Intrinsic Robot Rewarding (IRR) leverages existing vision‑language‑action (VLA) systems to evaluate a robot’s own outcomes and provide feedback for policy improvement. By using successful demonstration endpoints as task‑specific references and the policy’s frozen visual encoder as the feature space, IRR adds a reference bank and scoring operation to the current pipeline without requiring a separate evaluator or additional perception backbone. The approach aims to reduce integration effort, reward computation cost, and human outcome scoring while enabling learning from the data already available in industrial robot systems.
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...
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.
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...
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.
EmbodiedSkills is a skill-based agent framework that enhances frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies with world action models for consequence‑aware action selection. It defines reusable skills for observation, context encoding, candidate generation, consequence prediction, outcome evaluation, candidate comparison, and action execution, organized into five stages that support both continuous action chunks and pick‑and‑place primitives. The framework improves success rates on MetaWorld MT50, CLIPort, and CALVIN benchmarks by incorporating outcome predictions and lightweight comparators while keeping the core policy and observation encoders frozen.
arXiv:2609.13851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models for specific robots and tasks requires in-domain demonstrations, yet collecting diverse robot data...
The paper introduces D&A (Describe & Assess), a prompt-based method that separates progress estimation into a textual description of scene dynamics and a subsequent assessment using explicit rubrics. By requiring Vision‑Language Models to generate an explicit definition of absolute success before scoring, D&A anchors evaluations to an external criterion, reducing confirmation bias and providing fine‑grained, partial progress metrics. Empirical results show that D&A matches or surpasses post‑trained reward models across tasks, embodiments, and benchmarks, and its reward estimates support efficient downstream reinforcement learning.
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.
JoyInside‑VLM‑Agent is a ReAct‑style multimodal agent that learns product‑conditioned policies for embodied robots and smart hardware. It uses a closed‑loop sandbox to generate interaction trajectories, supervised fine‑tuning, multi‑teacher on‑policy distillation, and reinforcement learning with DPER to align token‑level evidence and rewards. The agent achieves a BFCL v4 overall score of 77.44, surpassing baselines on JoyInside‑Devices and JoyInside‑Robotics, and demonstrates visually grounded search, replanning, and failure reporting in two real‑world quadruped case studies.
arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.
arXiv:2607. 01897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Rank-Then-Act (RTA), a framework for learning control policies from expert video demonstrations without environment rewards.
The paper introduces D&A (Describe & Assess), a prompt‑based method that separates vision‑language model progress estimation into a textual description of scene dynamics and a rubric‑based assessment. By requiring the model to explicitly define absolute success before scoring, D&A reduces confirmation bias and provides fine‑grained, partial progress metrics that accurately penalize failures and interpolate successes. The approach generalizes across tasks, embodiments, and benchmarks, matching or surpassing post‑trained reward models while enabling efficient downstream reinforcement learning.