Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
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VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training
Canonical reference. 92% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Reward and representation learning are two long-standing challenges for learning an expanding set of robot manipulation skills from sensory observations. Given the inherent cost and scarcity of in-domain, task-specific robot data, learning from large, diverse, offline human videos has emerged as a promising path towards acquiring a generally useful visual representation for control; however, how these human videos can be used for general-purpose reward learning remains an open question. We introduce $\textbf{V}$alue-$\textbf{I}$mplicit $\textbf{P}$re-training (VIP), a self-supervised pre-trained visual representation capable of generating dense and smooth reward functions for unseen robotic tasks. VIP casts representation learning from human videos as an offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning problem and derives a self-supervised dual goal-conditioned value-function objective that does not depend on actions, enabling pre-training on unlabeled human videos. Theoretically, VIP can be understood as a novel implicit time contrastive objective that generates a temporally smooth embedding, enabling the value function to be implicitly defined via the embedding distance, which can then be used to construct the reward for any goal-image specified downstream task. Trained on large-scale Ego4D human videos and without any fine-tuning on in-domain, task-specific data, VIP's frozen representation can provide dense visual reward for an extensive set of simulated and $\textbf{real-robot}$ tasks, enabling diverse reward-based visual control methods and significantly outperforming all prior pre-trained representations. Notably, VIP can enable simple, $\textbf{few-shot}$ offline RL on a suite of real-world robot tasks with as few as 20 trajectories.
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representative citing papers
QVal is a new evaluation framework that directly measures dense supervision quality via Q-alignment to a reference policy, showing simple prompting baselines outperform 21 other methods across environments and models.
Introduces Colosseum V2 benchmark for evaluating VLA model generalization in robotic manipulation with 28 tasks, revealing limitations in current methods and sim-real correlations.
RoboWM-Bench evaluates video world models by converting their manipulation video predictions into executable actions validated in simulation, showing that visual plausibility does not guarantee physical executability.
KITE is a training-free method that uses keyframe-indexed tokenized evidence including BEV schematics to enhance VLM performance on robot failure detection, identification, localization, explanation, and correction.
SFHand presents the first streaming language-guided autoregressive framework for 3D hand forecasting, achieving up to 35.8% gains over prior methods and 13.4% better downstream embodied task performance.
A collaborative dataset spanning 22 robots and 527 skills enables RT-X models that transfer capabilities across different robot embodiments.
VoxPoser uses LLMs to compose 3D value maps via VLM interaction for model-based synthesis of robust robot trajectories on open-set language-specified manipulation tasks.
RMTL decomposes long-horizon Fetch manipulation into three micro-tasks with per-stage VLM rewards, a reverse curriculum, and a learned hierarchical manager, yielding faster learning than single-prompt VLM rewards.
ReTVL uses retry events as sparse supervision to train mistake-sensitive value functions that reweight demonstration chunks for improved behavior cloning on real-robot manipulation tasks.
Success Visitation Matching uses a discriminator to turn sparse outcome rewards into dense process rewards by matching visitations of successful episodes, provably preserving the optimal policy and speeding up robotic RL finetuning.
OpenHLM is an empirical recipe yielding a whole-body humanoid VLA model that outperforms GR00T N1.6 and Ψ0 baselines on long-horizon tasks using less than half the demonstration time.
RARM is a lightweight visual comparator trained once on general videos that supplies dense progress rewards to RL by matching rollout clips to a reference demonstration and gating rewards on match confidence.
GLAM learns a shared latent action space grounded in consistent future observation prediction across heterogeneous data sources to train improved behavioral cloning policies for robot manipulation tasks.
PoLAR imposes radial structure on latent actions in hyperbolic space to factorize extent and mode, improving robot policy performance over baselines.
DO AS I DO reconstructs and retargets hand-object interactions from in-the-wild monocular RGB videos to produce dexterous robot manipulation trajectories, outperforming prior methods on ground-truth and online video datasets.
EgoInfinity is a modular pipeline that lifts in-the-wild RGB videos into agent-agnostic 4D hand-object data with interaction-aware refinement and retargets motions to diverse robot morphologies for video-to-action learning.
AEM pretrains compact history representations via masked modeling on interleaved vision-action sequences to boost downstream robot manipulation in simulation and real settings.
PriorZero uses root-only LLM prior injection in MCTS and alternating world-model training with LLM fine-tuning to raise exploration efficiency and final performance on Jericho text games and BabyAI gridworlds.
Ms.PR applies multi-scale predictive supervision to enforce goal-directed alignment in latent spaces for offline GCRL, yielding improved representation quality and performance on vision and state-based tasks.
MoMo conditions contrastive representations and prediction operators on user preferences via FiLM and low-rank modulation to enable continuous modulation of plan safety while preserving inference efficiency.
QHyer replaces return-to-go with a state-conditioned Q-estimator and adds a gated hybrid attention-mamba backbone to achieve state-of-the-art performance in offline goal-conditioned RL on both Markovian and non-Markovian datasets.
GazeVLA pretrains on large human egocentric datasets to capture gaze-based intention, then finetunes on limited robot data with chain-of-thought reasoning to achieve better robotic manipulation performance than baselines.
UniT creates a unified physical language via visual anchoring and tri-branch reconstruction to enable scalable human-to-humanoid transfer for policy learning and world modeling.
citing papers explorer
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Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution
Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
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QVal: Cheaply Evaluating Dense Supervision Signals for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
QVal is a new evaluation framework that directly measures dense supervision quality via Q-alignment to a reference policy, showing simple prompting baselines outperform 21 other methods across environments and models.
-
Colosseum V2: Benchmarking Generalization for Vision Language Action Models
Introduces Colosseum V2 benchmark for evaluating VLA model generalization in robotic manipulation with 28 tasks, revealing limitations in current methods and sim-real correlations.
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RoboWM-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating World Models in Robotic Manipulation
RoboWM-Bench evaluates video world models by converting their manipulation video predictions into executable actions validated in simulation, showing that visual plausibility does not guarantee physical executability.
-
KITE: Keyframe-Indexed Tokenized Evidence for VLM-Based Robot Failure Analysis
KITE is a training-free method that uses keyframe-indexed tokenized evidence including BEV schematics to enhance VLM performance on robot failure detection, identification, localization, explanation, and correction.
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SFHand: Learning Embodied Manipulation by Streaming Egocentric 3D Hand Forecasting
SFHand presents the first streaming language-guided autoregressive framework for 3D hand forecasting, achieving up to 35.8% gains over prior methods and 13.4% better downstream embodied task performance.
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Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models
A collaborative dataset spanning 22 robots and 527 skills enables RT-X models that transfer capabilities across different robot embodiments.
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VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models
VoxPoser uses LLMs to compose 3D value maps via VLM interaction for model-based synthesis of robust robot trajectories on open-set language-specified manipulation tasks.
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RMTL: Reinforced Micro-task Learning for Long-Horizon Manipulation with VLM Rewards
RMTL decomposes long-horizon Fetch manipulation into three micro-tasks with per-stage VLM rewards, a reverse curriculum, and a learned hierarchical manager, yielding faster learning than single-prompt VLM rewards.
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Beyond Monotonic Progress: Retry-Supervised Value Learning for Robot Imitation
ReTVL uses retry events as sparse supervision to train mistake-sensitive value functions that reweight demonstration chunks for improved behavior cloning on real-robot manipulation tasks.
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Learning Process Rewards via Success Visitation Matching for Efficient RL
Success Visitation Matching uses a discriminator to turn sparse outcome rewards into dense process rewards by matching visitations of successful episodes, provably preserving the optimal policy and speeding up robotic RL finetuning.
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OpenHLM: An Empirical Recipe for Whole-Body Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
OpenHLM is an empirical recipe yielding a whole-body humanoid VLA model that outperforms GR00T N1.6 and Ψ0 baselines on long-horizon tasks using less than half the demonstration time.
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RARM: Confidence-Gated Progress Reward Modeling for RL in Manipulation
RARM is a lightweight visual comparator trained once on general videos that supplies dense progress rewards to RL by matching rollout clips to a reference demonstration and gating rewards on match confidence.
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Imitation from Heterogeneous Demonstrations using Grounded Latent-Action World Models
GLAM learns a shared latent action space grounded in consistent future observation prediction across heterogeneous data sources to train improved behavioral cloning policies for robot manipulation tasks.
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PoLAR: Factorizing Extent and Mode in Latent Actions for Robot Policy Learning
PoLAR imposes radial structure on latent actions in hyperbolic space to factorize extent and mode, improving robot policy performance over baselines.
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Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos
DO AS I DO reconstructs and retargets hand-object interactions from in-the-wild monocular RGB videos to produce dexterous robot manipulation trajectories, outperforming prior methods on ground-truth and online video datasets.
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EgoInfinity: A Web-Scale 4D Hand-Object Interaction Data Engine for Any-View Robot Retargeting and Video-to-Action Robot Learning
EgoInfinity is a modular pipeline that lifts in-the-wild RGB videos into agent-agnostic 4D hand-object data with interaction-aware refinement and retargets motions to diverse robot morphologies for video-to-action learning.
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Action-Effect Memory Pretraining for Robot Manipulation
AEM pretrains compact history representations via masked modeling on interleaved vision-action sequences to boost downstream robot manipulation in simulation and real settings.
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PriorZero: Bridging Language Priors and World Models for Decision Making
PriorZero uses root-only LLM prior injection in MCTS and alternating world-model training with LLM fine-tuning to raise exploration efficiency and final performance on Jericho text games and BabyAI gridworlds.
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Multi-scale Predictive Representations for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Ms.PR applies multi-scale predictive supervision to enforce goal-directed alignment in latent spaces for offline GCRL, yielding improved representation quality and performance on vision and state-based tasks.
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MoMo: Conditioned Contrastive Representation Learning for Preference-Modulated Planning
MoMo conditions contrastive representations and prediction operators on user preferences via FiLM and low-rank modulation to enable continuous modulation of plan safety while preserving inference efficiency.
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QHyer: Q-conditioned Hybrid Attention-mamba Transformer for Offline Goal-conditioned RL
QHyer replaces return-to-go with a state-conditioned Q-estimator and adds a gated hybrid attention-mamba backbone to achieve state-of-the-art performance in offline goal-conditioned RL on both Markovian and non-Markovian datasets.
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GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation
GazeVLA pretrains on large human egocentric datasets to capture gaze-based intention, then finetunes on limited robot data with chain-of-thought reasoning to achieve better robotic manipulation performance than baselines.
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UniT: Toward a Unified Physical Language for Human-to-Humanoid Policy Learning and World Modeling
UniT creates a unified physical language via visual anchoring and tri-branch reconstruction to enable scalable human-to-humanoid transfer for policy learning and world modeling.
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WARPED: Wrist-Aligned Rendering for Robot Policy Learning from Egocentric Human Demonstrations
WARPED synthesizes realistic wrist-view observations from monocular egocentric human videos via foundation models, hand-object tracking, retargeting, and Gaussian Splatting to train visuomotor policies that match teleoperation success rates on five tabletop tasks with 5-8x less collection effort.
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Grounding Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Models Through Explicit Language-Action Alignment
A contrastive alignment model plus offline preference learning explicitly grounds hierarchical VLA language descriptions to actions and visuals on LanguageTable, achieving performance comparable to fully supervised fine-tuning while reducing annotation needs.
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ARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation
ARM trains reward models on Progressive/Regressive/Stagnant labels to enable adaptive reweighting in offline RL, reaching 99.4% success on towel-folding with minimal human intervention.
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TimeRewarder: Learning Dense Reward from Passive Videos via Frame-wise Temporal Distance
TimeRewarder derives step-wise progress rewards from frame-wise temporal distances in passive videos and uses them to guide RL, achieving high success rates on Meta-World tasks with fewer interactions than prior methods or hand-designed rewards.
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Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success
OpenVLA-OFT fine-tuning boosts LIBERO success rate from 76.5% to 97.1%, speeds action generation 26x, and outperforms baselines on real bimanual dexterous tasks.
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Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations
Video Prediction Policy conditions robot action learning on future-frame predictions inside fine-tuned video diffusion models, yielding 18.6% relative gains on Calvin ABC-D and 31.6% higher real-world success rates.
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Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation
Gen2Act enables generalizable robot manipulation for unseen objects and novel motions by using zero-shot human video generation from web data to condition a policy trained on an order of magnitude less robot interaction data.
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Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation
A GPT-style model pre-trained on large video datasets achieves 94.9% success on CALVIN multi-task manipulation and 85.4% zero-shot generalization, outperforming prior baselines.
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TD-MPC2: Scalable, Robust World Models for Continuous Control
TD-MPC2 scales an implicit world-model RL method to a 317M-parameter agent that masters 80 tasks across four domains with a single hyperparameter configuration.
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Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning
STDR infers stage structure from expert videos to supply stage-transition and within-stage progress rewards, improving RL sample efficiency on 14 manipulation tasks.
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CORE: Common Outcome Regularities from Action-Free Visual Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation
CORE extracts visual goal prototypes from terminal embeddings in action-free demonstrations to condition robot policies, reporting success rate gains of up to 17 percentage points on manipulation benchmarks.
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Not All Actions Are Equal: Rethinking Conditioning for Dexterous World Model
DexAC-WM improves FID, FVD, and PCK in high-DoF action-conditioned video prediction via structured action modeling and semantic grounding on EgoDex and EgoVerse.
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World Value Models for Robotic Manipulation
World Value Model (WVM) integrates world models with value estimation to achieve SOTA Value-Order Correlation on expert and suboptimal robotic data and improves downstream policy performance.
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Factor-Aware Mixture-of-Experts with Pretrained Encoder for Combinatorial Generalization
FAME combines a factor-aware MoE with frozen pretrained encoders via staged adapter training and joint fine-tuning, reporting 34% gains on Meta-World and 35% in real-world pick-and-place under environmental changes.
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Robots Need More than VLA and World Models
The paper identifies four missing interfaces (data autolabelling, embodiment retargeting, physics-grounded world models, and video-based reward inference) as the central bottleneck beyond VLA scaling for robot intelligence.
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Physics-informed Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning under Hybrid Contact Dynamics
Analysis reveals Pi-GCRL degradation in contact-rich tasks due to hybrid dynamics; contact-aware and hierarchical formulations are proposed to extend it to manipulation.
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DyGRO-VLA: Cross-Task Scaling of Vision-Language-Action Models via Dynamic Grouped Residual Optimization
DyGRO-VLA is a two-stage optimization framework for cross-task scaling of Vision-Language-Action models via dynamic grouped residual optimization in RL.
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Efficient Hierarchical Implicit Flow Q-learning for Offline Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Proposes mean flow policies and LeJEPA loss to overcome Gaussian policy limits and weak subgoal generation in hierarchical offline GCRL, reporting strong results on OGBench state and pixel tasks.
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When a Robot is More Capable than a Human: Learning from Constrained Demonstrators
Robots outperform constrained human demonstrations by inferring state-only rewards from demos and using temporal interpolation to label and explore better trajectories, achieving 10x faster task completion on a real robotic arm than behavioral cloning.
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Reinforcement Learning with Foundation Priors: Let the Embodied Agent Efficiently Learn on Its Own
RLFP and the FAC algorithm combine foundation-model priors for policy, value, and rewards to produce sample-efficient robotic RL that reaches 86% real-robot success after one hour and 100% success on 7/8 Meta-world tasks in under 100k frames.
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Human2Any: Human-to-Robot Transfer via Constraint-Aware Compositional Planning
Human2Any transfers human video demonstrations to robots by representing tasks as object-object interactions and composing learned priors with robot-side planning.
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Robot Self-Improvement via Human-Video Dynamics Models
Human-video dynamics models enable cross-embodiment robot self-improvement via training-free Dynamics-Guided Action Correction, raising success rates from 40% to 81% on seven real-world tasks.
- From Video to Control: A Survey of Learning Manipulation Interfaces from Temporal Visual Data