Reading notes • Robot learning • 2026
Six recent papers on teaching robots to act, taken apart and rebuilt as interactive, illustrated walk-throughs, including a three-part series on vision-language-action foundation models: π₀, GR00T N1, and π0.7. Each one narrates the core mechanism step by step, with live canvas widgets you can replay and real figures from the paper. Built to understand, not just to skim.

A 5B steerable generalist robot policy whose gains come from nameable engineering: train on every kind of data except sim, then move the supervision into the prompt so a data-quality score cures the curse of mixed data and a painted future frame turns action prediction into inverse dynamics.
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Learn good robot behavior from suboptimal, noisy demonstrations by borrowing the ambient-diffusion trick from generative modeling, so bad data helps instead of hurts.
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Robots that invent their own tasks during open-ended play, distill the experience into a reusable skill library, and redeploy it to solve held-out tasks at test time.
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Grow the planning horizon one knot at a time to turn imperfect human motion into physically feasible humanoid loco-manipulation, then track it with RL that transfers zero-shot to a real Unitree G1.
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A dual-system humanoid foundation model whose real trick is data: it mines action-less video two ways, a VQ-VAE that learns latent motion codes and an inverse-dynamics model that invents pseudo-actions, multiplying 88 hours of real robot data into roughly 827.
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Turn a pretrained vision-language model into a robot by bolting on a small action expert trained with conditional flow matching, so it generates continuous, multimodal action chunks and runs dexterous behaviors at up to 50 Hz.
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