Daily Papers

Creating accurate, physical simulations directly from real-world robot motion holds great value for safe, scalable, and affordable robot learning, yet remains exceptionally challenging. Real robot data suffers from occlusions, noisy camera poses, dynamic scene elements, which hinder the creation of geometrically accurate and photorealistic digital twins of unseen objects. We introduce a novel real-to-sim framework tackling all these challenges at once. Our key insight is a hybrid scene representation merging the photorealistic rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting with explicit object meshes suitable for physics simulation within a single representation. We propose an end-to-end optimization pipeline that leverages differentiable rendering and differentiable physics within MuJoCo to jointly refine all scene components - from object geometry and appearance to robot poses and physical parameters - directly from raw and imprecise robot trajectories. This unified optimization allows us to simultaneously achieve high-fidelity object mesh reconstruction, generate photorealistic novel views, and perform annotation-free robot pose calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulation and on challenging real-world sequences using an ALOHA 2 bi-manual manipulator, enabling more practical and robust real-to-simulation pipelines.

Real-robot evaluation is essential for understanding whether learned manipulation policies can operate reliably outside curated demonstrations. This need is particularly pressing for Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI)-style policies, whose performance depends on the coupling between wrist-view observations, action representation, data collection, and physical deployment. Existing real-world benchmarks have made important progress, but they are not designed around this UMI data-to-deployment setting. We present UMI-Bench 1.0, a local-first real-robot benchmark for standardized evaluation of UMI-style manipulation policies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark dedicated to real-world evaluation of UMI-based manipulation models. UMI-Bench aligns data collection, scene reset, policy execution, result logging, and task-factor analysis within a unified protocol. By making the full evaluation process reproducible and auditable, UMI-Bench provides a practical testbed for measuring how UMI-trained policies generalize to real physical manipulation.

Scalable robot learning in the real world is limited by the cost and safety issues of real robots. In addition, rolling out robot trajectories in the real world can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to learn an interactive real-robot action simulator as an alternative. We introduce a novel method, IRASim, which leverages the power of generative models to generate extremely realistic videos of a robot arm that executes a given action trajectory, starting from an initial given frame. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we create a new benchmark, IRASim Benchmark, based on three real-robot datasets and perform extensive experiments on the benchmark. Results show that IRASim outperforms all the baseline methods and is more preferable in human evaluations. We hope that IRASim can serve as an effective and scalable approach to enhance robot learning in the real world. To promote research for generative real-robot action simulators, we open-source code, benchmark, and checkpoints at https: //gen-irasim.github.io.

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

Recent advances in humanoid whole-body motion tracking have enabled the execution of diverse and highly coordinated motions on real hardware. However, existing controllers are commonly driven either by predefined motion trajectories, which offer limited flexibility when user intent changes, or by continuous human teleoperation, which requires constant human involvement and limits autonomy. This work addresses the problem of how to drive a universal humanoid controller in a real-time and interactive manner. We present TextOp, a real-time text-driven humanoid motion generation and control framework that supports streaming language commands and on-the-fly instruction modification during execution. TextOp adopts a two-level architecture in which a high-level autoregressive motion diffusion model continuously generates short-horizon kinematic trajectories conditioned on the current text input, while a low-level motion tracking policy executes these trajectories on a physical humanoid robot. By bridging interactive motion generation with robust whole-body control, TextOp unlocks free-form intent expression and enables smooth transitions across multiple challenging behaviors such as dancing and jumping, within a single continuous motion execution. Extensive real-robot experiments and offline evaluations demonstrate instant responsiveness, smooth whole-body motion, and precise control. The project page and the open-source code are available at https://text-op.github.io/

A simulation of a real robot workspace must preserve task-relevant interactions, while policies developed in it must operate on observations available to the real robot. Yet scene reconstruction and policy development are often treated separately. We present Agentic Real-to-Sim-to-Real (Agentic RSR), a framework that links scene reconstruction, policy development, and real-robot execution through the same manipulation task. Given a workspace video, a task description, and a known robot model, an agent recovers metric scale, iteratively refines the scene using visual feedback, and checks task-relevant interactions in MuJoCo. A coding agent then develops an executable policy, progressing from privileged object poses to visual observations and randomized simulation. The policy can interleave multiple observations and actions within one invocation, while the agent uses execution feedback to continue, retry, or revise its approach. A shared task-level interface carries the policy and accumulated experience to the real robot, where fresh observations and safety checks guide execution. Using Claude Opus 5.5 through DeepSeek Harness (DSH), all 18 scenes across two robots pass the joint visual check; mean four-view Depth MAE against reference depth estimates is 0.0808 m, mean Lab ΔE_{76} is 8.01, and mean grayscale SSIM is 0.7338. In real-robot experiments, the aggregate task success rate reaches 80% of the simulation task success rate, indicating substantial retention of simulated performance on hardware. Code and reconstructed scene data will be made publicly available.

Coding agents powered by models such as GPT-6-Astra connect spatial reasoning with executable robot behavior, raising the question of how such agents can produce lasting improvements in robot capabilities from physical interaction. In this work, we study embodied recursive self-improvement (RSI) through real-world exploration, code refinement, and deployment using PyRUA-REAL, a framework in which coding agents retain interaction experience as persistent memory and reusable executable skills that inform subsequent exploration and improvement. Our empirical study places physical manipulation at the center of the improvement process, examining how agents collaborate, what kinds of execution feedback support effective code refinement, and how task specifications and previously acquired skills influence robustness and task transfer. We further investigate the efficiency and capability of the resulting programs when deployed without involving an online agent for decision-making. Across eight real-world tasks, PyRUA-REAL achieves an average success rate of 91.1%. In complementary evaluation on 42 tasks from the RoboDojo benchmark, it achieves an average success rate of 84.4%. This study provides empirical guidance for turning physical exploration into reusable robot skills that support continued improvement and robust, efficient deployment.

The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies broaden the spectrum of tasks they can perform. We identify control and visual disparities between real and simulated environments as key challenges for reliable simulated evaluation and propose approaches for mitigating these gaps without needing to craft full-fidelity digital twins of real-world environments. We then employ these approaches to create SIMPLER, a collection of simulated environments for manipulation policy evaluation on common real robot setups. Through paired sim-and-real evaluations of manipulation policies, we demonstrate strong correlation between policy performance in SIMPLER environments and in the real world. Additionally, we find that SIMPLER evaluations accurately reflect real-world policy behavior modes such as sensitivity to various distribution shifts. We open-source all SIMPLER environments along with our workflow for creating new environments at https://simpler-env.github.io to facilitate research on general-purpose manipulation policies and simulated evaluation frameworks.

It is a long-standing problem in robotics to develop agents capable of executing diverse manipulation tasks from visual observations in unstructured real-world environments. To achieve this goal, the robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of the 3D structure and semantics of the scene. In this work, we present GNFactor, a visual behavior cloning agent for multi-task robotic manipulation with Generalizable Neural feature Fields. GNFactor jointly optimizes a generalizable neural field (GNF) as a reconstruction module and a Perceiver Transformer as a decision-making module, leveraging a shared deep 3D voxel representation. To incorporate semantics in 3D, the reconstruction module utilizes a vision-language foundation model (e.g., Stable Diffusion) to distill rich semantic information into the deep 3D voxel. We evaluate GNFactor on 3 real robot tasks and perform detailed ablations on 10 RLBench tasks with a limited number of demonstrations. We observe a substantial improvement of GNFactor over current state-of-the-art methods in seen and unseen tasks, demonstrating the strong generalization ability of GNFactor. Our project website is https://yanjieze.com/GNFactor/ .

The pre-train and fine-tune paradigm in machine learning has had dramatic success in a wide range of domains because the use of existing data or pre-trained models on the internet enables quick and easy learning of new tasks. We aim to enable this paradigm in robotic reinforcement learning, allowing a robot to learn a new task with little human effort by leveraging data and models from the Internet. However, reinforcement learning often requires significant human effort in the form of manual reward specification or environment resets, even if the policy is pre-trained. We introduce RoboFuME, a reset-free fine-tuning system that pre-trains a multi-task manipulation policy from diverse datasets of prior experiences and self-improves online to learn a target task with minimal human intervention. Our insights are to utilize calibrated offline reinforcement learning techniques to ensure efficient online fine-tuning of a pre-trained policy in the presence of distribution shifts and leverage pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) to build a robust reward classifier for autonomously providing reward signals during the online fine-tuning process. In a diverse set of five real robot manipulation tasks, we show that our method can incorporate data from an existing robot dataset collected at a different institution and improve on a target task within as little as 3 hours of autonomous real-world experience. We also demonstrate in simulation experiments that our method outperforms prior works that use different RL algorithms or different approaches for predicting rewards. Project website: https://robofume.github.io

Testing on real machines is indispensable for robotic control algorithms. In the context of learning-based algorithms, especially VLA models, demand for large-scale evaluation, i.e. testing a large number of models on a large number of tasks, is becoming increasingly urgent. However, doing this right is highly non-trivial, especially when scalability and reproducibility is taken into account. In this report, we describe our methodology for constructing RoboChallenge, an online evaluation system to test robotic control algorithms, and our survey of recent state-of-the-art VLA models using our initial benchmark Table30.

In this report, we introduce Xiaomi-Robotics-0, an advanced vision-language-action (VLA) model optimized for high performance and fast and smooth real-time execution. The key to our method lies in a carefully designed training recipe and deployment strategy. Xiaomi-Robotics-0 is first pre-trained on large-scale cross-embodiment robot trajectories and vision-language data, endowing it with broad and generalizable action-generation capabilities while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of the visual-semantic knowledge of the underlying pre-trained VLM. During post-training, we propose several techniques for training the VLA model for asynchronous execution to address the inference latency during real-robot rollouts. During deployment, we carefully align the timesteps of consecutive predicted action chunks to ensure continuous and seamless real-time rollouts. We evaluate Xiaomi-Robotics-0 extensively in simulation benchmarks and on two challenging real-robot tasks that require precise and dexterous bimanual manipulation. Results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all simulation benchmarks. Moreover, Xiaomi-Robotics-0 can roll out fast and smoothly on real robots using a consumer-grade GPU, achieving high success rates and throughput on both real-robot tasks. To facilitate future research, code and model checkpoints are open-sourced at https://xiaomi-robotics-0.github.io

Dexterous manipulation is physics-intensive and highly sensitive to modeling errors and perception noise, making sim-to-real transfer prohibitively challenging. Domain randomization (DR) is commonly used to improve the robustness of learned policies for such tasks, but conventional DR randomizes one instance per episode, offering very limited exposure to the variability of real-world dynamics. To this end, we propose Domain-Randomized Instance Set (DRIS), which represents and propagates a set of randomized instances simultaneously, providing richer approximation of uncertain dynamics and enabling policies to learn actions that account for multiple possible outcomes. Supported by theoretical analysis, we show that DRIS yields more robust policies and alleviates the need for real-world fine-tuning, even with a modest number of instances (e.g., 10). We demonstrate this on a challenging reactive catching task. Unlike traditional catching setups that use end-effectors designed to mechanically stabilize the object (e.g., curved or enclosing surfaces), our system uses a flat plate that offers no passive stabilization, making the task highly sensitive to noise and requiring rapid reactive motions. The learned policies exhibit strong robustness to uncertainties and achieve reliable zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often specific to the characteristics of the simulator. Due to modeling error, strategies that are successful in simulation may not transfer to their real world counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple method to bridge this "reality gap". By randomizing the dynamics of the simulator during training, we are able to develop policies that are capable of adapting to very different dynamics, including ones that differ significantly from the dynamics on which the policies were trained. This adaptivity enables the policies to generalize to the dynamics of the real world without any training on the physical system. Our approach is demonstrated on an object pushing task using a robotic arm. Despite being trained exclusively in simulation, our policies are able to maintain a similar level of performance when deployed on a real robot, reliably moving an object to a desired location from random initial configurations. We explore the impact of various design decisions and show that the resulting policies are robust to significant calibration error.

Transferring robotic skills from simulation to reality requires task knowledge that remains usable across differences in perception, dynamics, and embodiment. We introduce Skill2Real, an agentic policy framework that learns executable skills through a shared application programming interface (API). A Proposer-Verifier-Governor (PVG) loop uses privileged simulation evidence to diagnose outcomes and validate updates, while keeping learned skills grounded in public observations and API semantics. The Cerebellum first acquires local manipulation skills; the Brain then learns task-level composition with the Cerebellum frozen. Both memories transfer to the real robot without task-policy fine-tuning or skill-memory updates. As GPT-5.6 Sol learns skills on LIBERO-90, evaluating each frozen checkpoint with GPT-6 Astra raises LIBERO-Pro Long success from 2.0% to 56.3%, without training on Pro Long. Independent Robosuite training reaches 85.1% and 89.4% mean success with Sol and Opus 5 across seven tasks, respectively. Frozen Sol-trained LIBERO-90 skills achieve 78.75% mean completion across four real-world manipulation tasks with Astra. Removing the Verifier or Governor during LIBERO-90 training lowers final Pro Long success by 17.3 and 13.3 percentage points, respectively. These results support learning and transferring a hierarchy of executable skills through a common robot interface.

Teleoperation remains the default way to collect robot demonstrations, but every episode costs robot and operator time, and every new task starts from scratch. We ask whether a coding agent can take over the teleoperator's job. In our DataFarm, the agent receives a data request and one calibration episode of the robot in the target scene and rebuilds the task in simulation: it writes the scene, an expert controller, and a success judge. The simulator supplies exact actions, and a video model conditioned on real images renders each rollout as photographic video, generating all camera views together consistently. The output is real-ready data: synchronized camera views labelled with the robot's actions, on which a policy can be trained directly and deployed on the real robot. Independent judges certify the expert and every rendered episode before admission. On five real-robot tasks, policies trained only on farm data match policies trained on as many teleoperated episodes (93 vs. 84 successes in 100 trials), and under an unseen tablecloth and coloured light they keep 87 successes where the teleoperation-trained policies fall to 46. Adapting a task is fully automatic and costs \21 of API usage on average, paid once per task, plus 5 for a render contract; every further episode costs \0.80 on average for simulation, rendering, and review, with no robot or operator. One hour of three-view data for a task costs 107 on average, these costs included, slightly below a quote of \117 for teleoperation in China and below 290 in labour alone in North America.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer1.github.io

Comprehensive, unbiased, and comparable evaluation of modern generalist policies is uniquely challenging: existing approaches for robot benchmarking typically rely on heavy standardization, either by specifying fixed evaluation tasks and environments, or by hosting centralized ''robot challenges'', and do not readily scale to evaluating generalist policies across a broad range of tasks and environments. In this work, we propose RoboArena, a new approach for scalable evaluation of generalist robot policies in the real world. Instead of standardizing evaluations around fixed tasks, environments, or locations, we propose to crowd-source evaluations across a distributed network of evaluators. Importantly, evaluators can freely choose the tasks and environments they evaluate on, enabling easy scaling of diversity, but they are required to perform double-blind evaluations over pairs of policies. Then, by aggregating preference feedback from pairwise comparisons across diverse tasks and environments, we can derive a ranking of policies. We instantiate our approach across a network of evaluators at seven academic institutions using the DROID robot platform. Through more than 600 pairwise real-robot evaluation episodes across seven generalist policies, we demonstrate that our crowd-sourced approach can more accurately rank the performance of existing generalist policies than conventional, centralized evaluation approaches, while being more scalable, resilient, and trustworthy. We open our evaluation network to the community and hope that it can enable more accessible comparisons of generalist robot policies.

Real-world robotic manipulation in homes and factories demands reliability, efficiency, and robustness that approach or surpass skilled human operators. We present RL-100, a real-world reinforcement learning training framework built on diffusion visuomotor policies trained bu supervised learning. RL-100 introduces a three-stage pipeline. First, imitation learning leverages human priors. Second, iterative offline reinforcement learning uses an Offline Policy Evaluation procedure, abbreviated OPE, to gate PPO-style updates that are applied in the denoising process for conservative and reliable improvement. Third, online reinforcement learning eliminates residual failure modes. An additional lightweight consistency distillation head compresses the multi-step sampling process in diffusion into a single-step policy, enabling high-frequency control with an order-of-magnitude reduction in latency while preserving task performance. The framework is task-, embodiment-, and representation-agnostic and supports both 3D point clouds and 2D RGB inputs, a variety of robot platforms, and both single-step and action-chunk policies. We evaluate RL-100 on seven real-robot tasks spanning dynamic rigid-body control, such as Push-T and Agile Bowling, fluids and granular pouring, deformable cloth folding, precise dexterous unscrewing, and multi-stage orange juicing. RL-100 attains 100\% success across evaluated trials for a total of 900 out of 900 episodes, including up to 250 out of 250 consecutive trials on one task. The method achieves near-human teleoperation or better time efficiency and demonstrates multi-hour robustness with uninterrupted operation lasting up to two hours.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has been successfully applied in various computer games [8]. However, it is still rarely used in real-world applications, especially for the navigation and continuous control of real mobile robots [13]. Previous approaches lack safety and robustness and/or need a structured environment. In this paper we present our proof of concept for autonomous self-learning robot navigation in an unknown environment for a real robot without a map or planner. The input for the robot is only the fused data from a 2D laser scanner and a RGB-D camera as well as the orientation to the goal. The map of the environment is unknown. The output actions of an Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic network (GA3C) are the linear and angular velocities for the robot. The navigator/controller network is pretrained in a high-speed, parallel, and self-implemented simulation environment to speed up the learning process and then deployed to the real robot. To avoid overfitting, we train relatively small networks, and we add random Gaussian noise to the input laser data. The sensor data fusion with the RGB-D camera allows the robot to navigate in real environments with real 3D obstacle avoidance and without the need to fit the environment to the sensory capabilities of the robot. To further increase the robustness, we train on environments of varying difficulties and run 32 training instances simultaneously. Video: supplementary File / YouTube, Code: GitHub

Recovering real-world scenes as interactive simulation environments can enable generalizable robot learning and reproducible policy evaluation. However, constructing scenes that are both physically stable and visually faithful remains slow and expensive. In this work, we present RoboSnap, a real-to-sim framework that turns a single RGB image into a simulation-ready scene. The key idea is a layered design that separates the physics-critical interaction area from the surrounding visual context: collision-aware foreground assets are refined for stable robot interaction, while a 3D Gaussian splatting visual layer preserves faithful background appearance under novel views. Experiments on DROID scenes and real-robot tasks show that RoboSnap achieves reliable trajectory replay in the recovered scenes, supports task-specific synthetic data generation for policy training, and yields meaningful sim-real correlation for policy evaluation. To further support real-to-sim research, we introduce DROID-Sim, a real-to-sim companion dataset constructed from 564 real-world scenes in DROID. Extensive experiments suggest that the value of real-to-sim methods lies not only in high-fidelity visual reconstruction, but in turning real environments into reusable infrastructure for robot learning and evaluation.

We present Xiaomi-Robotics-1, a foundational vision-language-action (VLA) model capable of (1) following diverse language instructions to perform a wide range of mobile manipulation tasks in unseen environments out-of-the-box, and (2) efficiently adapting to novel downstream tasks with minimal fine-tuning data. We propose a two-stage training recipe consisting of pre-training and post-training. During pre-training, we imbue the model with broad and generalizable action-generation capabilities by training on over 100k hours of real-world manipulation trajectories collected via UMI devices. Crucially, we develop a scalable auto-labeling pipeline that annotates trajectory clips with natural languages describing scene state transitions, providing rich and precise conditioning for action learning. During post-training, we aim to align these capabilities with robot embodiments and imperative instructions that humans naturally use to prompt robots. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong scaling behavior. Xiaomi-Robotics-1 consistently improves with increased data scales and model sizes during pre-training. This scaling behavior directly transfers to post-training, where a stronger pre-training model yields better out-of-the-box real-robot performance in unseen environments. Furthermore, Xiaomi-Robotics-1 serves as a strong robot foundation policy that can be efficiently fine-tuned on complex, dexterous tasks with high data efficiency. Across multiple simulation benchmarks, Xiaomi-Robotics-1 outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it establishes a new state-of-the-art with a 57.6% success rate on RoboCasa365, surpassing the previous best of 46.6%. Furthermore, it achieves an average score of 20.07 on RoboDojo, significantly outperforming the prior state-of-the-art (13.07). Code and model checkpoints will be released. Project page: https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html

Learning generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation remains bottlenecked by costly real-world demonstrations. Simulation provides a scalable alternative, but requires visually faithful, physics-ready scenes and executable whole-body motions. We present Zero-HLM, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that transforms smartphone captures and simulated source demonstrations into scalable training data for humanoid loco-manipulation. Gaussian-guided agentic real-to-sim reconstruction aligns visual and physical scenes; motion-environment co-adaptation uses rollout feedback to correct whole-body references and interaction geometry. We generate 4,800 physically validated demonstrations for zero-shot transfer across three Unitree G1 tasks. Simulation-trained GR00T N1.7 achieves 66.7% mean full-task success, versus 46.7% with real-data training. On generalized configurations, expanded simulation training raises pooled success from 23% for base-trained real-data policies to 69%, without additional real demonstrations. Project page: https://young-bit.github.io/zero-hlm/

Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances. This article focuses on demonstrating the applications of Isaac in local planning and obstacle avoidance as one of the most fundamental ways in which a mobile robot interacts with its environments. Although there is extensive research on proprioception-based RL policies, the article highlights less standardized and reproducible approaches to exteroception. At the same time, the article aims to provide a base framework for end-to-end local navigation policies and how a custom robot can be trained in such simulation environment. We benchmark end-to-end policies with the state-of-the-art Nav2, navigation stack in Robot Operating System (ROS). We also cover the sim-to-real transfer process by demonstrating zero-shot transferability of policies trained in the Isaac simulator to real-world robots. This is further evidenced by the tests with different simulated robots, which show the generalization of the learned policy. Finally, the benchmarks demonstrate comparable performance to Nav2, opening the door to quick deployment of state-of-the-art end-to-end local planners for custom robot platforms, but importantly furthering the possibilities by expanding the state and action spaces or task definitions for more complex missions. Overall, with this article we introduce the most important steps, and aspects to consider, in deploying RL policies for local path planning and obstacle avoidance with Isaac Sim training, Gazebo testing, and ROS 2 for real-time inference in real robots. The code is available at https://github.com/sahars93/RL-Navigation.

Three challenges limit the progress of robot learning research: robots are expensive (few labs can participate), everyone uses different robots (findings do not generalize across labs), and we lack internet-scale robotics data. We take on these challenges via a new benchmark: Train Offline, Test Online (TOTO). TOTO provides remote users with access to shared robotic hardware for evaluating methods on common tasks and an open-source dataset of these tasks for offline training. Its manipulation task suite requires challenging generalization to unseen objects, positions, and lighting. We present initial results on TOTO comparing five pretrained visual representations and four offline policy learning baselines, remotely contributed by five institutions. The real promise of TOTO, however, lies in the future: we release the benchmark for additional submissions from any user, enabling easy, direct comparison to several methods without the need to obtain hardware or collect data.

Recent advancements in behavior cloning have enabled robots to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, accurately assessing training performance remains challenging, particularly for real-world applications, as behavior cloning losses often correlate poorly with actual task success. Consequently, researchers resort to success rate metrics derived from costly and time-consuming real-world evaluations, making the identification of optimal policies and detection of overfitting or underfitting impractical. To address these issues, we propose real-is-sim, a novel behavior cloning framework that incorporates a dynamic digital twin (based on Embodied Gaussians) throughout the entire policy development pipeline: data collection, training, and deployment. By continuously aligning the simulated world with the physical world, demonstrations can be collected in the real world with states extracted from the simulator. The simulator enables flexible state representations by rendering image inputs from any viewpoint or extracting low-level state information from objects embodied within the scene. During training, policies can be directly evaluated within the simulator in an offline and highly parallelizable manner. Finally, during deployment, policies are run within the simulator where the real robot directly tracks the simulated robot's joints, effectively decoupling policy execution from real hardware and mitigating traditional domain-transfer challenges. We validate real-is-sim on the PushT manipulation task, demonstrating strong correlation between success rates obtained in the simulator and real-world evaluations. Videos of our system can be found at https://realissim.rai-inst.com.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown considerable promise for robotic decision-making, yet deploying multi-agent RL (MARL) on physical multi-robot systems in industrial environments remains challenging. This paper investigates the real-world applicability of decentralized MARL for multi-robot multi-machine tending. We propose Feature-fusion Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (FMAPPO), which fuses 2D LiDAR measurements with task-specific state information to enable safe decentralized multi-robot task assignment and navigation. A complete simulation-to-reality pipeline was developed using high-fidelity robotic simulation and ROS2 and deployed on physical mobile-manipulator platforms operating under realistic real-world conditions, with the robotic arms disabled during the experiments. We further investigate the sensitivity of the learned policy to command update frequency, an important consideration for real-world deployment. Comparative evaluation in simulation demonstrated that FMAPPO significantly outperformed state-of-the-art baselines with a large effect size, achieving improvements of 106\% and 21\% in parts delivery and 48\% and 11\% in parts collection over MAPPO and SMAPPO, respectively. FMAPPO also increased machine utilization by 31 and 10 percentage points, respectively, while reducing collisions by 18\% and 15\% and increasing the safety score by 14 and 6 percentage points compared with MAPPO and SMAPPO, respectively. Furthermore, real-world experiments demonstrated that the learned decentralized policies can coordinate multiple robots to service multiple machines while maintaining safe operation under real-world sensing and control constraints. Videos of the real-world experiment are available online https://anonymouspapers123.github.io/FMAPPO/.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive results in robotics, yet high-performing pipelines remain highly task-specific, with little reuse of prior data. Offline Model-based RL (MBRL) offers greater data efficiency by training policies entirely from existing datasets, but suffers from compounding errors and distribution shift in long-horizon rollouts. Although existing methods have shown success in controlled simulation benchmarks, robustly applying them to the noisy, biased, and partially observed datasets typical of real-world robotics remains challenging. We present a principled pipeline for making offline MBRL effective on physical robots. Our RWM-U extends autoregressive world models with epistemic uncertainty estimation, enabling temporally consistent multi-step rollouts with uncertainty effectively propagated over long horizons. We combine RWM-U with MOPO-PPO, which adapts uncertainty-penalized policy optimization to the stable, on-policy PPO framework for real-world control. We evaluate our approach on diverse manipulation and locomotion tasks in simulation and on real quadruped and humanoid, training policies entirely from offline datasets. The resulting policies consistently outperform model-free and uncertainty-unaware model-based baselines, and fusing real-world data in model learning further yields robust policies that surpass online model-free baselines trained solely in simulation.

Understanding robot behaviors and experiences through natural language is crucial for developing intelligent and transparent robotic systems. Recent advancement in large language models (LLMs) makes it possible to translate complex, multi-modal robotic experiences into coherent, human-readable narratives. However, grounding real-world robot experiences into natural language is challenging due to many reasons, such as multi-modal nature of data, differing sample rates, and data volume. We introduce RONAR, an LLM-based system that generates natural language narrations from robot experiences, aiding in behavior announcement, failure analysis, and human interaction to recover failure. Evaluated across various scenarios, RONAR outperforms state-of-the-art methods and improves failure recovery efficiency. Our contributions include a multi-modal framework for robot experience narration, a comprehensive real-robot dataset, and empirical evidence of RONAR's effectiveness in enhancing user experience in system transparency and failure analysis.

This paper presents a novel approach for pretraining robotic manipulation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using a large corpus of unscripted real-life video recordings of human hand activities. Treating human hand as dexterous robot end-effector, we show that "in-the-wild" egocentric human videos without any annotations can be transformed into data formats fully aligned with existing robotic V-L-A training data in terms of task granularity and labels. This is achieved by the development of a fully-automated holistic human activity analysis approach for arbitrary human hand videos. This approach can generate atomic-level hand activity segments and their language descriptions, each accompanied with framewise 3D hand motion and camera motion. We process a large volume of egocentric videos and create a hand-VLA training dataset containing 1M episodes and 26M frames. This training data covers a wide range of objects and concepts, dexterous manipulation tasks, and environment variations in real life, vastly exceeding the coverage of existing robot data. We design a dexterous hand VLA model architecture and pretrain the model on this dataset. The model exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on completely unseen real-world observations. Additionally, fine-tuning it on a small amount of real robot action data significantly improves task success rates and generalization to novel objects in real robotic experiments. We also demonstrate the appealing scaling behavior of the model's task performance with respect to pretraining data scale. We believe this work lays a solid foundation for scalable VLA pretraining, advancing robots toward truly generalizable embodied intelligence.

Deploying robots in human-shared environments requires a deep understanding of how nearby agents and objects interact. Employing causal inference to model cause-and-effect relationships facilitates the prediction of human behaviours and enables the anticipation of robot interventions. However, a significant challenge arises due to the absence of implementation of existing causal discovery methods within the ROS ecosystem, the standard de-facto framework in robotics, hindering effective utilisation on real robots. To bridge this gap, in our previous work we proposed ROS-Causal, a ROS-based framework designed for onboard data collection and causal discovery in human-robot spatial interactions. In this work, we present an experimental evaluation of ROS-Causal both in simulation and on a new dataset of human-robot spatial interactions in a lab scenario, to assess its performance and effectiveness. Our analysis demonstrates the efficacy of this approach, showcasing how causal models can be extracted directly onboard by robots during data collection. The online causal models generated from the simulation are consistent with those from lab experiments. These findings can help researchers to enhance the performance of robotic systems in shared environments, firstly by studying the causal relations between variables in simulation without real people, and then facilitating the actual robot deployment in real human environments. ROS-Causal: https://lcastri.github.io/roscausal

We present RoboManipBaselines, an open-source software framework for imitation learning research in robotic manipulation. The framework supports the entire imitation learning pipeline, including data collection, policy training, and rollout, across both simulation and real-world environments. Its design emphasizes integration through a consistent workflow, generality across diverse environments and robot platforms, extensibility for easily adding new robots, tasks, and policies, and reproducibility through evaluations using publicly available datasets. RoboManipBaselines systematically implements the core components of imitation learning: environment, dataset, and policy. Through a unified interface, the framework supports multiple simulators and real robot environments, as well as multimodal sensors and a wide variety of policy models. We further present benchmark evaluations in both simulation and real-world environments and introduce several research applications, including data augmentation, integration with tactile models, interactive robotic systems, 3D sensing evaluation, and hardware extensions. These results demonstrate that RoboManipBaselines provides a useful foundation for advancing research and experimental validation in robotic manipulation using imitation learning. https://isri-aist.github.io/RoboManipBaselines-ProjectPage

Simulated evaluation is increasingly used alongside real-world evaluation of robot policies because it is cheaper and easier to repeat; however, its value depends on how closely its outcomes track the real robot's. We test whether our reconstruction pipeline, combining metrically scaled object geometry, authored physical parameters and scene reconstruction, reduces disagreement between simulated and real robot scores relative to a default open-source recipe. We constructed two simulated versions of one bimanual robot cell: an authored reconstruction, using object geometry at estimated metric scale, projected textures, authored physics and our own scene splat; and a baseline, referred to as the default reconstruction, using the open-source recipe of a generative single-image mesh, engine-default physics and a Gaussian-splat scene. Both reconstructions use the same object photographs and scene video. Two policies ran five tasks each, giving ten task-policy pairs, which we call cells; each cell was run twenty times in each reconstruction with all other settings held fixed. Both reconstructions were scored against the same real trials, graded by a third-party evaluator. Pearson correlation between the ten simulated and real cell means is r = 0.90 for the authored reconstruction and 0.51 for the default. Mean score error is 6.97 percentage points for the authored reconstruction and 17.54 for the default, a reduction of 10.56 percentage points. These results show that improving the quality of the environment reconstruction through higher visual fidelity, authored physics and metric scale makes the simulation more faithful to the real world and narrows the sim-to-real gap. We release the harness, the per-trial scores, every reported run's configuration, and the assets and scenes of both reconstructions.

We present EVA-Client, an open-source framework for deployment, data collection, and evaluation of trained manipulation policies on real robots. Sitting between a policy server and the physical hardware, EVA-Client unifies the real-robot stages of the policy iteration loop within a single codebase. It makes three contributions. First, a component-decoupled architecture in which robot backends, inference strategies, and transport middlewares form an orthogonal grid: adding a robot or a strategy touches only its own layer. Second, inspectable execution through Debug, Collect, and Eval workflows, with modes ranging from open-loop simulation to continuous real-time control. Third, every evaluation run doubles as a data collection, recording full rollouts in training-ready format alongside exhaustive logs and a side-by-side comparison viewer, so each evaluation feeds the next round of training rather than ending as an unrecorded impression. EVA-Client further consolidates major real-time inference strategies, synchronous and asynchronous execution, ACT-style temporal ensembling, Real-Time Chunking, and a naive-async ablation baseline, behind a single configuration surface.

Despite strong generalization capabilities, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain constrained by the high cost of expert demonstrations and insufficient real-world interaction. While online reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in improving general foundation models, applying RL to VLA manipulation in real-world settings is still hindered by low exploration efficiency and a restricted exploration space. Through systematic real-world experiments, we observe that the effective exploration space of online RL is closely tied to the data distribution of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Motivated by this observation, we propose TwinRL, a digital twin-real-world collaborative RL framework designed to scale and guide exploration for VLA models. First, a high-fidelity digital twin is efficiently reconstructed from smartphone-captured scenes, enabling realistic bidirectional transfer between real and simulated environments. During the SFT warm-up stage, we introduce an exploration space expansion strategy using digital twins to broaden the support of the data trajectory distribution. Building on this enhanced initialization, we propose a sim-to-real guided exploration strategy to further accelerate online RL. Specifically, TwinRL performs efficient and parallel online RL in the digital twin prior to deployment, effectively bridging the gap between offline and online training stages. Subsequently, we exploit efficient digital twin sampling to identify failure-prone yet informative configurations, which are used to guide targeted human-in-the-loop rollouts on the real robot. In our experiments, TwinRL approaches 100% success in both in-distribution regions covered by real-world demonstrations and out-of-distribution regions, delivering at least a 30% speedup over prior real-world RL methods and requiring only about 20 minutes on average across four tasks.

Reinforcement learning solely from an agent's self-generated data is often believed to be infeasible for learning on real robots, due to the amount of data needed. However, if done right, agents learning from real data can be surprisingly efficient through re-using previously collected sub-optimal data. In this paper we demonstrate how the increased understanding of off-policy learning methods and their embedding in an iterative online/offline scheme (``collect and infer'') can drastically improve data-efficiency by using all the collected experience, which empowers learning from real robot experience only. Moreover, the resulting policy improves significantly over the state of the art on a recently proposed real robot manipulation benchmark. Our approach learns end-to-end, directly from pixels, and does not rely on additional human domain knowledge such as a simulator or demonstrations.

The ability to learn multi-modal action distributions is indispensable for robotic manipulation policies to perform precise and robust control. Flow-based generative models have recently emerged as a promising solution to learning distributions of actions, offering one-step action generation and thus achieving much higher sampling efficiency compared to diffusion-based methods. However, existing flow-based policies suffer from representation collapse, the inability to distinguish similar visual representations, leading to failures in precise manipulation tasks. We propose DM1 (MeanFlow with Dispersive Regularization for One-Step Robotic Manipulation), a novel flow matching framework that integrates dispersive regularization into MeanFlow to prevent collapse while maintaining one-step efficiency. DM1 employs multiple dispersive regularization variants across different intermediate embedding layers, encouraging diverse representations across training batches without introducing additional network modules or specialized training procedures. Experiments on RoboMimic benchmarks show that DM1 achieves 20-40 times faster inference (0.07s vs. 2-3.5s) and improves success rates by 10-20 percentage points, with the Lift task reaching 99% success over 85% of the baseline. Real-robot deployment on a Franka Panda further validates that DM1 transfers effectively from simulation to the physical world. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage representation regularization to enable flow-based policies to achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation, establishing a simple yet powerful approach for efficient and robust manipulation.

Contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as wiping and assembly, require accurate perception of contact forces, friction changes, and state transitions that cannot be reliably inferred from vision alone. Despite growing interest in visuo-tactile manipulation, progress is constrained by two persistent limitations: existing datasets are small in scale and narrow in task coverage, and current methods treat tactile signals as passive observations rather than using them to model contact dynamics or enable closed-loop control explicitly. In this paper, we present OmniViTac, a large-scale visuo-tactile-action dataset comprising 21{,}000+ trajectories across 86 tasks and 100+ objects, organized into six physics-grounded interaction patterns. Building on this dataset, we propose OmniVTA, a world-model-based visuo-tactile manipulation framework that integrates four tightly coupled modules: a self-supervised tactile encoder, a two-stream visuo-tactile world model for predicting short-horizon contact evolution, a contact-aware fusion policy for action generation, and a 60Hz reflexive controller that corrects deviations between predicted and observed tactile signals in a closed loop. Real-robot experiments across all six interaction categories show that OmniVTA outperforms existing methods and generalizes well to unseen objects and geometric configurations, confirming the value of combining predictive contact modeling with high-frequency tactile feedback for contact-rich manipulation. All data, models, and code will be made publicly available on the project website at https://mrsecant.github.io/OmniVTA.

Video-based manipulation provides object-centric motion priors from human demonstrations, generated videos, or RGB-D observations, but such priors are typically embodiment-agnostic and cannot be directly executed by a specific robot. This paper presents PhysV2A, a reachability-gated and semantic-mask-constrained feasibility-completion framework for converting video-derived 6D object motion into robot-executable manipulation trajectories. The key idea is to treat grasp feasibility as trajectory-conditioned rather than local: each RGB-D-generated 6-DoF grasp candidate is rigidly coupled with the recovered object motion to form a grasp-conditioned TCP trajectory hypothesis. PhysV2A then performs hierarchical reachability-gated selection, where infeasible grasp--trajectory pairs are rejected by robot-centric kinematic checks and surviving candidates are ranked by downstream execution suitability. For the selected reachable trajectory, a VLM-assisted and rule-validated S-Mask identifies task-critical and relaxable Cartesian components, enabling semantic-mask-constrained manipulability refinement through redundancy-first optimization and bounded Cartesian relaxation. Real-robot experiments on four tabletop manipulation tasks show that PhysV2A improves task success over representative video-prior and IK-only baselines, reduces kinematic-feasibility failures, and produces better-conditioned trajectories with bounded semantic deviations.

Learning-based manipulation policies have made substantial progress in real-world robot manipulation, particularly for short-horizon action generation. However, deployment in open workspaces remains fragile under unexpected local scene dynamics, such as moving objects, transient occlusions, or disturbances near the intended motion. Existing runtime monitors often rely on global observation anomalies, policy uncertainty, or frame-level visual changes, and struggle to distinguish task-relevant execution risk from benign visual variation. We introduce PATCH, an action-chunk-conditioned latent patch innovation monitor for deployment-time intervention. Given the active action chunk, PATCH defines a projected execution corridor, predicts latent patch evolution inside it, and accumulates persistent residuals unexplained by the robot's own motion. These residuals form a localized intervention signal that allows PATCH-Router to pause execution, select an available recovery source, and resume the original policy once localized innovation subsides. Experiments on real robot rollout data show that PATCH produces more stable and context-relevant triggers than competing runtime monitors. Real-robot deployment further demonstrates monitor-driven intervention and policy resumption for disturbance-aware manipulation. Project Page: https://yananzhou5555.github.io/PATCH/.

Continuous asynchronous replanning is essential for real-time generative robot policies, but independent stochastic initialization can cause mode switching and inconsistent continuation across action chunks. We propose Execution-Aligned Progressive Noise (EAPN), which introduces structured stochasticity at both inter-chunk and intra-chunk levels. Across replanning steps, EAPN propagates a shared noise trajectory and aligns it with the actual execution displacement, establishing execution-aligned inter-chunk correlation. Within each action chunk, it models temporal correlation along action time. The aligned stochastic history is further combined with committed action context to condition subsequent generation, allowing new chunks to continue from execution-consistent generative states rather than restart from independent noise. We evaluate EAPN on D3IL, Kinetix, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation tasks. EAPN improves multimodal behavior consistency on D3IL and achieves an average success rate of 88.59% on Kinetix. On LIBERO, it remains robust and maintains strong task performance even under long inference delays. Real-robot experiments further achieve 90.0% success on Object Storage and 96.7% on bimanual Cloth Folding, demonstrating reliable continuous execution under asynchronous replanning.

Existing robot policy memories typically evolve with observation sequences, implicitly treating each update as the same amount of physical time. Yet identical observation histories can span different durations and require different actions, exposing physical time as a missing dimension of policy memory. We introduce Temporal Flow Policy (TFP), which learns memory dynamics to retain past events and evolve the memory state over measured time intervals. Observations and prior memory determine the content and time scales of each transition; elapsed time determines how far the state advances. TFP conditions diffusion and flow-matching policies through this memory state and is trained with their native imitation objectives. We evaluate TFP with Diffusion Policy and π_{0.5} through controlled comparisons of memory designs. These experiments show that successful timing depends on both measured intervals and retained history. TFP achieves higher average success than the recurrent and state-space memories we equip with the same intervals and than a variant that feeds the interval to a learned gate. Memory readouts recover the time since an event and motion information after occlusion. Changing the supplied intervals systematically delays or advances actions, linking time inputs to behavior. Real-robot tasks requiring timing or memory, together with LIBERO evaluations, demonstrate benefits in physical and general manipulation. These results suggest viewing robot memory not as stored observation history, but as a state that retains past events and evolves with physical time.

Transparent objects are common in our daily life and frequently handled in the automated production line. Robust vision-based robotic grasping and manipulation for these objects would be beneficial for automation. However, the majority of current grasping algorithms would fail in this case since they heavily rely on the depth image, while ordinary depth sensors usually fail to produce accurate depth information for transparent objects owing to the reflection and refraction of light. In this work, we address this issue by contributing a large-scale real-world dataset for transparent object depth completion, which contains 57,715 RGB-D images from 130 different scenes. Our dataset is the first large-scale, real-world dataset that provides ground truth depth, surface normals, transparent masks in diverse and cluttered scenes. Cross-domain experiments show that our dataset is more general and can enable better generalization ability for models. Moreover, we propose an end-to-end depth completion network, which takes the RGB image and the inaccurate depth map as inputs and outputs a refined depth map. Experiments demonstrate superior efficacy, efficiency and robustness of our method over previous works, and it is able to process images of high resolutions under limited hardware resources. Real robot experiments show that our method can also be applied to novel transparent object grasping robustly. The full dataset and our method are publicly available at www.graspnet.net/transcg

Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a straightforward GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. In the setting of zero-shot unseen scene generalization, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms baseline methods and shows strong potentials in generalization to unseen scenes and objects. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Project page: https://GR1-Manipulation.github.io

Most existing robotic datasets capture static scene data and thus are limited in evaluating robots' dynamic performance. To address this, we present a mobile robot oriented large-scale indoor dataset, denoted as THUD (Tsinghua University Dynamic) robotic dataset, for training and evaluating their dynamic scene understanding algorithms. Specifically, the THUD dataset construction is first detailed, including organization, acquisition, and annotation methods. It comprises both real-world and synthetic data, collected with a real robot platform and a physical simulation platform, respectively. Our current dataset includes 13 larges-scale dynamic scenarios, 90K image frames, 20M 2D/3D bounding boxes of static and dynamic objects, camera poses, and IMU. The dataset is still continuously expanding. Then, the performance of mainstream indoor scene understanding tasks, e.g. 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and robot relocalization, is evaluated on our THUD dataset. These experiments reveal serious challenges for some robot scene understanding tasks in dynamic scenes. By sharing this dataset, we aim to foster and iterate new mobile robot algorithms quickly for robot actual working dynamic environment, i.e. complex crowded dynamic scenes.

Scaling real robot data is a key bottleneck in imitation learning, leading to the use of auxiliary data for policy training. While other aspects of robotic manipulation such as image or language understanding may be learned from internet-based datasets, acquiring motion knowledge remains challenging. Human data, with its rich diversity of manipulation behaviors, offers a valuable resource for this purpose. While previous works show that using human data can bring benefits, such as improving robustness and training efficiency, it remains unclear whether it can realize its greatest advantage: enabling robot policies to directly learn new motions for task completion. In this paper, we systematically explore this potential through multi-task human-robot cotraining. We introduce MotionTrans, a framework that includes a data collection system, a human data transformation pipeline, and a weighted cotraining strategy. By cotraining 30 human-robot tasks simultaneously, we direcly transfer motions of 13 tasks from human data to deployable end-to-end robot policies. Notably, 9 tasks achieve non-trivial success rates in zero-shot manner. MotionTrans also significantly enhances pretraining-finetuning performance (+40% success rate). Through ablation study, we also identify key factors for successful motion learning: cotraining with robot data and broad task-related motion coverage. These findings unlock the potential of motion-level learning from human data, offering insights into its effective use for training robotic manipulation policies. All data, code, and model weights are open-sourced https://motiontrans.github.io/.

Current robotic planning methods often rely on predicting multi-frame images with full pixel details. While this fine-grained approach can serve as a generic world model, it introduces two significant challenges for downstream policy learning: substantial computational costs that hinder real-time deployment, and accumulated inaccuracies that can mislead action extraction. Planning with coarse-grained subgoals partially alleviates efficiency issues. However, their forward planning schemes can still result in off-task predictions due to accumulation errors, leading to misalignment with long-term goals. This raises a critical question: Can robotic planning be both efficient and accurate enough for real-time control in long-horizon, multi-stage tasks? To address this, we propose a Latent Space Backward Planning scheme (LBP), which begins by grounding the task into final latent goals, followed by recursively predicting intermediate subgoals closer to the current state. The grounded final goal enables backward subgoal planning to always remain aware of task completion, facilitating on-task prediction along the entire planning horizon. The subgoal-conditioned policy incorporates a learnable token to summarize the subgoal sequences and determines how each subgoal guides action extraction. Through extensive simulation and real-robot long-horizon experiments, we show that LBP outperforms existing fine-grained and forward planning methods, achieving SOTA performance. Project Page: https://lbp-authors.github.io

Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict robot actions from visual observations and language instructions. These actions are defined in the robot's own 3D coordinate frame, yet most VLAs observe the scene in the camera frame, creating a frame mismatch between where the scene is observed and where actions are defined. The mismatch is benign under a fixed viewpoint, where the policy can memorize a single observation-to-action mapping, but grows harder as large-scale datasets aggregate demonstrations across diverse camera setups and the policy must generalize this mapping across viewpoints. We address this mismatch with robot-centric pointmaps, images whose pixels store the 3D coordinates of scene points in the robot frame. Pointmaps provide robot-frame 3D geometry while preserving the dense H x W grid expected by pretrained 2D VLAs, so they integrate into existing VLAs with minimal architectural change. On RoboCasa, pointmaps improve both pi0.5 and SmolVLA and outperform representative camera-viewpoint and 3D-aware baselines. In real-robot experiments, their advantage over an RGB-only policy widens when the camera is moved to a placement unseen during training.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models require large-scale video-action pairs, yet real teleoperation remains scarce. While generated robot videos offer a scalable alternative, existing methods treat them as real robot data by recovering pseudo-actions from synthesized pixels. We argue that deriving low-level control from generated visuals is a mismatched abstraction. A video captures only geometry: the spatial trajectory representing the where of a task. A real demonstration captures control: the exact motor commands representing the how. Human-to-robot video generation preserves these unequally: the visible geometry survives the generation process, while the underlying control signals are lost. This Asymmetric Preservation Principle dictates a clean rule: this surviving geometry should solely supervise visual perception, leaving control to real demonstrations. Following this principle, we propose GRA (Geometry-guided Representation Alignment), which extracts the geometric content as future 2D end-effector waypoints, computed from the source human video through pose estimation, retargeting, simulation, and calibrated projection, and routes them to the VLA vision backbone via an auxiliary 2D head. The action head is trained on real demonstrations only. During fine-tuning, the waypoint loss persists as a spatial representation anchor that prevents the backbone from losing its geometric grounding. On real-robot tasks, GRA outperforms pseudo-action baselines under matched data budgets and narrows the gap to policies trained with substantially more real demonstrations, suggesting that correctly routed geometry bridges generated videos to robot policies more reliably than recovered actions.

Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations can cover every task and situation a robot will encounter, making the ability to learn from context at deployment essential for generalization. Such in-context learning (ICL), however, remains largely beyond the reach of existing robotic policies. The broad agentic capabilities of commercial vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-6 Astra, raise a compelling question: can these models learn from demonstrations, examples, and interaction feedback, then translate that information into executable and verifiable robot behavior from a new initial state without gradient updates or persistent changes to task-specific parameters? We introduce GPT-Policy, a general-agent framework for in-context robot learning. GPT-Policy integrates a context compiler that preserves task-relevant visual transitions, a VLM that proposes robot-tool actions, and a constrained controller that verifies and executes each action and reports its outcome. We evaluate its reliability and limitations through task success and efficiency metrics, matched comparisons across models, and controlled context ablations. In real-robot trials, human video demonstrations improve task completion even without robot action labels, while aligned action references yield further gains on contact-sensitive tasks. These findings position GPT-Policy as a step toward robot adaptation through in-context learning, providing an empirical foundation for translating the general-purpose capabilities of VLMs into physical behavior and clarifying the challenges that must be overcome for reliable deployment.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by combining semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language models with expressive action-generation policies. Diffusion-based action generators are particularly effective for modeling temporally coherent action chunks, but these chunks are typically executed open-loop after inference. This limits responsiveness when objects move, contacts change, or the scene evolves during execution. We propose VLA-Feedback, a two-timescale architecture that combines low-frequency diffusion planning with high-frequency visual feedback. Rather than fully denoising an action chunk before execution, VLA-Feedback retains its final denoising step as a lightweight feedback interface, allowing each action to be corrected using the latest observation before it is executed. This design preserves the expressiveness of the diffusion planner while enabling real-time action correction without rerunning the full vision-language diffusion model. VLA-Feedback matched GR00T on static LIBERO tasks while improving average success on dynamic simulation tasks from 27.5% to 85.0%. On real-robot tasks, it improved average success from 51% to 73%. Additional materials can be found on our project page: https://vla-feedback.github.io.

Embodied chain-of-thought (CoT) aims to bridge linguistic reasoning and robotic control, but its effective form and integration strategy remain underexplored. In this paper, we revisit embodied CoT for vision-language-action (VLA) models at large scale. We construct the largest embodied CoT corpus to date, comprising 978,743 trajectories, 226.3M samples, and 2592.5 hours of robot data. Through extensive experiments, we find that effective embodied CoT should ground high-level semantic understanding into concrete action guidance, such as end-effector movement descriptions and image-space trajectories, while high-level reasoning alone brings only marginal gains. We further show that explicit CoT does not scale reliably when used as an autoregressive action prefix, as it suffers from compounding inference errors and unstable reasoning-action coupling. To address these limitations, we propose ERVLA, a VLA model that uses embodied CoT as representation-shaping supervision rather than mandatory test-time reasoning. ERVLA is trained with a reasoning-dropout strategy, enabling the model to absorb rich reasoning traces during training while predicting actions directly without CoT decoding during inference. This design improves scalability with increasing pre-training data and avoids autoregressive instability. ERVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO-Plus with an 86.9% success rate and reaches 53.2% success rate on VLABench, demonstrating strong out-of-distribution generalization. In real-robot experiments, ERVLA further outperforms competitive state-of-the-art baselines, especially on tasks requiring semantic disambiguation and long-horizon execution.

The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale. We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC. It consists of three key ingredients: a reasoning trace, a scalable automatic labeling pipeline, and a strategy for adapting pretrained RFMs to use these traces for control. First, we find that effective reasoning traces should be grounded in the robot's next action and explain its causal structure: why the action is appropriate and what effect it should produce. Second, we show that these traces can be generated automatically from existing demonstrations, enabling us to construct ARC-Trace-DROID from DROID without collecting new robot data. Third, we show how state-of-the-art VLAs such as π_{0.5} and WAMs such as Cosmos3-Nano-Policy can learn to use these traces for control, with fine-tuning and inference tailored to each model's architecture and capabilities. Using ARC, we obtain gains in zero-shot RFM performance that, to our knowledge, are unprecedented without additional robot demonstrations or foundation-scale training. The adapted models establish a new state of the art on RoboLab-120 and MolmoSpaces, with gains of up to 50 percentage points on RoboLab-Reasoning-50. On real robots, ARC improves π_{0.5}'s task success by 82.2 percentage points. Project website: https://arc-robot-reasoning.github.io/

Robot learning has advanced by scaling demonstration datasets and model capacity; however, deploying a new robot embodiment or task typically necessitates a dedicated teleoperation corpus. The resulting policies remain bounded by their imitation distributions, limiting generalization and continual self-improvement. We introduce RAX (Robot Agent eXploration), an open-source framework for robot agents centered on scaling exploration: enabling agents to improve by acquiring online experience and synthesizing executable programs. In RAX, a general-purpose coding agent generates robot control code, operating without action demonstration data, hand-engineered action primitives, or value-function guidance. Through online exploration, the agent identifies decision sequences that achieve task goals and compiles them into modular programs encapsulating the full perception-planning-control loop. Using RAX, we present a systematic multi-embodiment study on scaling online exploration across precision and long-horizon manipulation tasks using single-arm, bimanual, dexterous, mobile, and humanoid systems in simulation and on real robots. Generalization performance on unseen environments improves consistently as exploration scales. In simulation, RAX outperforms top baseline models by +37.4% on average. On real robots, RAX autonomously learns memory-dependent, articulated, high-precision, deformable, and long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks without human demonstrations, continually improving performance by composing verified skills from prior exploration sessions. As exploration scales, we observe emergent capabilities including active perception, error recovery, safety guardrails, and human-robot collaboration. We open-source RAX as a generalist robot-agent platform in which new robot embodiments are integrated through their APIs alone, without teleoperated data collection or policy training.

Egocentric human data provide a principled source of supervision for learning dexterous robot manipulation. Unlike prior approaches that often collect such data in constrained or specially constructed environments, we collect in-the-wild egocentric demonstrations in real-world settings, including homes, factories, and pharmacies, etc., where people perform their ordinary tasks while wearing head-mounted cameras. This collection protocol captures diverse workflows and hand-object interactions across long-tailed object and skill distributions, but also yields visually challenging observations due to scene clutter and head-motion-induced viewpoint changes (a mean cumulative rotation of 15.93^{circ}/s). To address these issues, we introduce EgoWild2Dex, which transfers in-the-wild ego-human experience to dual-arm robots with dexterous hands by jointly aligning unstable egocentric views and human motions with robot observations and actions, respectively. This work offers three benefits. First, we introduce GeoFormer, a differentiable geometric transformer that warps noisy human observations toward robot observations. Second, we design a human-robot training scheme to bridge the embodiment gap, enabling high task success with limited robot supervision. Third, we release EgoWild, a 538.9-hour in-the-wild egocentric human dataset comprising 179,049 episodes, 125,961 unique task descriptions, and 1,282 object categories. On real robots, EgoWild2Dex achieves an average success rate of 96.7% across three long-horizon bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks and an average object-level zero-shot success rate of 33.3%. The data, models, and code will be released.

Learning task progress from robot demonstrations provides a practical way to construct dense shaping rewards for robotic reinforcement learning. A common approach uses normalized demonstration time as progress labels, implicitly assuming monotonically increasing task progress. During policy exploration, however, actual task progress can stall or even regress. Such models may mistake regressions for progress, assigning positive shaping rewards to actions that cause progress loss. Real suboptimal and failed executions offer corrective experience, but assigning absolute progress values to their states is difficult. Our key observation is that stalls, regressions, and recoveries establish local relative progress relations even when absolute progress is unknown. We introduce Event2Reward, which uses normalized temporal labels to anchor the progress scale and these within-trajectory relations to constrain local changes, combining absolute and relative progress supervision. Its progress predictions serve as potentials for reward shaping. We curate an event-annotated dataset from approximately 100K raw real-robot execution records, covering successful, suboptimal, and failed executions, without requiring framewise absolute progress labels. Under the same training budgets, Event2Reward improves average policy success by 18.16 percentage points over a baseline using only sparse task rewards across 40 tasks in four LIBERO suites. On real robots, average success after 30 minutes of wall-clock training reaches 60.0% on three precise insertion tasks and 90.0% on three object manipulation tasks, exceeding the sparse-reward baseline under the same budget by 36.7 and 23.3 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies further show that absolute progress supervision and relative progress relations are complementary, with joint supervision yielding better downstream policy learning.

Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context. We introduce Test-Time-Training Robot Policies (RoboTTT), a robot model and training recipe that scale visuomotor context to 8K timesteps, three orders of magnitude beyond state-of-the-art policies, without growing inference latency. At this context length, we unlock new robot capabilities: one-shot in-context imitation from human video demonstrations, on-the-fly policy improvement, robustness to perturbations, and stronger performance on multi-stage, long-horizon tasks. We also observe, for the first time, steady gains in closed-loop performance as pretraining context length scales. At its core, RoboTTT integrates Test-Time Training into robot foundation models such as Vision-Language-Action policies, yielding a sequence model whose recurrent state consists of fast weights, parameters updated by gradient descent during both training and inference, compressing histories into weight space and retrieving contextual information for long-context conditioning. To scale training context length, the recipe combines sequence action forcing with truncated backpropagation through time. On challenging real-robot manipulation tasks, RoboTTT improves overall performance by 87% over the single-step context baseline and fully completes a five-minute, ten-stage assembly task, which no baseline ever does. RoboTTT trained with 8K-timestep context outperforms the same model pretrained with 1K timesteps by 62%, suggesting context length as a new scaling axis for robot foundation models. Videos are available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/robottt/

Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on an unverified assumption: generated futures faithfully reflect arbitrary valid actions. Existing benchmarks are typically confined to expert demonstrations, leaving off-expert action following inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce WorldEcho, which probes action following over a broader action distribution using visual integrity and SE(3) trajectory alignment. Our diagnosis shows that current world models reasonably execute expert actions but struggle with diverse off-expert trajectories, either ignoring the commanded actions or producing visually invalid rollouts. We further propose WorldSync, which strengthens action following along three complementary axes: distributional coverage, representational grounding, and intervention-effect alignment. It broadens the training distribution over action consequences, grounds intermediate video representations in action-induced robot dynamics through an Action-Forcing Expert, and aligns predicted changes under action interventions with the corresponding changes in ground-truth futures. Experiments on RoboTwin benchmarks and real-robot tasks show that WorldSync improves WorldEcho metrics and serves as a more reliable simulator for iterative policy improvement, enabling policies to achieve higher success rates.

Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action models often represent continuous robot actions as discrete token sequences, enabling action prediction with standard next-token objectives. FAST has substantially improved this representation by compactly encoding action containing diverse temporal frequencies into relatively few tokens. However, while such compression reduces the number of action tokens required for autoregressive prediction, it does not necessarily improve the efficiency of policy learning from limited demonstrations. In particular, FAST typically assigns a single deterministic tokenization to each quantized action sequence, although multiple token sequences can represent and decode to the same robot motion. We investigate whether exploiting this representational redundancy can improve policy learning. In this paper, we propose TOkenization of Action sequences with STochastic sampling (TOAST), a stochastic action tokenization method that samples alternative tokenizations of the same quantized action sequence during policy training. This diversifies the discrete supervision while preserving the underlying robot action and requires no additional demonstrations. Experiments on LIBERO show that TOAST consistently improves over its deterministic counterpart, with the improvement increasing as training data decreases, achieving a 6.8 point gain in success rate when only 1/16 of training data is available. Across four real-robot manipulation tasks, TOAST further improves mean success rate by 15.8 points over the deterministic counterpart. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of stochastic action tokenization for autoregressive robot policy learning, particularly when training data are limited.

Depth perception is essential for a robot's spatial and geometric understanding of its environment, with many tasks traditionally relying on hardware-based depth sensors like RGB-D or stereo cameras. However, these sensors face practical limitations, including issues with transparent and reflective objects, high costs, calibration complexity, spatial and energy constraints, and increased failure rates in compound systems. While monocular depth estimation methods offer a cost-effective and simpler alternative, their adoption in robotics is limited due to their output of relative rather than metric depth, which is crucial for robotics applications. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes a single calibrated camera, enabling the robot to act as a "measuring stick" to convert relative depth estimates into metric depth in real-time as tasks are performed. Our approach employs an LSTM-based metric depth regressor, trained online and refined through probabilistic filtering, to accurately restore the metric depth across the monocular depth map, particularly in areas proximal to the robot's motion. Experiments with real robots demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art monocular metric depth estimation techniques, achieving a 22.1% reduction in depth error and a 52% increase in success rate for a downstream task.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of promising capabilities -- from step-by-step planning to commonsense reasoning -- that may provide utility for robots, but remain prone to confidently hallucinated predictions. In this work, we present KnowNo, which is a framework for measuring and aligning the uncertainty of LLM-based planners such that they know when they don't know and ask for help when needed. KnowNo builds on the theory of conformal prediction to provide statistical guarantees on task completion while minimizing human help in complex multi-step planning settings. Experiments across a variety of simulated and real robot setups that involve tasks with different modes of ambiguity (e.g., from spatial to numeric uncertainties, from human preferences to Winograd schemas) show that KnowNo performs favorably over modern baselines (which may involve ensembles or extensive prompt tuning) in terms of improving efficiency and autonomy, while providing formal assurances. KnowNo can be used with LLMs out of the box without model-finetuning, and suggests a promising lightweight approach to modeling uncertainty that can complement and scale with the growing capabilities of foundation models. Website: https://robot-help.github.io

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked new capabilities of task planning from human instructions. However, prior attempts to apply LLMs to real-world robotic tasks are limited by the lack of grounding in the surrounding scene. In this paper, we develop NLMap, an open-vocabulary and queryable scene representation to address this problem. NLMap serves as a framework to gather and integrate contextual information into LLM planners, allowing them to see and query available objects in the scene before generating a context-conditioned plan. NLMap first establishes a natural language queryable scene representation with Visual Language models (VLMs). An LLM based object proposal module parses instructions and proposes involved objects to query the scene representation for object availability and location. An LLM planner then plans with such information about the scene. NLMap allows robots to operate without a fixed list of objects nor executable options, enabling real robot operation unachievable by previous methods. Project website: https://nlmap-saycan.github.io

Large foundation models have shown strong open-world generalization to complex problems in vision and language, but similar levels of generalization have yet to be achieved in robotics. One fundamental challenge is the lack of robotic data, which are typically obtained through expensive on-robot operation. A promising remedy is to leverage cheaper, off-domain data such as action-free videos, hand-drawn sketches or simulation data. In this work, we posit that hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models can be more effective in utilizing off-domain data than standard monolithic VLA models that directly finetune vision-language models (VLMs) to predict actions. In particular, we study a class of hierarchical VLA models, where the high-level VLM is finetuned to produce a coarse 2D path indicating the desired robot end-effector trajectory given an RGB image and a task description. The intermediate 2D path prediction is then served as guidance to the low-level, 3D-aware control policy capable of precise manipulation. Doing so alleviates the high-level VLM from fine-grained action prediction, while reducing the low-level policy's burden on complex task-level reasoning. We show that, with the hierarchical design, the high-level VLM can transfer across significant domain gaps between the off-domain finetuning data and real-robot testing scenarios, including differences on embodiments, dynamics, visual appearances and task semantics, etc. In the real-robot experiments, we observe an average of 20% improvement in success rate across seven different axes of generalization over OpenVLA, representing a 50% relative gain. Visual results, code, and dataset are provided at: https://hamster-robot.github.io/

Successful robotic grasping in cluttered environments not only requires a model to visually ground a target object but also to reason about obstructions that must be cleared beforehand. While current vision-language embodied reasoning models show emergent spatial understanding, they remain limited in terms of obstruction reasoning and accessibility planning. To bridge this gap, we present UNOGrasp, a learning-based vision-language model capable of performing visually-grounded obstruction reasoning to infer the sequence of actions needed to unobstruct the path and grasp the target object. We devise a novel multi-step reasoning process based on obstruction paths originated by the target object. We anchor each reasoning step with obstruction-aware visual cues to incentivize reasoning capability. UNOGrasp combines supervised and reinforcement finetuning through verifiable reasoning rewards. Moreover, we construct UNOBench, a large-scale dataset for both training and benchmarking, based on MetaGraspNetV2, with over 100k obstruction paths annotated by humans with obstruction ratios, contact points, and natural-language instructions. Extensive experiments and real-robot evaluations show that UNOGrasp significantly improves obstruction reasoning and grasp success across both synthetic and real-world environments, outperforming generalist and proprietary alternatives. Project website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/UnoGrasp/.

Learning dexterous manipulation requires demonstrations that preserve fine hand-object interactions while remaining executable at deployment. Existing pipelines either lose deployable dexterity through retargeting or embodiment conversion, or rely on robot-specific teleoperation that is costly to scale and often lacks intuitive, contact-aware control for dexterous data collection. We present RealDexUMI, a wearable universal manipulation interface built around a shared dexterous end-effector module that integrates a lightweight dexterous hand, in-hand vision, and fingertip tactile sensing. A palm-side isomorphic teleoperation glove maps human finger inputs to robot-hand joint commands, enabling real-time, retargeting-free, intuitive, and precise hand control. The shared hand and sensing modules yield zero-gap end-effector data, with matched in-hand observations, tactile signals, contacts, and hand actions between collection and deployment. Across eight real-robot tasks spanning fine-grained, contact-rich, long-horizon, and bimanual manipulation, policies trained on RealDexUMI data achieve an average success rate of 88.75%, generalize to unseen initial poses, and transfer across three embodiments. Website: https://research.beingbeyond.com/realdexumi

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models can generate plausible end-effector motions, yet they often fail in long-horizon, contact-rich tasks because the underlying hand-object interaction (HOI) structure is not explicitly represented. An embodiment-agnostic interaction representation that captures this structure would make manipulation behaviors easier to validate and transfer across robots. We propose FlowHOI, a two-stage flow-matching framework that generates semantically grounded, temporally coherent HOI sequences, comprising hand poses, object poses, and hand-object contact states, conditioned on an egocentric observation, a language instruction, and a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) scene reconstruction. We decouple geometry-centric grasping from semantics-centric manipulation, conditioning the latter on compact 3D scene tokens and employing a motion-text alignment loss to semantically ground the generated interactions in both the physical scene layout and the language instruction. To address the scarcity of high-fidelity HOI supervision, we introduce a reconstruction pipeline that recovers aligned hand-object trajectories and meshes from large-scale egocentric videos, yielding an HOI prior for robust generation. Across the GRAB and HOT3D benchmarks, FlowHOI achieves the highest action recognition accuracy and a 1.7times higher physics simulation success rate than the strongest diffusion-based baseline, while delivering a 40times inference speedup. We further demonstrate real-robot execution on four dexterous manipulation tasks, illustrating the feasibility of retargeting generated HOI representations to real-robot execution pipelines.

World-action models guide action generation with predicted future observations, but vision-centric predictions miss the local contact cues that decide contact-rich manipulation. However, naively predicting future tactile observations as additional views recovers only a third of the achievable gain in our experiments. This gap reflects a timing mismatch: predictions precede execution, while tactile feedback arrives during it. We introduce TacPAC, which turns tactile prediction into real-time action correction. Once the base model has planned an action chunk, TacPAC caches the predicted contact that plan was conditioned on together with the plan's own representation, and a tactile expert reads each newly observed tactile image against that cache to correct the actions not yet executed. Feedback is thus interpreted against what the plan anticipated rather than in isolation, and one correction is a single pass over that cache, 20.7times cheaper than regenerating the chunk. On five real-robot tasks spanning precision insertion, fragile-object handling, object reorientation, and long-horizon manipulation, TacPAC leads every task and raises the average from 22% for its vision-only base model to 64%. Code is available at https://github.com/LogosRoboticsGroup/TacPAC.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental capability for embodied intelligence, especially for fine-grained manipulation tasks such as robotic assembly. Recent methods based on vision-language models (VLMs) largely rely on coarse 2D perception and struggle to perform accurate reasoning over complex 3D geometry. To address this limitation, we propose AssemLM, a spatial multimodal large language model for robotic assembly that integrates assembly manuals, point clouds, and textual instructions to predict task-critical 6D assembly poses with explicit geometric understanding. To bridge raw 3D perception and high-level linguistic reasoning, AssemLM employs a specialized point cloud encoder to extract fine-grained geometric and rotational features for accurate 3D spatial reasoning in assembly tasks. In addition, we introduce AssemBench, a large-scale benchmark for assembly-oriented spatial reasoning with over 900K multimodal samples and precise 6D pose annotations, extending evaluation from 2D grounding to full 3D geometric inference. Extensive experiments and real-robot evaluations demonstrate that AssemLM achieves state-of-the-art 6D pose reasoning performance and effectively supports fine-grained, multi-step assembly tasks in real-world settings. Code, models, and the AssemBench dataset will be made publicly available.

General-purpose robots need to reason about their actions, combining perception, world knowledge, planning, success detection, recovery, and low-level control. Today's state-of-the-art models attempt to combine all these capabilities into the learned policy via large-scale pre-training. Instead, we show that these capabilities can be decomposed into a general language-conditioned policy/control agent and a high-level agent manager/orchestrator. Rather than training policies to reason via pre-training, we build a closed-loop physical agent orchestrator that can do high-level planning, decompose the goal into achievable subgoals, command low-level motor commands, track and verify the outcome from low-level observations, and recover from failures. Our Physical Agency orchestrator (Pigey) can control existing vision-language-action (VLA) policies as well as parametrized skills to solve complex reasoning tasks in the real world, without any additional data collection or post-training. We evaluate Pigey extensively across simulation benchmarks and challenging real-world robotic manipulation tasks, and demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing generalist policies. On LIBERO-PRO, Pigey advances the state-of-the-art by over 4x (12.8% -> 53.3%) with no task-specific fine-tuning. On a real robot, Pigey lifts the frozen policy from near-zero to over 90% on reasoning-limited tasks. We call the difference between what frozen motor skills achieve alone and inside the agentic loop the orchestration gap.

Rapid progress in high-level task planning and code generation for open-world robot manipulation has been witnessed in Embodied AI. However, previous studies put much effort into general common sense reasoning and task planning capabilities of large-scale language or multi-modal models, relatively little effort on ensuring the deployability of generated code on real robots, and other fundamental components of autonomous robot systems including robot perception, motion planning, and control. To bridge this ``ideal-to-real'' gap, this paper presents RobotScript, a platform for 1) a deployable robot manipulation pipeline powered by code generation; and 2) a code generation benchmark for robot manipulation tasks in free-form natural language. The RobotScript platform addresses this gap by emphasizing the unified interface with both simulation and real robots, based on abstraction from the Robot Operating System (ROS), ensuring syntax compliance and simulation validation with Gazebo. We demonstrate the adaptability of our code generation framework across multiple robot embodiments, including the Franka and UR5 robot arms, and multiple grippers. Additionally, our benchmark assesses reasoning abilities for physical space and constraints, highlighting the differences between GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Gemini in handling complex physical interactions. Finally, we present a thorough evaluation on the whole system, exploring how each module in the pipeline: code generation, perception, motion planning, and even object geometric properties, impact the overall performance of the system.

World Action Models (WAMs) acquire behavioral priors by modeling future scene evolution, but predicting detailed futures in pixel or latent space incurs substantial cost. Recent evidence that co-training gains persist without test-time generation raises a question: what must a WAM learn to improve control? We introduce Copper-Policy, which learns a compact World representation with the policy rather than relying on a predefined target space. Through temporal joint-embedding prediction, it predicts future observation embeddings conditioned on task intention without reconstructing pixels. This prediction and action decoding shape the representation jointly, while the policy retains access to current-frame spatial detail for execution. Representation analyses show that the learned features better separate task-driven change from perturbations and provide complementary information for control. Compact prediction targets reduce training tokens per sample, enabling a 2B-parameter model trained in 9.67 hours on 8times RTX 5090 GPUs and 6times faster than Fast-WAM on matched A100 GPUs. Copper-Policy outperforms every compared method without embodied pretraining on RoboTwin and several embodied-pretrained VLAs on LIBERO-Plus (80.85%). On three challenging real-robot tasks, it performs comparably to π_{0.5} and attains a higher average score. Together, these results show that Copper-Policy combines strong control performance with efficient training.

Robotic manipulation often requires inferring task-relevant states from past interactions when the current observation alone is insufficient to determine the appropriate action. Despite progress in benchmarking memory-augmented vision-language-action (VLA) models, application-oriented tasks requiring history-dependent semantic inference remain underrepresented. We introduce GiT (Grounded in Time), a dataset and benchmark for grounding manipulation decisions in past events across biolaboratory, household, and industrial scenarios. It includes real-robot and Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) style demonstrations covering 18 bimanual tasks, together with simulation data and a ManiSkill-based evaluation suite covering nine tasks. Fine-grained subtask annotations and annotated counterfactual task pairs, in which similar current observations require different actions depending on prior events, support policy learning and targeted evaluation of history use. Evaluations of representative end-to-end VLA models in simulation and on selected real-world tasks reveal substantial room for improvement in history-dependent manipulation. The dataset and benchmark are available at the project page.

Cotraining with demonstration data generated both in simulation and on real hardware has emerged as a promising recipe for scaling imitation learning in robotics. This work seeks to elucidate basic principles of this sim-and-real cotraining to inform simulation design, sim-and-real dataset creation, and policy training. Our experiments confirm that cotraining with simulated data can dramatically improve performance, especially when real data is limited. We show that these performance gains scale with additional simulated data up to a plateau; adding more real-world data increases this performance ceiling. The results also suggest that reducing physical domain gaps may be more impactful than visual fidelity for non-prehensile or contact-rich tasks. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that some visual gap can help cotraining -- binary probes reveal that high-performing policies must learn to distinguish simulated domains from real. We conclude by investigating this nuance and mechanisms that facilitate positive transfer between sim-and-real. Focusing narrowly on the canonical task of planar pushing from pixels allows us to be thorough in our study. In total, our experiments span 50+ real-world policies (evaluated on 1000+ trials) and 250 simulated policies (evaluated on 50,000+ trials). Videos and code can be found at https://sim-and-real-cotraining.github.io/.

While generalist vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled diverse open-world manipulation, real-world robotic assistance requires two critical capabilities they currently lack: personalization and reliable execution. First, executing an instruction like "make me a sandwich" requires grounding subtask decomposition in persistent user preferences rather than relying on a single generic solution. Second, reliable deployment demands explainable safety assurance that proactively prevents hazards and gracefully recovers from occasional physical failures. To address these gaps, we present CarryOn, a dual-loop harness designed to augment a frozen VLA policy. The planning loop maintains persistent user-level and scene-level context that is continually grounded against new observations and revised through interaction, enabling personalized task selection and execution grounding across conversations and changing scenes. The execution loop actively supervises policy rollouts, shielding actions from predicted hazardous contact. When execution fails, the system invokes reusable control-based recovery skills that restore task progress and are refined through reflection on earlier failures. On a real robot and in simulation, CarryOn dispatches preference-consistent subtasks across users and scenes, reduces the violation rate of an already safety-finetuned VLA from 52.6% to 6.1%, and increases recovery success from 13% to 80% when refined skills are reused.

Bimanual manipulation policies require large and diverse training datasets, yet collecting demonstrations on physical robots is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation can generate data efficiently, but existing pipelines typically operate within closed asset libraries and predefined scenes: adding a newly observed object or environment still requires substantial effort to reconstruct geometry, specify physical and semantic properties, annotate interactions, and integrate the result into executable tasks. We present RoboCousin, an extensible simulation-based data-generation platform that turns user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual manipulation. Built on RoboTwin~2.0, RoboCousin converts object images into simulation-ready assets with visual and collision geometry, semantic and physical metadata, and automatically generated grasp-contact candidates. It further constructs digital cousins that vary compatible objects, backgrounds, layouts, and language instructions while preserving task-relevant affordances and spatial relations. The same asset system supports tabletop and room-level scene construction, with collision-aware base control for interaction beyond a fixed workspace. We release RoboCousin-OBD, containing more than 3,000 annotated object instances and 50 background environments, and use RoboCousin to generate over one million expert trajectories across 50 tasks. Simulation and real-robot experiments show that the automatically generated interaction annotations are comparable to curated annotations, generated assets provide effective sim-to-real supervision, and tabletop cousins can improve transfer beyond training on a single reconstructed scene. RoboCousin therefore provides a practical path for expanding both the scale and coverage of synthetic bimanual manipulation data.

Multi-robot control requires integrating distributed camera views while predicting separate action sequences. Most vision-language-action and world-action models target one robot. Combining multiple views alone does not establish spatial correspondence between them. World Dreamer v5-lite is a multi-robot world-action model built around a shared world state for robot-specific action prediction. Calibrated features from a pretrained video encoder populate this state in workspace coordinates; its spatial size remains fixed as views are added. A vision-language model provides scene context and one query per robot. The queries read the shared state and exchange pose-aware information, while their action streams remain separate. Masked-view cooperative training withholds selected camera views from both visual branches while retaining all action targets. This encourages the use of observations shared by other robots. Pretraining uses more than 10,000 hours of trajectories from 20 simulated robot types, RoboFactory, and real robots. On RoboFactory, World Dreamer v5-lite achieves 74.0% mean success, 23.7 percentage points above the strongest evaluated baseline. Across four real-robot tasks, it reaches 78.8% mean success, a margin of 13.8 points. It also reaches 58.08% overall on RoboCasa365.

Pretrained video generation models encode rich priors about physical interactions, but leveraging them for robot control typically requires either resource-intensive video generation at test time or action heads trained from scratch that do not fully utilize the pretrained backbone. We introduce Tokenizing Actions as Video Patches in a Shared Transformer Policy (TAPESTRY), a world action model that repurposes a pretrained video diffusion transformer into a robotic policy without requiring video generation at inference. Our key idea is to treat robot actions as single-patch tokens in the video model's latent space. A lightweight linear projection maps each action timestep to the patch dimensions of the pretrained VAE, and the resulting tokens are processed by the same patchifying layers and transformer backbone used for video. The shared backbone is optimized through three diffusion objectives sampled per minibatch element: Video diffusion uses VAE latents from robot and human videos to establish dynamics priors. Joint video+action diffusion trains on robot demonstrations using a coupled diffusion timestep and an asymmetric attention mask. Action-only diffusion denoises actions conditioned on clean image latents. At test time, the model generates a compact action token sequence in a single DDIM step from pure noise, producing smooth action chunks at 84 ms per action chunk on consumer hardware and avoiding the cost of full video generation. Across simulation benchmarks and real-robot experiments, TAPESTRY achieves strong performance with substantially lower inference cost than comparable joint video--action policies. More information can be found at https://tapestry-wam.github.io.

A fundamental aspect for building intelligent autonomous robots that can assist humans in their daily lives is the construction of rich environmental representations. While advances in semantic scene representations have enriched robotic scene understanding, current approaches lack a connection between spatial features and dynamic events; e.g., connecting the blue mug to the event washing a mug. In this work, we introduce the event-grounding graph (EGG), a framework grounding event interactions to spatial features of a scene. This representation allows robots to perceive, reason, and respond to complex spatio-temporal queries. Experiments using real robotic data demonstrate EGG's capability to retrieve relevant information and respond accurately to human inquiries concerning the environment and events within. Furthermore, the EGG framework's source code and evaluation dataset are released as open-source at: https://github.com/aalto-intelligent-robotics/EGG.

Manipulation policies must know which objects matter and where they are, yet the pretrained backbones that current robot foundation models build on, from language in vision-language-action models (VLAs) to video generation in world-action models (WAMs), do not directly require this metric grounding, leaving it to be learned implicitly from robot demonstrations. We propose Grounded Action Models (GAMs), a new paradigm of robot foundation models built with 3D grounding. GAM can be conditioned using language, points, or box prompts, which are first transformed into a shared object-centric representation of the selected objects. This representation captures target-focused visual features and metric object geometry, which is mixed with robot state history through a multi-stream transformer to predict action chunks. Although GAMs can be run autonomously, they can also serve as a low-level controller that a high-level planner controls using its various input modalities, allowing for long-horizon and memory-dependent manipulation. On RoboTwin 2.0, GAM achieves an average success rate of 55.3% across 50 tasks (vs. 52.0% for Spatial Forcing), including 47.6% under scene randomization (vs. 30.4% for Abot-M0), with its action policy trained only on clean-scene demonstrations. On LIBERO-PRO, it achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 61% (vs. 53% for π_{0.5}) across 16 perturbation settings, with the largest gains when targets are relocated or newly designated. On two real robots, GAM retains 17/20 successes under visual shift on a bimanual YAM versus 4/20 for π_{0.5}, while its composition with a Molmo2 planner on a Franka achieves 64.7% ID and 49.8% OOD step completion on long-horizon and memory-dependent tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exciting progress in acquiring diverse new capabilities through in-context learning, ranging from logical reasoning to code-writing. Robotics researchers have also explored using LLMs to advance the capabilities of robotic control. However, since low-level robot actions are hardware-dependent and underrepresented in LLM training corpora, existing efforts in applying LLMs to robotics have largely treated LLMs as semantic planners or relied on human-engineered control primitives to interface with the robot. On the other hand, reward functions are shown to be flexible representations that can be optimized for control policies to achieve diverse tasks, while their semantic richness makes them suitable to be specified by LLMs. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm that harnesses this realization by utilizing LLMs to define reward parameters that can be optimized and accomplish variety of robotic tasks. Using reward as the intermediate interface generated by LLMs, we can effectively bridge the gap between high-level language instructions or corrections to low-level robot actions. Meanwhile, combining this with a real-time optimizer, MuJoCo MPC, empowers an interactive behavior creation experience where users can immediately observe the results and provide feedback to the system. To systematically evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we designed a total of 17 tasks for a simulated quadruped robot and a dexterous manipulator robot. We demonstrate that our proposed method reliably tackles 90% of the designed tasks, while a baseline using primitive skills as the interface with Code-as-policies achieves 50% of the tasks. We further validated our method on a real robot arm where complex manipulation skills such as non-prehensile pushing emerge through our interactive system.

In this paper, we present DiffusionVLA, a novel framework that seamlessly combines the autoregression model with the diffusion model for learning visuomotor policy. Central to our approach is a next-token prediction objective, enabling the model to reason effectively over the user's query in the context of current observations. Subsequently, a diffusion model is attached to generate robust action outputs. To enhance policy learning through self-reasoning, we introduce a novel reasoning injection module that integrates reasoning phrases directly into the policy learning process. The whole framework is simple and flexible, making it easy to deploy and upgrade. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple real robots to validate the effectiveness of DiffusionVLA. Our tests include a challenging factory sorting task, where DiffusionVLA successfully categorizes objects, including those not seen during training. We observe that the reasoning module makes the model interpretable. It allows observers to understand the model thought process and identify potential causes of policy failures. Additionally, we test DiffusionVLA on a zero-shot bin-picking task, achieving 63.7\% accuracy on 102 previously unseen objects. Our method demonstrates robustness to visual changes, such as distractors and new backgrounds, and easily adapts to new embodiments. Furthermore, DiffusionVLA can follow novel instructions and retain conversational ability. Notably, DiffusionVLA is data-efficient and fast at inference; our smallest DiffusionVLA-2B runs 82Hz on a single A6000 GPU and can train from scratch on less than 50 demonstrations for a complex task. Finally, we scale the model from 2B to 72B parameters, showcasing improved generalization capabilities with increased model size.

Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.

Recent progress in robot manipulation has been largely driven by learning from large-scale demonstrations. For humanoid robot loco-manipulation tasks, however, existing data sources force an unsatisfying tradeoff between trajectory quality and scalability. Real-world teleoperation provides the highest-quality trajectories but requires dedicated physical space and time-consuming scene resets. Simulation offers an alternative way out of this dilemma: it can produce clean, embodiment-aligned data at scale without any physical hardware. In this paper, we propose OASIS, a simulation-data-driven framework for humanoid loco-manipulation. OASIS automatically reconstructs realistic object assets from real-world images using a 3D generative model. Based on these assets, trajectories are first collected through teleoperation in simulation, and then augmented under diverse domain randomizations in a post-processing stage. With the resulting simulation data, we further design a hierarchical visuomotor policy for humanoid loco-manipulation. Extensive experiments on the real humanoid robot show that, under zero-shot deployment, the policy trained on our simulation data achieves higher success rates on most tasks than that trained on real-robot teleoperation data, owing largely to the broad lighting and environmental variations covered by our simulation rendering, which real-robot data fails to capture. The project page is available at https://oasis-humanoid.github.io/.

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a policy that fails cannot learn from that failure without additional human demonstrations. Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning offers a path to self-improvement but has proven difficult to scale to the multi-billion-parameter models underpinning modern robot policies. We propose Q-Planning, which equips a large visuomotor BC policy with a small off-policy Q-function. Because a Q-function estimates value rather than imitates actions, it can be trained on the same successful demonstrations as the BC policy and later absorb both successful and failed deployment rollouts, an asymmetry BC does not have. We exploit this asymmetry to enable value-guided action selection at inference (a single-step Q-weighted average over BC draws) and online self-improvement that fine-tunes only the Q-function, leaving the BC weights untouched. On LIBERO and bimanual RoboTwin, ten iterations of self-improvement lift every benchmark score we tested (LIBERO-10 93% to 99%, RoboTwin 83.8% to 91.4%) and shorten successful episodes on the near-ceiling suites (LIBERO-Object, LIBERO-Goal). On two contact-rich bimanual real-robot tasks, the same loop (BC frozen, no human intervention) improves purely from its own deployment rollouts: stack-cups 40% to 90% and insert-wallet 25% to 80% in five iterations, whereas SFT on successful rollouts alone stalls at 55% and 30%. Under an identical online budget Q-Planning is the only method, among Best-of-N, filtered SFT, IBRL, DSRL, and DAWR, that improves stably from failures without training an auxiliary actor.

Data collection has become an increasingly important problem in robotic manipulation, yet there still lacks much understanding of how to effectively collect data to facilitate broad generalization. Recent works on large-scale robotic data collection typically vary many environmental factors of variation (e.g., object types, table textures) during data collection, to cover a diverse range of scenarios. However, they do not explicitly account for the possible compositional abilities of policies trained on the data. If robot policies can compose environmental factors from their data to succeed when encountering unseen factor combinations, we can exploit this to avoid collecting data for situations that composition would address. To investigate this possibility, we conduct thorough empirical studies both in simulation and on a real robot that compare data collection strategies and assess whether visual imitation learning policies can compose environmental factors. We find that policies do exhibit composition, although leveraging prior robotic datasets is critical for this on a real robot. We use these insights to propose better in-domain data collection strategies that exploit composition, which can induce better generalization than naive approaches for the same amount of effort during data collection. We further demonstrate that a real robot policy trained on data from such a strategy achieves a success rate of 77.5% when transferred to entirely new environments that encompass unseen combinations of environmental factors, whereas policies trained using data collected without accounting for environmental variation fail to transfer effectively, with a success rate of only 2.5%. We provide videos at http://iliad.stanford.edu/robot-data-comp/.

Robotic manipulation videos are increasingly used as visual plans for embodied agents, but optimizing purely for visual plausibility often fails to capture the fragile physical manifold of real-world interactions. Even minor physics-violating errors at the interaction boundary, such as interpenetration or premature object motion, can completely invalidate the inferred timing and pose needed for downstream execution. Because standard supervised fine-tuning lacks the direct pressure to penalize these localized failures, we introduce AgiBot-PhysPref. This rigorously curated 10,000-sample preference dataset isolates condition-matched physics violations, turning the generator's own failure distribution into a foundational signal for physical consistency. Building upon this, we propose RobotAPO, an adversarial physics preference optimization framework operating in the continuous flow-matching denoising space. To prevent the policy from merely memorizing static curated failures, RobotAPO employs a lightweight adversarial counterfactual proposer that learns a condition-dependent, physical-failure-biased direction in denoising space. This encourages the model to explore and better respect the physical interaction boundary, all while maintaining a pure prompt-and-reference inference interface without requiring external structural conditioning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that explicitly correcting these localized physics violations improves downstream robot execution from generated videos. On held-out AgiBot conditions, RobotAPO outperforms the strongest controlled internal baseline in physical consistency by 6.8% hard score and 10.0% soft score. Crucially, in real-robot replay, it translates these physical-consistency gains into a 37.4% relative improvement in task success over the strongest controlled internal baseline.

This paper describes a strategy for implementing a robotic system capable of performing General Purpose Service Robot (GPSR) tasks in robocup@home. The GPSR task is that a real robot hears a variety of commands in spoken language and executes a task in a daily life environment. To achieve the task, we integrate foundation models based inference system and a state machine task executable. The foundation models plan the task and detect objects with open vocabulary, and a state machine task executable manages each robot's actions. This system works stable, and we took first place in the RoboCup@home Japan Open 2022's GPSR with 130 points, more than 85 points ahead of the other teams.

We present a scalable, bottom-up and intrinsically diverse data collection scheme that can be used for high-level reasoning with long and medium horizons and that has 2.2x higher throughput compared to traditional narrow top-down step-by-step collection. We collect realistic data by performing any user requests within the entirety of 3 office buildings and using multiple robot and human embodiments. With this data, we show that models trained on all embodiments perform better than ones trained on the robot data only, even when evaluated solely on robot episodes. We find that for a fixed collection budget it is beneficial to take advantage of cheaper human collection along with robot collection. We release a large and highly diverse (29,520 unique instructions) dataset dubbed RoboVQA containing 829,502 (video, text) pairs for robotics-focused visual question answering. We also demonstrate how evaluating real robot experiments with an intervention mechanism enables performing tasks to completion, making it deployable with human oversight even if imperfect while also providing a single performance metric. We demonstrate a single video-conditioned model named RoboVQA-VideoCoCa trained on our dataset that is capable of performing a variety of grounded high-level reasoning tasks in broad realistic settings with a cognitive intervention rate 46% lower than the zero-shot state of the art visual language model (VLM) baseline and is able to guide real robots through long-horizon tasks. The performance gap with zero-shot state-of-the-art models indicates that a lot of grounded data remains to be collected for real-world deployment, emphasizing the critical need for scalable data collection approaches. Finally, we show that video VLMs significantly outperform single-image VLMs with an average error rate reduction of 19% across all VQA tasks. Data and videos available at https://robovqa.github.io

Joint space and task space control are the two dominant action modes for controlling robot arms within the robot learning literature. Actions in joint space provide precise control over the robot's pose, but tend to suffer from inefficient training; actions in task space boast data-efficient training but sacrifice the ability to perform tasks in confined spaces due to limited control over the full joint configuration. This work analyses the criteria for designing action spaces for robot manipulation and introduces ER (End-effector Redundancy), a novel action space formulation that, by addressing the redundancies present in the manipulator, aims to combine the advantages of both joint and task spaces, offering fine-grained comprehensive control with overactuated robot arms whilst achieving highly efficient robot learning. We present two implementations of ER, ERAngle (ERA) and ERJoint (ERJ), and we show that ERJ in particular demonstrates superior performance across multiple settings, especially when precise control over the robot configuration is required. We validate our results both in simulated and real robotic environments.

We study the challenging problem of releasing a robot in a previously unseen environment, and having it follow unconstrained natural language navigation instructions. Recent work on the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has achieved significant progress in simulation. To assess the implications of this work for robotics, we transfer a VLN agent trained in simulation to a physical robot. To bridge the gap between the high-level discrete action space learned by the VLN agent, and the robot's low-level continuous action space, we propose a subgoal model to identify nearby waypoints, and use domain randomization to mitigate visual domain differences. For accurate sim and real comparisons in parallel environments, we annotate a 325m2 office space with 1.3km of navigation instructions, and create a digitized replica in simulation. We find that sim-to-real transfer to an environment not seen in training is successful if an occupancy map and navigation graph can be collected and annotated in advance (success rate of 46.8% vs. 55.9% in sim), but much more challenging in the hardest setting with no prior mapping at all (success rate of 22.5%).

Recent developments in Large Language Models pre-trained on extensive corpora have shown significant success in various natural language processing tasks with minimal fine-tuning. This success offers new promise for robotics, which has long been constrained by the high cost of action-labeled data. We ask: given the abundant video data containing interaction-related knowledge available as a rich "corpus", can a similar generative pre-training approach be effectively applied to enhance robot learning? The key challenge is to identify an effective representation for autoregressive pre-training that benefits robot manipulation tasks. Inspired by the way humans learn new skills through observing dynamic environments, we propose that effective robotic learning should emphasize motion-related knowledge, which is closely tied to low-level actions and is hardware-agnostic, facilitating the transfer of learned motions to actual robot actions. To this end, we introduce Moto, which converts video content into latent Motion Token sequences by a Latent Motion Tokenizer, learning a bridging "language" of motion from videos in an unsupervised manner. We pre-train Moto-GPT through motion token autoregression, enabling it to capture diverse visual motion knowledge. After pre-training, Moto-GPT demonstrates the promising ability to produce semantically interpretable motion tokens, predict plausible motion trajectories, and assess trajectory rationality through output likelihood. To transfer learned motion priors to real robot actions, we implement a co-fine-tuning strategy that seamlessly bridges latent motion token prediction and real robot control. Extensive experiments show that the fine-tuned Moto-GPT exhibits superior robustness and efficiency on robot manipulation benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in transferring knowledge from video data to downstream visual manipulation tasks.

Robots in dynamic, human-centric environments must follow language instructions while maintaining real-time reactive control. Vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising framework, but they assume temporally aligned reasoning and control, despite semantic inference being inherently delayed relative to real-time action. We introduce Think-in-Control (TIC)-VLA, a latency-aware framework that explicitly models delayed semantic reasoning during action generation. TIC-VLA defines a delayed semantic-control interface that conditions action generation on delayed vision-language semantic states and explicit latency metadata, in addition to current observations, enabling policies to compensate for asynchronous reasoning. We further propose a latency-consistent training pipeline that injects reasoning inference delays during imitation learning and online reinforcement learning, aligning training with asynchronous deployment. To support realistic evaluation, we present DynaNav, a physics-accurate, photo-realistic simulation suite for language-guided navigation in dynamic environments. Extensive experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that TIC-VLA consistently outperforms prior VLA models while maintaining robust real-time control under multi-second reasoning latency. Project website: https://ucla-mobility.github.io/TIC-VLA/

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic manipulation, leveraging large-scale pre-training to achieve strong performance. The field has rapidly evolved with additional spatial priors and diverse architectural innovations. However, these advancements are often accompanied by varying training recipes and implementation details, which can make it challenging to disentangle the precise source of empirical gains. In this work, we introduce SimVLA, a streamlined baseline designed to establish a transparent reference point for VLA research. By strictly decoupling perception from control, using a standard vision-language backbone and a lightweight action head, and standardizing critical training dynamics, we demonstrate that a minimal design can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Despite having only 0.5B parameters, SimVLA outperforms multi-billion-parameter models on standard simulation benchmarks without robot pretraining. SimVLA also reaches on-par real-robot performance compared to pi0.5. Our results establish SimVLA as a robust, reproducible baseline that enables clear attribution of empirical gains to future architectural innovations. Website: https://frontierrobo.github.io/SimVLA

Robot learning from interacting with the physical world is fundamentally bottlenecked by the cost of physical interaction. The two alternatives, supervised finetuning (SFT) from expert demonstrations and reinforcement learning (RL) in a software-based simulator, are limited by the amount of expert data available and the sim-to-real gap for manipulation. With the recent emergence of world models learned from real-world video-action data, we ask the question of whether training a policy in a world model can be more effective than supervised learning or software simulation in achieving better real-robot performance. We propose World-Gymnast, which performs RL finetuning of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy by rolling out the policy in an action-conditioned video world model and rewarding the rollouts with a vision-language model (VLM). On the Bridge robot setup, World-Gymnast outperforms SFT by as much as 18x and outperforms software simulator by as much as 2x. More importantly, World-Gymnast demonstrates intriguing capabilities of RL with a world model, including training on diverse language instructions and novel scenes from the world model, test-time training in a novel scene, and online iterative world model and policy improvement. Our results suggest learning a world model and training robot policies in the cloud could be the key to bridging the gap between robots that work in demonstrations and robots that can work in anyone's household.

Video generative models are increasingly used as world models for robotics, where a model generates a future visual rollout conditioned on the current observation and task instruction, and an inverse dynamics model (IDM) converts the generated frames into executable robot actions. However, current video world models lack explicit executability constraints. As a result, visually coherent rollouts may still violate rigid-body and kinematic consistency, producing unstable or infeasible control commands when decoded by an IDM. We refer to this mismatch between visual generation and physically executable control as the executability gap. While this gap can be mitigated at inference time using techniques such as rejection sampling, such approaches are inefficient due to the high cost of video generation. In this paper, we leverage the executability gap as a training signal and introduce Executable Video Alignment (EVA), a reinforcement-learning post-training framework for aligning video world models. EVA trains an inverse dynamics model on real robot trajectories and repurposes it as a reward model that evaluates generated videos through the action sequences they induce, encouraging smooth motions measured by velocity, acceleration, and jerk while penalizing actions that violate embodiment constraints. Importantly, the reward remains informative even when generated videos contain severe visual artifacts, since such artifacts typically translate into unstable or out-of-bound actions. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and a real bimanual robot show that EVA reduces embodiment-specific artifacts in generated rollouts and improves downstream task execution success.

Recent advances in real-time interactive text-driven motion generation have enabled humanoids to perform diverse behaviors. However, kinematics-only generators often exhibit physical hallucinations, producing motion trajectories that are physically infeasible to track with a downstream motion tracking controller or unsafe for real-world deployment. These failures often arise from the lack of explicit physics-aware objectives for real-robot execution and become more severe under out-of-distribution (OOD) user inputs. Hence, we propose SafeFlow, a text-driven humanoid whole-body control framework that combines physics-guided motion generation with a 3-Stage Safety Gate driven by explicit risk indicators. SafeFlow adopts a two-level architecture. At the high level, we generate motion trajectories using Physics-Guided Rectified Flow Matching in a VAE latent space to improve real-robot executability, and further accelerate sampling via Reflow to reduce the number of function evaluations (NFE) for real-time control. The 3-Stage Safety Gate enables selective execution by detecting semantic OOD prompts using a Mahalanobis score in text-embedding space, filtering unstable generations via a directional sensitivity discrepancy metric, and enforcing final hard kinematic constraints such as joint and velocity limits before passing the generated trajectory to a low-level motion tracking controller. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that SafeFlow outperforms prior diffusion-based methods in success rate, physical compliance, and inference speed, while maintaining diverse expressiveness.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, motivating efforts to leverage these models to supervise robot learning. However, when used as evaluators in reinforcement learning (RL), today's strongest models often fail under partial observability and distribution shift, enabling policies to exploit perceptual errors rather than solve the task. To address this limitation, we introduce SOLE-R1 (Self-Observing LEarner), a video-language reasoning model explicitly designed to serve as the sole reward signal for online RL. Given only raw video observations and a natural-language goal, SOLE-R1 performs per-timestep spatiotemporal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and produces dense estimates of task progress that can be used directly as rewards. To train SOLE-R1, we develop a large-scale video trajectory and reasoning synthesis pipeline that generates temporally grounded CoT traces aligned with continuous progress supervision. This data is combined with foundational spatial and multi-frame temporal reasoning, and used to train the model with a hybrid framework that couples supervised fine-tuning with RL from verifiable rewards. Across four different simulation environments and a real-robot setting, SOLE-R1 enables zero-shot online RL from random initialization: robots learn previously unseen manipulation tasks without ground-truth rewards, success indicators, demonstrations, or task-specific tuning. SOLE-R1 succeeds on 24 unseen tasks and substantially outperforms strong vision-language rewarders, including GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro, while exhibiting markedly greater robustness to reward hacking.

Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a unified framework, World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning (AdaWorldPolicy) to enhance robotic manipulation under dynamic conditions with minimal human involvement. Our core insight is that world models provide strong supervision signals, enabling online adaptive learning in dynamic environments, which can be complemented by force-torque feedback to mitigate dynamic force shifts. Our AdaWorldPolicy integrates a world model, an action expert, and a force predictor-all implemented as interconnected Flow Matching Diffusion Transformers (DiT). They are interconnected via the multi-modal self-attention layers, enabling deep feature exchange for joint learning while preserving their distinct modularity characteristics. We further propose a novel Online Adaptive Learning (AdaOL) strategy that dynamically switches between an Action Generation mode and a Future Imagination mode to drive reactive updates across all three modules. This creates a powerful closed-loop mechanism that adapts to both visual and physical domain shifts with minimal overhead. Across a suite of simulated and real-robot benchmarks, our AdaWorldPolicy achieves state-of-the-art performance, with dynamical adaptive capacity to out-of-distribution scenarios.

Chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies predict multi-step robot controls, conditioning each update on the current visual observation alone. Yet robot actions cause contact, occlusion, and object motion, and the geometry that later decisions depend on can change before the next visual update arrives. Spatial VLAs improve current-frame geometry. Temporal VLAs aggregate past frames. Neither maintains an action-updated scene prior across chunks. We argue for a persistent action-updated scene state across control calls, and introduce EvoScene-VLA. Its recurrent scene prefix carries a geometry-aware scene state across chunks. At each vision-language model (VLM) call, the VLM combines scene information from the current observation with the action-updated prior from the previous chunk; the action decoder outputs both the next action chunk and a compact scene update. This update becomes the next prior, which the VLM corrects against the new observation when the next call arrives. Each control call therefore starts from a scene prior that reflects both recent actions and fresh visual evidence. During training, Scene Predictor supplies future scene-token targets, and Geometric Anchor aligns scene slots with frozen depth and 3D teachers. We discard both modules at deployment. On 31 RoboTwin tasks, EvoScene-VLA raises average success from 87.2% to 89.1% in fixed evaluation and from 86.1% to 88.5% in randomized evaluation. On the Galaxea R1-Lite real robot, EvoScene-VLA outperforms all baselines.

Contact estimation is a key ability for limbed robots, where making and breaking contacts has a direct impact on state estimation and balance control. Existing approaches typically rely on gate-cycle priors or designated contact sensors. We design a contact estimator that is suitable for the emerging wheeled-biped robot types that do not have these features. To this end, we propose a Bayes filter in which update steps are learned from real-robot torque measurements while prediction steps rely on inertial measurements. We evaluate this approach in extensive real-robot and simulation experiments. Our method achieves better performance while being considerably more sample efficient than a comparable deep-learning baseline.

Dexterous manipulation is limited by the cost of collecting large-scale robot demonstrations. Egocentric human videos offer a scalable source of diverse manipulation behaviors, but directly using them for robot learning requires bridging two gaps: the visual gap between human and robot observations, and the action gap between human motion and robot-executable action. We propose EgoEngine, a scalable framework for transforming egocentric human manipulation videos into high-fidelity robot data. Given an egocentric RGB video, EgoEngine produces: (i) a high-fidelity robot observation video replacing human with robot while preserving scene context and temporal alignment, and (ii) a task-aligned, executable robot action trajectory under feasibility constraints. Experiments in simulation and on real robots show that EgoEngine enables scalable conversion of human videos into robot data and, to our knowledge, demonstrates the first zero-shot visuomotor dexterous policy learning from egocentric human videos without real-robot demonstrations. Project website: https://egoengine.github.io.

Deep reinforcement policy learning directly in physical robots (on-robot learning) remains bottlenecked by slow wall-clock training times. We present SymmGrid, a trajectory level augmentation framework inspired by parallelized symmetries that super-scales group transformations to significantly accelerate on-robot learning in both egocentric and exocentric visual setups. We model a Markov Decision Process (MDP) under a symmetry tree, in which state-action pairs have admissible parallelized invariant transformations that yield a geometric grid structure. The state is modelled with ego- or exocentric images and proprioception information. The latter require special treatment, in the form of homographies, to warp visual scenes in line with their corresponding spatial transformations. These parallelized transformations produce a large set of unique symmetric equivalences that populate the replay buffer with diverse and consistent experiences that speed up learning and improve performance. We present extensive training and evaluations performed directly on real robot manipulation contact tasks including peg-insertions, cable routing, and object relocations. Relative to SOTA, SymmGrid achieved wall-clock training convergence speed-ups of 1.37-2.17x, evaluation success rate improvements of 1.09x-1.27x, fastest training convergence times of 16.6, 10.9, and 79.3 minutes respectively. For trajectory wide assessments, we used normalized area under the curve (nAUC) ratios. SymmGrid achieved improvements of up to 2.59x. These results confirm that simple branch symmetries can have an outsized result due to super-scaling and bring us closer to sub-10 minute on-robot learning training in manipulation tasks suitable for arms and humanoids. The project page is available at symmgrid-robot.github.io

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic controllers capable of mapping visual observations and natural language instructions to continuous action sequences. However, VLAs provide no calibrated measure of confidence in their action predictions, thus limiting their reliability in real-world settings where uncertainty and failures must be anticipated. To address this problem we introduce ReconVLA, a reliable conformal model that produces uncertainty-guided and failure-aware control signals. Concretely, our approach applies conformal prediction directly to the action token outputs of pretrained VLA policies, yielding calibrated uncertainty estimates that correlate with execution quality and task success. Furthermore, we extend conformal prediction to the robot state space to detect outliers or unsafe states before failures occur, providing a simple yet effective failure detection mechanism that complements the action-level uncertainty. We evaluate ReconVLA in both simulation and real robot experiments across diverse manipulation tasks. Our results show that conformalized action predictions consistently improve failure anticipation, reduce catastrophic errors, and provide a calibrated measure of confidence without retraining or modifying the underlying VLA.

Human video datasets offer an abundant and diverse source of interaction data that can complement expensive real-robot data. To bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap, existing approaches either robotize videos in task-matched settings or address observation and action alignment separately at scale. In this work, we systematically examine whether robotized human videos can serve as an effective and scalable source of supervision for VLA pretraining. To this end, we develop a robotization pipeline that converts heterogeneous human videos into robot-aligned observations and action trajectories while inferring missing intermediate signals across annotation levels. Using this pipeline, we construct the HuRo dataset, comprising about 630K robotized episodes and 142M processed frames from five human-video sources. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, increasing the amount of robotized pretraining data improves overall completion from 51.5% to 80.3% and OOD completion under spatial and visual shifts from 34.9% to 72.2%. Ablations further show that visual robotization improves OOD robustness and that end-to-end pretraining with retargeted actions outperforms visual-only transfer. Project website: https://3587jjh.github.io/HuRo.

A general-purpose vision-language model can understand a task goal without knowing how a particular robot's motion and functional parts produce the intended effect. We introduce KnowBody, a harness that makes these action-relevant body relations explicit, queryable, and revisable while keeping the model weights frozen. Initialized from one off-task trajectory, a partial body model guides action selection and the interpretation of past interactions. New evidence refines the model, and knowledge dependent on revised body estimates is rechecked before reuse. Across 32 fixed-budget trials on four real-robot tasks, initialized KnowBody achieves 75% completion versus 25% for the native harness and requires fewer planner rounds on successful trials in tasks completed by both. With persistent updates enabled, planner rounds decrease by 29-53% from the first to the fifth recorded success.

Long-horizon robot manipulation reuses skills across many task compositions, but improving these compositions with additional end-to-end demonstrations is costly. A practical self-improving system must decide both what to teach next and where to apply that supervision. We present ROBOCOACH, a world-model-guided coaching framework that uses imagined failures to guide demonstration requests and expert updates. Its Route-Imagine-Diagnose-Improve (RIDI) loop executes reusable skill experts inside COACHWORLD, our shared action-conditioned world model, and uses a progress judge to record the first subtask that fails to complete. Aggregated records select which subtask demonstrations to acquire and which expert adapters to update. Across two simulation suites and two real-robot platforms, imagined and deployed success correlate over 22 task-policy pairs (rho = 0.840). Controlled comparisons show that our coaching method outperforms matched baselines under matched data budgets and update schedules. With only 150 additional subtask demonstrations, success rises from 13.3% to 75.0% on Franka and from 40.0% to 83.8% on AgileX. The coached experts also transfer to four held-out compositions, achieving an average success of 35.0%, compared with 0% for a shared-policy baseline updated with uniformly acquired demonstrations. Together, these results show that world models can serve as active coaches, turning imagined failures into targeted supervision for modular policy improvement. Project Page: https://robocoach-ai.github.io/

Manipulation failures can leave scenes in states from which a task policy cannot recover. Learning corrective behaviors requires scalable failure exploration and physical grounding. We present Recova, an agent-guided framework that jointly develops task execution and recovery in a reconstructed digital twin, then verifies and refines both through real-world experience. In the twin, the agent diagnoses failures, tests corrective programs, and collects successful task and recovery rollouts for separate policies. During deployment, it monitors progress, invokes a learned or programmatic recovery, verifies scene restoration, and resumes execution. When no suitable recovery is available, a human demonstration resolves the failure and enters the learning loop, allowing the system to expand its recovery capabilities. Physical rollouts and human demonstrations are routed to the corresponding policy for DAgger training. Across six LIBERO-Pro settings and four MolmoSpaces categories, Recova achieves 78.8% and 64.9% mean success, compared with 71.7% and 38.0% for the strongest baselines. With parallel collection across four real-robot workstations, DAgger fine-tuning raises mean success from 23.8% to 77.5%, and recovery skills further raise it to 87.5%. Over four collection rounds on one task, observed human intervention falls from 87.5% to 0%. Together, these results show how agent-guided recovery turns failures into reusable capabilities, improving robustness while progressively reducing human intervention. Project page: https://www.liuisabella.com/Recova

Recently, LLM-based autonomous agents have shown strong capabilities in iteratively generating, evaluating, and refining executable solutions. In robotic manipulation, Code-as-Policy lets these agents search over modular and editable robot programs. However, effective program search requires physical understanding: agents must understand how objects can be manipulated, how scene geometry constrains actions, and why interactions succeed or fail. Existing methods rely mainly on execution feedback for program refinement, often leaving these physical questions unresolved. We introduce RoboAuto, a framework for robot program search that explicitly organizes physical understanding at the object, scene, and interaction levels through three components. First, a hierarchical knowledge base combines executable skills with object-centric knowledge of affordances, spatial relations, and action effects, learned from embodied data and online task solving. Second, scene grounding connects this knowledge to the current environment by identifying relevant objects and resolving action-critical quantities. Third, multi-stage planning with self-designed experiments checks whether each stage produces its expected physical effects and actively tests competing hypotheses to resolve physical uncertainties. RoboAuto achieves superior performance across five benchmark families, attaining an 89.1% success rate on short-horizon LIBERO-PRO tasks and more than twice the mean success rate of ASPIRE on LIBERO-PRO Long and LIBERO-Plus. It also outperforms ASPIRE and π_{0.5} on three challenging long-horizon real-robot tasks requiring precise manipulation. We further show that the knowledge base transfers across simulators and embodiments, and that program search performance scales with its size. Project page: https://roboauto-ai.github.io/

Robot foundation models have shown remarkable performance in robot control, yet adapting them to a new task still relies heavily on teleoperated demonstrations. Egocentric human videos offer a scalable substitute, but overlaying rendered robots on human videos or retargeting human poses into robot actions leaves significant visual or action gaps for high-DoF robot embodiments. To address this limitation, we propose RoboTryOn, which treats human-to-robot translation as virtual try-on: try-on keeps the person and swaps the garment, RoboTryOn keeps the demonstrated motion and swaps the human for the robot. Specifically, RoboTryOn converts a human video into a video of the target robot specified by a reference image, while preserving the original task, objects, and background. To maintain visual consistency, we translate selected keyframes autoregressively and use them to guide video synthesis with motion conditioned on the human hand skeleton. Additionally, we use an inverse dynamics model (IDM) that incorporates depth features to infer action labels from synthesized videos for policy learning. Our experiments across multiple humanoid embodiments show that policies trained with our synthetic data improve the average success rate on novel tasks, including challenging bimanual manipulation, from 2% to 60%, without any real robot demonstration of those tasks. Moreover, training with our synthetic data matches the performance of policies trained solely on teleoperated demonstrations at approximately a third of the collection cost, demonstrating the cost efficiency of our approach.

We introduce a pipeline that enhances a general-purpose Vision Language Model, GPT-4V(ision), by integrating observations of human actions to facilitate robotic manipulation. This system analyzes videos of humans performing tasks and creates executable robot programs that incorporate affordance insights. The computation starts by analyzing the videos with GPT-4V to convert environmental and action details into text, followed by a GPT-4-empowered task planner. In the following analyses, vision systems reanalyze the video with the task plan. Object names are grounded using an open-vocabulary object detector, while focus on the hand-object relation helps to detect the moment of grasping and releasing. This spatiotemporal grounding allows the vision systems to further gather affordance data (e.g., grasp type, way points, and body postures). Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate this method's efficacy in achieving real robots' operations from human demonstrations in a zero-shot manner. The prompts of GPT-4V/GPT-4 are available at this project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GPT4Vision-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts/

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to learn skills from interactions with the real world. In practice, the unstructured step-based exploration used in Deep RL -- often very successful in simulation -- leads to jerky motion patterns on real robots. Consequences of the resulting shaky behavior are poor exploration, or even damage to the robot. We address these issues by adapting state-dependent exploration (SDE) to current Deep RL algorithms. To enable this adaptation, we propose two extensions to the original SDE, using more general features and re-sampling the noise periodically, which leads to a new exploration method generalized state-dependent exploration (gSDE). We evaluate gSDE both in simulation, on PyBullet continuous control tasks, and directly on three different real robots: a tendon-driven elastic robot, a quadruped and an RC car. The noise sampling interval of gSDE permits to have a compromise between performance and smoothness, which allows training directly on the real robots without loss of performance. The code is available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3.

The ability for robots to comprehend and execute manipulation tasks based on natural language instructions is a long-term goal in robotics. The dominant approaches for language-guided manipulation use 2D image representations, which face difficulties in combining multi-view cameras and inferring precise 3D positions and relationships. To address these limitations, we propose a 3D point cloud based policy called PolarNet for language-guided manipulation. It leverages carefully designed point cloud inputs, efficient point cloud encoders, and multimodal transformers to learn 3D point cloud representations and integrate them with language instructions for action prediction. PolarNet is shown to be effective and data efficient in a variety of experiments conducted on the RLBench benchmark. It outperforms state-of-the-art 2D and 3D approaches in both single-task and multi-task learning. It also achieves promising results on a real robot.

Legged robots pose one of the greatest challenges in robotics. Dynamic and agile maneuvers of animals cannot be imitated by existing methods that are crafted by humans. A compelling alternative is reinforcement learning, which requires minimal craftsmanship and promotes the natural evolution of a control policy. However, so far, reinforcement learning research for legged robots is mainly limited to simulation, and only few and comparably simple examples have been deployed on real systems. The primary reason is that training with real robots, particularly with dynamically balancing systems, is complicated and expensive. In the present work, we introduce a method for training a neural network policy in simulation and transferring it to a state-of-the-art legged system, thereby leveraging fast, automated, and cost-effective data generation schemes. The approach is applied to the ANYmal robot, a sophisticated medium-dog-sized quadrupedal system. Using policies trained in simulation, the quadrupedal machine achieves locomotion skills that go beyond what had been achieved with prior methods: ANYmal is capable of precisely and energy-efficiently following high-level body velocity commands, running faster than before, and recovering from falling even in complex configurations.

As an essential modality for dexterous and contact-rich tasks, tactile sensing provides precise force feedback that cannot be reliably inferred from vision. However, limited by hardware and data collection systems, existing datasets with tactility remain small in scale and narrow in contact coverage. Meanwhile, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with tactile modality are constrained on dynamics-agnostic post-training, which limits the performance ceiling on downstream tasks. In this paper, we present H-Tac, a large-scale tactile-action dataset with 160-hour egocentric human videos containing more than 300 tasks and 135k episodes. Building upon this, we propose Transferable Tactile Pre-Training (TTP), a system of tactile-based pre-training on human data for fine-grained robotic tasks. To bridge the gap between humans and robots, we use unified tactile and action spaces throughout the pre-training and post-training phases, preserving prior knowledge during human-to-robot transfer. By leveraging a tactile expert for future tactile prediction, our framework explicitly models the contact dynamics and precise physical interactions. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance, exhibiting robust generalization and fine-grained manipulation capabilities. TTP paves the way for scalable tactile pre-training via human-to-robot transfer.

A practical approach to learning robot skills, often termed sim2real, is to train control policies in simulation and then deploy them on a real robot. Popular techniques to improve the sim2real transfer build on domain randomization (DR) -- training the policy on a diverse set of randomly generated domains with the hope of better generalization to the real world. Due to the large number of hyper-parameters in both the policy learning and DR algorithms, one often ends up with a large number of trained policies, where choosing the best policy among them demands costly evaluation on the real robot. In this work we ask - can we rank the policies without running them in the real world? Our main idea is that a predefined set of real world data can be used to evaluate all policies, using out-of-distribution detection (OOD) techniques. In a sense, this approach can be seen as a `unit test' to evaluate policies before any real world execution. However, we find that by itself, the OOD score can be inaccurate and very sensitive to the particular OOD method. Our main contribution is a simple-yet-effective policy score that combines OOD with an evaluation in simulation. We show that our score - VSDR - can significantly improve the accuracy of policy ranking without requiring additional real world data. We evaluate the effectiveness of VSDR on sim2real transfer in a robotic grasping task with image inputs. We extensively evaluate different DR parameters and OOD methods, and show that VSDR improves policy selection across the board. More importantly, our method achieves significantly better ranking, and uses significantly less data compared to baselines. Project website is available at https://sites.google.com/view/vsdr/home.

Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) is an important field of research as it contributes to practical tasks such as automatic cloth handling, cable routing, surgical operation, etc. Perception is considered one of the major challenges in DOM due to the complex dynamics and high degree of freedom of deformable objects. In this paper, we develop a novel image-processing algorithm based on Gabor filters to extract useful features from cloth, and based on this, devise a strategy for cloth flattening tasks. We also evaluate the overall framework experimentally and compare it with three human operators. The results show that our algorithm can determine the direction of wrinkles on the cloth accurately in simulation as well as in real robot experiments. Furthermore, our dewrinkling strategy compares favorably to baseline methods. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/robotic-fabric-flattening/home

Training general robotic policies from heterogeneous data for different tasks is a significant challenge. Existing robotic datasets vary in different modalities such as color, depth, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and collected in different domains such as simulation, real robots, and human videos. Current methods usually collect and pool all data from one domain to train a single policy to handle such heterogeneity in tasks and domains, which is prohibitively expensive and difficult. In this work, we present a flexible approach, dubbed Policy Composition, to combine information across such diverse modalities and domains for learning scene-level and task-level generalized manipulation skills, by composing different data distributions represented with diffusion models. Our method can use task-level composition for multi-task manipulation and be composed with analytic cost functions to adapt policy behaviors at inference time. We train our method on simulation, human, and real robot data and evaluate in tool-use tasks. The composed policy achieves robust and dexterous performance under varying scenes and tasks and outperforms baselines from a single data source in both simulation and real-world experiments. See https://liruiw.github.io/policycomp for more details .

We introduce PhysWorld, a framework that enables robot learning from video generation through physical world modeling. Recent video generation models can synthesize photorealistic visual demonstrations from language commands and images, offering a powerful yet underexplored source of training signals for robotics. However, directly retargeting pixel motions from generated videos to robots neglects physics, often resulting in inaccurate manipulations. PhysWorld addresses this limitation by coupling video generation with physical world reconstruction. Given a single image and a task command, our method generates task-conditioned videos and reconstructs the underlying physical world from the videos, and the generated video motions are grounded into physically accurate actions through object-centric residual reinforcement learning with the physical world model. This synergy transforms implicit visual guidance into physically executable robotic trajectories, eliminating the need for real robot data collection and enabling zero-shot generalizable robotic manipulation. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks demonstrate that PhysWorld substantially improves manipulation accuracy compared to previous approaches. Visit https://pointscoder.github.io/PhysWorld_Web/{the project webpage} for details.

General-purpose robots require decision-making models that generalize across diverse tasks and environments. Recent works build robot foundation models by extending multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with action outputs, creating vision-language-action (VLA) systems. These efforts are motivated by the intuition that MLLMs' large-scale language and image pretraining can be effectively transferred to the action output modality. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm of using large-scale video pretraining as a primary modality for building robot foundation models. Unlike static images and language, videos capture spatio-temporal sequences of states and actions in the physical world that are naturally aligned with robotic behavior. We curate an internet-scale video dataset of human activities and task demonstrations, and train, for the first time at a foundation-model scale, an open video model for generative robotics planning. The model produces zero-shot video plans for novel scenes and tasks, which we post-process to extract executable robot actions. We evaluate task-level generalization through third-party selected tasks in the wild and real-robot experiments, demonstrating successful physical execution. Together, these results show robust instruction following, strong generalization, and real-world feasibility. We release both the model and dataset to support open, reproducible video-based robot learning. Our website is available at https://www.boyuan.space/large-video-planner/.