arXiv AI
Sep 11

Compact Visuotactile World Models for Lifting: Prediction, Reward Alignment, and Force Constraints

The paper presents a 652,157‑parameter action‑conditioned visuotactile world model designed for lifting tasks, integrating behavior cloning, policy learning in imagination, reactive implicit Q‑learning, and model‑assisted force feedback. Experiments on 120 fresh MuJoCo environments and additional ID environments show that visuotactile dynamics reduce force‑action‑effect mean absolute error from 0.413 N to 0.338 N, and model‑assisted feedback boosts force‑budgeted success from 73.3 % to 93.3 %. Imagined reinforcement learning achieves 11.9 % pooled joint success compared to 25.0 % for reactive IQL, with further stress testing adding 330 executions.

By Qinzhen Ma (Rice University)
arXiv AI
Sep 18

TacSushi: Tactile-Grounded World-Action Modeling for Dexterous Sushi Manipulation

TacSushi is a tactile‑grounded, Cosmos3‑based world‑action policy for dexterous sushi manipulation. It encodes RGB, language, and hand state, fusing fingertip tactile data via feature‑wise gated fusion, and learns from future‑consequence predictions while excluding failed actions from imitation. Trained on 340 successful and 50 failed trials, TacSushi achieves 68.3% in‑distribution and 37.5% out‑of‑distribution success, outperforming baselines that lack future‑consequence supervision or use direct tactile concatenation.

By Haodi Hu, Kaen Kogashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606. 11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks.

By Siyu Ma, Yuqi Liang, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Hao Su, Yixin Zhu, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu Jiang
arXiv AI
1d ago

Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation

The survey examines dexterous robotic hands in the context of foundation models, covering hardware, data, cross-embodiment transfer, learning, and evaluation from January 2024 to November 2026. It highlights that human data’s value hinges on alignment rather than volume, that shared policies still face embodiment constraints, and that task success alone does not guarantee physical correctness or readiness for deployment. The authors identify eleven open problems and suggest reporting standards to better measure full-stack progress.

By Ji Pei