arXiv Machine Learning

Tactile Modality Fusion for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2603. 14604v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose TacFiLM, a lightweight modality-fusion approach that integrates visual-tactile signals into vision-language-action (VLA) models.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imagination

DeCAL is a vision‑language‑action model designed for dexterous manipulation that incorporates tactile sensing through adaptive visuo‑tactile fusion and latent co‑imagination. It uses a Mixture‑of‑Transformers architecture with specialized experts for understanding, imagination, and action, enabling efficient information flow and dynamic regulation of tactile inputs. Experiments show DeCAL achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance, with a 71% average success rate and 83.4% progress success rate, and generalizes well to unseen scenarios.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606. 11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks.

By Siyu Ma, Yuqi Liang, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Hao Su, Yixin Zhu, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

TacSushi: Tactile-Grounded World-Action Modeling for Dexterous Sushi Manipulation

TacSushi is a tactile‑grounded, Cosmos3‑based world‑action policy for dexterous sushi manipulation. It encodes RGB, language, and hand state, fusing fingertip tactile data via feature‑wise gated fusion, and learns from future‑consequence predictions while excluding failed actions from imitation. Trained on 340 successful and 50 failed trials, TacSushi achieves 68.3% in‑distribution and 37.5% out‑of‑distribution success, outperforming baselines that lack future‑consequence supervision or use direct tactile concatenation.

By Haodi Hu, Kaen Kogashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control

Agile-WAM is a tactile World Action Model that jointly predicts future visual and tactile states and robot actions for contact‑rich manipulation. It encodes visual and tactile observations into a shared latent space and uses a vision‑tactile‑to‑action flow‑matching process to generate action chunks and future latents. The model introduces multi‑horizon multimodal prediction, leveraging the different timescales of vision and touch, and achieves a 29.4 % improvement in real‑world success rates with 11.9 ms inference latency across nine simulated and five real‑world tasks.

By Hanchu Zhou, Brendan Lynch, Raman Goyal, Dechen Gao, Begum Kasap, Boqi Zhao, Junshan Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation

VT-MUSE is a multimodal unified sequential representation learning framework for visuotactile manipulation. It uses a two‑stage approach: first, modality‑specific encoders are jointly adapted with cross‑modal temporal alignment and masked‑view consistency; second, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences and full tactile histories, with auxiliary decoders reconstructing recent visual observations and predicting tactile depth changes. The resulting representation is fed into a lightweight Transformer policy via gated cross‑attention, achieving an 11‑percentage‑point improvement over the strongest baseline in simulation and significant gains in real‑world experiments.

By Congsheng Xu, Qiaochu Yang, Fangyuan Shi, Yifan Han, Baijun Chen, Yiming Wang, Haonan Zhao, Daolin Ma, Xiaokang Yang, Hesheng Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

OmniTacTune: Policy-Agnostic Real-World RL for Tactile Residual Adaptation of Visual Policies

arXiv:2607. 03723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual policies learned from human videos, teleoperation, and robot demonstrations offer scalable motion priors, but often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where success significantly depends on local force and contact geometry.

By Kelin Yu, Haode Zhang, Harish Ravichandar, Yunhai Han, Ruohan Gao