arXiv:2607. 02466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of expert demonstrations -- triplets of observations, instructions, and actions that are costly to collect at scale.
By Junhao Shi, Siyin Wang, Xiaopeng Yu, Li Ji, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu
arXiv:2606. 10918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent trend in scaling models for robot learning has resulted in impressive policies that can perform various manipulation tasks and generalize to novel scenarios.
By Artur Kuramshin, \"Ozg\"ur Aslan, Cyrus Neary, Glen Berseth
Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging.
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
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.
By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
arXiv:2607. 27549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments.
By Ajay Sridhar, Jensen Gao, Jonathan Yang, Jean Mercat, Suneel Belkhale, Dorsa Sadigh
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...
The paper proposes a method to train efficient multi‑task manipulation policies by distilling knowledge from single‑task Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) experts. Instead of training separate models for each task, the authors transfer the experts’ learned velocity fields into a shared policy, combining this distillation signal with the original CFM objective. Experiments on RLBench demonstrate that this approach improves multi‑task performance while keeping the model size fixed, avoiding the need for larger capacity or performance drops seen with naive concatenated training.
By Shreya Deshmukh, Imen Mahdi, Nick Heppert, Abhinav Valada
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.
By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeff Schneider, Jeffrey Ichnowski
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:2607. 15880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation Learning aims to learn skills from extensive observations and demonstrations for robots, so it suffers from data scarcity and environment generalization.
By Zhenduo Shang, Xiyao Liu, Bohan Li, Xudong Wang, Teng Ren, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
arXiv:2606. 08530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments.
By Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen, Shuai Dong, Jiajun Deng, Xin Zhang, Yuxuan Gao, Jiajia Wu, Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang, Xingyi Zhang, Jia Pan