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:2610.09117v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Humanoid robots still struggle to plan contact-rich whole-body manipulation from egocentric RGB and proprioception. Workhorse learns such manipulatio...
By Songbo Hu, Qiayuan Liao, Yufeng Chi, Kevin Zakka, Yakun Sophia Shao, Pieter Abbeel, Koushil Sreenath
HumanoidToolBench is an 18‑task benchmark designed to evaluate humanoid robots on tool selection, manipulation, and locomotion across three scenarios, execution levels, and tool‑set modes. It is accompanied by ToolBook, a dataset of 3.1k demonstrations collected in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 robot. Experiments with seven policies in simulation and three on the real robot show significant gaps between tool selection and task completion, especially on unseen tools and under unrelated instructions.
By Kyochul Jang, Seohyeon Park, Ohchul Kwon, Sangjun Park, Junhyeok Choi, Seungyeop Yi, Chaeyun Kim, Sangkyu Lee, Idan Szpektor, Avi Caciularu, Jongmin Park, Youngjae Yu
Sim-and-Human Co-training (SimHum) is a method that combines simulation and human demonstration data to train bimanual manipulation policies. It first extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine‑tunes on a small real‑robot dataset. With only 80 real‑robot episodes per task, SimHum achieves 62.5% success on out‑of‑distribution scenes across four tabletop tasks, outperforming real‑only training by 53.7% and improving the best single‑source baseline by 35.0% in a matched‑time study.
By Kaipeng Fang, Weiqing Liang, Yuyang Li, Ji Zhang, Pengpeng Zeng, Heng Tao Shen, Jingkuan Song, Lianli Gao
arXiv:2608. 16837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation.
By Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li, Xinhua Wang, Jiaming Liu, Xinyuan Lv, Bowei Zhang, Shuanghao Bai, Guangrun Li, Jingyang He, Gaole Dai, Ziluo Ding, Zhiyuan Xu, Kuan Cheng, Jian Tang, Zhengping Che, Shanghang Zhang
Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively.
arXiv:2609.37089v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Real-world videos provide rich demonstrations of manipulation, but turning them into reusable robot skills requires visually aligned environments, exec...
By Kerui Ren, Yingxiang Xu, Kaiwen Song, Linning Xu, Bo Dai, Mulin Yu, Tao Lu
arXiv:2610.08220v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Portable mobile-manipulation demonstrations can help alleviate data scarcity for embodied intelligence, but obtaining reliable, low-cost, and robot-f...
By Yutian Zhang, Xingrui Xiong, Siyuan Ma, Yang Li, Jiawen Wen, Jiaqi Zhai, Liwen Yang, Ce Hao, Haozhen Chi, Yangkun Zhu, Yifan Zhu, Xiaowen Chu, Dong Wei, Qiaojun Yu, Dibo Hou
HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.
By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
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:2609.36588v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study reinforcement learning (RL) methods for cooperative multi-agent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. This problem is challenging because VLA...
By Ruixiao Xu, Wong Lik Hang Kenny, Zhiqian Liu, Jianing Guo, Hanxiao Li, Kejian Shi, Shuning Zhang, Pu Feng, Yongjia Ma, Yuqing Ma, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yaodong Yang, Xianglong Liu, Simin Li
arXiv:2606. 00252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Manipulating suspended payloads with humanoid robots is challenging because the robot can only influence an underactuated, oscillatory load through whole-body motion and intermittent contact.
By Songyang Liu, Shunyu Yao, Dingyuan Huang, Shuai Li