arXiv AI

TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics

arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv AI
Aug 25

RARM: Confidence-Gated Progress Reward Modeling for RL in Manipulation

The paper introduces RARM, a Reference‑Anchored Reward Model that uses a single successful demonstration to generate dense, progress‑aware rewards for reinforcement learning in robot manipulation. RARM is trained on general‑purpose videos with a contrastive temporal objective, requiring no task‑specific data or reward engineering. During deployment it matches rollout clips to reference clips and rewards only confident forward progress, reducing false positives. Experiments on nine simulated tasks and four real‑world tasks show that RARM achieves the best overall success rates, especially on long‑horizon tasks like cloth folding.

By Pengzhi Yang, Xinyu Wang, Pengyu Jing, Kehan Wen, Yiduo Qu, Zhenhao Huang, Minghao Fu, Xin Liu, Yaheng Shen, Fan Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

RynnValue: Scaling Robotic Value Foundation Models with Temporal Distance

arXiv:2608. 09853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored.

By Dongchi Huang, Hongyin Zhang, Bohan Hou, Siteng Huang, Zhian Su, Hang Guo, Tong Lu, Zhaofeng Xu, Jiahao Tang, Jianfei Yang, Donglin Wang, Peixi Peng, Mingxiu Chen, Deli Zhao, Xin Li
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.

By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.

By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.

By Yang Yang, Bingjie Chen, Zihan Wang, Yizhe Li, Guoping Pan, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu
arXiv AI
4d ago

FineART: Fine-grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation

arXiv:2609.36416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions....

By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Jackson Lee, Thomas Wolf, Pragna Mannam
arXiv AI
2d ago

FineART: Fine-Grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation

arXiv:2609.36416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must often execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isol...

By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Thomas Wolf, Jackson Lee, Pragna Mannam