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
Sep 21

FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo