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No Free Checker: A Survey of Verifiers for Robot Policies

arxiv.org/abs/2609.09250

Updated 52 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GKYFD8EZWKRMPBZZ7QS0

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 52 min ago
arXiv
2609.09250
T1 · 52 min ago
Category
cs.RO
T1 · 52 min ago

Abstract

A verifier for robot policies reads a candidate behavior and returns a score for how well it did, used both to evaluate vision-language-action policies and to train them. Verifiers range from success detectors and reward models to runtime monitors, safety filters, and temporal-logic specifications. We survey roughly 150 verifiers and compare them along two properties. Availability is how much a verdict costs, how early in a rollout the verdict arrives, and how often a verdict can be asked for. Availability rises as verdicts get cheaper, earlier, and denser. Credibility is how much a high score tells us about the task. Credibility falls as the judgment becomes gameable and self-serving. We group the verifiers by who supplies the judgment: human verifiers, rule-based and formal verifiers, learned and pretrained verifiers, and model-intrinsic verifiers. Across the four families, we find that credibility falls as availability rises. Regardless of who supplies the judgment, there is no free checker. We then examine what validates a verifier itself, and how much a high score tells us. Three measures appear in the literature: agreement with human labels, the performance of the policy it trains, and behavior under reward hacking. We close with nine metrics that make a verifier claim checkable, and coordinates for the verifiers still to be built.

Authors 10

Yang Wan, Xihang Yue, Zhirui Liu, Ziyuan Chu, Shuxun Wang, Yuhan Chen, Xiaonan Jiang, Xukun Zhu, Yubo Dong, Linchao Zhu

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
cross

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.09250

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

Categories
cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.SY, eess.SY

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.RO

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 52 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

52 min ago

Conflicts

None