AnyTask
An Automated Task and Data Generation Framework for Advancing Sim-to-Real Policy Learning
Ran Gong1*, Xiaohan Zhang1*, Jinghuan Shang1*, Maria Vittoria Minniti1*, Jigarkumar Patel1, Valerio Pepe1, Riedana Yan1, Ahmet Gundogdu1, Ivan Kapelyukh1, Ali Abbas1, Xiaoqiang Yan1, Harsh Patel1, Laura Herlant1, Karl Schmeckpeper1
1Robotics and AI Institute, Boston, MA, USA
* Equal Contribution
Abstract

Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high‐quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort.

We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible:

  • ViPR: A novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement.
  • ViPR-Eureka: A reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling.
  • ViPR-RL: A hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards.

We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks.

System Overview
System Overview

Figure 1: AnyTask System Overview. The pipeline first produces simulated manipulation tasks using an object database and high-level task types. It automatically generates task descriptions and simulation code, then efficiently collects data via ViPR, ViPR-RL, and ViPR-Eureka agents within massively parallel environments. Online domain randomization ensures diverse scenes and visual observations, allowing policies trained on this simulated data to transfer zero-shot to the real world.

Object Database

Figure 2: Object Database. We generate diverse manipulation tasks using an object database.

AnyTask Agents
Sim Real Comparison
Simulation
Real World
Drag the slider to compare Simulation (Left) vs Real World (Right)
Results & Sim-to-Real

The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks.