# ZETA: A Controlled Study of Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment VLA Transfer for Tabletop Manipulation

- Source: PKU EPIC Lab
- Published: 2026-09-02T13:00:18.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/kqtj15n3usntn8g05c9dkj7yz
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02546

## Summary

PKU EPIC Lab published the ZETA study on arXiv (arXiv:2609.02546), proposing a unified definition of zero-shot cross-embodiment VLA transfer and a controlled benchmark covering 14 held-out target embodiments, distinguishing strict zero-shot transfer from pretrain-exposed transfer. Experiments show that local end-effector state-action representations, source embodiment diversity, and auxiliary co-training improve transfer by about 15, 18, and 7 percentage points, respectively, and that adding only 5% target-embodiment data during pretraining raises average target-embodiment progress by 13.4 percentage points.

## Why it matters

The paper provides a unified definition of zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer and a controlled benchmark, allowing readers to understand the actual benefits of different representation and data strategies.