# TinyAstral: Transferring a self-evolving harness to small generalist manipulation agents

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-11-02T05:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/bjsk89xvl2d701n6u1935ftnr
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41216

## Summary

TinyAstral proposes a two-stage method: first freeze an open-weight teacher model and optimize its harness through recursive self-improvement (RSI), then distill a 4B student model to replace the teacher within the same harness. On RoboTwin, harness evolution raised the teacher's success rate from 33.4% to 63.6%, and the final 4B student reached 62.8%; in measured deployment episodes, the student used about one-fifth of the teacher's accelerator time.