Daily Papers

Key challenges for the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world are the discovery, representation and reuse of skills in the absence of a reward function. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn a task-agnostic skill embedding space from unlabeled multi-view videos. Our method learns a general skill embedding independently from the task context by using an adversarial loss. We combine a metric learning loss, which utilizes temporal video coherence to learn a state representation, with an entropy regularized adversarial skill-transfer loss. The metric learning loss learns a disentangled representation by attracting simultaneous viewpoints of the same observations and repelling visually similar frames from temporal neighbors. The adversarial skill-transfer loss enhances re-usability of learned skill embeddings over multiple task domains. We show that the learned embedding enables training of continuous control policies to solve novel tasks that require the interpolation of previously seen skills. Our extensive evaluation with both simulation and real world data demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in learning transferable skills from unlabeled interaction videos and composing them for new tasks. Code, pretrained models and dataset are available at http://robotskills.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Learning manipulation skills from human demonstration videos presents a promising yet challenging problem, primarily due to the significant embodiment gap between human body and robot manipulators. Existing methods rely on paired datasets or hand-crafted rewards, which limit scalability and generalization. We propose TrajSkill, a framework for Trajectory Conditioned Cross-embodiment Skill Transfer, enabling robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from human demonstration videos. Our key insight is to represent human motions as sparse optical flow trajectories, which serve as embodiment-agnostic motion cues by removing morphological variations while preserving essential dynamics. Conditioned on these trajectories together with visual and textual inputs, TrajSkill jointly synthesizes temporally consistent robot manipulation videos and translates them into executable actions, thereby achieving cross-embodiment skill transfer. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results on simulation data (MetaWorld) show that TrajSkill reduces FVD by 39.6\% and KVD by 36.6\% compared with the state-of-the-art, and improves cross-embodiment success rate by up to 16.7\%. Real-robot experiments in kitchen manipulation tasks further validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating practical human-to-robot skill transfer across embodiments.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can enable broad open world generalization, but require large and diverse datasets. It is appealing to consider whether some of this data can come from human videos, which cover diverse real-world situations and are easy to obtain. However, it is difficult to train VLAs with human videos alone, and establishing a mapping between humans and robots requires manual engineering and presents a major research challenge. Drawing inspiration from advances in large language models, where the ability to learn from diverse supervision emerges with scale, we ask whether a similar phenomenon holds for VLAs that incorporate human video data. We introduce a simple co-training recipe, and find that human-to-robot transfer emerges once the VLA is pre-trained on sufficient scenes, tasks, and embodiments. Our analysis suggests that this emergent capability arises because diverse pretraining produces embodiment-agnostic representations for human and robot data. We validate these findings through a series of experiments probing human to robot skill transfer and find that with sufficiently diverse robot pre-training our method can nearly double the performance on generalization settings seen only in human data.

Human egocentric video captures rich manipulation demonstrations without any robot hardware, yet transferring these skills to robots remains challenging due to the embodiment gap between human and robot in both visual appearance and kinematics. We present HumanEgo, a framework that bridges the embodiment gap by lifting each human demonstration to an entity-level representation of hand-object interaction, and training a flow matching policy with dense auxiliary objectives that amplify supervision from every trajectory. HumanEgo is robot-data-free, hardware-agnostic, data-efficient, and zero-shot human-to-robot transferable. With only 30 minutes of human videos per task, HumanEgo achieves 92.5% average success across four real-world tasks (75% with just 15 minutes), outperforms matched-time robot teleoperation by 41%, and robustly transfers zero-shot across novel robots, cameras, and environments.

A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing attention in recent years, driven by the abundance of human activity videos and advances in computer vision. This line of research promises to enable robots to acquire skills passively from the vast and readily available resource of human demonstrations, substantially favoring scalable learning for generalist robotic systems. Therefore, we present this survey to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of human-video-based learning techniques in robotics, focusing on both human-robot skill transfer and data foundations. We first review the policy learning foundations in robotics, and then describe the fundamental interfaces to incorporate human videos. Subsequently, we introduce a hierarchical taxonomy of transferring human videos to robot skills, covering task-, observation-, and action-oriented pathways, along with a cross-family analysis of their couplings with different data configurations and learning paradigms. In addition, we investigate the data foundations including widely-used human video datasets and video generation schemes, and provide large-scale statistical trends in dataset development and utilization. Ultimately, we emphasize the challenges and limitations intrinsic to this field, and delineate potential avenues for future research. The paper list of our survey is available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/awesome-robot-learning-from-human-videos.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) modeling remains challenging because it requires joint reasoning about hand articulation, object geometry, contact, semantics, and dynamics under severe visual uncertainty. Foundation models introduce transferable prior knowledge learned from large-scale cross-domain data, offering new ways to address these challenges beyond task-specific data and models. However, the rapidly growing literature remains fragmented, and existing studies typically describe these methods simply as ``using large models'' without systematically characterizing what knowledge is introduced, where it enters the HOI pipeline, or which HOI uncertainty it helps reduce. This survey presents the first systematic review of foundation-model priors for HOI. We organize the literature into six HOI tasks spanning reconstruction and generation. More importantly, we establish a taxonomy of eight foundation-model sub-priors grouped into geometric, semantic, and visual families. Geometric priors encompass shape retrieval, shape reconstruction, and spatial reconstruction; semantic priors include semantic grounding and language reasoning; and visual priors cover visual representation, image generation, and video generation. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically analyze how different priors are represented, injected, and adapted across HOI pipelines and tasks. Beyond how foundation models empower HOI, we further examine how HOI-derived knowledge is used in robot learning, including human-data pretraining, human-to-robot skill transfer, and HOI-to-robot data generation. Finally, we summarize datasets and evaluation protocols, and discuss limitations and future directions toward more generalizable HOI systems. To support long-term progress, we curate a live repository that continuously aggregates emerging methods and benchmarks.

Achieving robust, human-like whole-body control on humanoid robots for agile, contact-rich behaviors remains a central challenge, demanding heavy per-skill engineering and a brittle process of tuning controllers. We introduce ZEST (Zero-shot Embodied Skill Transfer), a streamlined motion-imitation framework that trains policies via reinforcement learning from diverse sources -- high-fidelity motion capture, noisy monocular video, and non-physics-constrained animation -- and deploys them to hardware zero-shot. ZEST generalizes across behaviors and platforms while avoiding contact labels, reference or observation windows, state estimators, and extensive reward shaping. Its training pipeline combines adaptive sampling, which focuses training on difficult motion segments, and an automatic curriculum using a model-based assistive wrench, together enabling dynamic, long-horizon maneuvers. We further provide a procedure for selecting joint-level gains from approximate analytical armature values for closed-chain actuators, along with a refined model of actuators. Trained entirely in simulation with moderate domain randomization, ZEST demonstrates remarkable generality. On Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid, ZEST learns dynamic, multi-contact skills (e.g., army crawl, breakdancing) from motion capture. It transfers expressive dance and scene-interaction skills, such as box-climbing, directly from videos to Atlas and the Unitree G1. Furthermore, it extends across morphologies to the Spot quadruped, enabling acrobatics, such as a continuous backflip, through animation. Together, these results demonstrate robust zero-shot deployment across heterogeneous data sources and embodiments, establishing ZEST as a scalable interface between biological movements and their robotic counterparts.

One of the central challenges preventing robots from acquiring complex manipulation skills is the prohibitive cost of collecting large-scale robot demonstrations. In contrast, humans are able to learn efficiently by watching others interact with their environment. To bridge this gap, we introduce semantic action flow as a core intermediate representation capturing the essential spatio-temporal manipulator-object interactions, invariant to superficial visual differences. We present ViSA-Flow, a framework that learns this representation self-supervised from unlabeled large-scale video data. First, a generative model is pre-trained on semantic action flows automatically extracted from large-scale human-object interaction video data, learning a robust prior over manipulation structure. Second, this prior is efficiently adapted to a target robot by fine-tuning on a small set of robot demonstrations processed through the same semantic abstraction pipeline. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the CALVIN benchmark and real-world tasks that ViSA-Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in low-data regimes, outperforming prior methods by effectively transferring knowledge from human video observation to robotic execution. Videos are available at https://visaflow-web.github.io/ViSAFLOW.

We present Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) -- a data collection and policy learning framework that allows direct skill transfer from in-the-wild human demonstrations to deployable robot policies. UMI employs hand-held grippers coupled with careful interface design to enable portable, low-cost, and information-rich data collection for challenging bimanual and dynamic manipulation demonstrations. To facilitate deployable policy learning, UMI incorporates a carefully designed policy interface with inference-time latency matching and a relative-trajectory action representation. The resulting learned policies are hardware-agnostic and deployable across multiple robot platforms. Equipped with these features, UMI framework unlocks new robot manipulation capabilities, allowing zero-shot generalizable dynamic, bimanual, precise, and long-horizon behaviors, by only changing the training data for each task. We demonstrate UMI's versatility and efficacy with comprehensive real-world experiments, where policies learned via UMI zero-shot generalize to novel environments and objects when trained on diverse human demonstrations. UMI's hardware and software system is open-sourced at https://umi-gripper.github.io.

We present DexCanvas, a large-scale hybrid real-synthetic human manipulation dataset containing 7,000 hours of dexterous hand-object interactions seeded from 70 hours of real human demonstrations, organized across 21 fundamental manipulation types based on the Cutkosky taxonomy. Each entry combines synchronized multi-view RGB-D, high-precision mocap with MANO hand parameters, and per-frame contact points with physically consistent force profiles. Our real-to-sim pipeline uses reinforcement learning to train policies that control an actuated MANO hand in physics simulation, reproducing human demonstrations while discovering the underlying contact forces that generate the observed object motion. DexCanvas is the first manipulation dataset to combine large-scale real demonstrations, systematic skill coverage based on established taxonomies, and physics-validated contact annotations. The dataset can facilitate research in robotic manipulation learning, contact-rich control, and skill transfer across different hand morphologies.

High-quality demonstration data are essential for humanoid robot skill learning, especially for whole-body behaviors that require coordinated perception, locomotion, and manipulation. Existing data-collection methods largely rely on robot teleoperation, which is constrained by hardware accessibility, operator expertise, and limited efficiency. Inspired by the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), we propose HumanoidUMI, a portable and robot-free framework for humanoid whole-body data collection. HumanoidUMI uses lightweight VR devices and UMI-inspired grippers to collect sparse human keypoint trajectories, wrist-view observations, and gripper actions. These demonstrations train a high-level policy to predict future keypoints, which are retargeted to robot-native whole-body references and executed by a whole-body controller. Experiments in five real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and validate the collected demonstrations for transferable humanoid whole-body skill learning.

Mimicry is a fundamental learning mechanism in humans, enabling individuals to learn new tasks by observing and imitating experts. However, applying this ability to robots presents significant challenges due to the inherent differences between human and robot embodiments in both their visual appearance and physical capabilities. While previous methods bridge this gap using cross-embodiment datasets with shared scenes and tasks, collecting such aligned data between humans and robots at scale is not trivial. In this paper, we propose UniSkill, a novel framework that learns embodiment-agnostic skill representations from large-scale cross-embodiment video data without any labels, enabling skills extracted from human video prompts to effectively transfer to robot policies trained only on robot data. Our experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our cross-embodiment skills successfully guide robots in selecting appropriate actions, even with unseen video prompts. The project website can be found at: https://kimhanjung.github.io/UniSkill.

Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures. We introduce ASPIRE (Agentic Skill Programming through Iterative Robot Exploration), a continual learning system that autonomously writes and refines robot control programs in a code-as-policy paradigm while compounding experience into a reusable skill library. ASPIRE discovers skills that persist across tasks, simulation and real-world settings, and embodiments. It operates in an open-ended loop with three components: (1) a closed-loop robot execution engine that exposes fine-grained multimodal traces, enabling autonomous failure diagnosis, repair synthesis, and validation; (2) a continually expanding skill library that distills validated fixes into reusable, transferable knowledge; and (3) evolutionary search that generates diverse task sequences and control programs to explore beyond single-trajectory refinement. ASPIRE surpasses prior methods by up to 77% on LIBERO-Pro manipulation under perturbation, 72% on Robosuite bimanual handover, and 32% on BEHAVIOR-1K long-horizon household tasks. Its accumulated library also enables zero-shot generalization to unseen long-horizon tasks: on LIBERO-Pro Long, ASPIRE achieves 31% success versus 4% for prior methods despite their use of test-time reasoning and retries. Finally, simulation-discovered skills provide initial evidence of sim-to-real transfer, substantially reducing real-robot programming effort across different embodiments and robot APIs.

Biomimetic, dexterous robotic hands have the potential to replicate much of the tasks that a human can do, and to achieve status as a general manipulation platform. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks have achieved remarkable performance in quadrupedal locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks. Combined with GPU-based highly parallelized simulations capable of simulating thousands of robots in parallel, RL-based controllers have become more scalable and approachable. However, in order to bring RL-trained policies to the real world, we require training frameworks that output policies that can work with physical actuators and sensors as well as a hardware platform that can be manufactured with accessible materials yet is robust enough to run interactive policies. This work introduces the biomimetic tendon-driven Faive Hand and its system architecture, which uses tendon-driven rolling contact joints to achieve a 3D printable, robust high-DoF hand design. We model each element of the hand and integrate it into a GPU simulation environment to train a policy with RL, and achieve zero-shot transfer of a dexterous in-hand sphere rotation skill to the physical robot hand.

Transforming complex actions into discrete skill abstractions has demonstrated strong potential for robotic manipulation. Existing approaches mainly leverage latent variable models, e.g., VQ-VAE, to learn skill abstractions through learned vectors (codebooks), while they suffer from codebook collapse and modeling the causal relationship between learned skills. To address these limitations, we present Skill Training with Augmented Rotation (STAR), a framework that advances both skill learning and composition to complete complex behaviors. Specifically, to prevent codebook collapse, we devise rotation-augmented residual skill quantization (RaRSQ). It encodes relative angles between encoder outputs into the gradient flow by rotation-based gradient mechanism. Points within the same skill code are forced to be either pushed apart or pulled closer together depending on gradient directions. Further, to capture the causal relationship between skills, we present causal skill transformer (CST) which explicitly models dependencies between skill representations through an autoregressive mechanism for coherent action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of STAR on both LIBERO benchmark and realworld tasks, with around 12\% improvement over the baselines.

The capability to transfer mastered skills to accomplish a range of similar yet novel tasks is crucial for intelligent robots. In this work, we introduce Diff-Transfer, a novel framework leveraging differentiable physics simulation to efficiently transfer robotic skills. Specifically, Diff-Transfer discovers a feasible path within the task space that brings the source task to the target task. At each pair of adjacent points along this task path, which is two sub-tasks, Diff-Transfer adapts known actions from one sub-task to tackle the other sub-task successfully. The adaptation is guided by the gradient information from differentiable physics simulations. We propose a novel path-planning method to generate sub-tasks, leveraging Q-learning with a task-level state and reward. We implement our framework in simulation experiments and execute four challenging transfer tasks on robotic manipulation, demonstrating the efficacy of Diff-Transfer through comprehensive experiments. Supplementary and Videos are on the website https://sites.google.com/view/difftransfer

The ability to acquire skills rapidly and effortlessly while retaining those already mastered is essential for robots. However, current methods still rely on a cumbersome training-time loop that is costly and slow, while eroding skills already mastered. In this paper, we introduce HOST (Human-to-robot One-Shot Skill AcquisiTion), a framework that enables a robot to acquire skills in seconds from a single human video while retaining previously mastered skills. HOST resolves skill acquisition through a cascade of self-grounded prediction. It first estimates the robot's progress within the demonstrated task, then translates the upcoming progression into the robot's own future observations, and finally derives actions from these predicted observations. This cascade is trained on targets coupled to the video demonstration, obtained by mapping the robot trajectory and the video demonstration onto a shared task progress manifold, then redefining each target to align with the future progression of the video. HOST thereby enables the robot to actively follow the demonstrated procedure and adapt it to the robot's embodiment. HOST acquires novel skills at inference time from a single human video in an average of 29 seconds and achieves a 62% average success rate. It exceeds the zero-shot baseline by 45% while retaining previously mastered skills. HOST even exceeds the baseline fine-tuned on 50 robot demonstrations per task while requiring 50 times fewer demonstrations and acquiring each skill 507 times faster. Additional information about HOST is available on the project website.

We present Skill Transformer, an approach for solving long-horizon robotic tasks by combining conditional sequence modeling and skill modularity. Conditioned on egocentric and proprioceptive observations of a robot, Skill Transformer is trained end-to-end to predict both a high-level skill (e.g., navigation, picking, placing), and a whole-body low-level action (e.g., base and arm motion), using a transformer architecture and demonstration trajectories that solve the full task. It retains the composability and modularity of the overall task through a skill predictor module while reasoning about low-level actions and avoiding hand-off errors, common in modular approaches. We test Skill Transformer on an embodied rearrangement benchmark and find it performs robust task planning and low-level control in new scenarios, achieving a 2.5x higher success rate than baselines in hard rearrangement problems.

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse domains, while imitation learning provides principled methods for robot skill adaptation from limited data. Combining these approaches holds significant promise for direct application to robotics, yet this combination has received limited attention, particularly for industrial deployment. We present a novel framework that enables open-vocabulary skill adaptation through a tool-based architecture, maintaining a protective abstraction layer between the language model and robot hardware. Our approach leverages pre-trained LLMs to select and parameterize specific tools for adapting robot skills without requiring fine-tuning or direct model-to-robot interaction. We demonstrate the framework on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot performing an industrial bearing ring insertion task, showing successful skill adaptation through natural language commands for speed adjustment, trajectory correction, and obstacle avoidance while maintaining safety, transparency, and interpretability.

As robots are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios, a key question is how to best transfer knowledge learned in one environment to another, where shifting constraints and human preferences render adaptation challenging. A central challenge remains that often, it is difficult (perhaps even impossible) to capture the full complexity of the deployment environment, and therefore the desired tasks, at training time. Consequently, the representation, or abstraction, of the tasks the human hopes for the robot to perform in one environment may be misaligned with the representation of the tasks that the robot has learned in another. We postulate that because humans will be the ultimate evaluator of system success in the world, they are best suited to communicating the aspects of the tasks that matter to the robot. Our key insight is that effective learning from human input requires first explicitly learning good intermediate representations and then using those representations for solving downstream tasks. We highlight three areas where we can use this approach to build interactive systems and offer future directions of work to better create advanced collaborative robots.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing into Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), capable of processing image, audio, and video as well as text. Combining first-person video, MLLMs show promising potential for understanding human activities through video and audio, enabling many human-computer interaction and human-augmentation applications such as human activity support, real-world agents, and skill transfer to robots or other individuals. However, handling high-resolution, long-duration videos generates large latent representations, leading to substantial memory and processing demands, limiting the length and resolution MLLMs can manage. Reducing video resolution can lower memory usage but often compromises comprehension. This paper introduces a method that optimizes first-person video analysis by integrating eye-tracking data, and proposes a method that decomposes first-person vision video into sub areas for regions of gaze focus. By processing these selectively gazed-focused inputs, our approach achieves task comprehension equivalent to or even better than processing the entire image at full resolution, but with significantly reduced video data input (reduce the number of pixels to one-tenth), offering an efficient solution for using MLLMs to interpret and utilize human skills.

We tackle real-world long-horizon robot manipulation tasks through skill discovery. We present a bottom-up approach to learning a library of reusable skills from unsegmented demonstrations and use these skills to synthesize prolonged robot behaviors. Our method starts with constructing a hierarchical task structure from each demonstration through agglomerative clustering. From the task structures of multi-task demonstrations, we identify skills based on the recurring patterns and train goal-conditioned sensorimotor policies with hierarchical imitation learning. Finally, we train a meta controller to compose these skills to solve long-horizon manipulation tasks. The entire model can be trained on a small set of human demonstrations collected within 30 minutes without further annotations, making it amendable to real-world deployment. We systematically evaluated our method in simulation environments and on a real robot. Our method has shown superior performance over state-of-the-art imitation learning methods in multi-stage manipulation tasks. Furthermore, skills discovered from multi-task demonstrations boost the average task success by 8% compared to those discovered from individual tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it often updates factual content without reliably improving the model's ability to use the newly incorporated information for question answering or decision-making. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for acquiring reasoning skills; however, its high computational cost makes it impractical for efficient online adaptation. We empirically observe that the parameter updates induced by SFT and RL are nearly orthogonal. Based on this observation, we propose Parametric Skill Transfer (PaST), a framework that supports modular skill transfer for efficient and effective knowledge adaptation. By extracting a domain-agnostic Skill Vector from a source domain, we can linearly inject knowledge manipulation skills into a target model after it has undergone lightweight SFT on new data. Experiments on knowledge-incorporation QA (SQuAD, LooGLE) and agentic tool-use benchmarks (ToolBench) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On SQuAD, PaST outperforms the state-of-the-art self-editing SFT baseline by up to 9.9 points. PaST further scales to long-context QA on LooGLE with an 8.0-point absolute accuracy gain, and improves zero-shot ToolBench success rates by +10.3 points on average with consistent gains across tool categories, indicating strong scalability and cross-domain transferability of the Skill Vector.

We present a framework for robot skill acquisition, which 1) efficiently scale up data generation of language-labelled robot data and 2) effectively distills this data down into a robust multi-task language-conditioned visuo-motor policy. For (1), we use a large language model (LLM) to guide high-level planning, and sampling-based robot planners (e.g. motion or grasp samplers) for generating diverse and rich manipulation trajectories. To robustify this data-collection process, the LLM also infers a code-snippet for the success condition of each task, simultaneously enabling the data-collection process to detect failure and retry as well as the automatic labeling of trajectories with success/failure. For (2), we extend the diffusion policy single-task behavior-cloning approach to multi-task settings with language conditioning. Finally, we propose a new multi-task benchmark with 18 tasks across five domains to test long-horizon behavior, common-sense reasoning, tool-use, and intuitive physics. We find that our distilled policy successfully learned the robust retrying behavior in its data collection policy, while improving absolute success rates by 34.8% on average across five domains. The benchmark, code, and qualitative results are on our website https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~huy/scalingup/

Robot learning is splitting into two bets: policies that bake competence into frozen weights (vision-language-action, or VLA, models), and agents that write and refine their own executable skills as code. This survey organises the field around that axis of weights versus skills. Its central analytical contribution is a deep-dive that arranges code-as-policy methods by their degree of self-improvement, from zero-shot program synthesis, through closed-loop self-repair and persistent skill memory, to the sparsely populated cell in which execution feedback, skill memory, and evolutionary search combine into one open-ended loop; only a few very recent systems (for example ASPIRE, ENPIRE, and RoboClaw) occupy that cell. We map the complementary "skills" pole, from unsupervised reinforcement-learning skill discovery to large-language-model skill libraries, and show that the word "skill" is used in at least five distinct senses, of which only the code sense self-improves without gradient updates. We then connect the taxonomy to the emerging skill economy: commercial robot-skill marketplaces now distribute one-tap skills across robots but ship only static playback, which surfaces open problems of adaptation, cross-embodiment portability, provenance, safety verification, composition, and standardisation. This is a deliberately focused survey. Rather than cataloguing the field exhaustively, it examines 77 representative systems across six technique families through one taxonomy and a set of contrast tables, and it supplies operational definitions of the self-improvement mechanisms together with a statement of what each family cannot do.

A key challenge in robotic manipulation in open domains is how to acquire diverse and generalizable skills for robots. Recent research in one-shot imitation learning has shown promise in transferring trained policies to new tasks based on demonstrations. This feature is attractive for enabling robots to acquire new skills and improving task and motion planning. However, due to limitations in the training dataset, the current focus of the community has mainly been on simple cases, such as push or pick-place tasks, relying solely on visual guidance. In reality, there are many complex skills, some of which may even require both visual and tactile perception to solve. This paper aims to unlock the potential for an agent to generalize to hundreds of real-world skills with multi-modal perception. To achieve this, we have collected a dataset comprising over 110,000 contact-rich robot manipulation sequences across diverse skills, contexts, robots, and camera viewpoints, all collected in the real world. Each sequence in the dataset includes visual, force, audio, and action information. Moreover, we also provide a corresponding human demonstration video and a language description for each robot sequence. We have invested significant efforts in calibrating all the sensors and ensuring a high-quality dataset. The dataset is made publicly available at rh20t.github.io

Long-horizon contact-rich tasks are challenging to learn with reinforcement learning, due to ineffective exploration of high-dimensional state spaces with sparse rewards. The learning process often gets stuck in local optimum and demands task-specific reward fine-tuning for complex scenarios. In this work, we propose a structured framework that leverages privileged actions with curriculum learning, enabling the policy to efficiently acquire long-horizon skills without relying on extensive reward engineering or reference trajectories. Specifically, we use privileged actions in simulation with a general training procedure that would be infeasible to implement in real-world scenarios. These privileges include relaxed constraints and virtual forces that enhance interaction and exploration with objects. Our results successfully achieve complex multi-stage long-horizon tasks that naturally combine non-prehensile manipulation with grasping to lift objects from non-graspable poses. We demonstrate generality by maintaining a parsimonious reward structure and showing convergence to diverse and robust behaviors across various environments. Additionally, real-world experiments further confirm that the skills acquired using our approach are transferable to real-world environments, exhibiting robust and intricate performance. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in these tasks, converging to solutions where others fail.

We present RoboGen, a generative robotic agent that automatically learns diverse robotic skills at scale via generative simulation. RoboGen leverages the latest advancements in foundation and generative models. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce policies or low-level actions, we advocate for a generative scheme, which uses these models to automatically generate diversified tasks, scenes, and training supervisions, thereby scaling up robotic skill learning with minimal human supervision. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided propose-generate-learn cycle: the agent first proposes interesting tasks and skills to develop, and then generates corresponding simulation environments by populating pertinent objects and assets with proper spatial configurations. Afterwards, the agent decomposes the proposed high-level task into sub-tasks, selects the optimal learning approach (reinforcement learning, motion planning, or trajectory optimization), generates required training supervision, and then learns policies to acquire the proposed skill. Our work attempts to extract the extensive and versatile knowledge embedded in large-scale models and transfer them to the field of robotics. Our fully generative pipeline can be queried repeatedly, producing an endless stream of skill demonstrations associated with diverse tasks and environments.

Humans possess a large reachable space in the 3D world, enabling interaction with objects at varying heights and distances. However, realizing such large-space reaching on humanoids is a complex whole-body control problem and requires the robot to master diverse skills simultaneously-including base positioning and reorientation, height and body posture adjustments, and end-effector pose control. Learning from scratch often leads to optimization difficulty and poor sim2real transferability. To address this challenge, we propose Real-world-Ready Skill Space (R2S2). Our approach begins with a carefully designed skill library consisting of real-world-ready primitive skills. We ensure optimal performance and robust sim2real transfer through individual skill tuning and sim2real evaluation. These skills are then ensembled into a unified latent space, serving as a structured prior that helps task execution in an efficient and sim2real transferable manner. A high-level planner, trained to sample skills from this space, enables the robot to accomplish real-world goal-reaching tasks. We demonstrate zero-shot sim2real transfer and validate R2S2 in multiple challenging goal-reaching scenarios.

Robot learning approaches such as behavior cloning and reinforcement learning have shown great promise in synthesizing robot skills from human demonstrations in specific environments. However, these approaches often require task-specific demonstrations or designing complex simulation environments, which limits the development of generalizable and robust policies for unseen real-world settings. Recent advances in the use of foundation models for robotics (e.g., LLMs, VLMs) have shown great potential in enabling systems to understand the semantics in the world from large-scale internet data. However, it remains an open challenge to use this knowledge to enable robotic systems to understand the underlying dynamics of the world, to generalize policies across different tasks, and to adapt policies to new environments. To alleviate these limitations, we propose an agentic framework for robot self-guidance and self-improvement, which consists of a set of role-specialized conversational agents, such as a high-level advisor, a grounding agent, a monitoring agent, and a robotic agent. Our framework iteratively grounds a base robot policy to relevant objects in the environment and uses visuomotor cues to shift the action distribution of the policy to more desirable states, online, while remaining agnostic to the subjective configuration of a given robot hardware platform. We demonstrate that our approach can effectively guide manipulation policies to achieve significantly higher success rates, both in simulation and in real-world experiments, without the need for additional human demonstrations or extensive exploration. Code and videos available at: https://agenticrobots.github.io

In order for robots to be useful, they must perform practically relevant tasks in the real world, outside of the lab. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive results for end-to-end robot control, it remains an open question how far such models can generalize in the wild. We describe pi_{0.5}, a new model based on pi_{0} that uses co-training on heterogeneous tasks to enable broad generalization. pi_{0.5}\ uses data from multiple robots, high-level semantic prediction, web data, and other sources to enable broadly generalizable real-world robotic manipulation. Our system uses a combination of co-training and hybrid multi-modal examples that combine image observations, language commands, object detections, semantic subtask prediction, and low-level actions. Our experiments show that this kind of knowledge transfer is essential for effective generalization, and we demonstrate for the first time that an end-to-end learning-enabled robotic system can perform long-horizon and dexterous manipulation skills, such as cleaning a kitchen or bedroom, in entirely new homes.

While imitation learning (IL) has achieved impressive success in dexterous manipulation through generative modeling and pretraining, state-of-the-art approaches like Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models still struggle with adaptation to environmental changes and skill transfer. We argue this stems from mimicking raw trajectories without understanding the underlying intent. To address this, we propose explicitly disentangling behavior intent from execution details in end-2-end IL: Mimic Intent, Not just Trajectories(MINT). We achieve this via multi-scale frequency-space tokenization, which enforces a spectral decomposition of action chunk representation. We learn action tokens with a multi-scale coarse-to-fine structure, and force the coarsest token to capture low-frequency global structure and finer tokens to encode high-frequency details. This yields an abstract Intent token that facilitates planning and transfer, and multi-scale Execution tokens that enable precise adaptation to environmental dynamics. Building on this hierarchy, our policy generates trajectories through next-scale autoregression, performing progressive intent-to-execution reasoning, thus boosting learning efficiency and generalization. Crucially, this disentanglement enables one-shot transfer of skills, by simply injecting the Intent token from a demonstration into the autoregressive generation process. Experiments on several manipulation benchmarks and on a real robot demonstrate state-of-the-art success rates, superior inference efficiency, robust generalization against disturbances, and effective one-shot transfer.

We study whether we can learn novel manipulation skills from human actions to a bi-manual robot with parallel grippers. Human action data is cheap, abundant, and diverse, making it one of the most promising resources for scaling up robot learning. Yet transferring skills from humans to robots remains hard: most prior work treats humans as just another bi-manual 6DoF embodiment, where hand-pose estimates are noisy and the contact patterns of human fingers differ fundamentally from those of a parallel gripper. We argue that learning rotation-inclusive action signals from human data is therefore sub-optimal, and instead propose a bridging action representation: the relative wrist translation within the initial head-camera frame, an action space shared by humans and robots. To handle the potential absence of certain action components in different embodiments, we build a π_0-like vision-language-action model with interleaved action tokens and attention masking. On a suite of novel bi-manual manipulation tasks, our bridging action transfers human manipulation knowledge to robots far more effectively than noisy 6DoF human actions and scales with the amount of human data.

We introduce a novel system for human-to-robot trajectory transfer that enables robots to manipulate objects by learning from human demonstration videos. The system consists of four modules. The first module is a data collection module that is designed to collect human demonstration videos from the point of view of a robot using an AR headset. The second module is a video understanding module that detects objects and extracts 3D human-hand trajectories from demonstration videos. The third module transfers a human-hand trajectory into a reference trajectory of a robot end-effector in 3D space. The last module utilizes a trajectory optimization algorithm to solve a trajectory in the robot configuration space that can follow the end-effector trajectory transferred from the human demonstration. Consequently, these modules enable a robot to watch a human demonstration video once and then repeat the same mobile manipulation task in different environments, even when objects are placed differently from the demonstrations. Experiments of different manipulation tasks are conducted on a mobile manipulator to verify the effectiveness of our system

Human video datasets used for cotraining robot manipulation policies largely consist of curated demonstrations where motions are orchestrated to resemble robot behavior and 3D hand poses are captured with specialized hardware. A more plentiful source of data is everyday Internet video, but it is an open question what factors enable transfer from such videos to robots. We investigate this using a new dataset of 532 human videos with 28 hours of high-quality triangulated hand labels and natural motions. We find that hand pose quality affects transfer, but even with accurate hands, the inherent motion gap hinders transfer unless the vision and policy networks specialize to each embodiment. Our cotraining recipe yields consistent improvements, with an absolute success rate gain of 29.7% in the low-robot-data regime across six manipulation tasks.

The ability to leverage heterogeneous robotic experience from different robots and tasks to quickly master novel skills and embodiments has the potential to transform robot learning. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models for vision and language, we propose a foundation agent for robotic manipulation. This agent, named RoboCat, is a visual goal-conditioned decision transformer capable of consuming multi-embodiment action-labelled visual experience. This data spans a large repertoire of motor control skills from simulated and real robotic arms with varying sets of observations and actions. With RoboCat, we demonstrate the ability to generalise to new tasks and robots, both zero-shot as well as through adaptation using only 100--1000 examples for the target task. We also show how a trained model itself can be used to generate data for subsequent training iterations, thus providing a basic building block for an autonomous improvement loop. We investigate the agent's capabilities, with large-scale evaluations both in simulation and on three different real robot embodiments. We find that as we grow and diversify its training data, RoboCat not only shows signs of cross-task transfer, but also becomes more efficient at adapting to new tasks.

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from simpler tasks, and faster by adapting the complexity of the actions to the task. We propose a task-oriented representation of complex actions, called procedures, to learn online task relationships and unbounded sequences of action primitives to control the different observables of the environment. Combining both goal-babbling with imitation learning, and active learning with transfer of knowledge based on intrinsic motivation, our algorithm self-organises its learning process. It chooses at any given time a task to focus on; and what, how, when and from whom to transfer knowledge. We show with a simulation and a real industrial robot arm, in cross-task and cross-learner transfer settings, that task composition is key to tackle highly complex tasks. Task decomposition is also efficiently transferred across different embodied learners and by active imitation, where the robot requests just a small amount of demonstrations and the adequate type of information. The robot learns and exploits task dependencies so as to learn tasks of every complexity.

Imitation learning offers a promising path for robots to learn general-purpose behaviors, but traditionally has exhibited limited scalability due to high data supervision requirements and brittle generalization. Inspired by recent advances in multi-task imitation learning, we investigate the use of prior data from previous tasks to facilitate learning novel tasks in a robust, data-efficient manner. To make effective use of the prior data, the robot must internalize knowledge from past experiences and contextualize this knowledge in novel tasks. To that end, we develop a skill-based imitation learning framework that extracts temporally extended sensorimotor skills from prior data and subsequently learns a policy for the target task that invokes these learned skills. We identify several key design choices that significantly improve performance on novel tasks, namely representation learning objectives to enable more predictable skill representations and a retrieval-based data augmentation mechanism to increase the scope of supervision for policy training. On a collection of simulated and real-world manipulation domains, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning approaches. Videos and code are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/sailor

Effective collaboration of dual-arm robots and their tool use capabilities are increasingly important areas in the advancement of robotics. These skills play a significant role in expanding robots' ability to operate in diverse real-world environments. However, progress is impeded by the scarcity of specialized training data. This paper introduces RoboTwin, a novel benchmark dataset combining real-world teleoperated data with synthetic data from digital twins, designed for dual-arm robotic scenarios. Using the COBOT Magic platform, we have collected diverse data on tool usage and human-robot interaction. We present a innovative approach to creating digital twins using AI-generated content, transforming 2D images into detailed 3D models. Furthermore, we utilize large language models to generate expert-level training data and task-specific pose sequences oriented toward functionality. Our key contributions are: 1) the RoboTwin benchmark dataset, 2) an efficient real-to-simulation pipeline, and 3) the use of language models for automatic expert-level data generation. These advancements are designed to address the shortage of robotic training data, potentially accelerating the development of more capable and versatile robotic systems for a wide range of real-world applications. The project page is available at https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/early-version/

Humans are remarkably efficient at learning tasks from demonstrations, but today's imitation learning methods for robot manipulation often require hundreds or thousands of demonstrations per task. We investigate two fundamental priors for improving learning efficiency: decomposing manipulation trajectories into sequential alignment and interaction phases, and retrieval-based generalisation. Through 3,450 real-world rollouts, we systematically study this decomposition. We compare different design choices for the alignment and interaction phases, and examine generalisation and scaling trends relative to today's dominant paradigm of behavioural cloning with a single-phase monolithic policy. In the few-demonstrations-per-task regime (<10 demonstrations), decomposition achieves an order of magnitude improvement in data efficiency over single-phase learning, with retrieval consistently outperforming behavioural cloning for both alignment and interaction. Building on these insights, we develop Multi-Task Trajectory Transfer (MT3), an imitation learning method based on decomposition and retrieval. MT3 learns everyday manipulation tasks from as little as a single demonstration each, whilst also generalising to novel object instances. This efficiency enables us to teach a robot 1,000 distinct everyday tasks in under 24 hours of human demonstrator time. Through 2,200 additional real-world rollouts, we reveal MT3's capabilities and limitations across different task families. Videos of our experiments can be found on at https://www.robot-learning.uk/learning-1000-tasks.

Industrial robot applications require increasingly flexible systems that non-expert users can easily adapt for varying tasks and environments. However, different adaptations benefit from different interaction modalities. We present an interactive framework that enables robot skill adaptation through three complementary modalities: kinesthetic touch for precise spatial corrections, natural language for high-level semantic modifications, and a graphical web interface for visualizing geometric relations and trajectories, inspecting and adjusting parameters, and editing via-points by drag-and-drop. The framework integrates five components: energy-based human-intention detection, a tool-based LLM architecture (where the LLM selects and parameterizes predefined functions rather than generating code) for safe natural language adaptation, Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMPs) for motion encoding, probabilistic Virtual Fixtures for guided demonstration recording, and ergodic control for surface finishing. We demonstrate that this tool-based LLM architecture generalizes skill adaptation from KMPs to ergodic control, enabling voice-commanded surface finishing. Validation on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot at the Automatica 2025 trade fair demonstrates the practical applicability of our approach in industrial settings.

Imitation Learning has become a fundamental approach in robotic manipulation. However, collecting large-scale real-world robot demonstrations is prohibitively expensive. Simulators offer a cost-effective alternative, but the sim-to-real gap make it extremely challenging to scale. Therefore, we introduce RoboTransfer, a diffusion-based video generation framework for robotic data synthesis. Unlike previous methods, RoboTransfer integrates multi-view geometry with explicit control over scene components, such as background and object attributes. By incorporating cross-view feature interactions and global depth/normal conditions, RoboTransfer ensures geometry consistency across views. This framework allows fine-grained control, including background edits and object swaps. Experiments demonstrate that RoboTransfer is capable of generating multi-view videos with enhanced geometric consistency and visual fidelity. In addition, policies trained on the data generated by RoboTransfer achieve a 33.3% relative improvement in the success rate in the DIFF-OBJ setting and a substantial 251% relative improvement in the more challenging DIFF-ALL scenario. Explore more demos on our project page: https://horizonrobotics.github.io/robot_lab/robotransfer

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io{robotics-transformer-x.github.io}.

Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the nuanced role of data diversity in robot learning by examining three critical dimensions-task (what to do), embodiment (which robot to use), and expert (who demonstrates)-challenging the conventional intuition of "more diverse is better". Throughout extensive experiments on various robot platforms, we reveal that (1) task diversity proves more critical than per-task demonstration quantity, benefiting transfer from diverse pre-training tasks to novel downstream scenarios; (2) multi-embodiment pre-training data is optional for cross-embodiment transfer-models trained on high-quality single-embodiment data can efficiently transfer to different platforms, showing more desirable scaling property during fine-tuning than multi-embodiment pre-trained models; and (3) expert diversity, arising from individual operational preferences and stochastic variations in human demonstrations, can be confounding to policy learning, with velocity multimodality emerging as a key contributing factor. Based on this insight, we propose a distribution debiasing method to mitigate velocity ambiguity, the yielding GO-1-Pro achieves substantial performance gains of 15%, equivalent to using 2.5 times pre-training data. Collectively, these findings provide new perspectives and offer practical guidance on how to scale robotic manipulation datasets effectively.

Recent years in robotics and imitation learning have shown remarkable progress in training large-scale foundation models by leveraging data across a multitude of embodiments. The success of such policies might lead us to wonder: just how diverse can the robots in the training set be while still facilitating positive transfer? In this work, we study this question in the context of heterogeneous embodiments, examining how even seemingly very different domains, such as robotic navigation and manipulation, can provide benefits when included in the training data for the same model. We train a single goal-conditioned policy that is capable of controlling robotic arms, quadcopters, quadrupeds, and mobile bases. We then investigate the extent to which transfer can occur across navigation and manipulation on these embodiments by framing them as a single goal-reaching task. We find that co-training with navigation data can enhance robustness and performance in goal-conditioned manipulation with a wrist-mounted camera. We then deploy our policy trained only from navigation-only and static manipulation-only data on a mobile manipulator, showing that it can control a novel embodiment in a zero-shot manner. These results provide evidence that large-scale robotic policies can benefit from data collected across various embodiments. Further information and robot videos can be found on our project website http://extreme-cross-embodiment.github.io.

Human manipulation videos are a convenient and intuitive source for robot learning. However, directly transferring human dexterity to robots remains challenging due to perception errors and embodiment gap. To address this, we introduce Video2Sim2Real, a full-stack framework for autonomous skill acquisition from a single human manipulation video. Our framework first uses off-the-shelf foundation models to reconstruct a simulator-ready digital twin and extract robot and object motion priors. Rather than treating the extracted robot motion as a reliable reference throughout execution, our key idea is to recover and leverage the most fundamental sources of supervision from the demonstrated skill: We identify object-centric keyframes to optimize the corresponding robot configurations using object information from the simulator, and use these configurations as anchors that refine the robot motion such that it ultimately has the desired impact on the environment. To bridge the remaining sim-to-real gap, we introduce a sim-to-real strategy that decouples robustness to noisy and incomplete perception from variations in hand-object interaction dynamics. Specifically, we learn to recalibrate robot configurations from noisy real-world point clouds via IL, and leverage residual RL to perform local finger-level adaptations to ensure for robust and effective interactions. Finally, a collision-aware motion planning module enables spatial generalization to novel object configurations. Across several everyday manipulation tasks, Video2Sim2Real improves simulated task success, safety, and trajectory coherence over numerous baselines, and achieves better sim-to-real transfer than existing techniques. These results demonstrate a promising path toward autonomous dexterous skill acquisition from human videos.

Robots that learn manipulation skills from everyday human videos could acquire broad capabilities without tedious robot data collection. We propose a video-to-video translation framework that converts ordinary human-object interaction videos into motion-consistent robot manipulation videos with realistic, physically grounded interactions. Our approach does not require any paired human-robot videos for training only a set of unpaired robot videos, making the system easy to scale. We introduce a transferable representation that bridges the embodiment gap: by inpainting the robot arm in training videos to obtain a clean background and overlaying a simple visual cue (a marker and arrow indicating the gripper's position and orientation), we can condition a generative model to insert the robot arm back into the scene. At test time, we apply the same process to human videos (inpainting the person and overlaying human pose cues) and generate high-quality robot videos that mimic the human's actions. We fine-tune a SOTA video diffusion model (Wan 2.2) in an in-context learning manner to ensure temporal coherence and leveraging of its rich prior knowledge. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly more realistic and grounded robot motions compared to baselines, pointing to a promising direction for scaling up robot learning from unlabeled human videos. Project page: https://showlab.github.io/H2R-Grounder/

Humanoid robots have the potential to perform dexterous manipulation in human environments, yet acquiring diverse and generalizable skills remains costly due to expensive hardware data collection and labor-intensive annotation. Recent advances in video generative models provide a promising opportunity to synthesize rich manipulation experiences from visual observations, but transferring such imagined behaviors into executable whole-body humanoid skills remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present RoboReact, a framework that automatically synthesizes whole-body humanoid manipulation skills from a single egocentric RGB-D observation. RoboReact generates human manipulation videos, extracts geometry-preserving interaction keyframes through depth-aware 3D reconstruction, and retargets them to high-DoF humanoid platforms while preserving hand-object interaction geometry. To bridge the gap between imagined plans and physical execution, RoboReact performs online object-centric re-grounding and leverages a vision-language model-guided refinement loop to adapt skills under geometric mismatch and execution deviations. The refined skills are executed through a whole-body controller, enabling coordinated whole-body manipulation and dexterous interaction. Experiments on real humanoid robots demonstrate that RoboReact generalizes across diverse object configurations and robustly recovers from execution disturbances without requiring teleoperation or human demonstrations. These results highlight the potential of combining generative models, vision-language reasoning, and closed-loop control for scalable humanoid skill acquisition.

Human behavior is among the most scalable sources of data for learning physical intelligence, yet how to effectively leverage it for dexterous manipulation remains unclear. While prior work demonstrates human to robot transfer in constrained settings, it is unclear whether large scale human data can support fine grained, high degree of freedom dexterous manipulation. We present EgoScale, a human to dexterous manipulation transfer framework built on large scale egocentric human data. We train a Vision Language Action (VLA) model on over 20,854 hours of action labeled egocentric human video, more than 20 times larger than prior efforts, and uncover a log linear scaling law between human data scale and validation loss. This validation loss strongly correlates with downstream real robot performance, establishing large scale human data as a predictable supervision source. Beyond scale, we introduce a simple two stage transfer recipe: large scale human pretraining followed by lightweight aligned human robot mid training. This enables strong long horizon dexterous manipulation and one shot task adaptation with minimal robot supervision. Our final policy improves average success rate by 54% over a no pretraining baseline using a 22 DoF dexterous robotic hand, and transfers effectively to robots with lower DoF hands, indicating that large scale human motion provides a reusable, embodiment agnostic motor prior.

Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learning either focus on repeated attempts of one task or use pipelines with multiple stages that entangle extraction, retrieval, and execution. We introduce SkillRise, a unified reinforcement learning framework for learning skills across tasks. SkillRise organizes related instances into progressively challenging sequences and uses a single policy to alternate between task solving and curating an evolving skill document passed directly to the next task. Decoupled credit assignment across tasks supervises solving with the current task outcome and curation with discounted downstream outcomes. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld show that SkillRise achieves the strongest Pass@1 performance among the compared methods, with gains over the strongest baseline ranging from 2.3 to 8.5 percentage points. Although trained across distinct tasks, its learned curation policy remains effective for repeated attempts on the same task. Further analysis reveals scaling at test time across tasks: performance improves with longer sequences of related tasks even when each task is attempted only once. This trend suggests that SkillRise reuses transferable skills across tasks rather than benefiting from repeated sampling of the same task. SkillRise further retains strong performance while substantially reducing the runtime overhead of skill learning pipelines with multiple stages. Together, these results provide a simple and efficient training paradigm for LLM agents to extract, refine, and reuse transferable skills across tasks.

One of the key arguments for building robots that have similar form factors to human beings is that we can leverage the massive human data for training. Yet, doing so has remained challenging in practice due to the complexities in humanoid perception and control, lingering physical gaps between humanoids and humans in morphologies and actuation, and lack of a data pipeline for humanoids to learn autonomous skills from egocentric vision. In this paper, we introduce a full-stack system for humanoids to learn motion and autonomous skills from human data. We first train a low-level policy in simulation via reinforcement learning using existing 40-hour human motion datasets. This policy transfers to the real world and allows humanoid robots to follow human body and hand motion in real time using only a RGB camera, i.e. shadowing. Through shadowing, human operators can teleoperate humanoids to collect whole-body data for learning different tasks in the real world. Using the data collected, we then perform supervised behavior cloning to train skill policies using egocentric vision, allowing humanoids to complete different tasks autonomously by imitating human skills. We demonstrate the system on our customized 33-DoF 180cm humanoid, autonomously completing tasks such as wearing a shoe to stand up and walk, unloading objects from warehouse racks, folding a sweatshirt, rearranging objects, typing, and greeting another robot with 60-100% success rates using up to 40 demonstrations. Project website: https://humanoid-ai.github.io/

Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate communication channel exists between the human expert and the robot to describe critical aspects of the task, such as the properties of the target object or the intended shape of the motion. Motivated by insights into the human teaching process, we introduce a method for incorporating unstructured natural language into imitation learning. At training time, the expert can provide demonstrations along with verbal descriptions in order to describe the underlying intent (e.g., "go to the large green bowl"). The training process then interrelates these two modalities to encode the correlations between language, perception, and motion. The resulting language-conditioned visuomotor policies can be conditioned at runtime on new human commands and instructions, which allows for more fine-grained control over the trained policies while also reducing situational ambiguity. We demonstrate in a set of simulation experiments how our approach can learn language-conditioned manipulation policies for a seven-degree-of-freedom robot arm and compare the results to a variety of alternative methods.

Teaching robots desired skills in real-world environments remains challenging, especially for non-experts. A key bottleneck is that collecting robotic data often requires expertise or specialized hardware, limiting accessibility and scalability. We posit that natural language offers an intuitive and accessible interface for robot learning. To this end, we study two aspects: (1) enabling non-experts to collect robotic data through natural language supervision (e.g., "move the arm to the right") and (2) training robot policies directly from this supervision. Specifically, we introduce a data collection framework that collects robot demonstrations based on natural language supervision and further augments these demonstrations. We then present CLIP-RT, a new vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns language-conditioned visuomotor policies from this supervision. CLIP-RT adapts the pretrained CLIP model and learns to predict language-based motion primitives via contrastive imitation learning. We train CLIP-RT on the Open X-Embodiment dataset and finetune it on in-domain data collected by our framework. In real-world evaluations, CLIP-RT demonstrates strong capabilities in learning novel manipulation skills, outperforming OpenVLA (7B parameters) by 24% in average success rates, while using 7x fewer parameters (1B). We further assess CLIP-RT's capabilities in few-shot generalization and collaborative scenarios involving large pretrained models or humans. In simulated environments, CLIP-RT also yields strong performance, achieving a 93.1% average success rate on the LIBERO benchmark with an inference throughput of 163 Hz.

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.

Unsupervised skill learning aims to learn a rich repertoire of behaviors without external supervision, providing artificial agents with the ability to control and influence the environment. However, without appropriate knowledge and exploration, skills may provide control only over a restricted area of the environment, limiting their applicability. Furthermore, it is unclear how to leverage the learned skill behaviors for adapting to downstream tasks in a data-efficient manner. We present Choreographer, a model-based agent that exploits its world model to learn and adapt skills in imagination. Our method decouples the exploration and skill learning processes, being able to discover skills in the latent state space of the model. During adaptation, the agent uses a meta-controller to evaluate and adapt the learned skills efficiently by deploying them in parallel in imagination. Choreographer is able to learn skills both from offline data, and by collecting data simultaneously with an exploration policy. The skills can be used to effectively adapt to downstream tasks, as we show in the URL benchmark, where we outperform previous approaches from both pixels and states inputs. The learned skills also explore the environment thoroughly, finding sparse rewards more frequently, as shown in goal-reaching tasks from the DMC Suite and Meta-World. Website and code: https://skillchoreographer.github.io/

Agent skills have become an important mechanism for equipping language-model agents with reusable procedural knowledge. However, providing skills alone does not guarantee that current models can effectively identify, apply, and coordinate them. To improve skill-use capabilities, we introduce SKT, a verified data synthesis pipeline that constructs skill-grounded tasks and executable trajectories from large collections of agent skills. SKT selects suitable single-skill and multi-skill configurations, synthesizes tasks through rule-based and agent-based verification with feedback-guided repair, and retains only successful trajectories that substantially use every required skill. Using 2,000 public skills, SKT produces 4,000 task packages and 27,164 verified trajectories. Based on the same pipeline and a disjoint test pool, we further construct SkillEval, a held-out executable benchmark for evaluating skill use. Experiments across diverse models, benchmarks, and agent harnesses show that supervised fine-tuning on SKT-generated trajectories consistently improves skill-use performance. Verification ablations, cross-harness evaluation, and scaling experiments further demonstrate that these gains depend on high-quality supervision, extend beyond a single agent interface, and increase with broader skill coverage. Together, these results establish verified data synthesis as an effective and scalable approach for skill-use training.

Coding agents are increasingly used as general-purpose problem solvers, but their flexibility does not by itself confer the domain expertise needed for specialized tasks. Recent work addresses this through agent skills: reusable workflows, and code, that augment agents with domain-specific capabilities. Most skills today are hand-crafted, and existing evolutionary approaches optimize low-level artifacts (e.g. prompts \& code) that are tightly coupled to specific models and tasks. We introduce EvoSkill, a self-evolving framework that automatically discovers and refines agent skills through iterative failure analysis. EvoSkill analyzes execution failures, proposes new skills or edits to existing ones, and materializes them into structured, reusable skill folders. A Pareto frontier of agent programs governs selection, retaining only skills that improve held-out validation performance while the underlying model remains frozen. We evaluate EvoSkill on two benchmarks: OfficeQA, a grounded reasoning benchmark over U.S.\ Treasury data, where it improves exact-match accuracy by 7.3\% (60.6\% to 67.9\%); and SealQA, a search-augmented QA benchmark with noisy retrieval, where it yields a 12.1\% gain (26.6\% to 38.7\%). We also investigate the zero-shot transfer capabilties of skills evolved on one task to the other; in particular: skills evolved from SealQA transfers zero-shot to BrowseComp, improving accuracy by 5.3\% without modification demonstrating that skill-level optimization produces transferable capabilities beyond the training task.

Robot learning holds the promise of learning policies that generalize broadly. However, such generalization requires sufficiently diverse datasets of the task of interest, which can be prohibitively expensive to collect. In other fields, such as computer vision, it is common to utilize shared, reusable datasets, such as ImageNet, to overcome this challenge, but this has proven difficult in robotics. In this paper, we ask: what would it take to enable practical data reuse in robotics for end-to-end skill learning? We hypothesize that the key is to use datasets with multiple tasks and multiple domains, such that a new user that wants to train their robot to perform a new task in a new domain can include this dataset in their training process and benefit from cross-task and cross-domain generalization. To evaluate this hypothesis, we collect a large multi-domain and multi-task dataset, with 7,200 demonstrations constituting 71 tasks across 10 environments, and empirically study how this data can improve the learning of new tasks in new environments. We find that jointly training with the proposed dataset and 50 demonstrations of a never-before-seen task in a new domain on average leads to a 2x improvement in success rate compared to using target domain data alone. We also find that data for only a few tasks in a new domain can bridge the domain gap and make it possible for a robot to perform a variety of prior tasks that were only seen in other domains. These results suggest that reusing diverse multi-task and multi-domain datasets, including our open-source dataset, may pave the way for broader robot generalization, eliminating the need to re-collect data for each new robot learning project.

We propose a novel parameterized skill-learning algorithm that aims to learn transferable parameterized skills and synthesize them into a new action space that supports efficient learning in long-horizon tasks. We propose to leverage off-policy Meta-RL combined with a trajectory-centric smoothness term to learn a set of parameterized skills. Our agent can use these learned skills to construct a three-level hierarchical framework that models a Temporally-extended Parameterized Action Markov Decision Process. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed algorithms enable an agent to solve a set of difficult long-horizon (obstacle-course and robot manipulation) tasks.

Multi-task learning by robots poses the challenge of the domain knowledge: complexity of tasks, complexity of the actions required, relationship between tasks for transfer learning. We demonstrate that this domain knowledge can be learned to address the challenges in life-long learning. Specifically, the hierarchy between tasks of various complexities is key to infer a curriculum from simple to composite tasks. We propose a framework for robots to learn sequences of actions of unbounded complexity in order to achieve multiple control tasks of various complexity. Our hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, named SGIM-SAHT, offers a new direction of research, and tries to unify partial implementations on robot arms and mobile robots. We outline our contributions to enable robots to map multiple control tasks to sequences of actions: representations of task dependencies, an intrinsically motivated exploration to learn task hierarchies, and active imitation learning. While learning the hierarchy of tasks, it infers its curriculum by deciding which tasks to explore first, how to transfer knowledge, and when, how and whom to imitate.

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with domain-specific skills is critical for tackling complex tasks. Yet, manual authoring creates a severe scalability bottleneck. Conversely, automated skill generation often yields fragile or fragmented results because it either relies on shallow parametric knowledge or sequentially overfits to non-generalizable trajectory-local lessons. To overcome this, we introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that mirrors how human experts author skills: by holistically analyzing broad execution experience before distilling it into a single, comprehensive guide. Instead of reacting sequentially to individual trajectories, Trace2Skill dispatches a parallel fleet of sub-agents to analyze a diverse pool of executions. It extracts trajectory-specific lessons and hierarchically consolidates them into a unified, conflict-free skill directory via inductive reasoning. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating new ones from scratch. Experiments in challenging domains, such as spreadsheet, VisionQA and math reasoning, show that Trace2Skill significantly improves upon strong baselines, including Anthropic's official xlsx skills. Crucially, this trajectory-grounded evolution does not merely memorize task instances or model-specific quirks: evolved skills transfer across LLM scales and generalize to OOD settings. For example, skills evolved by Qwen3.5-35B on its own trajectories improved a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to 57.65 absolute percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that complex agent experience can be packaged into highly transferable, declarative skills -- requiring no parameter updates, no external retrieval modules, and utilizing open-source models as small as 35B parameters.

Existing policy learning methods predominantly adopt the task-centric paradigm, necessitating the collection of task data in an end-to-end manner. Consequently, the learned policy tends to fail to tackle novel tasks. Moreover, it is hard to localize the errors for a complex task with multiple stages due to end-to-end learning. To address these challenges, we propose RoboMatrix, a skill-centric and hierarchical framework for scalable task planning and execution. We first introduce a novel skill-centric paradigm that extracts the common meta-skills from different complex tasks. This allows for the capture of embodied demonstrations through a kill-centric approach, enabling the completion of open-world tasks by combining learned meta-skills. To fully leverage meta-skills, we further develop a hierarchical framework that decouples complex robot tasks into three interconnected layers: (1) a high-level modular scheduling layer; (2) a middle-level skill layer; and (3) a low-level hardware layer. Experimental results illustrate that our skill-centric and hierarchical framework achieves remarkable generalization performance across novel objects, scenes, tasks, and embodiments. This framework offers a novel solution for robot task planning and execution in open-world scenarios. Our software and hardware are available at https://github.com/WayneMao/RoboMatrix.

Language agents increasingly improve by reusing skills -- structured procedural artifacts distilled from past experience. In particular, domain-level and model-generated skills are especially promising. They offer fast adaptation within a domain by encoding domain-specific recurring procedures, and they scale beyond labor-intensive hand-crafting. However, while extraction methods continue to proliferate, understanding remains limited, with no comprehensive study spanning the full skill lifecycle -- experience generation, skill extraction, and skill consumption -- to ask whether such skills actually work, when they work, and what makes them succeed or fail. To close this gap, we build a utility-grounded evaluation framework that provides systematic experimental results across extractors and target agents, covering five diverse agentic task domains. We find that model-generated skills are beneficial on average but exhibit non-trivial negative transfer, and that neither extractors nor targets behave uniformly. A model can be a strong extractor yet a weak consumer, or vice versa, with skill utility independent of model scale or baseline task strength. To explain these patterns, we then dissect each lifecycle stage in depth, analyzing how experience composition shapes skill quality, what properties characterize useful skills, and how the same skill transfers across different consumers. Finally, we translate these findings into a concrete meta-skill that guides skill extraction toward the features tied to actual utility, which consistently improves skill quality across domains and substantially reduces negative transfer.

Recent works have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to ground natural language to a wide variety of robot skills. However, in practice, learning multi-task, language-conditioned robotic skills typically requires large-scale data collection and frequent human intervention to reset the environment or help correcting the current policies. In this work, we propose a novel approach to efficiently learn general-purpose language-conditioned robot skills from unstructured, offline and reset-free data in the real world by exploiting a self-supervised visuo-lingual affordance model, which requires annotating as little as 1% of the total data with language. We evaluate our method in extensive experiments both in simulated and real-world robotic tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and learning over 25 distinct visuomotor manipulation tasks with a single policy in the real world. We find that when paired with LLMs to break down abstract natural language instructions into subgoals via few-shot prompting, our method is capable of completing long-horizon, multi-tier tasks in the real world, while requiring an order of magnitude less data than previous approaches. Code and videos are available at http://hulc2.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Teaching robots new skills quickly and conveniently is crucial for the broader adoption of robotic systems. In this work, we address the problem of one-shot imitation from a single human demonstration, given by an RGB-D video recording through a two-stage process. In the first stage which is offline, we extract the trajectory of the demonstration. This entails segmenting manipulated objects and determining their relative motion in relation to secondary objects such as containers. Subsequently, in the live online trajectory generation stage, we first re-detect all objects, then we warp the demonstration trajectory to the current scene, and finally, we trace the trajectory with the robot. To complete these steps, our method makes leverages several ancillary models, including those for segmentation, relative object pose estimation, and grasp prediction. We systematically evaluate different combinations of correspondence and re-detection methods to validate our design decision across a diverse range of tasks. Specifically, we collect demonstrations of ten different tasks including pick-and-place tasks as well as articulated object manipulation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations on a real robot system to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of our approach in real-world scenarios. We make the code publicly available at http://ditto.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Teaching robots dexterous manipulation skills, such as tool use, presents a significant challenge. Current approaches can be broadly categorized into two strategies: human teleoperation (for imitation learning) and sim-to-real reinforcement learning. The first approach is difficult as it is hard for humans to produce safe and dexterous motions on a different embodiment without touch feedback. The second RL-based approach struggles with the domain gap and involves highly task-specific reward engineering on complex tasks. Our key insight is that RL is effective at learning low-level motion primitives, while humans excel at providing coarse motion commands for complex, long-horizon tasks. Therefore, the optimal solution might be a combination of both approaches. In this paper, we introduce DexterityGen (DexGen), which uses RL to pretrain large-scale dexterous motion primitives, such as in-hand rotation or translation. We then leverage this learned dataset to train a dexterous foundational controller. In the real world, we use human teleoperation as a prompt to the controller to produce highly dexterous behavior. We evaluate the effectiveness of DexGen in both simulation and real world, demonstrating that it is a general-purpose controller that can realize input dexterous manipulation commands and significantly improves stability by 10-100x measured as duration of holding objects across diverse tasks. Notably, with DexGen we demonstrate unprecedented dexterous skills including diverse object reorientation and dexterous tool use such as pen, syringe, and screwdriver for the first time.

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/.

Agent skills, structured packages of procedural knowledge and executable resources that agents dynamically load at inference time, have become a reliable mechanism for augmenting LLM agents. Yet inference-time skill augmentation is fundamentally limited: retrieval noise introduces irrelevant guidance, injected skill content imposes substantial token overhead, and the model never truly acquires the knowledge it merely follows. We ask whether skills can instead be internalized into model parameters, enabling zero-shot autonomous behavior without any runtime skill retrieval. We introduce SKILL0, an in-context reinforcement learning framework designed for skill internalization. SKILL0 introduces a training-time curriculum that begins with full skill context and progressively withdraws it. Skills are grouped offline by category and rendered with interaction history into a compact visual context, teaching he model tool invocation and multi-turn task completion. A Dynamic Curriculum then evaluates each skill file's on-policy helpfulness, retaining only those from which the current policy still benefits within a linearly decaying budget, until the agent operates in a fully zero-shot setting. Extensive agentic experiments demonstrate that SKILL0 achieves substantial improvements over the standard RL baseline (+9.7\% for ALFWorld and +6.6\% for Search-QA), while maintaining a highly efficient context of fewer than 0.5k tokens per step. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-REAL/SkillZero.

Humanoid robots hold significant potential in accomplishing daily tasks across diverse environments thanks to their flexibility and human-like morphology. Recent works have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control and loco-manipulation leveraging optimal control or reinforcement learning. However, these methods require tedious task-specific tuning for each task to achieve satisfactory behaviors, limiting their versatility and scalability to diverse tasks in daily scenarios. To that end, we introduce SkillBlender, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for versatile humanoid loco-manipulation. SkillBlender first pretrains goal-conditioned task-agnostic primitive skills, and then dynamically blends these skills to accomplish complex loco-manipulation tasks with minimal task-specific reward engineering. We also introduce SkillBench, a parallel, cross-embodiment, and diverse simulated benchmark containing three embodiments, four primitive skills, and eight challenging loco-manipulation tasks, accompanied by a set of scientific evaluation metrics balancing accuracy and feasibility. Extensive simulated experiments show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines, while naturally regularizing behaviors to avoid reward hacking, resulting in more accurate and feasible movements for diverse loco-manipulation tasks in our daily scenarios. Our code and benchmark will be open-sourced to the community to facilitate future research. Project page: https://usc-gvl.github.io/SkillBlender-web/.

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

Pre-training robot policies with a rich set of skills can substantially accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Prior works have defined pre-training tasks via natural language instructions, but doing so requires tedious human annotation of hundreds of thousands of instructions. Thus, we propose SPRINT, a scalable offline policy pre-training approach which substantially reduces the human effort needed for pre-training a diverse set of skills. Our method uses two core ideas to automatically expand a base set of pre-training tasks: instruction relabeling via large language models and cross-trajectory skill chaining through offline reinforcement learning. As a result, SPRINT pre-training equips robots with a much richer repertoire of skills. Experimental results in a household simulator and on a real robot kitchen manipulation task show that SPRINT leads to substantially faster learning of new long-horizon tasks than previous pre-training approaches. Website at https://clvrai.com/sprint.

One of the key capabilities of intelligent agents is the ability to discover useful skills without external supervision. However, the current unsupervised skill discovery methods are often limited to acquiring simple, easy-to-learn skills due to the lack of incentives to discover more complex, challenging behaviors. We introduce a novel unsupervised skill discovery method, Controllability-aware Skill Discovery (CSD), which actively seeks complex, hard-to-control skills without supervision. The key component of CSD is a controllability-aware distance function, which assigns larger values to state transitions that are harder to achieve with the current skills. Combined with distance-maximizing skill discovery, CSD progressively learns more challenging skills over the course of training as our jointly trained distance function reduces rewards for easy-to-achieve skills. Our experimental results in six robotic manipulation and locomotion environments demonstrate that CSD can discover diverse complex skills including object manipulation and locomotion skills with no supervision, significantly outperforming prior unsupervised skill discovery methods. Videos and code are available at https://seohong.me/projects/csd/

Current AI agents can flexibly invoke tools and execute complex tasks, yet their long-term advancement is hindered by the lack of systematic accumulation and transfer of skills. Without a unified mechanism for skill consolidation, agents frequently ``reinvent the wheel'', rediscovering solutions in isolated contexts without leveraging prior strategies. To overcome this limitation, we introduce SkillNet, an open infrastructure designed to create, evaluate, and organize AI skills at scale. SkillNet structures skills within a unified ontology that supports creating skills from heterogeneous sources, establishing rich relational connections, and performing multi-dimensional evaluation across Safety, Completeness, Executability, Maintainability, and Cost-awareness. Our infrastructure integrates a repository of over 200,000 skills, an interactive platform, and a versatile Python toolkit. Experimental evaluations on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld demonstrate that SkillNet significantly enhances agent performance, improving average rewards by 40% and reducing execution steps by 30% across multiple backbone models. By formalizing skills as evolving, composable assets, SkillNet provides a robust foundation for agents to move from transient experience to durable mastery.

While skill-centric approaches leverage foundation models to enhance generalization in compositional tasks, they often rely on fixed skill libraries, limiting adaptability to new tasks without manual intervention. To address this, we propose Uni-Skill, a Unified Skill-centric framework that supports skill-aware planning and facilitates automatic skill evolution. Unlike prior methods that restrict planning to predefined skills, Uni-Skill requests for new skill implementations when existing ones are insufficient, ensuring adaptable planning with self-augmented skill library. To support automatic implementation of diverse skills requested by the planning module, we construct SkillFolder, a VerbNet-inspired repository derived from large-scale unstructured robotic videos. SkillFolder introduces a hierarchical skill taxonomy that captures diverse skill descriptions at multiple levels of abstraction. By populating this taxonomy with large-scale, automatically annotated demonstrations, Uni-Skill shifts the paradigm of skill acquisition from inefficient manual annotation to efficient offline structural retrieval. Retrieved examples provide semantic supervision over behavior patterns and fine-grained references for spatial trajectories, enabling few-shot skill inference without deployment-time demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings verify the state-of-the-art performance of Uni-Skill over existing VLM-based skill-centric approaches, highlighting its advanced reasoning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization across a wide range of novel tasks.

Learning from demonstration is a powerful method for teaching robots new skills, and having more demonstration data often improves policy learning. However, the high cost of collecting demonstration data is a significant bottleneck. Videos, as a rich data source, contain knowledge of behaviors, physics, and semantics, but extracting control-specific information from them is challenging due to the lack of action labels. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, Any-point Trajectory Modeling (ATM), that utilizes video demonstrations by pre-training a trajectory model to predict future trajectories of arbitrary points within a video frame. Once trained, these trajectories provide detailed control guidance, enabling the learning of robust visuomotor policies with minimal action-labeled data. Across over 130 language-conditioned tasks we evaluated in both simulation and the real world, ATM outperforms strong video pre-training baselines by 80% on average. Furthermore, we show effective transfer learning of manipulation skills from human videos and videos from a different robot morphology. Visualizations and code are available at: https://xingyu-lin.github.io/atm.

Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

Agent skills, which consist of reusable strategies that guide agent reasoning and action, have shown strong potential for improving model capability at inference time. However, current skill construction methods treat the problem as one-shot extraction, overlooking a fundamental tension: a skill tailored to the specific task fails to transfer, while the abstracted skill often provides insufficient guidance. We attribute this fragility to the absence of explicit mechanisms for skill specification and generalization. To address this gap, we introduce SkillComposer, a framework that decomposes skill construction into three learnable operations: create, improve, and merge. Trained via systematic rejection sampling recipe, SkillComposer enables language models to self-evolve skills at inference time and supports three deployment modes: offline for building generalized libraries, online for task-specific refinement, and hybrid for combining both. Comprehensive experiments on τ^2-Bench, LiveCodeBench v6, and AppWorld show that SkillComposer consistently outperforms baselines. Our SkillComposer-4B improves a 27B executor by up to +4.5 on agent tasks and +3.4 on code tasks, while generalizing across domains and task types unseen during training. Analysis reveals that merge and improve address orthogonal quality dimensions and that skill composition is a transferable meta-ability, providing a practical recipe for skill-augmented inference.

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

Skills are a promising way to improve LLM agent capabilities without retraining, while keeping the added procedure reusable and controllable. However, high-quality skills are still largely written by hand. We introduce SkillGen, a multi-agent framework that synthesizes a single auditable skill from trajectories generated by a base agent. The output is a human-readable artifact that can be inspected before use. Rather than merely summarizing trajectories, SkillGen leverages contrastive induction over both successful and failed trajectories to identify reusable success patterns, recurring failure modes, and behaviors that appear in nearby successes but are missing from failures. SkillGen then generates candidate skills and iteratively refines the skill. A key novelty in SkillGen is that we model agent skills as interventions to empirically verify the net effect of skills on the overall performance. Specifically, we compare outcomes on the same instances with and without the skill, so that we account for both repairs (cases where the skill fixes a baseline failure) and regressions (cases where the skill breaks a baseline success). Across a broad range of agents and datasets, SkillGen consistently improves held-out performance, outperforms existing skill-generation baselines, and produces skills that transfer across models.

Equipping large language models with explicit skills has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. Agent skills can be inherently divided into general skills for broad cognitive transfer and task-specific skills for dynamic execution. However, existing skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically force a rigid choice between full externalization, which incurs prohibitive context overhead, and full internalization, which risks overfitting and knowledge conflicts. To address this dilemma, we propose Skill0.5, a novel agentic RL framework that explicitly differentiates skill treatments by combining general skill internalization with task-specific skill utilization. Driven by a dynamic, difficulty-aware router, Skill0.5 streams tasks into distinct mastery tiers to apply tailored optimization strategies: it internalizes general skills via privileged distillation to build a cognitive foundation for hard tasks, while using diagnostic probing on easy tasks to penalize shortcuts and enforce specific skill utilization. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that Skill0.5 outperforms both memory-based and skill-based RL baselines, yielding performance improvements across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

Learning from human video demonstrations remains challenging due to noisy hand-object interactions, unseen objects with partial observation, and cross-embodiment discrepancy. To address these challenges, we present HOWTransfer (Hand-Object Open-World Transfer), a hand-centric framework that distills human demonstrations into contact-aware, taxonomy-informed, and diverse robotic trajectories. Instead of relying on object-specific descriptions, vision-language queries, or explicit object-state tracking, HOWTransfer recovers temporally consistent 3D hand motion and localizes temporal contact intervals by reasoning over observed hand-object interaction cues. The localized contact onsets are then used to retarget human grasp intent into multi-modal parallel-jaw grasp hypotheses, which are propagated along the recovered wrist trajectory to generate robot-executable motions. Finally, a trajectory editing stage refines contact alignment and produces diverse executable variants from a single demonstration. Experiments across diverse manipulation tasks show that HOWTransfer enables accurate contact localization and high-quality robot motion retargeting with 86% success, which is preferred over teleoperated trajectories in a blinded preference study.

Robot manipulation has seen tremendous progress in recent years, with imitation learning policies enabling successful performance of dexterous and hard-to-model tasks. Concurrently, scaling data and model size has led to the development of capable language and vision foundation models, motivating large-scale efforts to create general-purpose robot foundation models. While these models have garnered significant enthusiasm and investment, meaningful evaluation of real-world performance remains a challenge, limiting both the pace of development and inhibiting a nuanced understanding of current capabilities. In this paper, we rigorously evaluate multitask robot manipulation policies, referred to as Large Behavior Models (LBMs), by extending the Diffusion Policy paradigm across a corpus of simulated and real-world robot data. We propose and validate an evaluation pipeline to rigorously analyze the capabilities of these models with statistical confidence. We compare against single-task baselines through blind, randomized trials in a controlled setting, using both simulation and real-world experiments. We find that multi-task pretraining makes the policies more successful and robust, and enables teaching complex new tasks more quickly, using a fraction of the data when compared to single-task baselines. Moreover, performance predictably increases as pretraining scale and diversity grows. Project page: https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/lbm1/

As the capability frontier of autonomous agents continues to expand, they are increasingly able to complete specialized tasks through plug-and-play external skills. Yet current benchmarks mostly test whether models can use provided skills, leaving open whether they can discover skills from experience, repair them after failure, and maintain a coherent library over time. We introduce SkillFlow, a benchmark of 166 tasks across 20 families in which task construction within each family follows a Domain-Agnostic Execution Flow (DAEF) that defines an agent workflow framework, allowing these tasks to share a consistent workflow. Agents are evaluated under an Agentic Lifelong Learning protocol in which they begin without skills, solve tasks sequentially within each family, externalize lessons through trajectory- and rubric-driven skill patches, and carry the updated library forward. Experiments reveal a substantial capability gap. For Claude Opus 4.6, lifelong skill evolution improves task success from 62.65% to 71.08% (+8.43 points). However, high skill usage does not necessarily imply high utility: Kimi K2.5 gains only +0.60 points despite 66.87% skill usage, while Qwen-Coder-Next reaches only a 44.58% task completion rate and still regresses relative to the vanilla setting. SkillFlow contributes a structured testbed for this direction and an in-depth empirical analysis of skill discovery, patching, transfer, and their failure modes under lifelong evaluation.

Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates and measuring empirical utility, it systematically retains the optimal skill version. Evaluated across three benchmarks and five LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills exhibit strong cross-model transferability, capturing generalized procedural knowledge over model-specific artifacts.

Generative skill acquisition enables embodied agents to actively learn a scalable and evolving repertoire of control skills, crucial for the advancement of large decision models. While prior approaches often rely on supervision signals from generalist agents (e.g., LLMs), their effectiveness in complex 3D environments remains unclear; exhaustive evaluation incurs substantial computational costs, significantly hindering the efficiency of skill learning. Inspired by recent successes in verification models for mathematical reasoning, we propose VERGSA (Verifying Embodied Reasoning in Generative Skill Acquisition), a framework that systematically integrates real-time verification principles into embodied skill learning. VERGSA establishes 1) a seamless extension from verification of mathematical reasoning into embodied learning by dynamically incorporating contextually relevant tasks into prompts and defining success metrics for both subtasks and overall tasks, and 2) an automated, scalable reward labeling scheme that synthesizes dense reward signals by iteratively finalizing the contribution of scene configuration and subtask learning to overall skill acquisition. To the best of our knowledge, this approach constitutes the first comprehensive training dataset for verification-driven generative skill acquisition, eliminating arduous manual reward engineering. Experiments validate the efficacy of our approach: 1) the exemplar task pool improves the average task success rates by 21%, 2) our verification model boosts success rates by 24% for novel tasks and 36% for encountered tasks, and 3) outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in verification quality.

When assessing the quality of coding agents, predominant benchmarks focus on solving single issues on GitHub, such as SWE-Bench. In contrast, in real use, these agents solve more various and complex tasks that involve other skills such as exploring codebases, testing software, and designing architecture. In this paper, we first characterize some transferable skills that are shared across diverse tasks by decomposing trajectories into fine-grained components, and derive a set of principles for designing auxiliary training tasks to teach language models these skills. Guided by these principles, we propose a training environment, Hybrid-Gym, consisting of a set of scalable synthetic tasks, such as function localization and dependency search. Experiments show that agents trained on our synthetic tasks effectively generalize to diverse real-world tasks that are not present in training, improving a base model by 25.4% absolute gain on SWE-Bench Verified, 7.9% on SWT-Bench Verified, and 5.1% on Commit-0 Lite. Hybrid-Gym also complements datasets built for the downstream tasks (e.g., improving SWE-Play by 4.9% on SWT-Bench Verified). Code available at: https://github.com/yiqingxyq/Hybrid-Gym.

Lifelong learning offers a promising paradigm of building a generalist agent that learns and adapts over its lifespan. Unlike traditional lifelong learning problems in image and text domains, which primarily involve the transfer of declarative knowledge of entities and concepts, lifelong learning in decision-making (LLDM) also necessitates the transfer of procedural knowledge, such as actions and behaviors. To advance research in LLDM, we introduce LIBERO, a novel benchmark of lifelong learning for robot manipulation. Specifically, LIBERO highlights five key research topics in LLDM: 1) how to efficiently transfer declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the mixture of both; 2) how to design effective policy architectures and 3) effective algorithms for LLDM; 4) the robustness of a lifelong learner with respect to task ordering; and 5) the effect of model pretraining for LLDM. We develop an extendible procedural generation pipeline that can in principle generate infinitely many tasks. For benchmarking purpose, we create four task suites (130 tasks in total) that we use to investigate the above-mentioned research topics. To support sample-efficient learning, we provide high-quality human-teleoperated demonstration data for all tasks. Our extensive experiments present several insightful or even unexpected discoveries: sequential finetuning outperforms existing lifelong learning methods in forward transfer, no single visual encoder architecture excels at all types of knowledge transfer, and naive supervised pretraining can hinder agents' performance in the subsequent LLDM. Check the website at https://libero-project.github.io for the code and the datasets.

Large language model (LLM) agents such as OpenClaw rely on reusable skills to perform complex tasks, yet these skills remain largely static after deployment. As a result, similar workflows, tool usage patterns, and failure modes are repeatedly rediscovered across users, preventing the system from improving with experience. While interactions from different users provide complementary signals about when a skill works or fails, existing systems lack a mechanism to convert such heterogeneous experiences into reliable skill updates. To address these issues, we present SkillClaw, a framework for collective skill evolution in multi-user agent ecosystems, which treats cross-user and over-time interactions as the primary signal for improving skills. SkillClaw continuously aggregates trajectories generated during use and processes them with an autonomous evolver, which identifies recurring behavioral patterns and translates them into updates to the skill set by refining existing skills or extending them with new capabilities. The resulting skills are maintained in a shared repository and synchronized across users, allowing improvements discovered in one context to propagate system-wide while requiring no additional effort from users. By integrating multi-user experience into ongoing skill updates, SkillClaw enables cross-user knowledge transfer and cumulative capability improvement, and experiments on WildClawBench show that limited interaction and feedback, it significantly improves the performance of Qwen3-Max in real-world agent scenarios.

Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack real-world experience, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given embodiment. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment. We propose to provide real-world grounding by means of pretrained skills, which are used to constrain the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate. The robot can act as the language model's "hands and eyes," while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task. We show how low-level skills can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally-extended instructions, while value functions associated with these skills provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show the need for real-world grounding and that this approach is capable of completing long-horizon, abstract, natural language instructions on a mobile manipulator. The project's website and the video can be found at https://say-can.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to act like planners that can decompose high-level instructions into a sequence of executable instructions. However, current LLM-based planners are only able to operate with a fixed set of skills. We overcome this critical limitation and present a method for using LLM-based planners to query new skills and teach robots these skills in a data and time-efficient manner for rigid object manipulation. Our system can re-use newly acquired skills for future tasks, demonstrating the potential of open world and lifelong learning. We evaluate the proposed framework on multiple tasks in simulation and the real world. Videos are available at: https://sites.google.com/mit.edu/halp-robot-learning.

Assistive robotics and particularly robot coaches may be very helpful for rehabilitation healthcare. In this context, we propose a method based on Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GP-LVM) to transfer knowledge between a physiotherapist, a robot coach and a patient. Our model is able to map visual human body features to robot data in order to facilitate the robot learning and imitation. In addition , we propose to extend the model to adapt robots' understanding to patient's physical limitations during the assessment of rehabilitation exercises. Experimental evaluation demonstrates promising results for both robot imitation and model adaptation according to the patients' limitations.

We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Imitation learning has proven to be highly effective in teaching robots dexterous manipulation skills. However, it typically relies on large amounts of human demonstration data, which limits its scalability and applicability in dynamic, real-world environments. One key challenge in this context is object generalization, where a robot trained to perform a task with one object, such as "hand over the apple," struggles to transfer its skills to a semantically similar but visually different object, such as "hand over the peach." This gap in generalization to new objects beyond those in the same category has yet to be adequately addressed in previous work on end-to-end visuomotor policy learning. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach for achieving object generalization through Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, referred to as ObjectVLA. Our model enables robots to generalize learned skills to novel objects without requiring explicit human demonstrations for each new target object. By leveraging vision-language pair data, our method provides a lightweight and scalable way to inject knowledge about the target object, establishing an implicit link between the object and the desired action. We evaluate ObjectVLA on a real robotic platform, demonstrating its ability to generalize across 100 novel objects with a 64\% success rate in selecting objects not seen during training. Furthermore, we propose a more accessible method for enhancing object generalization in VLA models, using a smartphone to capture a few images and fine-tune the pre-trained model. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enabling object-level generalization and reducing the need for extensive human demonstrations, paving the way for more flexible and scalable robotic learning systems.

Physical intelligence holds immense promise for advancing embodied intelligence, enabling robots to acquire complex behaviors from demonstrations. However, achieving generalization and transfer across diverse robotic platforms and environments requires careful design of model architectures, training strategies, and data diversity. Meanwhile existing systems often struggle with scalability, adaptability to heterogeneous hardware, and objective evaluation in real-world settings. We present a generalized end-to-end robotic learning framework designed to bridge this gap. Our framework introduces a unified architecture that supports cross-platform adaptability, enabling seamless deployment across industrial-grade robots, collaborative arms, and novel embodiments without task-specific modifications. By integrating multi-task learning with streamlined network designs, it achieves more robust performance than conventional approaches, while maintaining compatibility with varying sensor configurations and action spaces. We validate our framework through extensive experiments on seven manipulation tasks. Notably, Diffusion-based models trained in our framework demonstrated superior performance and generalizability compared to the LeRobot framework, achieving performance improvements across diverse robotic platforms and environmental conditions.

The growing interest in language-conditioned robot manipulation aims to develop robots capable of understanding and executing complex tasks, with the objective of enabling robots to interpret language commands and manipulate objects accordingly. While language-conditioned approaches demonstrate impressive capabilities for addressing tasks in familiar environments, they encounter limitations in adapting to unfamiliar environment settings. In this study, we propose a general-purpose, language-conditioned approach that combines base skill priors and imitation learning under unstructured data to enhance the algorithm's generalization in adapting to unfamiliar environments. We assess our model's performance in both simulated and real-world environments using a zero-shot setting. In the simulated environment, the proposed approach surpasses previously reported scores for CALVIN benchmark, especially in the challenging Zero-Shot Multi-Environment setting. The average completed task length, indicating the average number of tasks the agent can continuously complete, improves more than 2.5 times compared to the state-of-the-art method HULC. In addition, we conduct a zero-shot evaluation of our policy in a real-world setting, following training exclusively in simulated environments without additional specific adaptations. In this evaluation, we set up ten tasks and achieved an average 30% improvement in our approach compared to the current state-of-the-art approach, demonstrating a high generalization capability in both simulated environments and the real world. For further details, including access to our code and videos, please refer to https://hk-zh.github.io/spil/

Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a powerful approach to training control policies for physical systems, such as robots, by combining end-to-end learning with transfer of semantic knowledge from web-scale vision-language model (VLM) training. However, the constraints of real-time control are often at odds with the design of VLMs: the most powerful VLMs have tens or hundreds of billions of parameters, presenting an obstacle to real-time inference, and operate on discrete tokens rather than the continuous-valued outputs that are required for controlling robots. To address this challenge, recent VLA models have used specialized modules for efficient continuous control, such as action experts or continuous output heads, which typically require adding new untrained parameters to the pretrained VLM backbone. While these modules improve real-time and control capabilities, it remains an open question whether they preserve or degrade the semantic knowledge contained in the pretrained VLM, and what effect they have on the VLA training dynamics. In this paper, we study this question in the context of VLAs that include a continuous diffusion or flow matching action expert, showing that naively including such experts significantly harms both training speed and knowledge transfer. We provide an extensive analysis of various design choices, their impact on performance and knowledge transfer, and propose a technique for insulating the VLM backbone during VLA training that mitigates this issue. Videos are available at https://pi.website/research/knowledge_insulation.

Agentic large language models often rely on skills, reusable natural language procedures that guide planning, action, and tool use. In practice, skills are typically improved through prompt engineering or by aligning the task LLM itself, which is costly, model-specific, and often infeasible for closed-source models. Skill optimization is not a one-step problem but a recurrent process with two coupled levels of credit assignment: a useful skill must improve rollout quality under current conditioning, while a useful revision must turn observed outcomes into a better skill for the next round. We propose Skill-R1, a reinforcement learning framework for instance-level recurrent skill optimization from verifiable rewards. Rather than updating the task LLM, Skill-R1 trains a lightweight skill generator that conditions on the task context, prior rollouts, and their verified outcomes to produce skills that steer a frozen task LLM. This preserves black-box compatibility with both open- and closed-source models while making adaptation substantially cheaper than model-level updates. Skill-R1 proceeds over multiple generations: at each step, the current skill induces rollouts whose verified outcomes are fed back to produce the next revision. To optimize this recurrent process, we introduce a bi-level group-relative policy optimization objective combining intra-generation and inter-generation advantages. The intra-generation term compares rollouts under shared skill conditioning, while the inter-generation term rewards revisions that improve behavior across successive generations. Together, these provide a principled objective for directional skill evolution rather than one-shot self-refinement. Empirically, Skill-R1 achieves consistent gains over no-skill baselines and standard GRPO across benchmarks with verifiable rewards, with particularly strong improvements on complex, multi-step tasks.

Skills are becoming a reusable operational layer for LLM agents, encoding SOPs, domain rules, tool workflows, scripts, and validation routines. In realistic skill repositories, overlapping skills make reliable skill-use difficult. Final verifier success is too coarse for both evaluation and training, since an agent may pass through trial and error while selecting distractor skills, skipping required steps, composing workflows incorrectly or omitting final checks. We introduce SkillCoach, a self-evolving rubric framework for evaluating and enhancing agentic skill-use. SkillCoach derives skill-grounded process rubrics from real rollouts and evaluates trajectories along four dimensions: skill selection, skill following, skill composition, and skill-grounded reflection. It keeps the external verifier as a separate outcome signal, allowing process quality to be distinguished from accidental task success. The evolved rubrics further serve as process supervision for selecting high-quality training trajectories. Experiments show that evolved rubrics substantially improve evaluation quality, expose failures hidden by final accuracy, and provide stronger supervision signals than outcome-only filtering for enhancing agentic skill-use.

Replicating human--level dexterity remains a fundamental robotics challenge, requiring integrated solutions from mechatronic design to the control of high degree--of--freedom (DoF) robotic hands. While imitation learning shows promise in transferring human dexterity to robots, the efficacy of trained policies relies on the quality of human demonstration data. We bridge this gap with a hand--arm teleoperation system featuring: (1) a 20--DoF linkage--driven anthropomorphic robotic hand for biomimetic dexterity, and (2) an optimization--based motion retargeting for real--time, high--fidelity reproduction of intricate human hand motions and seamless hand--arm coordination. We validate the system via extensive empirical evaluations, including dexterous in-hand manipulation tasks and a long--horizon task requiring the organization of a cluttered makeup table randomly populated with nine objects. Experimental results demonstrate its intuitive teleoperation interface with real--time control and the ability to generate high--quality demonstration data. Please refer to the accompanying video for further details.

Why do pretrained diffusion or flow-matching policies fail when the same task is performed near an obstacle, on a shifted support surface, or amid mild clutter? Such failures rarely reflect missing motor skills; instead, they expose a limitation of imitation learning under train-test shifts, where action generation is tightly coupled to training-specific spatial configurations and task specifications. Retraining or fine-tuning to address these failures is costly and conceptually misaligned, as the required behaviors already exist but cannot be selectively adapted at test time. We propose Vision-Language Steering (VLS), a training-free framework for inference-time adaptation of frozen generative robot policies. VLS treats adaptation as an inference-time control problem, steering the sampling process of a pretrained diffusion or flow-matching policy in response to out-of-distribution observation-language inputs without modifying policy parameters. By leveraging vision-language models to synthesize trajectory-differentiable reward functions, VLS guides denoising toward action trajectories that satisfy test-time spatial and task requirements. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, VLS consistently outperforms prior steering methods, achieving a 31% improvement on CALVIN and a 13% gain on LIBERO-PRO. Real-world deployment on a Franka robot further demonstrates robust inference-time adaptation under test-time spatial and semantic shifts. Project page: https://vision-language-steering.github.io/webpage/

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed in dynamic interactive environments, creating a growing need for continual skill learning during interaction. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning reusable skills from successful trajectories. However, these skill learning methods largely assume static and safe environments, overlooking risks from adversarial interactions (e.g., prompt injections) and environmental dynamics (e.g., pop-ups). In dynamic settings, such assumptions can lead to risky skill learning and brittle execution, undermining the reliability of CUAs. This raises the question: how can CUAs learn and use skills safely in dynamic environments? To address this problem, we propose SkillHarness, a framework for safe skill harnessing in dynamic environments. SkillHarness moves beyond static skill abstractions by modeling skill learning and utilization as a safety-constrained interaction process. Specifically, we introduce the skill boundary that leverages multi-source supervision signals to identify safe skills from interaction trajectories, and construct self-improving safety constraints throughout the skill lifecycle. In addition, SkillHarness introduces selective skill reuse, where tasks are guided to decompose according to context and completed through the selective activation of skill subsets. Our experiments demonstrate that SkillHarness significantly reduces the unsafe rate of learned skills by 57.1% and consistently improves execution stability under dynamic environmental changes, outperforming existing baselines.

Humans excel at reusing prior knowledge to address new challenges and developing skills while solving problems. This paradigm becomes increasingly popular in the development of autonomous agents, as it develops systems that can self-evolve in response to new challenges like human beings. However, previous methods suffer from limited training efficiency when expanding new skills and fail to fully leverage prior knowledge to facilitate new task learning. In this paper, we propose Parametric Skill Expansion and Composition (PSEC), a new framework designed to iteratively evolve the agents' capabilities and efficiently address new challenges by maintaining a manageable skill library. This library can progressively integrate skill primitives as plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules in parameter-efficient finetuning, facilitating efficient and flexible skill expansion. This structure also enables the direct skill compositions in parameter space by merging LoRA modules that encode different skills, leveraging shared information across skills to effectively program new skills. Based on this, we propose a context-aware module to dynamically activate different skills to collaboratively handle new tasks. Empowering diverse applications including multi-objective composition, dynamics shift, and continual policy shift, the results on D4RL, DSRL benchmarks, and the DeepMind Control Suite show that PSEC exhibits superior capacity to leverage prior knowledge to efficiently tackle new challenges, as well as expand its skill libraries to evolve the capabilities. Project website: https://ltlhuuu.github.io/PSEC/.

State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view towards generalizing to novel task configurations. The former suffers from poor data efficiency while the latter is difficult when test tasks are out-of-distribution. Agents that can effectively transfer their knowledge about the world pose a potential solution to these issues. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning in the context of model-based agents. Specifically, we aim to understand when exactly environment models have an advantage and why. We find that a model-based approach outperforms controlled model-free baselines for transfer learning. Through ablations, we show that both the policy and dynamics model learnt through exploration matter for successful transfer. We demonstrate our results across three domains which vary in their requirements for transfer: in-distribution procedural (Crafter), in-distribution identical (RoboDesk), and out-of-distribution (Meta-World). Our results show that intrinsic exploration combined with environment models present a viable direction towards agents that are self-supervised and able to generalize to novel reward functions.

Imitation learning for robotic manipulation faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality robot demonstration data. Recent robotic foundation models often pre-train on cross-embodiment robot datasets to increase data scale, while they face significant limitations as the diverse morphologies and action spaces across different robot embodiments make unified training challenging. In this paper, we present H-RDT (Human to Robotics Diffusion Transformer), a novel approach that leverages human manipulation data to enhance robot manipulation capabilities. Our key insight is that large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos with paired 3D hand pose annotations provide rich behavioral priors that capture natural manipulation strategies and can benefit robotic policy learning. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: (1) pre-training on large-scale egocentric human manipulation data, and (2) cross-embodiment fine-tuning on robot-specific data with modular action encoders and decoders. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture with 2B parameters, H-RDT uses flow matching to model complex action distributions. Extensive evaluations encompassing both simulation and real-world experiments, single-task and multitask scenarios, as well as few-shot learning and robustness assessments, demonstrate that H-RDT outperforms training from scratch and existing state-of-the-art methods, including Pi0 and RDT, achieving significant improvements of 13.9% and 40.5% over training from scratch in simulation and real-world experiments, respectively. The results validate our core hypothesis that human manipulation data can serve as a powerful foundation for learning bimanual robotic manipulation policies.

Robot learning of manipulation skills is hindered by the scarcity of diverse, unbiased datasets. While curated datasets can help, challenges remain in generalizability and real-world transfer. Meanwhile, large-scale "in-the-wild" video datasets have driven progress in computer vision through self-supervised techniques. Translating this to robotics, recent works have explored learning manipulation skills by passively watching abundant videos sourced online. Showing promising results, such video-based learning paradigms provide scalable supervision while reducing dataset bias. This survey reviews foundations such as video feature representation learning techniques, object affordance understanding, 3D hand/body modeling, and large-scale robot resources, as well as emerging techniques for acquiring robot manipulation skills from uncontrolled video demonstrations. We discuss how learning only from observing large-scale human videos can enhance generalization and sample efficiency for robotic manipulation. The survey summarizes video-based learning approaches, analyses their benefits over standard datasets, survey metrics, and benchmarks, and discusses open challenges and future directions in this nascent domain at the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing, and robot learning.

Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data, rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts. Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like. We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next, we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics. Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage readers to view our ``living`` GitHub repository of resources, including papers reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for developing foundation models for robotics.

We introduce Skills-Coach, a novel automated framework designed to significantly enhance the self-evolution of skills within Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. Addressing the current fragmentation of the skill ecosystem, Skills-Coach explores the boundaries of skill capabilities, thereby facilitating the comprehensive competency coverage essential for intelligent applications. The framework comprises four core modules: a Diverse Task Generation Module that systematically creates a comprehensive test suite for various skills; a Lightweight Optimization Module dedicated to optimizing skill prompts and their corresponding code; a Comparative Execution Module facilitating the execution and evaluation of both original and optimized skills; and a Traceable Evaluation Module, which rigorously evaluates performance against specified criteria. Skills-Coach offers flexible execution options through its virtual and real modes. To validate its efficacy, we introduce Skill-X, a comprehensive benchmark dataset consisting of 48 diverse skills. Experimental results demonstrate that Skills-Coach achieves significant performance improvements in skill capability across a wide range of categories, highlighting its potential to advance the development of more robust and adaptable LLM-based agents.

We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple and scalable method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks in natural environments by imitating a single human demonstration. Our approach is based on two key insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Our approach avoids the need for online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, enabling robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal manual effort. Experiments in both simulation and real-world settings show that DemoDiffusion outperforms both the base policy and the retargeted trajectory, enabling the robot to succeed even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

Large language model (LLM) powered AI agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous problem-solving, yet they continue to struggle with complex, multi-step real-world tasks that demand domain-specific procedural knowledge. Reusable agent skills, which encapsulate successful problem-solving strategies, offer a natural remedy by enabling agents to build on prior experience. However, curating such skills has largely remained a manual endeavor, requiring human experts to distill rich domain knowledge into actionable guidelines. In this work, we present Multi-agent INduction and Deduction for Skills (MIND-Skill), a framework that automatically induces generalizable skills from successful trajectories with robust quality guarantees. MIND-Skill consists of an induction agent which is tasked to abstract reusable skills from successful trajectories, and a deduction agent which aims to reconstruct trajectories by following the induced skills. To guarantee the quality of the generated skills, we introduce a reconstruction loss that compares input and reconstructed trajectories, an outcome loss that enforces the correctness of the reconstructed trajectories, and a rubric loss that assesses the documentation quality and regularizes the abstraction level of the generated skills according to predefined criteria. These textual losses are jointly optimized with TextGrad, and the resulting skills are evaluated on held-out tasks unseen during optimization. Experiments on AppWorld and BFCL-v3 show that MIND-Skill consistently outperforms concurrent skill generation methods.

Robot learning is at an inflection point, driven by rapid advancements in machine learning and the growing availability of large-scale robotics data. This shift from classical, model-based methods to data-driven, learning-based paradigms is unlocking unprecedented capabilities in autonomous systems. This tutorial navigates the landscape of modern robot learning, charting a course from the foundational principles of Reinforcement Learning and Behavioral Cloning to generalist, language-conditioned models capable of operating across diverse tasks and even robot embodiments. This work is intended as a guide for researchers and practitioners, and our goal is to equip the reader with the conceptual understanding and practical tools necessary to contribute to developments in robot learning, with ready-to-use examples implemented in lerobot.

Cross-embodiment imitation learning enables policies trained on specific embodiments to transfer across different robots, unlocking the potential for large-scale imitation learning that is both cost-effective and highly reusable. This paper presents LEGATO, a cross-embodiment imitation learning framework for visuomotor skill transfer across varied kinematic morphologies. We introduce a handheld gripper that unifies action and observation spaces, allowing tasks to be defined consistently across robots. We train visuomotor policies on task demonstrations using this gripper through imitation learning, applying transformation to a motion-invariant space for computing the training loss. Gripper motions generated by the policies are retargeted into high-degree-of-freedom whole-body motions using inverse kinematics for deployment across diverse embodiments. Our evaluations in simulation and real-robot experiments highlight the framework's effectiveness in learning and transferring visuomotor skills across various robots. More information can be found on the project page: https://ut-hcrl.github.io/LEGATO.

The problem of generalization in learning from demonstration (LfD) has received considerable attention over the years, particularly within the context of movement primitives, where a number of approaches have emerged. Recently, two important approaches have gained recognition. While one leverages via-points to adapt skills locally by modulating demonstrated trajectories, another relies on so-called task-parameterized models that encode movements with respect to different coordinate systems, using a product of probabilities for generalization. While the former are well-suited to precise, local modulations, the latter aim at generalizing over large regions of the workspace and often involve multiple objects. Addressing the quality of generalization by leveraging both approaches simultaneously has received little attention. In this work, we propose an interactive imitation learning framework that simultaneously leverages local and global modulations of trajectory distributions. Building on the kernelized movement primitives (KMP) framework, we introduce novel mechanisms for skill modulation from direct human corrective feedback. Our approach particularly exploits the concept of via-points to incrementally and interactively 1) improve the model accuracy locally, 2) add new objects to the task during execution and 3) extend the skill into regions where demonstrations were not provided. We evaluate our method on a bearing ring-loading task using a torque-controlled, 7-DoF, DLR SARA robot.

Skill-based prompting has become a practical mechanism for improving large language model (LLM) agents, yet existing skill acquisition methods often treat skills as experience summaries, memory entries, or direct summaries of successful demonstrations. This creates a mismatch for weaker student agents: when a student fails because it lacks task knowledge or operational strategy, its failed trajectory may not contain enough evidence to infer the missing behavior, while the teacher trajectory may be too implicit to be internalized as reusable guidance. We propose SKILL-KD, a contrastive skill distillation framework that treats skills as an explicit distillation medium between agents of different capabilities. Given a student failure and the teacher trajectory on the same task, SKILL-KD distills their actionable discrepancy into a textual skill patch, evaluates the patch by re-running the student, and iteratively refines the patch when the student still fails. To prevent repeated local updates from causing skill drift, SKILL-KD further maintains trace-linked edit histories and performs Drift-Aware Skill Consolidation, deciding whether each patch should add a new rule, delete or modify an existing rule, or be skipped. Across five agent benchmarks and two student settings, SKILL-KD consistently improves frozen student agents over fixed-model adaptation baselines.

The transition from monolithic language models to modular, skill-equipped agents marks a defining shift in how large language models (LLMs) are deployed in practice. Rather than encoding all procedural knowledge within model weights, agent skills -- composable packages of instructions, code, and resources that agents load on demand -- enable dynamic capability extension without retraining. It is formalized in a paradigm of progressive disclosure, portable skill definitions, and integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This survey provides a comprehensive treatment of the agent skills landscape, as it has rapidly evolved during the last few months. We organize the field along four axes: (i) architectural foundations, examining the SKILL.md specification, progressive context loading, and the complementary roles of skills and MCP; (ii) skill acquisition, covering reinforcement learning with skill libraries, autonomous skill discovery (SEAgent), and compositional skill synthesis; (iii) deployment at scale, including the computer-use agent (CUA) stack, GUI grounding advances, and benchmark progress on OSWorld and SWE-bench; and (iv) security, where recent empirical analyses reveal that 26.1% of community-contributed skills contain vulnerabilities, motivating our proposed Skill Trust and Lifecycle Governance Framework -- a four-tier, gate-based permission model that maps skill provenance to graduated deployment capabilities. We identify seven open challenges -- from cross-platform skill portability to capability-based permission models -- and propose a research agenda for realizing trustworthy, self-improving skill ecosystems. Unlike prior surveys that broadly cover LLM agents or tool use, this work focuses specifically on the emerging skill abstraction layer and its implications for the next generation of agentic systems. Project repo: https://github.com/scienceaix/agentskills

Robot learning holds tremendous promise to unlock the full potential of flexible, general, and dexterous robot systems, as well as to address some of the deepest questions in artificial intelligence. However, bringing robot learning to the level of generality required for effective real-world systems faces major obstacles in terms of data, generalization, and robustness. In this paper, we discuss how generalist robot policies (i.e., robot foundation models) can address these challenges, and how we can design effective generalist robot policies for complex and highly dexterous tasks. We propose a novel flow matching architecture built on top of a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to inherit Internet-scale semantic knowledge. We then discuss how this model can be trained on a large and diverse dataset from multiple dexterous robot platforms, including single-arm robots, dual-arm robots, and mobile manipulators. We evaluate our model in terms of its ability to perform tasks in zero shot after pre-training, follow language instructions from people and from a high-level VLM policy, and its ability to acquire new skills via fine-tuning. Our results cover a wide variety of tasks, such as laundry folding, table cleaning, and assembling boxes.

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.

Many recent advances in robotic manipulation have come through imitation learning, yet these rely largely on mimicking a particularly hard-to-acquire form of demonstrations: those collected on the same robot in the same room with the same objects as the trained policy must handle at test time. In contrast, large pre-recorded human video datasets demonstrating manipulation skills in-the-wild already exist, which contain valuable information for robots. Is it possible to distill a repository of useful robotic skill policies out of such data without any additional requirements on robot-specific demonstrations or exploration? We present the first such system ZeroMimic, that generates immediately deployable image goal-conditioned skill policies for several common categories of manipulation tasks (opening, closing, pouring, pick&place, cutting, and stirring) each capable of acting upon diverse objects and across diverse unseen task setups. ZeroMimic is carefully designed to exploit recent advances in semantic and geometric visual understanding of human videos, together with modern grasp affordance detectors and imitation policy classes. After training ZeroMimic on the popular EpicKitchens dataset of ego-centric human videos, we evaluate its out-of-the-box performance in varied real-world and simulated kitchen settings with two different robot embodiments, demonstrating its impressive abilities to handle these varied tasks. To enable plug-and-play reuse of ZeroMimic policies on other task setups and robots, we release software and policy checkpoints of our skill policies.

Recently, with the rapid development of robot learning and imitation learning, numerous datasets and methods have emerged. However, these datasets and their task designs often lack systematic consideration and principles. This raises important questions: Do the current datasets and task designs truly advance the capabilities of robotic agents? Do evaluations on a few common tasks accurately reflect the differentiated performance of various methods proposed by different teams and evaluated on different tasks? To address these issues, we introduce the Great March 100 (GM-100) as the first step towards a robot learning Olympics. GM-100 consists of 100 carefully designed tasks that cover a wide range of interactions and long-tail behaviors, aiming to provide a diverse and challenging set of tasks to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of robotic agents and promote diversity and complexity in robot dataset task designs. These tasks are developed through systematic analysis and expansion of existing task designs, combined with insights from human-object interaction primitives and object affordances. We collect a large amount of trajectory data on different robotic platforms and evaluate several baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GM-100 tasks are 1) feasible to execute and 2) sufficiently challenging to effectively differentiate the performance of current VLA models. Our data and code are available at https://rhos.ai/research/gm-100.

Hierarchical policies that combine language and low-level control have been shown to perform impressively long-horizon robotic tasks, by leveraging either zero-shot high-level planners like pretrained language and vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs) or models trained on annotated robotic demonstrations. However, for complex and dexterous skills, attaining high success rates on long-horizon tasks still represents a major challenge -- the longer the task is, the more likely it is that some stage will fail. Can humans help the robot to continuously improve its long-horizon task performance through intuitive and natural feedback? In this paper, we make the following observation: high-level policies that index into sufficiently rich and expressive low-level language-conditioned skills can be readily supervised with human feedback in the form of language corrections. We show that even fine-grained corrections, such as small movements ("move a bit to the left"), can be effectively incorporated into high-level policies, and that such corrections can be readily obtained from humans observing the robot and making occasional suggestions. This framework enables robots not only to rapidly adapt to real-time language feedback, but also incorporate this feedback into an iterative training scheme that improves the high-level policy's ability to correct errors in both low-level execution and high-level decision-making purely from verbal feedback. Our evaluation on real hardware shows that this leads to significant performance improvement in long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks without the need for any additional teleoperation. Videos and code are available at https://yay-robot.github.io/.