Robotics and embodied AI

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

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Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

DynaWM: Dynamics-Aware Distillation with World Model and Momentum Targets for Smooth Locomotion over Continuous Stairs

Recent advances in control have enabled bipedal-wheeled robots to traverse slopes and single-step obstacles, yet long staircase traversal remains challenging as current teacher-student frameworks suffer from weakened dynamics-aware representations and incomplete terrain geometry encoding. To bridge this gap, we propose DynaWM, a dynamics-aware representation learning framework.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

Real-Time Multimodal Activity-Aware Error Detection in Robot-Assisted Surgery

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery improves surgical precision but introduces complexity, making technical error detection essential for ensuring patient safety. Current executional error detection methods using video data often overlook fine-grained contextual descriptions of activities and error types within the hierarchical structure of surgical procedures.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

Humanoid-OmniOcc: Stereo-Based Full-View Occupancy Dataset for Embodied AI

Occupancy prediction at voxel-level granularity is essential for safe robotic navigation and interaction in complex environments. Existing occupancy datasets, however, are predominantly designed for autonomous driving with vehicle-centric biases -- forward-facing cameras, far-field geometry, and static road priors -- limiting their applicability to embodied humanoid perception.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606. 20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD).

By Maciej Wozniak, Jesper Ericsson, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Truls Nyberg, Thomas Gustafsson, Patric Jensfelt, Olov Andersson
arXiv AI
Jun 19

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

arXiv:2606. 19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.

By Ahmad Farooq, Kamran Iqbal
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606. 20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference.

By Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Tung M. Luu, Trung Le, Tran Nguyen Le, Minh Vu, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien
arXiv AI
Jun 19

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606. 19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence.

By Wenli Xiao, Jia Xie, Tonghe Zhang, Haotian Lin, Letian "Max" Fu, Haoru Xue, Jalen Lu, Yi Yang, Cunxi Dai, Zi Wang, Jimmy Wu, Guanzhi Wang, S. Shankar Sastry, Ken Goldberg, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu, Guanya Shi
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606. 19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential.

By Jinghan Yang, Yunchao Zhang, Wang Yuan, Haolun Wan, Jiaming Zhang, Zhengyang Hu, Yanchao Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

arXiv:2606. 20135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy.

By Jianing Guo, Fangzheng Chen, Zihao Mao, Wong Lik Hang Kenny, Zhenhong Wu, Yu Li, Yishuai Cai, Yuanpei Chen, Yikun Ban, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yaodong Yang, Xianglong Liu, Huijie Zhao, Simin Li
arXiv AI
Jun 19

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

arXiv:2606. 20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly.

By Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Yantian Shen, Zhikun Hu, Hongjun Wang, Yang Yang, Xindi Wang, Jiande Sun