Sim Envs Finally Useful for RL Post-Training of Robot Models, But Benchmarks Too Simple
DominiqueCAPaul · x · 2026-09-14
A practitioner working on RL methods to post-train robotic AI models notes that sim environments are, for the first time, actually useful for validation and ablations.
- After an afternoon of scouting sim tasks, they found many are surprisingly simple
- DuoBench stands out as the most useful benchmark, with sufficiently hard bimanual tasks (handovers, balancing, assembly)
- FurnitureBench looks interesting but is Isaac Sim-only — painful to set up despite better sim2real, which they aren't doing
More from Embodied
- Ex-Kernel CEO/CTO Ryan Field Jumps to Khosla-Backed BCI Startup Sabi, Signaling Consumer BCI Inflection — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-09-14
- Researcher: Astra Robot Shows Step-Level Image-Action Understanding Unlike Prior VLAs — YuXiang_IRVL · 2026-09-14
- Another European humanoid robot emerges as first public gait demo draws praise — lukas_m_ziegler · 2026-09-14
- Ambient reformulates intervention timing as single-token classification for proactive egocentric assistants — ambient-intelligence-labs · 2026-09-14
- Fly brain connectome with 166,700 neurons already powering robots, drones and AR demos — eyishazyer · 2026-09-14
- I Gave Codex Eyes: It Flashed an ESP32 and Made a Cat Printer Print Itself — cloudkats · 2026-09-14