Yanming Shao

RO
h-index2
4papers
15citations
Novelty57%
AI Score47

4 Papers

81.2ROMay 28
BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Models

Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation. However, dexterous manipulation remains challenging for VLA policies due to high-dimensional hand control and compounding execution errors, which makes real-world RL post-training essential for bridging the gap between visually grounded action generation and physically reliable dexterous execution. However, high-dimensional dexterous exploration often triggers temporal inconsistency, sample inefficiency and hardware risks in the real world. To address these challenges, we propose BORA, an offline-to-online RL post-training framework designed for real-world dexterous VLA models. In the offline phase, BORA constructs a critic that takes both the VLM's cognition tokens and action chunks as inputs. This design enables action-conditioned value guidance, allowing the critic to evaluate dexterous hand motions beyond visual context alone. During the subsequent online phase, BORA freezes the VLA base and introduces a lightweight, Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) chunk-wise residual adaptation mechanism to mitigate real-world execution errors and further correct the offline-learned intents within the actual physical environment. By inheriting the offline critic and employing intervention-driven rewards, BORA effectively corrects execution discrepancies and adapts to real-world physical variances while preserving the pretrained policy as a stable prior. Extensive evaluations across five complex real-world dexterous tasks demonstrate that BORA significantly outperforms pure imitation learning and traditional decoupled RL baselines, achieving a 33% absolute increase in average success rate under standard settings and up to a 43% improvement in unseen object generalization.

70.8ROMar 10
DexHiL: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training in Dexterous Manipulation

Yifan Han, Zhongxi Chen, Yuxuan Zhao et al.

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation, deploying them on specific and complex downstream tasks still demands effective post-training. In parallel, Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) learning has proven to be a powerful mechanism for refining robot policies. However, extending this paradigm to dexterous manipulation remains challenging: multi-finger control is high-dimensional, contact-intensive, and exhibits execution distributions that differ markedly from standard arm motions, leaving existing dexterous VLA systems limited in reliability and adaptability. We present DexHiL, the first integrated arm-hand human-in-the-loop framework for dexterous VLA models, enabling coordinated interventions over the arm and the dexterous hand within a single system. DexHiL introduces an intervention-aware data sampling strategy that prioritizes corrective segments for post-training, alongside a lightweight teleoperation interface that supports instantaneous human corrections during execution. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that DexHiL serves as an effective post-training framework, yielding a substantial performance leap, outperforming standard offline-only fine-tuning baselines by an average of 25% in success rates across distinct tasks. Project page: https://chenzhongxi-sjtu.github.io/dexhil/

RONov 24, 2024
Bimanual Grasp Synthesis for Dexterous Robot Hands

Yanming Shao, Chenxi Xiao

Humans naturally perform bimanual skills to handle large and heavy objects. To enhance robots' object manipulation capabilities, generating effective bimanual grasp poses is essential. Nevertheless, bimanual grasp synthesis for dexterous hand manipulators remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose the BimanGrasp algorithm for synthesizing bimanual grasps on 3D objects. The BimanGrasp algorithm generates grasp poses by optimizing an energy function that considers grasp stability and feasibility. Furthermore, the synthesized grasps are verified using the Isaac Gym physics simulation engine. These verified grasp poses form the BimanGrasp-Dataset, the first large-scale synthesized bimanual dexterous hand grasp pose dataset to our knowledge. The dataset comprises over 150k verified grasps on 900 objects, facilitating the synthesis of bimanual grasps through a data-driven approach. Last, we propose BimanGrasp-DDPM, a diffusion model trained on the BimanGrasp-Dataset. This model achieved a grasp synthesis success rate of 69.87\% and significant acceleration in computational speed compared to BimanGrasp algorithm.

ROMar 9
RoboRouter: Training-Free Policy Routing for Robotic Manipulation

Yiteng Chen, Zhe Cao, Hongjia Ren et al.

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches. Concrete policies typically attain high success rates on specific task distributions but lim-ited generalization beyond it. Rather than proposing an other monolithic policy, we propose to leverage the complementary strengths of existing approaches through intelligent policy routing. We introduce RoboRouter, a training-free framework that maintains a pool of heterogeneous policies and learns to select the best-performing policy for each task through accumulated execution experience. Given a new task, RoboRouter constructs a semantic task representation, retrieves historical records of similar tasks, predicts the optimal policy choice without requiring trial-and-error, and incorporates structured feedback to refine subsequent routing decisions. Integrating a new policy into the system requires only lightweight evaluation and incurs no training overhead. Across simulation benchmark and real-world evaluations, RoboRouter consistently outperforms than in-dividual policies, improving average success rate by more than 3% in simulation and over 13% in real-world settings, while preserving execution efficiency. Our results demonstrate that intelligent routing across heterogeneous, off-the-shelf policies provides a practical and scalable pathway toward building more capable robotic systems.