arXiv AI

Retiming Robot Demonstrations with a Learned Speed Prior

The paper introduces a learned speed prior that predicts a distribution over execution speed for robot demonstrations, allowing consistent retiming across tasks. By applying this prior to both robot teleoperation and handheld demonstrations, the authors retime demonstrations to a handheld pace before fine‑tuning a vision‑language‑action policy. Experiments on 120 RoboLab tasks and a real robot show that policies trained with the learned clocks achieve higher success rates and smoother motion, outperforming policies fine‑tuned on original or uniformly accelerated timings.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

EgoSpeedUp: Transferring Human Manipulation Tempo to Robot Policies

EgoSpeedUp is a framework that transfers human manipulation tempo to robot policies by aligning and retiming robot demonstrations using phase-wise tempo estimates derived from human demonstrations. The method improves task success rates by an average of 25 percentage points and reduces successful execution time by 36.5% on two real-world manipulation tasks. It demonstrates that human manipulation tempo can serve as an effective temporal reference for faster and more reliable robot policies.

By Hanbit Oh, Yukiyasu Domae, Takuma Yagi
arXiv AI
Oct 23

PaceVLA: Adaptive Temporal Action Quantization in Vision-Language-Action Models

PaceVLA introduces adaptive temporal action quantization for Vision‑Language‑Action models, enabling faster robot execution by aggregating low‑level actions into coarser steps when appropriate. The framework combines mode‑specific action decoders with a quantizability‑guided mode selection and a context‑conditioned router to decide execution granularity at each inference step. Experiments on simulation benchmarks and real‑world tasks demonstrate that PaceVLA improves execution efficiency while preserving task success rates across diverse embodiments.

By Hojin Jeon, Jimin Lee, Taekwan Kim, Nayoung Oh, Taeyoung Kim, Myungkyu Koo, Jinmo Koo, Joonwoo Ahn, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data

VioLA is a generalist humanoid control policy that predicts body and hand motion latents instead of joint commands, enabling a pretrained controller to execute these latents on a robot. By aligning human and robot motion in shared latent spaces, the policy can be trained on a large dataset of 140.6 million frames, 93.2% of which are human demonstrations. As a result, VioLA can follow locomotion and manipulation instructions on a real robot zero‑shot, achieving 100% locomotion success and 88.6% manipulation success without task‑specific fine‑tuning.

By Mert Albaba, Jens Bei{\ss}wenger, Anna Manasyan, Daniel Marta, Michael J. Black, Wieland Brendel, Andreas Krause, Georg Martius, Martin Riedmiller
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Video2STL: Grounding VLM-Generated Temporal Specifications for Robot Learning

arXiv:2609.37519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-based policy learning is particularly promising, as it illustrates target behaviors without requiring action annotations or embodiment-matched...

By Merve Atasever, Keyan Azbijari, Cagan Bakirci, Bo-Ruei Huang, Tolga Izdas, Zahra Shahrooei, Richard Yang, Erdem Biyik, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh