arXiv:2606. 16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information.
arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 09042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train vision-language-action (VLA) models, but every update consumes robot rollouts that are slow and costly to collect, making sample efficiency a central concern.
arXiv:2609.35575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrat...
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.
arXiv:2606. 31043v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Residual reinforcement learning adapts a pretrained robot policy by learning an additive correction to its actions.
arXiv:2603. 15956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning generalizable and robust behavior cloning policies requires large volumes of high-quality robotics data.
arXiv:2606. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots trained on real world data tend to be imprecise, slow, and brittle to perturbations.
arXiv:2607. 15935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has a longstanding tradition in addressing the reach-avoid task problem, especially for controlling robotic arms.
Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive.
arXiv:2608.21204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a poli...