Robot
-
CondenseVLA: Learnable History Condensation for Efficient Multi-Frame VLA
2026-10-20 15:47:30Feiyang Hong, Yujie Wei, Bo Zhao, Xiu Su, Hongxun Yao, Shuo YangAbstract
Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual context in action decoding. Given a sequence of cached per-frame features from the VLM backbone, CondenseVLA distills observation history into a fixed set of slot tokens using learnable queries and multi-head cross-attention. Simple auxiliary regularization penalizes overlap among slot attention maps and decorrelates slot embeddings, encouraging complementary attention and reducing slot redundancy. Across the evaluated tasks, CondenseVLA improves Simpler-WidowX success from 58.7% to 69.8% (+11.1 percentage points), achieves 97.2% on LIBERO, and reaches 52.8% on real-world tasks. It achieves 21.6% success on memory-dependent RMBench tasks. These results support selective condensation of bounded recent visual evidence for action decoding, while harder multi-observation tasks expose the limits of a finite history window. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25927
PDF
-
SPAR: Search-trained Push Action Ranker for Efficient Navigation Among Movable Obstacles
2026-10-20 15:25:57Dhruv Metha Ramesh, Tri-An Nguyen, Junshan Huang, Jingjin Yu, Kostas E. Bekris, Abdeslam BoulariasAbstract
Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) requires a robot to rearrange objects that block access to its goal. For a pushing robot, progress may depend on a setup push that enables a later opening without itself clearing a passage. The number of candidate sequences can grow exponentially with sequence length, making physics-based search costly. We introduce the Search-trained Push Action Ranker (SPAR), which learns to prioritize push primitives from simulated search outcomes. Searches over sequences of up to two pushes per object provide supervision that distinguishes immediate openings from setup pushes. A transformer trained with regression and ranking losses scores primitives using contact tokens conditioned on scene geometry and reachability regions. The same model guides simulator evaluations in SPAR Search and selects actions for direct execution in SPAR Policy. Both modes solve successive keyhole problems that open access to neighboring free-space regions within a NAMO planner. Across successful runs on $300$ simulated two-push keyhole problems, SPAR Search reduces median simulator calls by $7.0\times$, leading to a $3.8\times$ reduction in planning time relative to Random Search. Without retraining, the same ranker guides search on $600$ keyhole problems which have no solution within two pushes. At a depth limit of five pushes, SPAR Search achieves $50.7\%$ success within $100$ simulator calls, compared with $20.2\%$ for Random Search. These gains carry over to NAMO planning: on hard simulated scenes, SPAR Search achieves $47\%$ success within $100$ simulator calls, compared with $21\%$ for Random Search. In real-robot experiments, SPAR Policy succeeds in $37/40$ trials without a physics-based digital twin, compared with $33/40$ for SPAR Search and $27/40$ for Random Search.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28362
PDF
-
Reinforced Iterative Learning Control for elastic joint arms: Guaranteed cross-trajectory generalization under model uncertainties
2026-10-20 15:00:55Yuri De Santis, Michele Pierallini, Franco Angelini, Manolo GarabiniAbstract
Trajectory tracking for compliant robots is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and modeling uncertainties, often requiring learning-based methods to avoid explicit parameter identification. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) ensures theoretically high precision and preserves the passive compliance of the robot. However, traditional ILC requires a separate learning phase for each new trajectory. Conversely, Reinforcement Learning (RL) generalizes to new trajectories, but practically suffers from high sample complexity and limited tracking precision. This work proposes Reinforced Iterative Learning Control (RILC) that combines the strengths of both approaches to achieve fast adaptation and guaranteed tracking convergence across diverse trajectories. By establishing a concurrent coupling between the two controllers, RILC overcomes the high initial errors and slow adaptation of traditional ILC, enabling high-performance tracking from the very first trials. In this architecture, ILC provides high-quality samples, while RL contributes as a generalizing best-effort policy across iterations. Additionally, a theoretical proof is presented to show that the RL component preserves ILC stability and, under specific conditions, can also reduce the error bound asymptotically. The efficacy of this framework is demonstrated through simulation and experiments on an underactuated 4-degree-of-freedom serial elastic robot using different trajectories and modeling mismatches.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28329
PDF
-
Local Work, Global Progress: A Convergence Theory of AI Agent Collaboration
2026-10-20 14:37:06Ivan Ilin, Peter Richt\'arikAbstract
Teams of large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to complex tasks, but their collaboration protocols are mostly designed empirically, without convergence guarantees. We formalize collaborative problem solving as block optimization: each agent improves one part of a shared solution, guided by its local objective plus a correction for how its changes affect the other parts. A coordinator checks every proposal against the global objective and merges proposals that do not interfere with each other. We prove linear convergence up to an error floor that vanishes when the corrections are exact. Interfering proposals can also be merged once their combination has been checked; the rate then depends on how well the proposals actually combine, not on worst-case interactions. With GPT-OSS-120B agents on robot routing, a three-agent team finds collision-free plans in every run, better than those of a single agent that controls all robots. On a larger routing task, a six-agent team completes its search about twice as fast as the single agent (in median). Merging the best checked combination of proposals, rather than only proposals that do not interfere, cuts the team's search time by about 30%. With constants measured on the runs, our convergence bound holds in every round and follows the observed progress. We also test the theory on query planning in SQLite and on a synthetic task.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28286
PDF
-
Large Multimodal Models for Direct Robot Control: GPT-6 as a Beginning
2026-10-20 14:15:04Youwei Zhou, Bohan Hou, Yankai Fu, Yaoxu Lyu, Yifan Ye, Shilin Shan, Chen Guo, Jiaming Liu, Ran He, Caifeng Shan, Shanghang Zhang, Jianfei Yang, Zhihe LuAbstract
Recent advances in visuospatial understanding and agentic reasoning enable direct robotic manipulation with general-purpose multimodal models, but their embodied capabilities remain poorly understood. This paper systematically evaluate GPT-6 Astra for closed-loop robotic manipulation using a lightweight agent execution framework. We first probe three fundamental embodied capabilities-depth perception, embodied in-context learning, and tactile understanding-and demonstrate that the model can exploit depth information, acquire simple manipulation strategies from contextual demonstrations, and use tactile feedback to correct its actions. We then evaluate GPT-6 Astra across five established manipulation benchmarks along six capability dimensions. Despite competitive performance on several benchmarks-26.92\% success on RoboDojo and 76.0\% on RoboTwin 2.0-our analysis reveals a pronounced gap between semantic reasoning and physical execution, particularly in consequence-aware action planning, precision, and complex motion coordination. To further examine these limitations, we introduce LIBERO-GeoMotion, a new benchmark of geometry-constrained tasks that require precise pose alignment, coordinated translation and rotation, and anticipation of physical action consequences. GPT-6 Astra achieves only 11.1\% zero-shot success, exposing the difficulty of translating spatial understanding into physically feasible motion. Real-world experiments corroborate these findings: zero-shot execution is feasible for simple tasks, yet persistent deficits remain in motion feasibility, precise control, and physical safety, while substantial inference latency further hinders practical deployment. Overall, our results characterize the emerging embodied capabilities of general-purpose multimodal models and delineate the key challenges toward safe, efficient, and reliable robotic manipulation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28259
PDF
-
Safe Multi-Robot Collaboration With Uniform Exclusion Using Trust
2026-10-20 14:11:05Thomas Kaminsky, \'Aron V\'ek\'assy, Hammad Izhar, Angelia Nedi\'c, Stephanie GilAbstract
Robot swarms coordinate through directed, time-varying local communication links, some of which may be compromised to allow the transmission of arbitrary malicious data. We provide an algorithm that acts as a wrapper around robot communication---when a robot seeks to update its state using data from some incoming links, our wrapper provides a subset of trusted links whose data can be safely incorporated. It selects these links by testing a stream of trust values---data collected from an anomaly detector on each robot---using Safe Anytime-Valid Inference. We require only that the detector be better than chance. This wrapper ensures safe and performant autonomy by providing two powerful statistical guarantees: it uniformly excludes all compromised links for all time with high user-chosen probability, but nevertheless quickly learns to trust legitimate links. Both guarantees are vital to secure generic tasks, but no previous work provides them simultaneously without restrictive assumptions on connectivity structure or the number of compromised links that are not guaranteed in practice. We study our Safe Wrapper's performance in hardware for two contrasting tasks---neural implicit mapping and heading consensus---deploying on 3 LoCoBots and 8 GoPiGos, respectively. We provide simulations using trust values sampled from hardware to validate that our approach scales well to swarms of hundreds of robots.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28251
PDF
-
OPIS: An Input-Grounded Benchmark for Multi-Object Memory in Video World Models
2026-10-20 13:35:33Hao Wang, Tao Yu, Liuzhou Zhang, HeXin Wang, Haopeng Jin, Yuxuan Zhou, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinye Li, Yuanlei Wang, Ping Nie, Yan Huang, Yuxuan Zhang, Pengfei Zhou, Yanyan Zou, Wei YangAbstract
Video world models must preserve the visual state of the world over time, but existing evaluation protocols often rely on generated histories, video reference, or selected revisit viewpoints that can confound the assessment of a model's true memory capability. To address this, we introduce OPIS, an input-grounded benchmark that strictly anchors the assessment to a fixed set of object instances from the initial observation for evaluating multi-object memory in video world models. The OPIS dataset comprises 500 cases across real-world, embodied-robotic, and game-world domains, providing dense object-level annotations for 12,672 rigid, articulated, and deformable instances. Our object-centric evaluator combines association and explicit visibility reasoning to hierarchically measure Object (O) Presence (P), Identity (I), and Structure (S), utilizing static or dynamic evaluation tracks based on object kinematics. Across eight image-to-video or camera-conditioned world models, our proposed OPIS scores range from 48.65 to 56.01. As the reference inventory grows from less than 20 to more than 40 objects, the Presence, Identity, and Structure scores show an overall decline, with the average Identity score falling from 40.22 to 23.11. The results demonstrate that preserving the particular object instances in the input is considerably harder than generating plausible visual elements.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35052
PDF
-
De-Diffusing WAMs: Action-Sufficient Direct Prediction for Robot Control
2026-10-20 12:30:58Shaoyi Zheng, Zhongtao Jiang, Yue Peng, Wenbo Lu, Shunchi Zhang, Xi Wang, Shengji WanAbstract
Cascade world-action models (WAMs) use predicted visual futures to condition robot actions, but inherit costly iterative inference from diffusion-pretrained experts. We ask what a single-step predicted future must preserve to support accurate single-step action prediction. In the evaluated WAM, resampling video noise has little effect on downstream actions, yet naively truncating both streams to one step substantially reduces task success. Video-space supervision only partially closes this gap, and a local sensitivity analysis shows that vision prediction errors have highly unequal consequences for action accuracy. These findings motivate DirectWAM, which converts pretrained video and action experts into single-step predictors without stochastic sampling through action-sufficient distillation, while retaining the explicit future-to-action cascade. After learning a one-step action model, we train the future predictor by decoding actions from its own predicted futures and backpropagating demonstration action error through the expert, with an optional future-latent reconstruction loss. The resulting objective evaluates the student-generated future through its downstream control consequences rather than relying on representation matching alone. DirectWAM achieves 97.1% average success across four LIBERO suites and 85.4% on RoboTwin 2.0, outperforming Flash-WAM at the same one-evaluation-per-stream budget. This advantage has also extended to three real-world tasks that we designed. Compared with the full iterative teacher, it reduces inference latency by $28.0\times$.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28122
PDF
-
FIT-MAC: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-20 12:21:24Jiatong Li, Jisheng Dang, Qiangqiang Ma, Bimei Wang, Jingwen Zhao, Wenjun Ma, Juncheng Li, Hong Peng, Bin HuAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance on standard robotic manipulation benchmarks. However, their reliability can degrade substantially when task conditions deviate from the nominal setting. Perturbations in object positions and task instructions may lead to complete task failure. Existing VLA policies generally lack an explicit runtime mechanism for distinguishing these failure modes and selecting an appropriate recovery strategy. To systematically mitigate this issue, we propose FIT-MAC, a failure-aware, closed-loop multi-agent control framework for improving the robustness of VLA policies at inference time. FIT-MAC augments a VLA policy with an inference-time control layer. First, the Planner Agent parses the language instruction into a structured task specification that captures the manipulation goal and spatial constraints, and the Grounder Agent resolves each instruction-level reference to a visual target. Next, the Verifier Agent tracks phase-specific execution progress, distinguishes target-binding errors from local execution failures, and determines whether intervention is warranted. The Correction Agent then routes permitted interventions to target rebinding or bounded grasping or placement recovery, depending on the failure type. When no intervention is required, the pretrained VLA remains the default action generator. Extensive experiments on LIBERO-PRO demonstrate that FIT-MAC improves robustness across multiple VLA backbones, consistently increasing success rates and achieving state-of-the-art performance under diverse perturbations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28109
PDF
-
Temporal Difference Learning of Probabilistic Reach-Avoid Value Functions
2026-10-20 12:18:33Elias Fontanari, Pietro Noah Crestaz, Matteo Saveriano, Andrea Del PreteAbstract
Reach-avoid sets, defining the states from which a task can be completed while avoiding unsafe regions, are fundamental tools for deploying robots in environments subject to disturbances and uncertainty, as well as for runtime task-feasibility monitoring, allowing prediction of whether a state is safe and will lead to successful task completion. Classical Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability (HJR) and its recent neural extensions (e.g., Lipschitz Continuous Reachability Learning, DeepReach) treat disturbances adversarially, computing the reach-avoid set under worst-case disturbances from a bounded set. This guarantees safety but can yield overly conservative sets when disturbances are stochastic rather than adversarial, and additionally requires the disturbance set to be known or specified in advance. We propose Probabilistic reach-avoid Value Function (PVF), a self-supervised method, applicable to black-box systems, for computing reach-avoid sets as the states with a certain reach-avoid probability under stochastic, potentially unbounded disturbances. We evaluate our approach against HJR-based baselines on systems of increasing complexity, up to a Hopper locomotion task, and show that our probabilistic sets are less conservative and more accurate than adversarial HJR sets when disturbances are non-adversarial.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28106
PDF
-
Slot-JEPA: Object-Structured Prediction Interfaces for Latent World Models
2026-10-20 11:53:42Peisong Wen, Qianqian Xu, Minye Lei, Siran Dai, Yang Liu, Qingming HuangAbstract
As a prototypical latent world model, Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide strong semantic representations. However, dense patch representations expose a redundant interface to downstream predictors, which must implicitly infer spatial organization and temporal correspondence, presenting three challenges. First, object information is distributed across patches, forcing each downstream predictor to redundantly recover object structure that could otherwise be reused across tasks before modeling interactions. Second, the lack of explicit entity correspondence across time makes historical transitions expensive, restricting the predictor's flexibility in utilizing context. Third, without explicit transport structure, existing JEPA models typically use pointwise l1/l2 distances, which are insensitive to spatial displacement when predicted and goal supports are largely disjoint. We propose the Slot-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (Slot-JEPA), which decomposes dense representations into stable semantic slots and time-varying spatial masks. Pretrained once and frozen downstream, this decomposition exposes a reusable object-structured interface. Building on it, our Transition Memory Predictor (TMP) stores visual transitions as compact masks and retrieves useful context using statistics of corresponding slots. Its two branches separate slot-specific dynamics from shared cross-slot dynamics. We further use Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) to supervise mask prediction and evaluate candidate plans by transporting mass between aligned predicted and goal masks, providing a signal better aligned with spatial progress. Across seven visual-understanding benchmarks, the slot-reconstructed features remain transferable. Slot-JEPA also improves goal-conditioned planning across six planar environments and four robotic arm planning tasks on the REALM-JEPA benchmark.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28074
PDF
-
PACT-VLA: Speculative Action-Chunk Verification with Pre-Commit Observations
2026-10-20 11:08:41Yixiang Zhu, Ruilong Wu, Yonghao Chen, Jiaxiang Zou, Yusong Hu, Xinyu ChenAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies are commonly deployed with asynchronous inference in real-world settings, where the next action chunk is generated while the robot is still executing the previous one. By the time the new chunk is committed, the robot and scene have changed, so the chunk is conditioned on a stale observation and task success drops sharply as this inference delay grows. Generating multiple candidate chunks could let newer observations inform the final choice, but existing multi-candidate methods either rank candidates with the stale inference-start observation or repeatedly switch between candidates during execution, which can make the executed action sequence discontinuous. Our key insight is that inference delay can be used as decision time. While candidate generation is still underway, candidate selection can reuse the VLA itself to choose the complete action chunk that best fits a later observation. We propose PACT-VLA, a training-free framework that generates candidates from the inference-start observation and selects one using this pre-commit observation. Its scoring function, FlowRes, measures the residual between each candidate's implied flow direction and the velocity predicted by the frozen policy under the pre-commit observation, requiring no separate verifier. A pipelined implementation overlaps observation processing with candidate generation and batches scoring, so selection adds no control-step delay on the evaluated hardware. At a four-step delay, PACT-VLA improves average success by 15.0 percentage points over RTC on Kinetix and by 5.2 points over single-candidate asynchronous execution with GR00T N1.7 on LIBERO, and it further improves existing delay-robust methods. On three real-robot tasks, it raises average success from 60% to 82% over naive asynchronous execution with the same frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ checkpoint.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28019
PDF
-
LocoPilot: Single-Operator Bilateral Teleoperation for Loco-Manipulation Policy Learning
2026-10-20 10:37:39Antonio Langella, Giovanni Minelli, Giovanni B. Dessy, Lorenzo Amatucci, Giulio Turrisi, Victor Barasuol, Claudio SeminiAbstract
Learning loco-manipulation policies requires demonstrations that capture coordinated base and arm motion on the target embodiment. Robot-free interfaces allow demonstrations to be collected independently of the target robot, increasing flexibility but without directly capturing platform-specific commands, proprioception, and body-mounted observations. On-robot teleoperation allows to capture these signals directly, but requires an interface capable of commanding the complete system concurrently. This paper presents LocoPilot, a single-operator bilateral teleoperation and data-collection framework implemented on a 12-DoF Unitree Go2 quadruped equipped with a 6-DoF AgileX Piper L manipulator, an Intel RealSense D435 wrist camera, and an Intel RealSense D405 head camera. A second 6-DoF Piper L arm, used as the leader and two handheld controllers provide simultaneous control of the base, body posture, manipulator, and gripper. The follower arm interaction forces are estimated without a dedicated force/torque sensor and rendered to the operator through a passivity-constrained haptic channel. A ROS~2 pipeline records synchronized multimodal observations together with a unified 11D action shared by teleoperation and policy deployment. Compared to prior work, LocoPilot uniquely unifies robot-in-the-loop legged data collection, force feedback without motion-capture instrumentation, and the same action interface at deployment. We evaluate the interface across multiple loco-manipulation tasks and validate the complete collection-to-deployment pipeline by fine-tuning MolmoAct2 \cite{MOLMO} on pick-and-place demonstrations and deploying on the physical robot without action retargeting or additional inverse kinematics. Code available at: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27998
PDF
-
Learning Tactile-Aware Hand Representations from Human Hand-Object Interaction Data
2026-10-20 10:31:45Yeonguk Yu, Jaehong Kim, Byungok HanAbstract
Tactile representation learning for dexterous manipulation often requires substantial robot-side data collection, limiting its scalability across different hands and sensors. We explore whether large-scale human hand-object interaction (HOI) data can provide a useful prior for robotic tactile learning. To this end, we propose HuTact, a framework that pretrains tactile-aware hand representations from human HOI data without requiring real tactile signals during pretraining. HuTact transfers the interaction structure learned from human hand motions to robotic tactile observations and can be further adapted with a small amount of unlabeled robot interaction data. We evaluate HuTact on tactile perception and manipulation tasks, including grasp prediction, slip detection, object classification, and tactile-conditioned policy learning. Across these tasks, human HOI pretraining improves data efficiency and provides a strong initialization for downstream learning. Notably, with HOI pretraining followed by midtraining on unlabeled robot play data, HuTact achieves 88.26% Macro-F1 on grasp prediction using only 25\% of the labeled downstream data, comparable to training from scratch on the full labeled dataset (88.23%). These results suggest that human interaction data can serve as a scalable complementary source for robotic tactile representation learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27995
PDF
-
ForeTac: Predictive Contact Guidance for Generative Robot Policies
2026-10-20 10:22:41Zhiyuan Chen, Shuai Chen, Haoran Zhou, Yizhe Zhao, Kaiyuan Yang, Zhixiang Duan, Shaoqing Xu, Ran Cao, Diyun Xiang, Yangwei YouAbstract
In contact-rich manipulation, actions that appear equally plausible from vision can produce different contact outcomes, while reactive control based on current tactile feedback may respond too late to prevent failure. We present ForeTac, a predictive contact-guidance framework organized as a represent-predict-evaluate-guide loop. ForeTac encodes the current tactile state, predicts future tactile latent trajectories conditioned on candidate action sequences, and evaluates each predicted trajectory with a contact-quality objective learned from successful and failed physical interactions. At inference, gradients of this objective are backpropagated through the tactile predictor to guide action generation before execution while keeping all model parameters frozen. We evaluate ForeTac on four real-robot tasks (planar and curved-surface wiping, card swiping, and fragile-object grasping) with diffusion and flow-matching policies. Compared with vision-only Diffusion Policy, ForeTac improves the average task success rate (SR) from 36.3% to 71.3% and the average contact success rate (CSR) from 20.0% to 66.3% across these tasks, and yields gains in both metrics with a flow-matching policy. Component analyses support the learned tactile representation, action-conditioned foresight, and generation-time gradient guidance, while predicted tactile latent trajectories preserve contact-quality ordering. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18118
PDF
-
Learning Reachability-Based Safety Representations for Real-Time Robot Navigation in Unknown and Dynamic Environments
Abstract
Safe robot navigation in unknown, dynamic environments requires more than geometric collision checking: a robot still far from an obstacle may be unable to avoid it because of its speed, orientation, or the obstacle's motion. Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis captures this in a value function whose sign separates states that admit a safe continuation from those where collision is unavoidable, but computing it online for every newly observed environment is too expensive. This dissertation trains neural implicit representations offline on reachability solutions to give optimization-based controllers this information in real time. Since the value function never exceeds the constraint, it equals a directly computed constraint, such as a signed distance, minus a nonnegative dynamics correction. Learning only this correction keeps represented obstacles outside the predicted safe set despite approximation errors. The first two of five methods use the learned function as a terminal constraint in model predictive control, for static local environments and predicted obstacle motion. The next two use it as a barrier candidate in control barrier function safety filters, for static environments and, through pairwise barriers in relative coordinates, for a varying number of moving obstacles. Simulations and hardware experiments on ground and aerial robots show better collision avoidance than geometric and hand-designed baselines, especially for short horizons and moving obstacles. The fifth method replaces the grid-based offline solver, which limits the first four to low-dimensional models. For control-affine dynamics with polytopic inputs, the HJ Hamiltonian is maximized at a vertex, so a parallelizable tree search over vertex inputs can generate training labels. With a loss from the HJ variational inequality, these labels yield barrier candidates for systems with up to 13 states.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16522
PDF
-
Decoupling Action from Egocentric Observation for World Simulation
2026-10-20 09:52:46Yue Ma, Pengjie Song, Xinyu Wang, Yi He, Zeqian Long, Fangneng Zhan, Kaichen Zhou, Hongyu Liu, Hongfa Wang, Peihao Li, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan, Qifeng ChenAbstract
Egocentric action transfer aims to decouple the semantic action from egocentric observations and reproduce them in new visual contexts, enabling scalable world simulation, embodied policy learning, and robotic data generation. Existing approaches to transferring actions rely on condition-guided video generation, which converts the observation video into explicit geometric controls (e.g., hand poses or meshes) to drive synthesis. However, these methods introduce geometric estimation errors, making it difficult to preserve physically plausible interactions when transferred to new scenes. Alternatively, motion transfer methods directly extract motion patterns from the observation video, yet motion-level features alone cannot encode rich contact dynamics, frequently leading to severe hand structural collapse and implausible contact layout. To address both limitations, we present EgoACT, a test-time framework for egocentric action transfer that operates directly on the denoising process of video diffusion models without requiring additional geometric estimators. EgoACT uses Velocity-guided Structure Anchoring to stabilize reference-consistent hand-object structure in the early denoising stage, and Sparse Correspondence Calibration to refine reliable local correspondences in the mid-to-late denoising stages. Together, these two components preserve transferable action semantics while improving temporal coherence and interaction realism. We further establish EgoActionBench, a benchmark for evaluating action preservation, visual quality, and hand-object plausibility across diverse egocentric manipulation scenarios. Experiments show that EgoACT generates more coherent and physically plausible interaction videos than strong baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27946
PDF
-
EventSync: Event-Driven Memory Updates for History-Dependent Manipulation
2026-10-20 09:29:49Jingjiao Zhao, Dong Jing, Mingyu Cao, Ruochuan Shi, Xiansheng Chen, Pengwei Wang, Zhiwu LuAbstract
History-dependent robotic manipulation requires task context and interaction history, as the current observation alone is insufficient to determine the next action. Hierarchical frameworks use task memory for high-level subgoal reasoning and low-level policies for execution. However, memory updates require accurate completion assessment: similar observations may correspond to different execution phases, and prematurely recording completion can mislead subsequent subgoal reasoning. We present EventSync, a hierarchical framework that coordinates task reasoning and action execution through event-driven memory updates. A vision-language model generates subgoals from task plans and interaction history, while a vision-language-action model executes them. A lightweight Event Monitor combines visual observations with end-effector trajectories to determine whether the current subgoal is complete. The framework records the current subgoal in its completed-subgoal history and triggers subsequent reasoning only after obtaining completion evidence. With visual history in the executor, EventSync achieves 64.5% overall success on RoboMME, exceeding the best baseline reported in the benchmark by 20.0 percentage points. Further analysis shows that this update mechanism helps build a reliable completed-subgoal history. Experiments on four real-robot tasks with different memory requirements validate the framework's effectiveness in real-world robotic manipulation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27917
PDF
-
What Novice Operators See Changes What the Policy Learns: A User Study of Keypoint Hand Visual Representation for Teleoperated Demonstration
2026-10-20 09:22:21Amane Yamaguchi, Shohei Kamiguchi, Masashi Hamaya, Shigeo Yoshida, Takuji Narumi, Mai NishimuraAbstract
Imitation learning increasingly relies on novice operators, whose demonstrations fall short of experts' in number and inter-trial consistency. Operators act on what they are shown, yet how the rendering of the robot affects their demonstrations, and the policies trained on them, has not been examined. We study this question with PointHand, a teleoperation interface that renders a multi-fingered robot hand as sparse keypoints at its fingertips and joints, the same keypoints a policy can observe. In a simulated mug-in-box task, 18 novices and 4 experts collected 2,200 trials under three renderings: the real shape of the hand, all keypoints emphasized, or the thumb and index finger alone emphasized. The novices shown the thumb and index finger emphasized collected 441 successful demonstrations from 600 trials, against 320 for those shown the real shape. We then trained diffusion policies on these demonstrations, replacing the scene point cloud and proprioceptive state they observe with the hand keypoints and two object keypoints. Within 400 steps these demonstrations went from the weakest of the three novice conditions under the point-cloud policy (46.3%) to the strongest under the keypoint policy (57.3%), a gain of +11.0 percentage points in all five seeds. Those collected with all keypoints emphasized changed by at most +0.7 percentage points, and in no more than three seeds. The value of a demonstration therefore depends on the rendering shown during collection and on what the policy observes together. A shared representation can pay off on both sides, in the number of successful demonstrations and in the success rate of the policy trained on them. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27907
PDF
-
High-Precision RCM Motion for Ophthalmic Robotics via Hierarchical QP Control and Authority-Guided Recovery Planning
2026-10-20 09:20:50Huanyu Tian, Adriana Namour, Lingyun Zeng, Zicong Wu, Sebastien Ourselin, Lyndon da Cruz, Christos BergelesAbstract
General-purpose manipulators can position ophthalmic instruments under a software Remote Centre of Motion (RCM). However, at some reachable configurations that are nonsingular for the tip task alone, the RCM and tip-tracking objectives conflict and the servo oscillates. We formalise this failure as a constraint-induced task singularity: the RCM-projected tip Jacobian loses rank while the unprojected tip Jacobian stays well conditioned. Thus, the effective tip authority collapses although the target remains reachable. We present a high-precision RCM servo architecture with built-in singularity recovery: for each commanded target, an authority-guided planner selects a well-conditioned arm configuration that reaches it and plans an RCM-consistent route, executed by a fixed hierarchical-QP controller. On a 200-scenario kinematic benchmark, the complete nominal-and-recovery protocol reaches 128/128 near-singular targets and 71/72 near-joint-limit targets (100% and 99%, respectively), with the software-RCM residual below 0.142 mm. On a physical 6-DOF arm it executes across four RCM entry points, with a worst-case kinematically reconstructed RCM residual of 178 {\mu}m and a median tip-regulation error of 32{\mu}m, within the 200{\mu}m control requirement adopted for the ophthalmic task.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27905
PDF
