arXiv Computer Vision

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.

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
2d ago

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 Machine Learning
Sep 10

ControlTac: Scaling Tactile Data with Physically Controlled Tactile Image Generation

ControlTac is a two‑stage framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference image, contact force, and contact pose. By incorporating these physical priors, it produces realistic samples across different sensors and captures task‑relevant variations. Experiments in object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting show that datasets augmented with ControlTac consistently improve performance in dynamic real‑world settings.

By Dongyu Luo, Kelin Yu, Amir-Hossein Shahidzadeh, Cornelia Ferm\"uller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Ruohan Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 10

BIFTA: Brain-Inspired Few-Shot Tactile Adaptation for Unknown Sensors

The paper introduces BIFTA, a Brain‑Inspired Few‑Shot Tactile Adaptation framework that enables a frozen encoder to adapt quickly to an unknown tactile sensor using only a small labeled support set. It preserves pretrained representations via dual‑view statistical memory, builds support‑conditioned spectral graphs to correct sensor‑dependent feature neighborhoods, and employs uncertainty‑gated recurrent propagation to reinforce reliable cross‑query evidence. Benchmarks on three tactile datasets demonstrate that BIFTA dramatically improves adaptation performance, achieving an 87.09% mean Sparsh accuracy on SITR with just 10% labeled data—an increase of 47.22 percentage points over the best prior method.

By Boheng Liu, Ziyu Li, Xia Wu