arXiv AI July 21, 2026 By Junyi Hu, Shuaihang Yuan, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala, Anthony Tzes, Yi Fang

Learning Adaptive Safety Margins for Visual Navigation

arXiv:2607. 18200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots in cluttered indoor spaces often fail not because they cannot generate collision-free paths, but because a fixed safety margin is mis-calibrated: conservative margins cause detours and timeouts, while permissive margins lead to near-boundary shortcuts under perception bias.

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 AI.

arXiv AI

Sep 15

ShieldVLA: Feasibility-Aware Safety Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.13231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate strong generalization in robotic manipulation and navigation, but existing fine-tuning methods provid...

By Manan Tayal, Akshay Nambi

robotics fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 11

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

ObstaDiff is a diffusion-policy framework that introduces a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder to generate structured representations of targets, obstacles, and background. By aligning these representations, the policy produces end-effector trajectories that focus on a target-centered bottleneck pose while accounting for surrounding obstacles. In real-robot greenhouse trials, ObstaDiff achieved a 75.41% task success rate and an 8.20% obstacle collision rate, outperforming existing imitation-learning baselines in cluttered agricultural settings.

By Jiawen Wang, Kevin Yao, Khalid Jawed

diffusion robotics safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 17

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603. 25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations.

By Maeva Guerrier, Karthik Soma, Jana Pavlasek, Giovanni Beltrame

llms diffusion robotics benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 12

Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation for Safe Autonomous Driving with Online Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 10403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes.

By Xincong Hu (Nanjing University), Lei Ou (Nanjing University), Maosen Li (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Jingtao Zhang (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Liguo Hou (Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Zongzhang Zhang (Nanjing University)

agents reinforcement-learning robotics benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 18

EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation

arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.

By Zecheng Yin, Benedict Jun Ma

agents robotics multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 15

APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv:2603. 08862v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots.

By Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu, Yang Li, Xiaomin Lin, Chengzhi Mao, Xuesu Xiao

llms agents reinforcement-learning robotics fine-tuning efficiency multimodal benchmarks safety

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Related stories

ShieldVLA: Feasibility-Aware Safety Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation for Safe Autonomous Driving with Online Reinforcement Learning

EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation

APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model