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DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

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arxiv 2206.14176 v1 pith:IRW4YIN6 submitted 2022-06-28 cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG

DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

classification cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG
keywords learningworlddreamerrobotreallearnphysicalrobots
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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To solve tasks in complex environments, robots need to learn from experience. Deep reinforcement learning is a common approach to robot learning but requires a large amount of trial and error to learn, limiting its deployment in the physical world. As a consequence, many advances in robot learning rely on simulators. On the other hand, learning inside of simulators fails to capture the complexity of the real world, is prone to simulator inaccuracies, and the resulting behaviors do not adapt to changes in the world. The Dreamer algorithm has recently shown great promise for learning from small amounts of interaction by planning within a learned world model, outperforming pure reinforcement learning in video games. Learning a world model to predict the outcomes of potential actions enables planning in imagination, reducing the amount of trial and error needed in the real environment. However, it is unknown whether Dreamer can facilitate faster learning on physical robots. In this paper, we apply Dreamer to 4 robots to learn online and directly in the real world, without simulators. Dreamer trains a quadruped robot to roll off its back, stand up, and walk from scratch and without resets in only 1 hour. We then push the robot and find that Dreamer adapts within 10 minutes to withstand perturbations or quickly roll over and stand back up. On two different robotic arms, Dreamer learns to pick and place multiple objects directly from camera images and sparse rewards, approaching human performance. On a wheeled robot, Dreamer learns to navigate to a goal position purely from camera images, automatically resolving ambiguity about the robot orientation. Using the same hyperparameters across all experiments, we find that Dreamer is capable of online learning in the real world, establishing a strong baseline. We release our infrastructure for future applications of world models to robot learning.

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Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Deform360 supplies 215+ hours of synchronized multi-view video and tactile data plus markerless 3D tracks, revealing that 3D particle models win in low data while 2D video models generalize better at scale.

  2. Latent State Design for World Models under Sufficiency Constraints

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    World models succeed when their latent states are built to meet task-specific sufficiency constraints rather than preserving the maximum amount of information.

  3. World Action Verifier: Self-Improving World Models via Forward-Inverse Asymmetry

    cs.LG 2026-04 accept novelty 7.0

    WAV self-improves action-conditioned world models by cycle-consistent verification of state plausibility and sparse action reachability, doubling sample efficiency and lifting policy reward by over 22% on nine tasks.

  4. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

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    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

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    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    NEXUS introduces a graph-based neural energy-field model that derives forces from scalar energy and dissipation terms to achieve physically consistent contact-rich 3D dynamics.

  7. Intercepting the Future: Latent-Space Predictive World Model for Dynamic VLA Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AHEAD augments frozen VLAs with a 4.9M-parameter latent world model that forecasts future visual features using optical-flow motion cues, achieving 79-97% success on dynamic simulation tasks and high real-robot succes...

  8. How Should World Models Be Evaluated for Embodied Decision-Making? A Decision-Making-Centric Position

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

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  9. From Tabula Rasa to Emergent Abilities: Discovering Robot Skills via Real-World Unsupervised Quality-Diversity

    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0

    URSA extends quality-diversity actor-critic with learned skill spaces, safety constraints, and world-model training, enabling real-world unsupervised skill discovery on a quadruped.

  10. World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    The paper introduces World Action Models as a new paradigm unifying predictive world modeling with action generation in embodied foundation models and provides a taxonomy of existing approaches.