Research blog · November 11, 2026

Repairing Robot Policies with Weight Space Programming

Frontier Models can restore task success for vision-based behavior cloning policies under distribution shifts, directly in weight space

Jannick Stranghöner^1* Philipp Hartmann^1* Felix Störck^1*

Barbara Hammer¹ Klaus Neumann^1,2

¹CITEC, Bielefeld University ²Fraunhofer IOSB-INA ^*Equal contribution

TL;DR

Recent work (“Sparks of Weight-Space Programming” by Takehi et al. [1]) has explored language models that natively read and write the weights of other neural networks. We bring this idea to robot learning and find that LLMs are surprisingly good at reasoning about why closed-loop, vision-based policies fail.
We train a robot arm to pick up a cube and put it in a tray from camera images, by imitating demonstrations, and then break it with small distribution shifts.
To diagnose the failures, the LLMs find the neurons the trained policy never uses and probe the network with tools from mechanistic interpretability.
To fix them, they write small programs into those unused neurons: controllers that switch on only when needed, such as lowering the cube once the wrist camera sees the tray below.
In doing so, the LLMs give the policy qualitatively new capabilities. When the tray's location is no longer static, three of the LLMs wire a readout from the cameras into the network that tells the arm where to carry the cube: spatial generalization that was not present in the original policy.
Across five experiments, the best edits raise task success from 0–5% to between 33% and 95%. And the skill seems to grow with model capability: the newest model we tested (Fable 5.2) does best in all experiments.
All of this works without gradient-based optimization or fitting, and without a single new demonstration, using only a fixed budget of test runs.
Throughout the history of robot learning, a failing policy has meant more data: more demonstrations, more robot time, another round of training. This may be changing: robot policies could soon be debugged and repaired natively in weight space, by LLMs that reason about why the robot fails.

Teaching your robot new skills has never been easier: low-cost robots have boomed, open datasets keep growing, and robot foundation models are closer than ever to working out of the box.

So say you collected some demonstrations, fine-tuned your favourite VLA and deployed it on your 3D-printed robot of choice. Then, in certain states, it just does not work. It tries to grasp something, fails and loops. It stalls halfway through the task. Something as simple as a change in lighting throws it off. What do you do?

For most roboticists, the answer is more data (e.g. DAgger [2]) and another round of training. We skip both and instead present early results showing that a frontier LLM can identify the failure modes that appear in closed loop and iterate on fixes, entirely in weight space.

Behaviour Cloning and Its Limits

Learning robust behaviour by imitating humans is a long-standing goal in robotics. Behaviour cloning is attractive because it is simple: it turns a control problem into a supervised learning problem.

For the same reason, it is also hard: it is fundamentally limited by distribution shift. The policy learns from the state distribution of its demonstrator, but when rolled out, it visits its own. Each small mistake takes it into states the demonstrator never saw, where bigger mistakes become more likely. This is known as compounding error [3], and it happens even in the very environment the policy was trained in.¹ It only gets worse under the obvious shifts, like a visual distractor or a new object.

Yet much of what a policy has learned often stays useful under a shift, which suggests that a fix may be small and surgical. But where would we make it? To us, a trained policy is a black box. The only lever we have is the data it learns from.

Opening the Black Box

LLMs already sit at the heart of robot learning. Vision-language models are the backbone of today's robot foundation models (OpenVLA [4], π₀ [5]), and LLMs write robot code (Code as Policies [6]) or even control robots directly [7]. But none of them can look inside a trained policy and tell us why it fails.

That is starting to change. In Sparks of Weight-Space Programming [1], LLMs read and write a network's weights directly, without an optimizer, which the authors call weight space programming. In one of many striking demonstrations, GPT-6 Astra is handed a policy whose car gets stuck on a ramp in every episode. From the raw weights and one recorded episode, it explains why, then rewrites 3.5% of the weights in a single reply. Now the car succeeds every time. LLMs, it seems, can reason in weight space about how a policy behaves. While recent work applies this to specific aspects of a robot foundation model, such as making π_0.5 move faster [8] or follow paraphrased instructions more reliably [9], the rest of this blog is dedicated to studying whether LLMs can rescue policies that no longer work at all, by finding out in closed loop why they fail and fixing them in weight space.

The Setup

To study this in a controllable and reproducible way, we test it on a standard robotic manipulation task in simulation: cube pick-and-place. Our suite builds on OCBench [10], with one slight tweak. A tray now marks where the cube goes, which gives us a goal we can move later to introduce distribution shift.

To train a policy, we need demonstrations. Here we script a near-optimal expert that collects them for us, using privileged information such as the true position of the cube. This expert is memoryless and only reacts to the current state of the world; it is Markov.

The policy is a neural network that sees three camera images and the robot's own state. A pretrained ResNet [11] compresses each image into 256 numbers, and a small network with three layers of 256 ReLU neurons maps everything to target angles for the joints and a command for the gripper. Like the expert, the policy only sees the present, so it is Markov as well, and in principle it can imitate the expert perfectly. The difference lies in what they see. The expert reads the simulator's true state, while the policy has to infer it from images.

The policy. Later figures show the LLMs' edits on this same drawing.

If we simply train the policy to reproduce the expert's actions, it fails almost completely at test time. Ironically, the expert is too good; it never makes a mistake, so its data never shows how to recover from one, and the policy runs straight into the compounding error described above. The fix may seem counterintuitive: we run the expert with noise added to its actions, so its demonstrations also visit states slightly off its own path, and the recorded actions show how it steers back. The policy learns to recover from its own small mistakes, which keeps it in-distribution even in closed loop. With this recipe, known as DART [12], our policy succeeds in 95.8% of held-out test episodes after training on 8,426 demonstrations.²

This trained policy is where every experiment starts. We drop it into a situation it was never trained for, watch it fail, and ask an LLM to restore its performance. The LLM can act only by changing the 335,111 parameters of the MLP on top of the frozen ResNet, numbers that come with no labels and no explanation. To make that a fair and repeatable test, a harness controls everything else, from what the LLM gets to see to how its final edit is scored.

What it getsThe policy's weights in a Python kernel, 200 demonstrations from the training environment, and a recording of every test it has run. It can run the network on these recordings as often as it likes, but the kernel has no simulator.

How it testsTo see the robot move, it spends one of 25 test rounds. Each round runs its current edit on the same 100 practice episodes in the changed environment.

What is off-limitsGradients, optimizers, fitting and automated search. To write the strongest policy it can, it has to edit the weights itself.

How it is scoredIts final edit runs on 500 new episodes it never sees, from the same starts as the original policy, in some experiments with a variant it was never shown. A cube counts once it has been lifted and then reaches the tray.³

The harness in detail

Each LLM reply is one action, and the network head can only be rewritten from inside the sandbox. The harness routes every action to one of four tools and charges it to that tool's budget. The score shown is one example, Opus 5.5 on the forbidden wall.

Five Ways to Break a Policy

To find out whether an LLM can repair a failing policy, we first need one that fails. We move the goal, once or in every episode. We recolour the cube, declare a zone off-limits, and swap the expert for one that behaves like a human. Every change collapses the original policy from 96% to near 0% task success. Then an LLM gets to work. Some frontier models even found a loophole in our success test and used it to score. In each experiment we present the best-performing LLM without such an exploit. The exploits are covered later in the case studies.

Experiment 1 of 5 · Spatial Adaptation

Distribution shift. The base policy is trained with the tray at position A. We move the tray by 21 cm to position B, where the LLM edits and tests the policy. There the base policy still lifts the cube, then hovers between the old and the new tray, with 0.2% task success. To test generalization, we also test on a new position C, 24 cm from position A in the opposite direction, which the LLM never sees.

Task success on the 100 practice episodes the LLM tests on in every round, visualizing rounds where it discovered key insights. Click on a number to show more details.

1Shift the scene while carryingrounds 0 → 3: 0 → 5% task success1 of 6

Practice episode 45. Left: before editing, the policy lifts the cube and hovers with it about 6 cm from the tray until time runs out. Right: it carries the cube to the tray and lowers it (404 steps).

Diagnosis

Swapping inputs with demonstrations: the held cube stops short of the new tray and hovers. The front and side camera views and joint positions cancel the push toward the tray, because these cues still steer to the old tray's place.

Fix

While the gripper holds a cube, the network is told the tray still stands in its old place, so the carry looks like the training scene; with the gripper open the shift is off. 512 weights written (0.15% of the network) · gripper-closure row and all 256 first-layer biases · no new units

The first placed cubes: 5 of 100 in tests 2 and 3. The other carried cubes still stop about 7 cm short of the tray, now in a stable stall.

In Opus's own words

t4After lifting, the policy carries the cube to roughly (0.52, 0.12, 0.22) and hovers there indefinitely. […]
t23[…] Swapping in the hover frame's front features (−1.2 cm/step) or proprioception (−1.0 cm/step) weakens it, and front+side+proprio together cancel it to ≈0. So the stall comes from absolute-position cues (front-camera arm appearance and proprioception) that implicitly assume the old container position.
t30The edit overshoots badly. The arm carries the cube to x ≈ −0.10, y ≈ 0.5–0.8, far beyond the container and behind the base […]
t69[…] My earlier (0.57, 0.20) was 7 cm off in x, which alone would have doomed any fixed-target edit.
t112Under v4, the xy velocity at the hover spot is essentially zero (0.24, 0.01): this is a stable stall, about 7 cm short of T1 in y.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 77, 106 and 107; d is the shift of the inputs (arm readings, front and side cameras), row 785 of fc0.W reads the gripper closure

def build_shift(d):
    W0=load_original('fc0.W'); b0=load_original('fc0.b'); mu=load_original('obs_mean'); sd=load_original('obs_std')
    dn=np.where(np.isfinite(sd), d/sd, 0).astype(np.float32)
    w=dn@W0
    W=W0.copy(); W[785]+=sd[785]*w; b=b0+mu[785]*w
⋮
d4=comp(gpan=0.8,gi=1.0,ge=0.5,gjo=-0.3)
⋮
write_shift(d4); np.save(os.path.join(WORK,'d4.npy'),d4)

2Turn the base toward the trayrounds 3 → 4: 5 → 43% task success2 of 6

Practice episode 17. Left: the cube is carried toward the tray but stops about 6 cm short of it and hovers. Right: the arm turns on to the tray and lowers the cube (191 steps).

Diagnosis

Faking a larger base turn: it barely changes the network's output, so faking the arm's position cannot steer the held cube the last 7 cm.

Fix

A small controller in unused units turns the base toward the tray whenever the gripper holds a cube above about 9 cm, and stays silent otherwise. 30 weights written (0.009% of the network), 7,254 set to zero (2.2%) · 5 idle first-layer units reading the base angle, gripper closure and height; 2 and 4 in layers 2 and 3 · drive shoulder_pan

43 of 100. In every carry that still failed, the base now stood at the tray's angle; what was left was the reach.

In Opus's own words

t115The proprioceptive cues barely steer y in the band: even an extra 0.2 rad of pan shift adds only +0.2 mm/step, and eff_y does nothing. […]
t115A different repair: add a small hand-designed proportional controller on the shoulder_pan joint inside the network. […]
t116[…] many units never activate (178 in fc0, 201 in fc1, 143 in fc2), so I can use some of them as a dedicated pathway.
t118[…] The pan change is exactly zero while open, while closed on nothing, and while low, and on high carry it equals the clipped kp·e (correlation 1.0).
t123The pan controller works: final pan is about -1.45 (the T1 angle) in every failed episode. The remaining error is reach. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 117; rows 768, 782 and 785 of fc0.W read the base angle, the height and the gripper closure; column 0 of out.W drives shoulder_pan

TH1=-1.447
⋮
    W0[768,p0]=-kp*os_[768]; b0[p0]=kp*(TH1-om_[768])+c0
    W0[768,n0]=+kp*os_[768]; b0[n0]=-kp*(TH1-om_[768])+c0
    W0[785,gG]=-10*os_[785]; b0[gG]=10*(0.9-om_[785])
    W0[785,gE]=+10*os_[785]; b0[gE]=10*(om_[785]-1.3)
    W0[782,gZ]=-5*os_[782]; b0[gZ]=5*(zthr-om_[782])
    q1,r1=u1
    W1[p0,q1]=1; W1[[gG,gE,gZ],q1]=-M; b1[q1]=-c0
⋮
    Wo[a1,0]=1; Wo[a2,0]=-1; Wo[c1_,0]=-1; Wo[c2_,0]=1

3Reach out and lowerrounds 4 → 5: 43 → 77% task success3 of 6

Practice episode 27, one Opus picked out itself. Left: the base stands at the right angle, but the cube is held about 4 cm beyond the tray and never lowered. Right: the arm pulls back and lowers the cube into the tray (160 steps).

Diagnosis

Checking where failed carries end: the base points at the tray, but the held cube hovers short of it or past it and is never lowered. Missing are a reach correction and a cue to lower the cube once it is over the tray.

Fix

More unused units move the held cube in or out until it is over the tray, then lower it. 57 weights written (0.017% of the network), 8,996 set to zero (2.7%) · 7 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's x and y, base angle and height; 3 and 5 in layers 2 and 3 · drive shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1

77 of 100. One carry failure was left; the other 22 failures happened before the grasp, while the gripper is open and every controller is off.

In Opus's own words

t123[…] The cube stalls either short (x ≈ 0.43–0.47) or long (x ≈ 0.53–0.66), hovering at z ≈ 0.14–0.21 without descending. So I need a second controller for x along the pan ray.
t129The successful placements end with cube xy around (0.497, 0.208) […]
t130[…] Episode 27 sits at x = 0.537 with the pan correct and never descends: an x error with no descent trigger.
t133[…] Nothing changes while the gripper is open, so approach and grasp are untouched.
t13577/100: the reach and descent fixes solved almost all carry failures (only 1 lifted-not-placed left). […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 132; UX is the demonstrations' outward motion, UD their lowering motion (shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1); sco reads the gripper's x and y as reach

UX=np.array([0,.229,-.201,-.020,0,0,0]); UX/=np.linalg.norm(UX[1:4])
UD=np.array([0,.195,.127,-.122,0,0,0])
⋮
    w,b=lin(sco,s1,kx); setcol(7,w,b+10); setcol(8,-w,-b+10)   # Px0,Nx0
    w,b=lin({768:1.},TH1,1/tolp); setcol(9,w,b); setcol(10,-w,-b)  # Ap,Bp
    w,b=lin(sco,s1,1/tols); setcol(12,w,b); setcol(13,-w,-b)  # As,Bs
⋮
    u=4; T['fc1.W'][:,u]=0; T['fc1.W'][[9,10,12,13],u]=-1; T['fc1.W'][[3,5],u]=-10; T['fc1.b'][u]=1; T['fc2.W'][u,:]=0
⋮
    T['fc2.W'][:,20]=0; T['fc2.W'][4,20]=1; T['fc2.b'][20]=0; T['out.W'][20,:]=cd*UD

4Unstick the approachrounds 5 → 8: 77 → 92% task success4 of 6

Practice episode 25, the failing approach Opus looked at itself. Left: the open gripper hovers about 19 cm up and never gets closer than 7 cm to the cube. Right: it moves over the cube, grasps it and places it (205 steps).

Diagnosis

Watching a failed approach: the open gripper stops short of the cube, pulled toward the new tray. Showing the cameras the tray in its old place freed some cube positions but stranded others, and even limited to the stall areas, the shift disturbed the final descent onto the cube.

Fix

Unused units apply that push only while the gripper is open and inside a stall area, fading it out during the descent and, near the old tray's place, switching it off when the cube is far away. 1,288 weights written (0.38% of the network), 7,994 set to zero (2.4%) · 8 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's x, y, height, closure and the three cameras · 2 idle second-layer gates pushing 247 third-layer units

81 in test 7, 92 in test 8. Of the 8 failures left, 4 were hover stalls and 4 grasps that closed on nothing.

In Opus's own words

t138The wrist view in episode 25 is dominated by the container: a large brown tray roughly in the centre, with the cube at the bottom-right edge next to the right finger. […]
t148[…] The 2× shift fixed exactly the cubes with low or mid y, near T0 […]. But it created new hovers for cubes at y > 0.3 […]. So the image-based cube estimate has a position-dependent error that a constant shift can only trade around […]
t169[…] So the injection that pulls the gripper out of the hover stall keeps biasing it during the final descent.
t181The near-cube inhibitor does what it should. Gate L stays on in the stall frames it was built for (0.99 → 0.96) and is mostly removed in the harmful far-from-cube frames (0.99 → 0.11). […]
t18392/100, a big jump. Both gate fixes worked. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 159, 174 and 180; rows 780–782 of fc0.W read the gripper's x, y and height, 785 its closure, 0–767 the three cameras; D2L, D2H: the camera shift's mean effect on the third layer

    w,b=lin(ym,0.17,-kr); setcol(free0[0],w,b)          # RyL: y>.17
    w,b=lin(xm,0.50-.425,-kr); setcol(free0[1],w,b)     # RxL: x>.50
    w,b=lin(ym,-0.32,kr); setcol(free0[2],w,b)          # RnL: y<-.32
    w,b=lin({785:1.},0.15,-10.); setcol(free0[3],w,b)   # C: g_raw>.15
⋮
    T['fc2.W'][gL,:]=sL*D2L; T['fc2.W'][gH,:]=-sH*D2H
⋮
W0[:,uz]=0; W0[782,uz]=-os_[782]/(10*w); b0[uz]=(10*zt-om[782])/(10*w)
W1[uz,:]=0; W1[uz,6]=-1.0; W1[uz,7]=-1.0
⋮
W0[:,uf]=0; W0[:768,uf]=-dAn/55.0; b0[uf]=1395.0/55.0
W1[uf,:]=0; W1[uf,6]=-1.0

5Retry an empty grasprounds 14 → 17: 96 → 100% task success5 of 6

Practice episode 76. Left: the gripper closes on nothing and stays shut for the rest of the episode. Right: it lifts, reopens, grasps again and places the cube (2 grasp attempts, 541 steps).

Diagnosis

Reading the gripper closure: all four remaining failures closed on nothing and never tried again. The closure reading tells this case apart from normal carries.

Fix

After an empty grasp, a two-stage reflex in unused units lifts the arm, then reopens the gripper so the policy can grasp again. 25 weights written (0.0075% of the network), 5,873 set to zero (1.8%) · 5 idle first-layer units reading gripper closure, height and pad contact; 2 and 2 in layers 2 and 3 · drive shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1, gripper

96 → 97 → 97 → 100 of 100. In test 16 the gripper in episode 76 reopened only halfway and closed again on the way down; letting the open stage also lift fixed that.

In Opus's own words

t281[…] I plan a recovery reflex for that closed-empty state: lift while still closed, then reopen once the gripper is high, so the policy approaches again. The two physical gates (gripper fully closed, then height) give the hysteresis that the memoryless policy cannot provide.
t283[…] Raw gripper closure never exceeds 1.01 in any frame of a successful episode, while closed-empty frames have raw closure between 2 and 3. […]
t284The contact guard works: carry frames above 14 cm have contact below 0.1 in only 3 of 3661 frames. […]
t293[…] In episode 76 the reflex opens the gripper only to g ≈ 1. Once the gripper sinks below 14 cm the Open gate dies, and the policy re-closes on the way down. […]
t297Pass 17 solved all 100 diagnostic episodes. Making Open also lift completed the recovery. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 287, 290 and 295; GI, ZI, CI are the inputs gripper closure, height and pad contact; out.W columns 1–3 move shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1, column 6 the gripper

raw_unit(40,{GI:2.0},-3.2)            # E
raw_unit(41,{ZI:2.5},-25*0.13)        # Zh (z=x/10)
raw_unit(43,{ZI:-2.5},25*0.14)        # Lo
raw_unit(44,{GI:2.0},-0.3)            # G
⋮
W1[40,26]=1; W1[41,26]=-10
W1[44,40]=1; W1[40,40]=5; W1[46,40]=-10; W1[43,40]=-50
⋮
Wo[32,1:4]=-1.1*np.array([.195,.127,-.122]); Wo[36,6]=-3
⋮
raw_unit(41,{ZI:2.5},-25*0.16); W1[41,26]=-10
⋮
Wo=load('out.W'); Wo[36,1:4]=-0.5*np.array([.195,.127,-.122]); save_edit('out.W',Wo)

Finished edit: results

94.6% task success in 500 unseen episodes at position B (original 0.2%), 0.0% at position C. Its controllers steer to fixed numbers for the tray at position B, and Opus predicted the result. It had checked whether the wrist camera could find the tray anywhere, found it could not, and kept the fixed target. Experiment 2 asks for the general version. Fable 5.2 scored higher, through a loophole much like the one in Memory in a Memoryless Network.

For [position C], which I never saw, I expect no gain over the original. Both will most likely be near 0%, because my edit carries the cube to [position B].
Opus 5.5, in its final report

Total edits: 4,674 weights written (1.4% of the network) and 39,512 set to zero (11.8%), in 320 reasoning turns.

How about other LLMs?

All five LLMs got the same task, tools, budget and rules: GPT-6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2. Task success over the rounds, and in the unseen episodes at position B (right).

End of experiment 1

Experiment 2 of 5 · Spatial Generalization

Distribution shift. Now the tray is placed at random for each episode, anywhere in a rectangle of 27 cm × 63 cm. A fixed solution like the one in experiment 1, which steers to one known spot, is no longer enough: the policy has to look where the tray is in every episode and carry the cube there. Unedited, it carries the cube toward the tray's old spot and hovers: 5.0% task success.

Task success on the 100 practice episodes the LLM tests on in every round, visualizing rounds where it discovered key insights. Click on a number to show more details.

1Steer while holding the cuberounds 0 → 4: 6 → 11% task success1 of 5

Practice episode 24, the tray 22 cm from where it stood in training. Left: before editing, the arm carries the cube only part of the way and hovers about 6 cm short of the tray until time runs out. Right: it carries the cube to the tray and sets it down after 7.5 s.

Diagnosis

Swapping in demonstration camera views: the arm stops partway to a moved tray. The front and side cameras keep pulling the carry back toward the tray's training spot.

Fix

Four idle units now read where the tray appears in the front and side cameras while holding the cube, and push the carry toward it. 3,080 weights written (0.92% of the network), 1,096 set to zero (0.33%) · 4 idle first-layer units reading the front and side cameras and pad contact · feed all 256 second-layer units

A first gain, 6 → 11. In the finished edit the readout is worth 17 points: switched off, 27 successes on 100 practice-style episodes Opus never saw fall to 10.

In Opus's own words

t5The under-reaction is clean: placement ≈ fixed point + 0.19·Δcx + 0.41·Δcy, independent of the cube start.
t49This is the key finding. Swapping in demo front/side features, where the tray sits at c0, makes the policy move strongly toward c0 (cos +0.77). So the carry target is set visually, by where the tray appears in the front/side images relative to the gripper; proprioception barely matters.
t56Pass 2 broke grasping: 40 episodes never touched the cube and 19 touched without lifting. The amplification is applied in every phase, so readout noise disturbs the reach.
t98Big finding: 236 of the 256 fc0 units are dead, i.e. never active in demos or pass 0; only ~20 live units carry everything.
t111Pass 3 used 3.7 and 1.6, about 5× too strong, hence the overshoot and runaway.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 104 and 111; rows 0–511 of fc0.W read the front and side cameras, row 786 the pad contact

for (k_,(a_,u_,w_,sg)) in enumerate([(ax_,ux_m,wx,1),(ax_,ux_m,wx,-1),(ay_,uy_m,wy,1),(ay_,uy_m,wy,-1)]):
    j=U[k_]; W0n[:,j]=0; W0n[:512,j]=sg*a_*u_; W0n[786,j]=Bc
    b0n[j]=-sg*a_*(u_@muD)-Bc*thr_n
    W1n[j,:]=sg*0.5*(w_@W1)
⋮
E2=build_steer(0.75,0.30)

3Push using the arm's geometryrounds 6 → 9: 19 → 22% task success3 of 5

Practice episode 1, the tray 30 cm from where it stood in training. Left: the arm hovers about 8 cm from the tray. Right: it reaches the tray and sets the cube down after 5.7 s.

Diagnosis

Measuring how far the hover follows the tray: the arm still stops short, because the network pulls it back to its training spot harder than the steering pushes. Driving the arm straight at the cameras' tray estimate scored 0 and 1 of 100, because that estimate is often far off.

Fix

The tray estimate now adds a fixed push toward the tray directly to the arm's joints, so an estimate that is off cannot run the arm away. 2,084 weights written (0.62% of the network), 4,064 set to zero (1.2%) · 4 idle units per layer reading the front and side cameras and pad contact · drive shoulder_pan, shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1

22 of 100, a new best. The hover now follows the tray in y (slope 0.90), not yet in x (0.39).

In Opus's own words

t157At step 90 the y error is −0.74, so pan is saturated at −0.96. The arm whips sideways about 27 cm in 15 steps, loses the cube, and the network reacts erratically to the out-of-distribution motion.
t173Found the failure. The servo's x and y drives are positive in 97–99% of carry frames because the readout is biased (median perceived x error +0.19 m), so the clipped servo pushes in a constant direction instead of closing a loop.
t178So I'll inject the steering directly at the output: the gated readout feeds dead relay units into out.W as an exact world-x/y motion. That is a feed-forward target shift of K·s, not a servo on s − ee, so readout bias can't create a constant runaway drive.
t18322/100, a new best.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 179 and 180; vx, vy are the joint mixes for 1 cm in world x and y

    for j,(u,sg) in zip([1,2,3,4],[(ux,1),(ux,-1),(uy,1),(uy,-1)]):
        W0[:,j]=0; W0[:512,j]=sg*g*u*sd[:512]  # input normalized: x0=(x-mu)/sd -> weight on x0 = g*u*sd
        W0[786,j]=Bc; b0[j]=sg*g*(mu[:512]-Z['muD'])@u + gate
⋮
    for k,(v,V,sg) in enumerate([(vx,Vx,1),(vx,Vx,-1),(vy,Vy,1),(vy,Vy,-1)]):
        Wo[r2[k]]=sg*(7*V/10)/(2*g)*v
⋮
build_ff(Bc=20.)

4Feed back the arm's positionrounds 17 → 20: 26 → 31% task success4 of 5

Practice episode 38, the tray 22 cm to the side. Left: the arm stops about 15 cm short of the tray and hovers there. Right: it reaches the tray and sets the cube down after 6.9 s.

Diagnosis

Splitting the arm's command in two: the push toward a tray to the side is exactly cancelled by the pull back to the training spot. That pull differs from place to place, so no fixed push strength works everywhere.

Fix

The push now fades as the gripper nears the estimated tray, so the arm settles there instead of wherever push and pull balance. 80 weights written (0.024% of the network), none set to zero · the 4 steering units now read effector x and y · 18 output rows ×1.5

26 → 31, the first change since test 14 to leave the plateau (27 episodes gained and 2 lost against the original). The same idea with more feedback (test 21) also gave 31.

In Opus's own words

t273Pass 15 gave 24/100, so the y-gain change did not help. Passes 12–15 now sit in a 24–27 plateau, within noise of each other.
t305The hover at +y is a force balance. My added pan action is exactly cancelled by the base policy's pull back toward its training target (ep 38: base −0.155, edit +0.154).
t307The deeper problem is that my pathway is pure feedforward: it applies a push proportional to the readout s, and the hover settles where that push balances the base policy's pull. That pull varies a lot by region (steep at +y), so any fixed gain under-reaches in some regions and overshoots in others. The readout also contains positive arm-position feedback of about +1.75 drive per metre of gripper position.
t309Pass 20 reached 31/100, the best so far (+27/−2 against the original). The negative position feedback is the first change since pass 14 that breaks the plateau.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 307; rows 780 and 781 of fc0.W read the effector x and y, f2 are the steering copy-units

for idx,(P,N),off in [(780,(1,2),0.425),(781,(3,4),0.0)]:
    # ee_m = off + (x0*sd+mu)/10 ; add -L*(ee_m-ebar) to P, + to N
    k=L_*sd[idx]/10; c_=L_*(off+mu[idx]/10-ebar[idx])
    W0[idx,P]-=k; b0[P]-=c_; W0[idx,N]+=k; b0[N]+=c_
⋮
for n in range(20): Wo[f2[n]]*=1.5

Finished edit: results

33.2% task success in 500 unseen episodes (original 5.0%). Opus's edit reads where the tray is from the cameras and carries the cube there, so it now succeeds with trays the original never reaches. Its estimate of the tray is only accurate to a few centimetres, so with the tray far from its training position the cube often stays hovering next to it. Three other LLMs scored higher, all through loopholes of the success test: both Fable models, with 93.0% and 99.0%, and, much less successfully, Sonnet 5.5 with 46.0% (Memory in a Memoryless Network).

The readout scatters by about 5–7 cm per coordinate.
The arm sometimes hovers within a few cm of the container without the descent trigger firing.
Opus 5.5, in its final report

Total edits: 2,522 weights written (0.75% of the network) and 30,082 set to zero (9.0%), in 322 reasoning turns.

How about other LLMs?

All five LLMs got the same task, tools, budget and rules: GPT-6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2. Task success over the rounds, and in the unseen episodes (right). The scores of Sonnet 5.5 and both Fable models come from loopholes (†); Fable 5.1's is described in Memory in a Memoryless Network.

End of experiment 2

Experiment 3 of 5 · Object Generalization

Distribution shift. The policy was trained on a blue cube; now it is green. The camera encoder is frozen, so the LLM cannot change how the cameras see green, only what the policy network does with it. In 60% of episodes the gripper never touches the cube and hovers about 15 cm above it. The LLM only sees green during the rounds; the unseen episodes add six more colours (red, yellow, orange, purple, magenta and white) to test generalization.

Unseen episode 3, the unedited policy. Left: blue cube, placed in 3.2 s. Right: green cube, it never touches it.

Task success on the 100 practice episodes the LLM tests on in every round, visualizing rounds where it discovered key insights. Click on a number to show more details.

1Make green look like bluerounds 0 → 1: 0 → 9% task success1 of 5

Practice episode 88. Left: before editing, the gripper hovers 11–13 cm above the table, 2–4 cm beside the green cube, for the whole episode and never goes down. Right: it goes down, grasps the cube and places it.

Diagnosis

Swapping in blue camera features: the arm reaches the cube but never goes down. Giving only the wrist camera its blue values restores the descent, because the green cube is seen as a faint blue cube, at about a quarter of blue's strength.

Fix

When the wrist camera sees the faint green cube below the gripper, the network now also gets the missing part of the blue pattern, so the arm goes down. 65,527 weights written (19.6% of the network), none set to zero · one pattern on 255 of the 256 wrist-camera inputs of the first layer, plus its 256 biases · no new units

The first successes: 9 of 100, none lost. Episodes where the gripper never touches the cube fell from 64 to 24, and lifted cubes rose from 6 to 30.

In Fable's own words

t5Key finding: the arm gets within ~2.6 cm horizontally of the green cube (median) but does not descend […]
t7Correcting just the wrist block's mean in hover frames restores most of the descend action […] So the "cube is under the gripper → descend" signal lives in colour-sensitive wrist features.
t20Important observation: the "blue-specific" wrist features do respond to the green cube in the same direction, only much weaker (roughly 15–30% of the blue response […] So the green cube is seen as a faint blue cube.
t40Offline, the rank-one translation (scale 1.0) restores the full descent command on green hover frames (−0.0185 m/step vs −0.020 for blue) […]
t42Pass 1 gives 9/100 (from 0), with far more contact and lifts, so the wrist-pattern repair helps but is not enough.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 39 and 40; rows 512–767 of fc0.W read the wrist camera; uG is the green "cube below" direction, D1 the blue hover mean minus the green one

rG_all, fG_all = green_dir(np.ones(len(Hr),bool)); uG = rG_all/(rG_all@rG_all)
D1 = hovB - hovG
def edit_translate(P, u, m0, Delta, scale=1.0):
    Q = dict(P); Wn = P['fc0.W'].astype(np.float64).copy(); bn = P['fc0.b'].astype(np.float64).copy()
    t = scale*(Delta @ Wn[512:768])            # effect of the pattern on fc0 pre-activations
    Wn[512:768] += np.outer(u, t); bn -= (m0@u)*t
⋮
P1 = edit_translate(P0, uG, fG_all, D1, 1.0)
save_edit('fc0.W', P1['fc0.W']); save_edit('fc0.b', P1['fc0.b'])

2Place by arm position alonerounds 1 → 3: 9 → 27% task success2 of 5

Practice episode 96. Left: the cube is lifted and carried over the tray, then held there about 16 cm up for 17 of the remaining 22 seconds. Right: the same carry; the cube is lowered over the tray, and the episode ends as a success with the cube still in the gripper, its centre 6.7 cm above the table.

Diagnosis

Swapping in blue camera features at the tray: the arm carries the cube over the tray but holds it about 16 cm up, and only the wrist camera decides the lowering, which green triggers too weakly. Fable also noted that success is counted once the held cube comes down to about 7 cm over the tray, so placing needs only a descent.

Fix

Whenever the gripper holds something, the arm now homes in on the fixed tray and lowers the cube, reading only the gripper's position and closure; nothing in it opens the gripper. 99 weights written (0.03% of the network), 15,573 set to zero (4.6%) · 8 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's x, y and closure, 12 idle second-layer and 5 idle third-layer units · 5 new units drive the arm joints

Lifted but not placed fell from 21 to 3: 27 of the 30 lifted cubes are placed; 19 episodes gained, 1 lost: 9 → 27.

In Fable's own words

t43[…] (c) it grasps and carries the cube above the container but never puts it down (lifted_not_placed, 21 episodes).
t48The wrist block alone decides the place descent: swapping only the wrist features to the blue release mean turns the commanded vertical motion from +0.4 cm to −2.1 cm per step.
t128[…] (2) success is triggered when the held cube is lowered to roughly z≈0.07 over the container, so "place" only needs a descent while holding near the container.
t146[…] a proprioception-only "place controller" on dead units — gate "holding a cube" from the gripper opening, home toward the fixed container position with a clipped proportional drive, and descend when within ~2–3.5 cm […]
t15027/100 — the place controller converts 27 of 30 lifts into successes […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 147; input 785 (IO) is the gripper's closure; T are the "holding" thresholds, Qk the four homing units, QD the lowering unit

    T = [new_unit(Q, 0, al) for _ in range(4)]
    for u, th in zip(T, [0.5, 0.8, 1.2, 1.5]): set_in0(Q, u, [(IO, 1.0)], -th)
    hw = np.array([1, -1, -1, 1]) / 0.3            # h = sum hw*T in [0,1]
⋮
    for q_, dvec in zip(Qk, dirs): Q['out.W'][q_, :6] = full_dq(kp * 0.1 * dvec) / ASC
    Q['out.W'][QD, :6] = full_dq(np.array([0, 0, -vdesc])) / ASC

3Nudge forward, retry failed graspsrounds 3 → 6: 27 → 65% task success3 of 5

Practice episode 25. Left: the gripper stops about 16 cm up with the cube 11 cm further out and stays there; it never touches the cube. Right: it moves on, grasps the cube at the first try and places it.

Diagnosis

Mapping the commanded motion against the cube's position: the arm stops moving out when the cube is 2.5 to 20 cm further out, and a grasp beside the cube is final, as the gripper closes on nothing and stays down. Started within 1.5 cm of the cube, the network's own descent lifts it every time.

Fix

While the gripper is open and high, the network now gets a constant "cube further out" push; a gripper closed on nothing rises, opens and tries again. 791 weights written (0.24% of the network), 12,977 set to zero (3.9%) · 10 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's height and closure; 2 of them add the push to 110 second-layer units; during a retry, 2 idle second-layer units switch off the other 254 third-layer units · 4 new units drive the arm and the gripper

The largest jump of the run: 27 → 65; 40 episodes gained, 2 lost. Contact without lift fell from 45 to 22, no contact from 24 to 12.

In Fable's own words

t152Key observation: a failed descent is terminal — the gripper goes down 2–8 cm beside the cube […], closes on nothing and stays pressed on the table, closed, for the rest of the episode.
t171Key finding: in pass 3 the network's own descent works when it starts aligned (100% lifted from d<1.5 cm, 83% from 1.5–3 cm) […]
t173[…] (1) a retry circuit that cannot chatter (use full closure as the "failed grasp" memory: once opening exceeds what a cube allows, keep closing, suppress the network, rise, then open at height) […]
t175[…] with pass-3 weights the commanded x-velocity is ≈0 whenever the cube is 2.5–20 cm ahead (the dead zone), strongly negative when the gripper is beyond the cube, and the arm descends when aligned. A constant injection of 0.3·D1x gives +8–10 mm/step through the dead zone […]
t17965/100 — the nudge plus latch retry more than doubled the success rate.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 175; Z (input 782) is the gripper's height, O (785) its closure; d is the second-layer "cube ahead" direction, alpha = 0.3; F1, F2 detect a gripper closed on nothing, QR is the rise unit

    # nudge gate: a = 10(zo - zfloor) - 20 o ; g = relu(a)-relu(a-1)
    u0('N1',[(Z,10.0),(O,-20.0)],-10*zfloor); u0('N2',[(Z,10.0),(O,-20.0)],-10*zfloor-1)
⋮
    P['fc1.W'][U['N1'],:]=alpha*d; P['fc1.W'][U['N2'],:]=-alpha*d
    if with_retry:
        u0('F1',[(O,25.0)],-25*1.08); u0('F2',[(O,25.0)],-25*1.08-1)
⋮
        P['fc2.W'][U['R1'],oth]=-M; P['fc2.W'][U['R2'],oth]=+M
        P['out.W'][U['QR'],[1,2,3]]=[-rise,-rise,+rise]

4Keep the tool level on retriesrounds 6 → 12: 65 → 71% task success4 of 5

Practice episode 59. On both sides the first grasp closes on nothing after about 3 seconds. Left: the retry rise swings the gripper 23 cm back toward the robot, 33 cm from the cube, and the later tries fail. Right: it rises in place, comes down again and places the cube.

Diagnosis

Measuring how far each joint follows its command: the shoulder and elbow move only 0.17 to 0.19 of a command per step, the wrist 0.33. So the retry rise tilted the tool by about 35° and swung the gripper 15 to 20 cm back toward the robot, away from the cube.

Fix

Three output weights of the rise unit now allow for the slower shoulder and elbow, so the tool stays level and the gripper rises above the same spot. 3 weights written (0.0009% of the network), none set to zero · the output row of the retry's rise unit, idle in the original network · drive shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1

Six more successes from three weights: 65 → 71; 12 episodes gained, 6 lost. Contact without lift fell from 22 to 17.

In Fable's own words

t181[…] Bug: my retry rise (equal shoulder/elbow rotation) is far from vertical when the arm is folded near the base — in episode 6 the "rise" swings the gripper a full metre inward […]
t246[…] the retry rise then dragged the gripper 17 cm back toward the base into the blind zone.
t251Key finding: the shoulder and elbow realise only about 0.17–0.19 of a commanded delta per step, but wrist_1 realises 0.33. My retry rise commanded wrist_1 as if tracking were equal, so the tool tilted by about 0.02 rad per step (roughly 35° over the rise), swinging the pinch point 15–20 cm back toward the base. […] The fix is three output weights of the rise unit.
t253[…] I expect retries to re-attempt directly above the previous spot instead of from the blind zone.
t25471/100, a new best.

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 252; row 13 of out.W is the rise unit, before −0.45, −0.45, +0.45 for shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1

P12={k:v.copy() for k,v in P6.items()}
P12['out.W'][13]=np.array([0,-0.178,-0.585,0.197,0,0,0],dtype=P12['out.W'].dtype)
save_all(P12); print(edited())

Finished edit: results

Task success in the unseen episodes, per cube colour:

Cube colour		Original policy	After Fable's edit
blue	trained on	95.0%	95.5%
green	seen during the rounds	0.0%	71.6%
red	unseen	18.2%	68.2%
purple	unseen	13.0%	72.0%
magenta	unseen	12.5%	44.5%
yellow	unseen	2.5%	38.0%
orange	unseen	11.5%	16.5%
white	unseen	0.0%	0.0%

Key edits 2 to 4 read only the arm's own state, so they work for any colour. Key edit 1 does not: it adds blue's wrist-camera pattern where it sees green's. Still, every unseen colour but white gains. On blue, the colour it was trained on, the policy even does slightly better after Fable's edit (95.5% against 95.0%).

The policy fails because the wrist-camera features that tell it "cube is under the open gripper" and "cube is held" respond mainly to blue.
It was not tested on any other colour.
Fable 5.2, in its final report

Total edits: 60,378 weights written (18.0% of the network) and 36,818 set to zero (11.0%), in 337 reasoning turns.

How about other LLMs?

All five LLMs got the same task, tools, budget and rules: GPT-6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2. Task success over the rounds, and in the unseen episodes (right).

End of experiment 3

Experiment 4 of 5 · Safety

Distribution shift. A red wall, 30 cm high, marks a no-go zone next to the tray. It is not physical: if the arm, gripper or cube enters it, the episode fails. It also disturbs the camera features. Cube and gripper start at random places, so in some episodes one of them starts beyond the wall and the arm must go over it. Unedited, the policy enters the zone in half the episodes and has 1.6% task success.

Task success on the 100 practice episodes the LLM tests on in every round, visualizing rounds where it discovered key insights. Click on a number to show more details.

1Undo the wall's camera blurrounds 0 → 2: 1 → 13% task success1 of 6

Practice episode 31; the cube lies on the robot's side of the wall. Left: before editing, the gripper comes down to 17 cm and hovers about 20 cm from the cube until time runs out. Right: it grasps the cube, carries it to the tray and places it after 4.8 s.

Diagnosis

Matching wall frames to demonstration frames with the same arm and cube positions: the front and side camera features shrink toward one fixed "wall" pattern, to about 0.5 and 0.35 of their normal range. So the network sees the cube pulled toward the wall, and the arm hovers short of it.

Fix

The first layer now amplifies the front and side camera inputs (×1.9 and ×1.5) around their demonstration means; in unused units, Fable added a small controller that centres a held cube over the tray, lowers it and lets go. 121,222 weights written (36.2% of the network), 25,225 set to zero (7.5%) · front and side camera weights of the first layer and all its biases; 20 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's position and closure, 6 + 6 in layers 2 and 3 · drive all six joints and the gripper

From 1 to 13 of 100. With the camera fix alone (round 1), lifted cubes rose from 20 to 49, but only 3 were placed: the arm held them above the tray.

In Fable's own words

t16The hover points show a clear pattern: the perceived cube position is pulled toward roughly (0.35, 0.22) — the wall — as if the pooled features were a mixture (1−α)·cube + α·wall. […]
t20The contraction is remarkably uniform across features: front slopes ≈0.5 of baseline, side ≈0.35 of baseline, with correlations largely preserved. […]
t27The repaired policy now grasps and carries the cube to just above the tray (≈(0.42, 0.03, 0.2)) and then hovers forever without lowering/releasing — in 40+ episodes. […]
t32[…] The container is at a fixed place and the holding state is visible in proprioception, so a robust alternative is a small hand-built circuit (placement controller, and later a wall-avoidance field) on proprioception. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 24 and 36; F_, S_ are the rows of fc0.W that read the front and side cameras, mu_d, mu_w the mean features without and with the wall on matched frames

for sl,g in [(F_,gf),(S_,gs)]:
    b=b+(mu_d[sl]-g*mu_w[sl])@Wo[sl]; W[sl]=Wo[sl]*g
⋮
W1,b1=make_vis_edit(1.9,1.5)
save_edit('fc0.W',W1); save_edit('fc0.b',b1)
⋮
net=Net(base); add_placement(net,Jinv,M=50.0)

2Take over the carryrounds 2 → 4: 13 → 41% task success2 of 6

Practice episode 10. Left: the arm carries the cube to the tray's centre, then holds it about 8 cm up until time runs out. Right: it carries the cube to the tray and lowers it; the check counts it as placed after 3.9 s, while the gripper still holds it about 4 cm above the table.

Diagnosis

Splitting the arm's command at the stall into its parts: in 23 episodes the arm holds the cube centred over the tray, 8.5 cm up, and never lets go. There the trained network commands "up" and exactly cancels the controller's descent.

Fix

While the gripper holds the cube, hard gates switch the trained network off, and a hand-built controller lifts the cube, swings it to the tray, lowers it and opens the gripper. 81,679 weights written (24.4% of the network), 111,746 set to zero (33.3%) · the camera correction now only on the 20 first-layer units active in training (wrist camera ×1.3 added); 80 idle first-layer units, 47 and 37 in layers 2 and 3 · 39 new units drive all six joints and the gripper

From 13 to 41 of 100: 28 episodes gained, none lost. Round 3, whose two gates left a gap at the takeover height, fell to 4. Zone entries went from 49 to 51.

In Fable's own words

t46All 23 stall at exactly the same pose: cube centred over the tray, held at z≈0.085, never released. […]
t47Key finding: at the stall the learned network commands "up" (lift −0.21, elbow −0.16) and exactly cancels my descend term. The cure is to silence the learned network whenever the cube is held and let a hand-built transport controller have sole authority. […]
t81[…] pass 3 stalled right at the takeover height (pinch z≈0.09), where my hold gate seems to be half-on (the learned net is silenced but my own UP primitive is not yet enabled). […]
t93All 127 simulated transports end with a release inside the tray. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 91; He, Hs are the "cube held" gates from gripper closure and contact, prim adds a joint-space motion, the last loop switches the trained layer-3 units off

Hraw=G+C-1.0
He=B.clip1(Hraw*2.0); Hs=B.clip1(Hraw*2.0-1.0)
⋮
prim(0,P['v_up'],[He,ZLOW,NB,NRF,Z12hi])          # UP to crossing height
⋮
prim(0,-P['v_down'],[He,BOX,CEN,ZD])
⋮
for g_ in (Hs,R):
    for u,w in g_.w.items(): T['fc2.W'][u,others]+=-P['Ms']*w

3Rise over the wallrounds 4 → 5: 41 → 47% task success3 of 6

Practice episode 50; the gripper starts behind the wall, the cube in front of it. Left: the arm goes down through the wall into the forbidden zone, closes on nothing and never lifts the cube. Right: it rises to 38 cm, crosses over the wall, comes down to the cube and places it after 9.6 s.

Diagnosis

Timing the zone entries with its own model of the arm and the wall: 37 of 51 are the open gripper sweeping into the wall on its way to the cube, about 7 start inside the zone, and the carry causes none. From the start poses Fable put the wall's top at about 28 to 31 cm, so the arm can pass over it.

Fix

When the open gripper is in a strip along the wall below 38 cm, the trained network is switched off and the arm rises straight up; above that the network steers again. 294 weights written (0.088% of the network), 16,360 set to zero (4.9%) · 14 idle first-layer units reading the gripper's y position, height and closure, 2 + 8 in layers 2 and 3 · one unit switches off all 109 trained layer-3 units · 9 new units drive the joints and the gripper

Zone entries fell from 51 to 14 of 100 and successes rose from 41 to 47 (9 gained, 3 lost). With a lower front camera gain, round 6 reached 53 with 7 zone entries. Rounds 7 to 15 added a second camera correction for a gripper near or behind the wall, and moved the open gripper over the wall when a camera test says the cube lies behind it (59 at round 15).

In Fable's own words

t75[…] So the wall top is about 0.28–0.31, and carrying the cube over the wall at pinch height ≈0.39 should be legal. […]
t103The picture is clear: almost all violations are the gripper hitting the wall during the approach (37 cases, typically at z≈0.17–0.29 within the first ~100 steps), about 7 start already inside the zone, and my transport causes essentially none. […]
t104The guard lifts in-strip starts straight up to ≥0.365 within ~10–20 steps with ~1.5 cm horizontal drift, and the transport simulation is unchanged. […]
t10647/100 and violations fell from 51 to 14, but "no_contact" rose to 39: the arm no longer hits the wall but often fails to reach the cube. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 103; GA (switch the network off) and GU (rise) are gates on the gripper's y position, closure and height, the strip runs from y = 0.09 to 0.38 below 0.38 m

GA=B.and1([BYs,GO,zs]); GU=B.and1([BYu,GO,zu])
prim(0,P['g_v'],[GU])
⋮
j=B.n('fc2',GA); B.out(j,-T['out.b'])
sil.append(GA)
⋮
P2=dict(P1); P2.update(guard=True,g_y0=0.09,g_y1=0.38,g_z=0.38,g_v=0.006)

4Align the fingers with the cuberounds 15 → 16: 59 → 62% task success4 of 6

Practice episode 40. Left: the gripper comes down on the cube and closes, but gets no hold; it shuts fully, pushes the cube aside and ends at the robot's base. Right: it grasps the cube and places it after 7.2 s.

Diagnosis

Comparing failed and successful grasps: failed ones close with the gripper 17 to 32° off the cube's angle (successes within about 10°), so the fingers jam on its corners. The camera fix had added a constant offset to the wrist-turn command and cut its response to less than half.

Fix

The wrist-turn output is shifted back by the measured offset and scaled ×1.5; a new reflex lifts and reopens a gripper that closed on nothing. 640 weights written (0.19% of the network), 10,513 set to zero (3.1%) · the wrist-turn output of the trained units and its bias; 8 idle first-layer units reading gripper closure, pad contact and height, 4 + 11 in layers 2 and 3, for the reflex

From 59 to 62 of 100: episodes 26, 35, 37, 40, 50 and 94 gained; 30, 58 and 73 lost (73 to the new reflex, which round 17 fixed).

In Fable's own words

t252[…] So the gripper is mechanically jammed: the fingers cannot close or descend, which is what happens if they straddle the cube at the wrong yaw (the cube's diagonal doesn't fit between the fingers). […]
t253Confirmed: the failed grasps (ep 15, 20, 25, 26, 40, 56) start closing with the gripper 17–32° off the cube's yaw, while successes are within ~10°. […]
t255Two findings. First, the original network has no yaw offset near the cube (−0.007 at zero error), but every visual-fix variant, even with unit gains, has ≈−0.09: the mean-shift part of my visual correction leaks a constant into the wrist‑3 command. […]
t263[…] The yaw repair recovered the jammed grasps (26, 37, 40, plus 35, 50, 94); […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 258 and 259; output 5 is wrist_3 (the wrist turn), RA is the reflex gate

RA=B.clip1((GHr*2.0+GPr+NCr+ZHr-2.0)*5.0)            # over-closed anywhere OR (part-closed & no contact & above grasp height)
⋮
b5=float(B.T['out.b'][5]); B.T['out.W'][:,5]*=yaw_g; B.T['out.b'][5]=yaw_g*(b5+yaw_d)
⋮
P13=dict(P12); P13.update(reflex2=True, r2_v=0.004)
B16=build4(P13, yaw_g=1.5, yaw_d=0.10); T16=B16.T

5Correct the wrist camerarounds 18 → 19: 65 → 68% task success5 of 6

Practice episode 35; the cube lies close to the robot. Left: the gripper stops about 6 cm beside the cube at 19 cm and hovers there until time runs out. Right: it reaches the cube, grasps it and places it after 6.6 s.

Diagnosis

Viewing a stalled episode: the gripper stops exactly when the red wall enters a corner of the wrist camera image, so the wrist features, which Fable had treated as nearly intact, are blurred too. Offline, a stronger wrist correction turned the stalled commands of about 1 mm into 4 to 9 mm toward the cube.

Fix

The wrist camera inputs are now amplified ×2.5 with the gripper in front of the wall and ×3.0 near or behind it, instead of ×1.3 and ×1.5. 10,286 weights written (3.1% of the network) · wrist camera weights of the 20 trained first-layer units and of their 20 copies for the wall regime · the wrist-turn bias

From 65 to 68 of 100: episodes 20, 35, 37, 56, 70 and 91 gained; 50, 73 and 75 lost to new hover stalls.

In Fable's own words

t286[…] this shows a dead zone near (x≈0.23, y≈-0.06) for small-x cubes, where the outcome is a coin flip. […]
t288[…] but exactly when the gripper stalls (steps 150 and 300) the red wall has entered the bottom-left corner of the wrist image, whereas at step 100 (still moving) it had not. So here the wrist features, which I had treated as nearly intact, are what get corrupted. […]
t289This is a strong lead: raising the wrist-feature gain from 1.3 to 2–3 turns the dead-zone commands in episodes 35/37 from ~1 mm into 4–9 mm toward the cube, […]
t293Pass 19 gained six episodes (20, 35, 37, 56, 70, 91 — the small-x dead zone is largely gone) and lost three to new hover stalls (50, 73, 75). […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 290; GA_, GB_ are the (front, side, wrist) camera gains in front of and near or behind the wall, 0.125 the new wrist-turn offset

GA_=(GA_save[0],GA_save[1],2.5); GB_s=GB_; GB_=(GB_s[0],GB_s[1],3.0); B19=build4(P15,1.5,0.125); T19=B19.T; GB_=GB_s; GA_=GA_save
⋮
save_T(T19)

Finished edit: results

68.0% task success in 500 unseen episodes (original 1.6%), entering the zone in 7.8% (50.0%). What does not carry over is reaching: in 19.6% of episodes the gripper never touches the cube. Fable keeps the open gripper out of a strip along the wall and gives up cubes lying in it: on the practice episodes the final edit places 1 of 17 such cubes, against 60 of 67 in front of the strip and 10 of 16 behind it.

16 cubes lie inside the guarded strip and are deliberately not approached.
Fable 5.2, in its final report

Total edits: 43,031 weights written (12.8% of the network) and 261,499 set to zero (78.0%), in 341 reasoning turns.

How about other LLMs?

All five LLMs got the same task, tools, budget and rules: GPT-6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2. Task success over the rounds, and in the unseen episodes (right).

End of experiment 4

Experiment 5 of 5 · Non-Markovian Demonstrations

A change in the data. Technically, this is not a distribution shift; it changes the data the policy learns from. The demonstrations of experiments 1 to 4 came from a Markov expert, a feedback controller that reacts only to the current state. Humans rarely work that way. Our behaviour is correlated over time: we act on intentions nobody else can see, follow a rough plan, speed up and slow down, hesitate before we commit, and sometimes miss and try again.

OCBench comes with experts that mimic these properties, and making a script behave like this takes a lot of randomness. Ours plans each episode as a smooth curve through a few random waypoints, at a different speed on every stretch. It grasps the cube from a random direction with the wrist tilted by up to 25°, pauses with its fingers around the cube in about four out of ten episodes, and tries again when a grasp fails. We record it exactly as before and train the same network on it.

The two experts from the same start. Left: the Markov expert of experiments 1 to 4. Right: the human-like expert approaches with a tilted wrist, hesitates at the cube, pulls back and tries again.

This creates an expressivity mismatch [10]. The data comes from a non-Markovian expert, while our policy is still Markov. For an intuition, consider the moment the expert pauses with its fingers around the cube. Throughout the pause, the policy sees the same state and has no notion of how long the pause has lasted, so it could simply learn to stay in that spot forever, a failure case analysed in detail in [13]. Just by training on this data, the closed-loop success of our policy drops from 95.8% to 0.4%.

Instead of making our policy non-Markovian, we ask: can an LLM make it succeed as often as the policy trained on the Markov expert, without a single new demonstration?

Task success on the 100 practice episodes the LLM tests on in every round, visualizing rounds where it discovered key insights. Click on a number to show more details.

1Keep the gripper pointing downrounds 0 → 1: 0 → 9% task success1 of 6

Practice episode 4. Left: before editing, the gripper tips far over and closes beside the cube. Right: round 1, it stays pointing down, grasps the cube and places it (664 steps).

Diagnosis

Measuring the tilt against the teacher's: in the demonstrations the gripper stays within about 0.3 rad of pointing down, in the policy's own episodes it keeps drifting, by up to radians. The network has no restoring response to the tilt at all.

Fix

Two small circuits in unused units now turn the wrist back to pointing straight down, one for each wrist joint. 14 weights written (0.0042% of the network), 3,622 set to zero (1.1%) · 2 idle first-layer units, one reading shoulder_lift, elbow and wrist_1, one reading wrist_2, passed on by 2 idle units in each of layers 2 and 3 · drive wrist_1, wrist_2

From 0 to 9 of 100, and most cubes that are lifted now reach the tray. The bottleneck moves to the grasp: 86 episodes never lift the cube.

In Fable's own words

t18Key finding: the head has essentially zero tilt-restoring response in rollouts (slope ≈ 0), and the gripper tilts progressively away from vertical (pitch error up to radians), a regime the demos never contain (they stay within ±0.3 rad). […]
t19There are enough dead units (fc0: 5, fc1: 2, fc2: 6) to build two clean feedback channels without touching any active unit. […]
t22Progress: 9/100, and most lifts now end in a successful place. The bottleneck is now grasping (85 episodes never lift). […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 19; channel A carries the pitch error of shoulder_lift + elbow + wrist_1, channel B that of wrist_2

make_channel(Pd, 30, 9, 47, {J['lift']:1,J['elbow']:1,J['w1']:1}, np.pi/2)   # A: e_pitch + C
make_channel(Pd, 43, 248, 104, {J['w2']:1}, np.pi/2)                         # B: e_w2 + C
Pd['out.W'][47,3] = -g_pitch/0.36; Pd['out.b'][3] += g_pitch*C/0.36
Pd['out.W'][104,4] = -g_w2/0.36;  Pd['out.b'][4] += g_w2*C/0.36

2Get the stalled arm movingrounds 1 → 4: 9 → 24% task success2 of 6

Practice episode 35. Left: round 1, the arm slows to a stop and never comes within 36 cm of the cube. Right: round 4, it moves to the cube, closes low over it and places it (594 steps).

Diagnosis

Swapping one input block at a time: only the wrist camera tells the network the arm is already moving, because in the demonstrations the fingers jiggle while the arm moves. In the policy's own episodes they hang still, the image looks like a demonstration's first frame, where the action is zero, and the arm stalls. Once it moved, the gripper never closed at a good grasp pose.

Fix

A constant shift of the wrist-camera input makes every image look like an arm in motion, and a new unit closes the gripper once it is low over the table. Rounds 2 to 4: 260 weights written (0.078% of the network), 1,806 set to zero (0.54%) · the shift: the biases of 254 first-layer units · the close: 1 idle first-layer unit reading the gripper height, passed on by 1 unit taken over in layer 2 and 1 idle unit in layer 3 · drives the gripper

Round 2 tried to jiggle the fingers themselves and scored 0; Fable dropped it. With the shift, 88% of episodes came within 5 cm of the cube (round 3, 6 of 100); with the close, 24 of 100.

In Fable's own words

t55The wrist-camera features carry the cue: replacing only them with the step-0 values collapses the arm actions to step-0 level. […]
t62[…] So the wrist image cue "fingers displaced" is a visual proxy for "the arm is already moving", and the head only produces motion when it already sees motion — a loop that never starts in rollouts. […]
t68[…] the gripper reaches a perfect grasp pose (xy error <0.5 cm, yaw error <0.13 rad, z≈0.16–0.2, exactly where the demonstrator closes) and then waits 60–100 steps with a6≈−0.05 — the close trigger never fires. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 71; rows 512–767 of fc0.W read the wrist camera, 782 the gripper height; dirv is the mean wrist image at demonstration steps 10–30 minus that at step 0

if s: Pn['fc0.b']+= s*(dirv.astype(np.float64)@Pn['fc0.W'][512:768,:])
⋮
Pn['fc0.W'][:,u0]=0; Pn['fc0.W'][782,u0]=-std_[782]/w_; Pn['fc0.b'][u0]=(zt-mean_[782])/w_
⋮
Pn['out.W'][u2,:]=0; Pn['out.W'][u2,6]=K

3Carry the cube to the trayrounds 4 → 5: 24 → 35% task success3 of 6

Practice episode 59. Left: round 4, the cube is lifted and held about 38 cm up, never brought down at the tray. Right: round 5, it is carried over the tray and lowered (278 steps).

Diagnosis

Following the lifted cubes: after the grasp the arm rises to about 35 cm and stalls 5 to 25 cm from the tray with near-zero commands. The tray always stands at the same place, so putting the cube down there is one fixed arm pose, which Fable computed from the arm's geometry.

Fix

Only while the gripper holds the cube, a new circuit pulls the arm toward that pose, over the tray and down. 62 weights written (0.019% of the network), 12,074 set to zero (3.6%) · 9 first-layer units (2 idle) reading shoulder_pan, shoulder_lift, elbow and the gripper opening, 4 units taken over in layer 2, 3 idle units in layer 3 · drive shoulder_pan, shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1

The carry is solved: 1 episode still lifts the cube without placing it, against 19 in round 4. The failures that remain are now almost all at the grasp.

In Fable's own words

t105The carry failure is clear: after the grasp the policy rises to ~33–37 cm and then stalls 5–25 cm away from the container with near-zero commands, never descending. The container is always at the same place, so the placing pose is a fixed joint configuration […]
t107Useful facts: successes end with the cube centre at 4–7 cm height above the table, i.e. the episode ends as soon as the held cube is low enough over the container; […]
t11435/100: the carry attractor converted most lifted episodes, […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 110 and 112; rows 768–770 of fc0.W read the arm joints, 785 the gripper opening; QSTAR is the placing pose

QSTAR=np.array([-1.8898,-1.4769,2.3092])
⋮
        w={IQ+k:-Ka[j,k] for k in range(3)}; b0=float(Ka[j]@qstar)
        set_fc0(P,p[j],w,b0+c); set_fc0(P,r[j],w,b0-c)
    set_fc0(P,A,{IOP:10.0},-10.0*op_on); set_fc0(P,B,{IOP:10.0},-10.0*(op_on+0.1)); set_fc0(P,D,{IOP:10.0},-10.0*op_off)
⋮
        P['out.W'][u,3]=-ff

4Close firmly, retry if emptyrounds 5 → 8: 35 → 80% task success4 of 6

Practice episode 52. Left: round 5, a finger lands on the cube; later the gripper closes beside it and stays shut on nothing, twice. Right: round 8, the first close comes up empty; the arm rises, reopens, comes down again and places the cube (401 steps).

Diagnosis

Tracing every grasp: the gripper often closed on nothing and stayed shut, where the teacher lifts, reopens and tries again. Fable's first retry circuit scored 0 in round 6, because it lifted before the fingers held the cube. Closing also stopped halfway when the arm rose a little, so the close had to become a commitment.

Fix

After an empty grasp the arm now rises, reopens and tries again; it lifts only once the pads feel the cube, and a close, once started, is carried through. Rounds 6 to 8: 484 weights written (0.14% of the network), 28,419 set to zero (8.5%) · 20 first-layer units reading the arm joints, gripper height, opening and pad contact, 15 units in layer 2 and 3 in layer 3, all taken over · drive the gripper, shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1; plus stronger tilt and close gains and a larger wrist-camera shift

From 35 to 70 in round 7, where 31 of the 70 successes needed two or more grasps, and to 80 in round 8.

In Fable's own words

t40The demonstrator has a clear recovery routine: after closing on nothing it lifts a little, then reopens with a6 = −1 held all the way while it realigns and descends again. […]
t139[…] the trigger closes at z < 0.5, as soon as the reading passes 0.3 the "holding" gate lifts the arm (much faster than I estimated, ~3 mm/step) before the fingers reach the cube […] So the lift must not start until the cube is actually squeezed. […]
t155The retry loop works (31 of the 70 successes needed two or more attempts). […]
t158[…] So closing must be made a commitment instead of depending on staying below 0.5 […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpts of turns 151 and 158; the commit-to-close and contact-keep units, then the stronger tilt gain and close trigger

    set_unit(P,1,CM,{A:1.0,B:-1.0,Z1:-1.0,Z2:1.0,E1:-1.0,E2:1.0},0.0)
    set_unit(P,1,CTu,{C1:1.0,C2u:-1.0,E1:-1.0,E2:1.0},0.0)
    set_unit(P,2,FE,{EK:1.0,CM:1.0,CTu:1.0},0.0); P['out.W'][FE,6]=cfg['w_keep']
⋮
        P['out.W'][47,3]=-g_pitch/0.36; P['out.b'][3]=orig_outb[3]+g_pitch*4/0.36
    set_trigger(P,cfg['trig_z'],cfg['trig_w'],cfg['trig_g'])

5Centre the gripper over the cuberounds 8 → 17: 80 → 96% task success5 of 6

Practice episode 21. Left: round 8, the open gripper hovers about 3 cm beside the cube until time runs out. Right: round 17, it centres over the cube, grasps it and places it (207 steps).

Diagnosis

Measuring the network's own steering near the cube: within about 3 cm it has a dead zone, so the open gripper hovers beside the cube and never comes down. The wrist camera does see the offset: a difference of mean camera features (cube on one side minus the other) gets its direction right in 94% of the stalled frames. The same trick tells a cube turned diagonally, where the network's own wrist rotation was right only 50 to 80% of the time.

Fix

A camera-driven circuit now pushes the gripper over the cube when it reads it as off-centre, and a second one turns the wrist to match the cube. Rounds 13 to 17: 1,902 weights written (0.57% of the network), 18,300 set to zero (5.5%) · 13 first-layer units, 5 of them reading the 256 wrist-camera features, the rest the gripper height, its opening and the wrist_3 angle; 10 units in layer 2, 8 in layer 3 (1 idle) · drive shoulder_pan, shoulder_lift, elbow, wrist_1, wrist_3

Rounds 9 to 12 tried four simpler fixes (stronger pan and wrist gains, a forced descent, a constant pan offset); all scored below 80 and Fable dropped them. The camera circuits gave 86 (round 13), 91 (round 15) and 96 (round 17).

In Fable's own words

t205[…] So the head has a flat dead zone in its pan law about ±0.3 wide (3 cm) at low height, and the gripper just sits wherever a bias puts it. What is missing is a real restoring signal inside the dead zone. […]
t207The tangential direction from wrist features is right in 94% of stalled frames (correlation 0.82) and holds across most gripper orientations, so a fine-alignment servo built from it looks feasible. […]
t216New best: 86/100. The servo works. […]

The edit, as written into the network · excerpt of turn 213; wT, wR are the difference-of-means directions in the 256 wrist-camera features (rows 512–767 of fc0.W); output 0 is shoulder_pan

    lin_unit(T0, wT/nT/sT_, C0-(midT@wT/nT+zT_)/sT_)
    lin_unit(R0, wR/nR/sR_, C0-(midR@wR/nR+r0+rz*0.65)/sR_, {Z: rz/sR_})
⋮
    set_unit(P,1,Tp,{T0:1.0,**gates}, -C0-db); set_unit(P,1,Tm,{T0:-1.0,**gates}, C0-db)
⋮
    P['out.W'][TA,0]=gT; P['out.W'][TB,0]=-gT; P['out.b'][0]-=gT*c

Finished edit: results

84.6% task success in 500 unseen episodes (original 0.4%). The main failure was a compounding error: the gripper's tilt drifts and the policy has no response that turns it back. Fable wrote a circuit that turns the wrist back. When we tilt the wrist by about 9 degrees during an episode, the edited policy straightens it within half a second; the unedited one more than doubles the tilt. Fable also found a second trap of the human-like teacher: the policy only moves the arm when the wrist camera already shows motion, and a constant shift of that camera input gets it moving. The other key edits add controllers for grasping, retrying, carrying and centring over the cube.

Cubes within 0.32 m of the base remain the weak class (6/8).
Fable 5.2, in its final report

Total edits: 2,731 weights written (0.81% of the network) and 72,260 set to zero (21.6%), in 327 reasoning turns.

How about other LLMs?

All five LLMs got the same task, tools, budget and rules: GPT-6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2. Task success over the rounds, and in the unseen episodes (right).

End of experiment 5Next: Results at a Glance ↓

All ExperimentsResults at a Glance

After the ExperimentsUnder the Hood

So far, we have judged the edits mostly from the outside, by how the robot behaves and how often it succeeds. This section is about how exactly those changes are implemented in weights. For three edits, we open the network and trace how the new behaviour is implemented in the weights: a stabilizing loop that helps the policy stay in-distribution, a goal detector that Opus builds on high-dimensional camera features, and a full-on program that keeps its memory in the robot's own pose, but with some caveats.

Case Study 1 · Opus · Experiment 5A Recovery the Expert Never Taught

In experiment 5, the policy learns from a non-Markovian expert that behaves more like a human. It follows a latent plan and never demonstrates how to recover from slight disturbances, causing the policy to drift out of distribution. Opus identifies where exactly this happens: whenever the gripper tilts slightly, the network turns the wrist further in the same direction, so the tilt grows by about 9% with every control step. In one rollout, the gripper reaches the cube tilted by about 30°, far beyond the roughly 7° of the demonstrations, and the fingers close next to the cube instead of around it.

Opus's fix is a simple proportional controller, written into units the network never uses, that measures the tilt and turns the wrist back. From a 10° tilted start, the original policy lets the tilt grow to about 25° within two seconds; with the circuit, it is down to 1° after half a second. Switching the circuit off drops the finished edit from 68 to 3 successes in 100 evaluation runs.

unit the original network usesidle unitunit Opus wrote into

original policy

with Opus's circuit

Opus's wrist circuit (experiment 5). Twelve units that the original network never or hardly ever uses (rings) read the gripper's tilt from the joint angles and turn the wrist back against it. Point at a term of the formula to see where it sits in the network. Below: the wrist starts tilted by 10°. The original policy turns it further; with the circuit alone, the tilt is gone within half a second. Chart: total tilt over time, median and quartiles of 20 evaluation runs.

In the real world, robots mostly learn from non-Markovian data, because their experts are humans. Learning from such data usually means changing the policy itself, most prominently with action chunking [14], which recent work traces back to the temporal correlations in human demonstrations [10]. This preliminary result suggests that part of what a memoryless policy loses on such data might instead be recovered after training, directly in its weights.

Case Study 2 · Opus · Experiment 2A Goal Detector in 256 Dimensions

The second case study comes from experiment 2, where the goal moves every episode. Only the cameras can tell the policy where the goal is, through the embedding of a frozen ResNet. This embedding is sub-symbolic, i.e., the goal is spread across all 256 embedding dimensions, so there is no single neuron Opus could point to.

So Opus first tries to separate correlation from causation (to anthropomorphize a little). It takes frames in which the policy begins to descend, swaps in one camera's embedding from frames in which it hovers, and checks whether the descent survives. It finds out that swapping the wrist camera alone removes the descent, and the rollouts show that this trigger works anywhere on the table. All of this was evaluated on recorded rollouts without a simulator, so in principle it would work on a real robot too.

Opus then builds a small circuit on the wrist camera. The weights w of one idle unit are a difference of means, the average wrist embedding with the goal right beneath the gripper minus the average with the goal farther away. The unit fires only while the gripper holds the cube, and two copy-units turn it into a straight-down motion that Opus derived from the arm's kinematics.

unit the original network usesidle unitunit Opus wrote into

Opus's descent trigger (experiment 2). One idle unit per layer. The first reads the 256 wrist-camera features along the direction w and switches on only while the gripper holds the cube; two copy-units pass it on as a straight-down motion of shoulder, elbow and wrist.

Opus finds structure in a high-dimensional embedding without external optimization, confirms it causally, and builds on it. Across both case studies, it draws on three fields: activation patching [15] and difference-of-means probes [16] from mechanistic interpretability, a stable feedback loop from control theory, and a straight-down motion from the kinematics of the arm. Repairing a policy is an interdisciplinary problem, and Opus treats it as one.

Case Study 3 · Fable 5.1 · Experiment 2Memory in a Memoryless Network

Sadly, the most ingenious edit in our experiments is not a repair at all. In experiment 2, Fable 5.1 quickly concludes that the policy cannot see the goal, even though three other LLMs read it from the same camera features. Therefore, on its first pass, Fable writes a program of its own into more than a hundred idle units, and this program switches the trained network off as soon as the cube is lifted. It drags the cube across the table in ever wider sweeps until the cube happens to pass over the goal. Fable even checked the program in a small kinematic simulation it wrote itself before its first rollout. That rollout scored 86 of 100.

While this exploits an underspecified success condition, the more interesting part is how the behaviour is implemented in a memoryless policy. The program has to know whether the search is running and which row of the sweep comes next, but the policy only maps the current images and robot state to an action. Fable's solution is to keep the memory in the robot's body. Once the gripper holds a lifted cube, the network twists the wrist past an angle the original policy never reaches, and from then on it reads that twist back as a flag. An out-of-distribution state has become a one-bit memory.

As long as the flag is set, two units silence every unit the original uses in its last hidden layer, and the sweep takes over. The current row is stored the same way, in the shoulder angle. Each of the eight rows, from 30 to 64 cm out, has its own band of shoulder angles. The base swings one way on even rows and back on odd ones, and at the end of a row, the target moves on to the next. The shoulder follows into the next band, and that is how the counter goes up by one. The network itself still remembers nothing. Its memory is the robot's pose.

unit the original network usesidle unitunit Fable 5.1 wrote into

Fable 5.1's sweep (experiment 2). The program Fable wrote into 126 idle units. It reads only the robot state: the wrist twist holds the on/off bit, the shoulder angle holds the row, and the base angle marks the end of a row. While the bit is set, two units switch off all 109 units the original network uses in its last layer. Point at a term of the formula to see its units. Not drawn: two rescue rules for failed grasps.

Fable 5.1's loophole (experiment 2). Unseen episode 45, with the goal 30 cm from its training position. Left: the original policy lifts the cube and never places it. Right: Fable's edit lifts the cube, twists the wrist, puts the cube down and drags it across the table until it passes over the goal.

Our task prompt says that a cube dragged into the goal does not count, but our success check only required an earlier lift. Fable lifted the cube first and then dragged it, which earned it 93.0% on the unseen episodes. It was not the only one: three of the five LLMs exploited this gap in experiment 2, Fable 5.2 almost perfectly and Sonnet 5.5 much less successfully. Weight space programming, it turns out, is just as vulnerable to reward hacking [17] as any black-box optimizer. At least Fable was honest about it.

Since the container cannot be perceived, the edit exploits the success rule: a cube that has been lifted ≥3 cm and is then set down and dragged along the table counts as placed the moment it passes within 4 cm of the container centre.
Fable 5.1, in its final report

So What?Implications for Robot Learning

For decades, robotics has tried to replace hand-written controllers with behaviour learned from data, from a neural network that steered a vehicle from camera images in 1989 (ALVINN [18]) to the first serious proposals of imitation learning as a route to capable robots [19]. In the last few years, the field has finally scaled this up, with foundation models trained on large and diverse robot data (OpenVLA [4], π₀ [5]). Yet LLMs entered robotics the way engineers always had, by writing code for rewards (Eureka [20]) and for control (Code as Policies [6]). The weights of a learned policy remained, until recently, the one part of a robot's software that only an optimizer could write. We show early signs that language models can read and rewrite the learned controller itself.

This opens a shortcut in robot learning, as illustrated by the magenta path in the visual abstract. A language model can debug a trained policy the way a programmer debugs code. It opens the black box, finds out why the policy fails, and writes the fix into its weights. In our five experiments, this took policies from 0–5% to 33–95% task success, without a single new demonstration or gradient step. And because each fix is a small circuit with a stated purpose, it can be read, tested and switched off. That matters for policies that are notoriously hard to evaluate [21], and therefore hard to deploy.

If this capability keeps improving, it could open up possibilities that are new to robot learning, or at least far easier to reach than before.

Repair from rollouts. Throughout our experiments, the LLMs worked from recorded rollouts. They could ask for test runs, but could never query the simulator itself. A deployed robot might one day be repaired the same way, from the rollouts it records anyway.
Finding faults in the weights. Opus traced the drifting wrist to a positive feedback loop it could measure directly in the network. Faults like this might be found by inspecting a policy rather than by waiting for it to fail.
New behaviours on demand. In experiment 4, Opus made a trained policy stay out of a forbidden zone, without a single demonstration of how to avoid it. New goals and safety rules might one day be added the same way.
Learned and engineered in one network. In case study 1, Opus wrote a textbook controller into a learned policy. Perception could come from data, while critical control loops are written in, readable and testable.

Coding agents show where this could go. When GPT-3 turned out to write simple programs, its authors found this "exciting because GPT-3 was not explicitly trained for code generation" [22]. On their benchmark, it solved none of the problems. Then labs began to train for code, later with reinforcement learning that rewards code for passing compilers and unit tests (DeepSeek-R1 [23]), and coding agents took off. Weight space programming today looks much like code generation did then. It emerges incidentally from what a model knows about code, control theory and mechanistic interpretability, and nobody has trained for it yet. Robot learning, meanwhile, has long judged its policies by whether they succeed, checked automatically in simulation benchmarks (LIBERO [24]) or labelled by hand on real robots [21]. These success labels are much like the verifiable rewards that let LLM post-training flourish (Tülu 3 [25]), and they are what we used to score every edit in this blog. In principle, modern robot learning pipelines already have everything needed to train language models for weight space programming. Let's see where that takes us.

Not long ago, a trained robot policy was a black box, even to the people who built it. Handing it to a language model for repair would have sounded like science fiction. Soon, it might be the first thing we try when a robot fails.

How to Cite

If you find this work useful, please cite it as:

@online{stranghoener2026repairing,
  author = {Stranghöner, Jannick and Hartmann, Philipp and Störck, Felix and Hammer, Barbara and Neumann, Klaus},
  title  = {Repairing Robot Policies with Weight Space Programming},
  date   = {2026-11-11},
  url    = {https://jstranghoener.github.io/blog/robotic-weight-space-programming/},
  note   = {Blog post},
}

The same holds beyond behaviour cloning, for any method that learns online behaviour from offline data, from model predictive control to offline reinforcement learning. For all of them, distribution shift at test time is the fundamental challenge [26].
The demonstrator is our port of OGBench's [27] Markov cube controller; noisy execution with clean labels is the DART recipe. The policy uses a pretrained ResNet-10 per camera with its last stage fine-tuned, no joint-velocity input, and 100,000 training steps.
One editing run per LLM and experiment, reasoning effort high. The original and edited policies are scored from the same starts of 500 unseen episodes (200 for each extra colour).

References

Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, Omar Khattab. Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights. Blog post, 2026. rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming
Stéphane Ross, Geoffrey J. Gordon, J. Andrew Bagnell. A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning. AISTATS, 2011. arxiv.org/abs/1011.0686
Stéphane Ross, J. Andrew Bagnell. Efficient Reductions for Imitation Learning. AISTATS, 2010. proceedings.mlr.press/v9/ross10a.html
Moo Jin Kim et al. OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model. CoRL, 2024. arxiv.org/abs/2406.09246
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