Robot
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Agentic World Action Models
2026-10-21 17:59:56Zhuoyang Liu, Dantong Niu, Botong Zhang, Boning Shao, Jing Wang, Ruijie Zheng, Yuvan Sharma, Runyu Lu, Jiaming Liu, Renrui Zhang, Roei Herzig, Yutong Bai, Ken Goldberg, Danfei Xu, Yuke Zhu, Guanzhi Wang, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Trevor DarrellAbstract
Recent world action models provide visual foresight and future prediction for robot manipulation, but lack explicit mechanisms for compositional skill reuse. Agentic robotics combines code-based planning and reasoning with reusable skills, but often lacks predictive grounding in physical dynamics. We introduce AW-0, an agentic world action model framework that integrates code-based planning with joint video and action prediction. We jointly model code, future video, and robot actions as three coupled generative streams within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. Within this architecture a code expert generates parameterized skill routines and control logic while video and action experts generate future visual states and low-level motor commands. Code serves two complementary roles: it structures multi-step prediction and control within the world model and represents skills as reusable programs for subsequent agentic execution. We further introduce an automated curation pipeline that labels robot and human video trajectories with aligned programs and consolidates recurring routines into reusable skill libraries. Evaluations on RoboTwin 2.0 and physical bimanual manipulation tasks show improved task performance over VLA and WAM baselines, alongside gains in language following, semantic reasoning and robustness, demonstrating that agentic code enables connection between planning, prediction and execution within WAMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30136
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Rethinking Video Autoencoders for Interactive World Models
2026-10-21 17:58:11Adrien Ramanana Rahary, Yutong Bai, Nicolas Dufour, Patrick P\'erez, David PicardAbstract
Video world models predict future frames from past frames and actions. They serve as simulators in which agents train, plan or are evaluated, and that humans can control interactively. They generate in the latent space of a video autoencoder, whose compression sets their cost per frame and how long each action waits to take effect. Yet world models often reuse the autoencoders of text-to-video generators, built for offline generation with no agent waiting and, without their training data and code, not retrainable at another compression. We therefore ask how, where and how much a world model should compress. We build CADRE, an open family of causal diffusion representation autoencoders spanning multiple spatio-temporal compressions. Its members differ only in a small bottleneck on frozen features and share a diffusion decoder self-distilled to one or a few steps. We train the same world model on each autoencoder in two domains, manipulation and navigation, with two environments each. CADRE forms most of the latency-quality frontier, especially with a moving camera. Our study also leads to four findings. At strong compression, a diffusion decoder is sharper than perceptual regression. In robot manipulation, temporal compression is more effective in the autoencoder than in the world model. Manipulation and navigation call for opposite compressions: temporal compression costs little when the camera is still, and spatial compression when it moves. Surprisingly, with a still camera, coarser spatial tokens hurt motion far more than image quality. Code, models and a live demo are at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30129
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Multimodal Embodied Agents: A Unified Capability-centric Perspective from Computer-Use to Robot-Use
2026-10-21 17:52:48Yanzhe Chen, Ziyi Yang, Jifeng Zhu, Qiming Huang, Ruihe An, Peiyao Xu, Hesen Yang, Runda Liu, Chang Gong, Zhijun Cao, Zechen Bai, Wenzheng Zeng, Yiqi Lin, Guoqiang Liang, Kevin Yuchen Ma, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Mike Zheng ShouAbstract
Multimodal agents (MMAs) sustain interaction through reasoning, memory, tools, and feedback, most visibly as computer-use agents, while robotic systems (RSs) couple sensing and actuation under physical dynamics. We define multimodal embodied agents (MMEAs) as goal-directed systems that couple multimodal task reasoning with physical action and revise decisions from the resulting feedback. This raises a central question: what changes when a multimodal agent moves from computer-use to robot-use? We introduce PAPAV, a unified capability-centric framework of five recurring functions: Perceive the current state, Anticipate action effects, Plan a feasible course, Act through an interface or body, and Verify the outcome. Defined by function rather than architecture, these capabilities let PAPAV identify what all three share and then compare MMEAs with MMAs and with RSs. Five physical constraints, from partial observability to unverifiable outcomes, leave fewer choices fixed in advance and less room to reverse errors. Across 64 benchmarks, explicit evaluation centers on Act; only 5 assess Anticipate and 3 assess Verify, leaving both largely hidden behind task success. These constraints also frame the open challenges we identify. PAPAV therefore provides a common basis for designing reliable physical agents and measuring progress across all five capabilities rather than task success alone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30108
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Asymmetric On-Policy Distillation Learns In-Context Exploration
2026-10-21 17:50:31Sriyash Poddar, Yanda Bao, Jacob Krantz, Matthew Chang, Xavier Puig, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Natasha Jaques, Abhishek GuptaAbstract
Sequential decision-making under partial observability is difficult because agents must explore to infer hidden, task-relevant information before acting effectively. Learning such information-gathering behaviors tabula rasa via online reinforcement learning is sample-inefficient, whereas offline imitation averages expert actions across hidden states and fails to learn exploration. In this work, we propose ASTEROID, a simple and effective student--teacher supervised learning framework that can learn test-time exploration. Although a privileged expert never needs to explore, we demonstrate that a history-conditioned student can learn to do so when trained with on-policy contexts: the student first collects on-policy context under partial observability, and the privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that context. By distilling expert actions directly conditioned on the student's on-policy history, the student learns to systematically resolve partial observability, i.e., search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. This enables efficient test-time exploration (similar to Bayesian posterior sampling) without incurring the impractical training-data costs of reinforcement learning. Across a diverse range of eleven different environments, including discrete exploration benchmarks, robotic manipulation, navigation, and Procgen environments, ASTEROID achieves ~2x higher returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses ~100x fewer interactions than RL baselines, and outperforms frontier models at exploration. Finally, our method transfers policies trained in simulation to vision-denied real-world robot manipulation, exhibiting efficient exploration and increasing success by +40% over standard distillation. Overall, it provides a simple yet surprisingly effective framework to learn efficient test-time exploration.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30105
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Implementation of Dynamic Microsegmentation for a Multi-Robot Network
2026-10-21 17:50:18Vishwam Raval, Jaewon Kim, Ravi Pattabhi, Sandip RoyAbstract
This report describes a laboratory instantiation of a dynamic microsegmentation function for an Internet-of-Things network, specifically a multi-robot network, using a commercial software-defined microsegmentation tool. Fine-grained dynamic segmentation policies are defined, where segments are adapted based on asset functional and health tags. Automated implementation of the dynamic policies in software is also undertaken. The microsegmentation solution is shown to automatically isolate an indicated threat in real time, while maintaining unaffected operations. The demonstration indicates that microsegmentation can be implemented in IoT networks, in a way that allows for robust operation in the face of threats and disruptions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30102
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AtomicRL: Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-21 17:45:24Likui Zhang, Zhe Zhu, Zhihao Zhan, Yibo Bai, Hanlin Wang, Dongwei Li, Bin Wang, Tianle Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Liang LinAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, but imitation learning (IL) alone often struggles to master complex long-horizon skills. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an effective avenue for further improving VLA policies. However, existing VLA-RL methods typically suffer from delayed and biased credit assignment due to trajectory-level sparse rewards, while imbalanced subtask mastery creates bottlenecks that limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicRL, an RL post-training framework that leverages atomic task structures for reliable credit assignment and adaptive exploration. AtomicRL introduces Semantic-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses semantic-aware gating to constrain TD residuals from failed atomic subtasks from propagating across task boundaries, mitigating credit contamination while preserving intra-subtask credit assignment and value bootstrapping. In addition, Bottleneck-Adaptive Target Exploration (BATE) dynamically coordinates task sampling and local exploration incentives based on the mastery of individual atomic subtasks, directing learning toward the remaining bottlenecks. Finally, we develop a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that bridges online RL in simulation with real-world deployment, facilitating practical transfer to physical robots. On LIBERO-LONG, AtomicRL achieves absolute performance gains of 3.6% and 4.0% over PPO across two VLA architectures. On CALVIN ABC-D, it improves full-task performance by up to 9.5% over PPO. Combined with the Real2Sim2Real pipeline, AtomicRL further improves real-world task performance by an average of 21.3%. These results demonstrate that AtomicRL effectively improves the learning efficiency and manipulation performance of VLA policies on long-horizon tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30097
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Test-Time Motion Steering for Perceptive Humanoid Fall Recovery
2026-10-21 17:20:04Osher Azulay, Cheng-Lin Hsieh, Stella X. YuAbstract
Humanoid fall recovery requires selecting a motion that suits both the surrounding scene and the task. The same fallen pose can admit several ways to stand, with different routes, support transitions, and final headings. Yet reliable recovery alone does not provide control over which of these alternatives the robot executes. Steering this choice requires anticipating the physical consequences of a requested movement. We present RISE, an approach to perceptive humanoid recovery that lets task objectives steer how the robot returns to standing at inference time. It builds on two insights: diverse recoveries can be composed from shared movements, and anticipating how these movements unfold allows recovery to be steered toward a task objective. We learn a recovery vocabulary that connects intended movements to motor actions through sensory feedback. A visual diffusion planner learns from executions of this vocabulary to predict motion intent as future body states. Task costs guide this prediction toward a desired heading, rise speed, or path. The planner then generates motion latents conditioned on the steered intent, allowing the requested movement to shape its execution. Simulation experiments demonstrate diverse recoveries, terrain adaptation, and test-time steering without retraining, complemented by real-world demonstrations on a Unitree G1. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30061
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From Reasoning to Action: Benchmarking Frontier AI Models on LIBERO-10 Robot Manipulation Tasks
2026-10-21 17:11:52May Espinola, Qifan Zhang, Yu XiangAbstract
Recent advances in frontier AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, planning, and tool use, raising the possibility of using general-purpose AI models for robot manipulation without task-specific training. However, their manipulation capabilities have not been systematically evaluated on standardized robotics benchmarks. In this report, we present a unified closed-loop manipulation framework for evaluating frontier AI models on the LIBERO-10 benchmark. Our framework enables models to control a robot directly through visual observations, robot proprioception, and structured tool calls, primarily by specifying target end-effector poses and gripper commands, without task-specific fine-tuning or pretrained manipulation skills. We evaluate six frontier AI models, including GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 5.5, and Gemini-4 Argon, across three reasoning effort levels, resulting in 18 configurations and 1,800 evaluation episodes. Our results show that GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest success rate of 44%, followed by Gemini-4 Argon at 43%. Increasing reasoning effort generally improves manipulation performance, but the benefits vary across models and come at additional inference cost. We also observe substantial differences across tasks, with models performing relatively well on object placement tasks but struggling with precise spatial arrangements and complex multi-step interactions. These findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of frontier AI models for robot manipulation, highlighting the challenges of translating reasoning capabilities into reliable physical actions. We release our evaluation framework and experimental results to support reproducible benchmarking and future research on reasoning-based robot manipulation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30051
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SP-HLM: Sparse-Pose-Driven Motion Generation and Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
2026-10-21 17:03:34Zhaohui Yang, Quanbao Lin, Chengqi Shi, Zhenglang Weng, Jicheng Lin, Boyu Chen, Tengjie Zhu, Guanzhu Ren, Jiahao Xu, Yang Feng, Xiaokang Yang, Yao MuAbstract
Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first predicts task-relevant sparse poses and finger joint positions from multimodal observations and language instructions using asynchronous action-chunk inference. Given these sparse targets, SP-MGM, a motion generation model trained through two-stage distillation, reconstructs coordinated full-body motion in real time. A pretrained motion encoder maps this motion to a compact latent representation. SP-GMT, a general motion tracker, then integrates the explicit sparse targets with this implicit motion prior for whole-body control. Experiments in simulation and on a real humanoid robot demonstrate improved motion tracking, whole-body coordination, and loco-manipulation success over existing approaches. Additional results and videos are available on our \href{this https URL}{\textcolor{blue}{project page}}.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30044
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TARSphere: A Robot-Oriented Full-Stack Framework for Long-Horizon Embodied Agents in Evolving Physical and Social Environments
2026-10-21 17:02:52Yicheng Xu, Zhikai Xu, Ziyuan Chen, Yuhang Dong, Tao Zhang, Zhucun Xue, Yong Liu, Jiangning ZhangAbstract
Robots must act under physical and social constraints while adapting to changes in their environment and human needs. Existing embodied-agent systems often focus on specified goals or abstract execution into symbolic actions, limiting evaluation in an evolving world. We introduce TARSphere, a robot-oriented full-stack framework for physically and socially grounded long-horizon embodied agents. TARSphere-Infra runs robot policies in a physics simulator with embodied NPCs and constrained dialogue. An event-driven finite-state machine (FSM) uses completed actions and delivered information to update task states and evaluate outcomes. TARSphere-Harness, its embodied brain harness, lets a frozen multimodal large language model (MLLM) act through multi-level executable skills, using observations, hierarchical memory, and execution feedback to revise its decisions. On this foundation, agent-in-the-loop curation aligns task semantics, causal dependencies, and scene geometry to construct TARSphere-Bench: 360 episodes across 30 indoor scenes. Five paired conditions assess perceptual robustness, disruption adaptation, task update, human coordination, and intent understanding for navigate-and-report and fetch-and-deliver tasks. Our evaluation of 8 MLLMs shows that general-purpose models can outperform embodied models, while task updates and human interaction remain difficult. Frequent collisions and falls further motivate evaluating execution safety alongside task success, even with a shared action interface and decision budget.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30043
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DONIC: Generalist Dexterous Bimanual Tracking Control from Human Demonstrations
2026-10-21 16:36:02Mingze Sun, Ziang Cao, Yuan Fei, Qiankuan Tao, Zihan Wang, Tianqi Liu, Junhao Chen, Haiwen Diao, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei LiuAbstract
Despite recent progress in dexterous reference tracking, existing models focus primarily on single-hand manipulation and a limited range of interactions, leaving the bimanual dexterous behaviors common in real life unaddressed. The scarcity of contact-rich bimanual manipulation data and the increased complexity of coordinating contacts make developing a generalist bimanual tracker particularly challenging. Therefore, we present 1) DONIC, the first generalist bimanual tracker jointly trained across operation categories and human-motion sources, together with 2) BiHOI, a multi-view dataset of 1,575 sequences spanning 229 objects and emphasizing sustained bimanual interaction, where reconstructed interactions are retargeted into robot references. DONIC combines proximal policy optimization with behavioral cloning in a feedback loop that recycles verified successful executions into training demonstrations. An object-centered per-hand reward maintains object-motion feedback while supervising each hand according to its reference contact role. Clip-Centered Advantages remove reference-dependent advantage offsets while preserving within-trajectory differences. Together, these designs enable one single policy to learn coordinated manipulation across heterogeneous references. Without finetuning, a single checkpoint achieves 86.79% success on unseen trajectories of training objects and 57.32% on held-out objects, surpassing the state-of-the-art bimanual tracking baselines by 77.36 and 45.73 percentage points.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29997
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Object- and Task-Aware Active Perception for Safe Navigation of Mobile Manipulators in Semi-Static Environments
2026-10-21 16:19:15Jingxing Qian, Xintong Du, Jun Yang, Siqi Zhou, Steven L. Waslander, Angela P. SchoelligAbstract
Mobile manipulators must navigate safely in cluttered, partially unknown environments across logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Semi-static changes between robot visits can lead to outdated scene knowledge and increased collision risk. We propose an active perception framework that enables a high degree-of-freedom (DoF) mobile manipulator to inspect uncertain or safety-critical regions with its hand camera during navigation. A probabilistic, object- and task-aware next-best-view (NBV) formulation prioritizes observations near the desired path and around uncertain or potentially changing objects. The perception objective is integrated into hierarchical-task model predictive control (HTMPC), exploiting kinematic redundancy for viewpoint adjustment while preserving the higher priority of base-trajectory tracking. The system unifies navigation, map maintenance, and active perception in a closed loop. Real-world tests show improved map consistency, reduced task-dependent map entropy, and lower navigation risk than passive or non-task-aware baselines. Additional simulation and real-world sequences demonstrate responses to controlled semi-static scene changes.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29964
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Goal Images Are Control Targets: Spatially-Grounded Goal-Image Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-21 16:00:13Riddhi Chatterjee, Ritish Shrirao, Kushagra Mehrotra, Viswanath GopalakrishnanAbstract
Goal-conditioned manipulation policies are steered by a goal image, a picture of the desired post-manipulation scene synthesized from the current observation and a language instruction. The prevailing assumption is that better image-editing quality yields better goals, so goal generators are built and compared using general image-editing metrics. We show this assumption is false. Across two independent goal-conditioned policies on CALVIN, the image editors that top aggregate editing-quality leaderboards (Gemini 3 Pro Image and GPT Image 1.5) produce worse control targets than our proposed far smaller finetuned open models, and the gap widens sharply for the multi-step (long-horizon) tasks robots actually face. A per-dimension analysis explains why. Downstream policy success is governed almost entirely by manipulation adherence (selecting the right object and the right final state; Spearman $\rho \approx 0.9$ with success), while photorealism and aesthetic fidelity, precisely where large proprietary editors excel, are uncorrelated with success ($\rho \approx 0$). This dissociation holds on both CALVIN and the real-world-aligned SIMPLER-Bridge benchmark. We then present SGE-Goal, a spatially-grounded decomposed editing framework that predicts initial and final 2D edit-region masks before goal-image synthesis. SGE-Goal turns open base models (FLUX.1 Kontext, FLUX.2 klein) into the strongest goal generators we evaluate on CALVIN, and second only to Gemini 3 Pro Image on SIMPLER-Bridge. Base models fine-tuned with SGE-Goal also hold up under chaining far better than the best proprietary editor, sustaining roughly seven times the success rate at the longest (five-step) chains. We release code, datasets, checkpoints, and a human-aligned diagnostic evaluator. Our results argue that goal generators must be selected by downstream utility, not by editing-quality leaderboards.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24885
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GeoMem-VLA: Internalizing 3D Scene Understanding into Temporal Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-21 15:23:18Qinfan Zhang, Yifan Luo, Haoyuan Shi, Guanlin Liu, Han Dong, Haozhe Shan, Yong Dai, Xiangcong Ren, Xiaozhu JuAbstract
Geometric structure is essential for robotic manipulation and understanding the 3D world. Most VLA models rely on 2D representations of current observations, while geometry-aware approaches often require additional 3D information. However, geometry inferred independently from individual observations is often discarded rather than accumulated into a persistent task representation. Our key insight is that action generation needs a compact, task-relevant geometric abstraction that can be continuously updated, rather than a complete, renderable 3D reconstruction at every step. We introduce GeoMem-VLA, a VLA framework that internalizes explicit 3D supervision into dedicated geometric tokens and maintains them as temporal memory for action generation, without directly aligning the VLM's native visual embeddings with the teacher feature space. During training, a frozen geometry foundation model supervises learnable GeoPlan tokens through a geometric flow-matching objective over the current scene point map and future end-effector tracks. These tokens are integrated with the memory of observation representations, where historical information is retrieved, adaptively fused with current observations, and consolidated to retain event frames as the task progresses. At inference, the policy retrieves historical representations and fuses them with the current working representation to predict actions, without invoking the 3D teacher or explicitly reconstructing the scene. After benchmark-specific downstream adaptation, GeoMem-VLA achieves 98.9% average success on LIBERO and 91.10% / 91.24% on RoboTwin's clean/randomized settings. Across five real-world tasks, GeoMem-VLA achieves 78.0% average success. These results suggest that internalizing and remembering 3D scene understanding is a promising approach to robot control.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29866
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RangeNav: Task-Aligned LiDAR Range-Image Pretraining for Robot Navigation
2026-10-21 15:06:08Samuel Foo Enze, Manthan Patel, Fan Yang, Linus Kramer, Pascal Roth, Marco Hutter, Cesar CadenaAbstract
Autonomous mobile robots operating in dense crowds and cluttered sites require $360^\circ$ perception to react to surrounding hazards. While panoramic LiDAR offers full-surround coverage, learning representations within reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient under sparse rewards, and existing 3D pretrained point-cloud encoders are too memory-heavy for massively parallel RL simulation. We present RangeNav, a compact (183k parameters) LiDAR range-image encoder pretrained entirely on synthetic data. RangeNav uses anisotropic convolutions and circular padding to handle the extreme aspect ratio and azimuthal seam of range images. We pretrain the network using a navigation-aligned objective combining range reconstruction, semantic segmentation, and bird's-eye-view (BEV) prediction, then freeze it for policy learning. In simulation, adding semantic and BEV supervision increases success rates over a reconstruction-only baseline by an average of 32.03 and 23.73 percentage points (pp) in procedurally generated training and out-of-distribution realistic test environments, respectively. Zero-shot real-world deployments on a Unitree B2-W quadruped demonstrate robust navigation through dense crowds, low-light settings, and construction zones where limited-field-of-view depth policies struggle. Code and models will be open-sourced.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29845
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Spacetime Splines for Adaptive Robot Motions
2026-10-21 15:01:04Boxuan Zhang, Ante Mari\'c, Sylvain CalinonAbstract
Movement primitives commonly represent robot mo- tions through basis functions indexed by time or phase. Inspired by spacetime representations employed in physics, we propose a spline-based formulation in which spatial geometry and temporal progression are represented within a common set of continuous variables. The proposed method jointly estimates a shared Bezier curve, while allowing spatial and temporal model complexity to be adapted independently (e.g., demonstration-specific phase modulation). As use case, we consider an alternating optimization process that simultaneously estimates path intervals observed in partial demonstrations. Simulation experiments demonstrate accurate joint recovery, refinement through modifications in model complexity and continuity, and improved robustness to variance in the demonstration set. Finally, we demonstrate online retiming and synchronization capabilities in a patient-turning task assisted by a robot, evaluated with a physical manikin.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29839
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Robot Generalization Beyond Volume: The Diversity Path via Zero-Shot Capabilities
Abstract
General-purpose robots must handle tasks, objects and environments they were never trained on, yet zero-shot generalization remains one of the least solved problems in physical AI. In digital AI, zero-shot capability grew with the volume and, above all, the diversity of training data, much of it sourced from the crowd. Robotics instead relies on paid collection by a few well-funded teams, which yields volume without diversity. We formulate zero-shot generalization in physical AI as coverage of the deployment distribution, and show that more samples from the same collectors shrink the unseen region only slowly, while each new contributor can extend it. Building on this and on zero-shot learning, we propose a shared latent space for robot actions that combines multi-modal alignment, generative augmentation, and noisy-label learning. As a scalable source of diverse data, we propose a community of developers building applications on one standard, approachable robot, Origami. We close with a testable hypothesis and an evaluation protocol relating real-robot zero-shot success to the diversity of contributed data.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29829
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OMAR: Open-World Multi-Attribute Reasoning for Scene-Conditioned Shelf Organization
2026-10-21 13:59:13Benedikt Kreis, Rohit Menon, Benno Wingender, Muhammad Ehsan Ullah, Nils Dengler, Maren BennewitzAbstract
With the advent of foundation models, robots are increasingly capable of understanding and executing explicitly specified human tasks. Extending these capabilities to open-ended tasks, however, requires robots to infer appropriate actions from the observed scene. Household organization exemplifies this challenge, as robots must often act without detailed instructions, predefined object vocabularies, or known object-receptacle associations. While robots may follow instructions or learn organization preferences from demonstrations, inferring the latent organization of an occasionally changing scene and placing a novel object consistently with it remains challenging. We propose an open-world multi-attribute reasoning pipeline that grounds unknown objects across views and constructs an instance-level 3D scene graph for placement reasoning. First, a vision-language model proposes labels together with attributes such as content and packaging type, which are grounded through segmentation, depth, and multi-view association. Then, an LLM reasons over this representation to infer the latent shelf organization and rank scene-consistent object placements without explicitly user-provided preferences. The resulting placement rankings guide subsequent geometric and kinematic feasibility checks for execution. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach leads to improved instance mapping and placement coherence over single-view language-grounding and geometry-only baselines, enabling autonomous placement of previously unseen objects without predefined object-receptacle mappings or class-specific retraining.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29761
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Post-hoc Epistemic Uncertainty for Vision-Language-Action Policies
2026-10-21 13:34:03Johannes Keller, Albrecht M. Blo{\ss}e, Adrian Lindenmeyer, Thomas Neumuth, Daniel SchneiderAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies need to recognize gaps in their training knowledge to request useful demonstrations or assistance in new situations, especially when failures are costly. Disagreement within an ensemble of independently trained policies can guide these decisions, but requires training and running multiple policies. We propose post-hoc kernel-variance heads that estimate epistemic uncertainty from the embeddings of a single policy. Each head computes the conditional variance of a Gaussian process conditioned on embeddings from the training demonstrations. Fitting requires no regression targets or gradient updates and leaves the policy unchanged. In experiments with SmolVLA on LIBERO-10, the kernel variance heads perform competitively with two-policy ensemble scores in task-level correlation with task success, in demonstration acquisition during active learning, and in referral to a stronger supervisor policy as a proxy for human assistance. For SmolVLA, the head on the vision-language backbone reduces uncertainty-scoring time by up to approximately a factor of 50 compared with ensemble scores, while also substantially reducing setup costs. We also show that the established evaluation protocol on LIBERO-10 primarily rewards recognition of coverage differences between tasks, while execution variability weakens assessment of within-task rankings. Thus, controlled perturbations provide a complementary evaluation: modality-specific heads identify unfamiliar camera, instruction, or state inputs, while fused heads can detect unfamiliar combinations of individually familiar inputs. With a supervisor proxy trained on the evaluated perturbation families, the decoder head improves within-task referral over ensemble disagreement. These findings show that useful uncertainty estimates for adaptive robot learning can be obtained from a single policy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29730
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Reconstruction-Augmented Visuomotor Pre-Training of 3D-Grounded Bimanual Dexterity from RGB-Only Human Videos
2026-10-21 13:28:19Xingyi He, Zhiwen Qiu, Adhitya Polavaram, Yunhao Cao, Cory Fan, Julius Samwer, Saleh Kalantari, Kuan FangAbstract
We present SpatialDex, a framework that learns 3D-grounded bimanual dexterity from RGB-only human videos through reconstruction-augmented visuomotor pre-training. The central idea is to learn human behavior together with its spatial context. From each video, we reconstruct the scene geometry and estimate the hand motion, align them at a shared video-level scale using the hand-size prior of 3D hand estimates. We retain the reconstructed geometry as both a policy input and a prediction target. The policy grounds the token grid of a pre-trained vision-language model in this geometry through gated residual fusion, is trained to predict future scene geometry alongside wrist and finger actions, and generates finger motion conditioned on the predicted trajectories of both wrists. Pre-trained on 1M human-video clips and fine-tuned with a small number of robot demonstrations, SpatialDex outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 16.5 points on nine simulated dexterous tasks across two embodiments and by 38.3 points on six real-world bimanual dexterous tasks. Under a matched comparison, pre-training with reconstructed geometry improves success by 14.2 points over pre-training on hand motion alone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29716
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