arXiv AI

SILO: Simulation-in-the-Loop Sim-to-Real Transfer for Multi-Stage Cable Routing

arXiv:2607. 04616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear-deformable manipulation remains challenging due to the complex deformations of objects such as cables and ropes.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Generalizing deep reinforcement learning across cable-driven parallel robot configurations with actuator-level policies

arXiv:2608. 07546v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) present diverse configurations and complex control challenges, which can be addressed by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) by learning their nonlinear dynamics.

By Abir Bouaouda (CRAN, UIR), Mohamed Boutayeb (CRAN, UIR), Fran\c{c}ois Charpillet (LARSEN), Dominique Martinez (LORIA, ISM), R\'emi Pannequin (CRAN)
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Coupled Local and Global World Models for Efficient First Order RL

arXiv:2602. 06219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: World models offer a promising avenue for more faithfully capturing complex dynamics, including contacts and non-rigidity, as well as complex sensory information, such as visual perception, in situations where standard simulators struggle.

By Joseph Amigo, Rooholla Khorrambakht, Nicolas Mansard, Ludovic Righetti
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Accelerating Visual Policy Learning with Sampling-Based Model Predictive Control

The paper introduces Sampling-Guided Policy Search (SGPS), a method that combines sampling-based model‑predictive control with first‑order policy gradients to accelerate visual policy learning for locomotion and manipulation tasks. SGPS starts with behavior cloning from sampled actions and then alternates between sampling‑based refinement and short‑horizon policy updates under varied initial states and dynamics. The approach is demonstrated on simulated Unitree Go2 and G1 robots, learning tasks such as obstacle traversal and bimanual carrying, and the distilled policies transfer zero‑shot to a real Go2 robot using onboard depth perception.

By Yilang Liu, Haoxiang You, Qian Wang, Daniel Rakita, Ian Abraham
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Jun 17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605. 31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments.

By Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu, Tianjian Wang, Youzhang He, Zitai Huang, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Hanyang Wang, Tianjiao Zhang, Munan Yin, Weihao Ding, Yi Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Real2Sim2Real for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation: An AMD ROCm-Based Pipeline

arXiv:2607. 22997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical AI -- the integration of large vision-language-action (VLA) models with embodied agents that act in the real world -- has emerged as the next major frontier for AI, echoed by industry leaders such as Jensen Huang (``the next big thing is Physical AI, AI with a body,'' GTC Paris, June 2025) and Dr.

By Qing Yang, Xun Wang, Ziguan Wang, Zhenjiang Li, Hongqiang Wang, Dongdong Weng