arXiv:2608. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
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
The paper introduces AnchorQ, a method that improves sample-efficient reinforcement learning for policy refinement by using flow-reversed action anchors. AnchorQ maps reference behaviors to state-conditioned latent anchors, samples local particles around these anchors, and employs value-guided sampling to explore promising refinements. Experiments on simulated and real-world manipulation tasks show that AnchorQ outperforms state-of-the-art post-training baselines, achieving a 37% higher real-world success rate and 97% greater simulated task throughput within the same interaction budget.
By Carl Qi, Weijun Dong, Xiaojie Wang, Peiyi Chen, Rahul Sajnani, Mingyuan Zhang, Amy Zhang, Jose Barreiros, Manikatan Nambi, Lillian J. Ratliff, Dylan Randle
OGPO is an Offline Goal‑conditioned Policy Optimization framework designed to improve Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation. It replaces traditional step‑wise action imitation with adaptive relabeling of trajectories using semantic key states and goal‑conditioned rewards, enabling policies to reach task‑progress states even from off‑demonstration states. Experiments on LIBERO, MetaWorld, LIBERO‑Plus, and the proposed LIBERO‑ReAct benchmark show that OGPO consistently outperforms standard supervised fine‑tuning in terms of robustness and recoverability under distribution shifts.
By Xule Gao, Xi Wang, Zehua Zang, Rui Wang, Changwen Zheng, Chuxiong Sun
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.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
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.
By Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini, Loris Roveda
arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv:2603. 25464v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a family of policies from a reward-free dataset, and recover optimal policies for any reward function directly at test time.
By Jiajun Hu, Nuria Armengol Urpi, Jin Cheng, Stelian Coros
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.
By Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
arXiv:2608. 19684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent studies investigate how to leverage pre-collected datasets to improve the policy performance and sample efficiency of RL.
By Tanachai Anakewat, Takayuki Osa, Tatsuya Harada
EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2605.11151v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key ch...
By Andrew Choi, Wei Xu