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Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 1910.10897 v2 pith:NPOR4RDR submitted 2019-10-24 cs.LG cs.AIcs.ROstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.ROstat.ML
keywords learningtasksmeta-reinforcementalgorithmsenablemulti-tasktaskbenchmark
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 7 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    An affordable vision-and-hardware-keyboard AIoT platform quantifies a 1160% sim-to-real HNS drop for DQN on Breakout while enabling real-world training to ~38% of human performance.

  4. Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models

    cs.RO 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Adding a real-world supervised loss to simulation reinforcement learning improves real-robot success and data efficiency for VLA co-training.

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    Slot-based object-centric visual representations, especially with robot-video pretraining, improve out-of-distribution generalization of robotic manipulation policies compared to global and dense pre-trained features.

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    Genie Sim 3.0 introduces an LLM-powered scene generator, the first LLM-based automated evaluation benchmark, and a large open synthetic dataset that demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for robotic manipulation...

  7. Benchmarking Massively Parallelized Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Tasks

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    VLMgineer combines VLM-generated URDF tool designs with evolutionary search to co-design tools and action plans, outperforming human-specified and existing tools on a new simulated manipulation benchmark.

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    Fusing RGB and point-cloud inputs with training-time modality dropout plus cross-attention makes a diffusion visuomotor policy markedly more robust to visual and spatial shifts than unimodal or naively fused baselines.

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    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A hybrid model-based RL algorithm combining TDMPC2-style world models, PPO clipped updates, and POME-style exploration bonuses reports strong benchmark results but omits reproducible evidence.

  13. An Open-Source Software Toolkit & Benchmark Suite for the Evaluation and Adaptation of Multimodal Action Models

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