arXiv AI

RoboCoach: World Models as Active Coaches for Compositional Robot Skills

RoboCoach introduces a world-model-guided coaching framework that uses imagined failures to direct demonstration requests and expert updates for robot manipulation tasks. The system, called RIDI, runs reusable skill experts within a shared action-conditioned world model and records the first failing subtask to decide which demonstrations to acquire and which adapters to refine. Experiments on simulation suites and real robots show that with only 150 additional subtask demonstrations, success rates increase dramatically, and the coached experts transfer effectively to unseen task compositions.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

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.

By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun
arXiv AI
Jul 2

ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics

arXiv:2607. 00272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures.

By Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence

The paper surveys 160 benchmarks from 2017‑2026 that evaluate predictive embodied intelligence, categorising them into policy suites, embodied agents, world‑model evaluation, and prediction‑to‑action bridges. It finds that most benchmarks are model‑agnostic, rarely compare Vision‑Language‑Action policies to world models, and seldom turn predictions into executed actions. The authors argue that the lack of benchmarks designed to directly test the closed‑loop advantage of world models prevents the field from answering whether such models truly improve robotic performance.

By Gaytri Jena, Kapil Wanaskar, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Vasu Sharma, Amitava Das
arXiv AI
Sep 25

World Action Agent: Harnessing VLMs for Robot Manipulation via World Action Rehearsal

World Action Agent (WAA) is a multi‑agent framework that lets vision‑language models (VLMs) directly pilot robots by operating within a visual action workspace. The workspace provides automatically selected contact views, editable action rehearsals, and in‑view correction to refine decisions before low‑level execution. WAA learns procedural skills from expert videos and human teaching, and its interaction traces can train smaller VLMs, achieving state‑of‑the‑art success on LIBERO‑Pro and improving out‑of‑domain performance on robosuite and Qwen3.5‑9B.

By Yehang Zhang, Haojian Huang, Yifan Chang, Jianchong Su, Bohan Zhou, Yingjie Xu, Wosong Chen, Tianhao Zhou, Chenxu Wang, Tianyi Zhang, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Shiyuan Deng, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen, Zexi Li
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

EVO-WAM: Evolving World Action Models through Video-Action Verification

arXiv:2609.38057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving robot policies on new tasks without collecting additional expert demonstrations remains a central challenge in robot learning. World action m...

By Shiyang Zhou, Xionghao Wu, Wenbo Li, Shenghe Zheng, Jiyao Zhang, Songsong Yu, Yijun Yang, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Senqiao Yang, Li Jiang, Jingyong Su, Haoyang Huang, Zhuotao Tian
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang