AlphaNIST demonstrates that a single reinforcement‑learning policy can master 20 diverse assembly tasks on the NIST Assembly Task Board #1 using only a sparse binary reward, without demonstrations, progress shaping, scripted primitives, or per‑task tuning. The policy achieves 98.2% overall training success and can complete ten assembly pairs in a single episode, discovering dexterous, planning‑like behaviors such as selecting future grasps and reorienting parts using surrounding geometry. The work shows that task‑agnostic rewards can enable robots to learn complex manipulation strategies autonomously.
arXiv:2606. 26428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fingered robots promise the speed and dexterity of human hands, yet challenging problems such as precise assembly have remained out of reach.
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.
arXiv:2610.02196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study test-time evolution for humanoid loco-manipulation: solving tasks that a controller was never trained for by repurposing its existing skills...
arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
arXiv:2608. 19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to efficiently finetune robot policies to learn new tasks on the fly?
LADDER is a long‑horizon robot manipulation benchmark that scales from 1 to 10 subgoals within the same environment, covering 145 tasks across three suites and two embodiments. The benchmark evaluates low‑level policies and orchestration methods, showing that while low‑level policies perform well on single‑subgoal tasks, they fail on extended tasks, and orchestration improves performance but is limited by execution errors. Tool‑selection orchestration with GPT‑Policy achieves the highest success rate (~62%) but at significant time and cost.
arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.
arXiv:2604.00055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing robotic foundation policies are trained primarily via large-scale imitation learning. While such models demonstrate strong capabilit...
Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predi...
arXiv:2609.01596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We pre...
arXiv:2607. 04591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation.