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 2

Semantic-Geometric Task Representations for Bimanual Manipulation from Human Demonstrations to Robot Action Planning

arXiv:2601. 11460v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning structured task representations from human demonstrations is essential for bimanual manipulation, where action ordering, object involvement, and interaction geometry vary significantly across executions.

By Franziska Herbert, Vignesh Prasad, Han Liu, Dorothea Koert, Georgia Chalvatzaki
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Model

arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Closed-Loop Neural Activation Control in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606. 00269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can be steered at test time by intervening on semantically meaningful internal directions, but existing methods use a fixed steering coefficient, effectively operating in open loop.

By Abhijith Babu, Ramneet Kaur, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Olivera Kotevska, Susmit Jha, Yanzhao Wu, Sumit Kumar Jha, Anirban Roy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Per-Group Error, Not Total MSE: Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models for 11-DoF Mobile Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 00253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for mobile manipulators with heterogeneous joint spaces can produce a counterintuitive result: the checkpoint with the lowest aggregate MSE is not the one that performs best on the real robot.

By Pau Montagut Bofi, Mario Garc\'ia Blasco, Tessa Pulli, Markus Vincze
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SPARC: Spatial-Aware Path Planning via Attentive Agent Communication

arXiv:2603. 02845v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient communication is critical for decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning (MRPP), yet existing learned communication methods treat all neighboring robots equally regardless of their spatial proximity, leading to diluted attention in congested regions where coordination matters most.

By Sayang Mu, Xiangyu Wu, Bo An