arXiv Computer Vision

RoboDoctor: Training-Free Recursive Self-Improvement for Robot Policies

arXiv AI
Oct 1

RoboCoach: World Models as Active Coaches for Compositional Robot Skills

RoboCoach introduces a world-model-guided coaching framework that uses imagined failures to direct demonstration requests and expert updates for robot manipulation tasks. The system, called RIDI, runs reusable skill experts within a shared action-conditioned world model and records the first failing subtask to decide which demonstrations to acquire and which adapters to refine. Experiments on simulation suites and real robots show that with only 150 additional subtask demonstrations, success rates increase dramatically, and the coached experts transfer effectively to unseen task compositions.

By Jiajun Liu, Yifan Chen, Yichao Liu, Jiayi Zhang, Ruoqu Chen, Shaoxuan Xie, Guocai Yao, Mengdi Xu, Sen Cui, Changshui Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 2

ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics

arXiv:2607. 00272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures.

By Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

An Unexpected Robot Policy: Early Evaluations of GPT-6 Astra on RoboDojo and Beyond

arXiv:2609.24170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied AI systems are often organized into System 1 and System 2. System 1 is typically a pretrained policy that generates actions at high frequency,...

By Wenbo Zhang, Kaixuan Wang, Yutao Ouyang, Xiaoyu Huang, Liyang Li, Kailun Su, Weiyang Jin, Wenhao Chai, Haotian Liang, Zhiyang Dou, Yue Chen, Tianxing Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Learning and Transferring Closed-Loop Robot Software

Closed‑loop robot policies are difficult to design manually because they require complex observation processing, state management, and branching. This study treats complete closed‑loop implementations as reusable execution experience: a coding agent generates policy code from a few demonstrations, iteratively improves it with simulation feedback, and stores the validated implementations. When applying these archived implementations to new tasks, the agent can generate and refine policies using the stored code, target demonstrations, and execution feedback, ultimately producing a frozen policy that runs without further model calls. Across multiple source and target tasks, iterative optimization of the source implementations significantly boosts success rates, demonstrating the value of execution‑improved software for acquiring new policies.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real: Guided Self-Improvement for Embodied Agents

Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real (RPG) is a framework that enables autonomous improvement of robot execution systems without updating model weights. RPG identifies manipulation capabilities from offline data, creates simulation practice tasks, and uses feedback to diagnose failures, develop new symbolic skills, refine existing ones, and revise the system prompt. Across 22 manipulation tasks, RPG raises task success from 28.6% after the first practice round to 95.0% after 15 rounds, outperforming baselines and achieving perfect success on 30 physical trials after calibration.

By Yen-Jen Wang, Haozhe Jiang, Shuying Deng, Haoru Xue, Weirui Ye, Rocky Duan, Nika Haghtalab, S. Shankar Sastry, Pieter Abbeel, Haozhi Qi
arXiv AI
Oct 23

Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in Physical AI

The paper discusses recursive self‑improvement (RSI) in physical AI, where a system not only enhances its behavior but also the methods it uses to improve. It reviews how robot learning can evolve both capabilities and improvement processes, highlighting that gains persist only when feedback addresses remaining learning needs, the component can apply the change, the value survives task or hardware shifts, and practice remains safe and affordable. Current physical studies mainly show behavioral and procedural gains, but have not yet isolated recursive benefits, leading the authors to propose evaluation principles and future research directions for safely trial‑by‑trial self‑improvement.

By Meng Luo, Zechen Bai, Shanqing Xu, Yanlin Li, Kaixin Li, Mengchen Qian, Weifeng Lu, Ran Zhang, Yingtian Zou, Ziyang Luo, Wei Chen, Hongzhan Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

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.

By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Learning and Transferring Closed-Loop Robot Software

The paper investigates whether closed‑loop robot software generated and refined by a coding agent can be reused to acquire policies for new tasks. For each source task, the agent creates policy code from a few demonstrations, iteratively improves it with simulation feedback, and stores the validated implementations. When applied to new tasks, the agent uses these archived implementations, additional demonstrations, and execution feedback to produce a final policy that runs without further model calls, achieving higher success rates than starting from scratch or from unoptimized source code.

By So Kuroki, Yujin Tang