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.
By Brian Y. Tsui, Alan Y. Fang, Tiffany J. Hwu
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:2608. 14944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural-language interfaces can lower the barrier to programming robots, but existing systems struggle when users request complex tasks.
By John Woods, Hasti Seifi
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:2608. 06756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models are increasingly serving as the reasoning core of embodied agents.
By Ying Chen, Weizhen Li, Zhe Hu, Zhenjiang Li, Rui Jiang, Zhifeng Gu, Lihuang Fang, Jiangping Liu, Lei Yi, Jie Chen
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
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:2608. 14047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART).
By Yi Ding, Yanzhao Yu, Xili Dai, Xianbiao Qi, Peiwen Sun, Xueqian Wang, Xiangyu Yue, Jianan Wang
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
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
arXiv:2609.10522v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains cha...
By Yanzhe Chen, Zechen Bai, Zhijun Cao, Wenzheng Zeng, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Yiqi Lin, Guoqiang Liang, Kevin Yuchen Ma, Qiming Huang, Mike Zheng Shou
arXiv:2606.18363v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through...
By Haowen Liu, Xirui Li, Shaoxiong Yao, Peng Shi, Tianyi Zhou, Jia-Bin Huang, Furong Huang, Jiayuan Mao