arXiv AI

QuickLAP: Quick Language-Action Preference Learning for Semi-Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2511. 17855v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots must learn from both what people do and what they say, but either modality alone is often incomplete: physical corrections are grounded but ambiguous in intent, while language expresses high-level goals but lacks physical grounding.

arXiv AI
Jul 1

Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.

By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
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
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 Machine Learning
Jul 8

Supervised Reward Inference

arXiv:2502. 18447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing approaches to reward inference typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific behavior models.

By Will Schwarzer, Jordan Schneider, Philip S. Thomas, Scott Niekum
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TrustRoboReward: Preference-Ordered Isotonic Score Editing for Multi-Paradigm Robot Reward Models

arXiv:2608. 08491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward models are a bottleneck for reinforcement learning in embodied AI.

By Yidong Wang, Yan Zhan, Ziteng Feng, Zhenyu Cui, Ziyi Zhou, Renzhao Liang, Jiaxuan Zhu, Zilei Yang, Yiran Zhao, Zhongkuan Mao, Bo Jia, Hanchu Ni, Chenggang Xie, Biao Liu, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang