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
Aug 11

Particle-Based Conformal Prediction for Contact-Aware Uncertainty Calibration in Stratified Configuration Spaces

arXiv:2608. 09166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable uncertainty representation is essential for deploying autonomous systems that interact with their environment, as robots must reason about how uncertainty arising from both stochasticity and model mismatch is impacted by contacts with obstacles (e.

By Lu\'is Marques, Kristian Popov, Dmitry Berenson
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

V-Simba: Unleashing the Architectural Potential of RL in Visual Continuous Control

arXiv:2608. 07870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving sample efficiency remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially in real-world settings like robotics, where data collection is costly.

By Donghu Kim, Youngdo Lee, Hojoon Lee, Johan Obando-Ceron, Byungkun Lee, Aaron Courville, Pablo Samuel Castro, Jaegul Choo, Clare Lyle
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Auditing Instruction-Trajectory Mismatches in Multimodal Robot Demonstrations

arXiv:2608. 07895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot demonstration datasets used to train vision-language-action policies can contain a subtle but harmful failure mode: trajectories that are behaviorally correct but paired with the wrong language instruction.

By Simon Holk, Ryosuke Takanami, Tatsuya Matsushima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Yueh-Hua Wu, Kei Ota
arXiv AI
Aug 11

An AI Scientist that Doesn't Drift: Taste, Structure, and Falsifiable Findings in a Quadruped Navigation Research Loop

arXiv:2608. 07542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous research loops driven by large language models can run machine-learning experiments at scale but tend to drift toward local refinements of whichever metric they optimise rather than testing the hypotheses that motivate the experiments.

By Yiwen Zhang, Eloise Zeng, Jaeha Lee, Tony Yue Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

MusicLayout: Explicit Structural Planning for Controllable Text-to-Music Generation

arXiv:2608. 09035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-music generation has advanced rapidly, but current systems still rely primarily on global text prompts, leaving the structural organization of generated music implicit and difficult to inspect, control, or revise before audio generation.

By Shuyu Li, Kejun Zhang, Jiahe Lei, Shulei Ji, Zihao Wang, Jiaxing Yu, Wanying Wu, Lei Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 11

CMU-Drive and V2V-VLA: Cooperative Multi-agent Unified Driving with Reasoning Benchmark and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2608. 07621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved impressive performance for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches are primarily designed for an individual single autonomous driving agent with limited support for cooperative perception, reasoning, and planning.

By Hsu-kuang Chiu, Stephen F. Smith