arXiv AI

Efficient Skill Grounding via Code Refactoring with Small Language Models

arXiv:2606. 07999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective skill grounding is essential for deploying reusable skills in embodied agents, as even minor embodiment or environmental differences can render an entire skill incompatible.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2603. 22435v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: "Code-as-Policy" considers how executable code can complement data-intensive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) methods, yet their effectiveness as autonomous controllers for embodied manipulation remains underexplored.

By Letian Fu, Justin Yu, Karim El-Refai, Ethan Kou, Haoru Xue, Huang Huang, Wenli Xiao, Guanzhi Wang, Dantong Niu, Fei-Fei Li, Guanya Shi, Jiajun Wu, Shankar Sastry, Yuke Zhu, Ken Goldberg, Linxi "Jim" Fan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Self-Evolving Embodied Agents via Skill-Harness Evolution

The paper introduces SHAPER, a self‑evolving framework that enables embodied agents to adapt to new environments without retraining the underlying foundation model. SHAPER keeps model parameters frozen and instead evolves reusable skills and a context‑code harness through rollouts in the target environment, allowing the same model to act as both planner and optimizer. Experiments on VLABench and ESI‑Bench demonstrate that this skill‑and‑harness optimization outperforms pure execution, supervised fine‑tuning, and test‑time scaling baselines, showing that self‑evolving adaptation is viable when model training is costly or impractical.

By Peidong Wang, Zhiming Ma, Ying Chang, Xufang Luo, Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yuqing Yang, Dongsheng Li
arXiv AI
Sep 2

EmbodiedSkills: A Unified Framework for Orchestrating, Training, and Deploying VLA Agents

EmbodiedSkills is a unified framework that treats each skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites and verifying outcomes during long‑horizon vision‑language‑action tasks. It connects high‑level skill selection, bounded low‑level VLA execution, and post‑action verification through a fixed executable‑skill interface, enabling easy replacement of low‑level policies and recording of structured trajectories for supervision and adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3‑VL and OpenPI/pi0.5 on RoboTwin 2.0 and LIBERO, the framework achieves high success rates (86.20% and 97.40% respectively) and demonstrates effective memory‑dependent task performance.

By Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Tianwei Lin, Jinhao Mao, Zhenxuan Fan, Mingjian Gao, Yang Dai, Wentong Li, Zheqi Lv, Zheng Dong, Yingjie Niu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jun Xiao, Chao Li, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv AI
6d ago

Up and Down the Abstraction Ladder: Code-Based Skills for Language Agents

The paper introduces CodeHack, a library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions designed to improve language agents in complex environments like NetHack. By allowing agents to invoke reusable skills instead of selecting individual actions, the study shows that skill-based agents nearly triple game progression and cut inference cost by 86% in zero‑shot settings, while still retaining the option to fall back on primitive actions. In reinforcement learning, skill-based agents learn faster, achieving a 7.2× larger average gain in dungeon level within the same training budget.

By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov, Benjamin Eysenbach, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Karthik R. Narasimhan
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 Computation and Language
Aug 31

CEDAR: Automata as Verifiable Interfaces for Language-Guided Embodied Action

CEDAR is a counterexample-guided framework that translates natural-language instructions for embodied agents into regular languages over environment event traces, represented as deterministic finite automata. By using a language model for semantic judgments and execution traces for correction, CEDAR turns constraints into executable finite-state objects, enabling the intersection of learned skills with additional specifications. In Minecraft experiments, CEDAR preserves temporal and spatial constraints better than a program-generating baseline and reduces cumulative LLM queries by reusing learned skills.

By Lekai Chen, Alvaro Velasquez, Ashutosh Trivedi