Andrej Orsula, Miguel Olivares-Mendez, Carol Martinezcs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Space robots operate in extreme environments where hardware degradation can critically compromise traditional control strategies. While continual reinforcement learning offers a promising mechanism for online adaptation, it inherently requires access to a reward signal during deployment. However, precise reward computation in space is often infeasible due to the lack of external tracking systems and the overall complexity of the environment. To address the challenge of unobservable rewards, we introduce a reward-free continual learning framework that leverages latent-state world models. By pre-training a model-based agent across diverse simulations, the world model learns a robust predictor of the reward structure within its latent space. Upon deployment to an environment with severe hardware degradation, we freeze the observation encoder and reward predictor to update only the transition dynamics of the world model through unsupervised rollouts. By training the policy entirely on imagined trajectories generated by this updated world model, the agent adapts to altered dynamics without receiving new rewards. We demonstrate our approach across simulated planetary traversal, orbital navigation, and precision assembly tasks subjected to severe morphological failures.
Jiaqi Wang, Zhou Fang, Qiongfeng Shi +1cs.RO cs.CV
Pretrained Vision-Language-Action models provide a strong foundation for robot learning, but sequentially adapting them to diverse skills can perturb the representations and velocity mappings used by previous skills, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Architecture-based approaches improve retention by isolating skills but lead to increased inference footprint. Recent subspace-constrained methods restrict parameter updates in an orthogonal subspace to minimize interference but impose a unified constraint on the entire model. We analyze the distinct roles of internal VLA components and identify two VLA-specific challenges. First, the VLM maintains broad semantic representations, making it vulnerable to capacity exhaustion, whereas the ActionHead refines semantics into localized velocity patterns that are highly sensitive to perturbations. Second, the final velocity decoder serves as a readout layer. Freezing it forms an output-stage expressivity bottleneck, while updating it risks overwriting previous velocity mappings. To this end, we propose OrthoSkillVLA, a parameter-efficient framework for continual skill learning in pretrained VLA models without demonstration replay. Given the representation heterogeneity, we impose separate subspace constraints on the VLM and ActionHead, preserving reusable semantic capacity while protecting localized velocity patterns. For the output layer, we introduce a lightweight feature-aware MoE decoder, where each skill is allocated a compact expert and a training-free router selects the expert according to feature-space affinity. Extensive simulated and real-world evaluations, together with ablations, demonstrate that OrthoSkillVLA better preserves prior skills while acquiring new ones.
On analog neuromorphic hardware, intrinsic device noise is normally an accuracy tax. We ask whether it can instead consolidate memories. We cast per-synapse consolidation as a Doob h-transform: condition each weight's stochastic dynamics on never crossing a memory-critical barrier around its consolidated value. The conditioned diffusion gains an extra drift sigma^2 d/dw log h, a restoring force amplified by the noise variance itself that diverges at the barrier. We are explicit about novelty: the anchored drift -s(w-mu) our rule also contains is not ours (the limit of OUA, MESU, and EWC), and we surrender it. We claim only the conjunction of (a) the Doob barrier-conditioning as a synaptic rule, to our knowledge unclaimed (every h-transform use we found is generative modeling, none synaptic), and (b) a falsifiable prediction: increasing intrinsic noise non-monotonically improves sequential-task retention, an inverted-U that anchored-drift methods cannot produce. We pre-registered this as a go/no-go gate; it passes. On single-head Split-MNIST (8 seeds) the rule lifts retention 10.9 points at an interior optimum (paired Wilcoxon p=0.004), while matched OU/EWC/MESU anchors are monotone. Ablating the conditioning removes the effect; the optimum tracks the barrier; the inverted-U survives a second task stream and the realization where noise enters the forward pass. We then measure the intrinsic noise on real BrainScaleS-2 silicon (additive, trial-to-trial independent, tunable via on-chip averaging) and run the rule on the chip with its noise in the training loop: barrier-conditioning retains a prior task 15.6 points better than the matched control at matched average accuracy, a stability-plasticity shift, not a net-accuracy win (single seed; retention measured, energy modelled). Intrinsic analog noise thus becomes a consolidation dividend a digital accelerator must spend energy to generate.
In non-stationary streaming environments, simultaneously adapting to complex, non-linear domain shifts via continual learning while mitigating the catastrophic effects of severe, uncalibrated label noise poses a fundamental mathematical challenge. In this paper, we propose \FlatManifold{}, a novel, streamlined robust continual learning framework that utilizes a Nyström manifold flattening map based on the kernel trick and projection onto an orthogonalized Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Unlike traditional methods that rely on complex, error-prone sample-filtering pipelines, the proposed approach exploits the intrinsic mathematical robustness of the flattened space itself. By mapping feature distributions onto a fixed orthogonal target topology with a ridge regularizer, the framework naturally smoothes and counteracts the influence of extreme label noise during the optimization process. Concurrently, catastrophic forgetting is prevented via a continual topology brake term that leverages the covariance matrix of past experiences. Extensive evaluation on real-world multi-session robotics datasets demonstrates that even under severe conditions featuring 40\% symmetric label noise, \FlatManifold{} successfully mitigates gradient corruption. Under extreme cross-session domain shifts spanning various seasons and lighting conditions, the proposed framework establishes high generalization capabilities, significantly outperforming standard sequential optimization baselines and proving that structural linearization itself serves as a powerful mathematical barrier against distributed label corruption.
Robot policies inevitably encounter failures when deployed in real environments. Naive retries often repeat the same mistakes, while many existing recovery methods rely on human intervention. In this paper, we propose Failure-Aware Retry (FAR), a framework that enables robots to learn from previous failures at test time, adapt their behavior accordingly, and eventually complete the task autonomously. FAR combines Failure-Contrastive Preference Adaptation, which constructs preference learning data from failures to steer the policy away from previously unsuccessful behaviors, with lightweight action perturbations during retries to encourage local exploration. We further incorporate successful recovery trajectories into a training loop for continual policy improvement. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks show that FAR substantially improves success rates and robustness, with average gains of 17.6% over the standard diffusion policy in simulation and 11.7% in the real world. In addition, FAR significantly improves data efficiency under both reset and timestep budgets during continual policy improvement by exploiting informative failure cases.
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.
Going beyond predicting robot actions, World Action Models (WAMs) can also generate future visual observations. We build on this generative capability to propose Recurrent Generative Replay (REGEN), a continual imitation learning framework that synthesizes pseudo-replay trajectories, enabling a robot policy to rehearse previously learned tasks without storing their original human demonstrations. During continual adaptation, REGEN recursively queries the WAM to synthesize pseudo-replay trajectories conditioned only on prior task instructions and current-task observations. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation settings show that REGEN reduces catastrophic forgetting by up to $50\%$ relative to sequential fine-tuning, while approaching the performance of privileged experience replay methods that require access to real replay data. Finally, we analyze the factors limiting generated replay, identifying long-horizon visual degradation and action-observation inconsistency as the primary bottlenecks. Our results establish WAMs as a promising foundation for continual robot learning without stored demonstrations.
Maggie Wang, Lars Osterberg, Stephen Tian +3cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.g., "move gripper to the bowl", "lift upward", "pour the bottle"). InSight consists of two primary stages: (1) an automated segmentation pipeline that partitions demonstrations into labeled primitives via VLM plan decomposition and end-effector poses to enable VLA primitive steerability, and (2) a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives required to accomplish a novel task, autonomously attempts demonstrations of the missing primitives with VLM-proposed low-level control, and automatically labels, stores, and integrates successful demonstrations into the VLA training set. We evaluate InSight across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring, without any human demonstrations of these target skills. Once learned, these primitives can be composed to execute novel, long-horizon tasks without additional human demonstrations. Our findings demonstrate that primitive steerability provides a practical foundation for continual skill acquisition in VLA policies. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io.
Ulas Berk Karli, Tesca Fitzgeraldcs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are commonly fine-tuned through passive imitation learning, where additional demonstrations are collected for tasks where the policy performs poorly. This approach incurs several downsides: it requires the robot to fail before data collection is triggered, provides little guidance about which states require supervision, and wastes demonstrator effort on redundant parts of the task where the policy already performs well. In this paper, we propose an active, continual learning paradigm for VLAs. We demonstrate that active, uncertainty-guided data collection leads to more efficient fine-tuning than when using passively-collected demonstrations. However, we also find that fine-tuning only on actively-collected recovery data leads to catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate techniques for continual learning, including replay-based data mixing and elastic weight consolidation, and identify tradeoffs between plasticity to uncertainty-guided recovery data and retention of previously learned behaviors. Overall, our work contributes an empirical study of active continual learning for autoregressive VLAs, establishing that uncertainty-guided recovery demonstrations can improve adaptation efficiency while also revealing open challenges when targeted new data is incorporated into large robot policies.
Current embodied world models are primarily optimized for predictive objectives, limiting their ability to generalize under distribution shifts and reason systematically about unseen situations and hypothetical interventions. We argue that embodied intelligence should move beyond predictive world modeling toward self-evolving cognitive systems that continually construct and refine internal causal representations through interaction with the environment. To this end, we propose a self-evolving cognitive framework via causal world modeling for embodied scientific intelligence, which integrates three complementary components: causal world modeling, intervention-driven causal reasoning, and continual cognitive refinement. The proposed framework continuously revises and expands its internal causal world model through causal discovery, intervention-driven feedback, and counterfactual reasoning, supporting continual cognitive refinement and enabling cognition itself to evolve over time. Furthermore, we reinterpret embodied interaction not merely as a means of trajectory optimization, but as an epistemic process for causal hypothesis generation, intervention-driven experimentation, and continual knowledge acquisition. This work provides a conceptual and theoretical foundation for a transition from predictive intelligence toward epistemic intelligence, in which intelligence emerges through the continual construction, revision, and refinement of causal world models via interaction with the environment. Accordingly, an intervention-driven causal-epistemic benchmarking paradigm is suggested for evaluating self-evolving embodied scientific intelligence.
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.
Embodied Continual Learning (ECL) aims to enable robots to continually acquire new manipulation tasks while retaining previously learned behaviors under closed-loop control. Compared with conventional continual learning, ECL suffers from more severe catastrophic forgetting. Feature drift accumulated under closed-loop control progressively propagates through sequential decision-making, leading to degradation of previously learned behaviors. A key challenge in ECL lies in structured skill reuse across continually evolving tasks, since existing methods primarily focus on skill learning without explicitly organizing them for coherent task execution. To address this issue, we propose SCE, a Skill-Compositional Experts framework for ECL. SCE builds a skill base via Compositional Skill Grounding (CSG), which decomposes task demonstrations into reusable skills. Based on this, Dual Execution-and-Transition Experts (DETE) enable new task learning through skill composition, where one branch ensures skill execution and the other supports transitions between skills for coherent behavior. Experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SCE consistently improves retention and overall task performance. Further feature drift analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method. Project website: https://eqcy.github.io/sce/.
Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in language-conditioned robotic manipulation. However, deploying these models in open-ended environments requires continuously acquiring novel skills, a process that inevitably triggers severe catastrophic forgetting of previously learned behaviors. While experience replay (ER) serves as a standard mitigating strategy, naive uniform sampling fundamentally misaligns with the temporal characteristics of manipulation trajectories. It systematically under-samples brief but causally critical sub-skills, leading to phase starvation, and completely overlooks the varying degrees of forgetting across historical tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce PHASER, an architecture-agnostic continual learning framework. PHASER employs a phase-centric capacity allocation to guarantee equal memory support for all sub-skills, coupled with a multi-modal interference routing strategy that dynamically prioritizes historical phases at high risk of forgetting. Furthermore, to enable fully autonomous lifelong adaptation, we integrate Auto-PC, a lightweight pipeline combining unsupervised action-signal change-point detection with VLM-based semantic verification to extract temporal boundaries without intensive manual supervision. Evaluated across three VLA backbones on LIBERO continual learning suites, PHASER yields substantial empirical improvements, increasing Average Success Rate (ASR) by up to 31% over matched-budget ER and achieving an 87.8% final ASR on the LIBERO-Goal CL setting.