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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-03-012",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-zeta-cross-embodiment-transfer",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-09-03-morning-0056",
    "edition_url": "https://themachinepress.com/edition/2026-09-03",
    "position": 12,
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    "section": "robotics",
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    "headline": "Five Percent Exposure Changed What Zero-Shot Meant",
    "slug": "five-percent-exposure-changed-what-zero-shot-meant",
    "dek": "ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.",
    "summary": "ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.",
    "body_text": "The benchmark holds tasks, scenes and protocols steady while changing robot embodiment, distinguishing strict zero-shot transfer from pretrain-exposed transfer. Local end-effector representations, source-embodiment diversity and auxiliary co-training improved average transfer by about 15, 18 and 7 percentage points in the reported analysis. Adding only 5% target-embodiment data during pretraining raised target progress by 13.4 points, showing why the two zero-shot conditions should not share one label.",
    "why_it_matters": "ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.",
    "limitations": [
      "Adding only 5% target-embodiment data during pretraining raised target progress by 13.4 points, showing why the two zero-shot conditions should not share one label."
    ],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-03T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-09-03T14:20:28.218-04:00",
    "content_status": "new",
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        "text": "ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.",
        "source_ids": [
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        "qualification": "Adding only 5% target-embodiment data during pretraining raised target progress by 13.4 points, showing why the two zero-shot conditions should not share one label."
      }
    ],
    "source_ids": [
      "source-2026-09-03-012"
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    "tags": [
      "cross-embodiment",
      "VLA",
      "robot benchmarks"
    ],
    "image_url": null,
    "corrections": []
  },
  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-03-012",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.02546",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02546",
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      "source_type": "primary_research",
      "is_primary_source": true,
      "published_at": "2026-09-02T09:00:18.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "Five Percent Exposure Changed What Zero-Shot Meant",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-03T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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