Robotics and embodied AI

Manipulation, locomotion, sim-to-real transfer and autonomous driving: learning systems that have to survive physics.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

3D Underwater Path Planning via Generative Flow Field Surrogates

arXiv:2606. 06077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) launch and recovery (LAR) into the hull of an advancing host platform requires traversal of a complex, three-dimensional propeller wake whose hydrodynamic structure cannot be characterised by a uniform current model.

By Zachary Cooper-Baldock, Paulo E. Santos, Russell S. A. Brinkworth, Karl Sammut
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Equivariant Neural Belief Propagation

arXiv:2606. 06344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic inference over spatially embedded variables requires beliefs that respect $SE(3)$ symmetry, yet existing equivariant networks produce only scalars and vectors -- not the rank-2 precision tensors needed for anisotropic uncertainty, and single-component messages collapse multi-modal energy landscapes to physically meaningless averages.

By Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Learning Manifold and It\^o Dynamics with Branched Neural Rough Differential Equations

arXiv:2606. 05272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural rough differential equations (NRDEs) stay accurate under irregular sampling while taking far fewer integration steps than standard neural differential equations, summarising a finely sampled driver by its log-signature and advancing the hidden state over coarse intervals using the log-ODE method.

By Luke Thompson, Dai Shi, Lequan Lin, Junbin Gao, Andi Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Merging model-based control with multi-agent reinforcement learning for multi-agent cooperative teaming strategies

arXiv:2606. 06011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we propose a framework that combines multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with model-based control to achieve safe, dynamically feasible actions in cooperative multi-agent tasks.

By Christian Llanes, Spencer W. Jensen, Samuel Coogan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

What Objects Enable, Not What They Are: Functional Latent Spaces for Affordance Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 05533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing robot planning systems rely on appearance-based reasoning, where visual observations are encoded into latent spaces organized around object appearances (e.

By Rohan Siva, Neel P. Bhatt, Yunhao Yang, Seoyoung Lee, Nishant Gadde, Christian Ellis, Alvaro Velasquez, Zhangyang Wang, Ufuk Topcu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

LadderMan: Learning Humanoid Perceptive Ladder Climbing

arXiv:2606. 05873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humanoid robots hold great promise for operating in human-centered environments, yet ladder climbing remains one of the most challenging tasks due to sparse footholds and handholds, complex whole-body coordination, and sensitivity to perception and control errors.

By Siheng Zhao, Yuanhang Zhang, Ziqi Lu, Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Koushil Sreenath, Yue Wang, C. Karen Liu, Guanya Shi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

CogManip: Benchmarking Manipulative Behavior in Multi-Turn Interactions with Large Language Model

Whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit covert psychological manipulation in complex human-AI interactions has garnered increasing safety concerns. However, existing AI safety benchmarks remain largely restricted to explicit rule compliance and static prompts, failing to capture the dynamic and covert nature of manipulative strategies in multi-turn dialogues.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Learning of Robot Safety Policies via Adversarial Synthetic Scenarios

In this work, we propose an agentic gamification framework for hazard-informed learning of robot safety policies through synthetic scenarios. We model scenario generation as an adversarial game between two agents: a Red Team that explores the space of potential failures by constructing hazardous situations, and a Blue Team that incrementally refines safety policies to prevent them.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Inverse Design of Realizable Metasurface based Absorbers using Improved Conditioning and Diversity Enhanced Progressively Growing GANs

Metasurfaces enable precise manipulation of electromagnetic waves for applications such as beam steering, sensing, and stealth technology. However, inverse design of metasurfaces with targeted EM responses remains challenging due to the computational expense of iterative full wave simulation driven optimization and the limited conditioning fidelity and diversity of existing generative approaches.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models often inherit the image-generation view: actions are generated by iterative denoising. We argue that VLA action generation has a different condition-target structure: the policy is conditioned on rich observations, language, and state, but predicts only a compact, low-dimensional action chunk.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 04718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains, without resorting to unnecessarily complex motion patterns.

By Kailun Huang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zikang Xie (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yanzhe Xie (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Panpan Liao (Guangdong University of Technology), Fanghai Zhang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yanheng Mai (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Wenhao Xu (South China Agricultural University), Yunheng Wang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Renjing Xu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Haohui Huang (Guangdong University of Technology)
arXiv AI
Jun 4

ContactExplorer: Contact Coverage-Guided Exploration for General-Purpose Dexterous Manipulation

arXiv:2603. 10971v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in domains such as Atari games, navigation, and locomotion, where exploration can often be guided by novelty over states or dynamics.

By Zixuan Liu, Ruoyi Qiao, Chenrui Tie, Xuanwei Liu, Yunfan Lou, Chongkai Gao, Zhixuan Xu, Lin Shao
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Dual Advantage Fields

arXiv:2606. 04188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning requires both long-horizon reachability estimates and local action comparisons.

By Alexey Zemtsov, Maxim Bobrin, Alexander Nikulin, Dmitry V. Dylov, Fakhri Karray, Vladislav Kurenkov, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}, Arip Asadulaev