Abstract:In robot imitation learning, influence functions provide a principled approach to quantify each demonstration's effect on robot task outcomes, yet scaling them to billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is limited by computational and multitask bottlenecks. To this end, we propose ATHENA, an influence function framework tailored for multitask VLA data curation at a billion-parameter scale. Concretely, it leverages the Kronecker structure of linear-layer gradients to reduce projection cost, and approximates dense Hessian inversion with a rank-r Random Truncated Approximation, achieving about a 313.4x speedup in influence computation. Furthermore, ATHENA formulates global and local interactive influence to balance data curation across 50 jointly trained tasks. Extensive evaluations on RoboTwin 2.0 and real-robot deployment, covering 9.34 and 6.90 hours of demonstrations, respectively, show that ATHENA matches or exceeds full-data joint fine-tuning using only 50% of demonstrations in simulation and 66.7% of data across six real-robot tasks. Overall, ATHENA demonstrates its effectiveness for data curation in billion-parameter multitask VLA fine-tuning.
Abstract:Recently, with the rapid development of robot learning and imitation learning, numerous datasets and methods have emerged. However, these datasets and their task designs often lack systematic consideration and principles. This raises important questions: Do the current datasets and task designs truly advance the capabilities of robotic agents? Do evaluations on a few common tasks accurately reflect the differentiated performance of various methods proposed by different teams and evaluated on different tasks? To address these issues, we introduce the Great March 100 (\textbf{GM-100}) as the first step towards a robot learning Olympics. GM-100 consists of 100 carefully designed tasks that cover a wide range of interactions and long-tail behaviors, aiming to provide a diverse and challenging set of tasks to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of robotic agents and promote diversity and complexity in robot dataset task designs. These tasks are developed through systematic analysis and expansion of existing task designs, combined with insights from human-object interaction primitives and object affordances. We collect a large amount of trajectory data on different robotic platforms and evaluate several baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GM-100 tasks are 1) feasible to execute and 2) sufficiently challenging to effectively differentiate the performance of current VLA models. Our data and code are available at https://rhos.ai/research/gm-100.