Robot Learning Reading Group
Starting this robot learning reading group with New Systems, and potentially going to host more after.
About
Meetup to discuss state-of-the-art research on robot learning, similar to the Toronto ML/Systems Reading Group and Vector Institute’s Machine Learning Lunches- list of topics & articles below - all are welcome! 🎉
Week 1 - Robot Foundation Models
- 2:00pm - Physical Intelligence, 2024, Pi0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control
- 2:20pm - TRI LBM Team, 2025, A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation
- 2:40pm - Google, 2025, Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World
- 3:00pm - Open floor discussion on future directions
- 3:15pm - Wrap up and social
Additional Reading List
- Brohan, et al., 2022, RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
- Brohan, et al., 2023, RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control
- Open X-Embodiment Collaboration, 2023, Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models
- Chi, et al. 2023, Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion
- Liu, et al., 2024, RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation
- Etukuru, et al., 2024, Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments
- Kim, et al. 2024, OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model
- Cheang, et al., 2024, GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulation
- Octo Model Team, 2024, Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy
- Fang, et al., 2025, Robix: A Unified Model for Robot Interaction, Reasoning and Planning
- NVIDIA, 2025, GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
- Yang, et al., 2025, FP3: A 3D Foundation Policy for Robotic Manipulation
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07917
Additional Resources
- Short Blog on VLAs by Chris Paxton
- U of T Robotics Institute Seminar on Robotics Foundation Models by Sergey Levine