arXiv:2609.24187v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autonomous endoscopic navigation requires the policy model to predict actions from texture-poor monocular observations, make safe control decisions,...
By Tamima Tabassum, Yiming Huang, Tianchun Wu, Changjing Liu, Zhiqing Tang, Chikit Ng, Beilei Cui, Liangjing Shao, Jiewen Lai, Hongliang Ren
arXiv:2606. 29247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for embodied intelligence in surgical robotics.
By Jiashuo Sun, Yue He, Wenxuan Liu, Tao Mao, Jiazheng Wang, Xiang Chen, Min Liu
The paper introduces 3DWay, a method that predicts 3D consistent waypoints for robot manipulation using multi‑view images. By first generating 2D waypoints that are consistent across views and then triangulating them, the approach provides explicit 3D motion specifications while leveraging pretrained vision‑language models. Experiments demonstrate that 3DWay improves 3D spatial grounding and vision‑language reasoning, enhancing the generalization of robot manipulation policies.
The paper introduces 3DWay, a method that predicts 3D-consistent waypoints for robot manipulation by first generating multi‑view consistent 2D waypoints and then triangulating them. This approach addresses the 3D ambiguity inherent in 2D trajectory predictions and leverages pretrained vision‑language models to provide explicit 3D motion specifications. Experiments demonstrate that 3DWay improves 3D spatial grounding and vision‑language reasoning, enhancing generalization for robot manipulation tasks.
By Ziqin Huang, Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Gu Wang, Xingyu Liu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Xiangyang Ji
arXiv:2608. 11204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.
By Wenrui Bao, Tianyun Jiang, Zhiben Chen, Ser-Nam Lim, Peter D. Peng, Yuzhang Shang
arXiv:2609.17021v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Autonomous wheel-loader control requires joint reasoning over task semantics, egocentric vision, proprioception, and 3D scene geometry. We present sens...
By Gopi Krishna Erabati, Bjarne Johannsen, Angus Stewart, Vardeep Singh Sandhu
GaussVLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model that enhances spatial reasoning by converting flat 2D visual tokens into compact 3D Gaussian tokens using a Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer. It further employs a Depth‑Aware Chain‑of‑Thought module to perform structured, non‑autoregressive geometric reasoning conditioned on language and flow‑time. In both simulated and real‑world tests, GaussVLA achieves high spatial‑manipulation success rates—93.5% on LIBERO and 100% on the Spatial suite—while using only 200 M parameters, outperforming SpatialVLA by 19.7% relative success.
By Md Selim Sarowar, Md Tanvir Islam, Sungho Kim, Sangtae Ahn
FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.
By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz
The paper proposes a neuro‑symbolic framework that augments vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with explicit task graphs and multimodal procedural memory to handle long‑horizon manipulation tasks. Task graphs encode action dependencies, valid transitions, and branch conditions, while memory tracks the active step, completed actions, textual context, and relevant visual evidence. Human demonstrations provide spatial and temporal guidance via gaze or saliency cues, which are annotated in robot‑view teleoperation videos and used to fine‑tune VLA models. The approach is evaluated on workspace clearing and surgical‑instrument handling tasks, measuring object and destination selection, subtask completion, task progress, step‑order consistency, overall success, and procedural or execution mistakes.
By Vivek Chavan, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann, Kevin Haninger, J\"org Kr\"uger
arXiv:2608. 04575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable physical reasoning from video requires understanding how objects move, interact, and respond to interventions.
By Chen Yang, Shenxiang Zeng, Haoyang Zhao, Zhouyuan Xu, Youquan He, Haoyu Li, Mingyi Deng, Jiansheng Fan, Chen Wang
arXiv:2606. 00095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to reach target locations in unseen environments by following language instructions.
By Kailing Li, Tianwen Qian, Lijin Yang, Yuqian Fu, Jingyu Gong, Xiaoling Wang, Liang He
SurgAtlas is the largest surgical video‑language dataset, containing 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) across 18 specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, all sourced from public YouTube. It uniquely includes open‑surgery videos at scale (6,182) alongside more than 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and introduces standardized benchmarks for open‑surgery video understanding. The dataset offers a rich, multi‑tier annotation schema—segment‑level captions, step/phase descriptions, video‑level surgical narratives, and reasoning‑oriented VQA pairs—validated by experts and built through an automated LLM‑enriched pipeline.
"whyItMatters":"SurgAtlas provides an unprecedentedly large, diverse, and clinically validated resource that can train and benchmark multimodal surgical AI models, advancing the development of next‑generation foundation models for surgery."
By Filippos Bellos, Andre S. Gala-Garza, Miaowei Wang, Alyssa M. Hardin, Ahmad M. Hider, Li Yayuan, Jing Bi, Susan Liang, Chenliang Xu, Donald S. Likosky, Jason J. Corso