Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

Title:Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

Abstract:Robot learning is splitting into two bets: policies that bake competence into frozen weights (vision-language-action, or VLA, models), and agents that write and refine their own executable skills as code. This survey organises the field around that axis of weights versus skills. Its central analytical contribution is a deep-dive that arranges code-as-policy methods by their degree of self-improvement, from zero-shot program synthesis, through closed-loop self-repair and persistent skill memory, to the sparsely populated cell in which execution feedback, skill memory, and evolutionary search combine into one open-ended loop; only a few very recent systems (for example ASPIRE, ENPIRE, and RoboClaw) occupy that cell. We map the complementary "skills" pole, from unsupervised reinforcement-learning skill discovery to large-language-model skill libraries, and show that the word "skill" is used in at least five distinct senses, of which only the code sense self-improves without gradient updates. We then connect the taxonomy to the emerging skill economy: commercial robot-skill marketplaces now distribute one-tap skills across robots but ship only static playback, which surfaces open problems of adaptation, cross-embodiment portability, provenance, safety verification, composition, and standardisation. This is a deliberately focused survey. Rather than cataloguing the field exhaustively, it examines 77 representative systems across six technique families through one taxonomy and a set of contrast tables, and it supplies operational definitions of the self-improvement mechanisms together with a statement of what each family cannot do.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.01851 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.01851v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.01851 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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