Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

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Overview

Zero-shot robotic manipulation studies how robots can carry out new tasks and interact with unfamiliar objects or environments without task-specific demonstrations or fine-tuning. Approaches combine vision-language models and language-guided planning with geometric grounding, affordance representations, object-centric policies, and closed-loop feedback; other work learns transferable skills from human videos or scales synthetic data and simulation for sim-to-real transfer. Evaluation spans tabletop and long-horizon tasks, dexterous and contact-rich manipulation, and transfer across objects, viewpoints, robots, and real-world settings. A central challenge is turning broad semantic generalization into precise, reliable physical control, especially under occlusion, changing contact dynamics, and compounding errors during long tasks.

Latest papers

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103 papers26 papers in the last four weeks, up 117% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Force-Driven Hook Disassembly via Constraint-Aware Object-Centric Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 28, 2026Nadeen Elhadad, Takuya Kiyokawa, Kensuke HaradaRobotic ManipulationReinforcement Learning

    N. Elhadad, T. Kiyokawa, and K. Harada are with the Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan. · K. Harada is with the Industrial Cyber-physical Systems Research Center, The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-3-26 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

  2. RoboSTD: Zero-Shot Single-to-Dual Transfer via Sagittal Mirroring for Bimanual Learning

    Oct 27, 2026Hongyu Wu, Chong Liu, Shaoxuan Xie +4Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobot Imitation Learning

    Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

  3. Pretraining Knows What, Simulation Teaches How: Compositional Generalization in a Sim-Trained Robot Agent

    Oct 26, 2026Benjamin Pikus, Daniel Saunders, Mircea Mironenco +11Generalization in Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

    Luma AI

  4. Zero-HLM: Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation without Real Robot Data

    Oct 26, 2026Dianyi Yang, Mengya Liu, Zhumei Wang +9Humanoid Loco-ManipulationSim-to-Real Transfer

    Beijing Institute of Technology · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI · Tsinghua University +1

  5. How High Can GPT-6 Astra Climb in Contact-Rich Manipulation? PhysLadder: A Hierarchical, Matched Sim-Real Benchmark for Physical Interaction

    Oct 25, 2026Haibao Yu, Jiaqi Meng, Zijian Zhang +16Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    Tuojing Intelligence · The University of Hong Kong · Chinese Academy of Sciences +10

  6. From Reasoning to Action: Benchmarking Frontier AI Models on LIBERO-10 Robot Manipulation Tasks

    Oct 21, 2026May Espinola, Qifan Zhang, Yu XiangRobotic ManipulationZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas

  7. Robot Generalization Beyond Volume: The Diversity Path via Zero-Shot Capabilities

    Oct 21, 2026Rafael Felix, Flavia YanaseRobot Policy GeneralizationRobot Learning

    runibiLABS

  8. Large Multimodal Models for Direct Robot Control: GPT-6 as a Beginning

    Oct 20, 2026Youwei Zhou, Bohan Hou, Yankai Fu +10Robotic ManipulationZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Nanjing University · Nanyang Technological University · Peking University +2

  9. Learning to Compose: Recursive Self-Improvement of Shared Executable Stacks for Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation

    Oct 17, 2026Yangzhi Chen, Feiran Liu, Zishuo Wang +4Robotic ManipulationRecursive Self-Improvement

    Beijing Jiaotong University · New York University · University of Southern California +2

  10. No Eyes, No Problem: What Does Touch Contribute to Blind Baoding Ball Manipulation?

    Oct 16, 2026Ayush Deshmukh, Nalin Agarwal, Elle Miller +1In-Hand ManipulationZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    All authors are with the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

  11. MoCaP: Mobile Code-as-Policies for Zero-Shot Mobile Manipulation from Passive Human Videos

    Oct 14, 2026Yiyang Cai, Tatsuya Kamijo, Ninghao Lu +2Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationMobile Manipulation

    New York University, New York, NY, USA. · Fudan University, Shanghai, China. · NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China.

  12. TGrasp6D: Task-Informed Vision-Language Priors and Pose Refinement enable Zero-Shot Task-Oriented 6DoF Grasping

    Oct 14, 2026Manav Kulshrestha, Apoorva Vashisth, Damon Conover +1Robotic GraspingZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Manav Kulshrestha, S. Apoorva Vashisth, and Aniket Bera are with the IDEAS Lab, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. · Damon Conover is with the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA.

  13. Collective Learning for Unified Robotic Manipulation via Predictive Dynamics Adaptation

    Oct 13, 2026Shaocheng Liu, Yuan Meng, Zhenshan Bing +1Robotic ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany. · State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology and the School of Science and Technology, Nanjing University (Suzhou Campus), China.

  14. VLMs are Native Action Models: Unleashing the Manipulation Capabilities of VLMs with Explicit Action-Space Grounding

    Oct 9, 2026Jingkun Yi, Shujie Zhang, Zirui Zhou +8VLMs for RoboticsZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Zhejiang University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Tsinghua University

  15. Embodied Zero-Shot Task Planning via Hardware-Aware LLM-VLM Integration for Grounded Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 8, 2026Lonnie Tankersley, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Soroush KorivandRobotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    dept. of Aerospace Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS · dept. of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL · dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS

  16. CASTER: Formalizing Zero-Shot Manipulation from Synthetic Videos as Constrained Optimization

    Oct 8, 2026Yinlong Dai, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Dylan P. LoseyZero-Shot Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Collab, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. · B3, Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

  17. Dex-One2Many: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Human Demonstration

    Oct 8, 2026Jusuk Lee, Sungha Kim, Yeonsoo Park +8Robotic ManipulationLearning from Demonstration

    Seoul National University · University of Maryland, College Park · All Purpose AI +1

  18. VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data

    Oct 8, 2026Mert Albaba, Jens Beißwenger, Anna Manasyan +6Humanoid Robot ControlRobot Imitation Learning

    Vesoma · ETH Zürich · MPI-IS +2

  19. ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models

    Oct 8, 2026Gokul Puthumanaillam, Tao Sun, Elie Aljalbout +5Robot Foundation ModelsReasoning for VLA Models

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · NVIDIA · Stanford University +2

  20. SimVLA: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Learning for Mobile Manipulation

    Oct 8, 2026Kyoungin Baik, Youngwoon LeeSim-to-Real TransferVision-Language-Action Models

    Yonsei University · Seoul National University

  21. Video Prediction Policy 2: Predict Better, Act Better

    Oct 7, 2026Yanjiang Guo, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong +15Visuomotor Policy LearningWorld Action Models

    Robotera · Tsinghua University · HKUST (GZ) +2

  22. RoboRender: Robot-Oriented Video Generation for Visual Sim-to-Real Transfer

    Oct 7, 2026Huang Huang, Wensi Ai, Ziyu Chen +6Sim-to-Real TransferSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

    Stanford University · Nvidia · Microsoft Research

  23. TacZero: Training-Free Peg Insertion Using a General-Purpose Vision-Language Model with Tactile Feedback

    Oct 6, 2026Kazutoshi TanakaZero-Shot Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

  24. Autonomous Droplet Navigation via Model-Based Reinforcement Learning: Zero-Shot Transfer and Emergent Dynamics

    Oct 3, 2026Rajneesh Anand, Mayuresh V. KothareRobotic ManipulationAutonomous Experimentation

    Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA

  25. MixVLA: Adaptive Mixing of Non-Invariant Information for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Models

    Oct 2, 2026Pingrui Zhang, Yu Zhang, Pengyuan Wu +8Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobustness of VLA Models

    Fudan University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China +2

  26. Skill2Real: Agentic Skill Learning for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Robot Manipulation

    Oct 2, 2026Xincheng He, Siyu Ma, Chang Yu +5Robot Skill LearningSim-to-Real Transfer

    University of California, Los Angeles · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Utah +1

  27. OpenRUA: Robot-Use Agents Are Zero-Shot Visuomotor Policies

    Oct 1, 2026Zhaoyang Chu, Earl T. Barr, Claire Le Goues +4Agentic AI for RoboticsZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    University College London · Carnegie Mellon University

  28. HiWE: Hierarchical World Knowledge Model with Visual Keypoint Enhancement for Zero-Shot 3D Path Planning

    Sep 30, 2026Guoqing Ma, Mingqi Yuan, Chen Gao +2Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, CAS +2

  29. MotorMind: Scaffolding General Vision Language Models for Zero-Shot Robot Manipulation

    Sep 29, 2026Bingxuan Li, Siqi Song, Yizhuo Wu +3Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  30. UMR: Universal Manipulation Representation

    Sep 28, 2026Song Liu, Linyi Li, Yanshun Zhao +11Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. · Suzhou Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Suzhou, China.