# Robot Self-Improvement via Human-Video Dynamics Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00177/) (2019)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12114/) (2018)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02005/) (2022)
- [DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14176/) (2022)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04983/) (2024)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14759/) (2025)
- [HG-DAgger: Interactive Imitation Learning with Human Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02890/) (2018)
- [Masked Visual Pre-training for Motor Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06173/) (2022)
- [MT-Opt: Continuous Multi-Task Robotic Reinforcement Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08212/) (2021)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11709/) (2025)
- [Deep Dynamics Models for Learning Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11652/) (2019)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [Precise and Dexterous Robotic Manipulation via Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21845/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Recursive Self-Improvement in AI: From Bounded Self-Refinement to Autonomous Research Loops](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07663/) (2026)
- [Learning to Act While Waiting: RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23831/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A central question in robot learning is how to acquire skills from the kinds of data that humans learn from: passive observation, embodied practice, and the experience of failure. Human videos provide the first of these in abundance, and prior work has shown they can initialize useful policies. Far less clear is whether they can support the second and third: whether priors extracted from human videos can ground a robot's own attempts well enough to evaluate them, correct them, and improve from them. In this work, we show that human videos can be used to learn embodiment-agnostic action, dynamics, and value representations that transfer across robot embodiments, providing the predictive foundation required for robots to autonomously improve from their own rollouts and failures. We introduce Dynamics-Guided Action Correction (DGAC), a training-free approach that leverages these adapted models to repair failed states: each failure becomes a query for which the learned models propose and rank corrective actions, turning failures into supervision for the next policy update. Across seven real-world manipulation tasks spanning both a mobile manipulator and a static manipulator arm, our approach improves success rates from 40% to 81% across multiple policy backbones, demonstrating cross-embodiment robot self-improvement from human-video priors. These results show that human priors and robot failures can be combined to enable scalable autonomous policy improvement. Project page: https://ethz-mrl.github.io/robot-self-improvement-website/.