The paper introduces TacEx, a tactile‑curiosity framework that guides reinforcement learning agents to explore contact dynamics by focusing epistemic uncertainty on the tactile channel. By anchoring curiosity to touch, robots learn to manipulate and grasp objects without task rewards or demonstrations, generating an interaction‑dense dataset that supports offline pick‑and‑place policy learning. TacEx also enhances vision‑language‑action models through post‑training, improving downstream performance while remaining sample‑efficient.
arXiv:2606. 11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks.
arXiv:2609.34182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dexterous manipulation requires tactile feedback. However, robot tactile demonstrations are difficult to scale,because dexterous-hand teleope...
arXiv:2607. 03723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual policies learned from human videos, teleoperation, and robot demonstrations offer scalable motion priors, but often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where success significantly depends on local force and contact geometry.
arXiv:2606. 24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision.
arXiv:2606. 29892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become indispensable for pushing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) beyond static imitation learning.
arXiv:2605. 30226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation.
arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.
arXiv:2604. 13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment.
arXiv:2606. 14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution.
arXiv:2605. 12236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for downstream exploration.
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
arXiv:2609.05650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a reinforcement learning framework in which exploration is driven by intrinsic curiosity, designed for scenarios where environments are non-...