Robotics and embodied AI

Manipulation, locomotion, sim-to-real transfer and autonomous driving: learning systems that have to survive physics.

4,315 stories · RSS feed

arXiv AI
Jun 11

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

arXiv:2603. 13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF).

By Emanuele Sansone, Armando Solar-Lezama
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603. 14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions.

By Mikoto Kudo, Takumi Tanabe, Akifumi Wachi, Youhei Akimoto
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604. 13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment.

By Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini, Loris Roveda
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606. 11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks.

By Siyu Ma, Yuqi Liang, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Hao Su, Yixin Zhu, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policies

arXiv:2605. 03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning.

By Sarvesh Patil, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Manan Agarwal, Shashwat Saxena, Jesse Zhang, Giri Anantharaman, Cleah Winston, Chaoyi Pan, Douglas Chen, Nai-Chieh Huang, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, Sergey Levine, Abhishek Gupta, Hongkai Dai, Paarth Shah, Max Simchowitz