arXiv AI

Robo-Dopamine 2.0: History-Conditioned and OOD-Aware Process Reward Modeling for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 15680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models improve robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to compounding errors, scene changes, and off-trajectory states.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics

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 AI
Jun 9

BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Models

arXiv:2605. 30226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation.

By Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

RynnValue: Scaling Robotic Value Foundation Models with Temporal Distance

arXiv:2608. 09853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored.

By Dongchi Huang, Hongyin Zhang, Bohan Hou, Siteng Huang, Zhian Su, Hang Guo, Tong Lu, Zhaofeng Xu, Jiahao Tang, Jianfei Yang, Donglin Wang, Peixi Peng, Mingxiu Chen, Deli Zhao, Xin Li
arXiv AI
Aug 25

RARM: Confidence-Gated Progress Reward Modeling for RL in Manipulation

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 Machine Learning
Sep 14

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin‑Robotics introduces an omnimodal masked‑diffusion backbone, Dynin‑Omni, that jointly represents language, visual observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. By conditioning on different spans, the same model learns action prediction, next‑observation prediction, goal‑state prediction, and trajectory‑to‑instruction reconstruction, enabling test‑time scaling through goal prediction and action‑candidate evaluation. The system, pretrained on 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X‑Embodiment datasets, achieves competitive performance on LIBERO, zero‑shot LIBERO‑Plus, and a 78.4 % success rate on a Franka Research 3 robot, while a block‑parallel implementation speeds up action decoding by up to 29.2×.

By Hoeun Lee, Jaeik Kim, Jusang Oh, Jinhyeok Kim, Geon Choi, Hyeonggeun Kim, Jaeyoung Do
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.

By Yang Yang, Bingjie Chen, Zihan Wang, Yizhe Li, Guoping Pan, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Robo-ValueRL: Reliable Value Estimation for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 09866v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning is promising for generalizable robotic manipulation, yet its full-stack complexity obscures reproduction and diagnosis.

By Wenke Xia, Pei Ren, Wenbo Yu, Yizhuo Zhang, Jifan Li, Yixue Zhang, Yinuo Zhao, Qingyang Gao, Jianlong Fu, Jian Tang, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhengping Che, Di Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Prism-GRPO: Faster VLA Policy Optimization via Splitting Same-outcome Groups

Prism‑GRPO enhances the GRPO reinforcement‑learning algorithm for vision‑language‑action policies by adding a weighted trajectory‑level execution‑quality score to binary success rewards. This approach splits groups with identical outcomes into a quality spectrum, preserving training signal while ensuring successes always outrank failures. Experiments on four RoboTwin tasks show Prism‑GRPO achieves higher success and quality at matched rollout budgets, reaching target success rates with up to 56% fewer rollouts and mitigating reward‑hacking behaviors that transfer to real‑robot deployment.

By Zeyun Deng, Yuzhe Lu, Yawei Wang, Linbo Liu, Qing Ping, Han Ding, Guande Wu, Panpan Xu, Jun Huan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

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