Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs.

Diffusion-based vision-language-action models (dVLAs) are promising for embodied intelligence but are fundamentally limited in real-time deployment by the high latency of full inference. We propose Realtime-VLA FLASH, a speculative inference framework that eliminates most full inference calls during replanning by introducing a lightweight draft model with parallel verification via the main model's Action Expert and a phase-aware fallback mechanism that reverts to the full inference pipeline when needed. This design enables low-latency, high-frequency replanning without sacrificing reliability. Experiments show that on LIBERO, FLASH largely preserves task performance by replacing many 58.0 ms full-inference rounds with speculative rounds as fast as 7.8 ms, lowering task-level average inference latency to 19.1 ms (3.04x speedup). We additionally demonstrate effectiveness on real-world conveyor-belt sorting, highlighting its practical impact for latency-critical embodied tasks.

Diffusion-based vision-language-action models (dVLAs) are promising for embodied intelligence but are fundamentally limited in real-time deployment by the high latency of full inference.

The scalability of robotic manipulation is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of task-aligned physical interaction data. While vision-language models (VLMs) and video generation models (VGMs) hold promise for autonomous data synthesis, they suffer from semantic-spatial misalignment and physical hallucinations, respectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboEvolve, a novel framework that couples a VLM planner and a VGM simulator into a mutually reinforcing co-evolutionary loop. Operating purely on unlabeled seed images, RoboEvolve leverages a cognitive-inspired dual-phase mechanism: (i) daytime exploration fosters physically grounded behavioral discovery through a semantic-controlled multi-granular reward, and (ii) nighttime consolidation mines "near-miss" failures to stabilize policy optimization. Guided by an autonomous progressive curriculum, the system naturally scales from simple atomic actions to complex tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboEvolve (I) achieves superior effectiveness, elevating base planners by 30 absolute points and amplifying simulator success by 48% on average; (II) exhibits extreme data efficiency, surpassing fully supervised baselines with merely 500 unlabeled seeds--a 50x reduction; and (III) demonstrates robust continual learning without catastrophic forgetting.

The scalability of robotic manipulation is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of task-aligned physical interaction data.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly trained from dense robot demonstration trajectories, often collected through teleoperation, by sampling every recorded frame as if it provided equally useful supervision. We argue that this convention creates a temporal supervision imbalance: long low-change segments dominate the training stream, while manipulation-critical transitions such as alignment, contact, grasping, and release appear only sparsely. We introduce FrameSkip, a data-layer frame selection framework that scores trajectory frames using action variation, visual-action coherence, task-progress priors, and gripper-transition preservation, then remaps training samples toward high-importance frames under a target retention ratio. Because FrameSkip operates only in the dataloader, it leaves the VLA architecture, action head, training objective, and inference procedure unchanged. Across RoboCasa-GR1, SimplerEnv, and LIBERO, FrameSkip improves the success-retention trade-off over full-frame training and simpler frame selection variants, achieving a macro-average success rate of 76.15% across the three benchmarks compared with 66.50% for full-frame training while using a compressed trajectory view that retains 20% of unique frames in the main setting.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly trained from dense robot demonstration trajectories, often collected through teleoperation, by sampling every recorded frame as if it provided equally useful supervision.

Semidefinite programming (SDP) provides a principled framework for convex relaxations of nonconvex geometric constraints in motion planning, yet existing solvers are too computationally expensive for real-time control, particularly on resource-constrained embedded systems. To address this gap, we introduce TinySDP, the first semidefinite programming solver designed for embedded systems, enabling real-time model-predictive control (MPC) on microcontrollers for problems with nonconvex obstacle constraints. Our approach integrates positive-semidefinite cone projections into a cached-Riccati-based ADMM solver, leveraging computational structure for embedded tractability. We pair this solver with an a posteriori rank-1 certificate that converts relaxed solutions into explicit geometric guarantees at each timestep. On challenging benchmarks, e.g., cul-de-sac and dynamic obstacle avoidance scenarios that induce failures in local methods, TinySDP achieves collision-free navigation with up to 73% shorter paths than state-of-the-art baselines. We validate our approach on a Crazyflie quadrotor, demonstrating that semidefinite constraints can be enforced at real-time rates for agile embedded robotics.

Semidefinite programming (SDP) provides a principled framework for convex relaxations of nonconvex geometric constraints in motion planning, yet existing solvers are too computationally expensive for real-time control, particularly on resource-constrained embedded systems.

Edge-AI deployment is bottlenecked by data-movement energy; pairing event-driven vision sensors with in-memory analog compute could lift that ceiling by orders of magnitude. Both technologies are individually mature; the framework distinguishing fabricated demonstrations from projected systems is missing. Of six application domains surveyed (robotics, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR, surveillance, medical imaging, IoT), half rest entirely on projection, and existing hardware sits at Technology Readiness Levels 2-5. This evidence-graded review applies a three-paradigm architectural taxonomy and benchmarks the gap against current digital neuromorphic alternatives. It identifies an end-to-end integrated DVS-memristor system as the field's open challenge, with testable accuracy and power targets.

Edge-AI deployment is bottlenecked by data-movement energy; pairing event-driven vision sensors with in-memory analog compute could lift that ceiling by orders of magnitude.

We introduce the first universal pretraining corpus for industrial time-series data: FactoryNet. 51M datapoints across 23k end-to-end task executions (13.3k real, 9.8k synthetic) on six embodiments, unified by a shared schema that enables robust zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer and highly parameter-efficient anomaly detection. We introduce a novel schema: Setpoint, Effort, Feedback, Context (S-E-F-C) underlying the whole pipeline that maps any actuated system into a common representational frame. The corpus spans 27 annotated anomaly types alongside healthy baselines and counterfactual pairs across robotic manipulation and machining domains. Cross-embodiment transfer experiments yield positive results: under bias-aware metrics our model demonstrates fair cross-embodiment transfer capabilities on the evaluated source-target pair, while 24 schema-aligned signals achieves competitive anomaly detection performance compared to high-dimensional baselines. We release FactoryNet as a growing, multi-embodiment dataset to drive progress toward industrial foundation models.

We introduce the first universal pretraining corpus for industrial time-series data: FactoryNet.

Training deep neural networks with noise and data heterogeneity is a major challenge. We introduce Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting (LiLAW), a method that dynamically adjusts the loss weight of each training sample based on its evolving difficulty, categorized as easy, moderate, and hard, using only three global learnable scalar parameters. LiLAW learns to adaptively prioritize samples by updating these parameters with a single gradient descent step on a validation mini-batch after each training mini-batch, without requiring a clean, unbiased validation set. Experiments across general and medical imaging datasets, several noise types and levels, loss functions, and architectures with and without pretraining, including linear probing and full fine-tuning, show that LiLAW consistently improves accuracy and AUROC, especially in higher-noise settings, without requiring excessive tuning. We also obtain state-of-the-art results incorporating synthetic and augmented data from SynPAIN, GAITGen, ECG5000, and improved fairness on the Adult dataset. LiLAW is lightweight, practical, and computationally efficient, making it an effective, scalable approach to boost generalization and robustness across diverse deep learning training setups, especially in resource-constrained settings.

Training deep neural networks with noise and data heterogeneity is a major challenge.

In this paper, we propose GTA-VLA(Guide, Think, Act), an interactive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that enables spatially steerable embodied reasoning by allowing users to guide robot policies with explicit visual cues. Existing VLA models learn a direct "Sense-to-Act" mapping from multimodal observations to robot actions. While effective within the training distribution, such tightly coupled policies are brittle under out-of-domain (OOD) shifts and difficult to correct when failures occur. Although recent embodied Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches expose intermediate reasoning, they still lack a mechanism for incorporating human spatial guidance, limiting their ability to resolve visual ambiguities or recover from mistakes. To address this gap, our framework allows users to optionally guide the policy with spatial priors, such as affordance points, boxes, and traces, which the subsequent reasoning process can directly condition on. Based on these inputs, the model generates a unified spatial-visual Chain-of-Thought that integrates external guidance with internal task planning, aligning human visual intent with autonomous decision-making. For practical deployment, we further couple the reasoning module with a lightweight reactive action head for efficient action execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the in-domain SimplerEnv WidowX benchmark, our framework achieves a state-of-the-art 81.2% success rate. Under OOD visual shifts and spatial ambiguities, a single visual interaction substantially improves task success over existing methods, highlighting the value of interactive reasoning for failure recovery in embodied control. Details of the project can be found here: https://signalispupupu.github.io/GTA-VLA_ProjPage/

In this paper, we propose GTA-VLA(Guide, Think, Act), an interactive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that enables spatially steerable embodied reasoning by allowing users to guide robot policies with explicit visual cues.

Generating controllable and physically plausible indoor scenes is a pivotal prerequisite for constructing high-fidelity simulation environments for embodied AI. However, existing deeplearning-based methods usually treat all objects as homogeneous instances within a unified generation process. While effective for sparse and simplistic layouts, they struggle to model realistic layouts with dense object arrangements and complex spatial dependencies, leadingto limited scalability and degraded physical plausibility. To deal with these challenges, we revisit indoor layout generation from the perspective of structural heterogeneity and decompose the objects into primary objects and secondary objects according to their distinct roles in shaping a scene. Based on this decomposition, we propose HetScene, a heterogeneous two-stage generation framework that decouples indoor layout synthesis into Structural Layout Generation (SLG) and Contextual Layout Generation (CLG). SLG first generates globally coherent structural layouts with only primary objects conditioned on text descriptions, top-down binary room masks, and spatial relation graphs, establishing a stable global macro-skeleton of large core furniture.

Generating controllable and physically plausible indoor scenes is a pivotal prerequisite for constructing high-fidelity simulation environments for embodied AI.

Web-scale 3D asset collections are abundant but rarely deployment-ready, suffering from arbitrary metric scaling, incorrect pivots, brittle geometry, and incomplete textures, defects that limit their use in embodied AI, robotics, and spatial computing. We present AmaraSpatial-10K, a dataset of over 10,000 synthetic 3D assets optimised for zero-shot deployment. Each asset ships as a metric-scaled, deterministically anchored .glb with separated PBR maps, a convex collision hull, a paired reference image, and multi-sentence text metadata. Alongside the dataset we introduce a reusable evaluation suite for 3D asset banks, a continuous Scale Plausibility Score (SPS), an LLM Concept Density metric, anchor-error auditing, and a cross-modal CLIP coherence protocol, and apply it to AmaraSpatial-10K alongside matched subsets of Objaverse, HSSD, ABO, and GSO. AmaraSpatial-10K improves CLIP Recall@5 by $3.4\times$ over Objaverse ($0.612$ vs. $0.181$, median rank $267 \rightarrow 3$), achieves a $99.1\%$ physics-stability rate under Habitat-Sim with $\sim 20\times$ wall-time speed-up, and produces zero-overlap scenes when used as a drop-in asset bank for Holodeck. Controlled ablations on the same asset bank attribute the retrieval gain to description richness.

Web-scale 3D asset collections are abundant but rarely deployment-ready, suffering from arbitrary metric scaling, incorrect pivots, brittle geometry, and incomplete textures, defects that limit their use in embodied AI, robotics, and spatial computing.

Generating overtaking trajectories in high-speed scenarios is typically addressed through hierarchical planning, which often suffers from local optima due to single initial solutions and low computational efficiency during numerical optimization. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a Spatio-temporal topology and Reachable set analysis enhanced Overtaking trajectory Planning framework (SROP). Specifically, by introducing topological classes to represent distinct overtaking behaviors, the upper-layer planner performs a spatio-temporal search to extract diverse initial paths, effectively preventing local optima. Subsequently, a lower-layer planner conducts parallel trajectory evaluation using reachable sets, which decouples vehicle kinematic constraints from the optimization process to ensure feasibility and significantly accelerate computation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that SROP improves trajectory smoothness by 66.8% and reduces computation time by 62.9% compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, by seamlessly integrating the method into the F1TENTH autonomous racing simulation platform, a 100-lap sensitivity analysis demonstrates high overtaking success rates in challenging scenarios, thereby validating its practical utility, real-time efficiency, and robustness.

Generating overtaking trajectories in high-speed scenarios is typically addressed through hierarchical planning, which often suffers from local optima due to single initial solutions and low computational efficiency during numerical optimization.

Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization. This "flat" training paradigm, inherited from language modeling, remains indifferent to the underlying physical hierarchy of manipulation. In reality, robot trajectories are fundamentally heterogeneous, where low-velocity segments often dictate task success through precision-demanding interactions, while high-velocity motions serve as error-tolerant transitions. Such a misalignment between uniform loss weighting and physical criticality fundamentally limits the performance of current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World-Action Models (WAM) in complex, long-horizon tasks. To rectify this, we introduce AttenA+, an architecture-agnostic framework that prioritizes kinematically critical segments via velocity-driven action attention. By reweighting the training objective based on the inverse velocity field, AttenA+ naturally aligns the model's learning capacity with the physical demands of manipulation. As a plug-and-play enhancement, AttenA+ can be integrated into existing backbones without structural modifications or additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttenA+ significantly elevates the ceilings of current state-of-the-art models. Specifically, it improves OpenVLA-OFT to 98.6% (+1.5%) on the Libero benchmark and pushes FastWAM to 92.4% (+0.6%) on RoboTwin 2.0. Real-world validation on a Franka manipulator further showcases its robustness and cross-task generalization. Our work suggests that mining the intrinsic structural priors of action sequences offers a highly efficient, physics-aware complement to standard scaling laws, paving a new path for general-purpose robotic control.

Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization.

Gesture recognition is a cornerstone of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for smart eyewear, enabling natural and device-free control in augmented reality environments. Traditional vision-based approaches face significant challenges regarding power consumption, computational latency, and user privacy. This paper proposes a lightweight, privacy-preserving gesture recognition system based on the fusion of low-resolution Time-of-Flight (ToF) and Infrared (IR) thermal sensors. We used an 8 times 8 multizone ToF sensor (VL53L8CH) and an 8 times 8 IR array (AMG8833) to capture complementary depth and thermal cues. A compact Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a specialized grouped-convolution architecture is designed to fuse these modalities efficiently on a microcontroller (MCU). Experimental results on a custom dataset of 7 static gestures, validated via k-fold cross-validation, demonstrate that the proposed fusion strategy significantly outperforms single-sensor baselines with an accuracy of 92.3% and a macro F1-score of 0.93. Finally, on-device benchmarks on STM32F4 and STM32H7 MCUs confirm the system's suitability for resource-constrained wearables, requiring only 6,343 parameters and achieving millisecond-level inference latency with a total system power of 50 mW.

Gesture recognition is a cornerstone of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for smart eyewear, enabling natural and device-free control in augmented reality environments.

Generalizing robotic manipulation across object poses, viewpoints, and dynamic disturbances is difficult, especially with only a few demonstrations. End-to-end visuomotor policies are expressive but data-hungry, while planning and optimization satisfy explicit constraints but do not directly capture the interaction strategies demonstrated by humans. We propose Sliding into Distribution (SID), a structured framework that learns an object-centric motion field from canonicalized demonstrations to iteratively slide the system toward the demonstrated manifold and into the reliable operating region of a lightweight egocentric execution policy, mitigating out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. The motion field provides large corrective motions when far from the demonstration manifold and naturally vanishes near convergence, enabling robust reaching under substantial pose and viewpoint shifts. Within the reached regime, an egocentric policy trained with conditioned flow matching performs task-specific manipulation, supported by kinematically consistent point-cloud reprojection augmentation that preserves action-observation consistency. Across six real-world tasks, SID achieves approximately 90% success under OOD initializations with only two demonstrations, with under a 10% drop under distractors and external disturbances. Overall, SID provides a new paradigm for few-shot manipulation: explicitly managing distribution shift via online distribution recovery.

Generalizing robotic manipulation across object poses, viewpoints, and dynamic disturbances is difficult, especially with only a few demonstrations.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as an effective paradigm for handling heterogeneous datasets during Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pretraining, offering a unified action space across embodiments. However, existing LAMs often rely on discrete quantization encode and decode pipelines, which can lead to trivial frame reconstruction behavior, limited representational capacity, and a lack of physically meaningful structure. We introduce RotVLA, a VLA framework built on a continuous rotational latent action representation. Latent actions are modeled as elements of SO(n), providing continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry aligned with real-world action dynamics. A triplet frame learning framework further enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while avoiding degeneration. RotVLA consists of a VLM backbone and a flow-matching action head, pretrained on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets and human videos with latent-action supervision. For downstream robot control, the flow-matching head is extended into a unified action expert that jointly denoises latent and robot actions. Here, latent actions serve as a latent planner, providing high-level guidance that conditions action generation. With only 1.7B parameters and 1700+ hours of pretraining data, RotVLA achieves 98.2% on LIBERO and 89.6% / 88.5% on RoboTwin2.0 under clean and randomized settings, respectively. It also demonstrates strong real-world performance on manipulation tasks, consistently outperforming existing VLA models.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as an effective paradigm for handling heterogeneous datasets during Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pretraining, offering a unified action space across embodiments.

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) is a classic application with a growing business. CPU-based OLTP has low lock serving efficiency. The main reason is that most locks are cold, and the lock agent must issue frequent memory accesses to retrieve the lock details to determine whether to grant it. This motivates us to propose dedicated hardware-based lock agents with integrated lock tables to remove the DRAM access overhead. In this paper, we propose hardware-accelerated lock management and transaction processing for database systems. First, we propose a low-latency lock agent optimized for both lock acquiring and releasing requests. Second, we design a scalable transaction agent that executes the full transaction lifecycle. We present the architecture, optimizations, and design-space exploration of the proposed lock management and transaction processing system. The experiment results show up to 51X higher transaction throughput over the CPU baseline on the TPC-C benchmark.

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) is a classic application with a growing business.

While autoregressive (AR) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated formidable reasoning capabilities in robotic tasks, their sequential decoding process often incurs high inference latency and may amplify error accumulation during long-horizon execution. Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) provide a promising alternative through parallel token refinement, but their practical deployment in robotics remains limited by repeated denoising function evaluations (NFEs) and the difficulty of directly applying standard KV caching to bidirectional iterative decoding. To bridge these paradigms, we propose BlockVLA, a framework that adapts pretrained AR backbones into an efficient discrete diffusion policy through a block diffusion paradigm. BlockVLA maintains autoregressive dependencies at the block level while enabling parallel denoising within each block, thereby combining global causal coherence with local parallel generation. This design enables prefix KV-cache reuse across completed blocks, reduces the effective cost of iterative denoising, and provides a smoother transition from AR pretraining to diffusion-based policy fine-tuning. We conduct extensive evaluations on the LIBERO and SimplerEnv benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our BlockVLA achieves a 3.3$\times$ inference acceleration over standard discrete diffusion baselines. Furthermore, our model exhibits superior training efficiency, with success rates converging substantially faster than baselines, a gain that is particularly pronounced in complex, long-horizon tasks, where BlockVLA achieves significant performance gains in the early stages of training. This work establishes Block Diffusion as a robust bridge between large-scale pretrained AR models and efficient, high-frequency real-time robotic control.

While autoregressive (AR) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated formidable reasoning capabilities in robotic tasks, their sequential decoding process often incurs high inference latency and may amplify error accumulation during long-horizon execution.

Contextual bandits (CB) are online sequential decision-making problems under partial feedback that underpin many adaptive services. There is a growing demand to deploy CB agents directly on-device, under strict constraints on memory, compute, and energy. However, standard linear CB algorithms are often impractical for resource-constrained devices with their unfavorable scaling in computational and memory costs. Recently, HD-CB, a CB approach based on hyperdimensional computing principles, has been proposed to model and solve CB problems by moving into high-dimensional spaces. HD-CB offers faster convergence, favorable scalability, and improves memory efficiency compared to linear CB algorithms. However, its learning rule is accumulation-based: the values of action vectors grow over time, requiring high precision. While periodic binarization can prevent overflow in low-precision components, it may discard important information about magnitudes and degrade decision quality. This paper introduces probabilistic HD-CB, a low-precision variant that replaces deterministic accumulation with a probabilistic update rule. At each step, only a random subset of vector components is updated, with a time-decaying update probability, and component values are constrained to a predefined range [-k,+k]. This approach enables low-precision components, prevents overflow without periodic binarization, and reduces the expected update cost in proportion to the fraction of updated components. Off-policy evaluation on standardized synthetic CB benchmarks using the Open Bandit Pipeline shows that probabilistic HD-CB consistently outperforms binarized HD-CB at equal precision, while approaching the performance of HD-CB with as few as 3 bits per component.

Contextual bandits (CB) are online sequential decision-making problems under partial feedback that underpin many adaptive services.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a cornerstone of embodied intelligence. However, current agents often suffer from significant performance degradation when transitioning from simulation to real-world deployment, primarily due to perceptual instability (e.g., lighting variations and motion blur) and under-specified instructions. While existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by scaling up model size and training data, we argue that the bottleneck lies in the lack of robust spatial grounding and cross-domain priors. In this paper, we propose StereoNav, a robust Vision-Language-Action framework designed to enhance real-world navigation consistency. To address the inherent gap between synthetic training and physical execution, we introduce Target-Location Priors as a persistent bridge. These priors provide stable visual guidance that remains invariant across domains, effectively grounding the agent even when instructions are vague. Furthermore, to mitigate visual disturbances like motion blur and illumination shifts, StereoNav leverages stereo vision to construct a unified representation of semantics and geometry, enabling precise action prediction through enhanced depth awareness. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE demonstrate that StereoNav achieves state-of-the-art egocentric RGB performance, with SR and SPL scores of 81.1% and 68.3%, and 67.5% and 52.0%, respectively, while using significantly fewer parameters and less training data than prior scaling-based approaches. More importantly, real-world robotic deployments confirm that StereoNav substantially improves navigation reliability in complex, unstructured environments. Project page: https://yunheng-wang.github.io/stereonav-public.github.io.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a cornerstone of embodied intelligence.

VLN has achieved remarkable progress by scaling data and model capacity. However, the assumption of a static environment breaks down in real-world indoor scenarios, where robots inevitably encounter dynamic pedestrians. Existing human-aware approaches typically treat humans merely as moving obstacles based on implicit visual cues, lacking the explicit reasoning required to interpret human intentions or maintain social norms. To address this, we propose HCSG, the first human-centric framework for VLN. This framework provides a robust foundation for safe, socially intelligent navigation in dynamic human-robot environments that shifts the paradigm from passive collision avoidance to active human behavior understanding. Specifically, HCSG introduces a unified Human Understanding Module that synergizes two key capabilities: (i) geometric forecasting, which predicts human pose and trajectory to anticipate future motion dynamics; and (ii) semantic interpretation, which leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to generate natural language descriptions of human actions and intentions. These semantic-geometric representations are fused into the agent's topological map for instruction-conditioned planning. Furthermore, a social distance loss is introduced to enforce socially compliant interaction distances. Extensive experiments on the HA-VLNCE benchmark demonstrate that HCSG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 14% improvement in Success Rate and a 34% reduction in Collision Rate. Our project can be seen at https://haoxuanxu1024.github.io/HCSG/.

VLN has achieved remarkable progress by scaling data and model capacity.

The rapid evolution of Embodied AI has enabled Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to excel in multimodal perception and task execution. However, applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to these massive models in large-scale distributed environments faces severe systemic bottlenecks, primarily due to the resource conflict between high-fidelity physical simulation and the intensive VRAM/bandwidth demands of deep learning. This conflict often leaves overall throughput constrained by execution-phase inefficiencies. To address these challenges, we propose D-VLA, a high-concurrency, low-latency distributed RL framework for large-scale embodied foundation models. D-VLA introduces "Plane Decoupling," physically isolating high-frequency training data from low-frequency weight control to eliminate interference between simulation and optimization. We further design a four-thread asynchronous "Swimlane" pipeline, enabling full parallel overlap of sampling, inference, gradient computation, and parameter distribution. Additionally, a dual-pool VRAM management model and topology-aware replication resolve memory fragmentation and optimize communication efficiency. Experiments on benchmarks like LIBERO show that D-VLA significantly outperforms mainstream RL frameworks in throughput and sampling efficiency for billion-parameter VLA models. In trillion-parameter scalability tests, our framework maintains exceptional stability and linear speedup, providing a robust system for high-performance general-purpose embodied agents.

The rapid evolution of Embodied AI has enabled Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to excel in multimodal perception and task execution.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by the scarcity of action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos provide abundant evidence of how the physical world changes. Latent action models offer a promising way to extract such priors from videos, but reconstruction-trained latent codes are not necessarily suitable for policy generation: they may predict future observations while lacking the structure needed to be reused or generated coherently with robot actions. We introduce ALAM (Algebraic Latent Action Model), an Algebraically Consistent Latent Action Model that turns temporal relations in action-free video into structural supervision. Given frame triplets, ALAM learns latent transitions that are grounded by reconstruction while being regularized by composition and reversal consistency, encouraging a locally additive transition space. For downstream VLA learning, we freeze the pretrained encoder and use its latent transition sequences as auxiliary generative targets, co-generated with robot actions under a joint flow-matching objective. This couples structured latent transitions with flow-based policy generation, allowing the policy to exploit ALAM's locally consistent transition geometry without requiring latent-to-action decoding. Representation probes show that ALAM reduces additivity and reversibility errors by 25-85 times over unstructured latent-action baselines and improves long-horizon cumulative reconstruction. When transferred to VLA policies, ALAM raises the average success rate from 47.9% to 85.0% on MetaWorld MT50 and from 94.1% to 98.1% on LIBERO, with consistent gains on real-world manipulation tasks. Ablations further confirm that the strongest improvements arise from the synergy between algebraically structured latent transitions and joint flow matching.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by the scarcity of action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos provide abundant evidence of how the physical world changes.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robot manipulation but often struggle to generalize to new instructions or complex multi-task scenarios. We identify a critical pathology in current training paradigms where goal-driven data collection creates a dataset bias. In such datasets, language instructions are highly predictable from visual observations alone, causing the conditional mutual information between instructions and actions to vanish, a phenomenon we term Information Collapse. Consequently, models degenerate into vision-only policies that ignore language constraints and fail in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. To address this, we propose LangForce, a novel framework that enforces instruction following via Bayesian decomposition. By introducing learnable Latent Action Queries, we construct a dual-branch architecture to estimate both a vision-only prior $p(a \mid v)$ and a language-conditioned posterior $π(a \mid v, \ell)$. We then optimize the policy to maximize the conditional Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) between actions and instructions. This objective effectively penalizes the vision shortcut and rewards actions that explicitly explain the language command. Without requiring new data, LangForce significantly improves generalization. Extensive experiments across on SimplerEnv and RoboCasa demonstrate substantial gains, including an 11.3% improvement on the challenging OOD SimplerEnv benchmark, validating the ability of our approach to robustly ground language in action.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robot manipulation but often struggle to generalize to new instructions or complex multi-task scenarios.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing reasoning mechanisms still struggle to provide planning-oriented intermediate representations: textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fails to preserve continuous spatiotemporal structure, while latent world reasoning remains difficult to use as a direct condition for action generation. In this paper, we propose CoWorld-VLA, a multi-expert world reasoning framework for autonomous driving, where world representations serve as explicit conditions to guide action planning. CoWorld-VLA extracts complementary world information through multi-source supervision and encodes it into expert tokens within the VLA, thereby providing planner-accessible conditioning signals. Specifically, we construct four types of tokens: semantic interaction, geometric structure, dynamic evolution, and ego trajectory tokens, which respectively model interaction intent, spatial structure, future temporal dynamics, and behavioral goals. During action generation, CoWorld-VLA employs a diffusion-based hierarchical multi-expert fusion planner, which is coupled with scene context throughout the joint denoising process to generate continuous ego trajectories. Experiments show that CoWorld-VLA achieves competitive results in both future scene generation and planning on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark, demonstrating strong performance in collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy. Ablation studies further validate the complementarity of expert tokens and their effectiveness as planning conditions for action generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/CoWorld-VLA.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are effective robot action executors, but they remain limited on long-horizon tasks due to the dual burden of extended closed-loop planning and diverse physical operations. We therefore propose VLAs-as-Tools, a strategy that distributes this burden across a high-level vision language model (VLM) agent for temporal reasoning and a family of specialized VLA tools for diverse local physical operations. The VLM handles scene analysis, global planning, and recovery, while each VLA tool executes a bounded subtask. To tightly couple agent planning with VLA tool execution in long-horizon tasks, we introduce a VLA tool-family interface that exposes explicit tool selection and in-execution progress feedback, enabling efficient event-triggered agent replanning without continuous agent polling. To obtain diverse specialized VLA tools that faithfully follow agent invocations, we further propose Tool-Aligned Post-Training (TAPT), which constructs invocation-aligned training units for instruction following and adopts tool-family residual adapters for efficient tool specialization. Experiments show that VLAs-as-Tools improves the success rate of $π_{0.5}$ by 4.8 points on LIBERO-Long and 23.1 points on RoboTwin, and further enhances invocation fidelity by 15.0 points as measured by Non-biased Rate. Code will be released.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are effective robot action executors, but they remain limited on long-horizon tasks due to the dual burden of extended closed-loop planning and diverse physical operations.

Achieving reliable robotic manipulation, such as dexterous grasping, requires a synergy between physically stable interactions and semantic task guidance, yet these objectives are often treated as separate, disjoint goals. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate dexterous grasping techniques, i.e., physically stable grasps for object lifting and language-guided grasp generation, to achieve both physical stability and semantic understanding. To this end, we propose SECOND-Grasp (SEmantic CONtact-guided Dexterous Grasping), a unified framework that enables robotic hands to dynamically adjust grasping strategies based on semantic reasoning while ensuring physical feasibility. We begin by obtaining coarse contact proposals through vision-language reasoning to infer where contacts should occur based on object properties, followed by segmentation to localize these regions across views. To further ensure consistency across multiple viewpoints, we introduce Semantic-Geometric Consistency Refinement (SGCR), which refines initial contact predictions by enforcing semantic consistency across views and removing geometrically invalid regions, yielding reliable 3D contact maps. Then, we derive a feasible hand pose for each contact map via inverse kinematics, generating a supervision signal for policy learning. Our approach, trained on DexGraspNet, consistently outperforms baselines in lifting success rate on both seen and unseen categories, achieving 98.2% and 97.7%, respectively, while also improving intent-aware grasping by 12.8% and 26.2%. We further show promising results on additional datasets and robotic hands, including Shadow Hand and Allegro Hand.

Achieving reliable robotic manipulation, such as dexterous grasping, requires a synergy between physically stable interactions and semantic task guidance, yet these objectives are often treated as separate, disjoint goals.

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges. A key difficulty is that standard task rewards supervise task success, but offer limited guidance on whether a visual change is task-irrelevant or changes the behavior required for manipulation. We propose PAIR-VLA (Paired Action Invariance & Sensitivity for Visually Robust VLA), an RL fine-tuning framework to address this difficulty by adding two auxiliary objectives over paired visual variants during PPO optimization: an invariance term that reduces the discrepancy between action distributions for a task-preserving pair (e.g., different distractors), and a sensitivity objective that encourages separable action distributions for a task-altering pair (e.g., target object in a different pose). Together, these objectives turn visual variants from mere observation diversity into behavior-level guidance on policy responses during RL fine-tuning. We evaluate on ManiSkill3 across two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$, under diverse out-of-distribution visual shifts including unseen distractors, texture changes, target object pose variation, viewpoint shifts, and lighting changes. Our method consistently improves over standard PPO, achieving average improvements of 16.62% on $π_{0.5}$ and 9.10% on OpenVLA. Notably, ablations further show generalization across visual shifts: invariance guidance learned from distractor and texture variants transfers to target-pose and lighting shifts, while adding sensitivity guidance on target-pose variants further improves robustness to nuisance shifts, highlighting the broader transferability of behavior-level RL guidance.

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges.

Density estimation in high-dimensional settings is an important and challenging statistical problem.Traditional methods based on kernel smoothing are inefficient in high dimensions due to the difficulties in specifying appropriate location-adaptive kernels. In this work, we introduce pre-training, a key idea behind many cutting-edge AI technologies, to the context of non-parametric density estimation. By establishing a pre-trained neural network that can recommend an appropriate location-adaptive kernel for each sample point, efficient density estimation with adaptive kernels is achieved in high dimensions. A wide range of numerical experiments show that this strategy is highly effective for improving density-estimation accuracy, when the target distribution is close to the distribution family for pre-training. When the target distribution is substantially different from the pre-training distribution family, the benefit from the proposed pre-training strategy may be diluted, but can be reactivated by an additional fine-tuning procedure.

Density estimation in high-dimensional settings is an important and challenging statistical problem.Traditional methods based on kernel smoothing are inefficient in high dimensions due to the difficulties in specifying appropriate location-adaptive kernels.

Building generalist robot policies that can handle diverse tasks in open-ended environments is a central challenge in robotics. To leverage knowledge from large-scale pretraining, prior work (VLA) has typically built generalist policies either on top of vision-language understanding models (VLMs) or generative models. However, both semantic understanding from vision-language pretraining and visual dynamics modeling from visual-generation pretraining are crucial for embodied robots. Recent unified models of generation and understanding have demonstrated strong capabilities in both comprehension and generation through large-scale pretraining. We posit that robotic policy learning can likewise benefit from the combined strengths of understanding, planning, and continuous future representation learning. Building on this insight, we introduce UniJEPA, which acquires the ability to dynamically model high-dimensional visual features through pretraining on over 1M internet-scale instructional manipulation videos. Subsequently, UniJEPA is fine-tuned on data collected from the robot embodiment, enabling the learning of mappings from predictive representations to action tokens. Extensive experiments show our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods in terms of 9\% and 12\% across simulation environments and real-world out-of-distribution tasks.

Building generalist robot policies that can handle diverse tasks in open-ended environments is a central challenge in robotics.