Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation

tanhuajie2001, Sixiang Chen, Yijie Xu, zixiao_bios, yuhengji, Cheng Chi, Yaoxu Lyu, Zhongxia Zhao, Xiansheng Chen, Peterson Co, Shaoxuan Xie, Guocai Yao, Pengwei Wang, Zhongyuan Wang, Shanghang Zhang

Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation: 7 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #24 of 31 papers on 2025-12-30. Day-by-day upvote history.

The primary obstacle for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world robotics is the design of effective reward functions. While recently learning-based Process Reward Models (PRMs) are a promising direction, they are often hindered by two fundamental limitations: their reward models lack step-aware understanding and rely on single-view perception, leading to unreliable assessments of fine-grained manipulation progress; and their reward shaping procedures are theoretically unsound, often inducing a semantic trap that misguides policy optimization. To address these, we introduce Dopamine-Reward, a novel reward modeling method for learning a general-purpose, step-aware process reward model from multi-view inputs. At its core is our General Reward Model (GRM), trained on a vast 3,400+ hour dataset, which leverages Step-wise Reward Discretization for structural understanding and Multi-Perspective Reward Fusion to overcome perceptual limitations. Building upon Dopamine-Reward, we propose Dopamine-RL, a robust policy learning framework that employs a theoretically-sound Policy-Invariant Reward Shaping method, which enables the agent to leverage dense rewards for efficient self-improvement without altering the optimal policy, thereby fundamentally avoiding the semantic trap. Extensive experiments across diverse simulated and real-world tasks validate our approach. GRM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in reward assessment, and Dopamine-RL built on GRM significantly improves policy learning efficiency. For instance, after GRM is adapted to a new task in a one-shot manner from a single expert trajectory, the resulting reward model enables Dopamine-RL to improve the policy from near-zero to 95% success with only 150 online rollouts (approximately 1 hour of real robot interaction), while retaining strong generalization across tasks. Project website: https://robo-dopamine.github.io

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

Data: hysts-bot-data/daily-papers-stats and the Daily Papers API. Open data: tardellirs/paper-pulse-data. Sister project: Model Pulse, the download history of every model on the Hub.