Robot Skill Learning

Ask about this topic

Overview

Robot skill learning asks how machines can acquire reusable behaviors—such as grasping, insertion, locomotion, and tool use—and apply them in new situations. Common approaches include imitation learning from robot or human demonstrations, reinforcement learning in simulation and on hardware, and learned motion primitives or diffusion and vision-language-action policies. Researchers organize behaviors into skill libraries, hierarchies, or programs so robots can compose them for longer tasks, while using tactile feedback, language, and human corrections to adapt execution. A central challenge is making skills transfer reliably across objects, scenes, and robot bodies without losing earlier abilities; success on individual skills still does not guarantee robust long-horizon composition.

Latest papers

CardsList

323 papers48 papers in the last four weeks, up 92% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Uni-Skill: Building Self-Evolving Skill Repository for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 3, 2026Senwei Xie, Yuntian Zhang, Ruiping Wang +1Robot Skill LearningRobot Learning

    Key Laboratory of AI Safety of CAS, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

  2. Towards Robot Skill Learning and Adaptation with Gaussian Processes

    Mar 2, 2026A K M Nadimul Haque, Fouad Sukkar, Sheila Sutjipto +3Robot Skill LearningRobot Learning

  3. SimToolReal: An Object-Centric Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Tool Manipulation

    Feb 18, 2026Kushal Kedia, Tyler Ga Wei Lum, Jeannette Bohg +1Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Cornell University · Stanford University

  4. Dex4D: Task-Agnostic Point Track Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation

    Feb 17, 2026Yuxuan Kuang, Sungjae Park, Katerina Fragkiadaki +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Carnegie Mellon University

  5. Perceptive Humanoid Parkour: Chaining Dynamic Human Skills via Motion Matching

    Feb 17, 2026Zhen Wu, Xiaoyu Huang, Lujie Yang +8Humanoid Robot LocomotionRobot Skill Learning

    Amazon FAR · UC Berkeley · CMU +1

  6. Simulation-based Learning of Electrical Cabinet Assembly Using Robot Skills

    Feb 16, 2026Arik Laemmle, Balázs András Bálint, Philipp Tenbrock +4Robotic AssemblyRobot Skill Learning

    formerly Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, Stuttgart, Germany · formerly Institut für Strahlwerkzeuge IFSW, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany · Research Laboratory on Engineering and Management Intelligence, Institute for Computer Science and Control SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary +1

  7. TWISTED-RL: Hierarchical Skilled Agents for Knot-Tying without Human Demonstrations

    Feb 16, 2026Guy Freund, Tom Jurgenson, Matan Sudry +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Reichman University · Technion – Israel Institute of Technology · The University of Texas at Austin

  8. HumanX: Toward Agile and Generalizable Humanoid Interaction Skills from Human Videos

    Feb 2, 2026Yinhuai Wang, Qihan Zhao, Yuen Fui Lau +6Robot Skill LearningHumanoid Robotics

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Shanghai AI Laboratory

  9. Sim-and-Human Co-training for Data-Efficient and Scene-Generalizable Bimanual Manipulation

    Jan 27, 2026Kaipeng Fang, Weiqing Liang, Yuyang Li +5Robot Skill LearningBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Southwest Jiaotong University · Tongji University +1

  10. Skill-Aware Diffusion for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

    Jan 16, 2026Aoshen Huang, Jiaming Chen, Jiyu Cheng +3Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan 250061, China. · Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, M13 9PL Manchester, U.K.

  11. World In Your Hands: A Large-Scale and Open-Source Ecosystem for Learning Human-Centric Manipulation in the Wild

    Dec 30, 2025Yupeng Zheng, Jichao Peng, Weize Li +22Human-Object InteractionRobot Skill Learning

    TARS Robotics

  12. Learning Semantic Atomic Skills for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

    Dec 20, 2025Yihang Zhu, Weiqing Wang, Shijie Wu +2Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · InstAdapt

  13. ISS Policy : Scalable Diffusion Policy with Implicit Scene Supervision

    Dec 17, 2025Wenlong Xia, Jinhao Zhang, Ce Zhang +6Robot Skill LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

    [cs.RO]

  14. Learning Category-level Last-meter Navigation from RGB Demonstrations of a Single-instance

    Dec 11, 2025Tzu-Hsien Lee, Fidan Mahmudova, Karthik DesinghRobot Skill LearningRobot Navigation

    University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

  15. Continually Evolving Skill Knowledge in Vision Language Action Model

    Nov 22, 2025Yuxuan Wu, Guangming Wang, Zhiheng Yang +4Continual Learning for VLA ModelsContinual Robot Learning

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · University of Cambridge +4

  16. XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representations

    Nov 4, 2025Shichao Fan, Kun Wu, Zhengping Che +12Representation LearningRobot Skill Learning

    Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, SCSE, Beihang University, Beijing, China +1

  17. Robotic Ultra-Long-Horizon Manipulation Skills via Human-guided Lifelong Code Generation

    Sep 23, 2025Yuan Meng, Zhenguo Sun, Max Fest +4Code Generation for RoboticsLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    School of Computation, Information and Technology Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Beijing, China · The State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology Nanjing University Suzhou, China

  18. GeCCo -- a Generalist Contact-Conditioned Policy for Loco-Manipulation Skills on Legged Robots

    Sep 22, 2025Vassil Atanassov, Wanming Yu, Siddhant Gangapurwala +2Robotic ControlLegged Robotics

    Dynamic Robot Systems Group, Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford · Sony AI · Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology

  19. Imagine2Act: Leveraging Object-Action Motion Consistency from Imagined Goals for Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 21, 2025Liang Heng, Jiadong Xu, Yiwen Wang +6Robot Skill LearningLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University · PrimeBot · AGIBOT

  20. Physics-Guided Residual Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Narrow-Path Traversal

    Aug 28, 2025Tianchen Huang, Sisheng Chen, Wei Zhou +8Humanoid Robot LocomotionRobot Skill Learning

    Institute of Humanoid Robots, Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China

  21. Rational Inverse Reasoning: Few-Shot Imitation by Inferring Intent through Planning

    Aug 12, 2025Ben Zandonati, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack KaelblingRobot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    MIT CSAIL

  22. Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming

    Jul 15, 2025Asad Ali Shahid, Francesco Braghin, Loris RovedaLong-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    IDSIA, SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

  23. Prior Reinforce: Goal-Conditioned Dynamic Manipulation with Limited Trials

    May 28, 2025Yihang Hu, Pingyue Sheng, Yuyang Liu +2Robot Policy AdaptationRobot Skill Learning

    IIIS, Tsinghua University. · Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute. · Spirit AI.