χ_{0}: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies
Authors: name: Checheng Yu, name: Chonghao Sima, name: Gangcheng Jiang, name: Hai Zhang, name: Haoguang Mai, name: Hongyang Li, name: Huijie Wang, name: Jin Chen, name: Kaiyang Wu, name: Li Chen, name: Lirui Zhao, name: Modi Shi, name: Ping Luo, name: Qingwen Bu, name: Shijia Peng, name: Tianyu Li, name: Yibo Yuan
Organization: The University of Hong Kong

High-reliability long-horizon robotic manipulation has traditionally relied on large-scale data and compute to understand complex real-world dynamics. However, we identify that the primary bottleneck to real-world robustness is not resource scale alone, but the distributional shift among the human demonstration distribution, the inductive bias learned by the policy, and the test-time execution distribution -- a systematic inconsistency that causes compounding errors in multi-stage tasks. To mitigate these inconsistencies, we propose χ_{0}, a resource-efficient framework with effective modules designated to achieve production-level robustness in robotic manipulation. Our approach builds off three technical pillars: (i) Model Arithmetic, a weight-space merging strategy that efficiently soaks up diverse distributions of different demonstrations, varying from object appearance to state variations; (ii) Stage Advantage, a stage-aware advantage estimator that provides stable, dense progress signals, overcoming the numerical instability of prior non-stage approaches; and (iii) Train-Deploy Alignment, which bridges the distribution gap via spatio-temporal augmentation, heuristic DAgger corrections, and temporal chunk-wise smoothing. χ_{0} enables two sets of dual-arm robots to collaboratively orchestrate long-horizon garment manipulation, spanning tasks from flattening, folding, to hanging different clothes. Our method exhibits high-reliability autonomy; we are able to run the system from arbitrary initial state for consecutive 24 hours non-stop. Experiments validate that χ_{0} surpasses the state-of-the-art π_{0.5} in success rate by nearly 250%, with only 20-hour data and 8 A100 GPUs. Code, data and models will be released to facilitate the community.