Escaping the Diversity Trap in Robotic Manipulation via Anchor-Centric Adaptation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07381v1
• Date: Fri, 08 May 2026 07:35:24 GMT
• Title: Escaping the Diversity Trap in Robotic Manipulation via Anchor-Centric Adaptation
• Abstract summary: "Maximizing coverage" by collecting diverse, single-shot demonstrations can be self-defeating due to non-vanishing estimation noise.<n>We formalize this phenomenon as a Coverage--Density Trade-off.<n>We propose Anchor-Centric Adaptation (ACA), a two-stage framework that first stabilizes a policy skeleton through repeated demonstrations at core anchors, then expands coverage to high-risk boundaries via teacher-forced error mining and constrained residual updates.
• Score: 50.23374353859762
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer broad general capabilities, deploying them on specific hardware requires real-world adaptation to bridge the embodiment gap. Since robot demonstrations are costly, this adaptation must often occur under a strict data budget. In this work, we identify a critical diversity trap: the standard heuristic of "maximizing coverage" by collecting diverse, single-shot demonstrations can be self-defeating due to non-vanishing estimation noise. We formalize this phenomenon as a Coverage--Density Trade-off. By decomposing the policy error into estimation (density) and extrapolation (coverage) terms, we characterize an interior optimal allocation of unique conditions for a fixed budget. Guided by this analysis, we propose Anchor-Centric Adaptation (ACA), a two-stage framework that first stabilizes a policy skeleton through repeated demonstrations at core anchors, then selectively expands coverage to high-risk boundaries via teacher-forced error mining and constrained residual updates. Real-robot experiments validate our trade-off framework and demonstrate that ACA significantly improves task reliability and success rates over standard diverse sampling strategies under the same budget.

Related papers

• Activation Steering for Synthetic Data Generation: The Role of Diversity in Downstream Safety Detection [18.555524134112755]
  Activation Steering (AS) has emerged as a data-efficient method for generating target-concept-aligned responses.<n>We present a two-fold study with intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation across $4$ concepts.<n>We find that increasing steering strength reduces response diversity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-27T15:59:45Z)
• Too Correct to Learn: Reinforcement Learning on Saturated Reasoning Data [55.84428098924793]
  We propose Constrained Uniform Top-K Sampling (CUTS), a parameter-free decoding strategy enforcing structure-preserving exploration.<n>We integrate this into Mixed-CUTS, a training framework synergizing exploitative and exploratory rollouts to amplify intra-group advantage variance.<n> Notably, Mixed-CUTS improves Pass@1 accuracy on the challenging AIME25 benchmark by up to 15.1% over standard GRPO.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-20T16:43:28Z)
• Uncovering Linguistic Fragility in Vision-Language-Action Models via Diversity-Aware Red Teaming [64.48633529149579]
  We propose a novel framework to expose the vulnerabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models against linguistic variations.<n>Our method reduces the average task success rate from 93.33% to 5.85%, demonstrating a scalable approach to stress-testing VLA agents.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-07T08:43:36Z)
• Byzantine-Robust and Differentially Private Federated Optimization under Weaker Assumptions [89.52532304099522]
  Federated Learning (FL) enables clients to collaboratively train a shared model without centralizing their raw data, offering an inherent level of privacy.<n> gradients and model updates can still leak sensitive information, while malicious servers may mount adversarial attacks such as Byzantine manipulation.<n>These vulnerabilities highlight the need to address differential privacy (DP) and Byzantine robustness within a unified framework.<n>We propose Byz-Clip21-SGD2M, a new algorithm that integrates robust aggregation with double momentum and carefully designed clipping.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-24T17:39:09Z)
• OmniVL-Guard: Towards Unified Vision-Language Forgery Detection and Grounding via Balanced RL [63.388513841293616]
  Existing forgery detection methods fail to handle the interleaved text, images, and videos prevalent in real-world misinformation.<n>To bridge this gap, this paper targets to develop a unified framework for omnibus vision-language forgery detection and grounding.<n>We propose textbf OmniVL-Guard, a balanced reinforcement learning framework for omnibus vision-language forgery detection and grounding.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-11T09:41:36Z)
• Additive Distributionally Robust Ranking and Selection [0.8283940114367679]
  We propose a simple additive allocation (AA) procedure that aims to exclusively sample the $k + m - 1$ previously hypothesized critical scenarios.<n>We prove that AA is consistent and, surprisingly, achieves additivity in the strongest sense.<n>Results offer new and counterintuitive insights into the additive structure of DRR&S.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-07T17:36:29Z)
• Data-Driven Calibration of Prediction Sets in Large Vision-Language Models Based on Inductive Conformal Prediction [0.0]
  We propose a model-agnostic uncertainty quantification method that integrates dynamic threshold calibration and cross-modal consistency verification.<n>We show that the framework achieves stable performance across varying calibration-to-test split ratios, underscoring its robustness for real-world deployment in healthcare, autonomous systems, and other safety-sensitive domains.<n>This work bridges the gap between theoretical reliability and practical applicability in multi-modal AI systems, offering a scalable solution for hallucination detection and uncertainty-aware decision-making.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-24T15:39:46Z)
• When Demonstrations Meet Generative World Models: A Maximum Likelihood Framework for Offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning [62.00672284480755]
  This paper aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of expertise in executing a task has applications in safety-sensitive applications such as clinical decision making and autonomous driving.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-15T04:14:20Z)
• Posterior Differential Regularization with f-divergence for Improving Model Robustness [95.05725916287376]
  We focus on methods that regularize the model posterior difference between clean and noisy inputs. We generalize the posterior differential regularization to the family of $f$-divergences. Our experiments show that regularizing the posterior differential with $f$-divergence can result in well-improved model robustness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-23T19:58:01Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.