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 14

A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv:2607. 09792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigation is a fundamental capability of autonomous systems, yet most existing approaches rely on highly structured models and strong prior assumptions, limiting their robustness in open and uncertain real-world environments.

By Liuyi Wang, Kai Sheng, Zongtao He, Jinlong Li, Yongrui Qin, Haojie Dai, Xiangyi Wang, Jingwei Yang, Qingqing Yan, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Toward Autonomous Soft Robotic Endovascular Navigation via Imitation Learning

arXiv:2510. 09497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In endovascular surgery, endovascular interventionists push a thin tube called a catheter, guided by a thin wire to a treatment site inside the patient's blood vessels to treat various conditions such as blood clots, aneurysms, and malformations.

By Noah Barnes, Ji Woong Kim, Lingyun Di, Hannah Qu, Anuruddha Bhattacharjee, Miroslaw Janowski, Dheeraj Gandhi, Bailey Felix, Shaopeng Jiang, Olivia Young, Mark Fuge, Ryan D. Sochol, Jeremy D. Brown, Axel Krieger
arXiv AI
Jul 14

TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 09218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv AI
Jul 14

IntentVLA: Short-Horizon Intent Modeling for Aliased Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2605. 14712v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robot imitation data are often multimodal: similar visual-language observations may be followed by different action chunks because human demonstrators act with different short-horizon intents, task phases, or recent context.

By Shijie Lian, Bin Yu, Xiaopeng Lin, Zhaolong Shen, Laurence Tianruo Yang, Yurun Jin, Haishan Liu, Changti Wu, Hang Yuan, Cong Huang, Kai Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays

arXiv:2506. 14411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In standard reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects an action without delay, and executes it immediately.

By John Wikman, Alexandre Proutiere, David Broman
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Coverage Path Planning: Classical Foundations, Recent Advances, and Future Directions

arXiv:2607. 10649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coverage path planning (CPP) is a fundamental problem in robot motion planning, whose aim is to produce robot trajectories that provide complete coverage of target workspaces while minimizing task-specific objectives such as path length, overlap, number of turns, and energy consumption.

By Zongyuan Shen, Shalabh Gupta, Shancheng Zhao, Dehua Zhou, Gao Wang, Zhongqiang Ren, Yaming Ou, Yikui Zhai, C. L. Philip Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Reinforcement Learning in the Real World: A Survey of Statistical Challenges and Future Directions

arXiv:2601. 15353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing.

By Asim H. Gazi, Yongyi Guo, Daiqi Gao, Ziping Xu, Kelly W. Zhang, Susan A. Murphy
arXiv AI
Jul 14

FAST: A Framework for Aligned Sampling and Training in Parallel Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606. 21587v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning is pivotal for closed-loop autonomous driving yet remains constrained by severe bottlenecks in sampling efficiency.

By Bonan Wang, Letian Tao, Bin Shuai, Jiaxin Gao, Wenxin Zhao, Wei Xiong, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Yang Guan, Shengbo Eben Li
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Lifelong Representations: A Survey on Continual Self-Supervised Learning for Vision Models

arXiv:2607. 09785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditionally, continual learning has assumed access to labeled data, yet many real-world applications -- such as lifelong robotics -- require models to adapt continuously from unlabeled streams.

By Sergi Masip, Alicja Dobrzeniecka, Jonathan Swinnen, Joachim Collin, Bart{\l}omiej Twardowski, Szymon {\L}ukasik, Tinne Tuytelaars