In-context Robot Learning Made Simple: A Democratized Recipe for Manipulation Tasks
Minxing Li, Minghao Han, Weizhi Zhao, Hanwen Wang, Xiangshuo Liu, Shuyao Shang, Jingxiang Zhou, Mingchao Sun, Hongyu Pan, Mu Xu, Yu Liu, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
2026-10-09
Summary
We study robotic in-context learning (ICL), an emerging paradigm that enables robots to infer and execute tasks from visual demonstrations. Despite its growing promise, the problem itself remains under-defined: a visual demonstration simultaneously conveys action trajectories, object semantics, manipulation affordances, spatial relations, and task goals, making it unclear what information the robot is actually expected to follow.
What's the problem?
The paper tackles this problem: We study robotic in-context learning (ICL), an emerging paradigm that enables robots to infer and execute tasks from visual demonstrations. Despite its growing promise, the problem itself remains under-defined: a visual demonstration simultaneously conveys action trajectories, object semantics, manipulation affordances, spatial relations, and task goals, making it unclear what information the robot is actually expected to follow.
What's the solution?
The authors propose this solution: Building on this definition, we develop a minimalist and reproducible ICL framework (SimpleICL) with a visual prompt encoder and a low-cost data collection protocol. Without massive pre-training or specialized data infrastructure, our framework achieves strong performance in both simulation and real-world environments.
Why it matters?
Why it matters: Without massive pre-training or specialized data infrastructure, our framework achieves strong performance in both simulation and real-world environments. Extensive experiments further reveal several key properties of robot ICL, including action, semantic, composition, and affordance discrimination.
Abstract
We study robotic in-context learning (ICL), an emerging paradigm that enables robots to infer and execute tasks from visual demonstrations. Despite its growing promise, the problem itself remains under-defined: a visual demonstration simultaneously conveys action trajectories, object semantics, manipulation affordances, spatial relations, and task goals, making it unclear what information the robot is actually expected to follow. In this work, we first provide a clear problem definition of robot ICL that explicitly defines its learning target and resolves this fundamental prompt ambiguity. Building on this definition, we develop a minimalist and reproducible ICL framework (SimpleICL) with a visual prompt encoder and a low-cost data collection protocol. Without massive pre-training or specialized data infrastructure, our framework achieves strong performance in both simulation and real-world environments. Extensive experiments further reveal several key properties of robot ICL, including action, semantic, composition, and affordance discrimination. We will fully open-source our data and training pipeline to facilitate systematic and reproducible research on robot ICL. The project page can be found at https://simpleicl.github.io/simpleicl.