arXiv:2608. 09853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored.
By Dongchi Huang, Hongyin Zhang, Bohan Hou, Siteng Huang, Zhian Su, Hang Guo, Tong Lu, Zhaofeng Xu, Jiahao Tang, Jianfei Yang, Donglin Wang, Peixi Peng, Mingxiu Chen, Deli Zhao, Xin Li
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
The paper introduces RARM, a Reference‑Anchored Reward Model that uses a single successful demonstration to generate dense, progress‑aware rewards for reinforcement learning in robot manipulation. RARM is trained on general‑purpose videos with a contrastive temporal objective, requiring no task‑specific data or reward engineering. During deployment it matches rollout clips to reference clips and rewards only confident forward progress, reducing false positives. Experiments on nine simulated tasks and four real‑world tasks show that RARM achieves the best overall success rates, especially on long‑horizon tasks like cloth folding.
By Pengzhi Yang, Xinyu Wang, Pengyu Jing, Kehan Wen, Yiduo Qu, Zhenhao Huang, Minghao Fu, Xin Liu, Yaheng Shen, Fan Shi
arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.
By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
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.
By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
arXiv:2609.36416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must often execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isol...
By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Thomas Wolf, Jackson Lee, Pragna Mannam
arXiv:2609.36416v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions....
By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Jackson Lee, Thomas Wolf, Pragna Mannam
arXiv:2609.16864v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved impressive performance in quasi-static manipulation, but struggle in dynamic manipulation tasks bec...
By Zhenyang Feng, Jimin Heo, Erik B. Sudderth, Unnat Jain
arXiv:2607. 09776v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When adapting Vision Language Action (VLA) models to downstream tasks, multiple rounds of post-training are often required to progressively address policy weaknesses.
By Shaopeng Zhai, Qi Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Haoran Zhang, Fuxian Huang, Zhanhui Lin, Zijun Xu, Weinan Zhang
Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions. Current manipulation datasets struggle to support t...
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:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.
By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn