Saturday Robotics x AIM Intelligence: Robotics & World Models Reading Club 34: RPG: How Robots Improve Without Retraining. SF 10/17

Saturday Robotics x AIM Intelligence: Robotics & World Models Reading Club 34: RPG: How Robots Improve Without Retraining. SF 10/17

A high-signal reading group for AI researchers & builders pushing the frontiers of robotic world models, WAMs, and embodied intelligence. In our previous sessions, we brought together researchers and engineers from Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Generalist, Rhoda AI, and leading Bay Area robotics startups.

Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng.

Sponsored by AIM Intelligence. Al agents are making decisions, calling APls, and taking actions, with no one watching. AIM Intelligence attacks your Al before real attackers do, and enforces real-time guardrails to keep every agent under your control.

Support Saturday Robotics Inc: https://donate.stripe.com/28EcN52rjgeY1fJboYgEg00

​​​​Reading Club 34's Core Theme

RPG: How Robots Improve Without Retraining

Yen-Jen Wang (UC Berkeley)

Building reliable robot capabilities across diverse tasks requires substantial human effort to develop and maintain skills, design rewards, and integrate perception with control. We present Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real (RPG), a framework for autonomous improvement of robot execution systems without updating model weights. RPG identifies manipulation capabilities in an offline dataset and constructs related practice tasks in simulation. During practice, RPG uses execution feedback, privileged simulator state, and available dataset videos to diagnose failures. It develops new reusable symbolic skills, refines existing skills, and revises the system prompt based on these diagnoses. Cross-task evaluation tests individual candidate changes and merged revisions before they are retained for reuse. At test time, a multimodal LLM uses the resulting system prompt and skill library to coordinate perception and robot control. On held-out initializations of 22 manipulation tasks, RPG improves task success from 28.6% after the first practice round to 95.0% after 15 rounds, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including ASPIRE (75.5%) and CaP-Agent0 powered by GPT-6 Astra Pro (60.0%). After a common calibration and hardware-adaptation procedure, the frozen system succeeds in all 30 physical trials, with ten trials on each of three tasks.

Robotics Dinner Night

Join us for an exciting Robotics Dinner Night following our Reading Club! Enjoy an evening filled with innovation, creativity, and collaboration as we explore the fascinating world of robotics, discover emerging technologies, and share ideas over a delicious dinner.

Whether you're passionate about building robots, curious about the future of technology, or simply eager to connect with like-minded people, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, spark creativity, and have fun together. Let's bring our curiosity and enthusiasm to the table and celebrate the exciting possibilities of robotics!

Sponsor: Ethical Technologies of Humanity, Intelligence and Sustainability.

​​​​​​​​​​​Location

San Francisco

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Date & Time

Saturday, October 17, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Agenda

2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Door Opens & Social

• Food 😋, beverages🧋 and UNLIMITED strawberries 🍓 (our official reading club fruits ☺️😄).

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM Keynote by

YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers)

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Q&A, ​open-floor roundtable (10–20 min per topic) on spotlight papers or any paper you’d like to highlight. Feel free to share why the paper matters and its technical details.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Past events

#iros-reading-club-31-0928: 🍾 IROS 2026 x Saturday Robotics — Robotics Research Night | Reading Club 30. Pittsburgh 9/28

• Session 31 Luma: https://luma.com/tzbw7n61

#reading-club-29-0919: AgiBot × ManiFormer: Building the Next Generation of Physical AI. SF 9/19

• Session 29 Luma: https://luma.com/sk70aihm

#reading-club-28-0912: Booster T2: The Next Frontier of Open Humanoid Robotics. SF 9/12

• Session 28 Luma: https://luma.com/00z3oxw6

#reading-club-26-0905: Rethinking Robot Development: Co-Designing Morphology, Sensing, and Learning

Chenyang Ma (Applied Intuition, UNC)

• Session 26 Luma: https://luma.com/jm9jceqr

#reading-club-25-0829: Sunnyvale 8/29

• Session 25 Luma: https://luma.com/enowqo5v

#reading-club-24-0822: Contact-Rich Robot Learning from Human Videos and Tactile. SF 8/22

Kelin Yu (Maryland, Amazon FAR)

• Session 24 Luma: https://luma.com/yl76re1b

#reading-club-23-0815: Engineering Robotic Simulators for Evaluation and Beyond. SF 8/15

Kaifeng Zhang (Columbia, World Labs)

• Session 23 Luma: https://luma.com/non72bev

#reading-club-22-0808: ODEWorld: A Continuous Predictive Architecture via Physical-Time Flow. SF 8/8

Haoyi Niu (UC Berkeley)

• Session 22 Luma: https://luma.com/7nnl4a5r

• Reading Club 22 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2086482247344079100?s=20

• Reading Club 22 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2086484540013560280?s=20

#reading-club-21-0801: Vision-Language-Kinematics Supervision for Perception-Based Humanoid Loco-Manipulation — SF 8/1

Yen-Jen Wang (UC Berkeley, Amazon FAR)

• Session 21 Luma: https://luma.com/4xkibxbh

• Reading Club 21 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2083948325112533456?s=20

• Reading Club 21 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2083950393734975839?s=20

#reading-club-20-0725: Agentic Robotics Models (ENPIRE and Cap-X), Mountain View 07/25

Haoru Xue (UC Berkeley)

Kris Hauser (Samsung Research America, Robot Intelligence Lab)

• Session 20 Luma: https://luma.com/5ltk12w5

• Reading Club 20 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2081420671180284190?s=20

• Reading Club 20 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2081423890988044794?s=20

#SIGGRAPH-reading-club-19-0722: SIGGRAPH x Saturday Robotics — World Models for Robotics: Bridging Graphics, Simulation & Physical Intelligence | Reading Club 19, LA 07/22

• Session 19 Luma: https://luma.com/yh2212ac

• Reading Club 19 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2081923681627079055?s=20

• Reading Club 19 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2081924824709124174?s=20

#reading-club-18-0718: Causal World Models For Real-World Intelligence. SF 07/18

Guanming Wang & Bill (General Instinct, YC P26)

Feng Fan (UCSD, Aether AI)

• Session 18 Luma: https://luma.com/f74eguvr

• Reading Club 18 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078738476602884502?s=20

• Reading Club 18 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078747463058694625?s=20

• Autonomous Panel Moderation: Rebuilding the Factory: Physical AI on the Production Line: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078385948887490814?s=20

#reading-club-17-0711: Soft Tactile-Centric Multimodal Intelligence Toward Safe and Dexterous Manipulation. SF 07/11

Quan Luu, Purdue.

• Session 17 Luma: https://luma.com/e53zawq2

• Reading Club 17 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2076205508646850819?s=20

• Reading Club 17 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2076207394426917187?s=20

#private-lunch-icml-0709: Saturday Robotics x ICML Private Lunch (Seoul)

• Private Lunch: https://luma.com/khqg11gt

#reading-club-16-0704: The Embodied AI Hardware Stack — Supply Chain, Sensors, and the Data Flywheel — SF 07/04

Jerry Huang, Robotics Center of Silicon Valley.

• Session 16 Luma: https://luma.com/cgzyfpeb

• Reading Club 16 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2073666442512547957?s=20

• Reading Club 16 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2073667174678589620?s=20

#reading-club-15-0627: Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation

Binghao Huang, Columbia, Amazon FAR.

• Session 15 Luma: https://luma.com/7lts5ppf

• Reading Club 15 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2071129728984273105?s=20

• Reading Club 15 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2071132114226139489?s=20

#deep-tech-week-14-0625: Deep Tech Week Research Night

SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research. (ECCV 2026 accepted) by Mike Roberts, Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Research.

Bogdan Cristei, Venture Partner at SHACK15 Ventures.

Simone Totaro, CTO at Saturn Dynamics.

Shumo Chu, CEO at General Intelligence Labs.

Margaret Zhang, CEO at ThirdBrain Labs.

• Session 14 Luma: https://luma.com/l1g9c2l1

• Deep Tech Week 14 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2070417784560066592?s=20

• Deep Tech Week 14 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2070420270964514923?s=20

#reading-club-13-0620: HumanEgo: Train Robot Policy from 30 min Egocentric Videos — SF 0620

• Session 13 Luma: https://luma.com/6vkhxnum

• Reading Club 13 Review 1: HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning, Human Egocentric Video, Leo Wang, Amazon FAR & UMaryland https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068603103138713824?s=20

• Reading Club 13 Recap 1: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068605511549743127?s=20

• Reading Club 13 Review 2: Causal World Models: Biwei Huang, Aether AI & UCSD

• https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068743219685560453?s=20

• Reading Club 13 Recap 2: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068746229643936177?s=20

#reading-club-12-0613: Origami Robotics (YC W26) on Dexterity

• Session 12 Luma: https://luma.com/5w7c1t2a

• Reading Club 12 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066275974988337178?s=20

• Reading Club 12 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066278639554245097?s=20

#cvpr-denver-11-0606: 🤖🥘 Saturday Robotics x Manycore Tech x Neural Motion | CVPR 2026 Denver Research Night | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 11

Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng, Founders of Saturday Robotics

Anthony Zhao, Head of North America at Manycore Tech SpacialVerse

Aurora Feng, Founder at Neural Motion. NM-GenET.

Max Zhaoshuo Li, Robotics and World Model Tech Lead at NVIDIA Cosmos. Cosmos 3.

Xiaofan Li, World Model Tech Lead at X Square Robot. WALL-WM.

Zesen Zhao, University of Michigan. Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Verification.

Pengyi Liao. VGGT-Ω: From 3D Reconstruction to Scalable Spatial Representation.

Jie Wang, University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab. Toward a Robotics MMLU: Lessons from Sim & Real Evaluations of Generalist Policies.

Gordon Qian, Senior AI Researcher at Snap. Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning.

• YouTube livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/P_3gSC-5cYM?si=530zqf2NscCq643O

• CVPR Denver Research Night Luma: https://luma.com/zamm9g2g

• CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065102150418788581?s=20

• CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065104616497524843?s=20

• CVPR Hot Takes Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065234892653547904?s=20

• CVPR Hot Takes Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065236892988416166?s=20

#reading-club-10-0530: Bringing Robots to Life — Learning Humanoid Instincts from the Body Up | San Francisco 0530

Haochen Shi (Stanford, co-advised by Karen Liu & Shuran Song)

• Session 10 Luma: https://luma.com/czz76qe1

• Reading Club 10 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2061145697693683878?s=20

#private-dinner-01-0529: Robo Plov x Saturday Robotics

• Private Dinner 01 Luma: https://luma.com/3rzqwond

• Private Dinner 01 Review: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/junfan-zhu_saturday-robotics-was-excited-to-host-its-activity-7466384182190182400-Zgnv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABxP-p0BpUNGDf347aKh_1uJAPzG4er0As8

#reading-club-09-0523: CVPR Warm-up & Founders Spotlight — DeltaWorld + VisuoTactile Dexterous Hands

Tommie Kerssies (Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics)

Arjun Subramaniam (Factory Intelligence)

• Session 09 Luma: https://luma.com/wooiz0bf

• Reading Club 09 Review: Part 1: Robotics & World Model Reading Club 9.1: CVPR Warm-up— ​A Frame is Worth 1 Token: DeltaToken. https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2058449627184267621?s=20

• Reading Club 09 Review: Part 2: Robotics & World Model Reading Club 9.2: Tactile Sensor & Reliable Manipulation in Production. https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2058461947637694948?s=20

#reading-club-08-0516: Embodied Human Data as the “Internet of Motion and Behavior”

Ryan Punamiya (NVIDIA Gear, Georgia Tech)

• Session 08 Luma: https://luma.com/qoxioge7

• Reading Club 08 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2055913563743830229?s=20

• Reading Club 08 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2055915875493204439?s=20

#reading-club-07-0509: Learning to Dream: World Models, Imagination, Path to Foundation Models for Control

Ahmet Şemi ASARKAYA (Agility Robotics)

• Session 07 Luma: https://luma.com/srhe0vuo

• Reading Club 07 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2053387034241454397?s=20

#reading-club-06-0502: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics

Tongzhou Mu (Rhoda AI)

• Session 06 Luma: https://luma.com/sdrd4zwr

• Reading Club 06 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2050834699275383008?s=20

#reading-club-05-0425: World Models for Physical Intelligence: From Predictive Brains to Embodied Robots

Daniel Dugas & Sergio Arnaud (Meta FAIR)

• Session 05 Luma: https://luma.com/p7zvpyvg

• Reading Club 05 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2048315020946317710?s=20

• YouTube Recording: https://youtu.be/RVy6oQXNDgc?si=u2VLtCBjfdMvXaf-

#reading-club-04-0418: Abstractions of the Physical World for Decision-Making

Siming He (UC Berkeley)

• Session 04 Luma: https://luma.com/atv7bm3i

• Reading Club 04 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2045770010979905862

• YouTube Recording: /saturdayrobotic

#reading-club-03-0411: Robotic Policy Adaptation

Haoyi Niu (UC Berkeley)

• Session 03 Luma: https://luma.com/561xgirg

• Reading Club 03 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2043243484568768519?s=20

• YouTube Recording: /saturdayrobotic

#reading-club-02-0404: JEPA Zoo

Julian Saks (/JulianSaks)

• Session 02 Luma: https://luma.com/g3qrrti0

• Reading Club 02 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2040716119259164673?s=20

#reading-club-01-0328

• Session 01 Luma: https://luma.com/8s4w1wu6

• Reading Club 01 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2038153945219305812

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