arXiv:2609.36416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions....
Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task ca...
arXiv:2607. 05377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations.
Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.
arXiv:2608.22419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Query-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer low-latency inference that is attractive for bimanual robotic manipulation, but we observe that...
arXiv:2604. 20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control.
JEPA-WAM enhances World Action Models (WAMs) by pairing text instructions with stochastically generated visual cues, using a text-to-image generator and a frozen V‑JEPA encoder to create dense goal representations. These representations are compressed into goal tokens that condition both video and action experts via cross‑attention, enabling the model to better ground instructions. On a new real‑robot benchmark, JEPA‑WAM attains 87.3%, 74.5%, and 80.9% success rates across in‑distribution, out‑of‑distribution scenes, and out‑of‑distribution instructions, outperforming prior methods by significant margins.
HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.
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.
The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.
arXiv:2609.08638v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An action chunk can span several stages of a manipulation task, yet a label for its first step describes only the current stage. We introduce Chunk-A...
The paper introduces Intention Distillation (INDI), a method that injects behavior-level intent into Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model decoders by leveraging a frozen teacher vision‑language model to interpret demonstrations. During training, the teacher processes the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and execution video, producing a multimodal intent representation that the VLA decoder uses alongside trajectory and execution features to predict actions. Experiments on SimplerEnv‑Bridge, RoboCasa Kitchen, and real‑world tasks show that INDI consistently improves success rates, especially on longer‑horizon tasks, demonstrating that explicit modeling of semantic intent benefits action decoders.