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Reconciling Reality through Simulation: A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Approach for Robust Manipulation

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arxiv 2403.03949 v3 pith:PMC47M46 submitted 2024-03-06 cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.ROcs.AIcs.LG
keywords real-worldrialtodatahumanlearningrobustcollectionenvironments
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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Imitation learning methods need significant human supervision to learn policies robust to changes in object poses, physical disturbances, and visual distractors. Reinforcement learning, on the other hand, can explore the environment autonomously to learn robust behaviors but may require impractical amounts of unsafe real-world data collection. To learn performant, robust policies without the burden of unsafe real-world data collection or extensive human supervision, we propose RialTo, a system for robustifying real-world imitation learning policies via reinforcement learning in "digital twin" simulation environments constructed on the fly from small amounts of real-world data. To enable this real-to-sim-to-real pipeline, RialTo proposes an easy-to-use interface for quickly scanning and constructing digital twins of real-world environments. We also introduce a novel "inverse distillation" procedure for bringing real-world demonstrations into simulated environments for efficient fine-tuning, with minimal human intervention and engineering required. We evaluate RialTo across a variety of robotic manipulation problems in the real world, such as robustly stacking dishes on a rack, placing books on a shelf, and six other tasks. RialTo increases (over 67%) in policy robustness without requiring extensive human data collection. Project website and videos at https://real-to-sim-to-real.github.io/RialTo/

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Cited by 33 Pith papers

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

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  4. V-Simba: Unleashing the Architectural Potential of RL in Visual Continuous Control

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    V-Simba, a visual RL architecture combining layer normalization, weight decay, and a distributional critic, matches or outperforms complex baselines on 29 continuous control tasks while using less compute.

  5. SimFoundry: Modular and Automated Scene Generation for Policy Learning and Evaluation

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    SimFoundry automates zero-shot real-to-sim scene generation from video, producing digital twins and cousins that enable policy training with 0.911 mean Pearson correlation to real-world results and 17-40% success gain...

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  7. Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models

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    Adding a real-world supervised loss to simulation reinforcement learning improves real-robot success and data efficiency for VLA co-training.

  8. TabletopGen: Tabletop Scene Generation and Interactive Simulation for Robotic Manipulation

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    A training-free pipeline generates instance-level, physically interactive 3D tabletop scenes from text or one image, with a differentiable rotation optimizer and top-view spatial alignment for collision-free layouts.

  9. Learning in ImaginationLand: Omnidirectional Policies through 3D Generative Models (OP-Gen)

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A robot policy trained on one real demonstration plus AI-generated 3D views succeeds from novel initial poses, including opposite-side starts, across six real manipulation tasks.

  10. DEXOP: A Device for Robotic Transfer of Dexterous Human Manipulation

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    DEXOP implements perioperation with a passive exoskeleton linked to a sensorized robot hand, and DEXOP-collected demonstrations train robot policies more efficiently per unit time than teleoperation.

  11. LodeStar: Long-horizon Dexterity via Synthetic Data Augmentation from Human Demonstrations

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    LodeStar combines automatic skill segmentation with simulation-based reinforcement learning augmentation and a learned routing transformer to let a robotic hand complete long-horizon dexterous tasks from a few human demos.

  12. ControlVLA: Few-shot Object-centric Adaptation for Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action Models

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    ControlVLA adapts a DROID-pretrained diffusion VLA policy to new manipulation tasks with 10 to 20 demos by injecting object-centric features through zero-initialized cross-attention layers, achieving 76.7% success acr...

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    AntiGrounding lifts candidate robot trajectories into the VLM's visual space via multi-view rendering and structured VQA, and reports 57.5% average success across eight manipulation tasks, beating three intermediate-r...

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  15. Real2Render2Real: Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware

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  17. Web2Grasp: Learning Functional Grasps from Web Images of Hand-Object Interactions

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  19. PRISM: Projection-based Reward Integration for Scene-Aware Real-to-Sim-to-Real Transfer with Few Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2025-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Using five demonstrations, PRISM builds a simulator and trains a policy with a vision-language-model reward, reaching 82% success under randomized conditions on six tabletop tasks.

  20. MOSAIC: Skill-Centric Manipulation Planning with Physics Simulation

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    MOSAIC is a multi-directional skill-centric planner that seeds feasible local trajectories with generator skills, links them with connector skills, and uses a statistical oracle and physics simulation to guide the search.

  21. Novel Demonstration Generation with Gaussian Splatting Enables Robust One-Shot Manipulation

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    RoboSplat edits 3D Gaussian scene reconstructions to synthesize diverse robot demonstrations from one expert trajectory, and behavior-cloned policies trained on this data generalize robustly across six disturbance typ...

  22. A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Approach to Robotic Manipulation with VLM-Generated Iterative Keypoint Rewards

    cs.RO 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    IKER uses VLM-generated keypoint rewards to train manipulation policies in simulation that transfer to a real robot, enabling multi-step tasks and replanning.

  23. Rapidly Adapting Policies to the Real World via Simulation-Guided Fine-Tuning

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    SGFT uses a simulation-trained value function to guide real-world exploration via potential-based reward shaping and short-horizon objectives, substantially improving fine-tuning sample efficiency.

  24. VR-Robo: A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Framework for Visual Robot Navigation and Locomotion

    cs.RO 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A framework that reconstructs real scenes as interactive 3D Gaussian simulations and trains RGB-only navigation policies for legged robots that transfer to the real world without retraining.

  25. Dream to Manipulate: Compositional World Models Empowering Robot Imitation Learning with Imagination

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    DREMA creates an object-centric Gaussian Splatting plus PyBullet world model and generates equivariant-transformed demonstrations, improving imitation learning from a handful of real demonstrations.

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  27. Active Real-World Factor-Based Evaluation for Generalist Robot Policies

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  29. SimLauncher: Launching Sample-Efficient Real-world Robotic Reinforcement Learning via Simulation Pre-training

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  30. Scan, Materialize, Simulate: A Generalizable Framework for Physically Grounded Robot Planning

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  31. Distilling Realizable Students from Unrealizable Teachers

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