Robot Generalization Beyond Volume: The Diversity Path via Zero-Shot Capabilities

Abstract

General-purpose robots must handle tasks, objects and environments they were never trained on, yet zero-shot generalization remains one of the least solved problems in physical AI. In digital AI, zero-shot capability grew with the volume and, above all, the diversity of training data, much of it sourced from the crowd. Robotics instead relies on paid collection by a few well-funded teams, which yields volume without diversity. We formulate zero-shot generalization in physical AI as coverage of the deployment distribution, and show that more samples from the same collectors shrink the unseen region only slowly, while each new contributor can extend it. Building on this and on zero-shot learning, we propose a shared latent space for robot actions that combines multi-modal alignment, generative augmentation, and noisy-label learning. As a scalable source of diverse data, we propose a community of developers building applications on one standard, approachable robot, Origami. We close with a testable hypothesis and an evaluation protocol relating real-robot zero-shot success to the diversity of contributed data.