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 Computer Vision
Sep 21

PRIME: Perception Feedback with Situational Memory Embeddings in VLA Models

PRIME introduces a perception feedback mechanism for Vision‑Language‑Action models in autonomous driving, conditioning perceptual queries on a Situational Memory that aggregates past perception, reasoning, navigation goals, and predicted behaviors via cross‑attention. This approach adds only 29.7 M parameters (0.41 % of a 7.3 B‑parameter base model) and enables intent‑driven perceptual attention at minimal computational cost. On the Bench2Drive closed‑loop benchmark, PRIME achieves a state‑of‑the‑art Driving Score of 82.47 and a Success Rate of 60.00 %, outperforming prior models such as ORION.

By Erik Deinzer, Naya Baslan, Luca Paparusso, Narunas Vaskevicius, Peter Knott, Luigi Palmieri
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

ProTracer: Proprioception-Guided Failure Diagnosis in Robot Manipulation

ProTracer is a training‑free framework that uses Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) together with proprioceptive signals to analyze robot manipulation failures. It performs binary failure detection, categorization, explanation generation, and introduces failure onset localization—identifying the earliest moment a robot deviates from a valid trajectory leading to failure. The method leverages proprioceptive dynamics to pinpoint informative action boundaries and converts robot‑state signals into natural‑language descriptions for joint multimodal reasoning, achieving strong performance on both conventional failure diagnosis and the new failure onset localization task.

By Chang Dong, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, King Hang Wong, Lingqiao Liu, Francois Fraysse, Feras Dayoub, Minh Hoai Nguyen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Optimizing YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Segmentation in Complex Orchard Environments

The paper compares Ultralytics YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for detecting and segmenting small fruit parts in orchard settings. It evaluates five model scales across 30 experiments, finding that YOLO11s-960 and YOLO26s-960 achieve the best mask and box mAP scores while maintaining efficient parameter counts. The study also highlights the difficulty of peduncle detection and provides publicly available code and models for reproducibility.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

EventGeM: Global-to-Local Feature Matching for Event-Based Visual Place Recognition

EventGeM introduces a global‑to‑local feature fusion pipeline for event‑based visual place recognition, combining whole‑image feature detection with 2D homography‑based re‑ranking via RANSAC. It adds a regional generalized mean (GeM) pooling layer that learns to extract the most relevant spatial features from event streams, producing a compact global descriptor trained on the NYC‑Event‑VPR dataset. The method demonstrates significant improvements in viewpoint‑robust localization, achieving 7–43 percentage point gains in Recall@1 over the strongest baseline and real‑time performance on a robotic platform.

By Adam D. Hines, Gokul B. Nair, Nicol\'as Marticorena, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning

The paper compares two leading motion‑imitation reinforcement learning pipelines—HyFyDy, which uses detailed musculotendon modeling, and MuJoCo, which focuses on computational speed. Using the same human motion‑capture and EMG data, both pipelines reproduce kinematics similarly, but HyFyDy’s muscle activation predictions align more closely with experimental EMG (RMSE 0.164, r = 0.4) than MuJoCo’s (RMSE 0.344, r = 0.11). The authors conclude that HyFyDy’s higher physiological realism makes it currently more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, though both systems need further development for GPU‑parallelizable environments and robotic assistive‑device design.

By Ayah G. Ahmad, Claire E. Borden, Maegan Tucker
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Traffic Sign Recognition for Autonomous Driving Using Branched YOLOv2 and Geometric Features

The paper presents a traffic sign recognition system that extends YOLOv2 with a branched architecture and geometric feature integration. By adding intermediate prediction layers, the model can terminate inference early for easy cases, reducing computation time, while unsupervised Bayesian segmentation supplies geometric templates to improve classification of visually similar signs. Experiments on a combined GTSDB/GTSRB dataset show that the branched model achieves 0.680 mAP in 0.647 s, and adding geometric verification during inference raises mAP to 0.713.

By Arefeh Rezaei
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

RobotEQ-Video: A Video-Centric Benchmark for Social Proactive Intelligence with World-State Taxonomy

RobotEQ-Video is a new video-centric benchmark designed to advance Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI) by moving beyond static image analysis. It introduces a hierarchical world-state taxonomy with 6 domains, 20 dimensions, 142 level‑1 attributes, and 816 level‑2 attributes, and includes over 2,000 videos annotated with 100,000+ human labels and 16,000+ behavior‑properness tags. Evaluation shows existing systems underperform humans, highlighting the need for richer video data and comprehensive scenario coverage in SPI research.

By Xinyi Che, Zheng Lian, Kuofei Fang, Xuehao Wang, Xinghai Gao, Junqing Wu, Chuyu Wu, Liyi Liu, Yanhan Huang, Keyi Xie, Haomin Ouyang, Jinyang Wu, Fan Zhang, Runhao Zeng, Xun Yang, Bin He
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience

DexPIE is a post‑training framework that improves dexterous manipulation policies using real‑world experience. It introduces a dexterous‑hand‑adapted intervention system and multi‑stage DAgger‑style data collection to enhance exploration, aligns training and inference to reduce distribution shift, and conditions the policy on a continuous optimality indicator for fine‑grained data quality use. In three real‑world tasks, DexPIE boosts success rates by 37.3% over a demonstration‑based baseline, outperforming all other methods and showing stronger robustness.

By Ruizhe Liao, Wenrui Chen, Liangji Zeng, Haoran Lin, Fan Yang, Kailun Yang, Yaonan Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Adaptive World Memory 3D Foundation Model for Scalable 3D Mapping, Localization, and Rendering

The paper introduces Adaptive World Memory 3D Foundation Model (AWM-3DFM), a memory‑centric 3D foundation model that scales to large‑scale robotic localization, reconstruction, and Gaussian rendering. It employs transformer‑based gated updates, test‑time temporal‑spatial regulation, and local submap organization to maintain persistent memory, accuracy, and consistency across long image sequences. A Gaussian reconstruction head unifies pose estimation, dense point‑cloud reconstruction, and photorealistic rendering, achieving superior trajectory accuracy, reconstruction completeness, and rendering quality on public benchmarks and diverse robotic datasets.

By Tianchen Deng, Guole Shen, Yilin Shen, Wenhua Wu, Yilin Fang, Ziqi Ma, Tianjun Zhang, Shenghai Yuan, Wolfram Burgard, Hesheng Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

GestureFAR: Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Flow Autoregression

GestureFAR is a flow‑autoregressive framework that generates natural co‑speech gestures from streaming speech while preserving causality and continuous motion expressiveness. It autoregresses over continuous motion latents using a transformer for audio‑motion context and a flow‑matching head to sample the next latent. A head‑only flow distillation strategy further reduces latency by collapsing multi‑step flow sampling into a single network evaluation, enabling real‑time token‑causal generation with improved quality‑latency trade‑off on the BEAT2 benchmark.

By Pinxin Liu, Haiyang Liu, Jiahao Luo, Junhua Huang, Chunhao Zou, Luchuan Song
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

GALA: Geometry-Aware Latent Action Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Model Pretraining across Embodiments

The paper introduces GALA, a Geometry-Aware Latent Action modeling framework that enhances image-based latent actions with 3D end‑effector motion. It proposes the Unified End‑effector Motion Representation (UEMR) to preserve fine‑grained motion while improving cross‑embodiment generalizability. Experiments show GALA effectively models generalizable fine‑grained motions across embodiments, achieving high success rates in RoboCasa-GR1 and real‑world tasks.

By Yichen Liu, Puzhen Yuan, Xiang Zhu, Yanjiang Guo, Jianyu Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Multi-viewpoint Geo-localization with Event Cameras

The paper presents MegaEvent, an event‑based visual place recognition system that remains robust to viewpoint changes. By converting five large‑scale geo‑tagged datasets into synthetic event streams and fine‑tuning a vision transformer with a multi‑loss function, MegaEvent achieves an average Recall@1 of 82% on three event‑based localization datasets, outperforming existing methods by 20 recall points. The authors also introduce the Springfield‑Event‑VPR dataset, a 3.7 km walking route recorded in three camera orientations, where MegaEvent surpasses the strongest baseline by 9 recall points.

By Adam D. Hines, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

ULTRA is a unified framework for autonomous humanoid whole-body locomotion and manipulation that overcomes limitations of prior methods by combining a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm with a multimodal controller. The retargeting algorithm translates large-scale motion capture data into physically plausible humanoid motions, while the controller learns to handle both dense motion references and sparse task specifications using a range of sensory inputs, from accurate motion-capture states to noisy egocentric vision. In simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, ULTRA demonstrates improved generalization and robustness, enabling coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without relying on test-time reference motions.

By Xialin He, Sirui Xu, Xinyao Li, Runpei Dong, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Survival Reinforcement Learning: Toward Scalable Self-Supervised RL

The paper introduces Survival Reinforcement Learning (SRL), an online classification-based method that extends the survival value learning framework to maximize an agent’s dwell time at target goals. SRL addresses limitations of contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) in long-horizon, goal-conditioned tasks by avoiding the uniformity-tolerance dilemma and reducing undesirable bang-bang control behaviors. Across robotic benchmarks, SRL matches CRL on manipulation tasks and outperforms it by 2x to 8x on stable, long-horizon locomotion tasks, suggesting classification-based approaches are a promising direction for scaling reinforcement learning.

By Franki Nguimatsia-Tiofack, Fabian Schramm, Th\'eotime Le Hellard, Justin Carpentier
arXiv AI
Sep 21

FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz
arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz