arXiv:2609.37359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents can now write, run, and debug programs with little human help. Robot tasks, however, are usually specified by a sentence that leaves ou...
arXiv:2608.22301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans imitate at the level of intent: given a demonstration, we infer its goal and carry it out with whatever tools, objects, and layouts are at han...
The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.01453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dexterous manipulation policies learned by imitation are typically evaluated for robustness to variation in scenes, objects, or instructions, but the...
The paper reviews On‑Policy Self‑Distillation (OPSD), a method where a language model learns from its own generations using privileged information such as reference solutions or plans, eliminating the need for a larger teacher model. It identifies a key failure mode—collapse, where the model’s reasoning paths narrow progressively—and analyzes it through three levers: signal application, privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review focuses on mathematical reasoning, offering a unified vocabulary and distinguishing settled facts from ongoing debates.
arXiv:2607. 29617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning (IL)---training an agent to replicate expert behavior from demonstrations---underpins applications from robotics to language model training.
On-policy distillation trains a language model on its own generations while a teacher scores them token by token. It combines the dense supervision of imitation learning with the on-policy sampling of...
SynthDemo‑RL introduces a teacher‑student framework that uses an automated teacher to generate successful manipulation trajectories from simulator‑privileged state, which are then distilled into a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) student via supervised fine‑tuning. The student is further refined with PPO using binary task‑success rewards. On the LIBERO‑PRO benchmark, SynthDemo‑RL rescues all 27 previously unsolvable tasks and achieves near‑perfect success rates, matching performance that would otherwise require human demonstrations.
DreamAvoid introduces a test‑time dreaming framework for Vision‑Language‑Action models to anticipate and avoid failures during critical manipulation phases. It uses a Dream Trigger to detect critical phases, samples candidate action chunks via an Action Proposer, and evaluates short‑horizon futures with a Dream Evaluator trained on success, failure, and boundary data. Experiments on real‑world and simulated tasks show DreamAvoid improves task success rates, achieving 72.5% success versus 48.8% for the base policy and 54.4% for GPC‑RANK.
arXiv:2606. 26443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A robot working alongside people must reason about what they have done, in what order, and with what intent.
arXiv:2609.36608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains multi-turn language agents with dense teacher supervision on student-generated responses. However, standard think-t...
ASTEROID is a student–teacher supervised learning framework that learns efficient test‑time exploration in partially observable sequential decision problems. By training a history‑conditioned student on on‑policy contexts while a privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that history, the student learns to search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. Across eleven diverse environments, ASTEROID achieves roughly twice the returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses about 100× fewer interactions than reinforcement learning baselines, and transfers well to vision‑denied real‑world robot manipulation, improving success by +40% over standard distillation.