arXiv AI

Skill Composition for Legged Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv AI
Jul 2

Coachable agents for interactive gameplay

arXiv:2607. 00642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has proven to be a valuable tool in the creation of advanced AI and robotic systems, contributing to everything from game playing to robotics to foundation models.

By Roberto Capobianco (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Harm van Seijen (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Nolan D. Bard (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Neil Burch (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Fatima Davelouis (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Josh Davidson (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Alisa Devlic (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Yunshu Du (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Ishan Durugkar (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Siddhant Gangapurwala (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Daniel Hernandez (Sony AI, North America, various locations), G. Zacharias Holland (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Sahil Jain (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Kenta Kawamoto (Sony AI, Tokyo, Japan), Raksha Kumaraswamy (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Patrick MacAlpine (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Dustin R. Morrill (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Declan Oller (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Francesco Riccio (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Akanksha Saran (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Craig Sherstan (Sony AI, Tokyo, Japan), Kaushik Subramanian (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Thomas J. Walsh (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Samuel Barrett (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Kizza N. Frisbee (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Mady Govil (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Johannes G\"unther (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Varun R. Kompella (Sony AI, North America, various locations), James A. MacGlashan (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Maxwell Svetlik (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Michael D. Thomure (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Jaden B. Travnik (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Kevin Waugh (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Elahe Aghapour (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Florian Fuchs (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Andreanne Lemay (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Shruti Mishra (Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland), Takuma Seno (Sony AI, Tokyo, Japan), Peter Stone (Sony AI, North America, various locations), Michael Spranger (Sony AI, Tokyo, Japan), Peter R. Wurman (Sony AI, North America, various locations)
arXiv AI
Sep 7

A Schema Bounded Language Model for Refining Robot Policies Without Destabilizing Local Learning

The paper presents a decentralized navigation framework for composite heterogeneous robots that integrates a large language model (LLM) policy agent, an Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) bandit, and a Double Deep Q-Network (Double DQN) controller. Each robot independently generates and refines policies at the round level using LLM inference, while the Double DQN handles tick-level action selection based on navigation variables and LLM priors. Across 30 rounds, the full configuration achieved all goals with the lowest median completion time (42 ticks) and a 25–39% improvement over other setups.

By Chongwen Dong, Mithun Paul Saint-Germain, Pinjari Asif, Carlo R. daCunha
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Emergent Compositional Skills in Mixture-of-Experts VLAs

arXiv:2607. 20771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of learning compositional robot policies end-to-end from expert demonstrations, without any pre-specified notion of task decomposition or hierarchy.

By Shlok Shah, Rhiaan Jhaveri, Tharun Kumar Tiruppali Kalidoss, Chirayu Nimonkar, Ishaan Javali
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data

VioLA is a generalist humanoid control policy that predicts body and hand motion latents instead of joint commands, enabling a pretrained controller to execute these latents on a robot. By aligning human and robot motion in shared latent spaces, the policy can be trained on a large dataset of 140.6 million frames, 93.2% of which are human demonstrations. As a result, VioLA can follow locomotion and manipulation instructions on a real robot zero‑shot, achieving 100% locomotion success and 88.6% manipulation success without task‑specific fine‑tuning.

By Mert Albaba, Jens Bei{\ss}wenger, Anna Manasyan, Daniel Marta, Michael J. Black, Wieland Brendel, Andreas Krause, Georg Martius, Martin Riedmiller
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?

The paper evaluates GPT‑6‑Astra’s performance across 12 robotic benchmarks, showing it achieves unprecedented results when using in‑context learning from training‑set demonstrations. It highlights the benefits and costs of a dual‑system architecture (high‑level reasoning and low‑level control) and identifies practical gaps in real‑world deployment, such as expensive demonstration collection and physical constraints. The authors propose a new benchmark prototype that derives tasks from real‑world needs, omits in‑domain demos, and measures agents against a continuously running world clock.

By SenseNova, Joint Research Team, :, Zhongang Cai, Ziang Cao, Tailai Chen, Han Chong Chua, Linjun Dai, Hanming Deng, Hokin Deng, Haiwen Diao, Chenjing Ding, Weichen Fan, Xiao Fu, Zerui Gong, Chenyang Gu, Zexin He, Zhi Hou, Bo Li, Qinyue Li, Quanzhou Li, Xiaowan Li, Zhichao Liao, Dahua Lin, Zilong Lin, Bo Liu, Chunxiao Liu, Pengfei Liu, Tianqi Liu, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Lewei Lu, Jiapeng Luo, Yuexiao Ma, Liang Pan, Xingang Pan, Oscar Qian, Ziyi Shang, Yuyao Shao, Dawei Su, Dacheng Tao, Qingyi Tao, Quan Wang, Ruisi Wang, Xiaogang Wang, Ziyi Wang, Beichen Wen, Donghao Wu, Jiaxu Wu, Silei Wu, Xiaoming Wu, Zhonghua Wu, Hongcan Xiao, Weiye Xu, Atsushi Yamashita, Lei Yang, Zhe Yang, Baiqiao Yin, Wanqi Yin, Hanfei Zhao, Tianbo Zhong, Long Zhuo, Jing Zuo