arXiv:2605. 30719v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study when large language models (LLMs) can serve as effective black-box policy optimizers for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, i.
By Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, Emma Brunskill
The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.
By Weiqi Wang, Zhi Li, Yudong Lei, David Martinez, Xiaofeng Gao, Yuxin Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yingnian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ran Gong
arXiv:2606. 25700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been success in minimizing both memory usage and computation with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), like Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA).
By Samuel Valland Lyngset, Tor Viljen Raanaas, Gard Sveipe, Eirik M{\o}ller Nilsen, Jim Torresen, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Tobias L{\o}mo
SO-101 Bench is a simulated benchmark for language‑conditioned spatial manipulation on the low‑cost SO‑101 robotic arm, built using an Isaac Lab digital twin of a real setup. It features four tasks across five families, 138 objects with seen/unseen splits, 916 evaluation episodes, and 3,629 simulated demonstrations for policy fine‑tuning. The benchmark’s rankings mirror real‑world performance (Spearman ρ = 1.00) and reveals that while learned policies reach about 61% success, an LLM‑driven agent that writes code and delegates grasping achieves 83.2%.
By Truman Hickok
arXiv:2606. 24669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for planning and sequential decision-making, but prior work often relies on using them as direct controllers, which requires precise action generation and can be unreliable in practice.
By Kuan-Yen Liu, Ren-Jyun Huang, Ti-Rong Wu
The paper explores a runtime strategy-selection framework where a large language model (LLM) guides a pre‑trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy for non‑player characters (NPCs) in a Unity combat game without altering the underlying policy. Five NPC agents sharing a PPO policy were compared in a baseline setup and an LLM‑augmented setup, where a locally hosted Mistral 7B model assigns one of four tactical tags every five seconds based on live game state. Across 600 episodes against three scripted opponents, the LLM‑augmented agents more than doubled their win rate against a Balanced opponent, improved performance against an Evasive opponent, but struggled against an Aggressive opponent due to over‑reliance on encirclement; analysis of 2,430 strategy selections revealed limited zero‑shot differentiation with the model favoring Surround in 83.8% of cases.
By Hrithika Deepu Nair, Kayvan Karim
arXiv:2609.07111v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Quadruped robot locomotion policies are often trained using reinforcement learning, which in turn relies heavily on hand-crafted reward functions. De...
By Merve Atasever, Keyan Azbijari, Cagan Bakirci, Alfredo Reina Corona, Tolga Izdas, Richard Yang, Erdem Biyik, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
RoboAware learns to coordinate modular robot skills by training a state‑conditioned responsibility coordinator using counterfactual outcomes. It introduces State‑Locked Counterfactual Branching (SCB) to generate outcomes for all admissible skill families from the same state, and Execution‑Aware Learning (EAL) to distill these outcomes into family‑conditioned values via Monte Carlo tree search and Q‑learning. In single‑episode evaluations across 100 tasks, RoboAware achieves a 77.0% overall success rate, outperforming existing baselines on RoboSuite, LIBERO‑Pro, and RoboTwin bimanual tasks.
By Bohan Zhou, Xingbei Chen, Emily Huang, Weilin Ruan, Haojian Huang, Yehang Zhang, Zexi Li, Wenqian Li, Qize Yu, Zetian Song, Leyi Wu, Jinghao Li, Mingxuan Song, Xinrun Xu, Zongyang Qiu, Yangkai Wei, Tianyi Zhang, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, James Cheng
arXiv:2608. 19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to efficiently finetune robot policies to learn new tasks on the fly?
By Bhavya Sukhija, Oliver Groth, Mohit Shridhar, Tim Hertweck, Michael Bloesch, Markus Wulfmeier, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Martin Riedmiller
arXiv:2606. 31846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising framework for robotic manipulation by connecting language instructions, visual observations, and continuous control.
By Lang Cao, Renhong Chen, Luyi Li, Peng Wang, Mofan Peng, Yitong Li
EmbodiedSkills is a skill-based agent framework that enhances frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies with world action models for consequence‑aware action selection. It defines reusable skills for observation, context encoding, candidate generation, consequence prediction, outcome evaluation, candidate comparison, and action execution, organized into five stages that support both continuous action chunks and pick‑and‑place primitives. The framework improves success rates on MetaWorld MT50, CLIPort, and CALVIN benchmarks by incorporating outcome predictions and lightweight comparators while keeping the core policy and observation encoders frozen.
By Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Tianwei Lin, Jinhao Mao, Zhenxuan Fan, Mingjian Gao, Yang Dai, Wentong Li, Zheqi Lv, Zheng Dong, Yingjie Niu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jun Xiao, Chao Li, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv:2608.21204v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a poli...
By Varun Giridhar, Anant Khandelwal, Jeremy A. Collins, Ignat Georgiev, Animesh Garg