Ensuring reliability in uncertain environments remains difficult for long-horizon robotic manipulation. End-to-end VLA models are data-heavy and opaque, making diagnosis and verification difficult. Hi...
HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.
By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
arXiv:2604.16683v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Imitation learning has enabled robots to acquire complex visuomotor manipulation skills from demonstrations, but deployment failures remain a...
By Gehan Zheng, Sanjay Seenivasan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Weiming Zhi
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
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:2606. 28385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning.
By Minh-Loi Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Hung Khang Nguyen, Minh Le, Doanh Le Thien, Hoang H. Tran, Dung D. Le, Vu N. Duong, Daniel Sonntag, An Thai Le, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Vien Anh Ngo, Tran Van Nhiem