A Controlled Study of Models, Skills, Feedback, and Curriculum in Agentic Robotics

Kaiyuan Chen, Xinyue Zhu, Shuangyu Xie, Uksang Yoo, Thi Thu Phuong Luong +5

Agentic robotics asks coding agents to implement and iteratively improve robot policies from simulated and real-world physical interactions. We study the self-learning loop of agentic robotics through a controlled simulation study spanning nine manipulation tasks, 631 different experiment configurations, and 28K coding agent rollouts, systematically varying model capability, skill priors, feedback structure, and curriculum. The experiment data suggests that the bottleneck is often not the access to sufficient information, but interpreting it into the right policy update. Across these factors, a successful self-learning loop depends on how effectively agents attribute failures, reason task-relevant spatial and geometric structure, and selectively restructure code to improve policies.