The work gives the first algorithms for general robust Markov games with linear function approximation whose sample complexity breaks the curse of multiagency for large state spaces in both generative and online settings.
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Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
Canonical reference. 78% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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Pith papers citing it
Background
78% of classified citations
abstract
We demonstrate that models trained only in simulation can be used to solve a manipulation problem of unprecedented complexity on a real robot. This is made possible by two key components: a novel algorithm, which we call automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a robot platform built for machine learning. ADR automatically generates a distribution over randomized environments of ever-increasing difficulty. Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit vastly improved sim2real transfer. For control policies, memory-augmented models trained on an ADR-generated distribution of environments show clear signs of emergent meta-learning at test time. The combination of ADR with our custom robot platform allows us to solve a Rubik's cube with a humanoid robot hand, which involves both control and state estimation problems. Videos summarizing our results are available: https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/
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representative citing papers
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.
GPT-f, a transformer-based prover for Metamath, generated new short proofs that were accepted into the main library—the first such contribution from a deep-learning system.
CoP tactile representation with differentiable calibration enables zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and outperforms binary and raw-taxel baselines on peg-in-hole insertion and ball balancing with a multi-fingered hand.
A transformer policy distilled from a privileged RL teacher enables 3.1x faster real-world cube rotation on the ORCA hand using solely joint sensor data by extracting implicit object state from temporal joint patterns.
DRATS derives a minimax objective from a feasibility formulation of MTRL to adaptively sample tasks with the largest return gaps, leading to better worst-task performance on MetaWorld benchmarks.
SeqRejectron constructs a stopping rule with a small set of validator policies to achieve horizon-free sample complexity for selective imitation learning under arbitrary dynamics shifts.
ReGuard discovers network scenarios where RL controllers perform 43-64% worse than achievable and reduces those gaps by 79-85% with lightweight rule-based protection that preserves normal performance.
HANDFUL learns resource-aware grasps using finger contact rewards and curriculum learning to improve success on sequential dexterous tasks in simulation and on a real LEAP hand.
Betting mechanisms can yield provably more accurate and efficient estimates of real-world robot behavior than Monte Carlo sampling under specified conditions, with practical approximations demonstrated on synthetic data and a robotic manipulator task.
Topology-preserving synthetic P&IDs generated by seeding from real drawings enable models trained solely on synthetics to achieve 63.8% edge mAP on real P&ID benchmarks, closing most of the gap to real-data training.
Single-timescale actor-critic with STORM momentum and a recent-sample buffer achieves optimal O(ε^{-2}) sample complexity for ε-optimal policies in finite discounted MDPs.
A Sim2Real2Sim learning pipeline enables a real-world dexterous robot to play piano pieces including Happy Birthday and Ode to Joy with an average F1-score of 0.881.
OpenAI Five achieved superhuman performance in Dota 2 by defeating the world champions using scaled self-play reinforcement learning.
Task diversity along map, object, and hierarchy axes produces local transfer across shifts in a new continual RL benchmark but fails to sustain learning as the number of shifts grows.
UniLab is a CPU/GPU heterogeneous system for robot RL training using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim backends that reports 3-10x end-to-end efficiency improvements and cross-platform compatibility beyond CUDA.
A VAE-based latent task representation enables automatic curriculum generation in CRL for non-Euclidean navigation tasks, outperforming interpolation and GAN-based methods in experiments.
The paper decomposes simulator value errors into identifiable shifts and irreducible residuals, shows passive learning fails on reachability, and introduces Fisher-SEP to minimize posterior value variance via targeted experiments.
Recasts sampling-based nonconvex optimization as smoothed gradient descent to obtain non-asymptotic convergence guarantees and introduces the DIDA annealed algorithm that converges to the global optimum.
DRIS improves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for reactive catching by maintaining and acting on sets of randomized dynamics instances instead of single instances per episode.
GS-Playground delivers a high-throughput photorealistic simulator for vision-informed robot learning via parallel physics integrated with batch 3D Gaussian Splatting at 10^4 FPS and an automated Real2Sim workflow for consistent environments.
A framework using 3D Gaussian Splatting for visual domain randomization enables robust monocular RGB-based dexterous in-hand reorientation on real hardware for multiple objects under varied lighting.
Differentiable simulation enables torque-sensor-free actuator model identification from trajectory data, achieving 1.88x better position tracking than a stand-trained baseline and 46% longer travel in downstream locomotion policies.
GRIT learns dexterous grasping from sparse taxonomy guidance, achieving 87.9% success and better generalization to novel objects via a two-stage prediction-plus-policy approach.
citing papers explorer
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Taming the Curses of Multiagency in Robust Markov Games with Large State Space through Linear Function Approximation
The work gives the first algorithms for general robust Markov games with linear function approximation whose sample complexity breaks the curse of multiagency for large state spaces in both generative and online settings.
-
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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Generative Language Modeling for Automated Theorem Proving
GPT-f, a transformer-based prover for Metamath, generated new short proofs that were accepted into the main library—the first such contribution from a deep-learning system.
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Beyond Binary: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation with Physics-Grounded Contact Representation
CoP tactile representation with differentiable calibration enables zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and outperforms binary and raw-taxel baselines on peg-in-hole insertion and ball balancing with a multi-fingered hand.
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Learning Robust Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation from Joint Sensors with Proprioceptive Transformer
A transformer policy distilled from a privileged RL teacher enables 3.1x faster real-world cube rotation on the ORCA hand using solely joint sensor data by extracting implicit object state from temporal joint patterns.
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Distributionally Robust Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Task Sampling
DRATS derives a minimax objective from a feasibility formulation of MTRL to adaptively sample tasks with the largest return gaps, leading to better worst-task performance on MetaWorld benchmarks.
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Learning When to Stop: Selective Imitation Learning Under Arbitrary Dynamics Shift
SeqRejectron constructs a stopping rule with a small set of validator policies to achieve horizon-free sample complexity for selective imitation learning under arbitrary dynamics shifts.
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Worst-Case Discovery and Runtime Protection for RL-Based Network Controllers
ReGuard discovers network scenarios where RL controllers perform 43-64% worse than achievable and reduces those gaps by 79-85% with lightweight rule-based protection that preserves normal performance.
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HANDFUL: Sequential Grasp-Conditioned Dexterous Manipulation with Resource Awareness
HANDFUL learns resource-aware grasps using finger contact rewards and curriculum learning to improve success on sequential dexterous tasks in simulation and on a real LEAP hand.
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Betting for Sim-to-Real Performance Evaluation
Betting mechanisms can yield provably more accurate and efficient estimates of real-world robot behavior than Monte Carlo sampling under specified conditions, with practical approximations demonstrated on synthetic data and a robotic manipulator task.
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SynthPID: P&ID digitization from Topology-Preserving Synthetic Data
Topology-preserving synthetic P&IDs generated by seeding from real drawings enable models trained solely on synthetics to achieve 63.8% edge mAP on real P&ID benchmarks, closing most of the gap to real-data training.
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Optimal Sample Complexity for Single Time-Scale Actor-Critic with Momentum
Single-timescale actor-critic with STORM momentum and a recent-sample buffer achieves optimal O(ε^{-2}) sample complexity for ε-optimal policies in finite discounted MDPs.
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Learning to Play Piano in the Real World
A Sim2Real2Sim learning pipeline enables a real-world dexterous robot to play piano pieces including Happy Birthday and Ode to Joy with an average F1-score of 0.881.
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Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning
OpenAI Five achieved superhuman performance in Dota 2 by defeating the world champions using scaled self-play reinforcement learning.
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Task diversity produces systematic transfer but inhibits continual reinforcement learning
Task diversity along map, object, and hierarchy axes produces local transfer across shifts in a new continual RL benchmark but fails to sustain learning as the number of shifts grows.
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UniLab: A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms
UniLab is a CPU/GPU heterogeneous system for robot RL training using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim backends that reports 3-10x end-to-end efficiency improvements and cross-platform compatibility beyond CUDA.
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Curriculum reinforcement learning with measurable task representation learning
A VAE-based latent task representation enables automatic curriculum generation in CRL for non-Euclidean navigation tasks, outperforming interpolation and GAN-based methods in experiments.
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Mind the Sim-to-Real Gap & Think Like a Scientist
The paper decomposes simulator value errors into identifiable shifts and irreducible residuals, shows passive learning fails on reachability, and introduces Fisher-SEP to minimize posterior value variance via targeted experiments.
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Global Convergence of Sampling-Based Nonconvex Optimization through Diffusion-Style Smoothing
Recasts sampling-based nonconvex optimization as smoothed gradient descent to obtain non-asymptotic convergence guarantees and introduces the DIDA annealed algorithm that converges to the global optimum.
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Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Robot Learning: A Dexterous Manipulation Study on Reactive Catching
DRIS improves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for reactive catching by maintaining and acting on sets of randomized dynamics instances instead of single instances per episode.
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GS-Playground: A High-Throughput Photorealistic Simulator for Vision-Informed Robot Learning
GS-Playground delivers a high-throughput photorealistic simulator for vision-informed robot learning via parallel physics integrated with batch 3D Gaussian Splatting at 10^4 FPS and an automated Real2Sim workflow for consistent environments.
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ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation
A framework using 3D Gaussian Splatting for visual domain randomization enables robust monocular RGB-based dexterous in-hand reorientation on real hardware for multiple objects under varied lighting.
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Trajectory-based actuator identification via differentiable simulation
Differentiable simulation enables torque-sensor-free actuator model identification from trajectory data, achieving 1.88x better position tracking than a stand-trained baseline and 46% longer travel in downstream locomotion policies.
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Learning Dexterous Grasping from Sparse Taxonomy Guidance
GRIT learns dexterous grasping from sparse taxonomy guidance, achieving 87.9% success and better generalization to novel objects via a two-stage prediction-plus-policy approach.
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ROBOGATE: Adaptive Failure Discovery for Safe Robot Policy Deployment via Two-Stage Boundary-Focused Sampling
ROBOGATE applies adaptive boundary-focused sampling in simulation to discover robot policy failure boundaries, revealing a 97.65 percentage point performance gap for a VLA model between LIBERO and industrial scenarios.
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Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning
Isaac Lab is a unified GPU-native platform combining high-fidelity physics, photorealistic rendering, multi-frequency sensors, domain randomization, and learning pipelines for scalable multi-modal robot policy training.
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VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
VLA-RL applies online RL to pretrained VLAs, yielding a 4.5% gain over strong baselines on 40 LIBERO manipulation tasks and matching commercial models like π₀-FAST.
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SkillTree: Explainable Skill-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Control Tasks
SkillTree reduces continuous action spaces to discrete skills via a differentiable decision tree in a hierarchical policy, achieving comparable performance to neural skill methods with added skill-level explainability in robotic arm tasks.
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Proximal Policy Distillation
PPD integrates PPO into policy distillation so the student collects and uses its own rewards, yielding better sample efficiency and robustness than standard student-distill or teacher-distill on ATARI, Mujoco, and Procgen tasks.
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Continual Domain Randomization
Continual Domain Randomization trains RL policies sequentially on randomization parameter subsets with continual learning to achieve robust sim-to-real transfer in robotic reaching and grasping.
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Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience
Augmenting robot datasets via diffusion-based semantic inpainting enables manipulation policies to solve unseen tasks with new objects and improves robustness to novel distractors.
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Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.
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A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment
Ranked preference modeling outperforms imitation learning for language model alignment and scales more favorably with model size.
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Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning
Isaac Gym achieves 2-3 orders of magnitude faster robot policy training by keeping physics simulation and PyTorch-based RL entirely on GPU with direct buffer sharing.
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Scaling Laws for Transfer
Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.
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Closed-Loop Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Deformable Microfiber Shape Control
A closed-loop sim-to-real RL policy trained in a simplified frictionless simulator achieves sub-millimeter microfiber shape control on physical hardware via visual feedback without retraining.
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You're Pushing My Buttons: Instrumented Learning of Gentle Button Presses
Training-time instrumentation with audio and privileged button-state signals produces contact policies that match success rates but apply lower forces using only vision and audio at inference.
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HandelBot: Real-World Piano Playing via Fast Adaptation of Dexterous Robot Policies
HandelBot refines simulation policies via physical rollouts and residual RL to achieve precise bimanual piano playing, outperforming direct sim transfer by 1.8x with only 30 minutes of real data across five songs.
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UniCon: A Unified System for Efficient Robot Learning Transfers
UniCon standardizes states and control logic into modular execution graphs for efficient transfer of learning controllers across heterogeneous robots, with lower latency than ROS.
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RESample: A Robust Data Augmentation Framework via Exploratory Sampling for Robotic Manipulation
RESample uses exploratory sampling guided by a lightweight Coverage Function to expand VLA training data coverage, yielding 12% performance gains on LIBERO and real-world tasks with 10-20% added samples.
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Learning to Act Through Contact: A Unified View of Multi-Task Robot Learning
A single goal-conditioned RL policy trained on contact plans performs multiple gaits and bimanual manipulation tasks on quadruped and humanoid robots.
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Learning Geometry-Aware Nonprehensile Pushing and Pulling with Dexterous Hands
GD2P generates and learns dexterous hand poses for nonprehensile pushing and pulling by combining contact-guided sampling, physics-based filtering, and a geometry-conditioned diffusion model, demonstrated on Allegro and LEAP hands in real-world tests.
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Apple: Toward General Active Perception via Reinforcement Learning
APPLE is an RL framework that jointly optimizes a transformer perception module and policy via a unified objective for general active perception, with evaluations on tactile MNIST regression and classification tasks.
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Analyzing Adversarial Inputs in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Introduces the Adversarial Rate metric and associated tools to systematically evaluate and visualize the impact of adversarial inputs on DRL policies using formal verification.
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Plasticity Loss in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
Survey unifies the definition of plasticity loss in DRL, taxonomizes over 50 mitigations, identifies evaluation gaps, and finds general regularization often outperforms domain-specific methods.
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Analysis of Randomization Effects on Sim2Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation Tasks
A benchmark study finds that increased randomization improves Sim2Real transfer in robotic RL despite trade-offs in simulation learning, with full randomization and fine-tuning outperforming other approaches on the real robot.
- PTLD: Sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation for Dexterous Manipulation