mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Uni-Skill: Building Self-Evolving Skill Repository for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv 2603.02623 ↗First posted 3 Mar 2026cs.RO cs.LGcited by 8

On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Self-evolving LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

While skill-centric approaches leverage foundation models to enhance generalization in compositional tasks, they often rely on fixed skill libraries, limiting adaptability to new tasks without manual intervention. To address this, we propose Uni-Skill, a Unified Skill-centric framework that supports skill-aware planning and facilitates automatic skill evolution. Unlike prior methods that restrict planning to predefined skills, Uni-Skill requests for new skill implementations when existing ones are insufficient, ensuring adaptable planning with self-augmented skill library. To support automatic implementation of diverse skills requested by the planning module, we construct SkillFolder, a VerbNet-inspired repository derived from large-scale unstructured robotic videos. SkillFolder introduces a hierarchical skill taxonomy that captures diverse skill descriptions at multiple levels of abstraction. By populating this taxonomy with large-scale, automatically annotated demonstrations, Uni-Skill shifts the paradigm of skill acquisition from inefficient manual annotation to efficient offline structural retrieval. Retrieved examples provide semantic supervision over behavior patterns and fine-grained references for spatial trajectories, enabling few-shot skill inference without deployment-time demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings verify the state-of-the-art performance of Uni-Skill over existing VLM-based skill-centric approaches, highlighting its advanced reasoning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization across a wide range of novel tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Self-evolving LLM agents, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.

Builds on

34 of 41 references.

References · 34

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  3. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
  4. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  5. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
  6. 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,037
  7. 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,172
  8. 2017The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sensecited by 1,092
  9. 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
  10. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,029
  11. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
  12. 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasetcited by 801
22 more
  1. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 733
  2. 2019RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environmentcited by 669
  3. 2022ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Modelscited by 598
  4. 2022Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulationcited by 545
  5. 2023ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilitiescited by 296
  6. 2022AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domainscited by 205
  7. 2023Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Modelcited by 115
  8. 2024LLARVA: Vision-Action Instruction Tuning Enhances Robot Learningcited by 87
  9. 2022Learning and Retrieval from Prior Data for Skill-based Imitation Learningcited by 77
  10. 2024Number it: Temporal Grounding Videos like Flipping Mangacited by 65
  11. 2023Behavior Retrieval: Few-Shot Imitation Learning by Querying Unlabeled Datasetscited by 56
  12. 2024RoboCodeX: Multimodal Code Generation for Robotic Behavior Synthesiscited by 55
  13. 2024DINOBot: Robot Manipulation via Retrieval and Alignment with Vision Foundation Modelscited by 43
  14. 2023Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language Modelscited by 42
  15. 2024STRAP: Robot Sub-Trajectory Retrieval for Augmented Policy Learningcited by 42
  16. 2024VLM See, Robot Do: Human Demo Video to Robot Action Plan via Vision Language Modelcited by 36
  17. 2023Lifelong Robot Learning with Human Assisted Language Plannerscited by 19
  18. 2022Behavior Trees in Robot Control Systemscited by 13
  19. 2024Zero-shot Imitation Policy via Search in Demonstration Datasetcited by 13
  20. 2025Robotic Programmer: Video Instructed Policy Code Generation for Robotic Manipulationcited by 10
  21. 2024Vocal Sandbox: Continual Learning and Adaptation for Situated Human-Robot Collaborationcited by 4
  22. 2025ProVox: Personalization and Proactive Planning for Situated Human-Robot Collaborationcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025UniDomain: Pretraining a Unified PDDL Domain from Real-World Demonstrations for Generalizable Robot Task Planning
  2. 2026Skill-Aware Diffusion for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation
  3. 2025RoboHiMan: A Hierarchical Evaluation Paradigm for Compositional Generalization in Long-Horizon Manipulation
  4. 2023Offline Skill Generalization via Task and Motion Planning
  5. 2023Generative Skill Chaining: Long-Horizon Skill Planning with Diffusion Models
  6. 2023SkillDiffuser: Interpretable Hierarchical Planning via Skill Abstractions in Diffusion-Based Task Execution
  7. 2025Learning Semantic Atomic Skills for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation
  8. 2025S2-Diffusion: Generalizing from Instance-level to Category-level Skills in Robot Manipulation