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.
By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv:2502. 18447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing approaches to reward inference typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific behavior models.
By Will Schwarzer, Jordan Schneider, Philip S. Thomas, Scott Niekum
arXiv:2606. 29892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become indispensable for pushing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) beyond static imitation learning.
By Siyao Chen, Jiakang Yuan, Jiaxin Wang, Tao Chen
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
The paper introduces Residual Reward Models (RRM) to enhance preference‑based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in robotics. RRMs decompose the true reward into a prior component—such as a heuristic, language‑generated, or IRL‑derived reward—and a learned residual that is trained with human preferences. Experiments on Meta‑World, DM‑Control, and a physical Franka Panda robot show that RRMs markedly improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy learning compared to standard PbRL methods.
By Chenyang Cao, Miguel Rogel-Garc\'ia, Mohamed Nabail, Xueqian Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart
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