Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.
arXiv:2607. 04591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation.
KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.
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.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data.
arXiv:2604. 13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment.
arXiv:2608. 14028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dexterous manipulation is a fundamental capability for embodied intelligence, but scaling it remains difficult because robot demonstrations are expensive to collect and action spaces vary across embodiments.
The paper proposes a neuro‑symbolic framework that augments vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with explicit task graphs and multimodal procedural memory to handle long‑horizon manipulation tasks. Task graphs encode action dependencies, valid transitions, and branch conditions, while memory tracks the active step, completed actions, textual context, and relevant visual evidence. Human demonstrations provide spatial and temporal guidance via gaze or saliency cues, which are annotated in robot‑view teleoperation videos and used to fine‑tune VLA models. The approach is evaluated on workspace clearing and surgical‑instrument handling tasks, measuring object and destination selection, subtask completion, task progress, step‑order consistency, overall success, and procedural or execution mistakes.
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.
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.
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.