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Today, we publicly released RoboCasa365, a large-scale simulation benchmark for training and systematically evaluating generalist robot models. Built upon our original RoboCasa framework, it offers: • 2,500 realistic kitchen environments; • 365 everyday tasks (basic skills + long-horizon mobile manipulation); • Over 3,200 objects with many articulated fixtures/appliances. All...

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Yuke Zhu

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24,027 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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🧵 Evaluating robot policies in the real world is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. During my internship at SceniX this summer, we had many discussions around the two key questions: how accurate must a simulator be for evaluation to be meaningful, and how do we get there? Our new framework, Real2Sim-Eval, takes a step toward that answer. By combining Gaussian Splatting for photorealistic rendering and soft-body digital twins for realistic dynamics, we make simulation predictive of real-world performance. 👉
1:26

🧵 Evaluating robot policies in the real world is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. During my internship at SceniX this summer, we had many discussions around the two key questions: how accurate must a simulator be for evaluation to be meaningful, and how do we get there? Our new framework, Real2Sim-Eval, takes a step toward that answer. By combining Gaussian Splatting for photorealistic rendering and soft-body digital twins for realistic dynamics, we make simulation predictive of real-world performance. 👉

Kaifeng Zhang

63,190 views • 9 months ago

It’s long been a dream of roboticists to be able to teach a robot in simulation so as to skip the long and expensive process of collecting large amounts of real-world training data. However, building simulations for robot tasks is extremely hard. Ideally, we could go from real data to a useful simulation. This is exactly what Guangqi Jiang and his co-authors do. they use 3d Gaussian splatting to reconstructed scenes which let them create interactive environments that, when combined with a physcs engine, allow for training robot policies that show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer (i.e., using no real-world demonstrations). To learn more, watch Episode 56 of Robopapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!
46:05

It’s long been a dream of roboticists to be able to teach a robot in simulation so as to skip the long and expensive process of collecting large amounts of real-world training data. However, building simulations for robot tasks is extremely hard. Ideally, we could go from real data to a useful simulation. This is exactly what Guangqi Jiang and his co-authors do. they use 3d Gaussian splatting to reconstructed scenes which let them create interactive environments that, when combined with a physcs engine, allow for training robot policies that show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer (i.e., using no real-world demonstrations). To learn more, watch Episode 56 of Robopapers with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton now!

RoboPapers

20,434 views • 7 months ago

📢 Announcing one of the most exciting works from us this year on **scalable robot policy evaluation through real-to-sim transfer**, moving toward a scalable evaluation engine with structured world models that capture the appearance, geometry, and dynamics of environments involving deformable objects. 🤖 Evaluation remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in building general-purpose robots. Today, robots are still evaluated only in the real world, which is **orders of magnitude slower** than the development of language agents. We propose a new framework where simulation performance **strongly correlates** with the real world (r > 0.9), even for deformable objects. The key difference from existing work lies in the correlation between simulation and reality: if a robot model performs better in the digital world, does it also perform better in the real world? This question has long made people hesitant about simulation-based evaluation — especially for deformable objects. We are changing that. Our pipeline achieves effective real-to-sim transfer, establishing **state-of-the-art correlation** between simulation and reality for deformable object manipulation. It provides a **scalable and reproducible evaluation engine** for robot learning. 🌐
3:04

📢 Announcing one of the most exciting works from us this year on **scalable robot policy evaluation through real-to-sim transfer**, moving toward a scalable evaluation engine with structured world models that capture the appearance, geometry, and dynamics of environments involving deformable objects. 🤖 Evaluation remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in building general-purpose robots. Today, robots are still evaluated only in the real world, which is **orders of magnitude slower** than the development of language agents. We propose a new framework where simulation performance **strongly correlates** with the real world (r > 0.9), even for deformable objects. The key difference from existing work lies in the correlation between simulation and reality: if a robot model performs better in the digital world, does it also perform better in the real world? This question has long made people hesitant about simulation-based evaluation — especially for deformable objects. We are changing that. Our pipeline achieves effective real-to-sim transfer, establishing **state-of-the-art correlation** between simulation and reality for deformable object manipulation. It provides a **scalable and reproducible evaluation engine** for robot learning. 🌐

Yunzhu Li

39,960 views • 9 months ago

A big part of scaling robot learning to solve real-world problems is that we somehow need to get enough diverse, high-quality data to train our robots to perform useful things. GPT and its fellow large language models were bootstrapped and proved out on a massive dataset of real-world language data. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, similarly massive datasets don’t really exist for robotics — so, in our unending pursuit of high-quality, useful data, we turn to simulation. I compared a couple recent works on sim-to-real robot manipulation, which discuss how to train perception-driven manipulation policies in simulation, in such a way that they’re useful in the real world. - DextraH-RGB, from NVIDIA - Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, also from NVIDIA — specifically the GEAR lab - Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids, another GEAR lab paper - Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-Horizon Manipulation, from CMU (video from DextrAH-RGB)
0:33

A big part of scaling robot learning to solve real-world problems is that we somehow need to get enough diverse, high-quality data to train our robots to perform useful things. GPT and its fellow large language models were bootstrapped and proved out on a massive dataset of real-world language data. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, similarly massive datasets don’t really exist for robotics — so, in our unending pursuit of high-quality, useful data, we turn to simulation. I compared a couple recent works on sim-to-real robot manipulation, which discuss how to train perception-driven manipulation policies in simulation, in such a way that they’re useful in the real world. - DextraH-RGB, from NVIDIA - Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, also from NVIDIA — specifically the GEAR lab - Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids, another GEAR lab paper - Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-Horizon Manipulation, from CMU (video from DextrAH-RGB)

Chris Paxton

20,486 views • 1 year ago

Everything you love about generative models — now powered by real physics! Announcing the Genesis project — after a 24-month large-scale research collaboration involving over 20 research labs — a generative physics engine able to generate 4D dynamical worlds powered by a physics simulation platform designed for general-purpose robotics and physical AI applications. Genesis's physics engine is developed in pure Python, while being 10-80x faster than existing GPU-accelerated stacks like Isaac Gym and MJX. It delivers a simulation speed ~430,000 faster than in real-time, and takes only 26 seconds to train a robotic locomotion policy transferrable to the real world on a single RTX4090 (see tutorial: The Genesis physics engine and simulation platform is fully open source at We'll gradually roll out access to our generative framework in the near future. Genesis implements a unified simulation framework all from scratch, integrating a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art physics solvers, allowing simulation of the whole physical world in a virtual realm with the highest realism. We aim to build a universal data engine that leverages an upper-level generative framework to autonomously create physical worlds, together with various modes of data, including environments, camera motions, robotic task proposals, reward functions, robot policies, character motions, fully interactive 3D scenes, open-world articulated assets, and more, aiming towards fully automated data generation for robotics, physical AI and other applications. Open Source Code: Project webpage: Documentation: 1/n
3:26

Everything you love about generative models — now powered by real physics! Announcing the Genesis project — after a 24-month large-scale research collaboration involving over 20 research labs — a generative physics engine able to generate 4D dynamical worlds powered by a physics simulation platform designed for general-purpose robotics and physical AI applications. Genesis's physics engine is developed in pure Python, while being 10-80x faster than existing GPU-accelerated stacks like Isaac Gym and MJX. It delivers a simulation speed ~430,000 faster than in real-time, and takes only 26 seconds to train a robotic locomotion policy transferrable to the real world on a single RTX4090 (see tutorial: The Genesis physics engine and simulation platform is fully open source at We'll gradually roll out access to our generative framework in the near future. Genesis implements a unified simulation framework all from scratch, integrating a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art physics solvers, allowing simulation of the whole physical world in a virtual realm with the highest realism. We aim to build a universal data engine that leverages an upper-level generative framework to autonomously create physical worlds, together with various modes of data, including environments, camera motions, robotic task proposals, reward functions, robot policies, character motions, fully interactive 3D scenes, open-world articulated assets, and more, aiming towards fully automated data generation for robotics, physical AI and other applications. Open Source Code: Project webpage: Documentation: 1/n

Zhou Xian

3,818,940 views • 1 year ago

In my past research experience, finding or developing an appropriate simulation environment, dataset, and benchmark has always been a challenge. Missing features, limited support, or unexpected bugs often occupied my days and nights. Moreover, current simulation platforms are relatively fragmented—making it challenging to replicate the success of the RT-X dataset in unifying community efforts. Introducing RoboVerse, we provide a unified platform, dataset, and benchmark for scalable and generalizable robot learning. We hope to build a shared foundation to combine the community efforts. RoboVerse includes: MetaSim: We carefully designed a configuration system and a universal interface to align current robotic simulators. With MetaSim, you can use any simulator with the same code—bringing together the community’s diverse efforts under one framework! RoboVerse Dataset and Benchmark: We unify popular simulation environments and benchmarks into a single cohesive system and introduce the RoboVerse dataset—a large-scale, high-quality synthetic dataset. Additionally, we propose a standardized benchmark across both imitation learning and reinforcement learning. A cool feature enabled by our unified framework: Hybrid Simulation! You can now integrate physics engines and renderers from different simulators—e.g., using MuJoCo precise physics with Isaac photorealistic rendering. This not only elevates simulation fidelity but also significantly enhances real-world transfer performance across complex robotic applications. Hopefully, our team’s efforts could serve the robotic community to thrive vibrantly in the years to come. RoboVerse is open-sourced🥳!!! Project Page: Documentation: Github Repo: Paper:
2:21

In my past research experience, finding or developing an appropriate simulation environment, dataset, and benchmark has always been a challenge. Missing features, limited support, or unexpected bugs often occupied my days and nights. Moreover, current simulation platforms are relatively fragmented—making it challenging to replicate the success of the RT-X dataset in unifying community efforts. Introducing RoboVerse, we provide a unified platform, dataset, and benchmark for scalable and generalizable robot learning. We hope to build a shared foundation to combine the community efforts. RoboVerse includes: MetaSim: We carefully designed a configuration system and a universal interface to align current robotic simulators. With MetaSim, you can use any simulator with the same code—bringing together the community’s diverse efforts under one framework! RoboVerse Dataset and Benchmark: We unify popular simulation environments and benchmarks into a single cohesive system and introduce the RoboVerse dataset—a large-scale, high-quality synthetic dataset. Additionally, we propose a standardized benchmark across both imitation learning and reinforcement learning. A cool feature enabled by our unified framework: Hybrid Simulation! You can now integrate physics engines and renderers from different simulators—e.g., using MuJoCo precise physics with Isaac photorealistic rendering. This not only elevates simulation fidelity but also significantly enhances real-world transfer performance across complex robotic applications. Hopefully, our team’s efforts could serve the robotic community to thrive vibrantly in the years to come. RoboVerse is open-sourced🥳!!! Project Page: Documentation: Github Repo: Paper:

Haoran Geng

84,318 views • 1 year ago

Introducing EdgeBench, a benchmark designed to study how agents learn from environments over at least 12~72-hour runs. We find that performance follows a log-sigmoid function of environment interaction time with high precision. EdgeBench is built with three ingredients: - 🌍 Real & Diverse: 134 real-world tasks across 6 task categories, spanning scientific problems, professional knowledge work, software engineering, optimization, formal math, and games. - ⏳ Ultra-Long-Horizon: Each task supports 12–72 hours of agent work. Recorded human effort averages 57.2 hours. - 🔁 Informative Feedback: Agents receive real-world feedback for continuous improvement. After 38,000 hours of agent runs on EdgeBench, a scaling law for learning from environments emerges: - 📈 As agents interact with task environments over time, their aggregate performance is precisely fit by a log-sigmoid function. - 🧠 This phenomenon can be explained by an elegant theory of graph exploration. We are releasing an initial 51 of the 134 tasks, together with the full evaluation framework, to help advance long-horizon agent research. Check our blog & paper for more findings! Blog Paper GitHub Dataset Details below 👇🧵
0:52

Introducing EdgeBench, a benchmark designed to study how agents learn from environments over at least 12~72-hour runs. We find that performance follows a log-sigmoid function of environment interaction time with high precision. EdgeBench is built with three ingredients: - 🌍 Real & Diverse: 134 real-world tasks across 6 task categories, spanning scientific problems, professional knowledge work, software engineering, optimization, formal math, and games. - ⏳ Ultra-Long-Horizon: Each task supports 12–72 hours of agent work. Recorded human effort averages 57.2 hours. - 🔁 Informative Feedback: Agents receive real-world feedback for continuous improvement. After 38,000 hours of agent runs on EdgeBench, a scaling law for learning from environments emerges: - 📈 As agents interact with task environments over time, their aggregate performance is precisely fit by a log-sigmoid function. - 🧠 This phenomenon can be explained by an elegant theory of graph exploration. We are releasing an initial 51 of the 134 tasks, together with the full evaluation framework, to help advance long-horizon agent research. Check our blog & paper for more findings! Blog Paper GitHub Dataset Details below 👇🧵

Deyao Zhu

360,827 views • 1 month ago

Introducing FLUX-mimic, a next-generation Video-Action Model for general purpose dexterity, developed in partnership with Black Forest Labs. Late last year we published mimic-video and introduced Video-Action Models (VAM): a new family of robotics foundation models built on top of video generation models. We showed that robot control reduces to visual prediction, and that robot capability is downstream of improvements in video modeling accuracy. The obvious implication was that advances in the video modeling frontier would directly translate to increased capabilities in end-to-end robot learning. FLUX-mimic is that thesis at frontier scale: We've applied our VAM architecture to the strongest video backbone available today, FLUX 3 from Black Forest Labs, and trained it on data from our own robots and wearables. General-purpose dexterity, running on a single GPU on premises. Because the model already understands world dynamics, it needs far fewer demonstrations to learn a new task. This is game-changing for our mission to deploy robots to factory floors, where industrial robot data is scarce and expensive to collect. We're now testing and deploying FLUX-mimic with manufacturing leaders like Audi USA, on complex, multi-step manipulation long considered impossible for conventional automation.
3:49

Introducing FLUX-mimic, a next-generation Video-Action Model for general purpose dexterity, developed in partnership with Black Forest Labs. Late last year we published mimic-video and introduced Video-Action Models (VAM): a new family of robotics foundation models built on top of video generation models. We showed that robot control reduces to visual prediction, and that robot capability is downstream of improvements in video modeling accuracy. The obvious implication was that advances in the video modeling frontier would directly translate to increased capabilities in end-to-end robot learning. FLUX-mimic is that thesis at frontier scale: We've applied our VAM architecture to the strongest video backbone available today, FLUX 3 from Black Forest Labs, and trained it on data from our own robots and wearables. General-purpose dexterity, running on a single GPU on premises. Because the model already understands world dynamics, it needs far fewer demonstrations to learn a new task. This is game-changing for our mission to deploy robots to factory floors, where industrial robot data is scarce and expensive to collect. We're now testing and deploying FLUX-mimic with manufacturing leaders like Audi USA, on complex, multi-step manipulation long considered impossible for conventional automation.

mimic

116,758 views • 23 days ago

What if we're approaching robotic manipulation all wrong? Ilya Sutskever makes a fascinating point here: Current approaches throw massive amounts of data at the problem — millions of simulation steps, huge compute. And still, robots can't match human dexterity. Real-world learning of new skills? "Very out of reach." Meanwhile, humans pick up manipulation tasks almost instantly. Our dexterity is unmatched. And we do it with remarkable robustness — no reward shaping, no curriculum design, no training instability. Why the gap? Evolution. 500M years of optimisation for locomotion, vision, and manipulation. For these ancient sensorimotor tasks, maybe brute-force data isn't the answer. Maybe we should be copying the biological algorithms that already solved it. CC: Dwarkesh Patel
1:40

What if we're approaching robotic manipulation all wrong? Ilya Sutskever makes a fascinating point here: Current approaches throw massive amounts of data at the problem — millions of simulation steps, huge compute. And still, robots can't match human dexterity. Real-world learning of new skills? "Very out of reach." Meanwhile, humans pick up manipulation tasks almost instantly. Our dexterity is unmatched. And we do it with remarkable robustness — no reward shaping, no curriculum design, no training instability. Why the gap? Evolution. 500M years of optimisation for locomotion, vision, and manipulation. For these ancient sensorimotor tasks, maybe brute-force data isn't the answer. Maybe we should be copying the biological algorithms that already solved it. CC: Dwarkesh Patel

Jack 🤖

31,262 views • 8 months ago

If you want a vision encoder for dexterous manipulation, what should be the most important part to model? 🤔 Current standard models like CLIP, SigLIP, and DINOv2 have an incredible grasp of semantics and spatial details. But they lack the action-centric structure needed for downstream visuomotor control. But collecting annotated robotic trajectories at scale is SUPER expensive and largely unrealistic. So, how do we bridge this gap? We introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training) ⬇️ 🔸 Action-centric upstream: we align visual observations with action chunks through a contrastive objective. 🔸 Human video as a proxy: we represent 3D human hand poses analogously to robotic end-effector actions, tapping into a massive source of human demonstrations. 🔸 Massive scale: pre-trained on over 32,000 hours of manipulation video, driving both sample efficiency and robust generalization. 🔸 Hardware proven: achieves a 76% average success rate on a real-world Dexmate Vega bimanual Dexmate manipulator with dual 22-DoF Sharpa Wave hands Sharpa . 🔸 State-of-the-art: significantly outperforms strong baselines like DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and Qwen3.5 ViT across complex tasks, even under unexpected lighting changes and visual distractors. 🌐 Project: 📝 Blog: 📄 Paper: 💻 Model:
1:30

If you want a vision encoder for dexterous manipulation, what should be the most important part to model? 🤔 Current standard models like CLIP, SigLIP, and DINOv2 have an incredible grasp of semantics and spatial details. But they lack the action-centric structure needed for downstream visuomotor control. But collecting annotated robotic trajectories at scale is SUPER expensive and largely unrealistic. So, how do we bridge this gap? We introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training) ⬇️ 🔸 Action-centric upstream: we align visual observations with action chunks through a contrastive objective. 🔸 Human video as a proxy: we represent 3D human hand poses analogously to robotic end-effector actions, tapping into a massive source of human demonstrations. 🔸 Massive scale: pre-trained on over 32,000 hours of manipulation video, driving both sample efficiency and robust generalization. 🔸 Hardware proven: achieves a 76% average success rate on a real-world Dexmate Vega bimanual Dexmate manipulator with dual 22-DoF Sharpa Wave hands Sharpa . 🔸 State-of-the-art: significantly outperforms strong baselines like DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and Qwen3.5 ViT across complex tasks, even under unexpected lighting changes and visual distractors. 🌐 Project: 📝 Blog: 📄 Paper: 💻 Model:

Roei Herzig

23,239 views • 1 month ago

"One of the very confusing things about the models right now: how to reconcile the fact that they are doing so well on evals. And you look at the evals and you go, 'Those are pretty hard evals.' But the economic impact seems to be dramatically behind. There is [a possible] explanation. Back when people were doing pre-training, the question of what data to train on was answered, because that answer was everything. So you don't have to think if it's going to be this data or that data. When people do RL training, they say, 'Okay, we want to have this kind of RL training for this thing and that kind of RL training for that thing.' You say, 'Hey, I would love our model to do really well when we release it. I want the evals to look great. What would be RL training that could help on this task?' If you combine this with generalization of the models actually being inadequate, that has the potential to explain a lot of what we are seeing, this disconnect between eval performance and actual real-world performance"
2:21

"One of the very confusing things about the models right now: how to reconcile the fact that they are doing so well on evals. And you look at the evals and you go, 'Those are pretty hard evals.' But the economic impact seems to be dramatically behind. There is [a possible] explanation. Back when people were doing pre-training, the question of what data to train on was answered, because that answer was everything. So you don't have to think if it's going to be this data or that data. When people do RL training, they say, 'Okay, we want to have this kind of RL training for this thing and that kind of RL training for that thing.' You say, 'Hey, I would love our model to do really well when we release it. I want the evals to look great. What would be RL training that could help on this task?' If you combine this with generalization of the models actually being inadequate, that has the potential to explain a lot of what we are seeing, this disconnect between eval performance and actual real-world performance"

Dwarkesh Patel

502,249 views • 8 months ago

Today, we're joined by Nikita Rudin, co-founder and CEO of Flexion to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 04:07 - Is robot locomotion solved? 06:04 - Sim-to-real gap 08:58 - Adding semantics to policies 09:42 - Modular vs end-to-end architectures 10:29 - Planner model 12:21 - Adapting RL techniques from quadrupeds to humanoids 15:39 - Behind robot demos 18:09 - Humanoid robots in home environments 22:03 - Training approach 23:56 - VLA models 27:59 - Closing the sim-to-real gap 32:55 - Task orchestration using VLMs 36:38 - Tool use 38:10 - Model hierarchy 43:37 - Simulator versus simulation environment 44:57 - Combining imitation learning and reinforcement learning 46:42 - RL in real world versus RL in simulation 52:58 - Reward tuning and value functions in robotics 56:38 - Predictions 1:00:10 - Humanoids, quadropeds, and wheeled platforms 1:02:45 - Advice, recommended robot kits, and community pla
1:06:07

Today, we're joined by Nikita Rudin, co-founder and CEO of Flexion to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 04:07 - Is robot locomotion solved? 06:04 - Sim-to-real gap 08:58 - Adding semantics to policies 09:42 - Modular vs end-to-end architectures 10:29 - Planner model 12:21 - Adapting RL techniques from quadrupeds to humanoids 15:39 - Behind robot demos 18:09 - Humanoid robots in home environments 22:03 - Training approach 23:56 - VLA models 27:59 - Closing the sim-to-real gap 32:55 - Task orchestration using VLMs 36:38 - Tool use 38:10 - Model hierarchy 43:37 - Simulator versus simulation environment 44:57 - Combining imitation learning and reinforcement learning 46:42 - RL in real world versus RL in simulation 52:58 - Reward tuning and value functions in robotics 56:38 - Predictions 1:00:10 - Humanoids, quadropeds, and wheeled platforms 1:02:45 - Advice, recommended robot kits, and community pla

The TWIML AI Podcast

22,592 views • 7 months ago

We asked Mika Senghaas how RL environments need to change for better agents. His take: stop treating environments like static snapshots. Today, researchers manually define tasks and rewards. Prime Intellect is working toward a loop where agents solve tasks and help create harder ones. “Up to now, environments are still these static snapshots. The task in and of itself is sort of hard-coded.” “What gets really interesting is once we can fully close the loop.” “The policy you’re training is not only a solver... it also becomes an instance creating new tasks on the fly.”
1:32

We asked Mika Senghaas how RL environments need to change for better agents. His take: stop treating environments like static snapshots. Today, researchers manually define tasks and rewards. Prime Intellect is working toward a loop where agents solve tasks and help create harder ones. “Up to now, environments are still these static snapshots. The task in and of itself is sort of hard-coded.” “What gets really interesting is once we can fully close the loop.” “The policy you’re training is not only a solver... it also becomes an instance creating new tasks on the fly.”

MTS

15,324 views • 2 months ago

Modern AI is confined to the digital world. At Skild AI, we are building towards AGI for the real world, unconstrained by robot type or task — a single, omni-bodied brain. Today, we are sharing our journey, starting with early milestones, with more to come in the weeks ahead. Our Mission: Artificial General Intelligence grounded in the physical world. We believe AGI that can truly understand and reason in the real world can only be built through grounding in the physical world. Our Vision: Any robot, Any task, One brain. We tackle robotics in its full generality – building a continually improving, omni-bodied brain that can control any hardware for any task. Who are we? A passionate group of scientists & engineers driven by our shared vision. We have been researching AI and robotics for more than a decade. Our team includes pioneers of self-supervised learning, curiosity-driven exploration, end-to-end sim2real for visual locomotion, dexterous manipulation, learning from human videos, robot parkour, and many more. Many of these works have won awards at top-tier AI and Robotics conferences. Our team has also built production-ready systems at Anduril, Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, Kitty Hawk, Google, Everyday Robotics, and Amazon. Join us in our mission to build the robot brains of tomorrow.
2:48

Modern AI is confined to the digital world. At Skild AI, we are building towards AGI for the real world, unconstrained by robot type or task — a single, omni-bodied brain. Today, we are sharing our journey, starting with early milestones, with more to come in the weeks ahead. Our Mission: Artificial General Intelligence grounded in the physical world. We believe AGI that can truly understand and reason in the real world can only be built through grounding in the physical world. Our Vision: Any robot, Any task, One brain. We tackle robotics in its full generality – building a continually improving, omni-bodied brain that can control any hardware for any task. Who are we? A passionate group of scientists & engineers driven by our shared vision. We have been researching AI and robotics for more than a decade. Our team includes pioneers of self-supervised learning, curiosity-driven exploration, end-to-end sim2real for visual locomotion, dexterous manipulation, learning from human videos, robot parkour, and many more. Many of these works have won awards at top-tier AI and Robotics conferences. Our team has also built production-ready systems at Anduril, Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, Kitty Hawk, Google, Everyday Robotics, and Amazon. Join us in our mission to build the robot brains of tomorrow.

Skild AI

383,431 views • 1 year ago

After 8 months of building in stealth and testing our infrastructure on 10000+ hours of real-world data and hundreds of unique environments, we're bringing FPV Labs into the open today. FPV Labs started with the following bet - if human data proves to be the underlying factor that determines scaling laws in general-purpose robotics, it will trigger the largest economic transformation in human history, and the underlying infrastructure that captures that data will determine how fast we get there. We will achieve this by building the full-stack infrastructure for capturing, processing, transferring, and evaluating human experience into spatial, temporal, and semantic knowledge for machines. Despite all the research novelty behind ChatGPT, its success can be attributed to one foundational fact - the scaling law of transformers. We believe the same dynamics have made their way into robotics. Recent studies showed task completion rates jumping from 30% to 70% when human demonstration data scaled from 1,000 to 20,000 hours, a log-linear trend that mirrors exactly what we saw in language and vision. Seeing these emergent signs of scaling law curves in robotics, we believe we are entering the era of general-purpose robotics policies, which makes the next few years the most exciting time in the history of this field. But the library of physical interactions required to train general-purpose robot policies does not exist yet. Over the last 8 months, we've seen dozens of companies emerge in this space. We were really happy to see new companies pushing this space forward, but we also saw the same pattern repeat: every egocentric data company was making some tradeoffs between quality, scale, and diversity. We have built FPV labs on the core principle that high-quality data is orders of magnitude more valuable than sheer volume. Case in point, self-driving cars collect thousands of hours of data per day, but only a small fraction of that data is actually useful for training better models. Several studies, like RT-2, have shown that as little as 1% of data improves as much as 25% on task success. The quality and diversity of data matter a lot more than scale, so there is clearly a power law curve in the downstream impact of data. We've spent months obsessing over data quality by building our stack, discarding it, rebuilding it, and iterating until we found a formula that doesn't compromise downstream quality at scale. We believe the downstream impact here is far more profound than most people realize. Workers globally are paid around $60 trillion per year in aggregate, and a lion's share of that compensation goes to physical labor - tasks that require navigating real spaces, manipulating real objects, and negotiating the infinite variability of the physical world. Human-to-robot transfer will be one of the most important infrastructures that will shape our society in the near future, and if it works, the economic impact will dwarf every technology transition that came before it in an exponential manner and lead to the creation of goods and services we can’t imagine today. Our mission is to lay the groundwork for us to transition into this future - the future of abundance. We are deeply grateful to our earliest believers, Paras Chopra and Lossfunk, who played a critical role in shaping our thinking.
0:36

After 8 months of building in stealth and testing our infrastructure on 10000+ hours of real-world data and hundreds of unique environments, we're bringing FPV Labs into the open today. FPV Labs started with the following bet - if human data proves to be the underlying factor that determines scaling laws in general-purpose robotics, it will trigger the largest economic transformation in human history, and the underlying infrastructure that captures that data will determine how fast we get there. We will achieve this by building the full-stack infrastructure for capturing, processing, transferring, and evaluating human experience into spatial, temporal, and semantic knowledge for machines. Despite all the research novelty behind ChatGPT, its success can be attributed to one foundational fact - the scaling law of transformers. We believe the same dynamics have made their way into robotics. Recent studies showed task completion rates jumping from 30% to 70% when human demonstration data scaled from 1,000 to 20,000 hours, a log-linear trend that mirrors exactly what we saw in language and vision. Seeing these emergent signs of scaling law curves in robotics, we believe we are entering the era of general-purpose robotics policies, which makes the next few years the most exciting time in the history of this field. But the library of physical interactions required to train general-purpose robot policies does not exist yet. Over the last 8 months, we've seen dozens of companies emerge in this space. We were really happy to see new companies pushing this space forward, but we also saw the same pattern repeat: every egocentric data company was making some tradeoffs between quality, scale, and diversity. We have built FPV labs on the core principle that high-quality data is orders of magnitude more valuable than sheer volume. Case in point, self-driving cars collect thousands of hours of data per day, but only a small fraction of that data is actually useful for training better models. Several studies, like RT-2, have shown that as little as 1% of data improves as much as 25% on task success. The quality and diversity of data matter a lot more than scale, so there is clearly a power law curve in the downstream impact of data. We've spent months obsessing over data quality by building our stack, discarding it, rebuilding it, and iterating until we found a formula that doesn't compromise downstream quality at scale. We believe the downstream impact here is far more profound than most people realize. Workers globally are paid around $60 trillion per year in aggregate, and a lion's share of that compensation goes to physical labor - tasks that require navigating real spaces, manipulating real objects, and negotiating the infinite variability of the physical world. Human-to-robot transfer will be one of the most important infrastructures that will shape our society in the near future, and if it works, the economic impact will dwarf every technology transition that came before it in an exponential manner and lead to the creation of goods and services we can’t imagine today. Our mission is to lay the groundwork for us to transition into this future - the future of abundance. We are deeply grateful to our earliest believers, Paras Chopra and Lossfunk, who played a critical role in shaping our thinking.

Abhishek Anand

82,126 views • 4 months ago

The robot is learning several novel tasks instantly, after just ONE demonstration each... Instant Policy makes it possible: no extra training, no weight updates, just pure in-context learning. It just got accepted at ICLR 2025, and it’s changing how robots learn. With just a single demo, a robot can pick up a new task and start performing it right away. Why this is a big deal: ✅ Learns tasks instantly with just one or a few demonstrations ✅ Improves over time as more demonstrations are given ✅ Uses simulation-based training with “pseudo-demonstrations” for scalability ✅ Can transfer skills across different robots and even follow language-defined tasks It brings in-context learning to robotics, opening up new possibilities for flexible, real-world automation. You can try it yourself: code and weights are available at • • • • Thank you to Edward Johns, Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College for sharing their work! 🙏
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The robot is learning several novel tasks instantly, after just ONE demonstration each... Instant Policy makes it possible: no extra training, no weight updates, just pure in-context learning. It just got accepted at ICLR 2025, and it’s changing how robots learn. With just a single demo, a robot can pick up a new task and start performing it right away. Why this is a big deal: ✅ Learns tasks instantly with just one or a few demonstrations ✅ Improves over time as more demonstrations are given ✅ Uses simulation-based training with “pseudo-demonstrations” for scalability ✅ Can transfer skills across different robots and even follow language-defined tasks It brings in-context learning to robotics, opening up new possibilities for flexible, real-world automation. You can try it yourself: code and weights are available at • • • • Thank you to Edward Johns, Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College for sharing their work! 🙏

Ilir Aliu

46,285 views • 1 year ago

At Axis, every trajectory submitted by our community undergoes a strict replay validation process. We run each submission through checker to verify whether the target task was successfully completed. To see how strict it is, check this demo (Task: Place The Toy Train On The Board Game Box). Real human data passes smoothly (Video 1). However, bots or manually altered data will fail (Video 2). Why? Faking numbers breaks the simulation's physics causality. Even tiny tweaks cause error accumulation, resulting in failed movements. This invalid data is automatically rejected. Because of this mechanism, data submitted via bots will ultimately fail our replay verification. Invalid data is strictly excluded from model training, and the task slot is reopened to the community to collect genuine, high-quality trajectories. Furthermore, we actively monitor for duplicated data. Trajectories that are identical lack the diversity required for robot learning and will not be credited by our scoring system. If we detect accounts submitting a massive volume of identical trajectories, all associated addresses will be permanently banned. For Axis, the quality and diversity of data are the only ways to solve the robotics generalization gap. They will always be our absolute top priorities.
0:41

At Axis, every trajectory submitted by our community undergoes a strict replay validation process. We run each submission through checker to verify whether the target task was successfully completed. To see how strict it is, check this demo (Task: Place The Toy Train On The Board Game Box). Real human data passes smoothly (Video 1). However, bots or manually altered data will fail (Video 2). Why? Faking numbers breaks the simulation's physics causality. Even tiny tweaks cause error accumulation, resulting in failed movements. This invalid data is automatically rejected. Because of this mechanism, data submitted via bots will ultimately fail our replay verification. Invalid data is strictly excluded from model training, and the task slot is reopened to the community to collect genuine, high-quality trajectories. Furthermore, we actively monitor for duplicated data. Trajectories that are identical lack the diversity required for robot learning and will not be credited by our scoring system. If we detect accounts submitting a massive volume of identical trajectories, all associated addresses will be permanently banned. For Axis, the quality and diversity of data are the only ways to solve the robotics generalization gap. They will always be our absolute top priorities.

Axis Robotics

30,876 views • 4 months ago

Today we are excited to open up Neuracore to the academic community! Neuracore is a new data foundation built to accelerate robot learning by removing one of the field’s biggest bottlenecks: capturing and working with high-fidelity multimodal robotics data. For the first time, researchers can store, view, and work with robotics data in a cloud-native system built specifically for large-scale learning, and we are making this core platform completely free for academia. The platform lets teams capture every sensor at its native rate, store and visualize data without loss, and then train and deploy models locally using our open-source code (Link in the comments). We are rolling out access to select academic institutions first. Anyone with an academic email can sign up, and if your institution is not part of the initial rollout, you will be able to join the waitlist directly. Beyond providing this infrastructure, we see an opportunity to build a global community where engineers and researchers can share, collaborate, and advance the frontier of robot learning together. Supported by our recent $3M pre-seed round led by Earlybird VC, we are excited to take this mission even further. Our long-term goal is for Neuracore to become the natural home for cutting-edge robot learning algorithms and real-world robotics experimentation, helping accelerate the next wave of Physical AI.
1:00

Today we are excited to open up Neuracore to the academic community! Neuracore is a new data foundation built to accelerate robot learning by removing one of the field’s biggest bottlenecks: capturing and working with high-fidelity multimodal robotics data. For the first time, researchers can store, view, and work with robotics data in a cloud-native system built specifically for large-scale learning, and we are making this core platform completely free for academia. The platform lets teams capture every sensor at its native rate, store and visualize data without loss, and then train and deploy models locally using our open-source code (Link in the comments). We are rolling out access to select academic institutions first. Anyone with an academic email can sign up, and if your institution is not part of the initial rollout, you will be able to join the waitlist directly. Beyond providing this infrastructure, we see an opportunity to build a global community where engineers and researchers can share, collaborate, and advance the frontier of robot learning together. Supported by our recent $3M pre-seed round led by Earlybird VC, we are excited to take this mission even further. Our long-term goal is for Neuracore to become the natural home for cutting-edge robot learning algorithms and real-world robotics experimentation, helping accelerate the next wave of Physical AI.

Neuracore

40,620 views • 8 months ago

For robots to be useful, they must be able to interact with a wide variety of environments; and yet, scaling interaction data is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Instead, much research revolves around sim-to-real manipulation — but mostly this has not been mobile manipulation. Recently, though, this has begun to change. Two recent papers from Tairan He and Haoru Xue show us how to unlock the potential of this technique, building policies which, without any real data at all, can move objects around in the world and open doors in the real world with a humanoid robot. Watch Episode #60 of RoboPapers now to learn more, hosted by Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan. In this episode, we cover two papers:. First is VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation; and second is DoorMan: Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer.
1:13:32

For robots to be useful, they must be able to interact with a wide variety of environments; and yet, scaling interaction data is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Instead, much research revolves around sim-to-real manipulation — but mostly this has not been mobile manipulation. Recently, though, this has begun to change. Two recent papers from Tairan He and Haoru Xue show us how to unlock the potential of this technique, building policies which, without any real data at all, can move objects around in the world and open doors in the real world with a humanoid robot. Watch Episode #60 of RoboPapers now to learn more, hosted by Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan. In this episode, we cover two papers:. First is VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation; and second is DoorMan: Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer.

RoboPapers

30,767 views • 6 months ago