LLM-Pack: Intuitive Grocery Handling for Logistics Applications Y annik Blei 1, Michael Krawez 1, Tobias Jülg 1, Pierre Krack 1, Florian Walter 1 and Wolfram Burgard 1 Abstract -- Robotics and automation are increasingly influential in logistics but remain largely confined to traditional warehouses. In grocery retail, advancements such as cashier-less supermarkets exist, yet customers still manually pick and pack groceries. While there has been a substantial focus in robotics on the bin picking problem, the task of packing objects and groceries has remained largely untouched. However, packing grocery items in the right order is crucial for preventing product damage, e.g., heavy objects should not be placed on top of fragile ones. However, the exact criteria for the right packing order are hard to define, in particular given the huge variety of objects typically found in stores. In this paper, we introduce LLM-Pack, a novel approach for grocery packing. LLM-Pack leverages language and vision foundation models for identifying groceries and generating a packing sequence that mimics human packing strategy. LLM-Pack does not require dedicated training to handle new grocery items and its modularity allows easy upgrades of the underlying foundation models. We extensively evaluate our approach to demonstrate its performance.

Recent generalist Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) can perform a variety of tasks on real robots with remarkable generalization capabilities. However, reported success rates are often not on par with those of expert policies. Moreover, VLAs usually do not work out of the box and often must be fine-tuned as they are sensitive to setup changes. In this work, we present Refined Policy Distillation (RPD), an RL-based policy refinement method that enables the distillation of large generalist models into small, high-performing expert policies. The student policy is guided during the RL exploration by actions of a teacher VLA for increased sample efficiency and faster convergence. Different from previous work that focuses on applying VLAs to real-world experiments, we create fine-tuned versions of Octo and OpenVLA for ManiSkill2 to evaluate RPD in simulation. As our results for different manipulation tasks demonstrate, RPD enables the RL agent to learn expert policies that surpass the teacher's performance in both dense and sparse reward settings. Our approach is even robust to changes in the camera perspective and can generalize to task variations that the underlying VLA cannot solve.

In this paper, we propose VLM-Vac, a novel framework designed to enhance the autonomy of smart robot vacuum cleaners. Our approach integrates the zero-shot object detection capabilities of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a Knowledge Distillation (KD) strategy. By leveraging the VLM, the robot can categorize objects into actionable classes -- either to avoid or to suck -- across diverse backgrounds. However, frequently querying the VLM is computationally expensive and impractical for real-world deployment. To address this issue, we implement a KD process that gradually transfers the essential knowledge of the VLM to a smaller, more efficient model. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that this smaller model progressively learns from the VLM and requires significantly fewer queries over time. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of continual learning in dynamic home environments by exploiting a novel experience replay method based on language-guided sampling. Our results show that this approach is not only energy-efficient but also surpasses conventional vision-based clustering methods, particularly in detecting small objects across diverse backgrounds.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision making tasks. When it comes to deploying RL in the real world, safety concerns are usually raised, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such as in autonomous driving and robotics scenarios. While safety control has a long history, the study of safe RL algorithms is still in the early stages. To establish a good foundation for future research in this thread, in this paper, we provide a review for safe RL from the perspectives of methods, theory and applications. Firstly, we review the progress of safe RL from five dimensions and come up with five problems that are crucial for safe RL being deployed in real-world applications, coined as "2H3W". Secondly, we analyze the theory and algorithm progress from the perspectives of answering the "2H3W" problems. Then, the sample complexity of safe RL methods is reviewed and discussed, followed by an introduction of the applications and benchmarks of safe RL algorithms. Finally, we open the discussion of the challenging problems in safe RL, hoping to inspire more future research on this thread. To advance the study of safe RL algorithms, we release a benchmark suite, an open-sourced repository containing the implementations of major safe RL algorithms, along with tutorials at the link: https://github.com/chauncygu/Safe-Reinforcement-Learning-Baselines.git.