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 1

Agentic RAG-VLM: Affordance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Self-Reflective Planning for Robotic Grasping

arXiv:2606. 31200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable robotic grasping in cluttered environments is essential for deploying manipulators in unstructured human spaces, yet existing VLM-based methods rely on visual similarity for object matching, neglecting physical affordances such as handle graspability and material fragility, and operate open-loop without spatial reasoning or failure recovery, limiting their effectiveness when objects are densely packed or physically diverse.

By Tao Chen, Lizheng Liu, Jiaxu Wang, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Tian, JiGuang Huo, Zhongxue Gan
arXiv AI
Jul 1

MVP-Nav: Multi-layer Value Map Planner Navigator

arXiv:2606. 31919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ZSON) with RGB-only perception poses a fundamental challenge for embodied agents, as the absence of explicit depth information introduces severe physical uncertainty and semantic-physical misalignment.

By Wenyuan Xie, Shaokai Wu, Yijin Zhou, Yanbiao Ji, Guodong Zhang, Bayram Bayramli, Qiuchang Li, Xunchu Zhou, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

From Failure to Alignment: A Requirements Engineering Framework for Machine Learning Systems

arXiv:2606. 31589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organisations designing, developing, and deploying machine learning systems (MLS) need to be able to check that these systems are trustworthy, and communicate this clearly to their stakeholders, be they different categories of users, engineers, or wider society.

By Amel Bennaceur, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Prince Mercy, Bashar Nuseibeh, Faeq Alrimawi
arXiv AI
Jul 1

The HydroGym Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics

arXiv:2512. 17534v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modeling and controlling fluids is critical across science and engineering.

By Christian Lagemann, Sajeda Mokbel, Miro Gondrum, Mario R\"uttgers, Yuning Wang, Pol Su\'arez, Ludger Paehler, Deniz A. Bezgin, Aaron B. Buhendwa, Jared L. Callaham, Samuel Ahnert, Nicholas Zolman, Xiao Shao, Jean-Christophe Loiseau, Nikolaus Adams, Matthias Meinke, Wolfgang Schr\"oder, Kai Lagemann, Esther Lagemann, Ricardo Vinuesa, Steven L. Brunton
arXiv AI
Jul 1

A Scalable Whole-body Motion Transfer via Implicit Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting

arXiv:2509. 15443v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-to-humanoid imitation learning presents a promising pathway to address the severe data scarcity bottleneck in robotics by utilizing abundant, large-scale human motion collections.

By Xingyu Chen, Hanyu Wu, Sikai Wu, Mingliang Zhou, Diyun Xiang, Haodong Zhang, Yangchen Zhou, Yukang Gao, Yi Gu, Renjing Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Real-Time Source-Free Object Detection

arXiv:2606. 31834v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world detectors for autonomous driving, surveillance, and robotics must handle domain-shifts under strict latency and memory constraints, yet existing source-free object detection (SFOD) methods rely on heavyweight architectures that prioritize accuracy alone.

By Sairam VCR, Varun Gopal, Poornima Jain, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Muhammad Haris Khan
arXiv AI
Jul 1

CoReLIN: Constraint-based Reasoning for Zero-shot Lifelong Interactive Navigation

arXiv:2602. 20055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robot navigation typically assumes an obstacle-free path exists between start and goal.

By Apoorva Vashisth (Purdue University), Manav Kulshrestha (Purdue University), Pranav Bakshi (IIT Kharagpur), Damon Conover (DEVCOM Army Research Lab), Guillaume Sartoretti (National University of Singapore), Aniket Bera (Purdue University)
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.

By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

The Calibration Turn in AI-Assisted Research: A Conceptual and Methodological Framework for Evidence-Licensed Claims

arXiv:2606. 31273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-assisted research has entered a stage in which the central question is not only whether systems can generate hypotheses, run experiments, or produce manuscripts, but whether their scientific claims are calibrated to the evidence that supports them.

By Hongmin Li