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 Machine Learning
Jun 5

3D Underwater Path Planning via Generative Flow Field Surrogates

arXiv:2606. 06077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) launch and recovery (LAR) into the hull of an advancing host platform requires traversal of a complex, three-dimensional propeller wake whose hydrodynamic structure cannot be characterised by a uniform current model.

By Zachary Cooper-Baldock, Paulo E. Santos, Russell S. A. Brinkworth, Karl Sammut
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

What Objects Enable, Not What They Are: Functional Latent Spaces for Affordance Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 05533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing robot planning systems rely on appearance-based reasoning, where visual observations are encoded into latent spaces organized around object appearances (e.

By Rohan Siva, Neel P. Bhatt, Yunhao Yang, Seoyoung Lee, Nishant Gadde, Christian Ellis, Alvaro Velasquez, Zhangyang Wang, Ufuk Topcu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

A New Quaternion-Joint Cable-Driven Redundant Manipulator Configuration and its Control Through FABRIK and Residual Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 05236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic arms capable of traversing arbitrary spatial paths, especially in highly obstructed workspaces, are highly desired across several industries.

By Tanapath Pornthisan, Thanapat Kemthong, Thanyapisit Kangsathien, Pasut Aranchaiya, Paulo Garcia, Viboon Sangveraphunsiri
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models

arXiv:2606. 05254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future video and robot actions through iterative diffusion, achieving strong performance on manipulation benchmarks but requiring tens of denoising steps, a cost that precludes real-time control.

By Arman Akbari, Ci Zhang, Arash Akbari, Lin Zhao, Yixiao Chen, Weiwei Chen, Xuan Zhang, Geng Yuan, Yanzhi Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?

arXiv:2507. 06219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood.

By Modi Shi, Li Chen, Jin Chen, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Equivariant Neural Belief Propagation

arXiv:2606. 06344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic inference over spatially embedded variables requires beliefs that respect $SE(3)$ symmetry, yet existing equivariant networks produce only scalars and vectors -- not the rank-2 precision tensors needed for anisotropic uncertainty, and single-component messages collapse multi-modal energy landscapes to physically meaningless averages.

By Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

LadderMan: Learning Humanoid Perceptive Ladder Climbing

arXiv:2606. 05873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humanoid robots hold great promise for operating in human-centered environments, yet ladder climbing remains one of the most challenging tasks due to sparse footholds and handholds, complex whole-body coordination, and sensitivity to perception and control errors.

By Siheng Zhao, Yuanhang Zhang, Ziqi Lu, Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Koushil Sreenath, Yue Wang, C. Karen Liu, Guanya Shi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

CogManip: Benchmarking Manipulative Behavior in Multi-Turn Interactions with Large Language Model

Whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit covert psychological manipulation in complex human-AI interactions has garnered increasing safety concerns. However, existing AI safety benchmarks remain largely restricted to explicit rule compliance and static prompts, failing to capture the dynamic and covert nature of manipulative strategies in multi-turn dialogues.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Learning of Robot Safety Policies via Adversarial Synthetic Scenarios

In this work, we propose an agentic gamification framework for hazard-informed learning of robot safety policies through synthetic scenarios. We model scenario generation as an adversarial game between two agents: a Red Team that explores the space of potential failures by constructing hazardous situations, and a Blue Team that incrementally refines safety policies to prevent them.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Inverse Design of Realizable Metasurface based Absorbers using Improved Conditioning and Diversity Enhanced Progressively Growing GANs

Metasurfaces enable precise manipulation of electromagnetic waves for applications such as beam steering, sensing, and stealth technology. However, inverse design of metasurfaces with targeted EM responses remains challenging due to the computational expense of iterative full wave simulation driven optimization and the limited conditioning fidelity and diversity of existing generative approaches.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models often inherit the image-generation view: actions are generated by iterative denoising. We argue that VLA action generation has a different condition-target structure: the policy is conditioned on rich observations, language, and state, but predicts only a compact, low-dimensional action chunk.