Robotics paper index

RynnValue: Scaling Robotic Value Foundation Models with Temporal Distance

2026-08-10 · arXiv: 2608.09853

One-line summary

A robotics research paper on RynnValue: Scaling Robotic Value Foundation Models with Temporal Distance.

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored. Existing approaches tie supervision to task-internal anchors such as preferences or normalized progress, none of which transfer cleanly across embodiments and data sources. We introduce RynnValue, an open-source value foundation model for robotic manipulation that replaces these anchors with temporal distance, the directed cost-to-go from an observation to the language-specified goal. Because temporal-distance labels can be derived directly from timestamps, RynnValue scales to over 7,000 hours and roughly 3M instruction-conditioned clips without preference or progress annotations. To make temporal-value learning reliable at scale, we combine random temporal sampling, temporal-order shuffling, and value-isolation attention, suppressing shortcuts that would leave predictions insensitive to failures and regressions. Trained without preference labels, RynnValue attains an average Kendall's tau_a of 0.675 on RBM-EVAL-OOD, surpassing the fully preference-supervised state of the art (0.655) and more than doubling a progress-only counterpart (0.292), while generalizing zero-shot to unseen tasks, embodiments, and viewpoints. Converted into dense rewards via potential-based shaping, it raises real-world policy success from 52.5% to 72.5% online and from 63.8% to 82.5% offline. These results establish temporal distance as a scalable supervision target and practical reward interface for generalist robot policies.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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