arXiv Computer Vision By Yinlong Dai, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Dylan P. Losey

CASTER: Formalizing Zero-Shot Manipulation from Synthetic Videos as Constrained Optimization

Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →

The paper introduces CASTER, a framework that formalizes the conversion of synthetic videos into real robot trajectories as a constrained optimization problem. It shows that synthetic videos must probabilistically seed the search within a semantic basin of attraction, allowing local trajectory refinement while maintaining task alignment. By removing simplifying assumptions from existing methods, the authors achieve more robust zero‑shot manipulation and improve task success by 34.1% over the best baseline.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computer Vision.

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

NovaPlan: Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Manipulation via Closed-Loop Video Language Planning

arXiv:2602.20119v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Solving complex long-horizon robotic tasks requires joint reasoning over abstract task structure and low-level physical interaction. While co...

By Jiahui Fu, Junyu Nan, Lingfeng Sun, Hongyu Li, Jianing Qian, Benjamin Yang, Yilun Du, Jennifer L. Barry, Kris Kitani, George Konidaris
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

Video Prediction Policy 2: Predict Better, Act Better

Video Prediction Policy 2 (VPP2) is a new world action model that improves zero‑shot generalization for both video prediction and action generation. It achieves this by pretraining a large, diverse manipulation video dataset with event‑level supervision, then distilling the model into a single‑step visual planner and adding a mixture‑of‑transformers action module. Experiments show VPP2 outperforms leading baselines on open‑ended video prediction, real‑world zero‑shot manipulation, and several challenging benchmarks.

By Yanjiang Guo, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Zhongru Zhang, Qingyuan Yang, Qingzhou Lu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Shuying Deng, Chenghan Yang, Puzhen Yuan, Chenxin Liu, Tun Ban, Xiang Zhu, Yichen Liu, Kun Feng, Haoang Li, Jianyu Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606. 20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution.

By Jonghoon Lee, Seong Hyeon Park, Byungwoo Jeon, Minha Lee, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv AI
Jun 30

RoboGaze: Evaluating Robot World Models via Structured Vision-Language Analysis

arXiv:2606. 28385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning.

By Minh-Loi Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Hung Khang Nguyen, Minh Le, Doanh Le Thien, Hoang H. Tran, Dung D. Le, Vu N. Duong, Daniel Sonntag, An Thai Le, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Vien Anh Ngo, Tran Van Nhiem