Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Robotic Manipulation Surfaces (RMS) manipulate objects by deforming the surface on which they rest, offering safe, parallel handling of diverse and fragile items. However, existing designs face a fundamental tradeoff: achieving fine control typically demands dense actuator arrays that limit scalability. Modular architectures can extend the workspace, but transferring objects reliably across module boundaries on soft, continuously deformable surfaces remains an open challenge. We present a multi-modular soft manipulation platform that achieves coordinated inter-module object transfer and precise positioning across interconnected fabric-based modules. A hierarchical control framework, combining conflict-free Manhattan-based path planning with directional object passing and a geometric PID controller, achieves sub-centimeter positioning and consistent transfer of heterogeneous objects including fragile items. The platform employs shared-boundary actuation, where adjacent modules share edge actuators, reducing the required count from $4n^2$ to $(n + 1)^2$ for an $n \times n$ grid; a $2\times 2$ prototype covers $1\times 1$ m with only 9 actuators. This scaling comes at a cost: shared actuators mechanically couple neighbouring modules, creating interference during simultaneous manipulation. We systematically characterise this coupling across spatial configurations and propose compensation strategies that reduce passive-object displacement by 59--78\%. Together, these contributions establish a scalable foundation for soft manipulation surfaces in applications such as food processing and logistics.

Robotic Manipulation Surfaces (RMS) manipulate objects by deforming the surface on which they rest, offering safe, parallel handling of diverse and fragile items.

Network simulation is pivotal in network modeling, assisting with tasks ranging from capacity planning to performance estimation. Traditional approaches such as Discrete Event Simulation (DES) face limitations in terms of computational cost and accuracy. This paper introduces RouteNet-Gauss, a novel integration of a testbed network with a Machine Learning (ML) model to address these challenges. By using the testbed as a hardware accelerator, RouteNet-Gauss generates training datasets rapidly and simulates network scenarios with high fidelity to real-world conditions. Experimental results show that RouteNet-Gauss significantly reduces prediction errors by up to 95% and achieves a 488x speedup in inference time compared to state-of-the-art DES-based methods. RouteNet-Gauss's modular architecture is dynamically constructed based on the specific characteristics of the network scenario, such as topology and routing. This enables it to understand and generalize to different network configurations beyond those seen during training, including networks up to 10x larger. Additionally, it supports Temporal Aggregated Performance Estimation (TAPE), providing configurable temporal granularity and maintaining high accuracy in flow performance metrics. This approach shows promise in improving both simulation efficiency and accuracy, offering a valuable tool for network operators.

Network simulation is pivotal in network modeling, assisting with tasks ranging from capacity planning to performance estimation.

Real-time trajectory optimization for nonlinear constrained autonomous systems is critical and typically performed by CPU-based sequential solvers. Specifically, reliance on global sparse linear algebra or the serial nature of dynamic programming algorithms restricts the utilization of massively parallel computing architectures like GPUs. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fully GPU-native trajectory optimization framework that combines sequential convex programming with a consensus-based alternating direction method of multipliers. By applying a temporal splitting strategy, our algorithm decouples the optimization horizon into independent, per-node subproblems that execute massively in parallel. The entire process runs fully on the GPU, eliminating costly memory transfers and large-scale sparse factorizations. This architecture naturally scales to multi-trajectory optimization. We validate the solver on a quadrotor agile flight task and a Mars powered descent problem using an on-board edge computing platform. Benchmarks reveal a sustained 4x throughput speedup and a 51% reduction in energy consumption over a heavily optimized 12-core CPU baseline. Crucially, the framework saturates the hardware, maintaining over 96% active GPU utilization to achieve planning rates exceeding 100 Hz. Furthermore, we demonstrate the solver's extensibility to robust Model Predictive Control by jointly optimizing dynamically coupled scenarios under stochastic disturbances, enabling scalable and safe autonomy.

Real-time trajectory optimization for nonlinear constrained autonomous systems is critical and typically performed by CPU-based sequential solvers.

Achieving safe and stylized trajectory planning in complex real-world scenarios remains a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. This paper proposes the SDD Planner, a diffusion-based framework designed to effectively reconcile safety constraints with driving styles in real time. The framework integrates two core modules: a Multi-Source Style-Aware Encoder, which employs distance-sensitive attention to fuse dynamic agent data and environmental contexts for heterogeneous safety-style perception; and a Style-Guided Dynamic Trajectory Generator, which adaptively modulates priority weights within the diffusion denoising process to generate user-preferred yet safe trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDD Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance. On the StyleDrive benchmark, it improves the SM-PDMS metric by 3.9% over WoTE, the strongest baseline. Furthermore, on the NuPlan Test14 and Test14-hard benchmarks, SDD Planner ranks first with overall scores of 91.76 and 80.32, respectively, outperforming leading methods such as PLUTO. Real-vehicle closed-loop tests further confirm that SDD Planner maintains high safety standards while aligning with preset driving styles, validating its practical applicability for real-world deployment.

Achieving safe and stylized trajectory planning in complex real-world scenarios remains a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems.

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments. However, conventional wisdom from continual learning suggests that naive Sequential Fine-Tuning (Seq. FT) leads to catastrophic forgetting, necessitating complex CRL strategies. In this work, we take a step back and conduct a systematic study of CRL for large pretrained VLAs across three models and five challenging lifelong RL benchmarks. We find that, contrary to established belief, simple Seq. FT with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is remarkably strong: it achieves high plasticity, exhibits little to no forgetting, and retains strong zero-shot generalization, frequently outperforming more sophisticated CRL methods. Through detailed analysis, we show that this robustness arises from a synergy between the large pretrained model, parameter-efficient adaptation, and on-policy RL. Together, these components reshape the stability-plasticity trade-off, making continual adaptation both stable and scalable. Our results position Sequential Fine-Tuning as a powerful method for continual RL with VLAs and provide new insights into lifelong learning in the large model era. Code is available at github.com/UT-Austin-RobIn/continual-vla-rl.

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments.

Deploying visual reinforcement learning (RL) policies in real-world manipulation is often hindered by camera viewpoint changes. A policy trained from a fixed front-facing camera may fail when the camera is shifted -- an unavoidable situation in real-world settings where sensor placement is hard to manage appropriately. Existing methods often rely on precise camera calibration or struggle with large perspective changes. To address these limitations, we propose ManiVID-3D, a novel 3D RL architecture designed for robotic manipulation, which learns view-invariant representations through self-supervised disentangled feature learning. The framework incorporates ViewNet, a lightweight yet effective module that automatically aligns point cloud observations from arbitrary viewpoints into a unified spatial coordinate system without the need for extrinsic calibration. Additionally, we develop an efficient GPU-accelerated batch rendering module capable of processing over 5000 frames per second, enabling large-scale training for 3D visual RL at unprecedented speeds. Extensive evaluation across 10 simulated and 5 real-world tasks demonstrates that our approach achieves a 40.6% higher success rate than state-of-the-art methods under viewpoint variations while using 80% fewer parameters. The system's robustness to severe perspective changes and strong sim-to-real performance highlight the effectiveness of learning geometrically consistent representations for scalable robotic manipulation in unstructured environments.

Deploying visual reinforcement learning (RL) policies in real-world manipulation is often hindered by camera viewpoint changes.

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches. Concrete policies typically attain high success rates on specific task distributions but lim-ited generalization beyond it. Rather than proposing an other monolithic policy, we propose to leverage the complementary strengths of existing approaches through intelligent policy routing. We introduce RoboRouter, a training-free framework that maintains a pool of heterogeneous policies and learns to select the best-performing policy for each task through accumulated execution experience. Given a new task, RoboRouter constructs a semantic task representation, retrieves historical records of similar tasks, predicts the optimal policy choice without requiring trial-and-error, and incorporates structured feedback to refine subsequent routing decisions. Integrating a new policy into the system requires only lightweight evaluation and incurs no training overhead. Across simulation benchmark and real-world evaluations, RoboRouter consistently outperforms than in-dividual policies, improving average success rate by more than 3% in simulation and over 13% in real-world settings, while preserving execution efficiency. Our results demonstrate that intelligent routing across heterogeneous, off-the-shelf policies provides a practical and scalable pathway toward building more capable robotic systems.

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches.

3D-aware visual pretraining has proven effective in improving the performance of downstream robotic manipulation tasks. However, existing methods are constrained to Euclidean embedding spaces, whose flat geometry limits their ability to model structural relations among embeddings. As a result, they struggle to learn structured embeddings that are essential for robust spatial perception in robotic applications. To this end, we propose HyperMVP, a self-supervised framework for \underline{Hyper}bolic \underline{M}ulti\underline{V}iew \underline{P}retraining. Hyperbolic space offers geometric properties well suited for capturing structural relations. Methodologically, we extend the masked autoencoder paradigm and design a GeoLink encoder to learn multiview hyperbolic representations. The pretrained encoder is then finetuned with visuomotor policies on manipulation tasks. In addition, we introduce 3D-MOV, a large-scale dataset comprising multiple types of 3D point clouds to support pretraining. We evaluate HyperMVP on COLOSSEUM, RLBench, and real-world scenarios, where it consistently outperforms strong baselines across diverse tasks and perturbation settings. Our results highlight the potential of 3D-aware pretraining in a non-Euclidean space for learning robust and generalizable robotic manipulation policies.

3D-aware visual pretraining has proven effective in improving the performance of downstream robotic manipulation tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems have shown strong potential for language-driven robotic manipulation. However, scaling them to long-horizon tasks remains challenging. Existing pipelines typically separate data collection, policy learning, and deployment, resulting in heavy reliance on manual environment resets and brittle multi-policy execution. We present RoboClaw, an agentic robotics framework that unifies data collection, policy learning, and task execution under a single VLM-driven controller. At the policy level, RoboClaw introduces Entangled Action Pairs (EAP), which couple forward manipulation behaviors with inverse recovery actions to form self-resetting loops for autonomous data collection. This mechanism enables continuous on-policy data acquisition and iterative policy refinement with minimal human intervention. During deployment, the same agent performs high-level reasoning and dynamically orchestrates learned policy primitives to accomplish long-horizon tasks. By maintaining consistent contextual semantics across collection and execution, RoboClaw reduces mismatch between the two phases and improves multi-policy robustness. Experiments in real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improved stability and scalability compared to conventional open-loop pipelines, while significantly reducing human effort throughout the robot lifecycle, achieving a 25% improvement in success rate over baseline methods on long-horizon tasks and reducing human time investment by 53.7%.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems have shown strong potential for language-driven robotic manipulation.

Vision Language Action (VLA) models are mainstream in embodied intelligence but face high inference costs. Edge-Cloud Collaborative (ECC) inference offers an effective fix by easing edge-device computing pressure to meet real-time needs. However, existing ECC frameworks are suboptimal for VLA models due to two challenges: (1) Mainstream environment-oriented edge-cloud partitioning methods are susceptible to interference from visual noise; (2) Existing edge-cloud partitioning methods overlook the step-wise redundancy unique to embodied tasks, thereby disrupting the physical continuity of motion. To address these issues, we propose a novel ECC inference framework, termed RAPID. Specifically, we developed an implementation tailored to the proposed framework. Experiments demonstrate this achieves a speedup of up to 1.73x with only 5%~7% overhead.

Vision Language Action (VLA) models are mainstream in embodied intelligence but face high inference costs.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by combining vision, language, and proprioception to predict actions. However, previous methods fuse proprioceptive signals directly with vision-language features, resulting in state-dominant bias and \textbf{false completions} despite visible execution failures. We systematically analyze this failure mode, attributing it to modality imbalance, where policies overly rely on internal state progression and underuse visual evidence. To address this, we introduce the first \textbf{False-Completion Benchmark Suite}, featuring eight tasks with three controlled perturbations (\emph{Object Drop}, \emph{Distractor Swap}, \emph{Relayout}) to comprehensively evaluate false completion. Moreover, we propose \textbf{ReViP}, a novel VLA framework with \textbf{Vi}sion-\textbf{P}roprioception \textbf{Re}balance to enhance visual grounding and robustness under perturbations. The key insight is to introduce auxiliary \emph{progress-aware visual cues} to adaptively modulate the coupling between semantic perception and proprioceptive dynamics. Specifically, progress-aware visual cues are extracted by an external Task-Stage Observer, which performs task-relevant reasoning on real-time observations to drive task-stage feature-wise linear modulation, enhancing environmental awareness and mitigating state-driven errors. Extensive experiments show that ReViP effectively mitigates false completion and improves success rates over strong VLA baselines, achieving a \textbf{26\%} gain over $π_0$ model on our suite, with gains extending to LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world evaluations.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by combining vision, language, and proprioception to predict actions.

Recent work on robot manipulation has advanced policy generalization to novel scenarios. However, it is often difficult to characterize how different evaluation settings actually represent generalization from the training distribution of a given policy. To work towards more precise evaluation of generalization in robotics, we propose RADAR, a scalable framework for directly comparing test-time evaluation tasks to policy training data, to determine what form of policy generalization is required. RADAR consists of a two-stage pipeline: first, retrieval using generalist policy embeddings identifies which training examples are relevant for a given evaluation task. Next, vision-language models (VLMs) analyze the evaluation task against the retrieved data, outputting interpretable analysis on how they compare along a variety of axes, and an overall classification of what type of policy generalization is required. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that VLMs are effective at analyzing data for generalization, and that our retrieval step effectively identifies examples needed to make accurate classifications with respect to the training data. Furthermore, we scale RADAR to large-scale datasets, where we observe agreement with human-defined benchmark conditions from prior work. We provide demonstrations at radar-analysis.github.io.

Recent work on robot manipulation has advanced policy generalization to novel scenarios.

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work we investigate zero-shot cross-city generalization in end-to-end trajectory planning and ask whether self-supervised visual representations improve transfer across cities. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones (I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE) into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models relying on traditional supervised backbones across cities with different road topologies and driving conventions, particularly when transferring from right-side to left-side driving environments. Self-supervised representation learning reduces this gap. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe inflation when transferring from Boston to Singapore (L2 displacement ratio 9.77x, collision ratio 19.43x), whereas domain-specific self-supervised pretraining reduces this to 1.20x and 0.75x respectively. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves PDMS by up to 4 percent for all single-city training cities. These results show that representation learning strongly influences the robustness of cross-city planning and establish zero-shot geographic transfer as a necessary test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined.

Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and complex task dependencies collectively undermine system performance. This dissertation investigates how the reliability of learned robot policies can be improved at deployment time through mechanisms that operate around them. We develop three complementary classes of deployment-time mechanisms. First, we introduce runtime monitoring methods that detect impending failures by identifying inconsistencies in closed-loop policy behavior and deviations in task progress, without requiring failure data or task-specific supervision. Second, we propose a data-centric framework for policy interpretability that traces deployment-time successes and failures to influential training demonstrations using influence functions, enabling principled diagnosis and dataset curation. Third, we address reliable long-horizon task execution by formulating policy coordination as the problem of estimating and maximizing the success probability of behavior sequences, and we extend this formulation to open-ended, language-specified tasks through feasibility-aware task planning. By centering on core challenges of deployment, these contributions advance practical foundations for the reliable, real-world use of learned robot policies. Continued progress on these foundations will be essential for enabling trustworthy and scalable robot autonomy in the future.

Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities.

Leader-follower interaction is an important paradigm in human-robot interaction (HRI). Yet, assigning roles in real time remains challenging for resource-constrained mobile and assistive robots. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for natural communication, their size and latency limit on-device deployment. Small language models (SLMs) offer a potential alternative, but their effectiveness for role classification in HRI has not been systematically evaluated. In this paper, we present a benchmark of SLMs for leader-follower communication, introducing a novel dataset derived from a published database and augmented with synthetic samples to capture interaction-specific dynamics. We investigate two adaptation strategies: prompt engineering and fine-tuning, studied under zero-shot and one-shot interaction modes, compared with an untrained baseline. Experiments with Qwen2.5-0.5B reveal that zero-shot fine-tuning achieves robust classification performance (86.66% accuracy) while maintaining low latency (22.2 ms per sample), significantly outperforming baseline and prompt-engineered approaches. However, results also indicate a performance degradation in one-shot modes, where increased context length challenges the model's architectural capacity. These findings demonstrate that fine-tuned SLMs provide an effective solution for direct role assignment, while highlighting critical trade-offs between dialogue complexity and classification reliability on the edge.

Leader-follower interaction is an important paradigm in human-robot interaction (HRI).

Teleoperation of low-cost robotic manipulators remains challenging due to the complexity of mapping human hand articulations to robot joint commands. We present an offline hand-shadowing and retargeting pipeline from a single egocentric RGB-D camera mounted on 3D-printed glasses. The pipeline detects 21 hand landmarks per hand using MediaPipe Hands, deprojects them into 3D via depth sensing, transforms them into the robot coordinate frame, and solves a damped-least-squares inverse kinematics problem in PyBullet to produce joint commands for the 6-DOF SO-ARM101 robot. A gripper controller maps thumb-index finger geometry to grasp aperture with a four-level fallback hierarchy. Actions are first previewed in a physics simulation before replay on the physical robot through the LeRobot framework. We evaluate the IK retargeting pipeline on a structured pick-and-place benchmark (5-tile grid, 10 grasps per tile) achieving a 90% success rate, and compare it against four vision-language-action policies (ACT, SmolVLA, pi0.5, GR00T N1.5) trained on leader-follower teleoperation data. We also test the IK pipeline in unstructured real-world environments (grocery store, pharmacy), where hand occlusion by surrounding objects reduces success to 9.3% (N=75), highlighting both the promise and current limitations of marker-free analytical retargeting.

Teleoperation of low-cost robotic manipulators remains challenging due to the complexity of mapping human hand articulations to robot joint commands.

Adapter parameters provide a mechanism to modify the behavior of machine learning models and have gained significant popularity in the context of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. These parameters can be merged to support multiple tasks via a process known as task merging. However, prior work on merging in LLMs, particularly in natural language processing, has been limited to scenarios where each test example addresses only a single task. In this paper, we focus on on-device settings and study the problem of text-based compositional multi-tasking, where each test example involves the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks. For instance, generating a translated summary of a long text requires solving both translation and summarization tasks concurrently. To facilitate research in this setting, we propose a benchmark comprising four practically relevant compositional tasks. We also present an efficient method (Learnable Calibration) tailored for on-device applications, where computational resources are limited, emphasizing the need for solutions that are both resource-efficient and high-performing. Our contributions lay the groundwork for advancing the capabilities of LLMs in real-world multi-tasking scenarios, expanding their applicability to complex, resource-constrained use cases.

Adapter parameters provide a mechanism to modify the behavior of machine learning models and have gained significant popularity in the context of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.

We present Generative Predictive Control (GPC), an inference-time method for improving pretrained behavior-cloning policies without retraining. GPC augments a frozen diffusion policy at deployment with an action-conditioned world model trained on expert demonstrations and random exploration rollouts. The world model predicts the consequences of action proposals generated by the diffusion policy and enables lightweight online planning that ranks and refines these proposals through model-based look-ahead. By combining a generative prior with predictive foresight, GPC enables test-time adaptation while keeping the original policy fixed. Across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, including state- and vision-based settings in both simulation and real-world experiments, GPC consistently outperforms standard behavior cloning and compares favorably with other inference-time adaptation baselines.

We present Generative Predictive Control (GPC), an inference-time method for improving pretrained behavior-cloning policies without retraining.

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are rapidly transforming research in chemistry and materials science to accelerate new discoveries. Mobile robot chemists (MRCs) play a pivotal role by autonomously navigating the lab to transport samples, effectively connecting synthesis, analysis, and characterisation equipment. The instruments within an SDL are typically designed or retrofitted to be accessed by both human and robotic chemists, ensuring operational flexibility and integration between manual and automated workflows. In many scenarios, human and robotic chemists may need to use the same equipment simultaneously. Currently, MRCs rely on simple LiDAR-based obstruction detection, which forces the robot to passively wait if a human is present. This lack of situational awareness leads to unnecessary delays and inefficient coordination in time-critical automated workflows in human-robot shared labs. To address this, we present an initial study of an embodied, AI-driven perception method that facilitates proactive human-robot interaction in shared-access scenarios. Our method features a hierarchical human intention prediction model that allows the robot to distinguish between preparatory actions (waiting) and transient interactions (accessing the instrument). Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances efficiency by enabling proactive human-robot interaction, streamlining coordination, and potentially increasing the efficiency of autonomous scientific labs.

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are rapidly transforming research in chemistry and materials science to accelerate new discoveries.

We propose DynVLA, a driving VLA model that introduces a new CoT paradigm termed Dynamics CoT. DynVLA forecasts compact world dynamics before action generation, enabling more informed and physically grounded decision-making. To obtain compact dynamics representations, DynVLA introduces a Dynamics Tokenizer that compresses future evolution into a small set of dynamics tokens. Considering the rich environment dynamics in interaction-intensive driving scenarios, DynVLA decouples ego-centric and environment-centric dynamics, yielding more accurate world dynamics modeling. We then train DynVLA to generate dynamics tokens before actions through SFT and RFT, improving decision quality while maintaining latency-efficient inference. Compared to Textual CoT, which lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal understanding, and Visual CoT, which introduces substantial redundancy due to dense image prediction, Dynamics CoT captures the evolution of the world in a compact, interpretable, and efficient form. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM, Bench2Drive, and a large-scale in-house dataset demonstrate that DynVLA consistently outperforms Textual CoT and Visual CoT methods, validating the effectiveness and practical value of Dynamics CoT.

We propose DynVLA, a driving VLA model that introduces a new CoT paradigm termed Dynamics CoT.

We present DAWN (Diffusion is All We Need for robot control), a unified diffusion-based framework for language-conditioned robotic manipulation that bridges high-level motion intent and low-level robot action via structured pixel motion representation. In DAWN, both the high-level and low-level controllers are modeled as diffusion processes, yielding a fully trainable, end-to-end system with interpretable intermediate motion abstractions. DAWN achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging CALVIN benchmark, demonstrating strong multi-task performance, and further validates its effectiveness on MetaWorld. Despite the substantial domain gap between simulation and reality and limited real-world data, we demonstrate reliable real-world transfer with only minimal finetuning, illustrating the practical viability of diffusion-based motion abstractions for robotic control. Our results show the effectiveness of combining diffusion modeling with motion-centric representations as a strong baseline for scalable and robust robot learning. Project page: https://eronguyen.github.io/DAWN/

We present DAWN (Diffusion is All We Need for robot control), a unified diffusion-based framework for language-conditioned robotic manipulation that bridges high-level motion intent and low-level robot action via structured pixel motion representation.

Diffusion policies have shown to be very efficient at learning complex, multi-modal behaviors for robotic manipulation. However, errors in generated action sequences can compound over time which can potentially lead to failure. Some approaches mitigate this by augmenting datasets with expert demonstrations or learning predictive world models which might be computationally expensive. We introduce Performance Predictive Guidance (PPGuide), a lightweight, classifier-based framework that steers a pre-trained diffusion policy away from failure modes at inference time. PPGuide makes use of a novel self-supervised process: it uses attention-based multiple instance learning to automatically estimate which observation-action chunks from the policy's rollouts are relevant to success or failure. We then train a performance predictor on this self-labeled data. During inference, this predictor provides a real-time gradient to guide the policy toward more robust actions. We validated our proposed PPGuide across a diverse set of tasks from the Robomimic and MimicGen benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements in performance.

Diffusion policies have shown to be very efficient at learning complex, multi-modal behaviors for robotic manipulation.

The increasing demand for accelerated scientific discovery, driven by global challenges, highlights the need for advanced AI-driven robotics. Deploying robotic chemists in human-centric labs is key for the next horizon of autonomous discovery, as complex tasks still demand the dexterity of human scientists. Robotic manipulation in this context is uniquely challenged by handling diverse chemicals (granular, powdery, or viscous liquids), under varying lab conditions. For example, humans use spatulas for scraping materials from vial walls. Automating this process is challenging because it goes beyond simple robotic insertion tasks and traditional lab automation, requiring the execution of fine-granular movements within a constrained environment (the sample vial). Our work proposes an adaptive control framework to address this, relying on a low-level Cartesian impedance controller for stable and compliant physical interaction and a high-level reinforcement learning agent that learns to dynamically adjust interaction forces at the end-effector. The agent is guided by perception feedback, which provides the material's location. We first created a task-representative simulation environment with a Franka Research 3 robot, a scraping tool, and a sample vial containing heterogeneous materials. To facilitate the learning of an adaptive policy and model diverse characteristics, the sample is modelled as a collection of spheres, where each sphere is assigned a unique dislodgement force threshold, which is procedurally generated using Perlin noise. We train an agent to autonomously learn and adapt the optimal contact wrench for a sample scraping task in simulation and then successfully transfer this policy to a real robotic setup. Our method was evaluated across five different material setups, outperforming a fixed-wrench baseline by an average of 10.9%.

The increasing demand for accelerated scientific discovery, driven by global challenges, highlights the need for advanced AI-driven robotics.

Recent advancements in integrating tactile sensing into vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated transformative potential for robotic perception. However, existing tactile representations predominantly rely on qualitative descriptors (e.g., texture), neglecting quantitative contact states such as force magnitude, contact geometry, and principal axis orientation, which are indispensable for fine-grained manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose FG-CLTP, a fine-grained contrastive language tactile pretraining framework. We first introduce a novel dataset comprising over 100k tactile 3D point cloud-language pairs that explicitly capture multidimensional contact states from the sensor's perspective. We then implement a discretized numerical tokenization mechanism to achieve quantitative-semantic alignment, effectively injecting explicit physical metrics into the multimodal feature space. The proposed FG-CLTP model yields a 95.9% classification accuracy and reduces the regression error (MAE) by 52.6% compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the integration of 3D point cloud representations establishes a sensor-agnostic foundation with a minimal sim-to-real gap of 3.5%. Building upon this fine-grained representation, we develop a 3D tactile-language-action (3D-TLA) architecture driven by a flow matching policy to enable multimodal reasoning and control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms strong baselines in contact-rich manipulation tasks, providing a robust and generalizable foundation for tactile-language-action models.

Recent advancements in integrating tactile sensing into vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated transformative potential for robotic perception.

Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of single LLMs, improving multimodal zero-shot reasoning. In these natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs), new agents -- all communicating through the same universal symbolic language -- are easily added in a modular fashion. To demonstrate the power of NLSOMs, we assemble and experiment with several of them (having up to 129 members), leveraging mindstorms in them to solve some practical AI tasks: visual question answering, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, 3D generation, egocentric retrieval, embodied AI, and general language-based task solving. We view this as a starting point towards much larger NLSOMs with billions of agents-some of which may be humans. And with this emergence of great societies of heterogeneous minds, many new research questions have suddenly become paramount to the future of artificial intelligence. What should be the social structure of an NLSOM? What would be the (dis)advantages of having a monarchical rather than a democratic structure? How can principles of NN economies be used to maximize the total reward of a reinforcement learning NLSOM? In this work, we identify, discuss, and try to answer some of these questions.

Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface.

Wireless federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training of artificial intelligence (AI) models to support ubiquitous intelligent applications at the wireless edge. However, the inherent constraints of limited wireless resources inevitably lead to unreliable communication, which poses a significant challenge to wireless FL. To overcome this challenge, we propose Sign-Prioritized FL (SP-FL), a novel framework that improves wireless FL by prioritizing the transmission of important gradient information through uneven resource allocation. Specifically, recognizing the importance of descent direction in model updating, we transmit gradient signs in individual packets and allow their reuse for gradient descent if the remaining gradient modulus cannot be correctly recovered. To further improve the reliability of transmission of important information, we formulate a hierarchical resource allocation problem based on the importance disparity at both the packet and device levels, optimizing bandwidth allocation across multiple devices and power allocation between sign and modulus packets. To make the problem tractable, the one-step convergence behavior of SP-FL, which characterizes data importance at both levels in an explicit form, is analyzed. We then propose an alternating optimization algorithm to solve this problem using the Newton-Raphson method and successive convex approximation (SCA). Simulation results confirm the superiority of SP-FL, especially in resource-constrained scenarios, demonstrating up to 9.96\% higher testing accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset compared to existing methods.

Wireless federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training of artificial intelligence (AI) models to support ubiquitous intelligent applications at the wireless edge.

Predictive foresight is important to intelligent embodied agents. Since the motor execution of a robot is intrinsically constrained by its visual perception of environmental geometry, effectively anticipating the future requires capturing this tightly coupled visuomotor interplay. While recent vision-language-action models attempt to incorporate future guidance, they struggle with this joint modeling. Existing explicit methods divert capacity to task-irrelevant visual details, whereas implicit methods relying on sparse frame pairs disrupt temporal continuity. By heavily relying on visual reconstruction, these methods become visually dominated, entangling static scene context with dynamic action intent. We argue that effective joint visuomotor predictive modeling requires both temporal continuity and visually-conditioned supervision decoupling. To this end, we propose FutureVLA, featuring a novel Joint Visuomotor Predictive Architecture. FutureVLA is designed to extract joint visuomotor embeddings by first decoupling visual and motor information, and then jointly encoding generalized physical priors. Specifically, in the pretraining stage, we leverage heterogeneous manipulation datasets and introduce a Joint Visuomotor Gating mechanism to structurally separate visual state preservation from temporal action modeling. It allows the motor stream to focus on continuous physical dynamics while explicitly querying visual tokens for environmental constraints, yielding highly generalizable joint visuomotor embeddings. Subsequently, in the post-training stage, we employ a latent embeddings alignment strategy, enabling diverse downstream VLA models to internalize these temporal priors without modifying their inference architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FutureVLA consistently improves VLA frameworks.

Predictive foresight is important to intelligent embodied agents.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robots to execute increasingly complex tasks. However, VLA models trained through imitation learning struggle to operate reliably in dynamic environments and often fail under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) conditions. To address this issue, we propose Robot-Conditioned Normalizing Flow (RC-NF), a real-time monitoring model for robotic anomaly detection and intervention that ensures the robot's state and the object's motion trajectory align with the task. RC-NF decouples the processing of task-aware robot and object states within the normalizing flow. It requires only positive samples for unsupervised training and calculates accurate robotic anomaly scores during inference through the probability density function. We further present LIBERO-Anomaly-10, a benchmark comprising three categories of robotic anomalies for simulation evaluation. RC-NF achieves state-of-the-art performance across all anomaly types compared to previous methods in monitoring robotic tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate that RC-NF operates as a plug-and-play module for VLA models (e.g., pi0), providing a real-time OOD signal that enables state-level rollback or task-level replanning when necessary, with a response latency under 100 ms. These results demonstrate that RC-NF noticeably enhances the robustness and adaptability of VLA-based robotic systems in dynamic environments.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robots to execute increasingly complex tasks.

Pose estimation is essential for robotic manipulation, particularly when visual perception is occluded during gripper-object interactions. Existing tactile-based methods generally rely on tactile simulation or pre-trained models, which limits their generalizability and efficiency. In this study, we propose TacLoc, a novel tactile localization framework that formulates the problem as a one-shot point cloud registration task. TacLoc introduces a graph-theoretic partial-to-full registration method, leveraging dense point clouds and surface normals from tactile sensing for efficient and accurate pose estimation. Without requiring rendered data or pre-trained models, TacLoc achieves improved performance through normal-guided graph pruning and a hypothesis-and-verification pipeline. TacLoc is evaluated extensively on the YCB dataset. We further demonstrate TacLoc on real-world objects across two different visual-tactile sensors.

Pose estimation is essential for robotic manipulation, particularly when visual perception is occluded during gripper-object interactions.

Dexterous manipulation is limited by both control and design, without consensus as to what makes manipulators best for performing dexterous tasks. This raises a fundamental challenge: how should we design and control robot manipulators that are optimized for dexterity? We present a co-design framework that learns task-specific hand morphology and complementary dexterous control policies. The framework supports 1) an expansive morphology search space including joint, finger, and palm generation, 2) scalable evaluation across the wide design space via morphology-conditioned cross-embodied control, and 3) real-world fabrication with accessible components. We evaluate the approach across multiple dexterous tasks, including in-hand rotation with simulation and real deployment. Our framework enables an end-to-end pipeline that can design, train, fabricate, and deploy a new robotic hand in under 24 hours. The full framework will be open-sourced and available on our website: https://an-axolotl.github.io/HouseofDextra/ .

Dexterous manipulation is limited by both control and design, without consensus as to what makes manipulators best for performing dexterous tasks.