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:2609.13851v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models for specific robots and tasks requires in-domain demonstrations, yet collecting diverse robot data...
By Chenwei Wang, Dianye Huang, Match W. L. Ko, Chenjia Bai, Zhongliang Jiang
Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging.
arXiv:2607. 27549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments.
By Ajay Sridhar, Jensen Gao, Jonathan Yang, Jean Mercat, Suneel Belkhale, Dorsa Sadigh
The paper investigates how Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models can generalise across different driving environments and camera setups. It introduces a multi‑dataset training strategy and an auxiliary objective called BEV‑Forcing, which injects bird‑eye‑view spatial information into the VLA backbone to improve both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution performance on a limited number of camera rigs. The authors observe that while BEV‑Forcing helps when training data is scarce, its advantage diminishes as the number of training embodiments grows, suggesting that scaling diversity may reduce the impact of such auxiliary tasks.
By Caio Azevedo, Stefano Sabatini, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde
The paper proposes a method to train efficient multi‑task manipulation policies by distilling knowledge from single‑task Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) experts. Instead of training separate models for each task, the authors transfer the experts’ learned velocity fields into a shared policy, combining this distillation signal with the original CFM objective. Experiments on RLBench demonstrate that this approach improves multi‑task performance while keeping the model size fixed, avoiding the need for larger capacity or performance drops seen with naive concatenated training.
By Shreya Deshmukh, Imen Mahdi, Nick Heppert, Abhinav Valada