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Learning reliable manipulation skills for robots is probably the single most important thing for the field to accomplish. Generalist models are usually not reliable enough to achieve the ~100% reliability we really want. But Wenli Xiao has a recipe for achieving this, and for using the data to improve... show more

Chris Paxton

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35,602 views • 8 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Every home is different. That means that to build a useful home robot, we must be able to perform zero-shot generalization on a wide range of tasks. Humanoid company 1X has a solution: world models. 1X Director of Evaluations Daniel Ho joins us on RoboPapers to talk about: - why world models are the future for scaling robot learning - how to use world models for robot control - what world models unlock for evaluating robot model performance - how we can hill-climb from here to general purpose robots Watch Episode #61 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now!

Every home is different. That means that to build a useful home robot, we must be able to perform zero-shot generalization on a wide range of tasks. Humanoid company 1X has a solution: world models. 1X Director of Evaluations Daniel Ho joins us on RoboPapers to talk about: - why world models are the future for scaling robot learning - how to use world models for robot control - what world models unlock for evaluating robot model performance - how we can hill-climb from here to general purpose robots Watch Episode #61 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now!

RoboPapers

27,567 views • 6 months ago

Robots has a data problem, in that robotics data is rare. While human video is quite common, it’s not usually directly usable for robots for a variety of reasons, most significantly that it’s missing explicit, accurate robot actions. Instead, Jeremy Collins proposes that we predict keypoint trajectories — basically, how any given point in an object will move as a robot performs a task. This lets us use action-free human video to train robot skills. Learn more by watching Episode #37 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now.

Robots has a data problem, in that robotics data is rare. While human video is quite common, it’s not usually directly usable for robots for a variety of reasons, most significantly that it’s missing explicit, accurate robot actions. Instead, Jeremy Collins proposes that we predict keypoint trajectories — basically, how any given point in an object will move as a robot performs a task. This lets us use action-free human video to train robot skills. Learn more by watching Episode #37 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now.

RoboPapers

89,011 views • 9 months ago

Reasoning over long horizons would allow robots to generalize better to unseen environments and settings zero-shot. One mechanism for this kind of reasoning would be world models, but traditional video world models still tend to struggle with long horizons, and are very data intensive to train. But what if instead of predicting images about the future, we predicted just the symbolic information necessary for reasoning? Nishanth Kumar tells us about Pixels to Predicates, a method for symbol grounding which allows a VLM to plan sequences of robot skills to achieve unseen goals in previously unseen settings. To find out more, watch episode #44 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

Reasoning over long horizons would allow robots to generalize better to unseen environments and settings zero-shot. One mechanism for this kind of reasoning would be world models, but traditional video world models still tend to struggle with long horizons, and are very data intensive to train. But what if instead of predicting images about the future, we predicted just the symbolic information necessary for reasoning? Nishanth Kumar tells us about Pixels to Predicates, a method for symbol grounding which allows a VLM to plan sequences of robot skills to achieve unseen goals in previously unseen settings. To find out more, watch episode #44 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

RoboPapers

19,676 views • 8 months ago

In order for robots to be deployed in the real world, performing tasks of real value, they must be reliable. Unfortunately, even more, most robotic demos work maybe 70-80% of the time at best. The way to get better reliability is to do real-world reinforcement learning: having the robot teach itself how to perform the task up to a high level of success. The key to doing this is to start with a core of expert human data, use that to train a policy then iteratively improve it, until finally finishing with on-policy reinforcement learning. Kun Lei talks through a unified framework for imitation and reinforcement learning based on PPO, which enables this improvement process. In this episode, Kun Lei explains the theory behind his reinforcement learning method and how it allowed his robot to run in a shopping mall juicing oranges for seven hours at a time, among experiments on a wide variety of tasks and embodiments. Watch episode 58 of RoboPapers now, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

In order for robots to be deployed in the real world, performing tasks of real value, they must be reliable. Unfortunately, even more, most robotic demos work maybe 70-80% of the time at best. The way to get better reliability is to do real-world reinforcement learning: having the robot teach itself how to perform the task up to a high level of success. The key to doing this is to start with a core of expert human data, use that to train a policy then iteratively improve it, until finally finishing with on-policy reinforcement learning. Kun Lei talks through a unified framework for imitation and reinforcement learning based on PPO, which enables this improvement process. In this episode, Kun Lei explains the theory behind his reinforcement learning method and how it allowed his robot to run in a shopping mall juicing oranges for seven hours at a time, among experiments on a wide variety of tasks and embodiments. Watch episode 58 of RoboPapers now, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

18,813 views • 7 months ago

Robots need to be able to apply pressure and make contact with objects as needed in order to accomplish their tasks. From compliance to working safely around humans to whole-body manipulation of heavy objects, combining force and position control can dramatically expand the capabilities of robots. This is especially true for legged robots, which have so much ability to exert forces on the world around them. But how do we train robots which can do this? Baoxiong Jia tells us more in our discussion of his team’s recent, Best Paper Award winning work on learning a unified policy for position and force control, called UniFP. To learn more, watch Episode #49 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton.

Robots need to be able to apply pressure and make contact with objects as needed in order to accomplish their tasks. From compliance to working safely around humans to whole-body manipulation of heavy objects, combining force and position control can dramatically expand the capabilities of robots. This is especially true for legged robots, which have so much ability to exert forces on the world around them. But how do we train robots which can do this? Baoxiong Jia tells us more in our discussion of his team’s recent, Best Paper Award winning work on learning a unified policy for position and force control, called UniFP. To learn more, watch Episode #49 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton.

RoboPapers

44,803 views • 8 months ago

Robotics has changed dramatically over the last eight years. Ted Xiao has been involved in the cutting edge of robot learning through this period, spending those eight years at Google Brain/Google Deepmind. And he’s identified three eras of robot learning. These eras are: - The Era of Existence Proofs - trying different methods like QT-Opt, on-robot RL - The Era of Foundation Models - transitioning to data collection and clean objectives (i.e. supervised learning) - The Era of Scaling - orders of magnitude more data and larger models, enabling reasoning, long-horizon actions, and cross-embodiment transfer Watch Episode 78 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan to learn more!

Robotics has changed dramatically over the last eight years. Ted Xiao has been involved in the cutting edge of robot learning through this period, spending those eight years at Google Brain/Google Deepmind. And he’s identified three eras of robot learning. These eras are: - The Era of Existence Proofs - trying different methods like QT-Opt, on-robot RL - The Era of Foundation Models - transitioning to data collection and clean objectives (i.e. supervised learning) - The Era of Scaling - orders of magnitude more data and larger models, enabling reasoning, long-horizon actions, and cross-embodiment transfer Watch Episode 78 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan to learn more!

RoboPapers

36,732 views • 3 months ago

Robot policies must be both reliable and highly capable to be useful; the best way to achieve this level of performance is with reinforcement learning. However, for reinforcement learning you are usually stuck between two difficult options: reinforcement in the real world is often risky and expensive, while reinforcement learning in a traditional simulator takes a lot of engineering work and has a persistent sim-to-real gap. What if instead you could train your robot purely in a world model? RISE by Jiazhi Yang et al. uses a compositional world model to predict the future and evaluate progress. This allows for a self-improving pipeline, which learns a world model from real data and then learns how the robot should perform different tasks. This pipeline results in a data-driven way to improve policy performance from real data but without real-world reinforcement learning. Watch Episode #86 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

Robot policies must be both reliable and highly capable to be useful; the best way to achieve this level of performance is with reinforcement learning. However, for reinforcement learning you are usually stuck between two difficult options: reinforcement in the real world is often risky and expensive, while reinforcement learning in a traditional simulator takes a lot of engineering work and has a persistent sim-to-real gap. What if instead you could train your robot purely in a world model? RISE by Jiazhi Yang et al. uses a compositional world model to predict the future and evaluate progress. This allows for a self-improving pipeline, which learns a world model from real data and then learns how the robot should perform different tasks. This pipeline results in a data-driven way to improve policy performance from real data but without real-world reinforcement learning. Watch Episode #86 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

RoboPapers

38,334 views • 2 months ago

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

RoboPapers

27,344 views • 3 months ago

Agent sessions work well for focused tasks, but most real projects are too broad and complex for a single context window to hold. The more an agent sees, the less reliable it becomes. We built Missions to fix this.

Agent sessions work well for focused tasks, but most real projects are too broad and complex for a single context window to hold. The more an agent sees, the less reliable it becomes. We built Missions to fix this.

Factory

45,282 views • 4 months ago

Training robot foundation models faces two key hurdles: how to get enough data to train an effective model, and how to make sure that new skills can be acquired quickly. The team at Rhoda AI believes that the answer is training Direct Video Action models from web data. Web data is plentiful, to the point where Rhoda can train their base model on hundreds of years of video data. And then, with the addition of robot data, they can quickly adapt it to new tasks with as little as 20 hours of in-domain data, performing complex, multi-step manipulation tasks with their purpose-built video foundation model. Tongzhou Mu 🤖🦾🦿 Eric Chan and Changan Chen joined us to talk more about their approach. Watch Episode #79 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc, Chris Paxton, and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

Training robot foundation models faces two key hurdles: how to get enough data to train an effective model, and how to make sure that new skills can be acquired quickly. The team at Rhoda AI believes that the answer is training Direct Video Action models from web data. Web data is plentiful, to the point where Rhoda can train their base model on hundreds of years of video data. And then, with the addition of robot data, they can quickly adapt it to new tasks with as little as 20 hours of in-domain data, performing complex, multi-step manipulation tasks with their purpose-built video foundation model. Tongzhou Mu 🤖🦾🦿 Eric Chan and Changan Chen joined us to talk more about their approach. Watch Episode #79 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc, Chris Paxton, and Jiafei Duan, to learn more!

RoboPapers

24,475 views • 3 months ago

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Every lab has a different robot; reproducible evaluations are really challenging. This makes it hard for us to know which methods for learning robot policies are likely to perform the best in real-world scenarios. Taking a page from LLM evaluations like Chatbot Arena, RoboArena aims to address this problem through crowdsourcing evaluations with a network of different evaluators. Watch Episode #34 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , now to learn more from authors Pranav Atreya and Karl Pertsch!

Evaluating robot policies is hard. Every lab has a different robot; reproducible evaluations are really challenging. This makes it hard for us to know which methods for learning robot policies are likely to perform the best in real-world scenarios. Taking a page from LLM evaluations like Chatbot Arena, RoboArena aims to address this problem through crowdsourcing evaluations with a network of different evaluators. Watch Episode #34 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton , now to learn more from authors Pranav Atreya and Karl Pertsch!

RoboPapers

15,056 views • 10 months ago

World models — action-conditioned predictive models of the environment — are an exciting are of research for robots that can be useful both for training and for test-time compute. But video-based world models waste a lot of predictive power on reconstructing pixels, which makes model and data requirements much higher and limits how far out into the future their predictions remain viable. Instead, what if we learned a purely semantic world model, one which predicts which properties will be true about the world after a sequence of actions, without reconstructing the whole images? Jacob Berg tells us more. Watch Episode #53 of RoboPapers now, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

World models — action-conditioned predictive models of the environment — are an exciting are of research for robots that can be useful both for training and for test-time compute. But video-based world models waste a lot of predictive power on reconstructing pixels, which makes model and data requirements much higher and limits how far out into the future their predictions remain viable. Instead, what if we learned a purely semantic world model, one which predicts which properties will be true about the world after a sequence of actions, without reconstructing the whole images? Jacob Berg tells us more. Watch Episode #53 of RoboPapers now, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

39,322 views • 8 months ago

Just collecting manipulation data isn’t enough for robots - they need to be able to move around in the world, which has a whole different set of challenges from pure manipulation. And bringing navigation and manipulation together in a single framework is even more challenging. Enter HERMES, from Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei. This is a four-stage process in which human videos are used to set up an RL sim-to-real training pipeline in order to overcome differences between robot and human kinematics, and used together with a navigation foundation model to move around in a variety of environments. To learn more, join us as Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei tell us about how they built their system to perform mobile dexterous manipulation from human videos in a variety of environments. Watch Episode #45 of RoboPapers today, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

Just collecting manipulation data isn’t enough for robots - they need to be able to move around in the world, which has a whole different set of challenges from pure manipulation. And bringing navigation and manipulation together in a single framework is even more challenging. Enter HERMES, from Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei. This is a four-stage process in which human videos are used to set up an RL sim-to-real training pipeline in order to overcome differences between robot and human kinematics, and used together with a navigation foundation model to move around in a variety of environments. To learn more, join us as Zhecheng Yuan and Tianming Wei tell us about how they built their system to perform mobile dexterous manipulation from human videos in a variety of environments. Watch Episode #45 of RoboPapers today, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton!

RoboPapers

15,092 views • 8 months ago

Data curation is crucial for post-training recipes. But how do we curate? Curation is usually manual & tedious. And, it's hard to tell if a strategy in the data will be reliable! We introduce an automatic way to curate, informed by the robot's policy learning.

Data curation is crucial for post-training recipes. But how do we curate? Curation is usually manual & tedious. And, it's hard to tell if a strategy in the data will be reliable! We introduce an automatic way to curate, informed by the robot's policy learning.

Chelsea Finn

19,910 views • 1 year ago

Most robot policies today still largely lack memory: they make all their decisions based on what they can see right now. MemER aims to change that by learning which frames are important; this lets it deal with tasks like object search. Ajay Sridhar, Jenny Pan, and @satviks107Sharma tell us about how to achieve this fundamental capability for long-horizon task execution. Watch Episode #54 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

Most robot policies today still largely lack memory: they make all their decisions based on what they can see right now. MemER aims to change that by learning which frames are important; this lets it deal with tasks like object search. Ajay Sridhar, Jenny Pan, and @satviks107Sharma tell us about how to achieve this fundamental capability for long-horizon task execution. Watch Episode #54 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

RoboPapers

17,875 views • 8 months ago

The holy grail of robotics is to be able to perform previously-unseen, out-of-distribution manipulation tasks “zero shot” in a new environment. NovaFlow proposes an approach which (1) generates a video, (2) computes predicted flow — how points move through the scene — and (3) uses this flow as an objective to generate a motion. Using this procedure, NovaFlow generates motions in unseen scenes, for unseen tasks, and can transfer across embodiments. To learn more, we are joined by Hongyu Li and Jiahui Fu from RAI. Watch Episode #63 of RoboPapers with Chris Paxton and Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc now to learn more!

The holy grail of robotics is to be able to perform previously-unseen, out-of-distribution manipulation tasks “zero shot” in a new environment. NovaFlow proposes an approach which (1) generates a video, (2) computes predicted flow — how points move through the scene — and (3) uses this flow as an objective to generate a motion. Using this procedure, NovaFlow generates motions in unseen scenes, for unseen tasks, and can transfer across embodiments. To learn more, we are joined by Hongyu Li and Jiahui Fu from RAI. Watch Episode #63 of RoboPapers with Chris Paxton and Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc now to learn more!

RoboPapers

21,434 views • 5 months ago

🚨 New Product Announcement! 🚨 With Sportlogiq iCE Elite, we are delivering the most reliable data in hockey to even more leagues across the world for the 2025-26 season. 📈 🏒 Learn more: #HockeyAnalytics #HockeyTech #HockeyInsights #AI #PoweredbySportlogiq

🚨 New Product Announcement! 🚨 With Sportlogiq iCE Elite, we are delivering the most reliable data in hockey to even more leagues across the world for the 2025-26 season. 📈 🏒 Learn more: #HockeyAnalytics #HockeyTech #HockeyInsights #AI #PoweredbySportlogiq

Sportlogiq

21,035 views • 1 year ago

For robots to be useful, they can’t just dance — they must be able to physically interact with the world around them. Unfortunately, the sorts of motion tracking policies you see performing dancing or martial arts are not really capable of the kind of precise, forceful interaction needed to perform useful interactions with the world. Siheng Zhao and Yanjie Ze join us to talk about ResMimic, their new paper which takes a general-purpose human motion-tracking policy and improves it with a residual policy to reliably interact with objects To learn more, watch Episode #47 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, today!

For robots to be useful, they can’t just dance — they must be able to physically interact with the world around them. Unfortunately, the sorts of motion tracking policies you see performing dancing or martial arts are not really capable of the kind of precise, forceful interaction needed to perform useful interactions with the world. Siheng Zhao and Yanjie Ze join us to talk about ResMimic, their new paper which takes a general-purpose human motion-tracking policy and improves it with a residual policy to reliably interact with objects To learn more, watch Episode #47 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, today!

RoboPapers

11,399 views • 8 months ago

Robotics fundamentally involves understanding the dynamics of how things change in the world in response to action and force. This is impossible to learn from static images; instead, it’s far more effective and more data-efficient to learn from video. Elvis Nava joins us to talk about @mimicrobotic. One of the key findings from mimic-video is that pretraining on webscale video allows robots to learn physics priors; as a result, policies train faster, generalize better, and are capable of more impressive dexterity, versus training on static images or image-language pairs as per a VLM. Watch Episode #81 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

Robotics fundamentally involves understanding the dynamics of how things change in the world in response to action and force. This is impossible to learn from static images; instead, it’s far more effective and more data-efficient to learn from video. Elvis Nava joins us to talk about @mimicrobotic. One of the key findings from mimic-video is that pretraining on webscale video allows robots to learn physics priors; as a result, policies train faster, generalize better, and are capable of more impressive dexterity, versus training on static images or image-language pairs as per a VLM. Watch Episode #81 of RoboPapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton to learn more!

RoboPapers

48,343 views • 2 months ago

Benchmarking, evaluating, and developing robotics code is difficult, and part of this is because no simulator really reflects the diversity and scale of real embodiments. Enter MolmoSpaces from AI2: a massive open ecosystem with a range of 230,000 handcrafted and procedurally-generated home environments, including 48,000 manipulable objects. Crucially, MolmoSpaces provides simulation environments which work for both navigation and manipulation. We talked to the team: Yejin Kim @ RSS2026, Omar Rayyan, and Max Argus, to tell us more. Watch Episode 69 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan, now!

Benchmarking, evaluating, and developing robotics code is difficult, and part of this is because no simulator really reflects the diversity and scale of real embodiments. Enter MolmoSpaces from AI2: a massive open ecosystem with a range of 230,000 handcrafted and procedurally-generated home environments, including 48,000 manipulable objects. Crucially, MolmoSpaces provides simulation environments which work for both navigation and manipulation. We talked to the team: Yejin Kim @ RSS2026, Omar Rayyan, and Max Argus, to tell us more. Watch Episode 69 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Jiafei Duan, now!

RoboPapers

21,116 views • 4 months ago