arXiv AI

DepthWorld: 3D World Model for Robot Manipulation

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generation

XGenAct is a world action model that encodes RGB observations, robot actions, metric depth, surface normals, and functional role segmentation as RGB videos using deterministic codecs. It trains a single video diffusion transformer with a unified objective, sampling different perception and action tasks to learn temporal prediction across multiple spatial modalities without separate heads. Experiments on RLBench show that structured perception training boosts closed‑loop success, with XGenAct achieving 52% success on five external tasks compared to 26% for the best baselines, and it outperforms pipelines that first generate RGB and then apply a frozen perception expert for depth and segmentation prediction.

By Tingting Du, Ziyao Wang, Guoheng Sun, Ang Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion

The paper introduces Spatially Aware World Action Model (SA‑WAM), a diffusion‑based framework that extends existing World Action Models by incorporating depth information alongside RGB to enable 3‑D‑aware action and future‑state prediction. SA‑WAM repurposes a pretrained video diffusion model, using a nonlinear encoding to map unbounded depth into the tokenizer’s bounded domain, thus preserving pretrained visual priors without 3‑D‑specific fine‑tuning. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on RoboCasa and LIBERO‑Plus benchmarks and demonstrates superior real‑world performance on a UR5 robotic arm in randomized environments, while also providing analysis linking world‑model prediction quality to rollout success.

By Javier Alejandro Lopetegui Gonzalez, Paul Pacaud, Cordelia Schmid
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

StereoEngine: Scaling Stereo Bimanual Robot Data without Stereo Cameras

StereoEngine introduces two methods for generating realistic synthetic stereo data for robotic manipulation. The first method warps a monocular video into a right view using depth estimation and a video diffusion model to inpaint disoccluded regions, while the second method renders stereo pairs directly in simulation. These approaches outperform existing baselines in stereo quality and enable improved bimanual manipulation policies when used for mid‑training or task‑specific fine‑tuning.

By Jason Chen, I-Chun Arthur Liu, Gaurav Sukhatme, Daniel Seita
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

DeFM: Learning Foundation Representations from Depth for Robotics

DeFM is a self‑supervised foundation model trained solely on depth images for robotics. It uses a DINO‑style self‑distillation objective on 60 M curated depth images to learn geometric and semantic representations that generalize across environments, tasks, and sensors. The model incorporates a novel input normalization strategy for metric awareness, can be distilled into compact versions for resource‑constrained systems, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on depth‑based classification, segmentation, navigation, locomotion, and manipulation benchmarks, with strong sim‑to‑real transfer.

By Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Mayank Mittal, Fan Yang, Alexander Hansson, Amir Bar, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
arXiv AI
Aug 10

WNM-3D: A World Navigation Model with 3D Scene Conditioning for Closed-Loop VLN

arXiv:2608. 07267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adapt pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into vision-language-action (VLA) policies that map egocentric observations and language instructions directly to navigation actions.

By Yuehao Huang, Yunzi Wu, Xiaotao Zhang, Xinhai Li, Jiankun Dong, Jiajun Lv, Chi Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Yong Liu, Xuelong Li
arXiv AI
Jul 10

Time-to-Collision Based Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Using Pretrained Vision Models for Robots in Unstructured Environments

arXiv:2607. 07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical.

By Erik Jagnandan, Mulugeta Haile, Gregory Barber, Pratik Chaudhari