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 10

{\Omega}-QVLA: Robust Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Composite Rotation and Per-step Scaling

arXiv:2605. 28803v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models unify perception, reasoning, and control within a single policy, yet their multi-billion-parameter backbones and diffusion-based action heads make on-device deployment prohibitively expensive.

By Xinyu Wang, Mingze Li, Sicheng Lyu, Dongxiu Liu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziyu Zhao, Yufei Cui, Xiao-Wen Chang, Peng Lu
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Learning to Walk With Less: A Dyna-Style Approach to Quadrupedal Locomotion

arXiv:2509. 06296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion often suffer from low data efficiency, requiring millions of interactions with simulated environments to achieve stable control.

By Francisco Affonso, Felipe Tommaselli, Jo\~ao H. Al\'essio, Vivian S. Medeiros, Mateus V. Gasparino, Girish Chowdhary, Marcelo Becker
arXiv AI
Aug 10

WAM-Diff2: Hierarchical AR-to-Diffusion Distillation for Highly Efficient Autonomous Driving VLA

arXiv:2608. 01035v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving; however, their efficient deployment is severely constrained by high computational latency and exposure bias arising from sequential autoregressive decoding.

By Zhihao Zhu, Hanlin Shang, Mingwang Xu, Feipeng Cai, Zhuolin He, Yaoyi Li, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Siyu Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 10

SoRoMoX: Fast, Differentiable, and Parallelizable Soft Robot Models

arXiv:2608. 06650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reduced-order models based on Cosserat-rod theory are now well established, and modeling theory is no longer the primary bottleneck in soft-robot control.

By Maximilian St\"olzle, Solange Gribonval, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Vito Daniele Perfetta, Michele Martini, Chuhan Zhang, Kiwan Wong, Mohammed Tarnini, Anup Teejo Mathew, Federico Renda, Daniela Rus, Cosimo Della Santina
arXiv AI
Aug 7

From Passive Mirrors to Active Agents: Holonic Digital Twins for Physical AI over Networks

arXiv:2608. 06227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite advances in artificial intelligence (AI) across multiple sectors, today's AI tools, including deep learning and generative AI, still fail when embedded into physical systems, such as robots and vehicles operating under real-world physical laws.

By Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Omar Hashash, Walid Saad
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Hijacking Robots with a Piece of Paper: A Systematic Study of Physical Prompt Injection in VLM-Controlled Robots

arXiv:2608. 05715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners in robotic systems, where they translate natural-language commands into executable actions grounded in visual scene understanding.

By S. M . Bhagya P. Samarakoon, M. A. Viraj J. Muthugala, W. K. R. Sachinthana, Mohan Rajesh Elara
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

Dynamic Object Masks as Goal Representations for Visual Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2510. 06277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) offers a unified way to pursue diverse tasks, yet most existing methods rely on state- or position-based goal representations that are unavailable in real-world robotics.

By Fahim Shahriar, Cheryl Wang, Alireza Azimi, Gautham Vasan, Hany Hamed, Abhishek Naik, A. Rupam Mahmood, Colin Bellinger
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

Robot Learning from Human Demonstrations: Handwritten Alphabet Trajectories and Human-Likeness Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 06221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning from demonstration (LfD) provides a developmental framework through which robots can develop motor skills by observing and imitating human dynamics, reducing reliance on explicit programming to teach a skill to a robot.

By Alperen Kenan, Paul Bremner, Manuel Giuliani
arXiv AI
Aug 7

SkillMemo: Expert-guided Skill Memory Framework for Compositional Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 05970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks.

By Changyuan Wang, Chubin Zhang, Zhenyu Wu, Runhao Li, Angyuan Ma, Ke Chao, Yinan Liang, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Yansong Tang, Jiwen Lu