Generative Flow on Symbolic Abstractions for Embodiment Capability Discovery
cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SC
Submitted: 2026-10-12
Updated: 2026-10-12
Comments: The code and demonstration videos are available at https://www.youwei-yu.com/fosa
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Achieving complex, long-horizon robot behavior remains challenging because successful execution depends on skills grounded in a robot's physical affordances.
Terminology
Abstract
Achieving complex, long-horizon robot behavior remains challenging because successful execution depends on skills grounded in a robot's physical affordances. Existing training-task distributions are often handcrafted or sampled from large language models (LLMs), relying on semantic plausibility rather than embodiment-specific feasibility. This mismatch can produce curricula that are too difficult, redundant, or blind to non-obvious but learnable behaviors. We propose Generative Flow on Symbolic Abstractions (FOSA), a framework for discovering embodiment-specific capabilities by learning a grounded task generator. FOSA parameterizes an abstract policy as a Generative Flow Network that constructs symbolic task skeletons. Each skeleton is compiled into a simulation environment, where low-level policy-learning performance provides the reward signal for the abstract policy. Across heterogeneous robot platforms, FOSA discovers diverse and executable tasks near the robot's empirical capability frontier. After distilling the discovered task policies into a single language-conditioned policy, FOSA improves performance on unseen complex and long-horizon tasks. The code and demonstration videos are available at https://www.youwei-yu.com/fosa.
Sources
- Sim-to-Real: Learning Agile Locomotion For Quadruped Robots
- RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots
- Relay Policy Learning: Solving Long-Horizon Tasks via Imitation and Reinforcement Learning
- OPAL: Offline Primitive Discovery for Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning
- Adversarial Skill Chaining for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation via Terminal State Regularization
- Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
- Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function
- CIC: Contrastive Intrinsic Control for Unsupervised Skill Discovery
- Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Survey
- Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions
- Transferable Curricula through Difficulty Conditioned Generators
- Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models
- RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulation
- SAGE: Scalable Agentic 3D Scene Generation for Embodied AI
- RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
- Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success
- Transform2Act: Learning a Transform-and-Control Policy for Efficient Agent Design
- MetaMorph: Learning Universal Controllers with Transformers
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
- Exploration by Random Network Distillation
Related papers
- FMT x: An Efficient and Asymptotically Optimal Extension of the Fast Marching Tree for Dynamic Replanning
- MPCFormer: A physics-informed data-driven approach for explainable socially-aware autonomous driving
- RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies
- ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models
- HRDexDB: A 4D Dexterous Grasping Dataset Across Human and Multiple Robot Embodiments
- APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies