arXiv AI

Cross-Embodiment Causal Transfer from Human Videos to Robot Manipulation

The paper proposes Causal-Beam-Guided Subtask Transfer (CBST), a method that learns manipulation-related representations from human videos and grounds them in task-level semantic variables using robot demonstrations. CBST uses causal-beam constraints to select contextual information that preserves local mechanism outputs while maintaining responsiveness to retained inputs. Experiments on robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that CBST improves task success compared to baseline world-action models.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.

By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulation

The paper introduces a metric interaction framework for robotic manipulation that explicitly models object- and scene-level interactions in Cartesian space. It uses Interaction‑Centric Tokens (ICTs) to represent end‑effector trajectories relative to objects and a Metric Action Interaction Field (MAIF) to attend to scene point‑cloud features for geometry‑conditioned action corrections. Experiments show modest but consistent improvements across several benchmarks, including LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real‑world tasks.

By Lijie Wang, Zheng Lu, Yiming Wang, Heyang Yu, Kenghou Hoi, Bowen Hu, Di Cui, Tianyu Xin, Haoran Liao, Wanqi Zhong, Xingjie Fan, Yizhao Xu, Ziliang Wang, Fei Gao, Yiming Li
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.

By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeff Schneider, Jeffrey Ichnowski