arXiv:2607. 27549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments.
Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging.
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.
The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.
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.
arXiv:2608.22301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans imitate at the level of intent: given a demonstration, we infer its goal and carry it out with whatever tools, objects, and layouts are at han...
The paper introduces VLAct, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that focuses on representation‑centric continued pre‑training rather than merely scaling robot data. VLAct is trained on diverse, multi‑embodiment robot data and preserves a broad VLM prior while encouraging shared action semantics across embodiments. Experiments across simulation, real‑world, and unseen‑embodiment settings show that VLAct consistently outperforms existing industrial VLA systems, achieving high success rates with only a modest compute budget and open‑source data.
Sim-and-Human Co-training (SimHum) is a method that combines simulation and human demonstration data to train bimanual manipulation policies. It first extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine‑tunes on a small real‑robot dataset. With only 80 real‑robot episodes per task, SimHum achieves 62.5% success on out‑of‑distribution scenes across four tabletop tasks, outperforming real‑only training by 53.7% and improving the best single‑source baseline by 35.0% in a matched‑time study.
Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity.
arXiv:2606. 15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute.
AtomEgo investigates how to integrate large-scale egocentric human interaction data into embodied foundation model pre‑training. The study uses a curated 2,659‑hour corpus and a scalable data pipeline to evaluate three co‑training paradigms across vision‑language‑action and world‑action architectures. Results show that the benefit of egocentric data depends on both its scale and the quality of alignment with robotic embodiment, offering practical guidance for scalable ego‑robot pre‑training.
arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.