arXiv Computer Vision

CLARO: Clutter Aware Robot Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Grasping using VLM Agents

arXiv AI
Oct 27

AffordSim: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark for Affordance-Aware Robotic Manipulation

AffordSim is a scalable data generator and benchmark that integrates open‑vocabulary 3D affordance prediction into simulation‑based trajectory generation for robotic manipulation. Given a natural‑language task description, it synthesizes task‑relevant scenes, queries affordances, grounds them on object surfaces, samples region‑conditioned grasps, and selects executable candidates with motion planning, while randomizing pose, texture, lighting, noise, and backgrounds for sim‑to‑real transfer. The benchmark includes 50 tasks, five robot embodiments, and over 500 objects, achieving 93% of the success rate of manual contact annotations on affordance‑critical tasks and 89% on hard composite tasks, with policies trained on AffordSim transferring zero‑shot to a real Franka FR3 with 24% average success.

By Mingyang Li, Haofan Xu, Haowen Sun, Xinzhe Chen, Sihua Ren, Liqi Huang, Xinyang Sui, Chenyang Miao, Jiawei Ye, Qiongjie Cui, Xingyu Chen, Zeyang Liu, Xuguang Lan
arXiv AI
Sep 7

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate Vision‑Language‑Action models on fine‑grained spatial reasoning and long‑horizon procedural planning. It contains 10 task categories, 56 base tasks, and 280 variants across five difficulty levels, with 527K trajectories collected from multiple embodiments and scenes. The benchmark introduces diagnostic metrics beyond binary success, revealing that current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise execution, and memory‑intensive planning.

By Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv AI
Oct 28

RoboAuto: Autonomous Robot Program Search through Multi-Level Physical Understanding

RoboAuto is a framework that enhances autonomous robot program search by explicitly incorporating physical understanding at the object, scene, and interaction levels. It uses a hierarchical knowledge base of executable skills and object-centric affordances, scene grounding to map knowledge to the current environment, and multi-stage planning with self-designed experiments to verify physical effects and resolve uncertainties. The approach achieves higher success rates than prior methods on multiple benchmark tasks and demonstrates transferability across simulators and embodiments.

By Buzhao Liu, Jianing Ye, Xiu Yuan, Yangtong Feng, Chengsong Huang, Tyler Dinh, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Ning Zhang, Chongjie Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Continual Learning for 6-DoF Grasp Synthesis via Experience and Demonstrations

The paper introduces a continual‑learning framework for single‑view 6‑DoF grasp synthesis with a parallel‑jaw gripper in cluttered scenes. Instead of fine‑tuning a large parametric model, the method updates grasp scores via memory in a learned embedding space and optionally incorporates user demonstrations to generate new candidate grasps. Experiments in simulation and real‑world trials (over 1500 grasps) show that the approach matches baseline performance before adaptation, improves online on unseen objects, and achieves over 90% success on challenging categories after just 50 online attempts.

By Giulio Schiavi, Andrei Cramariuc, Michael Pantic, Roland Siegwart
arXiv AI
Jun 9

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 08530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments.

By Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen, Shuai Dong, Jiajun Deng, Xin Zhang, Yuxuan Gao, Jiajia Wu, Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang, Xingyi Zhang, Jia Pan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

XS-VLA: Coupling Coarse-grained Spatial Distillation with Latent Flow Matching for Lightweight Robotic Control

arXiv:2607. 04171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong multimodal understanding and spatial grounding, but their computational cost limits real-time robotic control.

By Lei Iok Tong, Qingchen Xie, Wei Huang, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Qianzhi Li, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng
arXiv AI
Oct 27

RoboGene: Diversity-Driven Agentic Task Generation Framework for VLA Pre-training

RoboGene is an agentic framework designed to generate diverse and informative manipulation tasks for single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile robots. It employs diversity-driven sampling, agentic self-reflection for task quality assessment, and human-verified feedback memory to validate and refine tasks. The framework produced 18,000 real-world trajectories and introduced new metrics for task feasibility and diversity, outperforming models like GPT‑4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro in training VLA models that achieve higher success rates and stronger generalization.

By Yixue Zhang, Kun Wu, Zhi Gao, Zhen Zhao, Pei Ren, Zhiyuan Xu, Fei Liao, Xinhua Wang, Shichao Fan, Di Wu, Qiuxuan Feng, Meng Li, Zhengping Che, Chang Liu, Jian Tang