokens as conditions, it realizes direct human-to-humanoid action transfer. This alignment ensures that human data seamlessly translates into enhanced action controllability for humanoid video generation. Ultimately, by inducing a highly aligned cross-embodiment representation (empirically verified by t-SNE visualizations revealing the convergence of human and humanoid features into a shared manifold), UniT offers a scalable path to distill vast human knowledge into general-purpose humanoid capabilities.
Boyu Chen, Yi Chen, Lu Qiu +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

Mask World Model: Predicting What Matters for Robust Robot Policy Learning

World models derived from large-scale video generative pre-training have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robot policy learning. However, standard approaches often focus on high-fidelity RGB video prediction, this can result in overfitting to irrelevant factors, such as dynamic backgrounds and illumination changes. These distractions reduce the model's ability to generalize, ultimately leading to unreliable and fragile control policies. To address this, we introduce the Mask World Model (MWM), which leverages video diffusion architectures to predict the evolution of semantic masks instead of pixels. This shift imposes a geometric information bottleneck, forcing the model to capture essential physical dynamics and contact relations while filtering out visual noise. We seamlessly integrate this mask dynamics backbone with a diffusion-based policy head to enable robust end-to-end control. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MWM on the LIBERO and RLBench simulation benchmarks, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art RGB-based world models. Furthermore, real-world experiments and robustness evaluation (via random token pruning) reveal that MWM exhibits superior generalization capabilities and robust resilience to texture information loss.
Yunfan Lou, Xiaowei Chi, Xiaojie Zhang +9
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

Reinforcement Learning Enabled Adaptive Multi-Task Control for Bipedal Soccer Robots

Developing bipedal football robots in dynamiccombat environments presents challenges related to motionstability and deep coupling of multiple tasks, as well ascontrol switching issues between different states such as up-right walking and fall recovery. To address these problems,this paper proposes a modular reinforcement learning (RL)framework for achieving adaptive multi-task control. Firstly,this framework combines an open-loop feedforward oscilla-tor with a reinforcement learning-based feedback residualstrategy, effectively separating the generation of basic gaitsfrom complex football actions. Secondly, a posture-driven statemachine is introduced, clearly switching between the ballseeking and kicking network (BSKN) and the fall recoverynetwork (FRN), fundamentally preventing state interference.The FRN is efficiently trained through a progressive forceattenuation curriculum learning strategy. The architecture wasverified in Unity simulations of bipedal robots, demonstratingexcellent spatial adaptability-reliably finding and kicking theball even in restricted corner scenarios-and rapid autonomousfall recovery (with an average recovery time of 0.715 seconds).This ensures seamless and stable operation in complex multi-task environments.
Yulai Zhang, Yinrong Zhang, Ting Wu +1
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

COFFAIL: A Dataset of Successful and Anomalous Robot Skill Executions in the Context of Coffee Preparation

In the context of robot learning for manipulation, curated datasets are an important resource for advancing the state of the art; however, available datasets typically only include successful executions or are focused on one particular type of skill. In this short paper, we briefly describe a dataset of various skills performed in the context of coffee preparation. The dataset, which we call COFFAIL, includes both successful and anomalous skill execution episodes collected with a physical robot in a kitchen environment, a couple of which are performed with bimanual manipulation. In addition to describing the data collection setup and the collected data, the paper illustrates the use of the data in COFFAIL to learn a robot policy using imitation learning.
Alex Mitrevski, Ayush Salunke
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained much attention from the research community thanks to their strength in translating multimodal observations with linguistic instructions into desired robotic actions. Despite their advancements, VLAs often overlook explicit reasoning and learn the functional input-action mappings, omitting crucial logical steps, which are especially pronounced in interpretability and generalization for complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose ReFineVLA, a multimodal reasoning-aware framework that fine-tunes VLAs with teacher-guided reasons. We first augment robotic datasets with reasoning rationales generated by an expert teacher model, guiding VLA models to learn to reason about their actions. Then, we fine-tune pre-trained VLAs with the reasoning-enriched datasets with ReFineVLA, while maintaining the underlying generalization abilities and boosting reasoning capabilities. We also conduct attention map visualization to analyze the alignment among visual observation, linguistic prompts, and to-be-executed actions of ReFineVLA, reflecting the model is ability to focus on relevant tasks and actions. Through this additional step, we explore that ReFineVLA-trained models exhibit a meaningful agreement between vision-language and action domains, highlighting the enhanced multimodal understanding and generalization. Evaluated across a suite of simulated manipulation benchmarks on SimplerEnv with both WidowX and Google Robot tasks, ReFineVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, in success rate over the second-best method on the both the WidowX benchmark and Google Robot Tasks.
Tuan Van Vo, Tan Q. Nguyen, Khang Nguyen +5
Apr 17, 2026cs.RO

From Seeing to Simulating: Generative High-Fidelity Simulation with Digital Cousins for Generalizable Robot Learning and Evaluation

Learning robust robot policies in real-world environments requires diverse data augmentation, yet scaling real-world data collection is costly due to the need for acquiring physical assets and reconfiguring environments. Therefore, augmenting real-world scenes into simulation has become a practical augmentation for efficient learning and evaluation. We present a generative framework that establishes a generative real-to-sim mapping from real-world panoramas to high-fidelity simulation scenes, and further synthesize diverse cousin scenes via semantic and geometric editing. Combined with high-quality physics engines and realistic assets, the generated scenes support interactive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we incorporate multi-room stitching to construct consistent large-scale environments for long-horizon navigation across complex layouts. Experiments demonstrate a strong sim-to-real correlation validating our platform's fidelity, and show that extensively scaling up data generation leads to significantly better generalization to unseen scene and object variations, demonstrating the effectiveness of Digital Cousins for generalizable robot learning and evaluation.
Jasper Lu, Zhenhao Shen, Yuanfei Wang +8
Apr 16, 2026cs.RO

One-Shot Cross-Geometry Skill Transfer through Part Decomposition

Given a demonstration, a robot should be able to generalize a skill to any object it encounters-but existing approaches to skill transfer often fail to adapt to objects with unfamiliar shapes. Motivated by examples of improved transfer from compositional modeling, we propose a method for improving transfer by decomposing objects into their constituent semantic parts. We leverage data-efficient generative shape models to accurately transfer interaction points from the parts of a demonstration object to a novel object. We autonomously construct an objective to optimize the alignment of those points on skill-relevant object parts. Our method generalizes to a wider range of object geometries than existing work, and achieves successful one-shot transfer for a range of skills and objects from a single demonstration, in both simulated and real environments.
Skye Thompson, Ondrej Biza, George Konidaris
Apr 16, 2026cs.RO

Switch: Learning Agile Skills Switching for Humanoid Robots

Recent advancements in whole-body control through deep reinforcement learning have enabled humanoid robots to achieve remarkable progress in real-world chal lenging locomotion skills. However, existing approaches often struggle with flexible transitions between distinct skills, cre ating safety concerns and practical limitations. To address this challenge, we introduce a hierarchical multi-skill system, Switch, enabling seamless skill transitions at any moment. Our approach comprises three key components: (1) a Skill Graph (SG) that establishes potential cross-skill transitions based on kinematic similarity within multi-skill motion data, (2) a whole-body tracking policy trained on this skill graph through deep reinforcement learning, and (3) an online skill scheduler to drive the tracking policy for robust skill execution and smooth transitions. For skill switching or significant tracking deviations, the scheduler performs online graph search to find the optimal feasible path, which ensures efficient, stable, and real-time execution of diverse locomotion skills. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Switch empowers humanoid to execute agile skill transitions with high success rates while maintaining strong motion imitation performance.
Yuen-Fui Lau, Qihan Zhao, Yinhuai Wang +4
Apr 9, 2026cs.RO

Incremental Residual Reinforcement Learning Toward Real-World Learning for Social Navigation

As the demand for mobile robots continues to increase, social navigation has emerged as a critical task, driving active research into deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. However, because pedestrian dynamics and social conventions vary widely across different regions, simulations cannot easily encompass all possible real-world scenarios. Real-world RL, in which agents learn while operating directly in physical environments, presents a promising solution to this issue. Nevertheless, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly regarding constrained computational resources on edge devices and learning efficiency. In this study, we propose incremental residual RL (IRRL). This method integrates incremental learning, which is a lightweight process that operates without a replay buffer or batch updates, with residual RL, which enhances learning efficiency by training only on the residuals relative to a base policy. Through the simulation experiments, we demonstrated that, despite lacking a replay buffer, IRRL achieved performance comparable to those of conventional replay buffer-based methods and outperformed existing incremental learning approaches. Furthermore, the real-world experiments confirmed that IRRL can enable robots to effectively adapt to previously unseen environments through the real-world learning.
Haruto Nagahisa, Kohei Matsumoto, Yuki Tomita +2
Apr 8, 2026cs.RO

EgoVerse: An Egocentric Human Dataset for Robot Learning from Around the World

Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer with experiments replicated across multiple labs, tasks, and robot embodiments under shared protocols. We find that policy performance generally improves with increased human data, but that effective scaling depends on alignment between human data and robot learning objectives. Together, the dataset, platform, and study establish a foundation for reproducible progress in human data-driven robot learning. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egoverse.ai/
Ryan Punamiya, Simar Kareer, Zeyi Liu +37
Mar 10, 2026cs.RO

From Prior to Pro: Efficient Skill Mastery via Distribution Contractive RL Finetuning

We introduce Distribution Contractive Reinforcement Learning (DICE-RL), a framework that uses reinforcement learning (RL) as a "distribution contraction" operator to refine pretrained generative robot policies. DICE-RL turns a pretrained behavior prior into a high-performing "pro" policy by amplifying high-success behaviors from online feedback. We pretrain a diffusion- or flow-based policy for broad behavioral coverage, then finetune it with a stable, sample-efficient residual off-policy RL framework that combines selective behavior regularization with value-guided action selection. Extensive experiments and analyses show that DICE-RL reliably improves performance with strong stability and sample efficiency. It enables mastery of complex long-horizon manipulation skills directly from high-dimensional pixel inputs, both in simulation and on a real robot. Project website: https://zhanyisun.github.io/dice.rl.2026/.
Zhanyi Sun, Shuran Song
Mar 9, 2026cs.RO

APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model

Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots. Classical navigation approaches offer safety assurances but require environment-specific parameter tuning; end-to-end learning bypasses parameter tuning but struggles with precise control in constrained spaces. To this end, recent robot learning approaches automate parameter tuning while retaining classical systems' safety, yet still face challenges in generalizing to unseen environments. Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise by leveraging foundation models' scene understanding capabilities, but still struggle with precise control and inference latency in navigation tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model (\textsc{applv}). Unlike traditional VLA models that directly output actions, \textsc{applv} leverages pre-trained vision-language models with a regression head to predict planner parameters that configure classical planners. We develop two training strategies: supervised learning fine-tuning from collected navigation trajectories and reinforcement learning fine-tuning to further optimize navigation performance. We evaluate \textsc{applv} across multiple motion planners on the simulated Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) dataset and in physical robot experiments. Results demonstrate that \textsc{applv} outperforms existing methods in both navigation performance and generalization to unseen environments.
Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu +4
Mar 9, 2026cs.RO

See and Switch: Vision-Based Branching for Interactive Robot-Skill Programming

Programming by demonstration (PbD) makes robot programming accessible to non-experts, but scaling it to real-world variability remains a challenge for current teaching frameworks, especially when a robot must select suitable task variants online from visual input. We present See & Switch, an interactive teaching-and-execution framework that represents tasks as graphs of skill parts connected by decision states, enabling conditional branching during replay. Its vision-based Switcher uses eye-in-hand images to select the appropriate successor skill part and detect novel situations that require new demonstrations. The framework supports recovery demonstrations during execution through kinesthetic teaching, joystick control, and hand gestures. We evaluate See & Switch on three dexterous manipulation tasks with 8 novice users, collecting approx. 900 real-robot execution rollouts. To isolate visual decision performance from timing errors during decision states, we evaluate the Switcher offline using user-gated decision state windows. In the evaluation within the decision state windows, the method achieves up to 90.6% branch-selection accuracy and detects anomalies with >90% accuracy in 47 of 79 decision states, demonstrating reliable switching based on visual input for conditional robot-skill programming. We provide all code and experiment data at http://imitrob.ciirc.cvut.cz/publications/seeandswitch.
Petr Vanc, Jan Kristof Behrens, Václav Hlaváč +1
Mar 9, 2026cs.RO

RoboRouter: Training-Free Policy Routing for Robotic Manipulation

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches. Concrete policies typically attain high success rates on specific task distributions, but limited generalization beyond it. Rather than proposing another monolithic policy, we propose to leverage the complementary strengths of existing approaches through intelligent policy routing. We introduce RoboRouter, a training-free framework that maintains a pool of heterogeneous policies and learns to select the best-performing policy for each task through accumulated execution experience. Given a new task, RoboRouter constructs a semantic task representation, retrieves historical records of similar tasks, predicts the optimal policy choice without requiring trial-and-error, and incorporates structured feedback to refine subsequent routing decisions. Integrating a new policy into the system requires only a lightweight evaluation and does not incur training overhead. Across simulation benchmark and real-world evaluations, RoboRouter consistently outperforms individual policies, improving the average success rate by more than 3% in simulation and 13% in real-world settings, while preserving execution efficiency. Our results demonstrate that intelligent routing across heterogeneous, off-the-shelf policies provides a practical and scalable pathway toward building more capable robotic systems.
Yiteng Chen, Zhe Cao, Hongjia Ren +9
Mar 6, 2026cs.RO

Restoring Linguistic Grounding in VLA Models via Train-Free Attention Recalibration

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to perform manipulation tasks directly from natural language instructions and are increasingly viewed as a foundation for generalist robotic policies. However, their reliability under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) instructions remains underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a critical failure mode in which VLA policies continue executing visually plausible actions even when the language instruction contradicts the scene. We refer to this phenomenon as linguistic blindness, where VLA policies prioritize visual priors over instruction semantics during action generation. To systematically analyze this issue, we introduce ICBench, a diagnostic benchmark constructed from the LIBERO dataset that probes language-action coupling by injecting controlled OOD instruction contradictions while keeping the visual environment unchanged. Evaluations on three representative VLA architectures, including Pi0, Pi0.5 and OpenVLA OFT, show that these models frequently succeed at tasks despite logically impossible instructions, revealing a strong visual bias in action generation. To mitigate this issue, we propose Instruction-Guided Attention Recalibration (IGAR), a train-free inference-time mechanism that rebalances attention distributions to restore the influence of language instructions. IGAR operates without retraining or architectural modification and can be directly applied to existing VLA models. Experiments across 30 LIBERO tasks demonstrate that IGAR substantially reduces erroneous execution under OOD contradictory instructions while preserving baseline task performance. We additionally validate the approach on a real Franka robotic arm, where IGAR effectively prevents manipulation triggered by inconsistent instructions.
Ninghao Zhang, Bin Zhu, Shijie Zhou +1
Mar 4, 2026cs.RO

From Local Corrections to Generalized Skills: Improving Neuro-Symbolic Policies with MEMO

Recent works use a neuro-symbolic framework for general manipulation policies. The advantage of this framework is that -- by applying off-the-shelf vision and language models -- the robot can break complex tasks down into semantic subtasks. However, the fundamental bottleneck is that the robot needs skills to ground these subtasks into embodied motions. Skills can take many forms (e.g., trajectory snippets, motion primitives, coded functions), but regardless of their form skills act as a constraint. The high-level policy can only ground its language reasoning through the available skills; if the robot cannot generate the right skill for the current task, its policy will fail. We propose to address this limitation -- and dynamically expand the robot's skills -- by leveraging user feedback. When a robot fails, humans can intuitively explain what went wrong (e.g., ``no, go higher''). While a simple approach is to recall this exact text the next time the robot faces a similar situation, we hypothesize that by collecting, clustering, and re-phrasing natural language corrections across multiple users and tasks, we can synthesize more general text guidance and coded skill templates. Applying this hypothesis we develop Memory Enhanced Manipulation (MEMO). MEMO builds and maintains a retrieval-augmented skillbook gathered from human feedback and task successes. At run time, MEMO retrieves relevant text and code from this skillbook, enabling the robot's policy to generate new skills while reasoning over multi-task human feedback. Our experiments demonstrate that using MEMO to aggregate local feedback into general skill templates enables generalization to novel tasks where existing baselines fall short. See supplemental material here: https://collab.me.vt.edu/memo
Benjamin A. Christie, Yinlong Dai, Mohammad Bararjanianbahnamiri +2
Feb 7, 2026cs.LG

Scalable Dexterous Robot Learning with AR-based Remote Human-Robot Interactions

This paper focuses on the scalable robot learning for manipulation in the dexterous robot arm-hand systems, where the remote human-robot interactions via augmented reality (AR) are established to collect the expert demonstration data for improving efficiency. In such a system, we present a novel method to address the general manipulation task problem. Specifically, the proposed method consists of two phases: i) In the first phase for pretraining, the policy is created in a behavior cloning (BC) manner, through leveraging the learning data from our AR-based remote human-robot interaction system; ii) In the second phase, a contrastive learning empowered reinforcement learning (RL) method is developed to obtain more efficient and robust policy than the BC, and thus a projection head is designed to accelerate the learning progress. An event-driven augmented reward is adopted for enhancing the safety. To validate the proposed method, both the physics simulations via PyBullet and real-world experiments are carried out. The results demonstrate that compared to the baselines, our method not only significantly speeds up the training process, but also achieves much better performance in terms of the success rate for fulfilling the manipulation tasks. By conducting the ablation study, it is confirmed that the proposed RL with contrastive learning overcomes policy collapse. Supplementary demonstrations are available at https://cyberyyc.github.io/.
Yicheng Yang, Ruijiao Li, Lifeng Wang +7
Jan 22, 2026cs.RO

PUMA: Perception-driven Unified Foothold Prior for Mobility Augmented Quadruped Parkour

Parkour tasks for quadrupeds have emerged as a promising benchmark for agile locomotion. While human athletes can effectively perceive environmental characteristics to select appropriate footholds for obstacle traversal, endowing legged robots with similar perceptual reasoning remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often rely on hierarchical controllers that follow pre-computed footholds, thereby constraining the robot's real-time adaptability and the exploratory potential of reinforcement learning. To overcome these challenges, we present PUMA, an end-to-end learning framework that integrates visual perception and foothold priors into a single-stage training process. This approach leverages terrain features to estimate egocentric polar foothold priors, composed of relative distance and heading, guiding the robot in active posture adaptation for parkour tasks. Extensive experiments conducted in simulation and real-world environments across various discrete complex terrains, demonstrate PUMA's exceptional agility and robustness in challenging scenarios.
Liang Wang, Kanzhong Yao, Yang Liu +4
Jan 5, 2026cs.RO

Genie Sim 3.0 : A High-Fidelity Comprehensive Simulation Platform for Humanoid Robot

The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.
Chenghao Yin, Da Huang, Di Yang +16
Dec 27, 2025cs.RO

VLA-Arena: An Open-Source Framework for Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models

While Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are rapidly advancing towards generalist robot policies, it remains difficult to quantitatively understand their limits and failure modes. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark called VLA-Arena. We propose a novel structured task design framework to quantify difficulty across three orthogonal axes: (1) Task Structure, (2) Language Command, and (3) Visual Observation. This allows us to systematically design tasks with fine-grained difficulty levels, enabling a precise measurement of model capability frontiers. For Task Structure, VLA-Arena's 170 tasks are grouped into four dimensions: Safety, Distractor, Extrapolation, and Long Horizon. Each task is designed with three difficulty levels (L0-L2), with fine-tuning performed exclusively on L0 to assess general capability. Orthogonal to this, language (W0-W4) and visual (V0-V4) perturbations can be applied to any task to enable a decoupled analysis of robustness. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLAs reveals several critical limitations, including a strong tendency toward memorization over generalization, asymmetric robustness, a lack of consideration for safety constraints, and an inability to compose learned skills for long-horizon tasks. To foster research addressing these challenges and ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete VLA-Arena framework, including an end-to-end toolchain from task definition to automated evaluation and the VLA-Arena-S/M/L datasets for fine-tuning. Our benchmark, data, models, and leaderboard are available at https://vla-arena.github.io.
Borong Zhang, Jiahao Li, Jiachen Shen +7
Nov 10, 2025cs.RO

Rapidly Learning Soft Robot Control via Implicit Time-Stepping

With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft robotics community. This gap stems partly from the lack of easy-to-use, general-purpose frameworks and partly from the high computational cost of accurately simulating continuum mechanics, which often renders policy learning infeasible. In this work, we demonstrate that rapid soft robot policy learning is indeed achievable via implicit time-stepping. Our simulator of choice, DisMech, is a general-purpose, fully implicit soft-body simulator capable of handling both soft dynamics and frictional contact. We further introduce delta natural curvature control, a method analogous to delta joint position control in rigid manipulators, providing an intuitive and effective means of enacting control for soft robot learning. To highlight the benefits of implicit time-stepping and delta curvature control, we conduct extensive comparisons across four diverse soft manipulator tasks against one of the most widely used soft-body frameworks, Elastica. With implicit time-stepping, parallel stepping of 500 environments achieves up to 6x faster speeds for non-contact cases and up to 40x faster for contact-rich scenarios. Finally, a comprehensive sim-to-sim gap evaluation--training policies in one simulator and evaluating them in another--demonstrates that implicit time-stepping provides a rare free lunch: dramatic speedups achieved without sacrificing accuracy.
Andrew Choi, Dezhong Tong, Xiaonan Huang
Oct 27, 2025cs.RO

Deep Active Inference with Diffusion Policy and Multiple Timescale World Model for Real-World Exploration and Navigation

Autonomous robotic navigation in real-world environments requires exploration to acquire environmental information as well as goal-directed navigation in order to reach specified targets. Active inference (AIF) based on the free-energy principle provides a unified framework for these behaviors by minimizing the expected free energy (EFE), thereby combining epistemic and extrinsic values. To realize this practically, we propose a deep AIF framework that integrates a diffusion policy as the policy model and a multiple timescale recurrent state-space model (MTRSSM) as the world model. The diffusion policy generates diverse candidate actions while the MTRSSM predicts their long-horizon consequences through latent imagination, enabling action selection that minimizes EFE. Real-world navigation experiments, including baseline comparisons, component ablations, and robustness evaluations, demonstrated that our framework achieved higher success rates and fewer collisions, particularly in exploration-demanding scenarios. These results highlight how AIF based on EFE minimization can unify exploration and goal-directed navigation in real-world robotic settings.
Riko Yokozawa, Kentaro Fujii, Yuta Nomura +1
Oct 12, 2025cs.RO

Gain Tuning Is Not What You Need: Reward Gain Adaptation for Constrained Locomotion Learning

Existing robot locomotion learning techniques rely heavily on the offline selection of proper reward weighting gains and cannot guarantee constraint satisfaction (i.e., constraint violation) during training. Thus, this work aims to address both issues by proposing Reward-Oriented Gains via Embodied Regulation (ROGER), which adapts reward-weighting gains online based on penalties received throughout the embodied interaction process. The ratio between the positive reward (primary reward) and negative reward (penalty) gains is automatically reduced as the learning approaches the constraint thresholds to avoid violation. Conversely, the ratio is increased when learning is in safe states to prioritize performance. With a 60-kg quadruped robot, ROGER achieved near-zero constraint violation throughout multiple learning trials. It also achieved up to 50% more primary reward than the equivalent state-of-the-art techniques. In MuJoCo continuous locomotion benchmarks, including a single-leg hopper, ROGER exhibited comparable or up to 100% higher performance and 60% less torque usage and orientation deviation compared to those trained with the default reward function. Finally, real-world locomotion learning of a physical quadruped robot was achieved from scratch within one hour without any falls. Therefore, this work contributes to constraint-satisfying real-world continual robot locomotion learning and simplifies reward weighting gain tuning, potentially facilitating the development of physical robots and those that learn in the real world.
Arthicha Srisuchinnawong, Poramate Manoonpong
Jul 21, 2025cs.RO

Look, Focus, Act: Efficient and Robust Robot Learning via Human Gaze and Foveated Vision Transformers

Human vision is a highly active process driven by gaze, which directs attention to task-relevant regions through foveation, dramatically reducing visual processing. In contrast, robot learning systems typically rely on passive, uniform processing of raw camera images. In this work, we explore how incorporating human-like active gaze into robotic policies can enhance efficiency and robustness. We develop GIAVA (Gaze Integrated Active-Vision ALOHA), a robot vision system that emulates human head and neck movement, and gaze adjustment for foveated processing. Extending the AV-ALOHA robot platform, we introduce a framework for simultaneously collecting eye-tracking, perspective control, and robot manipulation demonstration data from a human operator. We also open-source a simulation benchmark and dataset for training robot policies that incorporate human gaze. Inspired by recent work in foveated image segmentation and given the widespread use of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in robot learning, we integrate gaze information into ViTs using a foveated patch tokenization scheme. Compared to uniform patch tokenization, this significantly reduces the number of tokens, and thus computation. Our results show that our method for foveated robot vision drastically reduces computational overhead, and enhances robustness to background distractors. Notably, on certain high-precision tasks, foveated vision also improves performance, as reflected in higher success rates. Together, these findings suggest that human-inspired foveated visual processing offers untapped potential and should be further considered as a useful inductive bias in robotic vision systems. https://soltanilara.github.io/giava/
Ian Chuang, Jinyu Zou, Andrew Lee +2
Jun 10, 2025cs.AI

Shared Modular Recurrence in Contextual MDPs for Universal Morphology Control

A universal controller for any robot morphology would greatly improve computational and data efficiency. Steps have been made towards such multi-robot control by utilizing contextual information about the properties of individual robots and exploiting their modular structure in the architecture of deep reinforcement learning agents. When the robots have highly dissimilar morphologies, however, this becomes a challenging problem, especially when the agent must generalize to new, unseen robots. In this paper, we posit that contextual features are often only partially available, but that they can be recovered through modular interactions. This can allow for better multi-robot control and generalization to contexts that are not seen during training. To this extent, we implement a transformer-based architecture with shared modular recurrence and evaluate its (generalization) performance on a large set of MuJoCo robots. The results show a substantial improvement in zero-shot generalization performance on robots with unseen dynamics, kinematics, and topologies, in four different environments.
Laurens Engwegen, Max Weltevrede, Caroline Horsch +2
May 16, 2025cs.RO

SHIELD: Safety on Humanoids via CBFs In Expectation on Learned Dynamics

Robot learning has produced remarkably effective ``black-box'' controllers for complex tasks such as dynamic locomotion on humanoids. Yet ensuring dynamic safety, i.e., constraint satisfaction, remains challenging for such policies. Reinforcement learning (RL) embeds constraints heuristically through reward engineering, and adding or modifying constraints requires retraining. Model-based approaches, like control barrier functions (CBFs), enable runtime constraint specification with formal guarantees but require accurate dynamics models. This paper presents SHIELD, a layered safety framework that bridges this gap by: (1) training a generative, stochastic dynamics residual model using real-world data from hardware rollouts of the nominal controller, capturing system behavior and uncertainties; and (2) adding a safety layer on top of the nominal (learned locomotion) controller that leverages this model via a stochastic discrete-time CBF formulation enforcing safety constraints in probability. The result is a minimally-invasive safety layer that can be added to the existing autonomy stack to give probabilistic guarantees of safety that balance risk and performance. In hardware experiments on an Unitree G1 humanoid, SHIELD enables safe navigation (obstacle avoidance) through varied indoor and outdoor environments using a nominal (unknown) RL controller and onboard perception.
Lizhi Yang, Blake Werner, Ryan K. Cosner +3
Apr 23, 2025cs.RO

HERB: Human-augmented Efficient Reinforcement learning for Bin-packing

Packing objects efficiently is a fundamental problem in logistics, warehouse automation, and robotics. When dealing with highly diverse 3D objects (household or grocery items), closed-form solutions are infeasible, and heuristic or model-free Reinforcement Learning~(RL) methods tend to focus solely on geometric optimization, relying on exhaustive searches of the discretized solution space. This leads to long training times (for pure RL) and high latency (heuristics), limited transferability to robotic scenarios, and ultimately ignores object characteristics (fragility, deformability) and human preferences. We propose HERB, a human-augmented RL framework for packing irregular objects, the first to explore the potential of learning from human demonstrations to solve this complex task. It leverages human demonstrations of packing strategies, which inherently exhibit latent factors such as space optimization, stability, and object properties that are difficult to model explicitly. The human-expert data is combined with RL exploration to provide the placement of each object inside the container. Experimental results show that our method outperforms heuristic, purely RL-based, and imitation learning approaches in packing efficiency and latency. Qualitative results highlight that our packing strategy produces more stable, human-like arrangements, which we expect to be more appropriate and widely accepted. Finally, we demonstrate the real-world feasibility of our method on a robotic system.
Gojko Perovic, Nuno Ferreira Duarte, Atabak Dehban +3
Oct 24, 2024cs.RO

Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics, particularly in robotic manipulation, and whether appropriate data scaling can yield single-task robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot for any object within the same category in any environment. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on data scaling in imitation learning. By collecting data across numerous environments and objects, we study how a policy's generalization performance changes with the number of training environments, objects, and demonstrations. Throughout our research, we collect over 40,000 demonstrations and execute more than 15,000 real-world robot rollouts under a rigorous evaluation protocol. Our findings reveal several intriguing results: the generalization performance of the policy follows a roughly power-law relationship with the number of environments and objects. The diversity of environments and objects is far more important than the absolute number of demonstrations; once the number of demonstrations per environment or object reaches a certain threshold, additional demonstrations have minimal effect. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient data collection strategy. With four data collectors working for one afternoon, we collect sufficient data to enable the policies for two tasks to achieve approximately 90% success rates in novel environments with unseen objects.
Fanqi Lin, Yingdong Hu, Pingyue Sheng +3
Date pendingcs.CL

Self-Evolving Embodied Agents via Skill-Harness Evolution

Embodied agents are increasingly built as systems around foundation models, where performance depends not only on model weights but also on the skills, context, action interfaces, and execution harness surrounding the model. While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning can adapt agents to new environments, they require additional data, rewards, and training runs; meanwhile, many train-free code-centric approaches rely on programmable robot APIs that may be unavailable in fixed-interface settings. We propose SHAPER, a self-evolving framework for train-free embodied adaptation that keeps model parameters frozen and improves the non-parametric agent system by evolving reusable skills and a context-code harness through target-environment rollouts. In SHAPER, the same frozen model can serve as both planner and optimizer, refining its external skills and context-code harness without parameter updates. We evaluate SHAPER on VLABench and ESI-Bench, covering embodied agents with different low-level action interfaces, and compare against pure execution, supervised fine-tuning, and test-time-scaling baselines such as verifier-free selection and voting. Our results suggest that skill-and-harness optimization is a practical route to self-evolving embodied agents when model training is expensive, unavailable, or undesirable.
Peidong Wang, Zhiming Ma, Ying Chang +7
Date pendingcs.RO

SkillX: Unified Multi-Skill Policy Learning for Humanoid Soccer

Humanoid soccer is a challenging testbed for dynamic whole-body control, requiring robots to coordinate balance, locomotion, object interaction, and skill switching over long horizons. Existing humanoid sports methods often rely on task-specific multi-stage pipelines, making it difficult to jointly learn and compose multiple object-interactive skills within a single deployable policy. To address this, we present SkillX, a unified reinforcement learning framework that learns and composes multiple atomic soccer skills through a single command-conditioned policy. SkillX integrates three core designs: skill-specific adversarial motion priors, skill-specific critics, and an object-aware temporal encoder, enabling the robot to execute atomic skills and transition among them such as dribbling, trapping, and shooting. Experiments in simulation and on a real Noetix E1 humanoid demonstrate robust multi-skill execution, long-horizon skill composition, and successful sim-to-real deployment.
Zhangchen Ye, Enxuan Ruan, Yifei Bao +10