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 AI
Jul 22

AnchorRefine: Synergy-Manipulation Based on Trajectory Anchor and Residual Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2604. 17787v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Precision-critical manipulation requires both global trajectory organization and local execution correction, yet most vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate actions within a single unified space.

By Tingzheng Jia, Kan Guo, Lanping Qian, Yongli Hu, Daxin Tian, Guixian Qu, Chunmian Lin, Baocai Yin, Jiapu Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Engineering Trustworthy Agentic AI for Critical Systems

arXiv:2607. 18548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems, capable of autonomous perception, planning, tool use, and multi-step action, are increasingly proposed for critical engineering domains where decisions carry physical, operational, or economic consequences.

By Omar Al-Refai, Ibrahim Shahbaz, Adam Ali Husseinat, Michael Mandulak, Jaewon Kim, Eman Hammad
arXiv AI
Jul 22

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

arXiv:2607. 19306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time.

By Jason Stanley (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Zhirui Dai (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Qihao Qian (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Tzu-Chin Ho (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Tianxing Fan (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Siddharth Saha (Shield AI, San Diego, USA), Christopher Barngrover (Shield AI, San Diego, USA), Ki Myung Brian Lee (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA), Nikolay Atanasov (UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA)
arXiv AI
Jul 22

ImplicitRDP: An End-to-End Visual-Force Diffusion Policy with Structural Slow-Fast Learning

arXiv:2512. 10946v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-level contact-rich manipulation relies on the distinct roles of two key modalities: vision provides spatially rich but temporally slow global context, while force sensing captures rapid local contact dynamics.

By Wendi Chen, Han Xue, Yi Wang, Fangyuan Zhou, Jun Lv, Yang Jin, Shirun Tang, Chuan Wen, Cewu Lu
arXiv AI
Jul 22

SENTINEL: A Multi-Level Formal Framework for Safety Evaluation of Foundation Model-based Embodied Agents

arXiv:2510. 12985v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SENTINEL, a framework for formally evaluating the physical safety of foundation model (FM)-based embodied agents.

By Simon Sinong Zhan, Philip Wang, Yao Liu, Yiyan Peng, Zinan Wang, Qineng Wang, Zhian Ruan, Xiangyu Shi, Xinyu Cao, Frank Yang, Zhenyang Ni, Kangrui Wang, Ruohan Zhang, Huajie Shao, Manling Li, Qi Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Agentic Real2Sim: Physics-based World Modeling with Vision-Language Agents

arXiv:2607. 19190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-to-sim conversion for robotic interaction with objects remains labor-intensive because it requires more than visual reconstruction: a streamlined real2sim process must recover scene geometries and object states, infer physical parameters, and assemble actors, objects, cameras, poses, and trajectories into a runnable physical simulation.

By Guanxiong Chen, Qianjun Xia, Jiawei Peng, Heng Zhang, Bole Ma, Justin Qian, Ziyi Jiao, Bingyang Zhou, Luoxin Ye, Kaifeng Zhang, Kunyi Wang, Weijia Zeng, Yunuo Chen, Pengzhi Yang, Ziqiu Zeng, Huamin Wang, Chao Liu, Alan Yuille, Fan Shi, Changxi Zheng, Yunzhu Li, Chenfanfu Jiang, Peter Yichen Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

RAPT: Model-Predictive Out-of-Distribution Detection and Failure Diagnosis for Sim-to-Real Humanoid Deployment

arXiv:2602. 01515v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deploying learned control policies is risky because policies that appear robust in simulation can confidently enter out-of-distribution (OOD) states after Sim-to-Real transfer, causing silent failures and potential hardware damage.

By Humphrey Munn, Brendan Tidd, Peter Bohm, Marcus Gallagher, David Howard
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

NavVerse: Benchmarking Indoor-to-Outdoor Embodied Navigation in Continuous Robot Simulation

Robots deployed in delivery, campus, and emergency-response settings often need to navigate from buildings to streets within a single continuous episode. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate indoor and outdoor navigation separately, and many abstract away robot execution, leaving exit finding, boundary traversal, adaptation, and kinodynamic failures underexplored.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis

Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing

The report envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Potential applications include natural disaster detection drones that spot wildfire sources within minutes, medical supply chains that bypass ground congestion to reach rural hospitals, and nationwide fleets that continuously inspect bridges and power lines.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Agentic Real2Sim: Physics-based World Modeling with Vision-Language Agents

Real-to-sim conversion for robotic interaction with objects remains labor-intensive because it requires more than visual reconstruction: a streamlined real2sim process must recover scene geometries and object states, infer physical parameters, and assemble actors, objects, cameras, poses, and trajectories into a runnable physical simulation. Today this process still depends on manual tuning of visual foundation models, mesh cleanup, coordinate-frame alignment, and brittle workflow glue across visual perception tools and simulators.