arXiv:2608. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
The paper introduces a minimal‑data adaptation regime where a pretrained robot policy learns a new task from a single demonstration followed by autonomous online interaction. It shows that while zero‑shot performance is poor, one demonstration can guide the policy toward coarse task‑following, and identifies key design principles—pretrained VLA representations for sample‑efficient value learning, residual policy learning for corrective behavior, and data‑balancing to avoid exploration collapse. The proposed MiDAS method, combining few‑demonstration behavior cloning with value‑based residual learning over frozen VLA representations, significantly boosts task success on LIBERO, RoboCasa, and a bimanual YAM platform after only a few hours of online interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this improvement to scale across tasks, it must make effe...
arXiv:2609.38178v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this i...
By Zihang Rui, Renhao Wang, Haoxu Huang, Yang Gao
The paper introduces PARTS, a real‑world subtask reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes a pretrained robot policy by focusing on critical bottleneck subtasks while keeping the base policy frozen. It uses agent‑generated selectors and success verifiers to provide local rewards, enabling learning even when full‑task successes are rare. Experiments on bimanual YAM and single‑arm Franka robots show that PARTS raises complete‑task success from 32% to 61% and from 50% to 95%, respectively, with only tens of minutes of real‑world RL rollouts and minimal human intervention.
By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun
arXiv:2604.00055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Existing robotic foundation policies are trained primarily via large-scale imitation learning. While such models demonstrate strong capabilit...
By Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi, Xiaojie Wang, Evan Sheehan, Anurag Shivaprasad, Yaqi Xie, Katia Sycara, Yesh Dattatreya
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
arXiv:2608. 09853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored.
By Dongchi Huang, Hongyin Zhang, Bohan Hou, Siteng Huang, Zhian Su, Hang Guo, Tong Lu, Zhaofeng Xu, Jiahao Tang, Jianfei Yang, Donglin Wang, Peixi Peng, Mingxiu Chen, Deli Zhao, Xin Li
arXiv:2604. 09860v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of general-purpose robotics has yielded impressive foundation models, yet simulation-based benchmarking remains a bottleneck due to rapid performance saturation and a lack of true generalization testing.
By Jenai Xuning Yang, Rishit Dagli, Alex Zook, Hugo Hadfield, Ankit Goyal, Stan Birchfield, Fabio Ramos, Jonathan Tremblay
arXiv:2610.19129v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Training from offline data has allowed for substantial progress in domains such as robotics, leading to general-purpose policies that can be easily app...
By Daniel Lawson, Dhruv Sreenivas, Adriana Hugessen, Khimya Khetarpal, Glen Berseth
arXiv:2610.20318v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement-learning policies for robot locomotion can fail at deployment when operating conditions shift (e.g., rough or slippery terrain, payload...
By Motasem Alfarra, Pietro Mazzaglia, Markus Peschl, Daniel Dijkman, Christos Louizos
arXiv:2606. 18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time.
By Mingtong Zhang, Dhruv Shah