Overview

Robotic policy evaluation asks whether a learned controller can complete tasks reliably, recover from disturbances, follow instructions, and transfer across objects, environments, embodiments, and long-horizon settings. Researchers use simulation and real-robot benchmarks, paired perturbation and recovery tests, process-level video or trajectory metrics, and statistically rigorous comparisons rather than relying only on binary success rates. Other approaches estimate performance with offline fitted-value methods or action-conditioned world models and calibrated simulators, aiming to reduce costly hardware rollouts. The central tension is scalability versus validity: simulators and learned judges can cut evaluation costs but may miss physical or compositional failures, so their predictions need real-world validation and richer diagnostics.

Latest papers

CardsList

126 papers34 papers in the last four weeks, up 26% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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

    Jun 29, 2026Haoxu Huang, Tongsam Zheng, Yifan Chen +2Robot Policy LearningOff-Policy Evaluation

  2. SimFoundry: Modular and Automated Scene Generation for Policy Learning and Evaluation

    Jun 26, 2026Nadun Ranawaka, Josiah Wong, Wei-Lin Pai +15Robotics SimulationSim-to-Real Transfer

  3. IOI: Decoupling Kinematics and Physics for Interactive World Models

    Jun 22, 2026Chengyu Bai, Peidong Jia, Tiecheng Guo +11Action-Conditioned Video GenerationWorld Models for Robotics

  4. Robot Critics that Sweat the Small Stuff

    Jun 19, 2026Sruthi Sudhakar, Junbang Liang, Sreehari Rammohan +3Robot Task Progress EstimationRobot Failure Detection

  5. Inductive Generalization for Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 19, 2026Annabella Macaluso, Haochen Zhang, Ishaan Masilamony +2OOD GeneralizationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  6. SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

    Jun 17, 2026Wei-Cheng Tseng, Gashon Hussein, Yuzhu Dong +9Action-Conditioned Video GenerationPhysical Consistency in Video Generation

  7. EBench: Elemental Diagnosis of Generalist Mobile Manipulation Policies

    Jun 16, 2026Ning Gao, Jinliang Zheng, Xing Gao +22Mobile ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  8. X4Val: Learning Neural Surrogates for Variance-Reduced Policy Evaluation

    Jun 3, 2026Rachel Luo, Michael Watson, Apoorva Sharma +6Off-Policy EvaluationRobotic Policy Evaluation

  9. Beyond Task Success: Behavioral and Representational Diagnostics for WAM and VLA

    May 31, 2026Hung Mai, Bin Zhu, Tuan DoWorld Models for RoboticsRobotic Policy Evaluation

  10. StressDream: Steering Video World Models for Robust Policy Evaluation and Improvement

    May 29, 2026Junwon Seo, Sushant Veer, Ran Tian +6Video Diffusion ModelsAction-Conditioned World Models

  11. Per-Group Error, Not Total MSE: Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models for 11-DoF Mobile Manipulation

    May 29, 2026Pau Montagut Bofi, Mario García Blasco, Tessa Pulli +1Mobile ManipulationVLM Adaptation

  12. Nautilus: From One Prompt to Plug-and-Play Robot Learning

    May 12, 2026Yufeng Jin, Jianfei Guo, Xiaogang Jia +8Robotic Policy EvaluationAgentic Code Generation

  13. Offline Policy Evaluation for Manipulation Policies via Discounted Liveness Formulation

    May 12, 2026Hao Wang, Joshua Bowden, Colton Crosby +1RL for RoboticsReinforcement Learning

  14. dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model

    Apr 24, 2026Yaxuan Li, Zhongyi Zhou, Yefei Chen +2World Models for RoboticsRobotic Policy Evaluation

  15. RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies

    Apr 10, 2026Jenai Xuning Yang, Rishit Dagli, Alex Zook +5Robotic Policy EvaluationRobot Policy Generalization

  16. Evolving Skill Modules under a Fixed Planner: Versioning, Rollback, and Runtime Governance for Long-Lived Robot Systems

    Apr 9, 2026Xue Qin, Simin Luan, Cong Yang +1Robotic Policy EvaluationRobot Safety

  17. RoboPlayground: Democratizing Robotic Evaluation through Structured Physical Domains

    Apr 6, 2026Yi Ru Wang, Carter Ung, Evan Gubarev +3Robotic Policy EvaluationRobotics

  18. PRM-as-a-Judge: A Dense Evaluation Paradigm for Fine-Grained Robotic Auditing

    Mar 23, 2026Yuheng Ji, Yuyang Liu, Huajie Tan +15Robotic Policy EvaluationProcess Reward Models

  19. Beyond Binary Success: Sample-Efficient and Statistically Rigorous Robot Policy Comparison

    Mar 13, 2026David Snyder, Apurva Badithela, Nikolai Matni +4Robotic Policy EvaluationSequential Hypothesis Testing

  20. Grounding Robot Generalization in Training Data via Retrieval-Augmented VLMs

    Mar 12, 2026Jensen Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Sandy Huang +1Robotic Policy EvaluationRobot Policy Generalization