arXiv AI

From Passive Observer to Active Critic: Reinforcement Learning Elicits Process Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2603. 15600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation.

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 30

RoboGaze: Evaluating Robot World Models via Structured Vision-Language Analysis

arXiv:2606. 28385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning.

By Minh-Loi Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Hung Khang Nguyen, Minh Le, Doanh Le Thien, Hoang H. Tran, Dung D. Le, Vu N. Duong, Daniel Sonntag, An Thai Le, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Vien Anh Ngo, Tran Van Nhiem
arXiv AI
Jun 8

ViVa: A Video-Generative Value Model for Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604. 08168v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced robot manipulation through large-scale pretraining, but real-world deployment remains challenging due to partial observability and delayed feedback.

By Jindi Lv, Hao Li, Jie Li, Fankun Kong, Yang Wang, Pengfei Yi, Yifei Nie, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu, Chaojun Ni, Qiuping Deng, Hengtao Li, Jiancheng Lv, Guan Huang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.

By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

$R^3$: Training Robots to Reason in Natural Language via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces $R^3$, a post‑training method that converts vision‑language models into robotic reasoners by first mid‑training on expert reasoning traces and then refining them with single‑step rubric‑based reinforcement learning. $R^3$ enables free‑form language reasoning to guide low‑level manipulation policies, improving exploration, generalization, and performance on long‑horizon tasks in Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing benchmarks. The approach outperforms instruction‑only imitation learning baselines and demonstrates that natural language reasoning can serve as a test‑time compute mechanism for steering robotic actions.

By Lehong Wu, Yuxiao Qu, Zheyuan Hu, Ivan Zhang, Limin Wei, Zackory Erickson, Aviral Kumar
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 28

A Few Words Go a Long Way: Language Guided Robot Policy Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 23784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail.

By Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen, Emma Romig, Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak
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