Ep#86: RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model

Ep#86: RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model

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 [https://x.com/jiazhi_yang2024]. 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! Abstract Despite the sustained scaling on model capacity and data acquisition, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle in contact-rich and dynamic manipulation tasks, where minor execution deviations can compound into failures. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled path to robustness, on-policy RL in the physical world is constrained by safety risk, hardware cost, and environment reset. To bridge this gap, we present RISE, a scalable framework of robotic reinforcement learning via imagination. At its core is a Compositional World Model that (i) predicts multi-view future via a controllable dynamics model, and (ii) evaluates imagined outcomes with a progress value model, producing informative advantages for the policy improvement. Such compositional design allows state and value to be tailored by best-suited yet distinct architectures and objectives. These components are integrated into a closed-loop self-improving pipeline that continuously generates imaginary rollouts, estimates advantages, and updates the policy in imaginary space without costly physical interaction. Across three challenging real-world tasks, RISE yields significant improvement over prior art, with more than +35% absolute performance increase in dynamic brick sorting, +45% for backpack packing, and +35% for box closing, respectively. Learn More Project Page: https://opendrivelab.com/RISE/ [https://opendrivelab.com/RISE/] ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11075 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11075] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robopapers.substack.com [https://robopapers.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep#85: Tutor Intelligence

Collecting robot data at scale is key to deploying working manipulation policies, and the team from Tutor Intelligence is here to tell us about how to accomplish it. Their new announcement: a massive, 100-robot “data factory,” with a behind-the-scenes look at how to build a teleoperation platform and how to make robots and policies that are useful for their customers. Tutor Intelligence is a full-stack robotics company: they build robot arms, they sell robot arms, they write the software and they train neural networks. Josh Gruenstein [https://x.com/joshgruenstein], Jesse Michel [https://x.com/JesseMMichel], Shiraz [https://x.com/shirazkn] Khan, and Joe McCalmon join us to tell us more about how they scale both teleop data and human interventions from their teleoperators in order to train the policies they need. Watch Episode #85 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more! Learn More Blog post: https://tutorintelligence.com/blog/building-a-100-robot-data-factory-toward-factory-ready-ai [https://tutorintelligence.com/blog/building-a-100-robot-data-factory-toward-factory-ready-ai] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robopapers.substack.com [https://robopapers.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep#84: Robometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons

Learning robust, general-purpose reward functions for robotics unlocks many potential applications, like on-robot reinforcement learning or dataset validation. However, there’s a question of how to actually train such reward functions. Training success/failure prediction leads to ambiguous signals partway through a demonstration — it’s hard to measure progress — making the method unsuitable for reinforcement learning, among other things. Predicting progress, on the other hand, does not give a good way of using failure data. So why not do both? Robometer combines both progress and preference supervision, resulting in a stable, scalable, and highly general reward learning approach. Anthony Liang, Yigit Korkmaz, and Jesse Zhang join us to tell us more. Watch Episode #84 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more! Abstract General-purpose robot reward models are typically trained to predict absolute task progress from expert demonstrations, providing only local, frame-level supervision. While effective for expert demonstrations, this paradigm scales poorly to large-scale robotics datasets where failed and suboptimal trajectories are abundant and assigning dense progress labels is ambiguous. We introduce Robometer, a scalable reward modeling framework that combines intra-trajectory progress supervision with inter-trajectory preference supervision. Robometer is trained with a dual objective: a frame-level progress loss that anchors reward magnitude on expert data, and a trajectory-comparison preference loss that imposes global ordering constraints across trajectories of the same task, enabling effective learning from both real and augmented failed trajectories. To support this formulation at scale, we curate RBM-1M, a reward-learning dataset comprising over one million trajectories spanning diverse robot embodiments and tasks, including substantial suboptimal and failure data. Across benchmarks and real-world evaluations, Robometer learns more generalizable reward functions than prior methods and improves robot learning performance across a diverse set of downstream applications. Code, model weights, and videos at this https URL [https://robometer.github.io/]. Learn More Project page: https://robometer.github.io/ [https://robometer.github.io/] ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02115 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02115] Code on Github: https://github.com/robometer/robometer [https://github.com/robometer/robometer] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robopapers.substack.com [https://robopapers.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep#83: PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation

Spatial understanding is important to moving around in complex environments and is a huge part of the challenge of generalizing to new scenes. Most world models, however, largely ignore this spatial dimension, focusing on 2D images. Not PointWorld, though. PointWorld is a 3D world model trained from real and simulated data which can perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks on a real robot, including grasping or handling articulated objects, all without any additional fine tuning. Wenlong Huang joins us to tell us more about what makes this work and how it’s different from other world models. Watch Episode #83 of RoboPapers, with Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan, to learn more! Abstract Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. References Project page: https://point-world.github.io/ [https://point-world.github.io/] ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03782 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03782] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robopapers.substack.com [https://robopapers.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep#82: SimTooReal: An Object-Centric Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Tool Manipulation

Humans use tools to perform almost all of the physical work that we do from day to day. However, tools come in many different sizes and shapes, and it’s very difficult to collect human data for them in general. What about training in simulation? SimTooReal aims to address this through, unsurprisingly, sim-to-real learning. Kushal Kedia [https://x.com/kushalk_] and Tyler Lum [https://x.com/tylerlum23] talk about how it works: they procedurally generate tool-like objects, and then train with the universal objective of moving objects around to different locations. This creates a general-purpose model which can manipulate various tools to perform a variety of tasks in the real world. Watch episode #82 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho and Jiafei Duan, now to learn more! Abstract The ability to manipulate tools significantly expands the set of tasks a robot can perform. Yet, tool manipulation represents a challenging class of dexterity, requiring grasping thin objects, in-hand object rotations, and forceful interactions. Since collecting teleoperation data for these behaviors is challenging, sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising alternative. However, prior approaches typically require substantial engineering effort to model objects and tune reward functions for each task. In this work, we propose SimToolReal, taking a step towards generalizing sim-to-real RL policies for tool manipulation. Instead of focusing on a single object and task, we procedurally generate a large variety of tool-like object primitives in simulation and train a single RL policy with the universal goal of manipulating each object to random goal poses. This approach enables SimToolReal to perform general dexterous tool manipulation at test-time without any object or task-specific training. We demonstrate that SimToolReal outperforms prior retargeting and fixed-grasp methods by 37% while matching the performance of specialist RL policies trained on specific target objects and tasks. Finally, we show that SimToolReal generalizes across a diverse set of everyday tools, achieving strong zero-shot performance over 120 real-world rollouts spanning 24 tasks, 12 object instances, and 6 tool categories. Learn More Project page: https://simtoolreal.github.io/ [https://simtoolreal.github.io/] ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16863 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16863] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robopapers.substack.com [https://robopapers.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]