arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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
Jul 14

TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 09218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv AI
Jul 13

Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 09218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
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 Computer Vision
Sep 18

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

DexTouch-WM is an action‑conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics for dexterous robot manipulation. By using compatible piezoresistive arrays on both human and robot hands and retargeting human motion into the robot action space, the model can be supervised with human interaction data while keeping a fixed amount of real‑robot supervision. Experiments show that adding up to 100 hours of human interaction improves robot‑domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction, and the model can serve as a surrogate environment for policy evaluation and synthetic trajectory generation.

By Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin, Shujia Liu, Chuqiao Lyu, Kailun Su, Chenze Yu, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding, Tianxing Chen, Renjing Xu
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 28

Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

DreamTacVLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that incorporates high‑resolution tactile images alongside wrist‑camera and third‑person vision to enable robots to anticipate and react to contact dynamics. It uses a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment loss to align tactile tokens with visual counterparts and a tactile world model to predict future tactile signals, trained on a hybrid dataset from digital twins and real experiments. The approach achieves up to 95% success on contact‑rich manipulation tasks, outperforming existing VLA baselines.

By Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao, Shang Wu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Lu, Han Liu