arXiv:2512. 00062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic policy learning for complex real-world manipulation tasks has seen rapid recent progress, enabled in large part by the ability to collect demonstrations through human operation.
By Taewook Nam, Junmo Cho, Youngsoo Jang, Sung Ju Hwang
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.
By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv:2608. 07065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-chunking visuomotor policies learn from demonstrations and improve temporal consistency by predicting short action sequences rather than single-step commands.
By Jinhe Tang, Weiming Zhi
arXiv:2505. 03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation.
By Jan Ole von Hartz, Adrian R\"ofer, Joschka Boedecker, Abhinav Valada
Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.
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
arXiv:2505. 04999v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning robot control policies from demonstrations typically requires action-labeled expert data, which is expensive to collect through teleoperation.
By Anthony Liang, Pavel Czempin, Matthew M. Hong, Yutai Zhou, Jingzhen Wang, Erdem Biyik, Stephen Tu
arXiv:2608. 09138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds.
By David D. Yuan, Tony Z. Zhao, Kaylee Burns, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2606. 31846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising framework for robotic manipulation by connecting language instructions, visual observations, and continuous control.
By Lang Cao, Renhong Chen, Luyi Li, Peng Wang, Mofan Peng, Yitong Li
While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds. Imitation learning policies are inherently limited by hardware constraints and the speed of the operator during data collection.
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.
By Matthew M. Hong, Jesse Zhang, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
Effective online adaptation of vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging, as sparse rewards provide weak supervision for high-dimensional autoregressive action policies. Although self-distillation can in principle provide denser training signals, we find that text-based privileged teachers conditioned on demonstrations, retrieved experiences, or high-level plans are ineffective for VLA adaptation, exposing a modality gap between symbolic guidance and low-level robot actions.