OpenAI Blog

Learning concepts with energy functions

We’ve developed an energy-based model that can quickly learn to identify and generate instances of concepts, such as near, above, between, closest, and furthest, expressed as sets of 2d points. Our model learns these concepts after only five demonstrations.

OpenAI Blog
May 16, 2017

Robots that learn

We’ve created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, which can learn a new task after seeing it done once.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Distillation for Efficient Multitask Manipulation Policies via Conditional Flow Matching

The paper proposes a method to train efficient multi‑task manipulation policies by distilling knowledge from single‑task Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) experts. Instead of training separate models for each task, the authors transfer the experts’ learned velocity fields into a shared policy, combining this distillation signal with the original CFM objective. Experiments on RLBench demonstrate that this approach improves multi‑task performance while keeping the model size fixed, avoiding the need for larger capacity or performance drops seen with naive concatenated training.

By Shreya Deshmukh, Imen Mahdi, Nick Heppert, Abhinav Valada
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Decoupled Physical Modeling and Execution for Physics Reasoning

The paper introduces a framework that separates physical modeling from execution in physics reasoning tasks. It uses a two‑stage post‑training approach: supervised fine‑tuning to build structured models and reinforcement learning with rubric‑based feedback to refine them. Experiments on PhysReason, PhyX, and SeePhys show that this explicit modeling improves reasoning performance by about 3% on average for small LLMs.

By Ye Zhang, Xuehang Guo, Rui Pan, Pengfei Yu, Denghui Zhang, Manling Li, Qingyun Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

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.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Intelligence Across Embodiments

The paper discusses how robotic embodiment—sensing, kinematics, dynamics, geometry, actuation, and control—varies across robots and over time, and argues that general embodied intelligence must learn across these differences. It critiques current methods that engineer correspondences for short‑term gains, proposing instead that learning should discover representations that enable transfer across a broader range of embodiments as experience accumulates. The authors advocate for embodiment diversity as a scaling axis, broad learned priors as a complementary ingredient, and evaluations that better characterize embodiment gaps and transfer performance, linking practical cross‑embodiment learning to the scientific pursuit of physical intelligence that adapts with its embodiments.

By Bo Ai, Henrik I. Christensen, Hao Su