arXiv Machine Learning

Does Imitation Learning Preserve Temporal Robustness in Dexterous Manipulation? An Expert-Learner Comparison Across Task Execution Speeds

arXiv AI
Jun 2

ExpertGen: Scalable Sim-to-Real Expert Policy Learning from Imperfect Behavior Priors

arXiv:2603. 15956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning generalizable and robust behavior cloning policies requires large volumes of high-quality robotics data.

By Zifan Xu, Ran Gong, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Kausik Sivakumar, Ahmet Salih Gundogdu, Eric Rosen, Riedana Yan, Tushar Kusnur, Zixing Wang, Di Deng, Peter Stone, Xiaohan Zhang, Karl Schmeckpeper
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

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.

By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv AI
Aug 24

ForeTime-VLA: Causal Future-Token Distillation from a World Action Model for Conveyor-Belt Manipulation

ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference. whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."

By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang
arXiv AI
6d ago

2AM: Grounding Agent-Side Memory as Guidance for Steerable Action Models in Long-Horizon Manipulation

The paper introduces 2AM, a system that separates memory and action execution in long‑horizon robot manipulation. 2AM stores task memory exclusively in a multimodal Agent, while a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model performs motion based on language and optional 2D hints. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion—over 61 points higher than the best baseline—demonstrating that agent‑side memory and precise steering of the Action Model can substantially improve performance.

By Yutong Hu, Fengjiao Chen, Xuezhi Cao, Renaud Detry