The paper introduces RARM, a Reference‑Anchored Reward Model that uses a single successful demonstration to generate dense, progress‑aware rewards for reinforcement learning in robot manipulation. RARM is trained on general‑purpose videos with a contrastive temporal objective, requiring no task‑specific data or reward engineering. During deployment it matches rollout clips to reference clips and rewards only confident forward progress, reducing false positives. Experiments on nine simulated tasks and four real‑world tasks show that RARM achieves the best overall success rates, especially on long‑horizon tasks like cloth folding.
By Pengzhi Yang, Xinyu Wang, Pengyu Jing, Kehan Wen, Yiduo Qu, Zhenhao Huang, Minghao Fu, Xin Liu, Yaheng Shen, Fan Shi
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:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.
By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
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:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
By Jinrui Liu, Bingyan Nie, Boyu Li, Yaran Chen, Yuze Wang, Shunsen He, Haoran Li
arXiv:2512. 00062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic policy learning for complex real-world manipulation tasks has seen rapid recent progress, enabled in large part by the ability to collect demonstrations through human operation.
By Taewook Nam, Junmo Cho, Youngsoo Jang, Sung Ju Hwang
The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.
By Weiqi Wang, Zhi Li, Yudong Lei, David Martinez, Xiaofeng Gao, Yuxin Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yingnian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ran Gong
arXiv:2605. 30226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation.
By Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.
arXiv:2606. 01672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Hojoon Lee, Ajay Subramanian, Ben Abbatematteo, Vijay Veerabadran, Pedro Matias, Karl Ridgeway, Nitin Kamra
arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.
By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves