Robotics and embodied AI

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

3,858 stories · RSS feed

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

OmniMimic: Dynamics-completed Motion Augmentation for Multi-style Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion

OmniMimic is a training framework that expands limited animal demonstration data into a single multi‑gait policy for omnidirectional quadruped locomotion. It uses temporal reversal, constrained dynamics completion, and sagittal reflection to generate kinematic and physical supervision beyond the observed directions, then progressively expands command ranges and employs a shared actor with soft‑gated gait‑specialized residual experts. In simulation, OmniMimic improves foot‑position accuracy by 12.9% and velocity‑tracking error by 63.1% over the APEX baseline across four gaits.

By Sheng Wu, Guoqiang Zhao, Zhe Yang, Fei Teng, Zhikun Zhou, Yanlin Yang, Zheng Fang, Hong Zheng, Yaonan Wang, Kailun Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

TacSushi: Tactile-Grounded World-Action Modeling for Dexterous Sushi Manipulation

TacSushi is a tactile‑grounded, Cosmos3‑based world‑action policy for dexterous sushi manipulation. It encodes RGB, language, and hand state, fusing fingertip tactile data via feature‑wise gated fusion, and learns from future‑consequence predictions while excluding failed actions from imitation. Trained on 340 successful and 50 failed trials, TacSushi achieves 68.3% in‑distribution and 37.5% out‑of‑distribution success, outperforming baselines that lack future‑consequence supervision or use direct tactile concatenation.

By Haodi Hu, Kaen Kogashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

DexTouch-WM is an action‑conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics for dexterous robot manipulation. By using compatible piezoresistive arrays on both human and robot hands and retargeting human motion into the robot action space, the model can be supervised with human interaction data while keeping a fixed amount of real‑robot supervision. Experiments show that adding up to 100 hours of human interaction improves robot‑domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction, and the model can serve as a surrogate environment for policy evaluation and synthetic trajectory generation.

By Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin, Shujia Liu, Chuqiao Lyu, Kailun Su, Chenze Yu, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding, Tianxing Chen, Renjing Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Workspace Models: Lightweight Robotic Memory via Saliency-Driven Supervision

The paper introduces the workspace token, a lightweight latent memory representation for robotic manipulation that captures task-relevant historical information. By training with VLM queries only during training, the token can be queried efficiently at deployment, replacing full observations. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that policies using the workspace token solve memory-intensive tasks without in‑loop VLM reasoning and even outperform heavier approaches.

By Nitish Dashora, Douglas Chen, Idan Shenfeld, John Marangola, Pulkit Agrawal, Max Simchowitz
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Uni-LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Unifies Multimodal Reasoning

Uni-LaDiR (Unified Latent Diffusion Reasoner) is a new framework that unifies multimodal reasoning by mapping teacher reasoning steps from different modalities into a shared latent space of thought tokens. It employs a diffusion model to predict the next block of thought tokens, jointly training the encoder and reasoner with shared weights to ensure tokens are both useful and predictable. The approach achieves relative gains of 7.3% on visual reasoning benchmarks and 6.1% on robot manipulation tasks compared to the strongest baselines.

By Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Yian Ma, Lianhui Qin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

A Mathematical Model of Motivated Emotional Mind - Cognitive Embodied System

The paper introduces a mathematical model of the Motivated Emotional Mind cognitive architecture for embodied intelligent systems, describing how the system learns to maintain homeostasis via motivated learning—a reinforcement‑learning variant driven by internal motivations. It formalizes a re‑entrant loop that integrates feedforward processing, lateral interactions, and feedback pathways, and details how exteroceptive and interoceptive signals, bodily context, and memory traces form associative structures called semblions that compete for processing and reconstruction. The model incorporates need thresholds, goal dynamics, bodily state, resource constraints, and action uncertainty, and posits global affect as a central control signal modulating learning rate, representational valence, and exploration‑exploitation balance.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation

TouchSight is a monocular egocentric vision framework that predicts dense full-hand contact forces without tactile sensors. It uses 500 hours of pressure-glove data and a 20-hour TwinTouch-20H dataset where generative models render gloved recordings as bare-hand videos, bridging the appearance gap. The system outperforms previous methods on OakInk2, generalizes to unseen natural bare-hand egocentric videos, and improves as glove supervision increases.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Learning and Transferring Closed-Loop Robot Software

Closed‑loop robot policies are difficult to design manually because they require complex observation processing, state management, and branching. This study treats complete closed‑loop implementations as reusable execution experience: a coding agent generates policy code from a few demonstrations, iteratively improves it with simulation feedback, and stores the validated implementations. When applying these archived implementations to new tasks, the agent can generate and refine policies using the stored code, target demonstrations, and execution feedback, ultimately producing a frozen policy that runs without further model calls. Across multiple source and target tasks, iterative optimization of the source implementations significantly boosts success rates, demonstrating the value of execution‑improved software for acquiring new policies.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

DeliveryGym: An RL Environment for Long-Horizon Embodied Agent Planning with Adaptive Curriculum

DeliveryGym is a 3D reinforcement learning environment that simulates continuous courier shifts, integrating multimodal tool interaction and persistent world dynamics to compute trajectory rewards based on simulator events. It provides feedback on resource consumption—time, energy, and money—across entire delivery trajectories, enabling agents to learn planning that balances immediate task success with long‑term constraints. The environment also adapts future training shifts to a policy’s weaknesses while keeping evaluation fixed, demonstrating that both learning from complete shifts and targeted training improve agent performance on complex delivery tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Mem2Ego: Empowering Vision-Language Models with Global-to-Ego Memory for Long-Horizon Embodied Navigation

Mem2Ego introduces a vision‑language model for embodied navigation that combines global memory with egocentric visual inputs. By adaptively retrieving task‑relevant cues from a global memory module and aligning them with local perception, the framework improves spatial reasoning and decision‑making over long horizons. The method outperforms prior state‑of‑the‑art approaches on the HSSD and HM3D benchmarks and shows strong performance on a real robot.

By Lingfeng Zhang, Yuecheng Liu, Zhanguang Zhang, Matin Aghaei, Yixin Xiao, Yaochen Hu, Mohammad Ali Alomrani, David Gamaliel Arcos Bravo, Hongjian Gu, Zhiyuan Li, Yangzheng Wu, Zhanpeng Zhang, Raika Karimi, Atia Hamidizadeh, Guowei Huang, Haoping Xu, Tongtong Cao, Weichao Qiu, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao, Yuzheng Zhuang, Yingxue Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

HAP: A Hand-Driven Active Perception Framework for Egocentric Head Motion Prediction

The paper introduces HAP, a Hand-Driven Active Perception framework that predicts future six‑degree‑of‑freedom head motion in egocentric settings by conditioning on observed hand motion and inferred target context. HAP constructs a Predictive Target‑Centric Amodal Occlusion Graph to model current and potential occlusions among candidate objects, fuses this with hand and head motion history, and blends the learned trajectory with a constant‑velocity prior. Experiments on a public dataset and a newly released Bottle RGB‑D dataset demonstrate that HAP outperforms baseline methods in head‑motion prediction, highlighting the importance of hand‑driven intention and dynamic occlusion reasoning.

By Yunji Feng, Junyi Ma, Guanzhong Sun, Chenyang Xu, Hesheng Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Energy-Regularized Imitation Learning for Force- and Work-Aware Robotic Manipulation

This paper introduces an energy-aware approach to robotic manipulation by defining a joint-space mechanical-work proxy based on joint torque and angular displacement. A differentiable energy predictor is trained to estimate this work from robot states and actions, enabling it to serve as a regularizer that fine‑tunes a pretrained manipulation policy. Applied to RVT‑2 on RLBench, the method reduces average mechanical work from 208.8 J to 204.4 J (a 2.1 % drop) while slightly improving task success from 86.2 % to 86.9 % across 12 manipulation tasks.

By Toshiki Otani, Hiromu Taketsugu, Norimichi Ukita
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

ActiveScale: Scaling Active Perception for Robots across Model, Data, and Hardware

ActiveScale is a framework that enhances active perception for robots by integrating model, data, and hardware innovations. It augments vision‑language‑action models with historical video observations and explicit camera‑pose supervision, and introduces a scalable human‑robot mid‑training recipe using 1000 hours of egocentric and robotic data. The Active‑perception Mobile‑manipulation Platform (AMP) enables single‑operator teleoperation for scalable demonstration collection, leading to improved success rates on active‑perception tasks.

By Shuai Zhou, Kaisheng Pang, Wenxuan Song, Wenjie Zhang, Xinhu Zheng, Haoang Li
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in CARLA

The paper presents a compact multimodal policy trained via behavioral cloning to drive autonomously in the CARLA simulator. Using five‑frame histories of RGB images, LiDAR, telemetry, and lane waypoints, the 1.36‑million‑parameter model predicts throttle, brake, and steering at 20 Hz. Trained on 236,882 windows (≈3.3 hours of driving) from 448 captures, the policy drives for hours on both training and unseen routes without collisions, demonstrating qualitative transfer and recovery from large trajectory deviations.

By Jordy Kieto
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Market Signal Injection: Adversarial Context Manipulation of LLM Pricing Agents

The paper introduces Market Signal Injection (MSI), an attack that alters how market data is formatted or described—without changing its numerical values—to influence large language model (LLM) pricing agents. Experiments on nine open‑weight and three proprietary models in simulated duopoly and triopoly markets show that sentiment‑based formatting changes cause significant shifts in firm behavior, profits, and consumer surplus. The study also demonstrates that model susceptibility varies across families, that larger models are not always more robust, and that techniques such as input canonicalization and decision boundary anchoring can partially mitigate these attacks.

By Dohun Lee, Hyunwoo Park
arXiv AI
Sep 17

HINT-Plan: Human Intention-Aware Robot Task Planning in Context-Rich Environments using Vision Language Models

HINT-Plan is a new method that integrates human intention prediction into robot task planning by using Vision Language Models to infer high‑level human intentions from third‑person images. These intentions are converted into goal states and combined with hierarchical Scene Graphs to formulate joint task‑planning problems in context‑rich environments. In a photorealistic simulation, HINT-Plan achieved a 69.71% success rate, outperforming baselines by up to 35.29% and reducing functional conflicts.

By Yuchen Liu, Luigi Palmieri, Lujun Li, Radu State, Ilche Georgievski, Marco Aiello
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Learning Multi-Humanoid Pickup and Transport via Decentralized Object-Centric Control

The paper presents a decentralized, object‑centric control strategy for cooperative multi‑humanoid pickup and transport of objects with diverse sizes, weights, and shapes. Each humanoid is assigned a local attachment region on the shared object and learns to perform gripperless bimanual pinching, enabling pickup, transport, and handover without task‑specific redesign. Experiments in simulation and on real hardware demonstrate that single‑robot trained policies transfer to multi‑robot settings and that additional multi‑robot training further improves coordination.

By Bikram Pandit, Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Alan Fern
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

The Latent That Never Was: A Forensic Re-run of the CVAE Ablation in Action Chunking Transformers

The paper re‑examines the impact of removing the encoder from Action Chunking Transformers (ACT), a model used for robot manipulation learning. Contrary to the original claim that encoder removal drops success rates from 35% to 2%, the authors find no such dramatic decline in their re‑runs, though minor variations remain uncertain. They attribute the discrepancy to factors like training length and checkpoint selection, and note that the encoder’s latent variable offers little reconstruction benefit on the tested benchmark, while its removal speeds up training.

By Bo Kang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Multi-View Mixture-of-Experts with Vision-Language Reranking for Cross-View Object Geo-Localization

The paper introduces MVLGeo, a unified framework for cross-view object geo-localization that combines multiple viewpoints into a single model. It employs Vision‑Language Reranking to use contextual text from the query view, a multi‑view Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture to share knowledge and reduce redundancy, and an adaptive elliptical prior for positional encoding. Experiments on CVOGL benchmarks show that MVLGeo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance and robustness to input degradation.

By Xuyu Fan, Qi Ming, Zhu Han, Liuqian Wang, Siyuan Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Xudong Zhao, Mingjing Zhao, Yuhan Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

CALIPER: Metric-Grounded Model-Free Recognition of Visually Similar Industrial Parts

CALIPER is a model‑free RGB‑D framework that performs fine‑grained recognition of visually similar industrial parts by combining support‑based appearance matching with metric size evidence. Each class is onboarded from a single turntable RGB‑D video and a few labeled real images, enabling 3D reconstruction for appearance support and depth‑aligned size profiling. At inference, a YOLOv8n‑seg model localizes parts, a frozen DINOv2 backbone with an episodically trained embedding head matches support, and margin‑conditioned metric fusion selectively uses size evidence for ambiguous cases, achieving high accuracy on 18 parts and robust enrollment of unseen screws without retraining.

By Alankrit Gupta, Chenxi Tao, Seung-Kyum Choi