The paper argues that zero‑shot generalization in robotics is limited by a lack of diverse training data, unlike digital AI where crowd‑sourced data drives progress. It defines zero‑shot generalization as coverage of the deployment distribution and shows that adding more samples from the same source only marginally reduces the unseen region, whereas new contributors significantly expand it. The authors propose a shared latent space for robot actions, combining multi‑modal alignment, generative augmentation, and noisy‑label learning, and suggest building a community of developers around a single standard robot, Origami, to generate diverse data for testing zero‑shot success.
By Rafael Felix, Flavia Yanase
HumanEgo is a framework that enables zero‑shot robot learning from short egocentric human videos by converting each demonstration into an entity‑level hand‑object interaction representation and training a flow‑matching policy with dense auxiliary objectives. The method is robot‑data‑free, hardware‑agnostic, and data‑efficient, achieving 92.5 % success on four real‑world tasks with only 30 minutes of human video per task and outperforming matched‑time robot teleoperation by 41 %. HumanEgo also robustly transfers zero‑shot across new robots, cameras, and environments, and is released as an open‑source tool for learning robot policies directly from human data.
By Zhi Wang, Botao He, Kelin Yu, Seungjae Lee, Ruohan Gao, Furong Huang, Yiannis Aloimonos
arXiv:2607. 15880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation Learning aims to learn skills from extensive observations and demonstrations for robots, so it suffers from data scarcity and environment generalization.
By Zhenduo Shang, Xiyao Liu, Bohan Li, Xudong Wang, Teng Ren, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
arXiv:2507. 06219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood.
By Modi Shi, Li Chen, Jin Chen, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li
Video Prediction Policy 2 (VPP2) is a new world action model that improves zero‑shot generalization for both video prediction and action generation. It achieves this by pretraining a large, diverse manipulation video dataset with event‑level supervision, then distilling the model into a single‑step visual planner and adding a mixture‑of‑transformers action module. Experiments show VPP2 outperforms leading baselines on open‑ended video prediction, real‑world zero‑shot manipulation, and several challenging benchmarks.
By Yanjiang Guo, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Zhongru Zhang, Qingyuan Yang, Qingzhou Lu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Shuying Deng, Chenghan Yang, Puzhen Yuan, Chenxin Liu, Tun Ban, Xiang Zhu, Yichen Liu, Kun Feng, Haoang Li, Jianyu Chen
The paper explores whether inexpensive, procedurally generated synthetic data can provide useful priors for robot learning models before any real-world data is observed. By creating three data generation pipelines that capture mathematical abstractions of robotic control, the authors pretrain a Transformer and evaluate its zero‑shot action prediction on unseen physical robot tasks. The results show that the model achieves non‑trivial performance via in‑context learning, with specialized control priors outperforming generic causal priors, though a compute‑matched real‑robot baseline still excels on its own training datasets.
By Mateusz Odrowaz-Sypniewski, Michael Amir, Jasmine Bayrooti, Ajay Shankar, Amanda Prorok
The paper introduces CASTER, a framework that formalizes the conversion of synthetic videos into real robot trajectories as a constrained optimization problem. It shows that synthetic videos must probabilistically seed the search within a semantic basin of attraction, allowing local trajectory refinement while maintaining task alignment. By removing simplifying assumptions from existing methods, the authors achieve more robust zero‑shot manipulation and improve task success by 34.1% over the best baseline.
By Yinlong Dai, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Dylan P. Losey
Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task ca...
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.
By Artur Kuramshin, \"Ozg\"ur Aslan, Cyrus Neary, Glen Berseth
Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.
By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
ZimaBlue is a scalable framework that learns generalizable World Action Models (WAMs) from large-scale egocentric videos. It follows a three-stage curriculum: causal video pre‑training, video‑action mid‑training with a unified action representation, and final specialization to a target robot. The system employs an asynchronous Slow‑Fast architecture to enable real‑time 30 Hz action prediction, achieving a jump in real‑robot zero‑shot success from 36.1% to 77.8% when leveraging over 120,000 hours of embodied video.
By Xionghao Wu, Yijun Yang, Shiyang Zhou, Haoze Sun, Jianhui Liu, Songsong Yu, Jiyao Zhang, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Guoqing Ma, Lin Song, Renjie Liao, Shenghe Zheng, Wei Tang, Xiaojuan Qi, Yanwei Li, Yuan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
The paper investigates zero‑shot task generalisation in offline multi‑agent reinforcement learning by extending sequence‑modeling architectures to support multi‑task observation and action spaces and variable agent counts. It finds that increasing task diversity, rather than merely enlarging the dataset, is the key driver for robust zero‑shot transfer. Experiments on four challenging environments show a 3.2× mean improvement on held‑out tasks compared to single‑task models and outperform strong behaviour‑cloning baselines.
By Oussama Hidaoui, Omer Ebead, Ulrich Armel Mbou Sob, Siddarth Singh, Juan Claude Formanek, Felix Chalumeau, Omayma Mahjoub, Sasha Abramowitz, Ruan John de Kock, Wiem Khlifi, Louay Ben Nessir, Simon Verster Du Toit, Daniel Rajaonarivonivelomanantsoa, Asim Awad Osman, Arnol Manuel Fokam, Refiloe Shabe, Arnu Pretorius