Closed-Loop Physics-Based Manipulation Evaluation at a Commodity Price: What 4.4 L4 GPU hours at $3.50 Buys You
Overview
This paper introduces an affordable and reproducible evaluation harness for physics-based robotic manipulation, demonstrating that high-scale statistical evaluations can be performed on commodity hardware for approximately $3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock time per replication. The authors report a negative result regarding action chunking with sparse data, showing zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts for three independently trained chunked checkpoints compared to success rates between 2.6% and 11.8% for single-step checkpoints. The work isolates failures to the training formulation and multi-step prediction mechanisms rather than open-loop execution, aiming to democratize policy development and evaluation.
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Event evidence and corrections
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Reported quantity · GPU hours: 4.4 other · Basis not reported · Differing source assertions
“$3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partia”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
Reported quantity · wall-clock time: 38 other · Basis not reported
“$3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partia”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
Reported quantity · rollouts: 780 other · reported trials · Differing source assertions
“$3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partia”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
Reported quantity · Reported success rate: 11.8 percent · Basis not reported
“$3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partia”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
Reported quantity · GPU hours: 4.4 other · Basis not reported · Differing source assertions
“Closed-Loop Physics-Based Manipulation Evaluation at a Commodity Price: What 4.4 L4 GPU hours at $3.50 Buys You”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
Reported quantity · rollouts: 200 other · reported trials · Differing source assertions
“arXiv:2611.07441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running evaluations of contact-rich robotic manipulation at statistical scale has largely been possible only at well-resourced labs, highlighting the need for affordable and efficient options for broader audiences. We present a reproducible evaluation harness wrapper based on a previous study at 200-rollout scale on serverless commodity GPUs, at a cost of approximately”
Exact source · revision 1Source owner not reported
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- arXiv Robotics — research abstractsSignalClosed-Loop Physics-Based Manipulation Evaluation at a Commodity Price: What 4.4 L4 GPU hours at $3.50 Buys You
This paper introduces an affordable and reproducible evaluation harness for physics-based robotic manipulation, demonstrating that high-scale statistical evaluations can be performed on commodity hardware for approximately $3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock time per replication. The authors report a negative result regarding action chunking with sparse data, showing zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts for three independently trained chunked checkpoints compared to success rates between 2.6% and 11.8% for single-step checkpoints. The work isolates failures to the training formulation and multi-step prediction mechanisms rather than open-loop execution, aiming to democratize policy development and evaluation.
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