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
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
arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.
By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
The paper introduces Residual Reward Models (RRM) to enhance preference‑based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in robotics. RRMs decompose the true reward into a prior component—such as a heuristic, language‑generated, or IRL‑derived reward—and a learned residual that is trained with human preferences. Experiments on Meta‑World, DM‑Control, and a physical Franka Panda robot show that RRMs markedly improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy learning compared to standard PbRL methods.
By Chenyang Cao, Miguel Rogel-Garc\'ia, Mohamed Nabail, Xueqian Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart
arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv:2607. 01225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior work on imitation learning from suboptimal demonstrations typically relies on compressed supervision signals such as confidence estimates, discriminator scores, or importance weights.
By Chih-Han Yang, Dai-Jie Wu, Yun-Ping Huang, Ping-Chun Hsieh, Kenneth Marino, Shao-Hua Sun
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a powerful framework for learning from demonstrations. However, real-world tasks often exhibit substantial natural variations (e.
arXiv:2607. 17760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a powerful framework for learning from demonstrations.
By Ziyi Liu, Grace Zhang
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: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
arXiv:2508. 08983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans can learn a new manipulation task from one or two demonstrations and then perform it in a new room, with new objects, under new constraints.
By Ben Zandonati, Tom\'as Lozano-P\'erez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
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