Robotic RL

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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28 papers in the last four weeks, up 180% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

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RDA: Reward Design Agent for Reinforcement Learning
Jun 1, 2026Hojoon Lee, Ajay Subramanian, Ben Abbatematteo +4Agentic RL Reinforcement Learning
Meta · Holiday Robotics · Boston Dynamics
Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation: Optimal Transport and Graph-Driven Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation
Jun 1, 2026Xiang Fang, Wanlong Fang, Changshuo WangRobot Navigation Robotic RL
School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme University College London
All Models are Wrong, Knowing Where is Useful: On Model Uncertainty in Reinforcement Learning
May 31, 2026Bernd Frauenknecht, Devdutt Subhasish, Artur Eisele +2Robotic RL Safe RL
Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52062 Aachen, Germany
Lagrangian Perturbation Diffusion Steering: Latent Reinforcement Learning for Generative Policies
May 31, 2026Hikmet Simsir, Ozgur S. OguzRobot Policy Adaptation Reinforcement Learning
Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Türkiye.
Shape Your Body: Value Gradients for Multi-Embodiment Robot Design
May 30, 2026Nico Bohlinger, Jan PetersCross-Embodiment Robot Learning Robotic RL
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG); German Research Center for AI (DFKI); hessian.AI
Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots
May 29, 2026Khurram Javed, Joseph Modayil, Gloria Kennickell +2RL Benchmarks Reinforcement Learning
Keen Technologies · Openmind Research Institute · University of Alberta, Canada
When are LLMs Sufficient Policy Optimizers for Sequential RL Tasks?
May 29, 2026Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, Emma BrunskillLanguage Model-Based Control Policy Optimization
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
UniLab: A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms
May 28, 2026Yufei Jia, Zhanxiang Cao, Mingrui Yu +48Robot Policy Learning Robotics Simulation
Sample-Efficient Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning with Critic Guidance
May 28, 2026Shutong Ding, Zejia Zhong, Zhongyi Wang +4Diffusion Guidance Robotic RL
1ShanghaiTech University.
VE2VF: Vision-Enabled to Vision-Free Distillation via Real-world Reinforcement Learning for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation
May 28, 2026Victor Kowalski, Chengxi Li, Dongheui LeeCross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Robot Skill Learning
Autonomous Systems, Technische Universitaet Wien (TU Wien), Vienna, Austria · Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics (DLR), German Aerospace Center, Wessling, Germany
Ratio-Variance Regularized Policy Optimization
May 26, 2026Yu Luo, Shuo Han, Yihan Hu +5RL for Language Model Reasoning Policy Optimization
Department of Foundation Model, 2012 Labs, Huawei Shanghai · Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University +1
EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models
May 25, 2026Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao +2Robot Skill Learning Robotic RL
Stanford University
Q-SpiRL: Quantum Spiking Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Robot Navigation
May 20, 2026Mohamed Khair Altrabulsi, Nouhaila Innan, Alberto Marchisio +2Robot Navigation Robotic RL
1eBRAIN Lab, Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Abu Dhabi, UAE · Center for Quantum and Topological Systems (CQTS), NYUAD Research Institute, NYUAD, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Compositional Transduction with Latent Analogies for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
May 20, 2026Junseok Kim, Dohyeong Kim, Mineui Hong +1Reinforcement Learning Robotic RL
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and ASRI, Seoul National University · Independent researcher · Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
RoHIL: Robust Human-in-the-Loop Robotic Reinforcement Learning Against Illumination Variations
May 19, 2026Shuoqin Zhang, Yixin Xiong, Xiru Gao +4Distribution Shift Robustness Robot Skill Learning
Chongqing University · Chengdu Anu Intelligence
ManiSoft: Towards Vision-Language Manipulation for Soft Continuum Robotics
May 18, 2026Ziyu Wei, Luting Wang, Chen Gao +2Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Robotic RL
Beihang University · Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University · National University of Singapore
EUPHORIA: Efficient Universal Planning via Hybrid Optimization for Robust Industrial Robotic Assembly
May 15, 2026Shih-Yu Lai, Chia-Ching Yen, Yang-Ting Shen +3Robotic Construction Meta-Learning
National Taiwan University · MoonShine Animation Studio · National Cheng Kung University +2
OHP-RL: Online Human Preference as Guidance in Reinforcement Learning for Robot Manipulation
May 15, 2026Yunyang Mo, Jian Li, Qiwei Wu +2Robotic RL Human-in-the-Loop AI
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
NavRL++: A System-Level Framework for Improving Sim-to-Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning-Based Robot Navigation
May 15, 2026Zhefan Xu, Hanyu Jin, Kenji ShimadaRobot Policy Learning Robot Navigation
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
What to Ignore, What to React: Visually Robust RL Fine-Tuning of VLA Models
May 13, 2026Yuanfang Peng, Jingjing Fu, Chuheng Zhang +6VLM Robustness Domain Generalization
1Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · 2Microsoft Research Asia · 3Zhejiang University
Adaptive Smooth Tchebycheff Attention for Multi-Objective Policy Optimization
May 12, 2026Alejandro Murillo-Gonzalez, Mahmoud Ali, Lantao LiuMulti-Objective Reinforcement Learning Policy Optimization
Indiana University–Bloomington
3D RL-DWA: A Hybrid Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Window Approach for Goal-Directed Local Navigation in Multi-DoF Robots
May 12, 2026Chiara Castellani, Enrico Turco, Domenico PrattichizzoRobotic Control Robot Navigation
Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 16163, Genoa, Italy · Dept. of Information Engineering and Mathematics University of Siena 53100, Siena, Italy
TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuning
May 12, 2026Matthew M. Hong, Jesse Zhang, Anusha Nagabandi +1Robot Policy Adaptation Robot Skill Learning
University of Washington · Amazon FAR
EvoNav: Evolutionary Reward Function Design for Robot Navigation with Large Language Models
May 12, 2026Zhikai Zhao, Chuanbo Hua, Federico Berto +4Evolutionary Optimization Robot Navigation
1KAIST · 2Radical Numerics · 3UC Riverside +1
RankQ: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Action Ranking
May 11, 2026Andrew Choi, Wei XuQ-Learning Robotic RL
Horizon Robotics
XQCfD: Accelerating Fast Actor-Critic Algorithms with Prior Data and Prior Policies
May 11, 2026Daniel Palenicek, Florian Vogt, Joe Watson +3Robotic RL Learning from Demonstration
Technical University of Darmstadt · KTH Royal Institute of Technology · University of Oxford +2
Active Embodiment Identification with Reinforcement Learning for Legged Robots
May 8, 2026Nico Bohlinger, Jan PetersLegged Robotics Robotic RL
Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG); German Research Center for AI (DFKI); hessian.AI.
When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning
May 6, 2026Lakshita Dodeja, Ondrej Biza, Shivam Vats +5Q-Learning Robotic RL
1Robotics and AI Institute · 2Brown University · 3Northeastern University
LineRides: Line-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Bicycle Robot Stunts
May 6, 2026Seungeun Rho, Shamel Fahmi, Jeonghwan Kim +3Reinforcement Learning Robot Skill Learning
1RAI Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
SOAR: Real-Time Joint Optimization of Order Allocation and Robot Scheduling in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems
May 5, 2026Yibang Tang, Yifan Yang, Jingyuan Wang +2Mobile Robotics Robotic RL
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Geekplus Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, China

Jun 1, 2026, cs.LGJ/K move · Enter open · S save

RDA: Reward Design Agent for Reinforcement Learning

Hojoon Lee, Ajay Subramanian, Ben Abbatematteo, Vijay Veerabadran+3

Meta · Holiday Robotics · Boston Dynamics

Agentic RL Reinforcement Learning Robot Skill Learning Robotic RL Reward Design for RL

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Reinforcement learning has enabled the acquisition of impressive robotic skills, but typically requires hand-crafted reward functions that are slow to design and difficult to align with human intentions. Recent work, such as Eureka, automates reward design by using an LLM to iteratively generate and refine reward code from task descriptions. However, they rely on coarse feedback signals such as success rate, which provide little semantic insight into the learned behavior. As a result, their trained policies achieve the final goal but are frequently poorly aligned with task instructions. We introduce the Reward Design Agent (RDA), a VLM-based agentic framework that injects semantic understanding into reward design. RDA decomposes tasks, visually evaluates trajectories, summarizes failure modes, and iteratively revises reward code to better align with task instructions. Across 12 tabletop manipulation tasks from ManiSkill and 4 whole-body manipulation tasks from HumanoidBench, RDA produces policies substantially more instruction-aligned than those of other baselines, while achieving comparable task success rates. Videos and the generated reward code are available on https://nitinkamra1992.github.io/reward-design-agent.

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