Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions on sample-efficient real-world RL,
especially work that identifies practical bottlenecks, reports lessons learned from
real-robot experiments, or proposes methods that reduce the cost of learning on hardware.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
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Supervision and Reward Cost: Methods for obtaining useful learning
signals cheaply, including learned reward models, human feedback,
human-in-the-loop interventions, and strategies for avoiding supervision as the bottleneck.
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Exploration and Safety on Hardware: Algorithms and systems for efficient
exploration under safety constraints, reset-free or autonomous RL, safe online
adaptation, and approaches that improve wall-clock efficiency during real-world training.
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Leveraging Priors for Real-World RL: Approaches that use pretrained policies,
VLAs, offline datasets, world models, or sim-to-real
transfer to reduce the number of required on-robot interactions.
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Post-Deployment Adaptation: Methods for finetuning deployed policies,
improving robustness to distribution shift, learning new behaviors from experience, and
adapting generalist policies without catastrophic forgetting.
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Long-Horizon and Contact-Rich RL: Techniques for improving sample efficiency
in long-horizon manipulation, dexterous control, contact-rich tasks, and settings with delayed
rewards, compounding errors, or difficult exploration.
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Benchmarks, Metrics, and Lessons Learned: Benchmarks, evaluation protocols,
shared platforms, negative results, system-level insights, and analysis of what worked, what
failed, and why in real-world RL experiments.
Submission Guidelines
- Submission portal: all papers must be submitted through our OpenReview portal.
- Page limit: submissions should be 4–8 pages, excluding references and appendix.
- Format: submissions must follow the official CoRL paper template and style, and must be properly anonymized for double-blind review.
- Dual submission policy: we disallow work already accepted to the main CoRL 2026 conference. Accepted workshop papers will be listed on the website but are non-archival and will not appear in formal proceedings.
Spotlight Talks
All accepted papers will be presented at an in-person poster session. A small number
of selected papers will additionally give a 5-minute spotlight talk. Camera-ready versions
of all accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website.
