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 18

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

arXiv:2603. 11417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined.

By Fatemeh Naeinian, Ali Hamza, Haoran Zhu, Anna Choromanska
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606. 19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation.

By Nikita Kachaev, Andrey Moskalenko, Matvey Skripkin, Nikita Kurlaev, Daria Pugacheva, Albina Burlova, Mikhail Kolosov, Denis Shepelev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Elena Tutubalina, Aleksandr I. Panov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Vlad Shakhuro
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

Damage Adaptation in Seconds for Architected Materials

arXiv:2606. 17394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptation to damages and in-situ physical repairs is essential for long-term robot autonomy, yet challenging outside of narrowly defined and well-anticipated bounds.

By James Avtges, Jake Ketchum, Helena Young, Taekyoung Kim, Ryan Truby, Todd Murphey
arXiv AI
Jun 17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

arXiv:2606. 17511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment.

By Haoran Lu, Songling Liu, Yue Chen, Guo Ye, Mutian Shen, Shuyang Yu, Yu Xiao, Jihai Zhao, Shang Wu, Jianshu Zhang, Xiangtian Gui, Chuye Hong, Yuran Wang, Maojiang Su, Jiayi Wang, Ruihai Wu, Zhaoran Wang, Han Liu