RoboEvolve: Co-Evolving Planner-Simulator for Robotic Manipulation with Limited Data

Abstract

The scalability of robotic manipulation is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of task-aligned physical interaction data. While vision-language models (VLMs) and video generation models (VGMs) hold promise for autonomous data synthesis, they suffer from semantic-spatial misalignment and physical hallucinations, respectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboEvolve, a novel framework that couples a VLM planner and a VGM simulator into a mutually reinforcing co-evolutionary loop. Bootstrapped for self-evolution with unlabeled seed images, RoboEvolve leverages a cognitive-inspired dual-phase mechanism: (i) daytime exploration fosters physically grounded behavioral discovery through a semantic-controlled multi-granular reward, and (ii) nighttime consolidation mines "near-miss" failures to stabilize policy optimization. Guided by an autonomous progressive curriculum, the system naturally scales from simple atomic actions to complex tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboEvolve (I) achieves superior effectiveness, elevating base planners by 30 absolute points and amplifying simulator success by 48% on average; (II) exhibits extreme data efficiency, surpassing fully supervised baselines with merely 500 unlabeled seeds--a 50X reduction in initial RL data; (III) demonstrates robust continual learning without catastrophic forgetting; and (IV) extends to low-level control, improving cold-started LingBot-VA from 78.7% to 98.7% average task success on LIBERO using environment feedback. Together, these results demonstrate the applicability of our co-evolutionary framework to both internally supervised generative learning and environment-grounded action learning.

arXiv commentv2: Extended RoboEvolve to the world-action model setting, with new low-level control experiments on LIBERO