{"slug": "skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement", "title": "Skill-Space Shooting for Autonomous Robot Policy Improvement", "summary": "A paper submitted to arXiv on 29 Sep 2026 introduces skill-space shooting, a method that uses foundation model guidance to explore reusable short behaviors, or skills, and convert successful trials into corrective supervision for robot policies. The authors report real-world experiments showing repeated improvement in policies acting autonomously, with skills shareable across tasks to reduce the teaching needed for new tasks. The work is posted as arXiv 2609.38178v1 in the cs.RO category, with additional results and videos at skill-space-shooting.github.io.", "body_md": "# Computer Science > Robotics\n\n  [Submitted on 29 Sep 2026]\n\n# Title:Skill-Space Shooting for Autonomous Robot Policy Improvement\n\n[View PDF](http://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.38178v1)\n\n[HTML (experimental)](https://arxiv.org/html/2609.38178v1)\n\nAbstract:Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this improvement to scale across tasks, it must make effective use of experience without requiring human demonstration of each correction. Recent agentic systems offer a way to reduce this reliance on human effort by using foundation models to autonomously compose learned behaviors to complete tasks. Yet completing tasks this way does not itself teach a task policy to overcome its own failures; that requires turning these behaviors into learnable corrections for the policy. Our insight is that many such corrections are familiar short behaviors, or skills: they recur across tasks and describe actions that foundation models can reason about from a scene. We introduce skill-space shooting, which uses foundation model guidance to explore corrections through these reusable skills and turn successful trials into policy improvement. Real-world experiments show repeated improvement in policies acting autonomously, while skills can also be shared to reduce the teaching needed to improve on new tasks. By making reusable skills a source of corrective supervision, skill-space shooting enables scalable and generalizable policy improvement within and across tasks. Additional results and videos at [this https URL](https://skill-space-shooting.github.io).\n    \n\n### Current browse context:\n\ncs.RO\n\n### References & Citations\n\nLoading...\n\n# Bibliographic and Citation Tools\n\nBibliographic Explorer \n\n*(*[What is the Explorer?](https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html#arxiv-bibliographic-explorer))\nConnected Papers \n\n*(*[What is Connected Papers?](https://www.connectedpapers.com/about))\nLitmaps \n\n*(*[What is Litmaps?](https://www.litmaps.co/))\nscite Smart Citations \n\n*(*[What are Smart Citations?](https://www.scite.ai/))\n# Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article\n\nalphaXiv \n\n*(*[What is alphaXiv?](https://alphaxiv.org/))\nCatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers \n\n*(*[What is CatalyzeX?](https://www.catalyzex.com))\nDagsHub \n\n*(*[What is DagsHub?](https://dagshub.com/))\nGotit.pub \n\n*(*[What is GotitPub?](http://gotit.pub/faq))\nHugging Face \n\n*(*[What is Huggingface?](https://huggingface.co/huggingface))\nScienceCast \n\n*(*[What is ScienceCast?](https://sciencecast.org/welcome))\n# Demos\n\n# Recommenders and Search Tools\n\nInfluence Flower \n\n*(*[What are Influence Flowers?](https://influencemap.cmlab.dev/))\nCORE Recommender \n\n*(*[What is CORE?](https://core.ac.uk/services/recommender))\n# arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators\n\narXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.\n\nBoth individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.\n\nHave an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? [**Learn more about arXivLabs**](https://info.arxiv.org/labs/index.html).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement", "canonical_source": "http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38178v1", "published_at": "2026-09-30 14:15:25+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-30 14:48:37.413225+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["robotics", "artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-agents", "ai-research"], "entities": ["arXiv", "skill-space shooting", "skill-space-shooting.github.io"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/skill-space-shooting-for-autonomous-robot-policy-improvement.jsonld"}}