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arxiv:2602.09021

χ_{0}: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies

Published on Feb 9
Ā· Submitted by
Sima
on Feb 13
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Abstract

A resource-efficient robotic manipulation framework addresses distributional shifts through model arithmetic, stage-aware advantage estimation, and train-deploy alignment to achieve long-horizon task reliability.

AI-generated summary

High-reliability long-horizon robotic manipulation has traditionally relied on large-scale data and compute to understand complex real-world dynamics. However, we identify that the primary bottleneck to real-world robustness is not resource scale alone, but the distributional shift among the human demonstration distribution, the inductive bias learned by the policy, and the test-time execution distribution -- a systematic inconsistency that causes compounding errors in multi-stage tasks. To mitigate these inconsistencies, we propose χ_{0}, a resource-efficient framework with effective modules designated to achieve production-level robustness in robotic manipulation. Our approach builds off three technical pillars: (i) Model Arithmetic, a weight-space merging strategy that efficiently soaks up diverse distributions of different demonstrations, varying from object appearance to state variations; (ii) Stage Advantage, a stage-aware advantage estimator that provides stable, dense progress signals, overcoming the numerical instability of prior non-stage approaches; and (iii) Train-Deploy Alignment, which bridges the distribution gap via spatio-temporal augmentation, heuristic DAgger corrections, and temporal chunk-wise smoothing. χ_{0} enables two sets of dual-arm robots to collaboratively orchestrate long-horizon garment manipulation, spanning tasks from flattening, folding, to hanging different clothes. Our method exhibits high-reliability autonomy; we are able to run the system from arbitrary initial state for consecutive 24 hours non-stop. Experiments validate that χ_{0} surpasses the state-of-the-art Ļ€_{0.5} in success rate by nearly 250%, with only 20-hour data and 8 A100 GPUs. Code, data and models will be released to facilitate the community.

Community

Paper submitter

🧄 Live-stream robotic teamwork that folds clothes. 6 clothes in 3 minutes straight.

χ₀ = 20hrs data + 8 A100s + 3 key insights:

  • Mode Consistency: align your distributions
  • Model Arithmetic: merge, don't retrain
  • Stage Advantage: pivot wisely

šŸ”— http://mmlab.hk/research/kai0
šŸ“¦ Data + checkpoints + code: https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/KAI0

[2/5] Problem: Distribution Mismatch

Training data ≠ Model behavior ≠ Real-world execution

This gap causes failures.

Solution → Mode Consistency:
• DAgger for failure recovery
• Augmentation for coverage
• Inference smoothing for clean execution

[3/5] Problem: Expensive Iteration

Collect new data → Retrain everything → Repeat

Slow yet expensive.

How? Model Arithmetic:
• Train only on new data
• Merge via weight interpolation
• Merged model > full-dataset model

Models trained separately preserve distinct modes.

[4/5] Problem: Long-Horizon Credit Assignment

6-minute tasks. Which actions actually helped?

Solution → Stage Advantage:
• Decompose into semantic stages
• Predict advantage directly (not value-diff)
• Smoother supervision, less error compounding

[5/5] Bottom Line

• Not all robot data is equally valuable
• Fast iteration > bruteforce scaling
• Weight-space merging can outperform joint training
• Stage-aware advantage estimation helps long-horizon tasks

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