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Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data

Robotics 2025-09-25 v1

Abstract

Recent advances in generalist robot manipulation leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large-scale robot demonstrations to tackle diverse tasks in a zero-shot manner. A key challenge remains: scaling high-quality, action-labeled robot demonstration data, which existing methods rely on for robustness and generalization. To address this, we propose a method that benefits from videos without action labels - featuring humans and/or robots in action - enhancing open-vocabulary performance and enabling data-efficient learning of new tasks. Our method extracts dense, dynamic 3D point clouds at the hand or gripper location and uses a proposed 3D dynamics predictor for self-supervision. This predictor is then tuned to an action predictor using a smaller labeled dataset for action alignment. We show that our method not only learns from unlabeled human and robot demonstrations - improving downstream generalist robot policies - but also enables robots to learn new tasks without action labels (i.e., out-of-action generalization) in both real-world and simulated settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.19958,
  title  = {Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data},
  author = {Alexander Spiridonov and Jan-Nico Zaech and Nikolay Nikolov and Luc Van Gool and Danda Pani Paudel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.19958},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at Conference on Robot Learning 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:53:53.277Z