mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

RoboRouter: Training-Free Policy Routing for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv 2603.07892 ↗First posted 9 Mar 2026cs.ROcited by 6

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reinforcement learning and post-training

Abstract (arXiv)

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches. Concrete policies typically attain high success rates on specific task distributions, but limited generalization beyond it. Rather than proposing another monolithic policy, we propose to leverage the complementary strengths of existing approaches through intelligent policy routing. We introduce RoboRouter, a training-free framework that maintains a pool of heterogeneous policies and learns to select the best-performing policy for each task through accumulated execution experience. Given a new task, RoboRouter constructs a semantic task representation, retrieves historical records of similar tasks, predicts the optimal policy choice without requiring trial-and-error, and incorporates structured feedback to refine subsequent routing decisions. Integrating a new policy into the system requires only a lightweight evaluation and does not incur training overhead. Across simulation benchmark and real-world evaluations, RoboRouter consistently outperforms individual policies, improving the average success rate by more than 3% in simulation and 13% in real-world settings, while preserving execution efficiency. Our results demonstrate that intelligent routing across heterogeneous, off-the-shelf policies provides a practical and scalable pathway toward building more capable robotic systems.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning and post-training, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 100 of its 120 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.

Builds on

100 of 120 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning11 Sep

Other references · 99

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38 more
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SWAP: Stepwise Action Policy Routing for Vision-Language-Action Models
  2. 2026ArmnetBench v0.1: Parallel Real-World Evaluation of Manipulation Policies on a Low-Cost Arm Farm
  3. 2026HybridFlow: A 2-NFE Generative Policy for Real-Time Robotic Manipulation
  4. 2026RoMAN-Flow: Taming Autoregressive Normalizing Flows for Offline Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation
  5. 2026Exploring the Limits of Combinatorial Generalization in Embodied Manipulation
  6. 2025SpeedAug: Policy Acceleration via Tempo-Enriched Policy and RL Fine-Tuning
  7. 2023Language-Conditioned Semantic Search-Based Policy for Robotic Manipulation Tasks
  8. 2026AtomVLA: Scalable Post-Training for Robotic Manipulation via Predictive Latent World Models