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Computer Science Robotics

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Wednesday 10 June

Robotics

Action-Effect Memory Pretraining for Robot Manipulation

Yijing Zhou, Qiwei Liang, Sitong Zhuang et al. (+5 more)

We present AEM, an Action-Effect Memory pretraining framework for robot manipulation that learns compact temporal representations from vision-action history. Unlike prior robot representation pretraining methods that mainly focus on single-frame visual encoding, AEM targets the temporal nature of manipulation, where the current observation alone is often insufficient under partial observability. AEM models manipulation as an action-driven interaction process by interleaving visual and action features and applying masked modeling to recover missing content from incomplete histories, thereby learning action-conditioned state evolution. The Mamba-encoded output of the final vision token is used as a compact history representation, serving as the global context for decoding and downstream control. This design preserves a single-vector temporal bottleneck while keeping inference efficient. We evaluate AEM with Diffusion Policy and Flow Policy. AEM consistently improves manipulation performance in both simulation and real-world settings, outperforming baselines across clean scenes, cluttered and random scenes, and non-Markovian tasks. Ablation studies further show that history-aware pretraining surpasses single-frame pretraining and direct frame stacking, while reducing inference latency and computational cost.
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All authors Yijing Zhou, Qiwei Liang, Sitong Zhuang, Jiaxi Li, Xianpeng Wang, Boyang Cai, Yunyang Mo, Renjing Xu

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models

Egor Cherepanov, Nikita Kachaev, Daniil Zelezetsky et al. (+6 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $\mu$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $\mu$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.
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All authors Egor Cherepanov, Nikita Kachaev, Daniil Zelezetsky, Aydar Bulatov, Artem Pshenitsyn, Yuri Kuratov, Alexey Skrynnik, Aleksandr I. Panov, Alexey K. Kovalev

Robotics

Learning to Assist: Collaborative VLAs for Implicit Human-Robot Collaboration

Leo Xu, Letian Li, Alex Cuellar et al. (+1 more)

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) combines the complementary strengths of humans and robots to improve task efficiency. However, many existing collaborative systems rely on hand-engineered pipelines, limiting their scalability and flexibility for new tasks. In this work, we show that models trained end-to-end with imitation learning, specifically vision-language-action (VLA) models, can support collaborative manipulation, and characterize the key factors affecting their real-world performance. We evaluate two state-of-the-art models and identify a failure mode of action-chunking policies in implicit HRC, where demonstration action leakage (i.e., action chunks crossing latent task transitions) can cause premature assistive behavior. We find that this issue increases with longer execution horizons and occurs in real-world collaborative VLA systems, such as when a robot attempts to hand over a tool before the person is ready. We propose an inference-time steering method to mitigate these erroneous assistive actions while preserving policy performance. Finally, through a 16-participant user study on a long-horizon collaborative assembly task, we show that steering enables a longer execution horizon while mitigating premature assistance, leading to faster collaboration and fewer failures compared to a shorter-horizon policy. Our paper website can be found at https://learning-to-assist.github.io/
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All authors Leo Xu, Letian Li, Alex Cuellar, Michael Hagenow

Robotics

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

Steven Oh, Jason Jingzhou Liu, Tony Tao et al. (+5 more)

Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost. We present Neural External Torque Estimation (NEXT), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques without needing any dedicated force sensors. NEXT trains in 1 minute from only 10 minutes of free-motion data, yet achieves estimates comparable to dedicated joint-torque sensors. NEXT enables force-feedback teleoperation on low-cost arms and improves policy learning through Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples pre-contact and contact segments during behavior cloning. Across five long-horizon tasks, FIRST outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress. Together, NEXT and FIRST bring force-aware teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf robots without additional sensing hardware. Video results and code are available at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr2
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All authors Steven Oh, Jason Jingzhou Liu, Tony Tao, Philip Han, Kenneth Shaw, Satoshi Funabashi, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Deepak Pathak

Robotics

World Pilot: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models with World-Action Priors

Zefu Lin, Rongxu Cui, Junjia Xu et al. (+4 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit semantic grounding from large-scale pretraining and perform competently across in-distribution manipulation tasks. This grounding, however, is built on static image-text pairs, whereas manipulation is a continuous, contact-rich process whose dynamics this pretraining cannot capture. We present World Pilot, a VLA framework that augments the policy with priors from a World-Action Model (WAM), routed into the decision chain through two complementary pathways. Latent Steering conditions the perception layer on a scene-evolution latent, and Action Steering supplies an anticipated trajectory as a motion prior to the action generator. Together the two priors equip the VLA with an anticipated view of the scene and a trajectory-level motion hint alongside its semantic conditioning, and the scene-evolution prior remains effective even when supplied by a video-pretrained world model that has not been action-post-trained. World Pilot attains a state-of-the-art Total success rate of 84.7% on the LIBERO-Plus zero-shot OOD benchmark and the highest success rate on every real-robot setting across four manipulation tasks, with the largest margins under shifts in viewpoint, geometry, deformable state, and pose. Project Website: https://world-pilot.github.io/
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All authors Zefu Lin, Rongxu Cui, Junjia Xu, Xiaojuan Jin, Wenling Li, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang

Robotics

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Jadelynn Dao, Milan Ganai, Yasmina Abukhadra et al. (+7 more)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world, and we can budget inference at the planning level. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute at each step of a closed-loop agent, selecting a planner for every subtask, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.
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All authors Jadelynn Dao, Milan Ganai, Yasmina Abukhadra, Ajay Sridhar, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Katie Luo, Clark Barrett, Jiajun Wu, Chelsea Finn, Marco Pavone

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Jin Yao, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Tom Lampo et al. (+3 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50\,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.
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All authors Jin Yao, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Tom Lampo, Zezhou Cheng, Danhua Guo, Burhan Yaman

Robotics

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Sadman Sakib Enan and Junaed Sattar

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.
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Robotics

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Haoyuan Deng, Yitong Gao, Yudong Lin et al. (+3 more)

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.
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All authors Haoyuan Deng, Yitong Gao, Yudong Lin, Haichao Liu, Zhenyu Wu, Ziwei Wang

Robotics

APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies

Kechun Xu, Zhenjie Zhu, Anzhe Chen et al. (+2 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that couple pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with continuous action experts have achieved strong manipulation performance, yet generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) language instructions remains poor. A known challenge is the structural imbalance in VLA data, where language is far less diverse than visual and action content, making policies prone to visual shortcuts. While discrete-action methods mitigate this through vision-language co-training, continuous action experts lack such protection: they start from random initialization and learn entirely from imbalanced data, producing noisy gradients that corrupt the VLM and fail to exploit its language capability. We address this from a Bayesian perspective, factorizing the policy into a language-agnostic Vision-Action (VA) prior and a language-conditioned VLA likelihood, and propose APT, a two-stage training method emphasizing Action expert PreTraining. In Stage 1, the action expert is pretrained as a VA prior on vision-action pairs from a frozen VLM, bypassing the language imbalance. In Stage 2, language tokens are injected through a gated fusion mechanism that integrates VLM features while preserving the learned visuomotor prior. APT applies to mainstream VLA architectures, including the $\pi$ and GR00T-style architectures. Comprehensive experiments validate that APT achieves consistent gains on unseen instructions and compositional tasks. Project Page: https://xukechun.github.io/papers/APT/
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All authors Kechun Xu, Zhenjie Zhu, Anzhe Chen, Rong Xiong, Yue Wang

Robotics

Ambient Diffusion Policy: Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Data in Robotics

Adam Wei, Nicholas Pfaff, Thomas Cohn et al. (+4 more)

We propose Ambient Diffusion Policy, a simple and principled method for imitation learning from suboptimal data in robotics. High-quality, task-specific robot data is expensive and time-consuming to collect, while suboptimal datasets with lower-quality or out-of-distribution demonstrations are abundant. Existing methods that co-train on both data sources in robotics often fail to separate the meaningful and the harmful features in the suboptimal samples. In contrast, our method extracts only the useful features by introducing a new axis to co-training in robotics: noise-dependent data usage. Ambient Diffusion Policy restricts the contribution of suboptimal data during training to only the high and low diffusion times. To rigorously justify our approach, we first observe that robot action data exhibits a spectral power law. This induces two important properties on the optimal Diffusion Policy that we exploit: a global-to-local hierarchy and locality. We theoretically formalize this discussion using a simplified model. Our experiments validate Ambient Diffusion Policy on four types of suboptimal action data (noisy trajectories, sim-to-real gap, task mismatch, and large-scale data mixtures) across six tasks. The results show that it effectively learns from arbitrary sources of suboptimal data. Notably, it outperforms existing co-training baselines by up to 33% when scaled to Open X-Embodiment - a large dataset with heterogeneous data quality and unstructured distribution shifts. Overall, Ambient Diffusion Policy increases the utility of suboptimal demonstrations and expands the set of usable data sources in robotics.
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All authors Adam Wei, Nicholas Pfaff, Thomas Cohn, Arif Kerem Day{\i}, Constantinos Daskalakis, Giannis Daras, Russ Tedrake

Robotics

CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy

Ria Doshi, Tian Gao, Annie Chen et al. (+2 more)

Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference time to overcome partial observability. Our key insight is that the visuomotor priors of pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models should enable reactive, decentralized collaboration from each robot's local observations alone, without these inference-time assumptions. We propose CHORUS, a framework that adapts a single VLA backbone to control diverse, multi-robot teams. At inference time, each robot runs an independent copy of CHORUS, conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. In real-world experiments including mobile tape measurement, library book handovers, and laundry basket lifting, CHORUS achieves a 64% point improvement over decentralized, from-scratch models, improves reactivity to teammate behavior by 40% points, and outperforms centralized baselines. Together, these results show that a shared VLA backbone is capable of achieving decentralized multi-robot collaboration, without per-robot policies or inter-robot communication at inference.
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All authors Ria Doshi, Tian Gao, Annie Chen, Chelsea Finn, Jeannette Bohg

Robotics

Traceable Virtual Sea Trials in the Marine Robotics Unity Simulator for Manoeuvring Assessment of Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Paria Rezayan

Accurate identification of hydrodynamic derivatives is essential for precise control and autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). However, acquiring high-fidelity manoeuvring data from physical sea trials is often constrained by cost, safety, and environmental disturbances. Standard manoeuvring trials, particularly Turning Circle (TC) and Zig-Zag (ZZ), remain fundamental to IMO and ITTC assessment procedures because they provide comparable performance metrics reflective of underlying hydrodynamic behaviour. This paper extends the open-source Marine Robotics Unity Simulator (MARUS) by introducing a standardised Virtual Sea Trial framework for automated execution and data generation of TC/ZZ manoeuvres. The framework provides traceable command-actuation logging, system-identification (SI)-focused data conditioning, and automated extraction of IMO/ITTC-aligned manoeuvring metrics. A key contribution is a dedicated TC/ZZ data acquisition and post-processing pipeline, improving the repeatability and auditability of simulator-based manoeuvres while producing SI-ready datasets for hydrodynamic-derivative identification and digital-twin workflows. The framework also provides explicit command-execution separation for differential-thrust steering, where manoeuvre inputs are recorded as ordered rudder-equivalent commands and realised actuation is logged as an execution-level proxy derived from applied thrust. Case study results demonstrate repeatable and IMO-compliant manoeuvre behaviour. For TC tests, the normalised advance differs by approximately 3.9% between port and starboard turns, while the tactical diameter differs by 4.6-4.7%. For ZZ tests, first and second overshoot excesses remain below 1 degree for both +/-10-degree and +/-20-degree manoeuvres, satisfying IMO criteria, while peak yaw rates range from approximately 4.1 to 5.8 degrees/second.
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Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Fast-SDE: Efficient Single-Microphone Sound Source Distance Estimation in Reverberant Environments

Jiang Wang, Runwu Shi, Yaozhong Kang et al. (+3 more)

Sound source distance estimation (SDE) is a critical capability in human-robot interaction. An inappropriate interaction distance not only reduces the reliability of speech acquisition and understanding, but also compromises the naturalness and comfort of the interaction. Most existing SDE methods rely on microphone arrays, however, multi-microphone systems typically require careful hardware synchronization, geometric calibration, and additional space and computational resources, which limits applicability to size-constrained and computability-limited embodied platforms. To alleviate these issues, we propose Fast-SDE, a lightweight single-microphone SDE framework that is suited for deployment on robot platforms with limited computational resources and strict size constraints. Specifically, Fast-SDE employs a subband-based backbone that decomposes the frequency axis into multiple subbands, rather than processing the entire spectrum with a wide full-band backbone. A shared subband encoder then maps each subband to a compact latent representation and learns the relationship between acoustic structure and time-frequency patterns. Finally, a lightweight regression head converts the fused subband representations into the estimated distance. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed method. To benefit the broader research community, we have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/JiangWAV/FAST-SDE.
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All authors Jiang Wang, Runwu Shi, Yaozhong Kang, Benjamin Yen, Takeshi Ashizawa, Kazuhiro Nakadai

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Fourier Features Let Agents Learn High Precision Policies with Imitation Learning

Balázs Gyenes, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Jan Frieling et al. (+5 more)

High-precision robotic manipulation requires fine-grained spatial reasoning that is often difficult to achieve with RGB-only policies due to depth ambiguity and perspective scale issues. Policies that leverage 3D information directly, such as those based on point clouds, offer a stronger geometric prior over purely image-based ones, yet their performance remains highly task-dependent. We hypothesize that this discrepancy may be due to the spectral bias of neural networks towards learning low frequency functions, which especially affects architectures conditioned on slow-moving Cartesian features. We thus propose to map point clouds from Cartesian space into high-dimensional Fourier space, effectively equipping the point cloud encoder with direct access to high-frequency features. We experimentally validate the use of Fourier features on challenging manipulation tasks from the RoboCasa and ManiSkill3 benchmarks and on a real robot setup. Despite their simplicity, we find that Fourier features provide significant benefits across diverse encoder architectures and benchmarks and are robust across hyperparameters. Our results indicate that Fourier features let policies leverage geometric details more effectively than Cartesian features, showing their potential as a general-purpose tool for point cloud-based imitation learning. We provide source code and videos on our project page: https://fourier-il.github.io/fourier-il
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All authors Balázs Gyenes, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Jan Frieling, Enrico Krohmer, Nicolas Schreiber, Xiaogang Jia, Niklas Freymuth, Gerhard Neumann

Robotics

UGV-Conditioned Multi-UAV Informative Planning on a Shared Exposure Belief

Lars Oerlemans, Moji Shi and Marija Popovic

Safe ground navigation in large, threat-augmented environments requires aerial support that actively reduces the risks that a ground vehicle faces along its route. Existing aerial reconnaissance systems focus on mapping or covering the environment, but do not direct sensing toward regions that are most relevant for ground vehicle safety. In this paper, we address the problem of coordinating a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to improve the safety of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigating through unknown threat zones. A key aspect of our approach is a risk-averse shared exposure belief for UGV routing and a mission-conditioned UAV reward that directs sensing toward uncertain, exposure-relevant regions of the current UGV corridor. UAV observations update the shared belief online, allowing the UGV to replan around newly revealed threats while the evolving route in turn reshapes UAV sensing priorities. For multiple UAVs, we use region-conditioned spatial assignment to reduce redundant sensing. Simulation experiments show that our approach reduces cumulative UGV exposure by 38% compared with terrain-semantic replanning, and reduces redundant aerial coverage from 38.8% to 3.7% under our multi-UAV coordination scheme.
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Robotics

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy and Andrea Bajcsy

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations with calibration samples, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.
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Robotics

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Zhongyu Xia, Wenhao Chen, Yongtao Wang et al. (+1 more)

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.
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All authors Zhongyu Xia, Wenhao Chen, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

Lu Qiu, Yizhuo Li, Yi Chen et al. (+3 more)

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.
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All authors Lu Qiu, Yizhuo Li, Yi Chen, Yuying Ge, Yixiao Ge, Xihui Liu

Robotics

Intelligent Automation for Embodied Benchmark Construction: Pipelines, Embodiments, Simulators, and Trends

Jinshan Lai, Jianwei Hu, Baoyang Jiang et al. (+7 more)

Embodied intelligence now spans navigation, household assistance, manipulation, autonomous driving, aerial agents, and multimodal large-model control. This expansion has made benchmark construction a central bottleneck for reliable evaluation. Unlike static datasets, embodied benchmarks combine task specifications, environments, robot data, demonstrations, annotations, metrics, evaluation scripts, and release policies into a single evaluation system. This survey reviews the literature through a five-stage construction pipeline: requirement and task construction, data acquisition, data cleaning and annotation, benchmark suite generation and metric definition, and evaluation execution with diagnostic feedback. For each stage, the survey analyzes the transition from manual curation to traditional automation, foundation-model assistance, and agentic closed-loop workflows. It also compares qualitative construction costs across human labor, data and asset acquisition, compute and simulation, validation and debugging, governance and maintenance, and rework risk. The main conclusion is that automation does not simply reduce benchmark cost. Instead, it often shifts cost toward validation, auditability, version control, and long-term governance. Progress in embodied evaluation will therefore depend not only on larger benchmark suites, but also on construction pipelines that are diagnosable, auditable, and responsibly refreshable.
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All authors Jinshan Lai, Jianwei Hu, Baoyang Jiang, Fengchun Zhang, Leyuan Wang, Haotian Li, Yida Wang, Tingxuan Huang, Xi Ren, Qiang Ma

Robotics

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Ke Li, Jianfei Yang, Luyao Zhang et al. (+8 more)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.
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All authors Ke Li, Jianfei Yang, Luyao Zhang, Guo Yu, Chengwei Yan, Yuan Ding, Di Wang, Nan Luo, Gang Liu, Xiao Gao, Quan Wang

Robotics

PEBRE: An Open-Hardware Compute and Perception Add-On for the Pepper Robot

Malte Kuhlmann, Ignacio Bugueno-Cordova, Emil Alms et al. (+2 more)

This paper presents the design, development, and experimental verification of PEBRE, an open-hardware add-on for fast software development on the Pepper Robot. Our project enhances Pepper's computational and perception capabilities by integrating external components such as a Jetson Orin Nano, Logitech BRIO, Intel RealSense D435i, Samson UB1, and RØDE VideoMicro II. Our results show that the new hardware considerably improved Pepper's perception abilities and computational power. This development contributes to the community by implementing an open hardware and open-source modular add-on to the Pepper robot and keeping this relevant research platform functional beyond its expected lifespan. With PEBRE, we aim to facilitate faster software development and more efficient integration of external components, ultimately enhancing the capabilities of the Pepper robot.
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All authors Malte Kuhlmann, Ignacio Bugueno-Cordova, Emil Alms, Javier Ruiz-del-Solar, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero

Robotics

InDex: Empowering VLA Models with Intent-Conditioned Arm-Hand Coordination for Dexterous Manipulation

Chuanke Pang, Junyi Huang, Zhijun Zhao et al. (+3 more)

Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide useful semantic and spatial priors, yet their parallel-gripper action interfaces do not specify how those priors should be realized by a dexterous hand. Directly appending finger joints conflates two decisions with different structure: when contact should be established and how a morphology-specific hand trajectory should establish it. We introduce InDex, an intent-conditioned adaptation framework that separates these decisions without discarding full hand supervision. InDex derives a normalized grasp intent from retargeted demonstrations. A first stage predicts synchronized end-effector–intent chunks; conditioned on these predictions, VLA context, and proprioception, a diffusion decoder generates multi-joint hand actions. The scalar intent is therefore a temporal coordination interface rather than a compressed hand pose. Across four simulated tasks, three VLA backbones, and a physical arm–hand platform, InDex preserves the VLA's reaching competence while markedly improving conversion from approach to stable grasp and task completion. Ablations isolate complementary roles: intent aligns the contact transition, whereas diffusion represents the multiple hand trajectories compatible with the same task-space plan. These results identify post-reach arm–hand coordination, rather than object localization alone, as the principal bottleneck in adapting parallel-gripper VLAs to dexterous manipulation.
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All authors Chuanke Pang, Junyi Huang, Zhijun Zhao, Yaobing Wang, Kun Xu, Xilun Ding

Robotics

DAM-VLA: Decoupled Asynchronous Multimodal Vision Language Action model

Pankhuri Vanjani, Zhuoyue Li, Jakub Suliga et al. (+4 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2% vs.\ 40.95%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100\,Hz control. Project website: \href{https://intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}{intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}
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All authors Pankhuri Vanjani, Zhuoyue Li, Jakub Suliga, Moritz Reuss, Gianluca Geraci, Xinkai Jiang, Rudolf Lioutikov

Robotics

Fibration Trees: A Unified Approach to Multi-Robot Motion Planning

Andreas Orthey, Florian T. Pokorny and Lydia E. Kavraki

State space projections and decompositions have emerged as powerful tools to tackle the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional, multi-robot motion planning problems. However, existing methods lack a unified framework which seamlessly handles combinations of projections (prioritization or task-space) and decompositions (parallel or decoupled subspaces). To fill this gap, we introduce fibration trees, which are trees consisting of state spaces as nodes and fibrations as edges, whereby a fibration models a projection from a higher-dimensional space to a lower-dimensional (or simplified) space. By modeling projections as fibrations, we unify sequential prioritization, parallel decomposition, and task-space projections under a single, coherent formalism. Building on this, we develop the rapidly-exploring random fibration trees (Fibration-RRT) planner, a sampling-based motion planner that generalizes strategies from quotient-space RRT (for sequential prioritizations) and discrete RRT (for parallel decompositions), while allowing the inclusion of task-space projections. Fibration-RRT operates on user-defined fibration trees and is proven to be probabilistically complete. To test the generality and efficiency of Fibration-RRT, we provide an open-source implementation and conduct experiments on 32 scenarios using multi robot teams with up to 96 degrees of freedom. Our results indicate that Fibration-RRT efficiently solves high-dimensional problems by exploiting user-defined fibration trees, thereby establishing fibration trees as a powerful, unified framework for multi-robot motion planning.
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Robotics

Point Cloud Segmentation for Autonomous Clip Positioning in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy on a Phantom

Balázs Gyenes, Nikolai Franke, Paul Maria Scheikl et al. (+5 more)

High-risk applications in robotics, such as robot-assisted surgery, present unique challenges. These systems must be both highly precise and interpretable in order to be deployed in environments with very low tolerance for error or unsafe exploration. We present the first robotic system to demonstrate autonomous clip positioning on a physical phantom in laparoscopic surgery, one of the most common interventions in general surgery. After segmentation of a colorless point cloud from a single camera, target positions for the clips are extracted using spline interpolation, and can then be adjusted by the human operator. The segmentation model is trained on only 60 hand-labeled real point clouds, reflecting data scarcity in the surgical domain. We overcome this with a combination of pre-training on 128,000 synthetic point clouds and two novel data augmentation techniques. The motion of the end-effector to each target is visualized for the operator, satisfying the unique motion constraints of minimally-invasive surgery while ensuring that the robot's actions are verifiable and interpretable. In real robot experiments, our system localizes targets with the required precision of 0.75mm at a 95% success rate and executes autonomous clip positioning with a 100% success rate. We provide insights that are applicable to many other surgical and non-surgical tasks that require identifying and navigating to a precise target. Source code and project page: https://github.com/balazsgyenes/kirurc
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All authors Balázs Gyenes, Nikolai Franke, Paul Maria Scheikl, Pit Henrich, Rayan Younis, Gerhard Neumann, Martin Wagner, Franziska Mathis-Ullrich

Robotics

KinematicRL: A Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning Framework For Social Navigation With Kinodynamic Feasibility

Zhiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Chengju Liu et al. (+2 more)

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown promise for social navigation, yet its real-world deployment remains hindered by a persistent sim-to-real gap arising from simplified first-order dynamics and context-specific human state estimation pipelines. This work presents a unified framework that addresses these limitations to produce dynamically feasible navigation policies suitable for real-world deployment. First, theoretical analysis reveals that tracking error between simulated and actual robot position decays exponentially with increased control order, motivating the use of higher-order control inputs as DRL action space. A second-order control formulation tailored to differential drive robots is developed, complemented by a stochastic iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) that pretrains the policy via a divergence minimization objective. Second, to avoid the added system complexity of camera-LiDAR fusion, a cluster-based human tracking pipeline using only 2D LiDAR is introduced. Human detections are associated according to both spatial proximity and velocity similarity, enabling reliable differentiation of nearby pedestrians and yielding stable velocity estimates through temporal aggregation. Third, we introduce an unbiased residual gating block to balance reaction- and memory-based behaviors while handling time-varying crowd sizes, both critical for social navigation. The resulting policy, KinematicRL, consistently improves kinematic performance and adapts to varying number of detected humans. Experiments in real-world environments demonstrate that, when combined with the proposed tracking pipeline, KinematicRL can be deployed on a real differential drive robot with minimal modifications.
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All authors Zhiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen, Chenpeng Yao

Robotics

VICX: Generalizable Robot Manipulation via Video Generation and In-Context Operator Network

Song Chen, Linyan Xiang, Ying Zhou et al. (+1 more)

Generalizable robot manipulation requires not only task-level reasoning over unseen scenes, but also reliable grounding of visual plans into embodiment-specific execution. To bridge this gap, we propose VICX (Video generation and In-Context eXecution), a decoupled closed-loop manipulation framework. In VICX, a frozen video generation model produces vision-language-conditioned high-level visual plans, while a Video-to-Trajectory In-Context Operator Network (V2T-ICON) serves as the task-agnostic interface that grounds these plans into executable robot-state trajectories. To improve execution generalization, V2T-ICON operates on segmentation-extracted arm-only frame observations and uses retrieved image-state pairs as in-context prompts, allowing a robust and generalizable visual-to-state mapping at inference time without parameter updates. Experiments on Meta-World show that VICX supports cross-task generalization, closed-loop self-correction, and cross-embodiment transfer, demonstrating dual generalization across both task semantics and robot execution. The project webpage can be found here: https://scaling-group.github.io/vicx/.
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All authors Song Chen, Linyan Xiang, Ying Zhou, Liu Yang

Robotics

Learning Unions of Convex Sets via Invertible Latent Decomposition for Path Planning

Taerim Yoon, Dongho Kang, Kisang Park et al. (+3 more)

Collision-free path planning in cluttered, real-world environments relies on a representation of the collision-free space, and existing representations broadly fall into two categories. Explicit representations, such as unions of convex sets, can be plugged into optimization-based planners as hard collision-free constraints, but their parameters scale poorly with configuration-space dimension. Implicit representations, by contrast, are flexible and scale well to complex geometries, yet typically lack such guarantees. We bridge this gap with ILD (Invertible Latent Decomposition), a framework that jointly learns an invertible mapping and a union of explicit convex polytopes in the resulting latent space. Planning is carried out over these latent convex sets, and the invertible mapping decodes the resulting paths back to the original configuration space while preserving feasibility with respect to the refined explicit safe regions. We further propose Visibility-Guided Sampling (VGS) to keep the convex sets connected for path planning. Across 2D navigation, 6-DoF, and 14-DoF manipulation environments, ILD achieves broader coverage, better inter-set connectivity, and higher path-planning success rates than prior baselines, with zero observed false positives after test-time refinement. On a 14-DoF bimanual manipulator, we further demonstrate real-time collision-free planning, with test-time refinement adapting to scene-geometry changes during real-world deployment on a single 6-DoF arm.
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All authors Taerim Yoon, Dongho Kang, Kisang Park, Junha Cha, Stelian Coros, Sungjoon Choi

Robotics

MPPI-based Informative Trajectory Planning for Search and Capture of Drifting Targets with ASVs

Sanjeev Ramkumar Sudha, Marija Popović and Erlend M. Coates

Autonomous surface vehicles offer an efficient solution for environmental cleanup as well as search and rescue operations in open waters. Targets in these settings drift continuously, so efficient search must balance exploration of unobserved regions with tracking of known targets. However, most target tracking and pursuit scenarios consider simple guidance behaviours and short-term predictions for decision-making. In this letter, we address the problem of search and capture of multiple drifting targets, such as litter, in dynamic environments, using a hybrid planning framework. A key aspect of our strategy is a spatiotemporal informative planning method based on model predictive path integral (MPPI) control, a sampling-based model predictive control approach. The planner directly generates kinematic-level commands by optimising continuous trajectories over long horizons. A multi-objective cost balances search and tracking objectives while ensuring safe, feasible trajectories. In the interception stage, we switch to a pure pursuit guidance controller for the physical capture of moving targets. Experiments show that our planner outperforms the chosen planning baselines. Finally, we validate our approach in field trials with an ASV.
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