Robotics paper index

Pretraining Knows What, Simulation Teaches How: Compositional Generalization in a Sim-Trained Robot Agent

2026-10-26 · arXiv: 2610.35817

One-line summary

A robotics research paper on Pretraining Knows What, Simulation Teaches How: Compositional Generalization in a Sim-Trained Robot Agent.

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

A robot policy needs to understand what a task is asking for in a scene, and how to move the robot to accomplish that task. To achieve these two skills, we introduce Zero-real Agent Policy (ZAP), a recipe that teaches a small off-the-shelf vision-language model to control a robot via a simple tool harness. We use a pretrained 27B parameter model to bootstrap world understanding and reasoning, followed by supervised fine-tuning and GRPO on simple simulated tasks to teach it how to move the robot. Without any real-world robot data during training, ZAP reaches 96.7% success on real-world tasks, matching GPT-6 Astra in our harness and outperforming the MolmoAct2 VLA (33.3%), while running 3x faster and 17x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra. We demonstrate that ZAP also generalizes to completely new objects, goals, strategies, and language by seating a test tube in a rack (and choosing a different hole in the rack when prompted), handing a test tube between arms mid-air, drawing an X on a tic-tac-toe board, and playing chess. These goals and types of manipulation don't appear in our training data. Furthermore, ZAP also transfers to an unseen embodiment. On a single-arm Franka, ZAP reaches 55.9% on RoboLab-120, 4.9 percentage points ahead of the leading VLA/WAM baseline.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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