Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study
Authors: Alfarizy Alfarizy, Hung Truong Thanh Nguyen, René Richard, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Hung Cao
First: 2026-06-19T13:45:45+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T17:35:35+00:00
Comments: 18 pages, 7 tables, 4 figures. Submitted to FAIEMA 2026. Code available at https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/edge-moe
Abstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through llama$.$cpp, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching llama$.$cpp to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.
Summary / 总结
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference.
The Illusion of Equivalency: Statistical Characterization of Quantization Effects in LLMs
Authors: Baha Rababah, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Carson K. Leung
First: 2026-07-09T17:35:02+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T17:35:02+00:00
Abstract
Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity. We show that these metrics fail to capture behavioral changes induced by quantization. We introduce correctness agreement, a decision-level metric that measures overlap in correct predictions between a base model and its quantized variants, independent of absolute accuracy. Across multiple models and quantization schemes from 8-bit to 2-bit, we find that behavioral divergence emerges under moderate quantization even when task performance appears preserved. To explain this effect, we analyze quantization as a structural operator on attention weights and quantify layer-wise distortions using statistical and distributional measures. Our results reveal non-linear breakpoints at low bit-widths and show that query and key projections are consistently more sensitive than value and output projections. These findings expose an illusion of equivalence between base and quantized models and motivate behavioral evaluation beyond conventional performance metrics.
Summary / 总结
Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity.
Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization
Authors: Zeyuan Ding, Wenhai Liu, Yang Xu, Jiayu Hu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Jian Tang, Xiaozhu Ju
First: 2026-07-07T17:50:22+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T16:46:08+00:00
Abstract
In this report, we present Pelican-VLA 0.5, a unified VLA model that integrates vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction within a single architecture. Pelican-VLA 0.5 achieves attention-level generalization: without object annotations, segmentation masks, attention supervision, or task-specific fine-tuning, its action pathway already focuses on the manipulation-relevant object and contact region. This behavior persists across unseen scenes and unseen robot embodiments, and is substantially stronger than in other open-source VLA baselines. We verify that this ability originates from the learnable Bottleneck Token inserted between perception and action: by routing task-relevant visual information through a compact bottleneck, the tokens interface induces manipulation-centric attention during pre-training and remains effective across different policy structures, including a MoT-style architecture.
Summary / 总结
In this report, we present Pelican-VLA 0.5, a unified VLA model that integrates vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction within a single architecture.
FabriVLA: A Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model for Precise Multi-Task Manipulation
Authors: Shiyuan Yang, Borong Zhang, Jizheng Zhang, Zhijia Tao, Junfei Guo, Donglai Ran, Xu Bian, Qingbiao Li
First: 2026-07-09T15:06:43+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T15:06:43+00:00
Abstract
We present FabriVLA, a lightweight Vision-Language-Action model for Precise Multi-Task Manipulation. FabriVLA combines an InternVL3.5 vision-language backbone with a flow-matching action head featuring gated self-attention across action tokens and shallow VLM layer fusion for enriched spatial context. The model is trained via single stage joint optimization from a pretrained VLM and randomly initialized action head. On the Meta-World MT50 benchmark spanning 50 diverse manipulation tasks, FabriVLA achieves a tier-average success rate of 90.0%, demonstrating that a compact VLA built on a 1B scale VLM can achieve strong performance without relying on multi billion parameter VLA backbones.
Summary / 总结
We present FabriVLA, a lightweight Vision-Language-Action model for Precise Multi-Task Manipulation.
ESBMC-Arduino: Closing the Deployment Gap for Formal Verification of Open-Hardware PLCs
Authors: Pierre Dantas, Lucas Cordeiro, Waldir Junior
First: 2026-07-09T14:42:15+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T14:42:15+00:00
Comments: 21 pages
Abstract
OpenPLC, Arduino OPTA, CONTROLLINO, and Industrial Shields M-Duino bring IEC 61131-3 to low-cost microcontrollers used in real automation and industrial control system (ICS) security research. Existing open-source verifiers for IEC 61131-3, including ESBMC-PLC, prove safety over an abstract scan-cycle model with idealized unbounded integers. The board artifact runs on a resource-constrained microcontroller unit (MCU) with 16-bit words (8-bit AVR Arduinos), and sensors are read via a finite-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC). We show this deployment gap makes naive width-aware verification unsound: across 123 real programs, checking 16-bit overflow without a hardware input model yields 44% false alarms (54/123) and finds no genuine defects, because it explores sensor values no ADC can produce. Since the gap lies where computation meets the physical process - a bounded sensor reading scaled by finite-width arithmetic into an actuation command - an overflow can silently suppress a safety action, such as a high-level alarm. An unbounded input model fabricates alarms that no environment can trigger. We present hardware-faithful verification for IEC 61131-3 on open hardware: a declarative hardware abstraction layer (HAL) descriptor (width, ADC/PWM resolution, I/O binding) and a sound lowering that interprets arithmetic at target width and constrains inputs to hardware-realizable ranges. We instantiate it for Arduino as ArduinoTool, deriving HAL parameters from official cores and realizing the input-range model in the ESBMC Ladder Diagram (LD) frontend. On the 123-program corpus, the HAL annotator eliminates all 54 false alarms while preserving robustness proofs, and a controlled corpus demonstrates the rare width-dependent defects it detects with realizable witnesses.
Summary / 总结
OpenPLC, Arduino OPTA, CONTROLLINO, and Industrial Shields M-Duino bring IEC 61131-3 to low-cost microcontrollers used in real automation and industrial control system (ICS) security research.
Early to Share, Late to Save: Synchronisation-Driven Communication Gating in Bandwidth-Constrained Cooperative VLN
Authors: Arav Gupta, Nivedan Yakolli, Avinash Gautam
Venue: IJCAI 2026
First: 2026-07-09T14:00:17+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T14:00:17+00:00
Comments: Accepted at the IJCAI 2026 GLOW Workshop. To appear in Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS)
Abstract
Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods assume unlimited communication, not considering real-world applications where bandwidth is restricted and information efficiency is critical. We introduce \textbf{bandwidth-constrained cooperative VLN} and propose \textbf{hindsight gating}: a lightweight supervised gate that labels communication-critical steps post-hoc from navigation failures, avoiding the high variance of REINFORCE. Contrary to the intuition that agents should communicate when uncertain, we observe a consistent counter-intuitive pattern: trained gates fire predominantly in early episode steps and more often when agents are confident, across all budget levels ($B \in \{1,3,5\}$). We explain this through \textbf{recurrent hidden-state alignment}: early communication injects grounded trajectory representations that persist and compound through subsequent Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) updates, achieving $+0.072$ cumulative alignment gain with $B{=}3$ transmissions, approaching unconstrained communication ($+0.078$) at 260\% greater alignment efficiency than random gating ($+0.020$) and 320\% greater efficiency than entropy-based gating ($+0.017$). Our results establish a new communication regime for bandwidth-limited embodied agents: synchronise representations early, navigate independently later. Our codebase is available at: https://github.com/AravG13/bandwidth-constrained-cooperative-vln
Summary / 总结
Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods assume unlimited communication, not considering real-world applications where bandwidth is restricted and information efficiency is critical.
Harness VLA: Steering Frozen VLAs into Reliable Manipulation Primitives via Memory-Guided Agents
Authors: Yixian Zhang, Huanming Zhang, Feng Gao, Xiao Li, Zhihao Liu, Chunyang Zhu, Jiaxing Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Jiyuan Liu, Wenhao Tang, Zhengru Fang, Yi Nie, Changxu Wei, Yu Wang, Wenbo Ding, Chao Yu
First: 2026-07-09T13:08:54+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T13:08:54+00:00
Abstract
Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong local visuomotor skills, but they are trained on in-distribution task trajectories and often fail under deployment perturbations such as semantic retargeting, goal re-binding, spatial-layout shifts, and unstable local contacts. LLM coding agents provide complementary semantic and compositional reasoning, but purely analytic primitives struggle with irregular grasping, constrained placement, and articulated-object interaction. We present Harness VLA, a memory-augmented agentic framework that exposes a frozen VLA as a retryable contact-rich primitive and composes it with a small fixed library of analytic primitives for grounding, staging, transport, navigation, and release. Rather than expanding the skill library, the harness learns the operating range of these fixed primitives from task-specific execution traces, global success rules, and failure models. By lifting semantic re-grounding, non-contact execution, and VLA re-staging to the planner while reserving the frozen VLA for local contact-rich phases, Harness VLA extends pretrained VLAs beyond their original trajectory distribution without finetuning. Across perturbed tabletop, household kitchen, and clean-to-randomized bimanual manipulation, Harness VLA improves over the strongest relevant baselines by 38.6 and 25.4 percentage points on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa365, respectively, and reaches 58.4% on RoboTwin C2R.
Summary / 总结
Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons.
WCog-VLA: A Dual-Level World-Cognitive Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Authors: Xuerun Yan, Zhexi Lian, Nuoheng Zhang, Shiyu Fang, Haoran Wang, Chen Lv, Jia Hu, Binyang Song
First: 2026-07-09T11:49:57+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T11:49:57+00:00
Comments: 20 pages, 7 figures
Abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing methods either lack comprehensive world cognition or suffer from fragmented world foresight, inherently confining these models to reactive driving. To address this limitation, we propose WCog-VLA, a novel dual-level World-Cognitive VLA framework that successfully bridges semantic world forecasting with generative world evolution to achieve proactive autonomous driving. At the semantic level, WCog-VLA unifies world cognition and reasoning by incorporating 3D spatial perception and injecting agent tokens to capture the world dynamics, while concurrently enabling Game-theoretic Chain-of-Thought (Game-CoT) reasoning. At the generative level, we introduce the Aligned Decoupled Diffusion Transformer (ADDT) as a powerful generative world model that synthesizes physically-plausible joint multi-agent trajectories. Through scene representation alignment, ADDT reduces the number of denoising steps required and thus significantly accelerates inference. To facilitate strategic reasoning, we further construct a large-scale dataset featuring 85k Game-CoT annotations. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that WCog-VLA achieves a State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) PDMS score of 92.9.
Summary / 总结
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving.
FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Xueke Zhu, Qingyan Meng, Liutao Yu, Wei Zhang, Zhengyu Ma, Huihui Zhou, Yonghong Tian
First: 2026-07-09T11:17:04+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T11:17:04+00:00
Abstract
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.Existing methods suffer from structural misalignment between global multimodal understanding and sequential action generation, causing jittery trajectories and severe decision latency for long-horizon aerial navigation. To solve this issue, we propose FSD-VLN, a fast-slow dual-system architecture disentangling semantic reasoning and low-latency flight command generation.The framework has two asynchronous branches: a slow stream extracting stable semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language models, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fast stream modeling cross-temporal action distributions to produce consistent flight outputs. We further introduce a time-aware adaptive optimizer to stabilize long-sequence training and reduce gradient oscillation.Large-scale low-altitude simulation experiments show FSD-VLN achieves up to 2X higher navigation success rates on unseen scenes than SOTA methods, while cutting single-action inference delay and total task runtime by over 50%. Our work validates the benefit of decoupled semantic-control modeling and provides a practical paradigm for long-horizon aerial VLN.
Summary / 总结
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs.
SkillPlug: Unsupervised Skill Mining for Few-Shot Adaptation in Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Zi-han Ding, Ziwei Wang
Venue: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 9511-9518, Aug. 2026
First: 2026-07-09T11:02:35+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T11:02:35+00:00
Comments: 8 pages, 8 figures, published to RA-L
Abstract
Learning transferable visuomotor imitation policies that generalize across diverse manipulation tasks and adapt rapidly to new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations remains challenging. Most modern policies are trained end-to-end to map observations directly to low-level actions, offering little explicit structure for reusing and recombining behaviors across tasks and making transfer data-inefficient under limited supervision. We propose SkillPlug, a plug-in framework that augments an existing visuomotor policy with a skill-conditioning module and mines a shared, transferable skill library from raw multi-task demonstrations. SkillPlug learns skills via self-supervised objectives that promote compact, reusable, and non-redundant behavior-level primitives, forming a task-shared prior for compositional control. After skill mining, we keep the learned skills fixed and specialize to unseen tasks by fine-tuning only lightweight router and action head, enabling efficient adaptation without full end-to-end retraining. We evaluate SkillPlug on two simulation benchmarks and on a real robot, and observe that the mined transferable skills consistently improve both multi-task performance and few-shot adaptation. Overall, SkillPlug offers a scalable way to mine reusable skills that improve data-efficient generalization in robotic manipulation.
Summary / 总结
Learning transferable visuomotor imitation policies that generalize across diverse manipulation tasks and adapt rapidly to new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations remains challenging.
TFP: Temporally Conditioned Memory-Fusion Policies for Visuomotor Learning
Authors: Yushen Liang, Yue Peng, Baosheng Jin, Tianluo Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, Shuyi Zhou, Zhuoran Chen, Xinqi Liu, Shenji Wan
Venue: RSS 2026
First: 2026-07-09T09:24:30+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T09:24:30+00:00
Comments: Accepted to the SemRob 2026 Workshop at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2026)
Abstract
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies such as $π_{0.5}$ and OpenVLA perform well on many manipulation tasks, but they are often reactive: the next action is predicted from the current observation, instruction, and proprioceptive state. This assumption breaks down in stage-dependent manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on latent task progress and previous interaction outcomes. We argue that such tasks require not only memory, but dynamics-aware belief updates: the policy should preserve task progress during stable or occluded phases and revise its belief near contact, release, or subgoal transitions. We introduce Temporally Conditioned Memory-Fusion Policies (TFP), a lightweight memory-action framework for VLA backbones. TFP maintains an episode-local task-progress belief with Liquid Time-Constant dynamics and injects the updated belief directly into the flow-matching action decoder through adaptive modulation. This lets temporally accumulated context shape the generated action chunk, rather than serving only as passive history context. With a 3.3B-parameter model, TFP improves the average success rate from \(96.9\%\) to \(98.75\%\) on LIBERO and from \(91.4\%\) to \(93.77\%\) on LIBERO-plus. On the memory-focused MIKASA ShellGameTouch diagnostic, TFP achieves success up to \(75.0\%\). Mechanistic analyses show that write-gain changes near manipulation events are about \(6\times\) larger than far non-event phases, and hidden-state interventions show that the belief causally modulates generated action chunks. These results suggest that compact, event-sensitive memory dynamics can improve VLA policies under occlusion, visual perturbation, and stage-dependent task structure.
Summary / 总结
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies such as $π_{0.5}$ and OpenVLA perform well on many manipulation tasks, but they are often reactive: the next action is predicted from the current observation, instruction, and proprioceptive state.
Training and Evaluating Diffusion Policies with Long Context Lengths
Authors: Abhinav Agarwal, Adam Wei, Taylan Kargin, Michael Zeng, Cole Becker, Arif Kerem Dayi, Pablo Parrilo, Asuman Ozdaglar, Russ Tedrake
First: 2026-06-15T09:19:34+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T08:44:02+00:00
Abstract
Imitation learning has enabled highly-dexterous robotic manipulation from RGB observations. Policies trained with these methods, however, typically condition robot actions on only a short history of observations. These policies cannot solve tasks that require memory and can get stuck repeatedly executing the same failing motions. In this work, we first benchmark policy performance as context length is incrementally increased from short to long, across a spectrum of tasks with varying local stability and memory requirements, and in multiple data regimes. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate context length for Diffusion Policies at this level of detail. Our results challenge prior claims: naively scaling context length is not as brittle as advertised in literature. With an appropriate conditioning method and denoising backbone (UNet+Cross-Attention), single-task policies achieve high success rates on many tasks in the usual data regime even with naive scaling. Next, we propose a training algorithm to jointly train policies at multiple context lengths, further reducing the sample complexity of long-context learning. Finally, we apply our findings to re-evaluate some previously proposed solutions to long-context imitation learning.
Summary / 总结
Imitation learning has enabled highly-dexterous robotic manipulation from RGB observations.
RhyMix: A Lightweight Adaptive Multi-Rhythm Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Sumit Satishrao Shevtekar, Chandresh Kumar Maurya
First: 2026-07-09T08:29:38+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T08:29:38+00:00
Comments: 38 Pages
Abstract
Real-world time series exhibit complex dynamics characterized by multiple simultaneous temporal patterns: short-term fluctuations, periodic seasonal cycles, long-term trends, and irregular abrupt changes. However, many existing forecasting architectures rely on single-path temporal modeling--transformers capture long-range dependencies but smooth local variations, convolutions capture local patterns but have limited receptive fields, and linear models are efficient but cannot capture nonlinear dynamics. To address this, we introduce RhyMix (RHYthm MIXture), a hybrid neural architecture designed around a parallel dual-path modeling paradigm with adaptive gating mechanisms. RhyMix integrates two complementary encoding branches: (i) a Cyclic Path that incorporates explicit seasonal inductive bias through learnable cyclic embeddings, capturing predictable rhythmic patterns; and (ii) a lightweight Multi-Scale Temporal Convolutional Network with Channel Attention Path that employs multi-scale depthwise dilated convolutions to capture temporal dependencies across different receptive fields. A key innovation is the use of adaptive gating at multiple levels: a path gate dynamically combines four specialized forecasting heads (Direct, Trend-Seasonal Decomposition, Local Convolution, and Periodic Fusion) per sample and channel, while a hybrid gate adaptively balances the Cyclic and MSTCN-CA Paths based on input characteristics. This design ensures the model adapts to specific temporal patterns while maintaining linear complexity in sequence length, channels, and prediction horizon. Across extensive benchmarks on 12 real-world datasets for long-term forecasting, RhyMix achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 of 12 datasets. The model remains lightweight (~40K params) with linear complexity and low-latency inference (<5ms),suitable for resource-constrained edge devices and real-time deployment.
Summary / 总结
Real-world time series exhibit complex dynamics characterized by multiple simultaneous temporal patterns: short-term fluctuations, periodic seasonal cycles, long-term trends, and irregular abrupt changes.
LEEVLA: Seeing What Matters in Latent Environment Evolution for Vision-Language-Action
Authors: Qi Lyu, Baicheng Liu, Xudong Wang, Jiahua Dong, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
First: 2026-07-09T07:28:21+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T07:28:21+00:00
Abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to map multimodal inputs to robot actions. However, most existing approaches struggle to cover complex dynamic scenarios due to treating all visual tokens uniformly and reasoning with human-selected factors, which lack mechanisms to emphasize task-critical evidence and ignore underlying factors. To address this issue, we propose LEEVLA, a VLA architecture for seeing what matters in Latent Environment Evolution that explicitly guides the model toward informative regions while preserving the structured evolution of latent world representations. To identify salient and instruction-relevant regions, we introduce drift-guided dynamic prioritization (DGDP), which combines dynamic position prioritization (DPP) with semantic drift guidance (SDG) to guide the VLA agent where to attend during training. On top of this, we introduce structured feature flow generation (SFFG), which models how these prioritized features should evolve in latent space via prototype-to-periphery (P2P) prediction, and a mutual-neighborhood contrastive (MC) loss to maintain topological consistency among neighborhoods. Together, DGDP and SFFG form a task-aware "where-how" training framework. Extensive experiments on VLA benchmarks show that LEEVLA consistently outperforms prior methods, confirming that explicit task-evidence guidance and structured latent reasoning are both crucial for scalable VLA. Our code is available at https://github.com/LyuQi127/LEEVLA.
Summary / 总结
Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to map multimodal inputs to robot actions.
StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling
Authors: Meng Wei, Chenyang Wan, Xiqian Yu, Tai Wang, Yuqiang Yang, Xiaohan Mao, Chenming Zhu, Wenzhe Cai, Hanqing Wang, Yilun Chen, Xihui Liu, Jiangmiao Pang
Venue: ICRA 2026
First: 2025-07-07T17:49:41+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T06:53:43+00:00
Comments: Accepted to ICRA 2026
Abstract
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in real-world settings requires agents to process continuous visual streams and generate actions with low latency grounded in language instructions. While Video-based Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have driven recent progress, current VLN methods based on Video-LLM often face trade-offs among fine-grained visual understanding, long-term context modeling and computational efficiency. We introduce StreamVLN, a streaming VLN framework that employs a hybrid slow-fast context modeling strategy to support multi-modal reasoning over interleaved vision, language and action inputs. The fast-streaming dialogue context facilitates responsive action generation through a sliding-window of multi-turn dialogues, while the slow-updating memory context compresses historical visual states using a 3D-aware token pruning strategy. With this slow-fast design, StreamVLN achieves real-time dialogues through KV cache reuse, supporting long video streams with bounded context size and inference cost. Experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance with low latency, ensuring robustness and efficiency in real-world deployment. The project page is: https://streamvln.github.io/.
Summary / 总结
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in real-world settings requires agents to process continuous visual streams and generate actions with low latency grounded in language instructions.
CoCo-Fed: A Unified Framework for Memory- and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning at the Wireless Edge
Authors: Zhiheng Guo, Zhaoyang Liu, Zihan Cen, Chenyuan Feng, Xinghua Sun, Xiang Chen, Tony Q. S. Quek, Xijun Wang
First: 2026-01-02T03:39:50+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T04:45:42+00:00
Comments: This article contains several errors in theoretical derivation and improper usage of formula notations
Abstract
The deployment of large-scale neural networks within the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture is pivotal for enabling native edge intelligence. However, this paradigm faces two critical bottlenecks: the prohibitive memory footprint required for local training on resource-constrained gNBs, and the saturation of bandwidth-limited backhaul links during the global aggregation of high-dimensional model updates. To address these challenges, we propose CoCo-Fed, a novel Compression and Combination-based Federated learning framework that unifies local memory efficiency and global communication reduction. Locally, CoCo-Fed breaks the memory wall by performing a double-dimension down-projection of gradients, adapting the optimizer to operate on low-rank structures without introducing additional inference parameters/latency. Globally, we introduce a transmission protocol based on orthogonal subspace superposition, where layer-wise updates are projected and superimposed into a single consolidated matrix per gNB, drastically reducing the backhaul traffic. Beyond empirical designs, we establish a rigorous theoretical foundation, proving the convergence of CoCo-Fed even under unsupervised learning conditions suitable for wireless sensing tasks. Extensive simulations on an angle-of-arrival estimation task demonstrate that CoCo-Fed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both memory and communication efficiency while maintaining robust convergence under non-IID settings.
Summary / 总结
The deployment of large-scale neural networks within the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture is pivotal for enabling native edge intelligence.
MambaLIE: Scene Light Intensity-Boosted Low-Light Image Enhancement with State Space Model
Authors: Wanshu Fan, Xiangyu Li, Cong Wang, Kin-man Lam, Xin Yang, Haiyan Zhang, Dongsheng Zhou
First: 2026-07-03T06:46:45+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T02:26:14+00:00
Comments: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. Code: https://github.com/ghfkahfk/MambaLIEcode
Abstract
Images captured by consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, often suffer from low-light degradation due to sensor limitations and imaging pipelines, which degrades visual quality and affects downstream vision tasks. Existing methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have dominated current low-light image enhancement (LIE) due to their excellent ability to model hierarchical features. However, CNNs operate in local receptive fields that cannot model long-range dependencies, while Transformers overcome this problem but incur substantial computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose MambaLIE, a Scene Light Intensity-Boosted Low-Light Image Enhancement method based on a State Space Model (SSM). We first introduce scene light intensity to improve the structural distribution of illumination, which is then gated with the low-light input to guide enhancement. To better model the illumination while maintaining computational efficiency, we propose the Locally Enhanced State Space Model (LESSM) for efficient light enhancement. Our LESSM contains two branches: an SSM branch and a Local Enhanced branch, where the former is used to model the long-range dependencies with linear time complexity, while the latter is used to enhance local feature representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaLIE outperforms state-of-the-art CNN-based and Transformer-based LIE methods on four widely used synthetic benchmarks and five publicly available real-world benchmarks in terms of accuracy, speed, and model size, making it suitable for practical deployment on resource-constrained devices.
Summary / 总结
Images captured by consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, often suffer from low-light degradation due to sensor limitations and imaging pipelines, which degrades visual quality and affects downstream vision tasks.
V-VLAPS: Value-Guided Planning for Vision-Language-Action Models
Authors: Ke Ren, Ali Salamatian, Kieran Pattison, Cyrus Neary
First: 2026-01-02T19:40:34+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-09T00:51:40+00:00
Abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong action priors for robotic manipulation, but their reactive behavior can fail under distribution shift and long-horizon task structure. Recent VLA-guided planning methods improve execution by using pretrained policies to guide tree search, yet node selection still depends heavily on policy priors and visit-count exploration. Consequently, when the policy favors poor actions, the planner lacks a learned value signal to correct this bias. Prior work has shown that VLA representations encode rollout success and failure information, suggesting that they may also support value estimation during planning. We introduce Value-Guided Vision-Language-Action Planning and Search (V-VLAPS), which augments VLA-guided planning with a lightweight value head trained on offline VLA rollouts to predict Monte Carlo returns. These predictions guide Monte Carlo Tree Search in simulation toward higher-value branches. Across five LIBERO suites, V-VLAPS matches value-free planning baseline at the default search budget in aggregate, and analysis shows that many hard failures are root-level timeouts where predicted values are weakly separated. With a larger search budget, V-VLAPS improves over the baseline in all task suites with +6 percentage points on LIBERO-Object and +4 percentage points on LIBERO-10. Our results suggest that VLA representations can support not only failure prediction, but also value-guided planning when search reaches branches where value-based ranking matters.
Summary / 总结
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong action priors for robotic manipulation, but their reactive behavior can fail under distribution shift and long-horizon task structure.
Dynamic Evaluation of Classical and Control-Aware Optimal Trajectory Planning in Robot Manipulators
Authors: Bhanuka Dayawansa, Rohan Munasinghe
First: 2026-07-06T18:26:48+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T20:42:22+00:00
Comments: Accepted at MERCon 2026. To be presented at MERCon 2026. 7 pages, 7 figures
Abstract
Trajectory planning strongly influences tracking accuracy, actuator demand, and overall execution behavior in robotic manipulators. Classical planners such as cubic, quintic, and trapezoidal profiles are widely used for their simplicity and smoothness, yet they remain purely kinematic and ignore system dynamics and control effort during trajectory generation. As a result, nominally smooth trajectories can lead to inefficient nonlinear execution and increased corrective control action. This paper presents a control-aware optimal trajectory planning framework that explicitly incorporates manipulator dynamics and actuator effort within a finite-horizon formulation. A midpoint linearization strategy is introduced to improve approximation accuracy for large point-to-point motions. In contrast to prior comparisons, the proposed approach enables fair, isolated evaluation of trajectory generation effects under identical closed-loop nonlinear execution conditions. To this end, a unified evaluation framework is developed in which all planners are executed under identical nonlinear dynamics, controller structure, and actuator constraints. Simulations on a nonlinear simplified UR5 manipulator show that the proposed approach consistently reduces tracking error, corrective torque, and closed-loop execution cost compared to classical methods, achieving substantial reductions in actuator effort and execution cost across all evaluated scenarios, demonstrating that kinematic smoothness alone does not ensure dynamically efficient execution.
Summary / 总结
Trajectory planning strongly influences tracking accuracy, actuator demand, and overall execution behavior in robotic manipulators.
A Sparse and Truncated State Vector Simulator for Peaked Circuits
Authors: Diogo R. Ferreira
First: 2026-07-08T18:02:03+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T18:02:03+00:00
Abstract
In a class of quantum circuits known as peaked circuits, the goal is to predict the most probable bit string at the output of the circuit. Since these circuits are designed to have a sharp peak in their output distribution, in principle it should be possible to simulate them using a truncated state vector with a limited number of terms, or a fraction of the total probability mass. This approximate simulation can be carried out on a classical computer with a sparse representation that stores only the nonzero amplitudes of the state vector, in contrast to the dense representations that are common in most quantum simulators. For efficiency, all operations on the state vector should be vectorized to the furthest possible extent and, if available, hardware acceleration can also be used. This work describes how these requirements were met in an open-source implementation, and discusses its performance and limitations.
Summary / 总结
In a class of quantum circuits known as peaked circuits, the goal is to predict the most probable bit string at the output of the circuit.
RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies
Authors: Tianxing Chen, Yue Chen, Zixuan Li, Junyuan Tang, Kailun Su, Haoran Lu, Weijie Wan, Baijun Chen, Songling Liu, Haowen Yan, Honghao Su, Zhiyang Dou, Kaixuan Wang, Dandan Zhang, Yunze Liu, Yan Qin, Qiwei Liang, Qiwei Wu, Zijian Lin, Wenwei Lin, Yuran Wang, Minghua He, Tianshu Wu, Ruihai Wu, Jingquan Zhou, Kai-Chong Lei, Haibao Yu, Yuanfeng Ji, Weiyang Jin, Guanyu Lin, Xiaofan Li, Qi Xiong, Renjing Xu, Zhongyu Li, Wenhao Chai, Enze Xie, Ziwei Wang, Yao Mu, Hao Dong, Wojciech Matusik, Mingyu Ding, Wenbo Ding, Ping Luo, Masayoshi Tomizuka
First: 2026-07-05T17:58:02+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T17:48:03+00:00
Comments: Website: https://robodojo-benchmark.com/, Code: https://github.com/RoboDojo-Benchmark/RoboDojo, Leaderboard: https://robodojo-benchmark.com/leaderboard
Abstract
Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities. Many rely on simple, short-horizon, or skill-narrow tasks with limited capability coverage, and are often conducted only in simulation or only in the real world. Simulation enables scalable feedback but misses physical deployment challenges, while real-world evaluation is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to reproduce. We introduce RoboDojo, a unified sim-and-real benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of generalist robot manipulation policies. RoboDojo includes 42 simulation tasks and 18 real-world tasks covering diverse and complementary manipulation capabilities. The simulation benchmark evaluates five dimensions: generalization, memory, precision, long-horizon execution, and open-vocabulary instruction following, while the real-world benchmark exposes policies to challenging physical-world deployment conditions. RoboDojo supports scalable evaluation through heterogeneous parallel simulation in Isaac Sim and provides RoboDojo-RealEval, a reproducible real-world evaluation system with remote cloud access, standardized hardware, scene reset, evaluation protocol, and deployment interface. Together with XPolicyLab, policies can be integrated once and evaluated across simulation and real-world settings with minimal adaptation. We integrate 30 policies into XPolicyLab and evaluate them on RoboDojo, establishing a public leaderboard and systematic analysis of current policy performance. The website is available at http://robodojo-benchmark.com/.
Summary / 总结
Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities.
VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting
Authors: Juyi Lin, Amir Taherin, Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Lei Lu, Guangyu Chen, Taskin Padir, Xiaomeng Yang, Weiwei Chen, Yiqian Li, Xue Lin, David Kaeli, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
First: 2025-07-07T15:30:55+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T17:09:24+00:00
Comments: 12 pages
Abstract
Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language. However, current VLA models suffer from two drawbacks: (i) generation of massive tokens leading to high inference latency and increased training cost, and (ii) insufficient utilization of generated actions resulting in potential performance loss. To address these issues, we develop a training framework to finetune VLA models for generating significantly fewer action tokens with high parallelism, effectively reducing inference latency and training cost. Furthermore, we introduce an inference optimization technique with a novel voting-based ensemble strategy to combine current and previous action predictions, improving the utilization of generated actions and overall performance. Our results demonstrate that we achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art VLA models, achieving significantly higher success rates and 39$\times$ faster inference than OpenVLA with 46 Hz throughput on edge platforms, demonstrating practical deployability. The code is available at https://github.com/LukeLIN-web/VOTE.
Summary / 总结
Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language.
Embedded Blockchain Infrastructure Management (eBIM): A RISC-V-Empowered Hardware--Software Co-Design Framework Towards Trustworthy Blockchain
Authors: Qinglin Yang, Yuan Liu, Yaoyao Zhang, Boya Wang, Zongjian You, Chunming Rong, Zhihong Tian
First: 2026-07-08T16:41:05+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T16:41:05+00:00
Abstract
Blockchain systems are undergoing a fundamental transition from decentralized ledgers for digital assets to general-purpose trust infrastructures for verifiable computation, decentralized physical resources, and automated infrastructure management. Meanwhile, the limitations of the Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) model stem from a common structural problem: outsourcing control of infrastructure to third-party service providers inevitably involves a systemic surrender of trust, flexibility, and data sovereignty. RISC-V, with its open, modular, and extensible design, provides a general-purpose computing foundation for public blockchains that is open, low-level, compileable, verifiable, and scalable. Inspired by the development and characteristics of eSIM, the embedded Blockchain infrastructure management (eBIM) is defined as a software-hardware collaborative paradigm for blockchain infrastructure management with RISC-V. This study aims to provide a comprehensive survey on eBIM supporting research and technologies, to answer the following research questions (RQs): RQ1 What is eBIM? RQ2 How does eBIM work? RQ3 What can eBIM do? By introducing the concept of eBIM, this paper establishes a foundational reference for researchers, hardware architects, and protocol designers in this rapidly evolving landscape, including cryptographic acceleration, trusted execution environments, zero-knowledge virtual machines, and smart contract execution engines. The prospects of the proposed e-BIM and its future research directions are indicated in this paper.
Summary / 总结
Blockchain systems are undergoing a fundamental transition from decentralized ledgers for digital assets to general-purpose trust infrastructures for verifiable computation, decentralized physical resources, and automated infrastructure management.
Dual Latent Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Hongyu Qu, Jianzhe Gao, Xiaobin Hu, Shaohuan Yang, Xinlei Yu, Rui Yan, Wenguan Wang, Xiangbo Shu, Shuicheng Yan
First: 2026-07-08T16:26:06+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T16:26:06+00:00
Comments: Project page: https://github.com/quhongyu/LaMem-VLA
Abstract
Mainstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predict actions primarily from the current observation under a Markovian assumption, thus struggling with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Existing memory-augmented VLAs either expand the observation window or retrieve history from the memory bank as auxiliary policy-side context. However, they leave memory outside the native latent embedding space of VLA reasoning, preventing historical experience from being fluidly interleaved with multimodal reasoning and action formation. To this end, we introduce LaMem-VLA, a latent-memory-native framework that reconstructs historical experience into latent memory tokens and directly interweaves them with VLA reasoning. At its core, LaMem-VLA introduces four coordinated components: (i) a curator that organizes historical experience into two complementary short-term and long-term memory vaults; (ii) a seeker that queries both vaults using the multimodal cognition to retrieve context-relevant evidence; (iii) a condenser that reconstructs the retrieved evidence into compact short-term and long-term latent memory tokens; and (iv) a weaver that injects these memory tokens with the current observation and instruction into one continuous embedding sequence. By representing, retrieving, and consuming historical experience entirely in the same continuous latent space, LaMem-VLA enables memory to directly participate in VLA reasoning and guide action generation under a bounded context. Extensive experiments on SimplerEnv and LIBERO demonstrate the superiority of our LaMem-VLA.
Summary / 总结
Mainstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predict actions primarily from the current observation under a Markovian assumption, thus struggling with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks.
EgoWAM: World Action Models Beyond Pixels with In-the-Wild Egocentric Human Data
Authors: Baoyu Li, Xinchen Yin, Mengying Lin, Yixin Zhang, Danfei Xu
First: 2026-07-08T16:11:37+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T16:11:37+00:00
Abstract
Egocentric human data offers scalable supervision for robot manipulation. However, behavior cloning entangles transferable content like objects, scenes, and task semantics, with non-transferable factors like human morphology, head motion, and behavioral style. We study whether World Action Models (WAMs) provide a better training signal by requiring policies to predict not only actions, but also how the scene evolves. The central question is what world representation best enables human-to-robot transfer. We hypothesize that an effective world target should abstract appearance, capture agent-invariant physical effects, and separate camera motion from environment change. We introduce EgoWAM, a controlled human-robot co-training framework that fixes the policy backbone, action head, and data mixture while varying only the world prediction target, comparing Pixel, DINO, and 3D motion flow. Across three real-world bimanual tasks, WAM co-training scales more effectively with in-the-wild egocentric human data than behavior cloning. Pixel-based prediction transfers weakly, while DINO and 3D flow yield substantial gains: DINO improves out-of-distribution object and scene generalization by up to 4x, and 3D flow improves in-domain performance by 20-30%. More details: https://gatech-rl2.github.io/egowam.github.io
Summary / 总结
Egocentric human data offers scalable supervision for robot manipulation.
Smooth Operator: A Real-Time Sampling-Based Algorithm for Kinematic Hand Retargeting
Authors: Robert Jomar Malate, Erik Bauer, Norica Bacuieti, Stefanos Charalambous, Elvis Nava, Robert K. Katzschmann, Benedek Forrai
First: 2026-07-08T14:50:17+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T14:50:17+00:00
Abstract
Advances in learning-based robotic manipulation, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and Video Action Models (VAMs), heavily rely on high-quality teleoperation data. Their capabilities are strictly upper-bounded by the quality of the underlying human demonstrations. Current gradient-based retargeting algorithms often converge to different local minima, resulting in jitter that affects data quality and teleoperation experience. To address this, we introduce the Sampling-Based Retargeter (SBR), a novel gradient-free retargeting method drawn from the rich literature of sampling-based control and explicitly designed for low-jitter, real-time kinematic retargeting. We evaluate SBR both in simulation and through a rigorous real-world user study involving 18 participants performing 3 complex manipulation tasks. Compared to gradient-based baselines, SBR achieved the highest overall task success rate (54.1%) while significantly reducing operator cognitive fatigue, recording the lowest NASA-TLX workload score (36.4 out of 100). Ultimately, we establish SBR as a highly effective, intuitive retargeter for dexterous manipulation, providing the community with a rigorous benchmarking methodology to guide future retargeting research.
Summary / 总结
Advances in learning-based robotic manipulation, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and Video Action Models (VAMs), heavily rely on high-quality teleoperation data.
EmbodiedGen V2: An Agentic, Simulation-Ready 3D World Engine for Embodied AI
Authors: Xinjie Wang, Liu Liu, Taojun Ding, Andrew Choi, Chaodong Huang, Mengao Zhao, Ziang Li, Jackson Jiang, Chunlei Yu, Shengxiang Liu, Wei Xu, Zhizhong Su
First: 2026-07-08T14:27:31+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T14:27:31+00:00
Abstract
We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable sim-ready environments for embodied intelligence. Sim-ready 3D asset generation has advanced rapidly, yet assembling such assets into policy-ready task environments remains largely manual, limiting scalable closed-loop learning. EmbodiedGen V2 addresses this gap through a unified sim-ready representation that connects cross-simulator assets, interaction affordances, task-driven worlds, large-scale multi-room scenes, and stateful Vibe Coding into a generative, editable, and reusable simulation pipeline. The generated environments support manipulation, navigation, mobile manipulation, cross-simulator deployment, and embodied policy training. In evaluation, the asset pipeline achieves 96.5% human acceptance and 98.6% collision success, and 83.3% of task-driven worlds are directly usable for downstream simulation without manual modification. Online reinforcement learning with generated environments further improves simulation success from 9.7% to 79.8%, and transfers to real robots with task success increasing from 21.7% to 75.0%. These results establish EmbodiedGen V2 as scalable simulation infrastructure for training, evaluating, and deploying embodied policies.
Summary / 总结
We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable sim-ready environments for embodied intelligence.
Initiation Safety: A Missing Dimension in Generalist-Robot Safety
Authors: Zhijin Meng, Francisco Cruz
Venue: RSS 2026
First: 2026-07-08T13:49:06+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T13:49:06+00:00
Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. Accepted to RSS 2026 Workshop on Rethinking Safety for Generalist Robots
Abstract
Safety for generalist robots is usually discussed in terms of motion or dialogue. We argue a third question is missing: should the robot take its first hard-to-undo social action at all, such as a greeting, an uninvited grasp, or stepping into someone's space? We call this initiation authorization. Current frameworks rarely treat it as a separate safety layer. Today's stacks often skip this step: a high engagement score or a confident VLA rollout is treated as permission to act. But seeing a person is not the same as having their consent to be addressed. We frame initiation authorization within generalist-robot safety and contrast it with post-plan VLA guardrails, implementing PAS (probe-authorize-speak) on a doorway humanoid, comparing it with direct-init on logged traces, and proposing a three-condition user study, with open questions on metrics, governance, and where initiation ends and foundation-model generation begins.
Summary / 总结
Safety for generalist robots is usually discussed in terms of motion or dialogue.
Multi-Agent Robotic Control with Onboard Vision-Language Models
Authors: Kajetan Rachwał, Maciej Majek, Bartłomiej Boczek, Jakub Matejczyk, Dominik Matejkowski, Adam Dąbrowski, Tim Seyde, Alexander Amini, Maria Ganzha
First: 2026-07-08T13:37:31+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T13:37:31+00:00
Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, accepted to 24th International Conference on Practical applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS'26)
Abstract
Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic control. Yet, they face significant challenges regarding explainability, generalization, and compute requirements. This paper presents a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture that addresses these limitations by deploying specialized agents on onboard hardware - eliminating dependence on external compute. The system controls a multi-purpose autonomous mobile manipulator in a simulated industrial warehouse, fulfilling five task categories: safety inspection, warehouse maintenance, warehouse search, package quality verification, and responding to human requests. Compact VLMs (3-20B parameters) are used throughout, with fine-tuning applied to improve package inspection accuracy. A novel "Megamind" orchestration agent mitigates context retention issues inherent to long-horizon planning with smaller models. The system was validated in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation using an AMD Ryzen(TM) AI mini PC. Results demonstrate that a fully onboard MAS architecture is a viable, cost-efficient alternative to cloud-dependent deployments, with strong potential for real-world transfer. The simulation environment has been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Summary / 总结
Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic control.
HumAIN: Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation
Authors: Daeun Song, Nhat Le, Jeffrey Chen, Mohammad Nazeri, Amirreza Payandeh, Rohan Chandra, Reuth Mirsky, Ross Mead, Ling Xiao, Xuesu Xiao
Venue: IROS 2026
First: 2026-07-08T12:52:51+00:00 · Latest: 2026-07-08T12:52:51+00:00
Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)
Abstract
Effective social robot navigation requires sensitivity to human behavior, often revealed through subtle skeletal cues like gait and orientation. We present Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation (HumAIN), a novel framework that fuses implicit social cues directly into the planning loop via knowledge distillation. We first employ a transformer-based teacher model that fuses rich multi-modal inputs, including historic images, skeletal keypoints, robot state, and a robot's target goal, to learn robust, human-aware representations for the robot's future trajectory planning. To enable real-time deployment, we then distill this knowledge into a lightweight student model. By optimizing for both trajectory reconstruction and latent feature alignment with the teacher, the student learns to infer complex social dynamics from minimal inputs. Bridging the prediction-planning gap with an efficient distilled architecture, our method enables robots to reason about human behavior in a manner that is adaptive, robust, and socially compliant. We validate HumAIN through extensive experiments, where it improves trajectory prediction metrics by an average of 29.8% across all metrics compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results highlight the benefit of using implicit, whole-body cues to achieve human-like navigation awareness on resource-constrained platforms.
Summary / 总结
Effective social robot navigation requires sensitivity to human behavior, often revealed through subtle skeletal cues like gait and orientation.