arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv AI
Aug 19

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

LoopVLA introduces a recurrent Vision‑Language‑Action architecture that learns to refine multimodal representations, predict actions, and estimate when further refinement is unnecessary. By iteratively applying a shared Transformer block and producing a sufficiency score at each step, it decouples refinement from fixed layer indices and aligns confidence scores with action quality through a self‑supervised objective. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, and VLA‑Arena demonstrate that LoopVLA reduces model parameters by 45% and boosts inference throughput up to 1.7× while matching or surpassing strong baselines in task success.

By Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.

By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeff Schneider, Jeffrey Ichnowski
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

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 Computer Vision
Sep 28

InternW0-$\Delta$: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data

InternW0-Δ is a unified World Action Model that integrates pretrained visual dynamics, scene semantics, 4D geometry, and motion priors within a Mixture-of-Transformers framework to generate robot actions. It leverages a frozen VLM for semantic guidance, a 4D foundation model for geometric priors, and introduces Causal Imprint to learn future-relevant scene changes without future-video rollout. The model is pretrained on a newly curated 20K‑hour heterogeneous corpus of robot and human demonstrations, achieving superior performance on simulation benchmarks and real‑robot platforms.

By Xingyu Miao, Zizun Li, Baole Fang, Kaiwen Song, Tenghui Wang, Hanxue Zhang, Yating Wang, Xudong Li, Yuping He, Xueyuan Wei, Chao Gao, Xijie Yang, Yingxiang Xu, Kerui Ren, Wenqi Guo, Jianjun Zhou, Xinzhe Wang, Weiguang Zhao, Ni Yang, Zetao Cai, Yufei Xue, Hengjie Li, Zeyu He, Yuanzhen Zhou, Rong Fu, Jianyang Zhang, Siwei Cui, Fuxian Huang, Yunsong Zhou, Xing Gao, Yifei Yao, Qiaojun Yu, Kailin Li, Ming Zhou, Mu Huang, Xinyue Li, Wenze Cui, Bingqi Jiang, Xueyue Zhu, Junting Dong, Haoyu Guo, Tao Lu, Mulin Yu, Bowen Zhou, Bin Zhao, Tianfan Xue, Weinan Zhang, Chunhua Shen