arXiv Machine Learning

Task Robustness via Re-Labelling Vision-Action Robot Data

arXiv:2606. 10918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent trend in scaling models for robot learning has resulted in impressive policies that can perform various manipulation tasks and generalize to novel scenarios.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.

By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeff Schneider, Jeffrey Ichnowski
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

PoseVLA: Universal Pose Pretraining for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2602. 19710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often suffer from feature collapse and low training efficiency because they entangle high-level perception with sparse, embodiment-specific action supervision.

By Haitao Lin, Hanyang Yu, Jingshun Huang, He Zhang, Yonggen Ling, Ping Tan, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu
arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.

By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.