Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have opened new avenues for robot manipulation, yet existing methods exhibit limited efficiency and a lack of high-level knowledge and spatial awareness. To address these challenges, we propose PokeVLA, a lightweight yet powerful foundation model for embodied manipulation that effectively infuses vision-language understanding into action learning. Our framework introduces a two-stage training paradigm: first, we pre-train a compact vision-language model (PokeVLM) on a curated multimodal dataset of 2.4M samples encompassing spatial grounding, affordance, and embodied reasoning tasks; second, we inject manipulation-relevant representations into the action space through multi-view goal-aware semantics learning, geometry alignment, and a novel action expert. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the LIBERO-Plus benchmark and in real-world deployment, outperforming comparable baselines in success rate and robustness under diverse perturbations. To foster reproducibility and community progress, we will open-source our code, model weights, and the scripts for the curated pre-training dataset. Project page: https://getterupper.github.io/PokeVLA

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have opened new avenues for robot manipulation, yet existing methods exhibit limited efficiency and a lack of high-level knowledge and spatial awareness.

Peg-in-hole (PiH) assembly is a fundamental yet challenging robotic manipulation task. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in tackling such tasks, it requires extensive exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel visual-tactile skill learning framework for the PiH task that leverages its inverse task, i.e., peg-out-of-hole (PooH) disassembly, to facilitate PiH learning. Compared to PiH, PooH is inherently easier as it only needs to overcome existing friction without precise alignment, making data collection more efficient. To this end, we formulate both PooH and PiH as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) in a unified environment with shared visual-tactile observation space. A visual-tactile PooH policy is first trained; its trajectories, containing kinematic, visual and tactile information, are temporally reversed and action-randomized to provide expert data for PiH. In the policy learning, visual sensing facilitates the peg-hole approach, while tactile measurements compensate for peg-hole misalignment. Experiments across diverse peg-hole geometries show that the visual-tactile policy attains 6.4% lower contact forces than its single-modality counterparts, and that our framework achieves average success rates of 87.5% on seen objects and 77.1% on unseen objects, outperforming direct RL methods that train PiH policies from scratch by 18.1% in success rate. Demos, code, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pooh2pih.

Peg-in-hole (PiH) assembly is a fundamental yet challenging robotic manipulation task.

Dexterous robotic manipulation requires comprehensive perception across all phases of interaction: pre-contact, contact initiation, and post-contact. Such continuous feedback allows a robot to adapt its actions throughout interaction. However, many existing tactile sensors, such as GelSight and its variants, only provide feedback after contact is established, limiting a robot's ability to precisely initiate contact. We introduce FingerEye, a compact and cost-effective sensor that provides continuous vision-tactile feedback throughout the interaction process. FingerEye integrates binocular RGB cameras to provide close-range visual perception with implicit stereo depth. Upon contact, external forces and torques deform a compliant ring structure; these deformations are captured via marker-based pose estimation and serve as a proxy for contact wrench sensing. This design enables a perception stream that smoothly transitions from pre-contact visual cues to post-contact tactile feedback. Building on this sensing capability, we develop a vision-tactile imitation learning policy that fuses signals from multiple FingerEye sensors to learn dexterous manipulation behaviors from limited real-world data. We further develop a digital twin of our sensor and robot platform to improve policy generalization. By combining real demonstrations with visually augmented simulated observations for representation learning, the learned policies become more robust to object appearance variations. Together, these design aspects enable dexterous manipulation across diverse object properties and interaction regimes, including coin standing, chip picking, letter retrieving, and syringe manipulation. The hardware design, code, appendix, and videos are available on our project website: https://nus-lins-lab.github.io/FingerEyeWeb/

Dexterous robotic manipulation requires comprehensive perception across all phases of interaction: pre-contact, contact initiation, and post-contact.

Shared Control methods often use impedance control to track target poses in a robotic manipulator. The guidance behavior of such controllers is shaped by the used stiffness gains, which can be varying over time to achieve an adaptive guiding. When multiple target poses are tracked at the same time with varying importance, the corresponding output wrenches have to be arbitrated with weightings changing over time. In this work, we study the stabilization of both variable stiffness in impedance control as well as the arbitration of different controllers through a scaled addition of their output wrenches, reformulating both into a holistic framework. We identify passivity violations in the closed loop system and provide methods to passivate the system. The resulting approach can be used to stabilize standard impedance controllers, allowing for the development of novel and flexible shared control methods. We do not constrain the design of stiffness matrices or arbitration factors; both can be matrix-valued including off-diagonal elements and change arbitrarily over time. The proposed methods are furthermore validated in simulation as well as in real robot experiments on different systems, proving their effectiveness and showcasing different behaviors which can be utilized depending on the requirements of the shared control approach.

Shared Control methods often use impedance control to track target poses in a robotic manipulator.

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics have highlighted the importance of reliable uncertainty quantification in sequential tasks. However, assessing and improving calibration in such settings remains mostly unexplored, especially when only partial trajectories are observed. In this work, we formulate sequential calibration for episodic tasks, where task-success confidence is produced along an episode, while success is determined at the end of it. We introduce a sequential extension of the Brier score and show that, for binary outcomes, its risk minimizer coincides with the VLA policy's value function. This connection bridges uncertainty calibration and reinforcement learning, enabling the use of temporal-difference (TD) value estimation as a principled calibration mechanism over time. We empirically show that TD calibration improves performance relative to the state-of-the-art on simulated and real-robot data. Interestingly, we show that when calibrated using TD, the VLA's single-step action probabilities can yield competitive uncertainty estimates, in contrast to recent findings that employed different calibration techniques.

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics have highlighted the importance of reliable uncertainty quantification in sequential tasks.

Nowadays, we are witnessing an Artificial Intelligence revolution that dominates the technology landscape in various application domains, such as healthcare, robotics, automotive, security, and defense. Massive-scale AI models, which mimic the human brain's functionality, typically feature millions and even billions of parameters through data-intensive matrix multiplication tasks. While conventional Von-Neumann architectures struggle with the memory wall and the end of Moore's Law, these AI applications are migrating rapidly towards the edge, such as in robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, thereby adding more constraints to the hardware budget of AI architectures at the edge. Although in-memory computing has been proposed as a promising solution for the memory wall, both analog and digital in-memory computing architectures suffer from substantial degradation of the proposed benefits due to various design limitations. We propose a new digital in-memory stochastic computing architecture, DISCA, utilizing a compressed version of the quasi-stochastic Bent-Pyramid data format. DISCA inherits the same computational simplicity of analog computing, while preserving the same scalability, productivity, and reliability of digital systems. Post-layout modeling results of DISCA show an energy efficiency of 3.59TOPS/W per bit at 500 MHz using a commercial 180 nm CMOS technology. Therefore, DISCA significantly improves the energy efficiency for matrix multiplication workloads by orders of magnitude if scaled and compared to its counterpart architectures.

Nowadays, we are witnessing an Artificial Intelligence revolution that dominates the technology landscape in various application domains, such as healthcare, robotics, automotive, security, and defense.

The reliable execution of high-level missions in multi-robot systems with heterogeneous agents, requires robust methods for detecting spurious behaviors. In this paper, we address the challenge of identifying spurious executions of plans specified as a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula, as incorrect task sequences, violations of spatial constraints, timing inconsistencies, or deviations from intended mission semantics. To tackle this, we introduce a structured data generation framework based on the Nets-within-Nets (NWN) paradigm, which coordinates robot actions with LTL-derived global mission specifications. We further propose a Transformer-based anomaly detection pipeline that classifies robot trajectories as normal or anomalous. Experimental evaluations show that our method achieves high accuracy (91.3%) in identifying execution inefficiencies, and demonstrates robust detection capabilities for core mission violations (88.3%) and constraint-based adaptive anomalies (66.8%). An ablation experiment of the embedding and architecture was carried out, obtaining successful results where our novel proposition performs better than simpler representations.

The reliable execution of high-level missions in multi-robot systems with heterogeneous agents, requires robust methods for detecting spurious behaviors.

Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging, as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. This naturally extends to Arms' Debate, an iterative refinement process, and to the introduction of a third LLM-as-Judge to evaluate and select the most plausible coordinated trajectories. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves up to 71.1% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.7 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We further demonstrate strong few-shot generalization on novel tasks.

Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control.

Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is a critical yet challenging procedure due to dynamic imaging conditions and difficulties in needle visualization. Many methods have been proposed for automated needle insertion, but they often rely on hand-crafted pipelines with modular controllers, whose performance degrades in challenging cases. In this paper, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model is proposed for adaptive and automated US-guided needle insertion and tracking on a robotic ultrasound (RUS) system. This framework provides a unified approach to needle tracking and needle insertion control, enabling real-time, dynamically adaptive adjustment of insertion based on the obtained needle position and environment awareness. To achieve real-time and end-to-end tracking, a Cross-Depth Fusion (CDF) tracking head is proposed, integrating shallow positional and deep semantic features from the large-scale vision backbone. To adapt the pretrained vision backbone for tracking tasks, a Tracking-Conditioning (TraCon) register is introduced for parameter-efficient feature conditioning. After needle tracking, an uncertainty-aware control policy and an asynchronous VLA pipeline are presented for adaptive needle insertion control, ensuring timely decision-making for improved safety and outcomes. Extensive experiments on both needle tracking and insertion show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art trackers and manual operation, achieving higher tracking accuracy, improved insertion success rates, and reduced procedure time, highlighting promising directions for RUS-based intelligent intervention.

Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is a critical yet challenging procedure due to dynamic imaging conditions and difficulties in needle visualization.

For LLM agents, memory management critically impacts efficiency, quality, and security. While much research focuses on retention, selective forgetting--inspired by human cognitive processes (hippocampal indexing/consolidation theory and Ebbinghaus forgetting curve)--remains underexplored. We argue that in resource-constrained environments, a well-designed forgetting mechanism is as crucial as remembering, delivering benefits across three dimensions: (1) efficiency via intelligent memory pruning, (2) quality by dynamically updating outdated preferences and context, and (3) security through active forgetting of malicious inputs, sensitive data, and privacy-compromising content. Our framework establishes a taxonomy of forgetting mechanisms: passive decay-based, active deletion-based, safety-triggered, and adaptive reinforcement-based. Building on advances in LLM agent architectures and vector databases, we present detailed specifications, implementation strategies, and empirical validation from controlled experiments. Results show significant improvements: access efficiency (+8.49%), content quality (+29.2% signal-to-noise ratio), and security performance (100% elimination of security risks). Our work bridges cognitive neuroscience and AI systems, offering practical solutions for real-world deployment while addressing ethical and regulatory compliance. The paper concludes with challenges and future directions, establishing selective forgetting as a fundamental capability for next-generation LLM agents operating in real-world, resource-constrained scenarios. Our contributions align with AI-native memory systems and responsible AI development.

For LLM agents, memory management critically impacts efficiency, quality, and security.

Tactile sensors are increasingly integrated into dexterous robotic manipulators to enhance contact perception. However, learning manipulation policies that rely on tactile sensing remains challenging, primarily due to the trade-off between fidelity and computational cost of soft-body simulations. To address this, we present ETac, a tactile simulation framework that models elastomeric soft-body interactions with both high fidelity and efficiency. ETac employs a lightweight data-driven deformation propagation model to capture soft-body contact dynamics, achieving high simulation quality and boosting efficiency that enables large-scale policy training. When serving as the simulation backend, ETac produces surface deformation estimates comparable to FEM and demonstrates applicability for modeling real tactile sensors. Then, we showcase its capability in training a blind grasping policy that leverages large-area tactile feedback to manipulate diverse objects. Running on a single RTX 4090 GPU, ETac supports reinforcement learning across 4,096 parallel environments, achieving a total throughput of 869 FPS. The resulting policy reaches an average success rate of 84.45% across four object types, underscoring ETac's potential to make tactile-based skill learning both efficient and scalable.

Tactile sensors are increasingly integrated into dexterous robotic manipulators to enhance contact perception.

Achieving general-purpose robotics requires empowering robots to adapt and evolve based on their environment and feedback. Traditional methods face limitations such as extensive training requirements, difficulties in cross-task generalization, and lack of interpretability. Prompt learning offers new opportunities for self-evolving robots without extensive training, but simply reflecting on past experiences. However, extracting meaningful insights from task successes and failures remains a challenge. To this end, we propose the evolvable embodied agent (EEAgent) framework, which leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) for better environmental interpretation and policy planning. To enhance reflection on past experiences, we propose a long short-term reflective optimization (LSTRO) mechanism that dynamically refines prompts based on both past experiences and newly learned lessons, facilitating continuous self-evolution, thereby enhancing overall task success rates. Evaluations on six VIMA-Bench tasks reveal that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art, notably outperforming baselines in complex scenarios.

Achieving general-purpose robotics requires empowering robots to adapt and evolve based on their environment and feedback.

Industrial robotic manipulation demands reliable long-horizon execution across embodiments, tasks, and changing object distributions. While Vision-Language-Action models have demonstrated strong generalization, they remain fundamentally reactive. By optimizing the next action given the current observation without evaluating potential futures, they are brittle to the compounding failure modes of long-horizon tasks. Cortex 2.0 shifts from reactive control to plan-and-act by generating candidate future trajectories in visual latent space, scoring them for expected success and efficiency, then committing only to the highest-scoring candidate. We evaluate Cortex 2.0 on a single-arm and dual-arm manipulation platform across four tasks of increasing complexity: pick and place, item and trash sorting, screw sorting, and shoebox unpacking. Cortex 2.0 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action baselines, achieving the best results across all tasks. The system remains reliable in unstructured environments characterized by heavy clutter, frequent occlusions, and contact-rich manipulation, where reactive policies fail. These results demonstrate that world-model-based planning can operate reliably in complex industrial environments.

Industrial robotic manipulation demands reliable long-horizon execution across embodiments, tasks, and changing object distributions.

Ensuring functional safety in human-robot interaction is challenging because AI perception is inherently probabilistic, whereas industrial standards require deterministic behavior. We present an LLM-guided safety agent for edge robotics, built on an ISO-compliant low-latency perception-compute-control architecture. Our method translates natural-language safety regulations into executable predicates and deploys them through a redundant heterogeneous edge runtime. For fault-tolerant closed-loop execution under edge constraints, we adopt a symmetric dual-modular redundancy design with parallel independent execution for low-latency perception, computation, and control. We prototype the system on a dual-RK3588 platform and evaluate it in representative human-robot interaction scenarios. The results demonstrate a practical edge implementation path toward ISO 13849 Category 3 and PL d using cost-effective hardware, supporting practical deployment of safety-critical embodied AI.

Ensuring functional safety in human-robot interaction is challenging because AI perception is inherently probabilistic, whereas industrial standards require deterministic behavior.

We propose a post-hoc adaptive conformal anomaly detection method for monitoring time series that leverages predictions from pre-trained foundation models without requiring additional fine-tuning. Our method yields an interpretable anomaly score directly interpretable as a false alarm rate (p-value), facilitating transparent and actionable decision-making. It employs weighted quantile conformal prediction bounds and adaptively learns optimal weighting parameters from past predictions, enabling calibration under distribution shifts and stable false alarm control, while preserving out-of-sample guarantees. As a model-agnostic solution, it integrates seamlessly with foundation models and supports rapid deployment in resource-constrained environments. This approach addresses key industrial challenges such as limited data availability, lack of training expertise, and the need for immediate inference, while taking advantage of the growing accessibility of time series foundation models. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach delivers strong performance, combining simplicity, interpretability, robustness, and adaptivity.

We propose a post-hoc adaptive conformal anomaly detection method for monitoring time series that leverages predictions from pre-trained foundation models without requiring additional fine-tuning.

BACKGROUND: General aviation fleet expansion demands intelligent health monitoring under computational constraints. Real-world aircraft health diagnosis requires balancing accuracy with computational constraints under extreme class imbalance and environmental uncertainty. Existing end-to-end approaches suffer from the receptive field paradox: global attention introduces excessive operational heterogeneity noise for fine-grained fault classification, while localized constraints sacrifice critical cross-temporal context essential for anomaly detection. METHODS: This paper presents an AI-driven heterogeneous cascading architecture for general aviation health management. The proposed Long-Micro Scale Diagnostician (LMSD) explicitly decouples global anomaly detection (full-sequence attention) from micro-scale fault classification (restricted receptive fields), resolving the receptive field paradox while minimizing training overhead. A knowledge distillation-based interpretability module provides physically traceable explanations for safety-critical validation. RESULTS: Experiments on the public National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID) dataset (28,935 flights, 36 categories) demonstrate 4--8% improvement in safety-critical metrics (MCWPM) with 4.2 times training acceleration and 46% model compression compared to end-to-end baselines. CONCLUSIONS: The AI-driven heterogeneous architecture offers deployable solutions for aviation equipment health management, with potential for digital twin integration in future work. The proposed framework substantiates deployability in resource-constrained aviation environments while maintaining stringent safety requirements.

BACKGROUND: General aviation fleet expansion demands intelligent health monitoring under computational constraints.

Robotic autonomy in open-world environments is fundamentally limited by insufficient data diversity and poor cross-embodiment generalization. Existing robotic datasets are often limited in scale and task coverage, while relatively large differences across robot embodiments impede effective behavior knowledge transfer. To address these challenges, we propose JoyAI-RA, a vision-language-action (VLA) embodied foundation model tailored for generalizable robotic manipulation. JoyAI-RA presents a multi-source multi-level pretraining framework that integrates web data, large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos, simulation-generated trajectories, and real-robot data. Through training on heterogeneous multi-source data with explicit action-space unification, JoyAI-RA effectively bridges embodiment gaps, particularly between human manipulation and robotic control, thereby enhancing cross-embodiment behavior learning. JoyAI-RA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and real-world benchmarks, especially on diverse tasks with generalization demands.

Robotic autonomy in open-world environments is fundamentally limited by insufficient data diversity and poor cross-embodiment generalization.

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) inherit their visual and linguistic capabilities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet most VLAs are built from off-the-shelf VLMs that are not adapted to the embodied domain, limiting their downstream performance. In this work, we propose EmbodiedMidtrain to bridge the gap between VLMs and VLAs. We first characterize the data distribution gap between them, showing that VLA data occupy compact regions that are largely separated from the broader VLM distribution, while the degree of alignment varies substantially both across and within VLM data sources. Then, we build a mid-training data engine that leverages a lightweight learnable proximity estimator to select the most VLA-aligned candidates from a large VLM pool, and mid-trains the VLM on this curated mixture before downstream VLA fine-tuning. Experiments on three robot manipulation benchmarks show that mid-training consistently improves performance across different VLM backbones, achieving results competitive with expert VLAs and off-the-shelf VLMs trained with larger model scale and training budgets. Further analysis reveals that mid-training provides a stronger initialization for VLA fine-tuning, with gains emerging from the earliest steps and widening throughout training. Moreover, the data engine captures both dataset-level and sample-level alignment signals, favoring spatial reasoning over text-centric tasks while preserving the diversity of the VLM data. We will release all code, data and models for future research.

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) inherit their visual and linguistic capabilities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet most VLAs are built from off-the-shelf VLMs that are not adapted to the embodied domain, limiting their downstream performance.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) deliver state-of-the-art accuracy on regression and classification tasks, yet two structural deficits persistently obstruct their deployment in safety-critical, resource-constrained settings: (i) opacity of the learned function, which precludes formal verification, and (ii) reliance on heterogeneous, library-bound activation functions that inflate latency and silicon area on edge hardware. The recently introduced Exp-Minus-Log (EML) Sheffer operator, eml(x, y) = exp(x) - ln(y), was shown by Odrzywolek (2026) to be sufficient - together with the constant 1 - to express every standard elementary function as a binary tree of identical nodes. We propose to embed EML primitives inside conventional DNN architectures, yielding a hybrid DNN-EML model in which the trunk learns distributed representations and the head is a depth-bounded, weight-sparse EML tree whose snapped weights collapse to closed-form symbolic sub-expressions. We derive the forward equations, prove computational-cost bounds, analyse inference and training acceleration relative to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and quantify the trade-offs for FPGA/analog deployment. We argue that the DNN-EML pairing closes a literature gap: prior neuro-symbolic and equation-learner approaches (EQL, KAN, AI-Feynman) work with heterogeneous primitive sets and do not exploit a single hardware-realisable Sheffer element. A balanced assessment shows that EML is unlikely to accelerate training, and on commodity CPU/GPU it is also unlikely to accelerate inference; however, on a custom EML cell (FPGA logic block or analog circuit) the asymptotic latency advantage can reach an order of magnitude with simultaneous gain in interpretability and formal-verification tractability.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) deliver state-of-the-art accuracy on regression and classification tasks, yet two structural deficits persistently obstruct their deployment in safety-critical, resource-constrained settings: (i) opacity of the learned function, which precludes formal verification, and (ii) reliance on heterogeneous, library-bound activation functions that inflate latency and silicon area on edge hardware.

Scaling humanoid foundation models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of robotic data. While massive egocentric human data offers a scalable alternative, bridging the cross-embodiment chasm remains a fundamental challenge due to kinematic mismatches. We introduce UniT (Unified Latent Action Tokenizer via Visual Anchoring), a framework that establishes a unified physical language for human-to-humanoid transfer. Grounded in the philosophy that heterogeneous kinematics share universal visual consequences, UniT employs a tri-branch cross-reconstruction mechanism: actions predict vision to anchor kinematics to physical outcomes, while vision reconstructs actions to filter out irrelevant visual confounders. Concurrently, a fusion branch synergies these purified modalities into a shared discrete latent space of embodiment-agnostic physical intents. We validate UniT across two paradigms: 1) Policy Learning (VLA-UniT): By predicting these unified tokens, it effectively leverages diverse human data to achieve state-of-the-art data efficiency and robust out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on both humanoid simulation benchmark and real-world deployments, notably demonstrating zero-shot task transfer. 2) World Modeling (WM-UniT): By aligning cross-embodiment dynamics via unified tokens as conditions, it realizes direct human-to-humanoid action transfer. This alignment ensures that human data seamlessly translates into enhanced action controllability for humanoid video generation. Ultimately, by inducing a highly aligned cross-embodiment representation (empirically verified by t-SNE visualizations revealing the convergence of human and humanoid features into a shared manifold), UniT offers a scalable path to distill vast human knowledge into general-purpose humanoid capabilities.

Scaling humanoid foundation models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of robotic data.

Some of the most performant reinforcement learning algorithms today can be prohibitively expensive as they use test-time scaling methods such as sampling multiple action candidates and selecting the best one. In this work, we propose FASTER, a method for getting the benefits of sampling-based test-time scaling of diffusion-based policies without the computational cost by tracing the performance gain of action samples back to earlier in the denoising process. Our key insight is that we can model the denoising of multiple action candidates and selecting the best one as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the goal is to progressively filter action candidates before denoising is complete. With this MDP, we can learn a policy and value function in the denoising space that predicts the downstream value of action candidates in the denoising process and filters them while maximizing returns. The result is a method that is lightweight and can be plugged into existing generative RL algorithms. Across challenging long-horizon manipulation tasks in online and batch-online RL, FASTER consistently improves the underlying policies and achieves the best overall performance among the compared methods. Applied to a pretrained VLA, FASTER achieves the same performance while substantially reducing training and inference compute requirements. Code is available at https://github.com/alexanderswerdlow/faster .

Some of the most performant reinforcement learning algorithms today can be prohibitively expensive as they use test-time scaling methods such as sampling multiple action candidates and selecting the best one.

We present VLA Foundry, an open-source framework that unifies LLM, VLM, and VLA training in a single codebase. Most open-source VLA efforts specialize on the action training stage, often stitching together incompatible pretraining pipelines. VLA Foundry instead provides a shared training stack with end-to-end control, from language pretraining to action-expert fine-tuning. VLA Foundry supports both from-scratch training and pretrained backbones from Hugging Face. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we train and release two types of models: the first trained fully from scratch through our LLM-->VLM-->VLA pipeline and the second built on the pretrained Qwen3-VL backbone. We evaluate closed-loop policy performance of both models on LBM Eval, an open-data, open-source simulator. We also contribute usability improvements to the simulator and the STEP analysis tools for easier public use. In the nominal evaluation setting, our fully-open from-scratch model is on par with our prior closed-source work and substituting in the Qwen3-VL backbone leads to a strong multi-task table top manipulation policy outperforming our baseline by a wide margin. The VLA Foundry codebase is available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/vla_foundry and all multi-task model weights are released on https://huggingface.co/collections/TRI-ML/vla-foundry. Additional qualitative videos are available on the project website https://tri-ml.github.io/vla_foundry.

We present VLA Foundry, an open-source framework that unifies LLM, VLM, and VLA training in a single codebase.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been emerging as prominent AI models for solving many natural language tasks due to their high performance (e.g., accuracy) and capabilities in generating high-quality responses to the given inputs. However, their large computational cost, huge memory footprints, and high processing power/energy make it challenging for their embedded deployments. Amid several tinyLLMs, recent works have proposed spike-driven language models (SLMs) for significantly reducing the processing power/energy of LLMs. However, their memory footprints still remain too large for low-cost and resource-constrained embedded devices. Manual quantization approach may effectively compress SLM memory footprints, but it requires a huge design time and compute power to find the quantization setting for each network, hence making this approach not-scalable for handling different networks, performance requirements, and memory budgets. To bridge this gap, we propose QSLM, a novel framework that performs automated quantization for compressing pre-trained SLMs, while meeting the performance and memory constraints. To achieve this, QSLM first identifies the hierarchy of the given network architecture and the sensitivity of network layers under quantization, then employs a tiered quantization strategy (e.g., global-, block-, and module-level quantization) while leveraging a multi-objective performance-and-memory trade-off function to select the final quantization setting. Experimental results indicate that our QSLM reduces memory footprint by up to 86.5%, reduces power consumption by up to 20%, maintains high performance across different tasks (i.e., by up to 84.4% accuracy of sentiment classification on the SST-2 dataset and perplexity score of 23.2 for text generation on the WikiText-2 dataset) close to the original non-quantized model while meeting the performance and memory constraints.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been emerging as prominent AI models for solving many natural language tasks due to their high performance (e.g., accuracy) and capabilities in generating high-quality responses to the given inputs.

We propose a fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture for trapped-ion devices, which we call the walking cat architecture. Our blueprint includes a compiler, a detailed description of all the quantum error-correction protocols, a micro-architecture, a sufficiently fast decoder, and thorough simulations. The backbone of the architecture is a cat factory, producing cat states distributed throughout the machine, which are consumed to perform logical operations. The walking cat architecture is based entirely on a modern quantum error-correction approach called low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We identify promising instances of the walking cat architecture, such as (1) a simple architecture based on a single LDPC code, (2) a fast architecture based on fast logical gates relying on a [[70, 6, 9]] code, equipped with Clifford-frame tracking for any 6-qubit Clifford gate, and (3) a dense architecture based on a [[102, 22, 9]]] code encoding 22 logical qubits per memory block. Our dense architecture provides a design with 110 logical qubits executing about one million T gates per day using only 2,514 physical qubits. We estimate that the quantum Hamiltonian simulation of a Heisenberg model on 100 sites can be executed within one month with 10,000 physical qubits, including all shots required to achieve chemical accuracy, suggesting that such a device could enter the regime of classically intractable physics simulations. Our design relies on hardware components that have been experimentally demonstrated on small devices. We emphasize simplicity over hypothetical performance to facilitate the practical realization of this machine. Based on this approach, we believe that a fault-tolerant quantum computer with hundreds of logical qubits capable of running millions of logical gates can be built in the near term, providing a platform to explore a broad range of applications.

We propose a fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture for trapped-ion devices, which we call the walking cat architecture.

Unknown payloads can strongly affect compliant robotic manipulation, especially when the payload center of mass is not aligned with the tool center point. In this case, the payload generates an offset wrench at the robot wrist. During motion, this wrench is not only related to payload weight, but also to payload inertia. If it is not modeled, the compliant controller can interpret it as an external interaction wrench, which causes unintended compliant motion, larger tracking error, and reduced transport accuracy. This paper presents a wrench-aware admittance control framework for unknown-payload pick-and-place using a UR5e robot. The method uses force-torque measurements in two different roles. First, a three-axis translational excitation term is used to reduce payload-induced force effects during transport without making the robot excessively stiff. Second, after grasping, the controller first estimates payload mass for transport compensation and then estimates the payload CoM offset relative to the TCP using wrist force-torque measurements collected during the subsequent translational motion. This helps improve object placement and stacking behavior. Experimental results show improved transport and placement performance compared with uncorrected placement while preserving compliant motion.

Unknown payloads can strongly affect compliant robotic manipulation, especially when the payload center of mass is not aligned with the tool center point.

Spoken dialogue systems powered by large language models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding human speech and generating appropriate spoken responses. However, these systems struggle with end-turn detection (ETD) -- the ability to distinguish between user turn completion and hesitation. This limitation often leads to premature or delayed responses, disrupting the flow of spoken conversations. In this paper, we introduce the ETD Dataset, the first public dataset for end-turn detection. The ETD dataset consists of both synthetic speech data generated with text-to-speech models and real-world speech data collected from web sources. We also propose SpeculativeETD, a novel collaborative inference framework that balances efficiency and accuracy to improve real-time ETD in resource-constrained environments. Our approach jointly employs a lightweight GRU-based model, which rapidly detects the non-speaking units in real-time on local devices, and a high-performance Wav2vec-based model running on the server to make a more challenging classification of distinguishing turn ends from mere pauses. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed SpeculativeETD significantly improves ETD accuracy while keeping the required computations low. Datasets and code will be available after the review.

Spoken dialogue systems powered by large language models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding human speech and generating appropriate spoken responses.

Although multi-step generative policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation by modeling multimodal action distributions, they require multi-step iterative denoising at inference time. Each action therefore needs tens to hundreds of network function evaluations (NFEs), making them costly for high-frequency closed-loop control and online reinforcement learning (RL). To address this limitation, we propose a two-stage framework for native one-step generative policies that shifts refinement from inference to training. First, we introduce the Drift-Based Policy (DBP), which leverages fixed-point drifting objectives to internalize iterative refinement into the model parameters, yielding a one-step generative backbone by design while preserving multimodal action modeling capacity. Second, we develop Drift-Based Policy Optimization (DBPO), an online RL framework that equips the pretrained backbone with a compatible stochastic interface, enabling stable on-policy updates without sacrificing the one-step deployment property. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework across offline imitation learning, online fine-tuning, and real-world control scenarios. DBP matches or exceeds the performance of multi-step diffusion policies while achieving up to $100\times$ faster inference. It also consistently outperforms existing one-step baselines on challenging manipulation benchmarks. Moreover, DBPO enables effective and stable policy improvement in online settings. Experiments on a real-world dual-arm robot demonstrate reliable high-frequency control at 105.2 Hz.

Although multi-step generative policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation by modeling multimodal action distributions, they require multi-step iterative denoising at inference time.

Recent advances in embodied Vision-Language Agentic Systems (VLAS), powered by large vision-language models (LVLMs), enable AI systems to perceive and reason over real-world scenes. Within this context, environmental signals such as traffic lights are essential in-band signals that can and should influence agent behavior. However, similar signals could also be crafted to operate as misleading visual injections, overriding user intent and posing security risks. This duality creates a fundamental challenge: agents must respond to legitimate environmental cues while remaining robust to misleading ones. We refer to this tension as trust boundary confusion. To study this behavior, we design a dual-intent dataset and evaluation framework, through which we show that current LVLM-based agents fail to reliably balance this trade-off, either ignoring useful signals or following harmful ones. We systematically evaluate 7 LVLM agents across multiple embodied settings under both structure-based and noise-based visual injections. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a multi-agent defense framework that separates perception from decision-making to dynamically assess the reliability of visual inputs. Our approach significantly reduces misleading behaviors while preserving correct responses and provides robustness guarantees under adversarial perturbations. The code of the evaluation framework and artifacts are made available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Visual-Prompt-Inject.

Recent advances in embodied Vision-Language Agentic Systems (VLAS), powered by large vision-language models (LVLMs), enable AI systems to perceive and reason over real-world scenes.

This study addresses the deployment challenges of integer-only quantized Transformers on resource-constrained embedded FPGAs (Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S15). We enhanced the flexibility of our VHDL template by introducing a selectable resource type for storing intermediate results across model layers, thereby breaking the deployment bottleneck by utilizing BRAM efficiently. Moreover, we developed a resource-aware mixed-precision quantization approach that enables researchers to explore hardware-level quantization strategies without requiring extensive expertise in Neural Architecture Search. This method provides accurate resource utilization estimates with a precision discrepancy as low as 3%, compared to actual deployment metrics. Compared to previous work, our approach has successfully facilitated the deployment of model configurations utilizing mixed-precision quantization, thus overcoming the limitations inherent in five previously non-deployable configurations with uniform quantization bitwidths. Consequently, this research enhances the applicability of Transformers in embedded systems, facilitating a broader range of Transformer-powered applications on edge devices.

This study addresses the deployment challenges of integer-only quantized Transformers on resource-constrained embedded FPGAs (Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S15).

This paper presents the design of a hardware accelerator for Transformers, optimized for on-device time-series forecasting in AIoT systems. It integrates integer-only quantization and Quantization-Aware Training with optimized hardware designs to realize 6-bit and 4-bit quantized Transformer models, which achieved precision comparable to 8-bit quantized models from related research. Utilizing a complete implementation on an embedded FPGA (Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S15), we examine the feasibility of deploying Transformer models on embedded IoT devices. This includes a thorough analysis of achievable precision, resource utilization, timing, power, and energy consumption for on-device inference. Our results indicate that while sufficient performance can be attained, the optimization process is not trivial. For instance, reducing the quantization bitwidth does not consistently result in decreased latency or energy consumption, underscoring the necessity of systematically exploring various optimization combinations. Compared to an 8-bit quantized Transformer model in related studies, our 4-bit quantized Transformer model increases test loss by only 0.63%, operates up to 132.33x faster, and consumes 48.19x less energy. Relevant source code is provided in the accompanying GitHub repository: https://github.com/tianheng-ling/TinyTransformer4TS.

This paper presents the design of a hardware accelerator for Transformers, optimized for on-device time-series forecasting in AIoT systems.