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Grounding Sim-to-Real Generalization in Dexterous Manipulation: An Empirical Study with Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2603.22876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning a generalist control policy for dexterous manipulation typically relies on large-scale datasets. Given the high cost of real-world data collection, a practical alternative is to generate synthetic data through simulation. However, the resulting synthetic data often exhibits a significant gap from real-world distributions. While many prior studies have proposed algorithms to bridge the Sim-to-Real discrepancy, there remains a lack of principled research that grounds these methods in real-world manipulation tasks, particularly their performance on generalist policies such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. In this study, we empirically examine the primary determinants of Sim-to-Real generalization across four dimensions: multi-level domain randomization, photorealistic rendering, physics-realistic modeling, and reinforcement learning updates. To support this study, we design a comprehensive evaluation protocol to quantify the real-world performance of manipulation tasks. The protocol accounts for key variations in background, lighting, distractors, object types, and spatial features. Through experiments involving over 10k real-world trials, we derive critical insights into Sim-to-Real transfer. To inform and advance future studies, we release both the robotic platforms and the evaluation protocol for public access to facilitate independent verification, thereby establishing a realistic and standardized benchmark for dexterous manipulation policies.

ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2510.11608v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities for planning long-horizon, real-world tasks, yet existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. To address this, we present ParaCook, a benchmark for time-efficient collaborative planning. Inspired by the Overcooked game, ParaCook provides an environment for various challenging interaction planning of multi-agent systems that are instantiated as cooking tasks, with a simplified action space to isolate the core challenge of strategic parallel planning. Through a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that current approaches achieve suboptimal plans, which struggle with parallel actions or coordination. Our analysis also reveals LLMs' potential on abstract tasks where they can focus on high-level parallel optimization. ParaCook provides a scalable evaluation framework with adjustable complexity, establishing a foundation for developing and assessing time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/ParaCook.
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