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Computer Science Robotics

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Monday 28 September

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

AGILE-GS: Anchor-Guided Fast Next-Best-View Selection for Active 3D Gaussian Splatting

Amirhossein Mollaei Khass and Nader Motee

Radiance fields need hundreds of views, and their placement matters as much as their number. Next-best-view (NBV) selection for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) usually scores every candidate in the pool and keeps one. Searching for information and choosing a camera, however, are separable problems. We present AGILE-GS, an anchor-guided NBV method that separates the two. A virtual anchor pose is optimized on SE(3) by Riemannian gradient ascent on expected information gain. It need not be reachable or in the pool; it marks where the model is most uncertain. Candidates are scored against the anchor's viewing geometry, and a greedy ridge-leverage step distills the pool into a small, non-redundant shortlist without rendering any candidate. The shortlist can be used in two ways. AGILE-GS takes the first view on it as the next view, so no Fisher information is computed for any candidate. AGILE-GS+ computes the Fisher information gain of each shortlisted view and picks the best, so the expensive evaluation runs on a handful of views rather than the whole pool. On standard benchmarks and in closed-loop embodied acquisition, both match or exceed existing baselines while cutting selection latency by one to two orders of magnitude.
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Robotics

FailPatch: Failure Residual Patching for Vision-Language-Action Models

Peng Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Ziheng Zhang et al. (+6 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are typically adapted using successful demonstrations, which provide direct action supervision but rarely cover failure-prone states. Deployment failures expose these states, yet lack the corrective actions needed for conventional supervised learning. We propose FailPatch, a failure-driven residual patching framework that decouples action supervision from execution-reliability supervision. Successful demonstrations ground how the policy should act, while deployment trajectories indicate when its behavior becomes unreliable. We further observe that action hidden representations exhibit clear linear separability between reliable and failure-associated states while directly conditioning action generation. Building on these insights, FailPatch introduces a Null-gated Residual Expert Bank into the action hidden space of a frozen VLA policy. A unified Preserve–Redirect–Trust objective retains the original policy in reliable states, selects residual experts in failure-associated states and redirects representations from failure regions toward success-associated regions under bounded intervention. With only 0.52% trainable parameters, FailPatch improves success rates by 11.0 percentage points on four long-horizon RoboTwin tasks under clean evaluation, 9.5 percentage points under clean-to-random generalization, and 16.7 percentage points over the baseline across three real-world tasks. Project and code: https://github.com/yupeng-2003/FailPatch.
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All authors Peng Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Ziheng Zhang, Xuchong Zhang, Baoting Li, Zhuoyuan Yu, Yuxiang Chen, Tiancai Wang, Hongbin Sun

Robotics · Cross-listed from eess.SY

A Weak Notion of Symmetry for Control Systems

Jake Welde, Riley Link and Pieter van Goor

Symmetry (or invariance) is a powerful structural property that enables efficient, effective solutions for estimation and control. However, the constraints imposed on a system's dynamics by classical invariance make symmetry a very rigid property, which may be broken by external forces or confined to only a portion of the overall system. Seeking greater flexibility, this work introduces a novel relaxed notion of symmetry, termed “weak invariance”, in which the non-symmetric part of the dynamics (the “residual”) can be captured entirely by another control system evolving on the symmetry group. Weakly invariant systems are strictly more general than classical invariant systems, but they nonetheless enjoy many similar favorable properties. In particular, we prove that any weakly invariant system admits a cascade decomposition in which the driven subsystem is group affine, showing that weak symmetry generalizes not only classical symmetry, but also the (thus far distinct) class of group affine systems. We also show that a weak symmetry with autonomous residual can be factored out of the system's error dynamics, enabling yet a greater reduction of dimensionality as compared to classical symmetries. Finally, we study the example of an aerial vehicle under the influence of gravity, for which we propose a nine-dimensional weak symmetry (strictly containing the system's familiar four-dimensional classical symmetry). Weak invariance thus generalizes classical symmetry while also preserving key structural properties, thereby laying a foundation for more flexible methods of symmetry-informed control.
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Robotics

RAVEL: Asynchronous Rolling Inference for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

Yuhan Chen, Ke Yu, Pengfei Liu et al. (+3 more)

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models are highly effective for generalist robot manipulation, yet their reliance on computationally expensive VLM encoding and multi-step iterative action generation imposes a significant latency bottleneck. The resulting inference latency makes it difficult for robots to respond quickly, especially in dynamic environments. We address this limitation with RAVEL (Rolling Asynchronous VLA Enabling Low-Latency Control), an asynchronous inference framework that addresses the computational bottlenecks of both the VLM backbone and the action expert. To reduce the delay from multi-step action denoising, RAVEL allows near-term actions to be executed after a single denoising step by carrying partially denoised future actions forward in a rolling buffer. To avoid blocking on slow VLM encoding, RAVEL decouples VLM encoding from rolling action generation, allowing the action expert to operate continuously using the latest available VLM context, while a lightweight Fast Observation Pathway (FOP) directly conditions the action expert on current observations. Across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, RAVEL consistently achieves substantially lower response latency while maintaining the task capability of the underlying VLA, enabling high-frequency and responsive closed-loop control.
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All authors Yuhan Chen, Ke Yu, Pengfei Liu, Shuxun Wang, Yi Yang, Linchao Zhu

Robotics

Reliability-Aware Sparse Route Memory for Round-Trip Vision-Language Navigation

Bojun Long, Lingfan Bao, Tianhu Peng et al. (+2 more)

Vision-language navigation (VLN) is typically evaluated as a one-way task, although deployed robots may need to return after reaching a goal. We study continuous round-trip VLN and diagnose failures in directional observability, deviation recovery, and termination stability. We propose a reliability-aware sparse route memory that records the executed Outbound trajectory as ordered geometric anchors and queries them in reverse through a structured hint, action-level arbitration, and terminal verification. On 50 reverse-paired episodes using NaVILA and a simulated Unitree Go2, language-only Return succeeds in 22.0% of episodes, while our online system reaches 55.1%. With exact route information, the same interfaces achieve 86.0%, showing that effective Return requires both accurate information and consistent action on that information. The remaining online gap arises mainly from geometric evidence that is too unreliable to authorise intervention. These results distinguish information quality, behavioural consistency, and online reliability as separate limits in long-horizon navigation.
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All authors Bojun Long, Lingfan Bao, Tianhu Peng, Jingcheng Sun, Chengxu Zhou

Robotics

Beyond Retrieval Relevance: Scene-Grounded Risk Entailment for Vision-Language Driving

Jiaxin Liu, Ruilin Yu, Liang Peng et al. (+8 more)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives vision–language driving systems access to external safety knowledge, yet a retrieved risk rule may be relevant without applying to the current scene. A vision–language model (VLM) receiving such knowledge must ground objects, bind entities across time, and verify relations before deciding how to act, leaving the support for risk conclusions implicit. We address this relevance–applicability gap with a Driving-Risk Knowledge Graph (DRKG) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) reasoning stage before VLM decision-making. Structured perception instantiates scene facts, from which SWRL rules derive events and directed risk relations when their antecedents are jointly satisfied. Recognized events, bound risk relations, and semantic descriptions of activated rules form compact evidence that conditions the VLM and diffusion planner. In matched comparisons on nuReasoning, our method improved the nuReasoning planning score (NPS) by 1.30 points and the non-at-fault collision score (NC) by 2.76 points over the relevance retrieval-based baseline. These gains indicate that scene-applicable risk evidence improves safety-weighted planning relative to semantically retrieved risk knowledge.
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All authors Jiaxin Liu, Ruilin Yu, Liang Peng, Jingkai Wang, Chengxiang Zhao, Zhenxin Zhu, Bing Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Hong Wang, Jun Li

Robotics

AD-E2E-JEPA: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture For End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Haoran Zhu, Wancong Zhang, Yann LeCun et al. (+1 more)

Autonomous driving requires world models that can understand the physical world, reason and plan, and operate safely. In this paper, we first systematically evaluate existing action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) world models, including LeWM, DINO-WM, and JEPA-WM for end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD). To isolate world-model quality from policy learning, we employ a goal-conditioned zero-shot planning setting that evaluates these models using ground-truth future observations as goals, without training any driving policy. We find that existing JEPA-based world models are either accurate for driving but computationally expensive, or computationally efficient but insufficient for planning. To address this trade-off, we propose AD-E2E-JEPA, which introduces a SIGReg-regularized learnable projector applied to projected patch embeddings. The projector reduces the number of planning patches by $16\times$ and the embedding dimension by $4\times$, achieving a $100\times$ inference speedup while retaining planning performance, with a 0.8-second runtime for an 8-frame rollout over 256 candidate trajectories. Without training any driving policy, the world model itself reaches the goals located 20 meters away on average within the displacement of respectively 4.0/2.8 meters, using world-model rollouts over trajectory vocabularies of respectively 256/8,192 candidates. On the NAVSIMv2 benchmark, it achieves 67.3/72.9 EPDMS with multiplicative safety metrics and 84.1/86.5 EPDMS$^{\dagger}$ without them in goal-conditioned zero-shot planning. Experiments further show that the self-supervised pretrained projector improves downstream imitation learning performance from 80.2 to 85.4 EPDMS. The source code is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-E2E-JEPA
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All authors Haoran Zhu, Wancong Zhang, Yann LeCun, Anna Choromanska

Robotics

Quantile Head for Vision-Language-Action Models

Xuan Wang, Yinan Wu, Haoran Duan et al. (+1 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with action heads for robot control. Common action heads have distinct limitations: point regression provides only a point estimate of the action distribution, while standard flow-matching samplers require costly iterative sampling. To address these limitations, we unify regression and flow matching under a shared objective and extend it to derive a quantile objective. This quantile objective guides the design of our Quantile Head, which predicts a median and positive gaps to form ordered marginal action quantiles in one forward pass. These quantiles support multiple sampling strategies without retraining and are jointly supervised to train the default median policy. Our local analysis of this joint supervision shows that, with calibrated nearby quantiles, fixed gaps, and matched correction speed, direct median updates have lower variance than under median-only supervision. Experiments show that this jointly supervised median policy achieves the highest average success rates among the compared methods on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, LIBERO-Pro, and two real-robot tasks, together with the shortest mean episode time among matched LIBERO baselines; code is available at https://github.com/xwangrs/Quantile-Head-for-VLA.
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All authors Xuan Wang, Yinan Wu, Haoran Duan, Jungong Han

Sunday 27 September

Robotics

Fiatlux: A Long-Horizon Benchmark for Humanoid Ladder Climbing and Light-Bulb Replacement

Pavel Bushuyeu, Yujin Chen, Anton Nikolaev et al. (+2 more)

Existing benchmarks evaluate tabletop manipulation, flat-floor household activity, or humanoid locomotion and manipulation as separate task groups; none scores vertical mobility and dexterous work on a fragile payload in one long-horizon episode. We present Fiatlux, a light-bulb replacement benchmark built on NVIDIA Isaac Lab. In one episode, a Unitree G1 humanoid positions a step ladder under a ceiling or wall fixture, climbs it, exchanges a spent bulb in a socket for a fresh one, and leaves the spent one in a disposal crate. We decompose the episode into twelve subtask environments scored on difficulty-weighted gates. The goal is a successful replacement, with the fresh bulb seated, the spent one disposed of, neither dropped, and a fragility bound not crossed. Runs that fall short can earn partial credit. Observations are split into a standard mode (signals a physical robot could sense or estimate) and a privileged mode (exact simulator state). We specify the evaluation protocol and provide reference baseline implementations spanning RSL-RL PPO, zero-shot NVIDIA GR00T N1.7 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and whole-body controllers. Additionally, we provide the teleoperated recordings used to specify and check the success gates. The benchmark code and the teleoperated recordings are available at fiatlux-bench.github.io.
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All authors Pavel Bushuyeu, Yujin Chen, Anton Nikolaev, Brian Shu, Igor Molybog

Robotics

Waggle-Dance-Inspired Multi-UAV Recruitment with RGB and Synthetic Event Vision

Zhang Nengbo

The honeybee waggle dance motivates a communication mechanism in which one agent's motion guides the subsequent work of other agents. For aerial robots, realizing this mechanism requires a link from observed movement to a complete message, local task selection, and execution. This paper presents a MuJoCo system for comparing RGB and synthetic event vision within that link. One performer broadcasts six-bit task offers to one to three observers, each of which independently decodes both offers before selecting a task. The RGB receiver extracts trajectories using sparse optical flow; the event receiver uses only local event support and packet timing. Both use a common motion alphabet and explicit null delimiters. Because event silence does not establish target visibility, the event version includes a physical acquisition motion and continuity-qualified null confirmation. In the nominal three-observer case, each version produced 12 complete message receptions, six completed work units, and reassignment after withdrawal of a depleted task. Six paired functional cases produced the same message and work counts; an additional event-stream dropout case preserved inactivity of the affected observer. Replaying 42,060,633 recorded synthetic events reproduced all 12 event-message payloads and completion timestamps. Total nominal mission time was 493.80 s for RGB and 517.40 s for events, with the difference dominated by the event acquisition schedule. These fixed simulation results establish functional feasibility across two receiver implementations, rather than a sensor-performance advantage or hardware validation.
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Robotics

Contact-Adaptive Robotic Ultrasound Probe Control for Tissue Exploration and Continuous Task-Relevant Visualization Using Robot-Free Image-Motion Demonstration

Seong Jeong, Minsung Kim, Dongho Yee et al. (+8 more)

Robotic ultrasound commonly targets standardized views, predefined scanning protocols, or expert-scan reproduction. We target a different role: while a clinician performs the primary procedure, a robotic assistant maintains a clinician-selected view so that changing tissue remains observable. We present contact-adaptive robotic ultrasound monitoring derived from robot-free demonstrations. Sonologger clamps a six-axis inertial sensor to the clinician-operated probe and records synchronized ultrasound and probe-frame relative rotations without a robot, camera, or tracker. Rather than imitating trajectories, the recordings measure which probe axis and sign the clinician uses to correct an image offset. A measured image latency is removed before still-move-still segmentation yields relative-rotation labels; translation is excluded from control because of inertial drift. These measurements parameterize the Demonstration-Informed Image-Motion Controller (DIMC), an interpretable, non-learned controller combined with beam-axis force regulation and an independent safety supervisor with 5 N forced retreat. On a dynamic bladder phantom, DIMC acquired and held a task-relevant view in 7 of 7 blind, pose-paired trials versus 1 of 7 for a static hold (McNemar p = 0.031), and retained the view during syringe-driven hydro-distension while the supervisor bounded the force excursion. The framework offers an operational representation of ultrasound context for contact-adaptive intraoperative monitoring; clinical validation remains future work.
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All authors Seong Jeong, Minsung Kim, Dongho Yee, Juahn Oh, Yechan Seo, Jiyul Lee, Jinseok Lee, Seonho Shim, Younghoon Noh, Youngbin Kong, Hyoun-Joong Kong

Robotics

Surgical Master Console Using General-Purpose Robot Arms and a Separable Articulated Distal Interface: Porcine In-Vivo Evaluation

Minsung Kim, Seonho Shim, Dongho Yee et al. (+9 more)

High-performance surgical master consoles offer intuitive articulated manipulation but are expensive and difficult to reproduce, while accessible commercial haptic devices lack built-in interfaces for surgical wrist articulation and continuous grasp. We present a laparoscopic master in which general-purpose robot manipulators provide the programmable base and surgical-specific interaction is concentrated in a separable distal adapter. Each 6-DoF arm carries a custom 2-DoF direct-drive wrist, continuous grasp sensing, and clutch-based workspace management; the complete bimanual hardware costs approximately US$5,500, below common bimanual commercial haptic references. To support sustained hand-guided use, we characterize current scaling, gravity, and break-away friction and use them for posture-dependent gravity compensation and motion-gated assistance, reducing continuous actuation and thermal loading. A common master state drives either Isaac Sim or an RCM-constrained dual-FR3 platform. Master-state publication to FR3 target update adds at most 8 ms, and tip tracking shows 0.31-0.66 mm mean delay-aligned residuals. In a porcine cholecystectomy experiment, five common operator-side metrics and hand/tip-speed distributions were compared descriptively with human in-vivo telemetry from 120 clinical Versius recordings of 99 cholecystectomy procedures; no interruption originated from the master console, and no abnormal clinical signs were recorded during the 7-day postoperative observation period. These results demonstrate a surgical master built from general-purpose robot arms with surgical-specific interaction concentrated in a separable distal interface.
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All authors Minsung Kim, Seonho Shim, Dongho Yee, Younghoon Noh, Juahn Oh, Yechan Seo, Jinseok Lee, Jiyul Lee, Seong Jeong, Hyuk Choi, Youngbin Kong, Hyoun-Joong Kong

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

3D Point Tracking with State Space Models

Masahiro Ogawa, Qi An and Atsushi Yamashita

Tracking any point of a dynamic scene in metric 3D - in absolute meters, not up to an unknown scale - underpins 3D and 4D reconstruction, robot navigation, and autonomous driving, where decisions are made in meters, not pixels. Our objective is a 3D point tracker accurate in those absolute terms and operating within a single commodity GPU, pose-free, monocular budget. Our method rests on one observation: once a point's 2D image trajectory is fixed, the quantity that governs its metric accuracy is the depth along its pixel ray. Rather than learning tracking end-to-end, we therefore compose two frozen front-ends - dense optical flow for 2D correspondence and a monocular metric-depth network for the third dimension - and learn only the residual they cannot supply: that depth, refined by a compact state space model (Mamba-3) conditioned on appearance features (DINOv3). A state space model rather than the transformers the strongest 3D trackers adopt is what makes a single-GPU budget attainable: it summarises a track in a fixed-size recurrent state whose memory cost is constant in the number of frames, whereas attention requires a key-value cache that grows linearly with them. On the TAPVid-3D minival benchmark our best configuration attains the highest absolute metric accuracy among methods evaluated under identical conditions (mean metric Average Jaccard, 0.256), exceeding strong feed-forward trackers, while a companion analysis, reproduced with each competitor's own evaluator, explains why several published trackers lose most of their accuracy under this budget.
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Robotics

Estimate, Don't Imitate: Reusing Differentiable State-Based Policies for Visuomotor Control

Denis Shcherba, Adrian Abel, Eckart Cobo-Briesewitz et al. (+3 more)

Simulation-trained manipulation policies can exploit privileged state information to learn effective contact-rich behaviours, but deployment requires acting from partial observations such as noisy camera images. A common solution is teacher-student distillation, in which a visuomotor policy is trained to reproduce the actions of the privileged expert. This requires the student to jointly infer the task-relevant state and relearn the expert's action mapping that is already available. An alternative is to reuse the state-based expert and learn only a perceptual interface that reconstructs its missing state inputs. However, minimising the state estimate error alone does not necessarily minimise the downstream control error induced by these estimates. To bridge this gap, we train a visual state estimator using both direct state supervision and an action-consistency loss backpropagated through the frozen, differentiable expert. A scheduled objective first establishes a physically meaningful state estimate and progressively emphasises errors that affect the expert's actions. Across five goal-conditioned manipulation tasks, retaining the expert consistently outperforms direct pixel-to-action imitation from the same expert demonstration corpus. We further demonstrate sim-to-real transfer on a physical Panda robot, achieving 76% success without retraining the underlying expert.
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All authors Denis Shcherba, Adrian Abel, Eckart Cobo-Briesewitz, Paul Mattes, Wojciech Samek, Marc Toussaint

Robotics

ZeroBot: Learning from Scratch in Minutes with Generative Real2Sim

Ivan Kapelyukh, Xiaohan Zhang, Stephen James et al. (+2 more)

We present ZeroBot, a real2sim framework for learning a robot manipulation task from scratch in minutes under challenging conditions: zero human demonstrations, zero policy pre-training, and zero known object models. Given only a single view of an object and a goal pose for that object, ZeroBot uses image-to-3D generative models to obtain a complete object mesh, which is used in simulation for large-scale parallel reinforcement learning. To accelerate training, we introduce an action space which leverages the generated geometry and learned value function to sample states involving robot-object contact. When evaluated on real-world tasks including grasping, pushing, articulated object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, ZeroBot achieves an 87% success rate with an average training time of 119 seconds. These results show the value of using image-to-3D models in a real2sim framework for rapid, autonomous robot learning.
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All authors Ivan Kapelyukh, Xiaohan Zhang, Stephen James, Laura Herlant, Edward Johns

Robotics

TacGooseBumps (TacGB): Retrofitting Normal-Only Tactile Sensors with Shear Encoding for Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation

Wenjie Li, Binyu Yang, Yuxin Chen et al. (+2 more)

Contact-rich policies often fail because distinct physical states look alike yet require different actions. Cameras may not reveal whether a connector is aligned or fully seated, while many normal-only tactile sensors can miss the tangential interactions perpendicular to the grasping direction that distinguish these states. We ask whether a learning policy needs calibrated shear measurements, or only a repeatable observation that separates shear-dependent contact states. We introduce TacGooseBumps (TacGB), a passive domed film that mechanically encodes tangential loading as pattern changes in an existing sensor's pressure map. Tangential loading tilts each dome and redistributes pressure across its footprint; an end-to-end policy consumes the resulting maps without added electronics, force reconstruction, or taxel-level dome alignment. Across four imitation-learning tasks and two data-collection pipelines, TacGB improves goal attainment, efficiency, and contact quality: insertion success increases by up to 36 percentage points, and successful insertions are completed faster, while fragile-object placement becomes gentler and drawing becomes more continuous and straight. Signal, stage-wise, failure-mode, and trajectory analyses link these gains to contact regimes in which task-relevant tangential interactions are poorly resolved by vision and normal pressure alone. Together, these results show that shear need not be measured metrically to benefit robot learning; it can instead be mechanically encoded without changing the underlying tactile sensor or the policy's pressure-map input format.
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All authors Wenjie Li, Binyu Yang, Yuxin Chen, Ambrose Wang, Masayoshi Tomizuka

Robotics

Test-Time Spatial Reasoning for Robot Manipulation Using Generative Real-to-Sim

Ivan Kapelyukh, Yafei Hu, Ran Gong et al. (+6 more)

Spatial reasoning is fundamental to general robot intelligence, as it enables robots to complete long-horizon tasks involving multi-object interaction. We introduce Simify, a training-free, test-time framework that performs explicit spatial reasoning via massively parallel physics simulation. From a single RGB-D image of a scene, Simify reconstructs simulation-ready assets leveraging 3D generative models and vision-language models. Then given a task specified by a reward function (e.g., build the tallest tower), Simify launches thousands of parallel rollouts in simulation and performs an evolutionary search to optimize object arrangements, typically converging within seconds. We conduct quantitative experiments on real-robot hardware to demonstrate the ability of our framework to execute complex object rearrangement tasks end-to-end with previously unseen objects. Results show that our framework outperforms prior work on foundation models for spatial reasoning by effectively exploiting large-scale parallel simulation during inference, and also highlight the importance of complete and accurate geometry for successful sim-to-real transfer.
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All authors Ivan Kapelyukh, Yafei Hu, Ran Gong, Brandon May, Tushar Kusnur, Laura Herlant, Karl Schmeckpeper, Edward Johns, Xiaohan Zhang

Robotics

FINGR: Learning Dexterous Hand Control for Real-World Rubik's Cube Solving

Yutong Liang, Quanquan Peng, Matthew Kim et al. (+1 more)

Manipulating a Rubik's Cube with a single dexterous hand is a challenging test of sustained, contact-rich control: the hand must execute successive layer turns while keeping the cube secure. Each turn requires some fingers to support the cube while others push a moving layer, release contact, and reset for the next move. To learn this coordination, we introduce FINGR (Future-supervised Interaction Network with Geometric Representations), a policy that combines finger-relative geometry with future interaction prediction. A shared point encoder expresses the cube relative to each fingertip and aggregates its points without depending on cubie indexing. Learned future tokens share the observation encoder and receive supervision for contact-force changes, layer-turn progress, and finger joint displacement at multiple time scales. The resulting representation conditions a flow policy that directly generates finger actions. On a real dexterous hand, our policy achieves 99.0% success over 300 turn attempts, compared with 79.7% for the base flow policy. Integrated with grasping and table-assisted regrasping, the policy solves all ten scrambled $2\times2\times2$ cubes in a mean complete-system time of approximately 137 seconds. The project website is available at https://www.lyt0112.com/projects/FINGR
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All authors Yutong Liang, Quanquan Peng, Matthew Kim, Xiaolong Wang

Robotics

Integrity Detection and Characterization of Malicious Injections in RAVEN II

Xingli Zhang, Diba Afroze, Fei Hu et al. (+1 more)

The increasing adoption of robotic systems in surgery, together with the expanding range of procedures they can support and the growing level of autonomy they provide, has substantially increased the complexity of surgical robots. As these systems integrate more sensors, controllers, communication interfaces, and model-driven control components, their attack surface continues to expand. A compromise of the integrity of a surgical robot can therefore cause unintended robot behavior and potentially threaten patient safety. In this paper, we characterize the detection boundary of malicious injections on RAVEN II using a public dataset that pairs the platform's telemetry with external high-resolution encoder ground truth. We identify three injection points spanning the command and observation paths and evaluate three injection patterns with increasing temporal dispersion. To capture different detection behaviors, we perform detection at two timescales: the window scale and the session scale. Rather than reporting detection rates at an arbitrarily chosen threshold, we quantify, for each injection point and injection pattern, the smallest end-effector deviation that can be resolved while maintaining an alarm rate acceptable for surgical operation. Our results show that detectability is strongly influenced by how the injected deviation is distributed over time. An abrupt step can be detected at deviations well below the 1 mm clinical tolerance, whereas the same overall deviation spread across a window or a session can remain hidden from single-window statistics. The open source code can be found at http://github.com/RAVENIIROS/RAVENIIIntegrity.
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All authors Xingli Zhang, Diba Afroze, Fei Hu, Xiali Hei

Robotics

ReSync: Re-Aligning the Two Clocks of Asynchronous World-Action Models

Xi Lin, Feihong Zhang, Yulong Shi et al. (+6 more)

Jointly generating future video and actions has become a standard recipe for world-action models, and the strongest systems denoise the two streams on separate schedules: actions are decoded in few steps so control stays fast, while the video stream runs longer to keep the predicted future sharp. The design is deliberate, but it leaves the two streams on different clocks, and an action can become executable while the future that should justify it is still largely unresolved. We formalize this as a two-clock view of asynchronous inference and introduce the commitment-evidence gap, a quantity read directly from a model's own sampling schedule rather than measured by search. The gap is predictive: as it widens, candidate utility becomes harder to identify and extra candidate sampling buys less, while advancing the world stream buys more, and the two cross. Spending more world computation is therefore not simply better. The useful interval is closed at both ends, and both ends can be read off the schedule before any rollout. ReSync places the computation inside it: hold the action state, advance only the world within the supported window, then resume native denoising. No parameters change and no candidates are compared. On a frozen paired RoboCasa panel this improves success by 4.48 points, while an equal-compute control that waits without advancing the world does not move, and the same rule transfers to a second benchmark and a second backbone without retuning.
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All authors Xi Lin, Feihong Zhang, Yulong Shi, Yanghong Mei, Zuxing Lu, Xiaofan Zhu, Zihao Liang, Zhirui Gao, Zhaowen Li

Robotics

EpiTransfer: Sparse, Training-Free Long-Range Depth Estimation from Temporal Monocular Aerial Frames

Diksha Aggarwal, Rutvik Dagadkhair, Sanjana Srivastava et al. (+2 more)

Reliable 3D spatial understanding is essential for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, and scene reconstruction. While state-of-the-art learned depth estimation techniques achieve high accuracy in-distribution, they often generalize poorly to novel viewpoints and altitudes. This paper presents a geometrically derived, training-free depth estimation method using epipolar transfer with only two monocular images and camera pose estimates. By leveraging camera motion to synthesize a virtual stereo pair with a freely chosen baseline, our approach transforms temporal correspondence into a stereo triangulation task while mitigating geometric degeneracies inherent to direct two-view triangulation. Validated across outdoor drone flights (to a maximum range of approximately 90\,m) and indoor OptiTrack environments against LiDAR ground truth, the method achieves an indoor AbsRel of 0.092 and $\delta < 1.25$ of 0.940, comparable to direct triangulation (AbsRel 0.073) while retaining valid depth over a larger fraction of challenging scenes, and substantially outperforms off-the-shelf learning-based baselines such as ZoeDepth (AbsRel 0.225) and Depth Anything V2 (AbsRel 0.570), which are not trained or fine-tuned for this domain, with no training data required.
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All authors Diksha Aggarwal, Rutvik Dagadkhair, Sanjana Srivastava, Bradley Denby, Kevin Kochersberger

Robotics

ArticulateArena: A Metric for Articulated Kinematics

Yumeng He, Yongfei She, Huanyu Chen et al. (+6 more)

Modern methods reconstruct or generate simulation-ready articulated objects, predicting not only their geometry but also how their parts are connected and allowed to move. Evaluating the geometry is straightforward, but evaluating the predicted articulation is not, because articulation specifies a motion rather than a shape, and there is no agreed distance between two motions. More specifically, existing protocols score joint type, axis direction, origin, and motion limits separately, although these parameters jointly describe a single physical motion, and the same motion can be written as different parameter values. As a result, a joint can score maximally wrong against an equivalent encoding of itself, and several component errors are ill-conditioned or undefined exactly where predictions become accurate. We propose ArticulateArena, a representation-invariant counterpart of Chamfer distance for articulation that compares the motions one-DOF joints induce rather than the parameters that encode them. It represents each joint by the unordered pair of its Lie-algebra endpoint twists, and we prove that the resulting quotient distance is a metric. It unifies fixed, revolute, prismatic, and helical joints, brings continuous joints into the same score through a compactification, and reads as the RMS motion of the moving part in meters when weighted by its mass distribution. A motion-aware tree edit distance lifts the metric to full kinematic trees, pricing structural errors such as spurious or missing joints in the same motion units as joint errors, and for a fixed inner product it remains a metric on trees up to relabeling. Alongside the metric we release ArticulateArena-20K, a new suite of 19,977 articulated objects with verified kinematics, and we re-evaluate published reconstruction methods on it under the new metric. Project page: https://heyumeng.com/ArticulateArena-web/
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All authors Yumeng He, Yongfei She, Huanyu Chen, Chun Yuan, Peihao Li, Joseph Masterjohn, Yin Yang, Ying Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang

Robotics

Residual Learning-Based Control of Vehicle Platoons with $\ell_2$ Stability Guarantees via Recurrent Equilibrium Networks

Brian Delgado, Anh-Tu Nguyen and Hamid Taghavifar

This paper proposes a residual learning-based control framework for heterogeneous vehicle platoons subject to parametric uncertainty and external disturbances. A nominal controller designed via Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), along with disturbance-observer compensation, is enhanced by a Recurrent Equilibrium Network (REN) trained offline using stored trajectories and nominal-model prediction errors. The REN is constrained to satisfy a prescribed $\ell_2$-gain bound, enabling sufficient small-gain conditions for local closed-loop stability and disturbance string stability. Experiments demonstrate reduced spacing and velocity errors relative to the nominal controller.
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Robotics

DexTaG: Tactile-as-Guidance in Reinforcement Learning for Dexterous Manipulation

Han Yang, Yian Wang, Yunlong Song et al. (+2 more)

Glove-based motion capture is emerging as a scalable approach to collecting dexterous-hand demonstration data. However, due to the kinematic gap between the human and robot hand, the recorded human motions cannot be executed directly on the robot, especially for contact-rich tool-use tasks involving in-hand reorientation. Prior work bridges this gap in simulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or trajectory optimization, but the human contact pattern is hard to preserve under such formulations, often producing unnatural manipulation and unstable functional grasps. These methods also train a separate policy or solve a separate optimization for each reference trajectory, which is inefficient. To solve these problems, we propose DexTaG, a tactile-guided RL framework for dexterous manipulation. During training, tactile signals captured by the glove guide policy search toward the measured human contact pattern, reducing reliance on precise reference geometry for contact supervision. To improve efficiency, we train a single generalizable retargeter jointly on all training trajectories of the same object. The retargeter is further distilled into a tactile-free student controller conditioned on the target object trajectory for real-world deployment. On marker-pen and hammer manipulation tasks, DexTaG learns natural, contact-rich behaviors that baselines with distance-based contact heuristics fail to learn, generalizes to held-out trajectories of the same object and task, and outperforms single-trajectory baselines on OakInk2.
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All authors Han Yang, Yian Wang, Yunlong Song, Zhenjia Xu, Chuang Gan

Robotics

Robot-GST: geometry-aware spatial-temporal robot policy representation and evaluation

Sichao Liu, Zekun Wang, Lixuan Tang et al. (+6 more)

Robotic manipulation policies are advancing rapidly with increasing reliance on vision-language models for end-to-end decision making. However, reliable deployment remains challenging because many policies lack explicit mechanisms for predicting task outcomes and evaluating whether generated actions will achieve desired final states, causing execution errors to accumulate during long-horizon manipulation. We present Robot-GST, a geometry-aware spatio-temporal behaviour representation and evaluation framework that constructs a Gaussian-SAM robotic environment for real-to-sim policy verification and improves the reliability of real-world manipulation deployment. Our approach constructs a high-fidelity robotic environment from RGB-D observations using 3D Gaussian Splatting and SAM3D, enabling “simulation and evaluation before acting”. It integrates visual observations and language instructions with spatio-temporal reasoning for long-horizon task planning using large vision-language models. To bridge high-level planning and real-world execution, we introduce Gaussian-aware final-state estimation through geometric sampling and state-based trajectory planning. Before execution, candidate action sequences are simulated and evaluated in the Gaussian-SAM environment to filter infeasible behaviours. We validate our approach on representative manipulation tasks involving rigid, soft, and deformable objects, including cube placing, toy packing, and duck rearrangement, demonstrating that geometry-aware spatio-temporal reasoning and state-aware execution improve manipulation reliability across different object categories. Our results suggest that combining geometry-aware reconstruction with high-quality rendering and simulation provides a scalable approach for evaluating robotic manipulation behaviours. Website: https://robot-gst.github.io
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All authors Sichao Liu, Zekun Wang, Lixuan Tang, Yiming Li, Xiaohan Wang, Hanzhi Zhang, Daqiang Guo, Peng Zhou, Lihui Wang

Robotics

DeltaSeek: Toward Active Perception in Evolving Construction Environments

Sanjay Acharjee and Md Nazmus Sakib

Construction environments evolve continuously, causing large geometric changes that degrade static mapping and registration performance. This necessitates active perception, where robots deliberately select sensing configurations to resolve the environment's current state. We present DeltaSeek, an initial framework toward active perception in evolving built environments. While our broader objective is a system that reasons about where, how, and when to observe, this paper addresses a critical prerequisite: how a robot's sensing embodiment constrains the observations it can acquire. We formalize an embodiment's permissible observation set and evaluate with a Husky A300 equipped with a UR5e on an IFC-derived benchmark under chassis-mounted and wrist-mounted RGB-D configurations, scoring observations by geometric visibility and effort by drivable distance. In a room-scale scene with eight controlled changes spanning four observability conditions, exhaustive evaluation over 240 permissible base poses and five arm postures shows that two changes admit no chassis viewpoint whatsoever, while the wrist camera resolves both. For changes observed by both embodiments, the median base travel is $6.0$~m for the wrist camera and $15.2$~m for the chassis camera. These results distinguish sensing limitations from acquisition costs, clarifying whether an observation is impossible or simply requires more travel.
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Robotics

Achieve What You Imagined: Learning to Align Actions with Visual Plans

Yuheng Qiao, Ziran Wei, Xiaohan Wang et al. (+5 more)

World-action models can jointly predict future visual observations and robot actions. However, discrepancies may exist between their visual predictions and the consequences implied by generated actions. We observe that WAMs can often generate visually plausible task-completion outcomes before producing action sequences that reliably achieve them. Consequently, we treat the WAM-generated visual prediction as a goal-conditioned visual proposal rather than a directly executable plan. We use a frozen action-conditioned world model to predict action-conditioned consequences and construct feedback based on consistency between the two future predictions and alignment with the terminal goal. Leveraging this feedback, we employ Flow Policy Optimization (FPO) to optimize the action head of the WAM. This framework avoids online robot interaction and additional training of task-specific reward models. Across four real-world UR5 manipulation tasks, our method increases the mean success rate from 43.4% to 75.1%, compared with 61.4% for $\pi_{0.5}$. These results show that cross-model prediction discrepancy can provide useful feedback for improving robot policies under the evaluated manipulation tasks. Website: https://imagine-to-achieve.github.io/
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All authors Yuheng Qiao, Ziran Wei, Xiaohan Wang, Daqiang Guo, Yichen Luo, Zhibo Pang, Peng Zhou, Sichao Liu

Robotics

CodeActionBench: Evaluating Agentic Code-as-Policy for Embodied Manipulation

Yiheng Lyu, Xueying Jiang, Wenhao Li et al. (+2 more)

How well can general-purpose multimodal models turn visual understanding and reasoning into embodied manipulation via executable code? We introduce CodeActionBench, a benchmark of 25 manipulation tasks that evaluates this capability through agentic Code-as-Policy. Without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrations, external specialist perception or grasp modules, privileged scene state, or predefined task policies, agents should select visual evidence, form task-relevant 3D estimates, construct manipulation targets, and iteratively execute and revise their policies. A shared robot API provides RGB observations, calibrated geometric operations, robot feedback, and bounded motion, leaving task-dependent decisions to the evaluated agent. Fixed task instances, resource budgets, and a hidden physical-outcome verifier support controlled comparisons across models and harness configurations. Extensive evaluations across nine configurations and 675 attempts achieve success rates ranging from 2.7% to 73.3%. The strongest configuration, GPT-6 Astra with Codex CLI, solves 22 of 25 tasks at least once in three attempts, demonstrating the best performance while still leaving substantial room for improvement. Trajectory analyses reveal difficulties in spatial alignment, object retention, and completion judgment, including task failures despite successfully completed motions. CodeActionBench provides a controlled testbed for measuring how general-purpose models translate their capabilities into manipulation behavior and for examining typical failure scenarios in that process.
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All authors Yiheng Lyu, Xueying Jiang, Wenhao Li, Shijian Lu, Gongjie Zhang

Robotics

Principal Steering Subspaces for Online Adaptation of Frozen Generative Robot Policies

Jialeng Ni, Nathan Zhao and Kunpeng Song

Generative robot policies provide expressive behavior priors, but updating a large diffusion or flow-matching model through online interaction is costly. Latent-space reinforcement learning avoids updating the pretrained generator by controlling its initial sampling noise, yet high-dimensional noise can have strongly anisotropic effects on decoded actions. We introduce Principal Steering Subspaces (PSS), a forward-query interface that constructs a fixed low-dimensional control basis from finite-difference decoder responses. Soft Actor-Critic controls the leading response directions, while the orthogonal complement is independently resampled from the Gaussian prior at each query. On three RoboMimic tasks with diffusion and flow-matching policies, response spectra reveal substantial concentration. Across five matched task-generator pairs, the training curves indicate that PSS generally converges faster and exhibits more stable late-training behavior than full-latent control, while achieving stronger final performance overall. Controlled Diffusion-Square ablations further show that leading-response directions outperform random and least-responsive subspaces of equal dimension. We further integrate PSS with a frozen, closed-source 3B-parameter vision-language-action (VLA) policy in a humanoid learning system with synchronous transition collection, reset-time optimization, and latency-aware asynchronous deployment. In an exploratory screwdriver-placement evaluation, success is observed in 2/10 trials for the frozen VLA policy and 6/10 after SAC+PSS adaptation. These results support decoder-response geometry as a practical basis for online adaptation of frozen generative robot policies.
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Robotics

AnyStep-WAM: Budget-Aligned Distillation and Adaptive Inference for World Action Models

Rui Wang, Xiangyu Wang, Donglin Yang et al. (+4 more)

World-action models (WAMs) couple predictive visual modeling with action generation, typically relying on iterative denoising with a fixed denoising steps. However, manipulation tasks contain actions chunks with varying sensitivity to generation errors: critical actions require precision, while less sensitive actions allow faster generation with fewer denoising steps. Here we introduce AnyStep World Action Model, a general framework for tunable-budget prediction and scene-dependent computation allocation. Our budget-aligned teacher-trajectory distillation trains interval-conditioned flow maps using explicit frozen-teacher transitions and shared low-rank adapters, supporting action generation from one-step prediction to multi-step refinement. Building on this capability, a lightweight risk-benefit scheduler predicts teacher-curvature-based difficulty and budget-specific student-teacher fidelity from a single one-step preview, selecting the smallest budget predicted to satisfy risk-adaptive fidelity requirements. We evaluate our framework on three widely used WAMs Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA using RoboTwin 2.0. Our method reduces average denoising steps by 60.2%, 49.8%, and 85.28%, respectively, while maintaining baseline task success rates. In particular, our AnyStep training substantially improves model performance under a one-step denoising budget, increasing task success rates by 7.07%, 12.08%, and 8.94% on Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA, respectively. Experiments on six real-world manipulation tasks further validate its effectiveness.
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All authors Rui Wang, Xiangyu Wang, Donglin Yang, Yibo Li, Canyang Chen, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi