arXiv AI

ATOM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Atomic Skills and Compositional Generalization in Manipulation Policies

arXiv:2606. 16826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist manipulation policies are increasingly presented as foundation models for robotic control, but their real-world generalization remains difficult to diagnose.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

AtomicVLA: Unlocking the Potential of Atomic Skill Learning in Robots

AtomicVLA is a unified planning-and-execution framework that generates task-level plans, atomic skill abstractions, and fine-grained actions for robotic manipulation. It builds a scalable atomic skill library using a Skill‑Guided Mixture‑of‑Experts (SG‑MoE) and a flexible routing encoder that assigns new skills to dedicated experts, enabling continual learning. Experiments show that AtomicVLA outperforms baseline models on both simulated and real‑world long‑horizon tasks, achieving significant improvements in task performance and learning efficiency.

By Likui Zhang, Tao Tang, Zhihao Zhan, Xiuwei Chen, Zisheng Chen, Jianhua Han, Jiangtong Zhu, Pei Xu, Hang Xu, Hefeng Wu, Liang Lin, Xiaodan Liang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

SkillMemo: Expert-guided Skill Memory Framework for Compositional Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 05970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks.

By Changyuan Wang, Chubin Zhang, Zhenyu Wu, Runhao Li, Angyuan Ma, Ke Chao, Yinan Liang, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Yansong Tang, Jiwen Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

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 AI
Jul 7

HALO-WA: Hybrid-Attention Latent-Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for World-Action Models

arXiv:2607. 04265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion.

By Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

DeepInsight II: One Trace from Benchmark to Robot

arXiv:2608. 16556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Across a Physical AI stack, evaluation maturity is inversely aligned with deployment risk: foundation models enjoy mature, standardized harnesses, while the embodied layers on which deployment actually turns remain fragmented across benchmark-specific simulators, embodiments, and interfaces.

By Siyi Li, Yuchen Kang, Wuliang Wang, Zhengjie Zhang, Jiangpin Liu, Jianhao Yao, Jie Chen
arXiv AI
4d ago

AlphaNIST: Emergent Assembly Skills from Binary Task Rewards

AlphaNIST demonstrates that a single reinforcement‑learning policy can master 20 diverse assembly tasks on the NIST Assembly Task Board #1 using only a sparse binary reward, without demonstrations, progress shaping, scripted primitives, or per‑task tuning. The policy achieves 98.2% overall training success and can complete ten assembly pairs in a single episode, discovering dexterous, planning‑like behaviors such as selecting future grasps and reorienting parts using surrounding geometry. The work shows that task‑agnostic rewards can enable robots to learn complex manipulation strategies autonomously.

By Octi Zhang, Iretiayo Akinola, Rosario Scalise, Mateo Guaman Castro, Patrick Yin, Tobias Widmer, Miles Macklin, Chris Amevor, Dylan Turpin, Dirk Van Gelder, Jan Carius, Ankur Handa, Gavriel State, Yunrong Guo, Yashraj Narang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience

DexPIE is a post‑training framework that improves dexterous manipulation policies using real‑world experience. It introduces a dexterous‑hand‑adapted intervention system and multi‑stage DAgger‑style data collection to enhance exploration, aligns training and inference to reduce distribution shift, and conditions the policy on a continuous optimality indicator for fine‑grained data quality use. In three real‑world tasks, DexPIE boosts success rates by 37.3% over a demonstration‑based baseline, outperforming all other methods and showing stronger robustness.

By Ruizhe Liao, Wenrui Chen, Liangji Zeng, Haoran Lin, Fan Yang, Kailun Yang, Yaonan Wang