SCAPE is a scenario‑conditioned simulation‑augmented policy evaluation framework that predicts real‑world policy performance for specific scenarios using limited paired simulation‑and‑real samples and extensive simulation rollouts. It corrects sim‑to‑real bias in simulation labels before training the prediction model and calibrates prediction uncertainty via conformal prediction. Experiments on autonomous driving and quadruped velocity tracking show SCAPE reduces scenario‑level prediction error, improves testing sample efficiency, narrows calibrated prediction intervals, and generalizes better to out‑of‑distribution scenarios, enabling fine‑grained deployment strategies.
arXiv:2608.06481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Synthesizing safe and robust neural controllers in simulation for reliable sim-to-real deployment remains a critical challenge in robotics. E...
By Riccardo Curcio, Hongpeng Cao, Marco Caccamo
arXiv:2604. 09860v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of general-purpose robotics has yielded impressive foundation models, yet simulation-based benchmarking remains a bottleneck due to rapid performance saturation and a lack of true generalization testing.
By Jenai Xuning Yang, Rishit Dagli, Alex Zook, Hugo Hadfield, Ankit Goyal, Stan Birchfield, Fabio Ramos, Jonathan Tremblay
arXiv:2606. 29898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world evaluation is the gold standard for robot policies because it tests them against the physical conditions and deployment challenges they are ultimately designed to handle.
By Haoxu Huang, Tongsam Zheng, Yifan Chen, Jiacheng You, Yang Gao
arXiv:2606. 10366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation has become an essential tool for evaluating and improving vision-language-action (VLA) policies, offering scalable, reproducible, and controllable alternatives to costly real-world robot evaluation.
By Shuo Wang, Hanyuan Xu, Yingdong Hu, Fanqi Lin, Yang Gao
arXiv:2606. 31106v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale datasets and fast simulators have enabled improvements in driving policies that appear safe and robust, yet strong performance in nominal scenarios can still mask flawed reasoning and unsafe heuristics.
By Hyeonchang Jeon, Kyungbeom Kim, Eugene Vinitsky, Kyung-Joong Kim
arXiv:2608.22549v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Batched simulators for autonomous driving have recently enabled training reinforcement learning (RL) agents at scale, encompassing thousands of traffic...
By Cevahir Koprulu, David Paz, Feng Tao, Yuliang Guo, Xinyu Huang, Ufuk Topcu, Liu Ren
arXiv:2610.20318v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement-learning policies for robot locomotion can fail at deployment when operating conditions shift (e.g., rough or slippery terrain, payload...
By Motasem Alfarra, Pietro Mazzaglia, Markus Peschl, Daniel Dijkman, Christos Louizos
arXiv:2607. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities.
By Tianxing Chen, Yue Chen, Zixuan Li, Junyuan Tang, Kailun Su, Weijie Wan, Baijun Chen, Haoran Lu, Haowen Yan, Honghao Su, Zhiyang Dou, Kaixuan Wang, Dandan Zhang, Yunze Liu, Yan Qin, Qiwei Liang, Qiwei Wu, Zijian Lin, Wenwei Lin, Yuran Wang, Minghua He, Tianshu Wu, Ruihai Wu, Jingquan Zhou, Kai-Chong Lei, Haibao Yu, Yuanfeng Ji, Weiyang Jin, Guanyu Lin, Xiaofan Li, Qi Xiong, Renjing Xu, Zhongyu Li, Wenhao Chai, Enze Xie, Ziwei Wang, Yao Mu, Hao Dong, Wojciech Matusik, Mingyu Ding, Wenbo Ding, Ping Luo, Masayoshi Tomizuka
arXiv:2606. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots trained on real world data tend to be imprecise, slow, and brittle to perturbations.
By Raymond Yu, William Huey, Mustafa Mukadam, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
The paper introduces a low‑cost, open experimental platform for end‑to‑end autonomous driving on miniature Ackermann vehicles, combining a physical car, printed track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin. It implements command‑conditioned behavior cloning, achieving a mean cross‑track error of 6.1 cm on the real vehicle and demonstrating the impact of camera field of view in simulation. Using synthetic data from the digital twin and a sim‑to‑real image translator, a higher‑capacity policy trained on both synthetic and real data completes all four track routes, outperforming the baseline trained only on real data.
By Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperer
arXiv:2607. 02431v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) can overcome the demonstration-coverage limitation of imitation learning (IL) by allowing robots to improve through trial-and-error interaction beyond the states observed in demonstrations.
By Yuquan Xue, Le Xu, Zeyi Liu, Zhenyu Wu, Zhengyi Gu, Xinyang Song, Bofang Jia, Ziwei Wang