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Five Percent Exposure Changed What Zero-Shot Meant

ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-09-03-012
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Summary

ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.

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.

Limits and context

  • 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.

Key claims

  1. ZETA separates truly unseen robot hardware from embodiments glimpsed during pretraining across 14 held-out targets.

    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.

    Evidence: source-2026-09-03-012

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2609.02546arXiv · primary research

Corrections

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