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SkillWeaver: Agentic Exploration over Neural Interaction Skills for Scalable Robot Data Generation

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arXiv:2609.36171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale demonstrations have driven unprecedented progress in robot learning, yet collecting robot data through teleoperation is expensive and difficult to scale to diverse environments and long-horizon tasks. Simulation offers a scalable alternative, but existing data-generation pipelines often rely on open-loop controllers, scripted skill sequences, or task-specific programs. We introduce SkillWeaver, an agentic framework that autonomously generates robot experience by exploring over Neural Interaction Skills (NIS): reusable, parameterized, closed-loop policies that expose learned physical interaction capabilities to a reasoning agent. Given a task and a simulated environment, a VLM agent reasons about what to do next, invokes and param…

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: He Zhu, Lusen Zhao, Kwan Man Cheng, Su Li, Katerina Fragkiadaki
SkillWeaver: Agentic Exploration over Neural Interaction Skills for Scalable Robot Data Generation
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[Submitted on 28 Sep 2026]

Title:SkillWeaver: Agentic Exploration over Neural Interaction Skills for Scalable Robot Data Generation

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Abstract:Large-scale demonstrations have driven unprecedented progress in robot learning, yet collecting robot data through teleoperation is expensive and difficult to scale to diverse environments and long-horizon tasks. Simulation offers a scalable alternative, but existing data-generation pipelines often rely on open-loop controllers, scripted skill sequences, or task-specific programs. We introduce SkillWeaver, an agentic framework that autonomously generates robot experience by exploring over Neural Interaction Skills (NIS): reusable, parameterized, closed-loop policies that expose learned physical interaction capabilities to a reasoning agent. Given a task and a simulated environment, a VLM agent reasons about what to do next, invokes and parameterizes NIS to interact with the environment, observes their outcomes, and generates verification, reflection, and memory to guide subsequent exploration. We instantiate NIS as reinforcement-learned policies for closed-loop, contact-rich manipulation and organize exploration as verifier-guided tree search, enabling the agent to discover successful long-horizon behaviors without relying on predetermined execution pipelines. SkillWeaver scales autonomously to 39.1K demonstrations across 14.1K scenes, which we distill into visuomotor policies. Across simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation, training on SkillWeaver-generated experience substantially improves generalization to novel objects, spatial configurations, tasks, and environments, and enables zero- and few-shot sim-to-sim and sim-to-real transfer. Our results suggest agentic exploration over neural interaction skills as a scalable alternative for robot data generation.

Comments: Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO)

Cite as: arXiv:2609.36171 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.36171v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36171

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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From: He Zhu [view email] [v1] Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:41:42 UTC (29,035 KB)

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  • AI generation is temporarily unavailable; this entry was preserved with deterministic fallback metadata.
  • arXiv:2609.36171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale demonstrations have driven unprecedented progress in robot learning, yet collecting robot data through teleoperation is…

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