KeyGen is a framework that learns canonical 3D keypoints from point clouds to create structured, object‑centric representations for policy learning in robotic manipulation. By conditioning a visuomotor diffusion policy on these keypoints and object geometry, it predicts full manipulation trajectories that maintain geometric correspondence across different object instances. Experiments on a photorealistic simulation benchmark with three tasks show that KeyGen outperforms prior methods on both seen and unseen objects, scales with more demonstrations, remains robust to rescaling, and performs well in real‑world manipulation.
By Shuxin Cao, Liquan Wang, Masoud Moghani, Benjamin Joffe, Animesh Garg
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang
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.
By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
arXiv:2606. 18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance.
By Seyed Alireza Azimi, Homayoon Farrahi, Abhishek Naik, Colin Bellinger, A. Rupam Mahmood
arXiv:2608. 14379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved promising performance in robotic manipulation.
By Yuxuan Chen, Wanruo Zhang, Xiao Li
arXiv:2603.18532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The strong performance of large vision-language models (VLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) has motivated similar approaches for f...
By Andrew Choi, Xinjie Wang, Zhizhong Su, Wei Xu
arXiv:2606. 17046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world.
By Jisang Han, Seonghu Jeon, Jaewoo Jung, Ren\'e Zurbr\"ugg, Honggyu An, Tifanny Portela, Marco Hutter, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging. We identify two critical mismatches: wrist-mounted fisheye views, with severe radial distortion and local gripper-centric perspectives, are out-of-distribution for pretrained VLMs; and human-collected trajectories frequently violate kinematic limits, incur collisions, or exceed controller bandwidth, teaching VLA policies physically infeasible actions.
arXiv:2606. 20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution.
By Jonghoon Lee, Seong Hyeon Park, Byungwoo Jeon, Minha Lee, Jinwoo Shin
FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.
By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz
Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.