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.
Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences. Whet...
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
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.
arXiv:2603. 15600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation.
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.
The paper introduces ARC, a reasoning recipe that enhances zero‑shot performance of robot foundation models (RFMs) without additional data or large‑scale training. ARC combines a reasoning trace grounded in the robot’s next action, an automatic labeling pipeline to generate these traces from existing demonstrations, and a strategy to adapt pretrained RFMs to use the traces for control. Applying ARC yields significant gains, including up to 50 percentage points on RoboLab-Reasoning-50 and an 82.2‑point improvement in task success for the π_{0.5} model on real robots.
arXiv:2601. 20334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift.
arXiv:2512. 19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging the gap between natural language commands and autonomous execution in unstructured environments remains an open challenge for robotics.
Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO) is a reinforcement‑learning framework that adaptively uses ground‑truth rationale information to scaffold a language model’s reasoning process. Instead of treating reference solutions as fixed imitation targets, RGPO temporarily incorporates rationales to help the model generate better responses, then reverts to unguided learning with higher‑reward, model‑generated solutions. Experiments in both language‑only and vision‑language tasks show that RGPO consistently outperforms RLVR baselines, with ablation studies confirming that adaptive rationale guidance is a key factor in its success.
arXiv:2508. 08983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans can learn a new manipulation task from one or two demonstrations and then perform it in a new room, with new objects, under new constraints.
arXiv:2512. 24125v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
The paper introduces RARRL, a hierarchical framework that learns when and how an embodied robotic agent should invoke large language model reasoning. By adaptively deciding whether to reason, selecting the reasoning role, and allocating computational budget based on observations, execution history, and remaining resources, RARRL improves task success rates and reduces execution latency. Experiments on the ALFRED benchmark demonstrate that this resource‑aware orchestration outperforms fixed or heuristic reasoning strategies, highlighting the importance of adaptive reasoning control for reliable robotic agents.