Overview

Robot policy learning studies how robots can turn camera, depth, tactile, and proprioceptive inputs into actions for tasks such as manipulation, locomotion, and navigation. Common approaches include behavior cloning from demonstrations, reinforcement learning in simulation or on hardware, and diffusion, flow-matching, or vision-language-action policies that generate action sequences; world models and hierarchical planners can add foresight and long-horizon structure. Researchers evaluate these methods in simulation suites such as LIBERO, CALVIN, RoboTwin, and navigation benchmarks, as well as on physical robots, with growing attention to memory, contact, safety, and recovery from failure. A central tension is how to make policies generalize across tasks, robots, and changing conditions while remaining data-efficient, reactive, reliable, and fast enough to deploy.

Latest papers

377 papers85 papers in the last four weeks, up 47% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

Jun 30, 2026

Adapting Generalist Robot Policies with Semantic Reinforcement Learning

Generalist robot policies learn a diverse repertoire of behaviors from large-scale pretraining. In principle, this makes them excellent priors for downstream adaptation via reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, however, standard RL methods leveraging this prior optimize directly over robot actions, requiring the base policy's action distribution to be close to that of a performant policy from the start. This assumption breaks down for complex or long-horizon tasks that fall outside the pretraining distribution. Our key insight is that, for sufficiently expressive generalist policies, language prompts are an effective alternative space for learning to solve such tasks: modulating language inputs elicits skills already within the policy's repertoire, which can be composed to solve tasks beyond its zero-shot capabilities. We propose Semantic Action Reinforcement Learning (SARL), which learns to optimize this prompt space through online interaction, treating the generalist policy as a controllable skill prior. Importantly, leveraging pretrained skills rather than learning new ones from scratch yields structured, semantically meaningful exploration and highly efficient online improvement, and learning to modulate prompts through experience grounds them in induced real-world behaviors for robust task-solving. Across real-world settings and simulated benchmarks, we show SARL unlocks fundamentally new capabilities -- adapting VLA behavior to solve complex, long-horizon tasks -- and significantly outperforms existing approaches for improving robot behavior in deployment.
Jun 30, 2026

HABIT: Human-Aware Behavior and Interaction Training Dataset for Robot Manipulation

Large-scale demonstration datasets have been central to recent progress in general-purpose robot policies. However, existing datasets are collected in human-absent settings, and policies trained on such data may perform tasks competently in isolation but fail to exhibit human-aware behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce HABIT, a large-scale robot demonstration dataset for human-present environments. We organize tasks into three roles capturing distinct modes of human-robot interaction: Collaborator, where human and robot jointly accomplish a task; Coworker, where they pursue separate tasks in a shared space; and Supervisor, where the human directs the robot. The dataset comprises over 10K episodes and over 160 hours across 60 tasks. Our experiments show that training on human-present data elicits human-aware behaviors that robot-only data fails to produce: spatiotemporal synchronization in Collaborator tasks, yielding in Coworker tasks, and gesture grounding in Supervisor tasks. Moreover, training on HABIT enables rapid adaptation to new human-robot interaction tasks. By introducing human presence as a new axis of dataset diversity, HABIT extends robot policies to environments shared with humans.
Jun 29, 2026

Multisensory Continual Learning: Adapting Pretrained Visuomotor Policies to Force

Robot manipulation often relies on sensory feedback beyond vision, particularly in contact-rich settings where force, tactile, or audio signals reveal interaction states that are not directly observable from images. However, these modalities are often hardware- and task-specific, and large-scale multisensory robot datasets remain scarce. As a result, it is impractical to pretrain policies with every sensor they may encounter. We study multisensory continual learning: adapting a pretrained robot policy such as a World-Action Model or VLA to new tasks with newly introduced modalities while preserving performance under the original sensor suite. We propose MultiSensory World Model (MuSe), which incorporates limited multisensory data into pretrained vision-only policies through multi-stage fusion, multisensory future prediction, and experience replay over pretraining data. We instantiate MuSe by augmenting a pretrained vision-only World-Action Model with tactile force-torque sensing and evaluate it on real-world manipulation tasks. Our experiments show that MuSe performs strongly on contact-rich finetuning tasks while preserving, and in some cases improving, performance on the original pretraining tasks. These results suggest that a modest multisensory dataset can improve general robot capabilities beyond the finetuning distribution. Project website: https://jadenvc.github.io/multisensory-continual-learning/
Jun 29, 2026

Chronos: A Physics-Informed Full-History Framework for Non-Markovian Long-Horizon Manipulation

General-purpose robot policies should be modeled as dynamical systems, yet many VLA and generative imitation policies still rely on present observations or short windows. This Markovian shortcut fails in memory-dependent manipulation: identical observations can demand different actions after different histories. We present Chronos, a physics-informed full-history framework for non-Markovian long-horizon manipulation. The key idea is to elevate observation history from auxiliary context to the latent state of the policy dynamics. At each physical control step, Chronos forms one state-representative token by fusing observation and proprioception, so the token sequence is aligned one-to-one with physical time. A selective state space model propagates this causal historical state, which conditions a multimodal coarse action prior through implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE). This prior is then refined by a second-order Schrodinger-inspired bridge that predicts acceleration fields, yielding smoother and more physically grounded robot motion. Across 16 simulated tasks and 4 real-world experiments, Chronos is evaluated on precision insertion, general manipulation, and memory-dependent long-horizon control. On RMBench, where success requires remembering task phase, Chronos achieves 73.6% average success, outperforming Markovian VLA baseline pi0.5 by +62.4 percentage points, a 6.6x relative gain, while using 10x fewer parameters. It also surpasses the memory VLA Mem-0 by 22.8 points while using over 30x fewer parameters. In real-world dual-arm experiments using a single RGB camera, Chronos achieves 78% average success over four tasks, including 72% on the three memory-dependent tasks, whereas pi0.5 achieves 7% overall and 0% on the memory-dependent subset. These results suggest that history should not be treated as auxiliary context, but as the latent state of the manipulation policy.
Jun 29, 2026

SIR: Structured Image Representations for Explainable Robot Learning

Existing robot policies based on learned visual embeddings lack explicit structure and are sensitive to visual distractions. Thus, the representations that drive their behaviour are often opaque, making their decision-making process difficult to interpret. To address this, we introduce Structured Image Representations (SIR), a method that leverages Scene Graphs (SGs) as an intermediate representation for robot policy learning. Our approach first constructs a fully connected graph, using image-derived features as initial node representations. Then, a module learns to sparsify this graph end-to-end, creating a task-relevant sub-graph that is passed to the action generation model. This process makes our model intrinsically explainable. Evaluations on RoboCasa show that our sparse graph policies outperform image-based baselines on average with 19.5% vs 14.81% success rate. Most importantly, we show that the learned sparse graphs are a powerful tool for model analysis. By analysing when the model's sub-graph deviates from human expectation, such as by including distractor nodes or omitting key objects, we successfully uncover dataset biases, including spurious correlations and positional biases. https://github.com/intuitive-robots/SIR_Model
Jun 29, 2026

Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation

Visuo-Tactile policies leveraging optical tactile sensors have shown great promise in contact-rich manipulation. These sensors achieve high spatial resolution and multi-dimensional force sensing by utilizing an internal camera to monitor the deformation of their elastic gel surface, thereby indirectly inferring tactile cues. Despite their advantages, extracting fine-grained contact states necessary for contact-rich manipulation remains an open challenge. Existing methods typically use either raw images or cumulative motion fields to represent tactile cues. However, both are prone to perception ambiguity. Raw tactile images mainly capture appearance changes, while cumulative motion fields only reflect the aggregate gel deformation. Consequently, distinct fine-grained contact states can exhibit highly similar patterns, making it difficult to explicitly distinguish subtle contact variations. To address this issue, we explore the dynamic priors of tactile motion and discover that the correlation between transient and cumulative motion can explicitly distinguish fine-grained contact states. Based on this insight, we propose a motion-aware tactile representation to facilitate contact-rich manipulation. Beyond tactile representation, effective fusion of tactile and visual modalities is also critical. Most existing fusion methods either directly concatenate features from each modality or train modality-specific networks separately and fuse their outputs. However, these strategies struggle to simultaneously model cross-modal interactions and preserve modality-specific characteristics. In this work, we take advantage of the Mixture-of-Transformers architecture and propose a unified modality-aware visuo-tactile policy that captures cross-modal complementarity while maintaining modality-specific properties.
Jun 29, 2026

Critical Interval MSE: Toward Reliable Offline Validation for Robot Manipulation Policies

Real-world evaluation is the gold standard for robot manipulation policies because it tests them against the physical conditions and deployment challenges they are ultimately designed to handle. However, real-world evaluation is also the bottleneck for iterating on robot imitation learning policies: it is costly, difficult to reproduce, and often too sparse to reliably compare nearby model variants. A straightforward proxy for performance is validation loss on expert demonstrations, but this proxy is often poorly correlated with real-world performance. In this paper, we introduce Critical Interval MSE (CI-MSE), an intuitively simple yet effective offline validation metric. CI-MSE uses a zero-shot agent to localize task-critical segments, restricts error computation to those segments, and applies simple action-alignment procedures that better match rollout-time behavior. Across simulation and real-world experiments, CI-MSE generally yields a stronger correlation between validation error and rollout performance than raw MSE. Across 27 distinct policy checkpoints, CI-MSE achieves a Spearman rank correlation of −0.87-0.87, closer to the ideal value of −1-1 than raw MSE's −0.61-0.61, demonstrating a significant improvement. Sensitivity analysis shows that our metric is robust across a wide range of hyperparameter settings. We further study the effectiveness of CI-MSE under evaluation distribution shifts and identify practical boundaries for its use. In summary, this paper provides a simple and reliable offline validation tool for accelerating policy iteration. Project webpage: https://ci-mse.github.io/
Jun 29, 2026

STEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning

Real-world robot learning increasingly relies on heterogeneous data, but demonstrations and rollouts often mix useful progress with stalls, corrections, and suboptimal behavior. Effective policy learning therefore requires frame-level advantages that distinguish reliable local progress from failures and regressions. We propose Self-supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling (STEAM), a label-free method that learns such advantages from expert demonstrations. STEAM trains an ensemble of temporal-offset predictors on frame pairs within expert trajectories, using the normalized temporal offset between two frames as a self-supervised signal. Each predictor maps a frame pair to a distribution over temporal offsets, which is converted into a scalar advantage. STEAM then takes the minimum advantage across the ensemble to score mixed-quality rollout data conservatively. Across real-world bimanual towel folding, chip checkout, table clearing, and cola restocking tasks, STEAM identifies stalls, failures, and recoveries. When combined with CFGRL, STEAM achieves the highest policy success rate on all four tasks, averaging 83.5%83.5\% against 58.8%58.8\% for the best baseline. Project page: https://rlinf.github.io/steam/.
Jun 28, 2026

Hierarchical Policy Learning via Spectral Decomposition

In this paper, we identify a semantic decomposition in robot action sequences, separating task-level motion intent from execution-level refinements. By analyzing actions in the spectral domain using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), we observe that low-frequency components capture global motion trajectories, while high-frequency components encode precise timing, alignment, and contact behaviors. Motivated by this structure, we propose Causal Spectral Policy (CSP), which models action generation as a causal coarse-to-fine process: coarse motion is predicted from observation and language, and fine corrections are generated conditionally on the realized trajectory. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, CSP consistently outperforms strong baselines on precision-sensitive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we propose human-inspired teleoperation noise injection as a data augmentation method, under which our approach demonstrates strong robustness to noisy demonstrations.
Jun 28, 2026

Learning Transferable Dynamics Priors from Action to World Modeling

We study action-conditioned world modeling as a scalable way to learn transferable dynamics priors for robot learning. By pretraining a model to predict how actions drive visual scene evolution, the resulting world model captures reusable interaction dynamics beyond appearance-level video generation. Concretely, we pretrain a multi-view interactive base diffusion world model, A2World, on large-scale robot manipulation data with real action annotations. We validate the learned dynamics priors from two complementary perspectives. First, we adapt A2World into a task- or scene-specialized real-world simulator, A2World-sim, whose long-horizon rollouts support simulator-based policy evaluation and scalable what-if analysis by replacing real-robot rollouts with world model rollouts. Second, starting from the same pretrained weights, we adapt A2World into a video-action joint prediction model, A2World-policy, that predicts actions under visual and instruction conditioning. Experiments across simulation benchmarks and real-robot settings demonstrate that action-conditioned world model pretraining yields transferable dynamics priors that benefit both simulator-centric and policy-centric robot learning.
Jun 28, 2026

Behavior Uncloning: Distilling Mode Redirection into Policy Weights without Inference-Time Steering

Behavior-cloned policies often learn multiple behavior modes from demonstration datasets, including modes that are unsafe or otherwise undesired at deployment. For example, a policy trained on diverse handover demonstrations may learn to pass a knife blade-first. Standard remedies such as data curation and inference-time steering either require access to the original demonstrations for full retraining or add substantial inference-time overhead. To address this gap, we propose MoRE(Mode Redirection), which redirects policy rollouts toward desired behavior modes through a short "uncloning" step. Specifically, MoRE distills the redirection signal from a temporary mode classifier into the policy weights to steer behavior. A retain loss balances this edit by preserving desired-mode competence, allowing the standalone policy to suppress unwanted modes with zero inference-time overhead. Across eight simulated and real-world tasks, MoRE improves the average deployment success rate (SR) by 44 percentage points over the original mixed-mode policy. Among all compared adaptation and steering baselines, MoRE achieves the strongest SR and approaches the filtered-data retraining reference, while preserving task competence and inference speed. MoRE also generalizes across robot policy backbones, including Diffusion Policy and the Pi0.5 VLA, diverse task categories, and real-world deployments.
Jun 27, 2026

Keypose Exploration: Efficient Automatic Trajectory Labelling and Cross-Embodiment Policy Transfer

Keypose-based manipulation decomposes tasks into critical waypoints to simplify policy learning for long-horizon tasks, but existing approaches rely on task-specific heuristics or manual annotation to extract keyposes from demonstrations. We present an automatic trajectory labelling pipeline for grasp-related tasks. This pipeline combines vision-language models (VLMs) for semantic event detection with classical trajectory analysis for precise temporal alignment, requiring VLM inference only on one single demo among repeating ones per task. Using the labelled data, we train a keypose-guided Diffusion Policy (DP) that exploits keypose conditioning to intervene demonstration distributions. We explore the possibility to apply this property for cross-embodiment transfer: candidate keyposes are sampled and filtered via a reachability map, steering the policy toward kinematically feasible keyposes for the target robot. As a preliminary feasibility study, experiments on two robomimic tasks show that the labelled data produces policies matching a standard DP baseline, and that reachability-filtered keypose conditioning may benefit zero-shot transfer on the multimodal insertion task when feasible candidates are available.
Jun 25, 2026

Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation

We introduce ABC, a fully open-source stack for manipulation with behavior cloning. At its core is ABC-130K: the largest open-source teleoperation dataset to date, featuring 3,500 hours of data spanning over 130K episodes across 195 diverse tasks. Furthermore, we open-source our accessible hardware setup, training infrastructure, and simulation pipeline. We also release 400 hours of sim-teleop data and provide a co-training recipe that produces correlated simulation and real-world evaluation, offering a reliable proxy for ablating model-design and training decisions before costly real-world evaluation. We explore various training recipes and compare common architectural choices for Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, grounding our findings in real-world evaluations. The resulting policies successfully execute dexterous tasks such as box folding and extracting credit cards from wallets. By providing a reproducible toolkit, we aim to place researchers on an equal footing, establishing the necessary foundation to learn the ABCs of Behavior Cloning together as a community.
Jun 25, 2026

RouterVLA: Turning Smoke Tests into Supervision for Heterogeneous VLA Selection

We study whether pre-deployment evaluation rollouts can be reused to supervise policy selection. Robot teams routinely smoke test candidate vision-language-action (VLA) policies, then compress those trials into a global winner. RouterVLA evaluates this idea with outcome-disjoint cross-fitting: recorded probes build a profile for each frozen expert, and a separate trial scores the selected expert without entering its profile. Across 34,752 LIBERO-Plus rollout records, a transparent probe-success rule raises held-out success from 0.4686 to 0.6149, a +14.64pp gain. Under the scalar-only profiles studied here, learned scorers are statistically indistinguishable from this rule, showing that commissioning carries the routing value while extra scalar scorer capacity does not create it. Reusing the scored trial inflates the measured gain by 1.87×1.87\times, so credible ledger routing needs outcome separation; model scaling improves individual policies, while commissioning-aware routing improves the system built from them.
Jun 25, 2026

Continual Robot Policy Learning via Variational Neural Dynamics

Robots deployed in the real world rarely operate under a single fixed dynamics model: wind changes, payloads vary, batteries drain, contacts shift, and hardware wears. Yet most learning-based controllers are trained once and deployed as if learning were complete. This prevents the robot from using deployment experience to further improve task performance. In this work, we propose a continual learning framework that uses real-world experience to improve robot policies under hidden and recurring dynamics. Our method learns a condition-aware dynamics model from real state-action trajectories by combining an analytical physics prior with a neural residual for unmodeled effects. A recurrent encoder infers the current hidden condition from recent interaction, and this estimate conditions both the residual model and the policy. Policy learning is performed via differentiable simulation using diverse learned dynamics sampled from the latent model. At deployment, these sampled conditions are replaced by conditions inferred online from recent real interaction, allowing the policy to recover recurring dynamics by recognition rather than residual re-fitting. Through extensive simulation studies and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that the framework improves policy performance under diverse unobserved disturbances. On real quadrotor trajectory tracking under changing wind, the policy recovers from recurring disturbances in roughly 1s, about 5x faster than online residual re-fitting. It also reduces large-disturbance hover and tracking errors by 65.7% and 53.3% over the state-of-the-art online adaptation approaches
Jun 25, 2026

PhysReflect-VLA: Physical Feasibility and Self-Reflective Regulation for Reliable Vision-Language-Action Policies

Long-horizon robotic manipulation is highly sensitive to physically infeasible transitions, contact-induced disturbances, and the lack of effective self-correction during execution. Although Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong task grounding through multimodal learning, they typically generate actions in a feed-forward manner without explicitly checking physical feasibility or diagnosing execution errors online. We present PhysReflect-VLA, a plug-and-play execution-time reliability framework that augments VLA policies with physical feasibility evaluation and structured self-reflection in a closed-loop control pipeline. A Feasibility Operator evaluates whether candidate actions induce dynamically consistent state transitions; an Action Explanation Operator verifies transition coherence; and an LLM-based Reflection Module analyzes state discrepancies to generate corrective guidance for subsequent actions. A two-stage training procedure stabilizes feasibility modeling and integrates reflection into the control loop. Experiments on multi-stage, contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks show consistent improvements in stage-wise stability and overall task success compared with representative VLA baselines with an average gain of 5.4%. Ablation results further indicate that feasibility checking and reflection-based correction both contribute to improved execution robustness. These results highlight the importance of embedding physical consistency checks and online self-reflection for reliable long-horizon robotic manipulation.
Jun 25, 2026

RobOralScan: Learning Active Intraoral Scanning for Robotic Dental Reconstruction

Intraoral scanning is widely used for digital optical impressions in prosthodontic, implant, and orthodontic treatment, but full-arch and long-span scanning remain labor-intensive tasks with limited automation. In the confined oral cavity, operators must continuously adjust scanner motion while accumulating narrow field-of-view observations, making reconstruction quality sensitive to missing tooth surfaces and operator workload. We propose RobOralScan, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first reinforcement learning (RL)-based pipeline for robotic automatic intraoral scanning. RobOralScan introduces a geometric memory-based observation space that accumulates partial scan observations into a tri-state geometric representation, allowing the policy to reason over scan history and insufficiently observed regions. It further introduces tooth-wise coverage learning, combining coverage-aware reward signals and a progressive training scheme to improve global reconstruction coverage while reducing uneven coverage across individual teeth. The learned policy selects relative scanner motions from accumulated geometric memory and robot proprioception for closed-loop scan control within the oral workspace. RobOralScan achieves a Chamfer Distance of 0.00838, an average coverage of 92.58%, a lower-tail per-tooth coverage of 88.45%, and a normalized AUC of 0.6674, completing the scan criterion in 8 of 10 evaluation episodes. Furthermore, zero-shot sim-to-real experiments demonstrate its practical feasibility on a physical robot-scanner setup.
Jun 24, 2026

LiMoDE: Rethinking Lifelong Robot Manipulation from a Mixture-of-Dynamic-Experts Perspective

Building a generalist robot that can leverage prior knowledge for continuous task adaptation remains a significant challenge. Previous works alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem by parameter-efficient fine-tuning for single-task adaptation. However, they fail to extract reusable skills and model the interaction with other skills effectively. Recent works try to address these issues by learning prompts. Differently, this paper presents an architectural perspective on the Lifelong Mixture of Dynamic Experts (LiMoDE), a novel two-stage learning scheme for lifelong robot manipulation. Specifically, a dynamic MoE structure is first proposed in the multi-task pre-training stage to learn prior knowledge, where a varied number of heterogeneous experts are activated based on the motion information to address different short-term manipulations. Subsequently, in the task adaptation stage, we design a lifelong MoE adaptation mechanism % (LiMoEAM) that learns lifelong experts and dynamically combines them with frozen ones for new tasks, facilitating the knowledge transfer during adaptation. The proposed LiMoDE is evaluated on both the simulated lifelong learning benchmark and real-world tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving superior performance and strong lifelong adaptation by introducing a moderate number of additional trainable parameters and inference overhead.
Jun 24, 2026

Learning Asynchronous Upper-body Task-space Trajectory Tracking Policy for Humanoid Robots

High-level humanoid planners often output sparse task-space, low-rate trajectories, whereas whole-body controllers run at high frequency. This creates temporal asynchrony between the planning and execution, and structural incompleteness for full-body control. We propose an asynchronous upper body task-space tracking framework for humanoids. A student policy is initialized by teacher-student distillation, conditioned on the full cached future trajectory and an execution-time index, and trained with a sliding-window global reward to reduce frame drift without explicit frame estimation. For task-specific post-training, an MPC module completes sparse references into floating-base and upper-body guidance, while action- and FK level self-guidance constrain policy drift. Simulation and Unitree G1 hardware experiments show improved tracking under low update rates, stronger performance than synchronous and decoupled baselines, and safer adaptation to out-of-distribution motions.
Jun 24, 2026

SAGE-Nav: Leveraging LLM Planning and Alignment Fusion for Hierarchical Scene Graph-Guided Navigation

Object-Goal Navigation (ObjNav) requires embodied agents to autonomously locate specified targets using only egocentric visual observations. Existing monolithic methods struggle with long-horizon reasoning and generalize poorly to novel environments. To address these limitations, we propose SAGE-Nav, a novel hierarchical framework that integrates the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with dynamic scene graphs. Crucially, it decouples asynchronous global semantic planning from the high-frequency reactive control loop. The LLM serves as a global planner, decomposing abstract instructions into a sequence of semantically grounded waypoints. To translate these plans into dense multi-modal guidance, we design a Hierarchical Scene Graph Encoder (HSGE) that leverages relational graph convolutions to produce structure-aware embeddings preserving both semantic and spatial topology. Furthermore, we develop the Goal-aware Alignment-Fusion Network (GAFN) to dynamically fuse real-time perception with these structural priors. Using an adaptive gating mechanism with an explicit inductive bias, GAFN ensures robust visual-topological alignment for the low-level policy. Extensive evaluations in the i-THOR and RoboTHOR environments demonstrate that SAGE-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering substantial gains in navigation efficiency and zero-shot generalization while maintaining the low control latency required for physical robotic deployment.
Jun 23, 2026

World Value Models for Robotic Manipulation

Generalist value models play a pivotal role in scaling robotic policy learning from large-scale, mixed-quality data. Mathematically, accurate value estimation demands deep temporal understanding, requiring models to both ground the current belief using historical context and plan over future outcomes. However, most existing robotic value models are built on Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbones that are pretrained primarily on static or temporally sparse visual observations, lacking the requisite temporal modeling capabilities for value estimation. Unlike VLMs, world models naturally excel at temporal modeling and future planning, making them ideal foundations for learning generalizable value functions. Driven by this insight, we marry world models with value estimation to construct a new generalist robotic value model, World Value Model (WVM), that offers accurate task progressions to assess data quality. On standard benchmarks, WVM delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) Value-Order Correlation (VOC) results. Complementing standard evaluation suites that contains only expert data, we further introduce Suboptimal-Value-Bench, a multi-embodiment benchmark consisting of 800 suboptimal trajectories with high-fidelity, human-labeled frame annotations. Our evaluations show that WVM maintains its SOTA performance on Suboptimal-Value-Bench, establishing its robustness in handling both expert and suboptimal data. When deployed for policy learning, WVM improves manipulation performance across various policy extraction approaches in both simulated and real-world deployment, providing robust guidance for learning from mixed-quality data.
Jun 22, 2026

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full foundation-model backbone. This makes formal analysis tractable with existing tools while preserving the Controller's expressive power for task reasoning. To show that the decomposed policy remains capable of solving diverse tasks, we evaluate FEARL on three simulated robotic domains using multiple Controller backbones and training procedures, including pretrained off-the-shelf vision-language-action models. We further transfer the learned policy from one of our simulated tasks to a physical robot, suggesting that the low-dimensional safety interface supports practical sim-to-real transfer.
Jun 20, 2026

RoboLineage: Agent-Native Data Lifecycle Governance Across Robot Policy Iterations

We present RoboLineage, an agent-native data lifecycle governance system for robot policy iteration. Modern robot policies improve through repeated data collection, review, retraining, evaluation, and release decisions, but the evidence connecting these steps is often scattered across local tools, scripts, and expert memory. RoboLineage makes this lifecycle explicit by representing rollouts, reviews, dataset decisions, training runs, policy metadata, evaluations, deployment recommendations, and next-collection plans as typed lineage artifacts. Agents interpret embodied rollout evidence, adapt accepted data to existing training stacks, maintain data health, and summarize cross-iteration state under explicit artifact boundaries. In real-robot manipulation workflows, RoboLineage makes routine policy iteration faster and more auditable while maintaining downstream policy performance. We open source RoboLineage as a lightweight lifecycle layer for different robot embodiments and training families. Project page: https://robolineage.github.io/
Jun 19, 2026

Remember what you did?: Learning Behavioral Memories for Partially Observable Object Manipulation

Long horizon, contact-rich manipulation is inherently partially observable. This is as a single visual observation rarely captures a robot's full action context, including prior attempts, interactions, or progress. Consequently, standard visuomotor policies or vision-language-action models are prone to struggle in such tasks due to a lack of memory. To address this, we introduce Compressed Action Memory Policy (CAMP) based on the insight that a robot's own action history serves as a highly informative, self-supervised signal, enabling the policy to learn a robust, compact history representation. In our approach, we train a memory module to maintain a compressed representation of past actions, forcing it to encode a latent behavioral memory of all the robot's past interactions that can then be used to better contextualize future actions. This allows our approach to implicitly track generalized task progress and learn from failed attempts without any additional supervision, or external oversight. We evaluate CAMP across four real-robot setups and two novel simulation benchmarks: Memory-T-Bench and Memory-Manip-Bench. By demonstrating substantial gains over state-of-the-art baselines, CAMP is, to our knowledge, the first policy to demonstrate substantial success on contact-rich partially observable manipulation tasks purely through learned memory.
Jun 19, 2026

PoLAR: Factorizing Extent and Mode in Latent Actions for Robot Policy Learning

Robot actions vary in both extent and mode: how much change they produce and what kind of change they produce. A latent action space that reflects this structure may make it easier for downstream policies to map latent actions to robot actions. However, existing latent action methods typically rely on visual reconstruction from observation pairs without explicitly encouraging such structure. We introduce Polar Latent Actions with Radial structure (PoLAR), which imposes a radial-direction structure on latent actions, encouraging radius to encode transition extent and direction to retain transition mode. PoLAR uses temporal offsets between observations as a weak proxy for transition extent, encouraging transitions with larger offsets to occupy larger radii. We instantiate this structure in hyperbolic space, whose expanding volume with radius offers a natural fit for more diverse transition modes at larger extents. Across in-task and large-scale pretraining settings, PoLAR improves downstream policy performance in simulation and real-world robot experiments, outperforming latent action baselines and strong pretrained VLAs. These results suggest that structuring latent actions by extent and mode helps transfer visual pretraining to robot policy learning.
Jun 19, 2026

BayesFP: Posterior Estimation for Flow-Based Policies via Feynman-Kac Sampling

Robots must generate trajectories that remain faithful to learned expert behavior while satisfying safety constraints and task-specific objectives specified only at inference time. We formulate constrained trajectory generation for pretrained diffusion and flow-matching policies as Bayesian posterior sampling, with the learned demonstration distribution as a prior and an inference-time, cost-derived likelihood tilting it toward feasible, optimal trajectories. To sample from this posterior without any retraining of the base policy, we leverage the Feynman--Kac corrector framework, originally formulated for diffusion models, and extend it to deterministic flow-matching policies. The result is a unified, inference-time, retraining-free sampler for diffusion and flow policies. We validate the approach on pretrained Diffusion Policy, GR00T-N1.6, and π0.5π_{0.5} checkpoints across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, including planning around non-convex obstacles introduced at inference time, and show improvements over the base π0.5π_{0.5} on zero-shot tasks.
Jun 18, 2026

When to Personalize Household Object Search: A Rigidity-Gated Hybrid Policy

Service robots searching for household objects rely on spatial priors to reduce search cost, yet object locations can vary with resident traits. Collecting longitudinal, trait-specific in-home trajectories is invasive and hard to scale. We study when personalization helps and propose PerSim, a rigidity-gated hybrid policy that combines a trait-conditioned prior with a population-frequency baseline, personalizing only when placement behavior is variable. To scale resident-conditioned dynamics, we employ a human-calibrated simulation pipeline to generate and validate object-placement transitions in diverse home layouts, and train a predictor that injects continuous Big Five vectors to output room-level priors and within-room co-occurrence cues. In a unified human study (N=200), dual-layer validation shows that (i) synthetic transitions are judged behaviorally plausible (mean 3.85/5, p < 1e-6), and (ii) in a blinded A/B comparison, personalization is favored primarily for low-rigidity objects (p=0.005), while the population-frequency baseline remains strong for universally placed items, yielding a decision rule for when to personalize. In an offline objective test, we observe a small but significant improvement on unseen continuous trait vectors over nearest discrete configuration matching (p=0.035), supporting interpolation in five-dimensional trait space. Finally, in a home digital twin we show that PerSim reduces expected search cost by combining room visitation effort with within-room cue checking, demonstrating end-to-end gains beyond isolated prediction metrics.
Jun 18, 2026

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.
Jun 18, 2026

EquiVLA: A General Framework for Rotationally Equivariant Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generalist robot manipulation, yet they lack geometric inductive biases: policies trained at specific orientations require substantially more data to generalize across rotational configurations. We present EquiVLA, the first general framework for end-to-end SO(2)\mathrm{SO}(2)-equivariant VLA models, applicable to any architecture coupling a frozen vision-language backbone with a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer action head. EquiVLA introduces EquiPerceptor, which produces approximately SO(2)\mathrm{SO}(2)-equivariant visual representations from frozen ViT features; and EquiActor, an exactly SO(2)\mathrm{SO}(2)-equivariant flow-matching Diffusion Transformer action head. Together, they establish an approximate SO(2)\mathrm{SO}(2) equivariance chain from camera observations to predicted action sequences. Instantiated on GR00T~N1.5 and evaluated across four LIBERO suites, CALVIN ABCD→\toD, and five real-robot tasks on Mobile ALOHA, EquiVLA achieves 92.6%92.6\% average success on LIBERO (vs. 78.1%78.1\% baseline), an average sequence length of 4.034.03 on CALVIN (vs. 3.453.45), and improves real-robot success from 54%54\% to 72%72\%.
Jun 18, 2026

Start Right, Arrive Right: Asynchronous Execution via Initial Noise Selection

Action chunking enables robot policies to produce temporally coherent behavior, but generating multi-step action sequences with flow-based policies incurs latency that is incompatible with real-time control. Under asynchronous execution, the robot continues executing the current chunk while the next one is generated, causing even minor delays to create inconsistencies at chunk boundaries. Existing methods address this problem by steering generation toward the already executed action prefix. We instead show that prefix consistency can be achieved by selecting an appropriate initial noise before generation begins, allowing the unmodified flow ODE to produce a coherent next chunk. This establishes initial-noise selection as a complementary approach to gradient-based asynchronous execution. We introduce PAINT, a training-free method that finds this noise via backward Euler inversion and constructs the final chunk through a repainting rule. In summary, PAINT requires no gradients, retraining, or policy modification; and achieves task performance comparable to RTC while improving prefix consistency across 12 simulated benchmarks and 6 real-world manipulation tasks spanning single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid embodiments. Project site is available at: ~https://paint-action-chunking.github.io.