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: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.
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.
arXiv:2609.13851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models for specific robots and tasks requires in-domain demonstrations, yet collecting diverse robot data...
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.
arXiv:2607. 02466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of expert demonstrations -- triplets of observations, instructions, and actions that are costly to collect at scale.
arXiv:2608. 10600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skill abstraction---the process of learning reusable and temporally extended behaviors---has emerged as a key paradigm for improving sample efficiency and generalization in robot learning.
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.
The paper discusses the "embodiment gap" in robot foundation models, highlighting that while models can generalize across tasks, additional work is often needed to deploy them on specific robot bodies. It surveys what components can be reused across different robot embodiments and what must be implemented anew, mapping existing methods along axes of shared structure and adaptation stage. The authors propose a reporting framework to better assess adaptation efforts and identify remaining challenges for cross-embodiment learning.
arXiv:2607. 13597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich semantic representations from pretrained Vision-Language Models, yet fine-tuning on limited robot demonstrations degrades this structure and undermines generalization.
The paper proposes using action‑similarity supervision to improve cross‑embodiment transfer in latent action models (LAMs). By training the similarity between latent actions to match the similarity of ground‑truth robot action sequences—without predicting the actions themselves—the authors reduce sensitivity to background noise and embodiment differences. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 show that this approach more than doubles cross‑embodiment success compared to predicting ground‑truth actions, especially when similarities are computed on end‑effector motion and compared across robots.
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.