In-Context Robot Learning with VLM Agents
arXiv:2609.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations...
arXiv:2609.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations...
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
arXiv:2609.38178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this i...
Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this improvement to scale across tasks, it must make effe...
SAIL is a framework that transforms robot imitation learning into an iterative refinement problem, enabling test-time scaling of trajectory generation. It employs Monte Carlo Tree Search where each node represents a full trajectory and edges denote refinements, guided by an archive of successful trajectories, a vision‑language model for scoring, and step‑level feedback. Experiments on six manipulation tasks in simulation and real‑world settings show that higher test‑time compute consistently raises success rates, reaching up to 95% on complex tasks.
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.
The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.
The paper introduces Adaptive Agents via Latent Topologies (AALT), a method for active imitation learning that selects demonstrations based on their expected impact on start‑to‑goal connectivity rather than generic information gain. AALT builds a latent topology of hub states and learned behaviors, identifies high‑value bridge demonstrations that can solve many tasks simultaneously, and uses these to condition a diffusion policy for planning. In a simulated UR5e robot retrieval task with 72 start‑goal pairs, AALT achieved 100% success after only three demonstrations, outperforming baselines that required many more queries.