Cornelius Braun

(1/6) From @GoogleDeepmind’s AlphaGo to AlphaZero, we saw machines find moves that reached beyond what we’d imagined for them. No one taught them those strategies. They emerged from reinforcement learning: playing, failing, and trying again under a single binary task reward for success or failure. Inspired by them, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might a robot discover if we gave it that same freedom to learn? That question led us to AlphaNIST. Starting tabula rasa, with that same binary reward plus only a simple control cost, a single policy solves all 20 @NIST assembly tasks at a 98.2% success rate in simulation. More surprising still, AlphaNIST can complete 10 different tasks in a row, receiving that reward only once, after all 10 are done. Just as AlphaGo’s strategies surprised its creators, AlphaNIST discovered dexterous strategies we couldn’t have come up with ourselves. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.13354 Website: alpha-nist.github.io

(1/5) Everyone says dexterous manipulation needs real-world data. These policies were trained with none. Our robots mesh gears, thread nuts, and insert pegs zero-shot from RGB, and the same recipe works for locomotion across terrains much harder than before. The missing piece wasn't a better RL algorithm, but a small tweak to what the robot practices. Today we're releasing Success-Guided Sampling (SGS), a simple change to the task sampler that unlocks new levels of dexterity and agility with large-scale, end-to-end sim2real RL. No demonstrations, no per-task reward tuning. Just PPO at scale. Check out the policies yourself at sgs-rl.github.io! All videos at 1x speed! 🧵 🔈