Daily Papers Arch&EAI

World models offer a data-driven alternative to traditional simulators for robotics, with applications spanning policy evaluation, improvement, and planning. All of these uses depend on faithful 3D geometry, yet current video-based world models are trained on RGB alone and produce rollouts that look correct frame-by-frame but do not compose into a consistent 3D world. Closing this gap requires progress on two fronts: large-scale 3D supervision for manipulation, and an architecture that can absorb it without disturbing strong pretrained video priors. We introduce a calibration pipeline that combines learned stereo depth with a joint factor graph, pooling all episodes collected from the same physical robot to recover its shared kinematic parameters alongside per-scene extrinsics. Applied to the DROID dataset, this yields DROID-3D, a calibrated 3D dataset providing dense metric depth and recalibrated multi-view extrinsics (achieving <0.7 px reprojection error on 90% of episodes for external cameras). We then train DepthWorld, a Stable Video Diffusion-based world model that jointly predicts multi-view RGB and depth via spatial latent tiling, leaving the pretrained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) unchanged. Depth supervision improves RGB prediction itself by +1.48 dB PSNR over an identical RGB-only baseline at equal training budget, while simultaneously yielding accurate metric depth for downstream geometric reasoning.

World models offer a data-driven alternative to traditional simulators for robotics, with applications spanning policy evaluation, improvement, and planning.

Egocentric human data offer a path to scaling robot learning beyond costly robot demonstrations, yet the embodiment gap makes raw human trajectories a poor supervisory target for control. Our key insight is that, although low-level actions are embodiment-specific, their underlying motion intent can capture task-relevant structure that transfers across humans and robots. We introduce EgoLAP, a VLA pre-training framework that jointly learns from human and robot trajectories through a shared language-based action chain-of-thought. EgoLAP expresses motion intent as structured, temporally abstracted language actions and pairs them with motion-level reasoning grounded in scene geometry, physics, and object affordances. Across extensive real-world and simulated experiments, EgoLAP transfers human experience to robot control more effectively than alternative action representations and reaches 80.1% mean real-world task progress, a 2.3x performance gain over alternative action representations. Motion-level reasoning also outperforms a composite reasoning format that combines subtask, object-box, and visual-trace reasoning.

Egocentric human data offer a path to scaling robot learning beyond costly robot demonstrations, yet the embodiment gap makes raw human trajectories a poor supervisory target for control.

LLM-based agents are increasingly advancing scientific and engineering problem solving, with physics simulation emerging as a challenging yet practical testbed for reproducing complex physical phenomena with application in embodied AI, games and films. As the workhorse of such simulation, a solver computes how the state of a dynamic system evolves over time. Building such solvers requires physical understanding to identify appropriate models, mathematical reasoning to formulate the underlying dynamics, and software engineering to implement them as executable code, yet this capability of LLM agents remains underexplored. To this end, we introduce WorldSolver, a benchmark of 168 simulation tasks derived from physical phenomena in 61 classic computer graphics papers, spanning 7 physical domains. Each task contains a code scaffold that provides a fixed simulation environment for the scene, with the solver implementation left for the agent to complete. Specifically, we evaluate them along three dimensions: Execution Checks for successful execution, Visual Fidelity for reproducing the intended dynamic behavior in the rendered simulation, and Physical Plausibility for physics-grounded verification of the generated dynamics. Experiments on frontier agents reveal that producing executable solvers is difficult itself, and satisfying visual and physical correctness is even harder. GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude-Opus-5 perform comparatively better than the other evaluated agents, yet achieve overall scores of only 48.7% and 46.7%, respectively. WorldSolver is an early step toward agentic solver generation, and we hope it helps drive progress toward agents that can faithfully simulate the dynamic physical world. Code is available at https://github.com/sirujiang/WorldSolver.

LLM-based agents are increasingly advancing scientific and engineering problem solving, with physics simulation emerging as a challenging yet practical testbed for reproducing complex physical phenomena with application in embodied AI, games and films.

This work presents a framework for accelerating transformer-based language models (LMs) on resource-constrained IoT devices. The framework targets compact LMs: BERT-Tiny (B-Ty), MobileBERT (M-Bt), MiniLM (M-Lm), Electra (E-Lt) and DeBERTa (D-Bt) -- selected for their architectural diversity and use in edge inference scenarios. The proposed flow derives lightweight instruction set extensions tailored to the non-obvious computational patterns of these models. In addition, a custom instruction is introduced to accelerate the address generation stage of batch matrix multiplication, achieving a performance improvement of 15.39--21.74% with modest ASIC overheads of 6.79% in area and 2.33% in power. To further enhance performance without incurring additional processor core hardware cost, an optional compiler-directed loop unrolling strategy is employed, trading increased code size for overall reduced execution time. Evaluation on the Synopsys trv32p3f RISC-V core demonstrates inference speedups of up to 2.19x, and FPGA implementation on the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU102 shows a 32.94% area overhead at 75 MHz, whereas the ASIC implementation using the TSMC 28 nm library incurs a 21.08% area overhead while operating at 250 MHz.

This work presents a framework for accelerating transformer-based language models (LMs) on resource-constrained IoT devices.

When learning probabilistic policies from human demonstrations, data-efficient learning and fast adaptations to new scenarios are key requirements. One popular way to achieve intuitive and reliable adaptations is through non-parametric, typically kernel-based, methods. However, existing solutions either fail to account for the geometry of manifolds common in robotics, limiting data efficiency, or, when geometry-aware, provide unreliable uncertainty estimates or require retraining to adapt. We propose a non-parametric approach leveraging geometric priors in scenarios of data scarcity and heteroscedastic uncertainties for probabilistic modeling. We utilize the method to formulate policies based on time or robot state, where non-separable diagonal kernels allow capturing uncertainty relations between degrees of freedom for same-sized in- and outputs. Fast updates, requiring less than 3 ms for a trajectory involving both position and orientation are possible through an optimized formulation. Our approach supports both manifold-valued input and manifold-valued output with large orientation changes. Using task parameterization, adaptation to different object poses is easily possible. We evaluate the approach on a set of toy examples and on real robot manipulation tasks both in autonomous execution and in shared control scenarios.

When learning probabilistic policies from human demonstrations, data-efficient learning and fast adaptations to new scenarios are key requirements.

Network pruning can reduce parameter redundancy in robotic policies. However, generic pruning criteria are tailored for image recognition tasks and commonly designed to preserve weight magnitude, local reconstruction, or language-model likelihood rather than closed-loop action behavior. Directly applying these pruning algorithms to robotic tasks yields unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose Loss-Conditioned Activation-Moment (LCAM) pruning, a training-free method for unstructured pruning of pre-trained robotic manipulation policies. Specifically, we first rank connections using row-normalized weight contribution, activation moments measured on calibration demonstrations, and the sensitivity of output directions to the action-prediction loss. We further design a self-recursive coarse-to-fine procedure: importance is recalibrated after each nested coarse pruning stage, while held-out offline action distortion guides fine-grained budget allocation after a sparsity knee. Our algorithm is free from costly recovery training and simulator rollouts after pruning. Experiments on three LIBERO suites with competitive robotic policies, together with evaluations on OpenVLA, show that LCAM attains competitive performance across a broad range of pruning ratios. Notably, on LIBERO-Object with OpenVLA, our LCAM achieves 84.0% success at 50% unstructured pruning, retaining over 90% of the dense policy's success rate. Promising results on real-world robotic ping pong further demonstrate the effectiveness of our pruning algorithm.

Network pruning can reduce parameter redundancy in robotic policies.

In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of Micro Neural Policies (MNP) to enable safe and robust real-time robotic control on computationally constrained embedded devices. We demonstrate that integrating Evolution Strategy (ES) and Statistical Model Checking (SMC)-based verification for policy search can drastically reduce neural network size without compromising safety and robustness. We conduct a large-scale training and evaluation of MNP on Cartpole and Quadrotor control tasks, varying control frequencies and network architectures. After validating these policies in simulation, we evaluate their deployability through zero-shot transfer to physical systems. Our experiments show that MNP can successfully achieve safe sim-to-real transfer without sacrificing control performance. We then show that the policies' memory footprint, ranging from 0.5 to 7.5 kB, allows deployment on microcontrollers, where they achieve real-time inference latency with under 25 ns of jitter while leaving the chip idle for over 97% of the time for additional workloads. This makes them a highly practical solution for severely resource-constrained robotic systems.

In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of Micro Neural Policies (MNP) to enable safe and robust real-time robotic control on computationally constrained embedded devices.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by using a lightweight draft to propose multiple tokens for parallel verification. However, existing methods often require an additional draft model or weight representation, introducing non-negligible memory overhead on resource-constrained devices. Self-speculative approaches reduce this overhead, yet still face trade-offs between draft quality, target quality, and storage efficiency. We propose BitNest, a bit-nested speculative decoding framework that embeds a low-precision draft directly into the higher-precision target representation. Instead of deriving a draft from a predefined target, BitNest first constructs a strong low-precision base and then recovers the higher-precision target through residual refinement, enabling both models to share a single physical weight representation. BitNest further extends this progressive-precision design to the KV cache for long-context inference. Across multiple 7B--8B edge-friendly LLMs and diverse workloads, BitNest achieves an average speculative acceptance rate of 95.2% while closely preserving higher-precision model quality, and delivers 1.48--1.61x end-to-end speedup over FP16 autoregressive decoding. On the LLaMA models supported by all representative self-speculative baselines, BitNest also achieves consistently competitive or higher decoding speedup.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by using a lightweight draft to propose multiple tokens for parallel verification.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation and ground-mobile navigation, yet language-conditioned control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in smart warehouses remains largely unexplored, hindered by the lack of benchmarks that jointly provide continuous low-level flight actions, fine-grained natural-language target descriptions, and realistic industrial environments. This paper introduces WareFly-VLA, a photorealistic UAV VLA framework and dataset for language-guided human search, localization, and tracking in warehouse environments. It contains 507 human-teleoperated flight episodes and 8,504 high-resolution RGB transitions collected in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, each paired with a human-written appearance description of the target worker and a synchronized four-degree-of-freedom control command. Two aerial tasks are covered: target approach and person following, under occlusion, long-range search, altitude variation, and clutter. A unified benchmark of four open-source VLA architectures (SmolVLA, GR00T N1.7, pi_0 and OpenVLA) is established under a leakage-free episode-level protocol at two control rates. The results show that language-conditioned aerial control in warehouses is far from solved: performance drops substantially under strict generalization settings, continuous action modeling consistently outperforms discrete action tokenization, only the forward channel is reliably learnable from a single frame, and current foundation-model interfaces transfer poorly from ground and humanoid embodiments to aerial platforms. The synchronized video, language, action, pose, and difficulty annotations further support world-model research. The dataset, baselines, and evaluation protocol are released to support language-grounded aerial autonomy in smart warehouses.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation and ground-mobile navigation, yet language-conditioned control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in smart warehouses remains largely unexplored, hindered by the lack of benchmarks that jointly provide continuous low-level flight actions, fine-grained natural-language target descriptions, and realistic industrial environments.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly invoke inference to control robots, making graphics processing unit (GPU) energy a recurring cost of task execution. Reducing energy per inference call, however, may not reduce energy per successful task if numerical errors increase failures or slower inference prolongs execution. We therefore target GPU energy per successful task while preserving task success and keeping the inference-latency increase within 10\%. Our approach builds on two observations: quantization sensitivity varies across action classes, model layers, and weights versus activations; and numerical precision changes the workload, shifting favorable GPU operating points. We introduce ActTune, an action-aware framework that connects layer-wise precision allocation with workload-dependent GPU operating-point selection over requested frequency--power-cap pairs. A lightweight decision tree learns its splits and leaf precision configurations directly from configuration action errors, then selects precision before each policy call. The controller forecasts the next workload and applies the selected GPU operating point asynchronously using a lookup table calibrated under a latency budget. A shared resident quantized weight bank enables configuration switching without weight reconstruction or additional policy evaluations. On LIBERO, a benchmark for lifelong robot learning, ActTune improves mean task success by up to 2.3\% relative to state of the art. Relative to the original BF16 implementations, it delivers up to $2.02\times$ faster inference and, with GPU operating-point adaptation, reduces energy per successful task by up to 76.8\%.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly invoke inference to control robots, making graphics processing unit (GPU) energy a recurring cost of task execution.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies infer grasp actions primarily from visual observations and robot state, but do not explicitly represent the physical response observed after contact. We present MIM-VLA, a motor-feedback-based architecture that encodes recent gripper current, position, velocity, and signal validity as a 128-dimensional interaction token. A motor-only Motor Interaction Module (MIM) is pretrained with human-reviewed contact and interaction-phase labels and then conditions only the gripper-action pathway of SmolVLA; arm actions and the position-control interface remain unchanged. The same token supports the MEM selector VLM that compares candidate interactions and produces evidence-conditioned selections and explanations. We evaluate MIM-VLA in three real-world settings: comparing the interaction resistance of visually different objects, disambiguating visually similar real and replica objects through active probing, and gently grasping fragile objects, including held-out instances. Across 13 object pairs, MIM-VLA selects the higher-resistance object in 75.0% of trials, compared with 48.8% for the SmolVLA baseline. For the evaluated tasks, the approach uses motor feedback already available from the gripper and does not require an additional tactile array, force-torque sensor, calibrated force estimate, or direct current control.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies infer grasp actions primarily from visual observations and robot state, but do not explicitly represent the physical response observed after contact.

Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Ternary LLMs mitigate these demands through weight quantization via ternary values, achieving significant compression often with 50-90% sparsity. However, existing approaches have limitations: methods optimized for ternary weights, such as BitNet, redundant segment reduction (RSR), and its improved version RSR++, do not exploit sparsity structures, while conventional sparse formats neglect ternary characteristics, foregoing dual optimization opportunities. In this paper, we introduce Sparse Segment Reduction (SSR), a ternary matrix multiplication method designed to accelerate the inference of ternary LLMs and general Ternary Weight Networks (TWNs). SSR has a dedicated optimized ternary data format and an algorithm that systematically exploits sparsity patterns through computation trees that scale with the sparsity. SSR provides theoretical gains with asymptotically faster inference than RSR++ for sparsity above 50%, while practical evaluations reveal performance improvements across all sparsity levels. Evaluation results show that SSR achieves 2.1-11.3x speedup over RSR++ on ternary GEMM with 45-95% sparsity. Furthermore, SSR achieves 3.5-6.3x end-to-end speedup and 4.9% of memory saving over RSR++ on the Llama-3 1B model inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained hardware.

Reinforcement learning can improve vision-language-action (VLA) policies beyond supervised fine-tuning, although this typically involves further updates to the policy parameters. For flow-matching policies, iterative action generation provides an additional opportunity to incorporate task information during inference. We introduce Guided Action Flow (GAF), which learns a compact, observation-conditioned action-value critic from robot task rollouts and applies its action gradient to steer reverse-time flow sampling. The supervised-fine-tuned VLA remains frozen throughout critic learning and deployment. Physical-robot experiments show an increase in aggregate success from 60.0% to 82.5% across six nominal manipulation tasks. Under six altered-lighting and object-distractor conditions evaluated on three of these tasks, aggregate success improves from 34.2% to 49.2%. Ablations and rollout analyses support the importance of the learned guidance direction and the critic's visual and proprioceptive inputs. With approximately 2.735M trainable critic parameters alongside a 0.45B-parameter VLA, GAF enables task outcomes to inform action generation through a compact inference-time guidance module.

Reinforcement learning can improve vision-language-action (VLA) policies beyond supervised fine-tuning, although this typically involves further updates to the policy parameters.

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised concerns over the privacy of data collected by resource-constrained sensing devices. Homomorphic encryption (HE) addresses this by letting a device encrypt its data once and an untrusted cloud server compute on the ciphertext without seeing the values. In practice, HE's memory and computational cost have kept it out of reach of microcontroller-class devices. Prior work, SEAL-Embedded, made this feasible using CKKS, but left three gaps: its arithmetic is entirely scalar, even on hardware with a vector instruction set; it never decrypts on the device, so the client cannot consume a result; and it does not explore BFV, whose encoding uses only integer arithmetic and decrypts exactly. We present Zeppelin, the first HE library to use an embedded vector instruction set, the first to support both encryption and decryption on an embedded device, and the first BFV implementation on MCU-class hardware. Zeppelin vectorizes the number-theoretic transform, HE's main bottleneck, for ARM's Helium extension, and includes a decryption procedure that avoids large-integer arithmetic and timing leakage of the secret key. A server-side adapter converts Zeppelin's ciphertexts into a format compatible with Microsoft SEAL, so the device handles encryption and decryption while the server performs all homomorphic computation. On an STM32N6 MCU with an ARM Cortex-M55, Zeppelin encodes and encrypts 4096 packed values in 4.76 ms (seeded symmetric, 128-bit security per the HE standard) and decrypts and decodes the result in 5.38 ms, using under 500 KB of RAM, with the vectorized NTT engine ${\sim}2.7\times$ faster than an equivalent scalar implementation on the same core.

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised concerns over the privacy of data collected by resource-constrained sensing devices.

Pervasive intelligent applications are increasingly deployed on mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices. Consequently, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support these applications. Yet, due to their high resource demands, LLMs are mostly deployed in the cloud. Layer-wise edge-cloud inference lets resource-constrained edge devices contribute computation to LLMs they cannot host in full. However, heterogeneous split points introduce two coupled inefficiencies. First, edge execution and communication create idle gaps between cloud invocations. Second, requests arriving at different model depths cannot be conventionally batched. We present DySCo, a collaborative runtime that keeps KV caches local and introduces dyForward, a model-aware layer-range executor that runs configurable contiguous layer ranges from resident model shards without reloading weights. For multi-edge serving settings, we introduce depth-synchronized batching (DSB), which advances heterogeneous requests to the deepest cut and batches their common suffix. Experiments across heterogeneous devices, two model families, and local and wide-area links show that idle gaps increase the latency of subsequent GPU forward calls even when waiting time is excluded, adding up to 25 ms of additional cloud-side suffix latency per decoding step in our measurements. At an average concurrency of eight, DSB improves throughput by 275% over FIFO, 48% over exact-match batching, and 79% over round-robin interleaving while reducing mean per-session latency. Together, these results show that requests with different edge-cloud splits can reuse resident cloud weights and share batched suffix computation. The artifact repository for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/Large-scale-Sustainable-Computing-LSC/dysco-artifact

Pervasive intelligent applications are increasingly deployed on mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices.

Portable mobile-manipulation demonstrations can help alleviate data scarcity for embodied intelligence, but obtaining reliable, low-cost, and robot-free motion supervision from RGB observations remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on teleoperation or specialized devices equipped with additional sensing hardware, while directly using estimated visual odometry (VO) trajectories can introduce inconsistencies due to accumulated drift and imperfect motion supervision. We present the Visual-Odometry-Conditioned Mobile Manipulation Interface (VOMMI), a portable demonstration collection and learning framework that connects portable RGB demonstrations to vision-language-action (VLA) post-training through offline trajectory reconstruction and online visual-motion conditioning. VOMMI synchronizes body and hand views to capture navigation context and local object interactions without requiring human-robot kinematic correspondence calibration. R2-VO refines offline demonstration trajectories using sparse geometric anchors and produces causal local-motion tokens over multiple prediction horizons for online policy conditioning. An action-group residual adapter incorporates these tokens only into the base branch. Experiments use a 500-trajectory portable for each task, with 75 trajectories held out for RGB-VO evaluation, and 200 robot demonstrations as references. Our policy, post-trained only on portable demonstrations, achieves 18.2% lower base-velocity error than a policy trained with robot-collected demonstrations, while maintaining comparable end-effector translation accuracy. Offline reconstruction reduces absolute trajectory errors for the body and hand streams by 24.6% on average relative to the best evaluated baseline for each stream. The complete system improves the mean success rate by 8.3 percentage points over OpenPI 0.5 across three real-robot tasks.

Portable mobile-manipulation demonstrations can help alleviate data scarcity for embodied intelligence, but obtaining reliable, low-cost, and robot-free motion supervision from RGB observations remains challenging.

Can changing only the language instruction redirect a VLA policy's end effector, or does the visually driven motion prior dominate? We present Atomic Motion Coordinate, a geometry-grounded coordinate for steerable and force-responsive manipulation. Each arm owns thirteen signed translation, rotation, and hold atoms grounded from text and forward kinematics with vision withheld, and the coordinate is injected into every action-expert block via weighted codebook alignment. Contact history modulates the same coordinate through a bounded spherical residual that is recomputed from a fixed nominal latent to regenerate only the unexecuted horizon suffix. Across 7,520 offline horizon interventions, opposite-atom separation reaches 92.5/83.1% (single/dual) versus 39.1/24.0% for LA4VLA-style. Across 50 real-robot trials per task, AMC raises OOD fruit progress from 60.5% to 87.8%; force adaptation raises Plug/Vase from 59.0/71.5% to 78.5/75.2%.

Can changing only the language instruction redirect a VLA policy's end effector, or does the visually driven motion prior dominate?

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a central paradigm for robot policy learning, which predict actions in three forms: raw action chunks, discrete action tokens, or continuous action latents. However, existing action representations primarily model action trajectories, with limited consideration of the visual dynamics induced by these actions. We introduce ViDAL, a Visual Dynamics-grounded Action Latent Space that anchors continuous action latents in the future visual dynamics of the scene. Specifically, ViDAL learns action latent space by training an Action Variational Autoencoder (Action VAE) to reconstruct action chunks while aligning its latent with future scene dynamics. When integrated into downstream robot policies, the proposed Action VAE serves as a plug-in action interface compatible with multiple VLA architectures and enables optional future-video prediction as an additional capability. Empirically, ViDAL outperforms competitive baselines on LIBERO with 98.1% average success, improves a multi-task $π_{0.5}$ policy on RoboTwin 2.0 from 54.3% to 65.5% (Clean) and from 33.2% to 43.1% (Random) success rates over 50 dual-arm tasks, and yields 20.0% and 23.4% absolute success-rate gains on real-world single-arm Franka and dual-arm ARX robot platforms.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a central paradigm for robot policy learning, which predict actions in three forms: raw action chunks, discrete action tokens, or continuous action latents.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong robotic manipulation performance but incur high computational costs from processing long token sequences at every control step, limiting real-time deployment. Visual token pruning offers a direct solution, as visual patches dominate the input sequence and contain considerable redundancy. Existing approaches, however, either rely on indirect training-free heuristics, such as attention scores and motion thresholds, or require costly fine-tuning of the base VLA model. We introduce VLA-ACL (Action Consistency Learning), which learns a lightweight visual token pruning policy through action-level supervision while keeping the base VLA model entirely frozen. The training objective encourages actions produced from pruned visual contexts to remain consistent with the full-context teacher, with ground-truth actions as auxiliary supervision. This directly ties token selection to its effect on the downstream control output. Experiments on LIBERO and real-world manipulation tasks show that VLA-ACL prunes up to 87.5% of visual tokens while retaining competitive performance, reduces computation by up to 75%, and achieves a 1.5x inference speedup. These results establish a stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than existing frozen-VLA pruning methods and demonstrate the value of action-level supervision for visual token selection. Code is available at https://github.com/du-owen/VLA-ACL.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong robotic manipulation performance but incur high computational costs from processing long token sequences at every control step, limiting real-time deployment.

The exploration of confined, occluded, and partially known spaces poses significant challenges in robotic manipulation. The overall pose of the robotic arm must be carefully controlled to respect tight geometric constraints while avoiding newly discovered obstacles. We address this problem by proposing an active exploration approach for redundant robotic arms with an eye-in-hand camera configuration. Our approach navigates and acquires information in real-time based on a novel scoring method that directly selects a target voxel from the unexplored space using the robot's current state and expected information gain. To move the robot safely toward the target voxel, we utilize Virtual Model Control, which guarantees compliance and enables whole-body reactive obstacle avoidance without the need for path replanning. Simulated and real-robot experiments in both confined and open environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving over $90\%$ mapping coverage across all tested environments in under $120$ seconds without colliding with obstacles.

The exploration of confined, occluded, and partially known spaces poses significant challenges in robotic manipulation.

A safe action is not necessarily a viable one. A frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policy can favor a locally admissible move that leaves no policy-supported route to safe task completion. We call this the feasibility-likelihood gap: likelihood ranks the next move, while feasibility depends on the futures it leaves open. To bring those futures into the decision, we derive the exact next-block marginal of the history-conditioned policy-environment trajectory law restricted to safe task completion. The derivation reveals a candidate-dependent feasible-future mass: its support records whether safe completion remains possible under the frozen continuation process, while its magnitude measures how much weighted safe-completion mass remains. Since exact evaluation is impractical online, we develop a selective finite-candidate approximation and establish conditions for recovering the best retained viable candidate. Our alarm-triggered, training-free reranker VICS-G lowers mean cumulative safety cost by 1.9%-57.5% across six Safety-CHORES settings while remaining within 2.5 percentage points of policy sampling in success and 0.82 steps in mean episode length. Our approach offers a promising and practical path toward safer task completion, grounded in an exact policy-relative target yet requiring neither policy retraining nor online rollouts.

A safe action is not necessarily a viable one.

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often optimize for semantic grounding, whereas executable manipulation requires geometry-aware spatial alignment. We introduce GeoAlign, a state-guided spatial alignment architecture for VLA policy learning. Offline robot-domain RGB-D supervision post-trains an RGB geometry branch to produce Geometry-Enhanced Post-Trained (GEP) features; the depth head is then discarded, so policy training and rollout use RGB, language, and proprioceptive state. State-generated queries attend to the GEP grid to produce eight compact geometry tokens for action prediction. GeoAlign achieves 99.0% on LIBERO, 85.3% across three SimplerEnv-Fractal task families, and 78.8% on eight real-world ALOHA tasks, with ablations supporting the combined recipe of geometry post-training and state-guided querying on Isaac-GR00T N1.6-3B. Project website: https://chenyizhi123.github.io/geoalign-project/.

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often optimize for semantic grounding, whereas executable manipulation requires geometry-aware spatial alignment.

Scaling robotic foundation models requires diverse training data and reliable evaluation environments. Simulation offers a scalable solution, yet existing generation pipelines remain constrained by predefined assets and skills, a disconnect between scene generation and task generation, and limited support for complex embodiments and physics. We introduce EmbodiedSmith, a framework for scalable embodied data generation through recursive self-improvement (RSI). EmbodiedSmith unifies asset, scene, and task generation in a pipeline that supports autonomous creation and language-driven customization. Its core is an agentic refinement loop: scene generation anticipates downstream task requirements, while task generation guides targeted scene edits, allowing scenes and tasks to iteratively improve one another. This joint refinement improves task generation success, including for long-horizon tasks. The framework further supports mobile manipulators, humanoids, and dexterous hands, as well as interactions involving deformable objects and fluids, broadening the range of behaviors and physical phenomena represented in generated data. Together, these capabilities provide a flexible simulation engine for both robot pretraining and evaluation. Extensive experiments validate the quality, diversity, and generation efficiency of the resulting data, while downstream policy experiments demonstrate that increased data diversity improves generalization.

Scaling robotic foundation models requires diverse training data and reliable evaluation environments.

Video Action Models (VAMs) couple visual dynamics modeling with action generation for robot manipulation. However, video representations are not naturally suited to action generation, as exposing the action policy to excessive visual detail can impair its generalization ability. Therefore, we introduce IronMan (Information-constRained videO-actioN learning for robot MANipulation), a robust video-action learning framework built on the information bottleneck principle. The core principle of this framework is to impose information constraints that suppress irrelevant visual information while preserving action-relevant dynamics cues. IronMan employs a dynamics-aware bottleneck that distills noisy, entangled one-step video features into compact world representations. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong in-distribution (ID) performance and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness while maintaining efficient inference. IronMan achieves success rates of 99.0% on LIBERO and 79.4% on RoboTwin clean2clean, outperforming all the evaluated baselines. Under OOD shifts, IronMan achieves a success rate of 79.1% on LIBERO-Plus, exceeding the strongest baseline by 10.4 percentage points. Project page: https://youngsoul0731.github.io/ironman-project-page/

Video Action Models (VAMs) couple visual dynamics modeling with action generation for robot manipulation.

Action-chunking policies predict multi-step control sequences, but a fundamental question remains: how much of a predicted action chunk should be committed before replanning? Existing systems typically execute a fixed-length prefix, implicitly assuming that the same execution horizon remains trustworthy across states. Some adaptive methods estimate this horizon from the similarity or stability of predicted actions. However, different actions may lead to the same successful outcome, whereas similar actions can produce different futures, suggesting that commitment should be determined by agreement among imagined futures rather than by similarity in action space. To this end, we propose Consequence-Aware Adaptive Action Chunking (CA$^3$C), an inference-time framework built on a simple principle: commit while imagined futures agree, and replan when they diverge. Without modifying or retraining the base policy, CA$^3$C uses an action-conditioned world model to imagine the future consequences of multiple candidate action chunks under the same sampling noise. Using these imagined consequences, we formulate execution-horizon estimation as a Bayesian change-point inference problem and select the execution candidate through future consensus. Across multiple simulation benchmarks and real-world robot manipulation tasks, CA$^3$C consistently improves diverse action-chunking policies, achieving up to a 71.8% relative reduction in failure rate over the corresponding base policies.

Action-chunking policies predict multi-step control sequences, but a fundamental question remains: how much of a predicted action chunk should be committed before replanning?

Visual disruptions can arise while a robot is executing a task, leaving a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to respond without knowing the disruption type or timing. We introduce Self-supervised Adaptation from Leftover Trajectories (SALT), which uses the leftover trajectory, the unexecuted part of the previous action chunk, as self-supervision for test-time adaptation. Because consecutive chunks overlap in time, the leftover provides a temporally aligned target for the current prediction over the same future control interval. At the onset of a visual shift, the leftover can retain a plan formed before the corruption, so updating the policy toward it anchors the adaptation across the shift (Transition Anchoring). SALT keeps the adapted policy and regenerates the current chunk, whose leftover becomes the target at the next replan, carrying the correction forward along the execution trajectory (Sequential Correction Propagation). Supervision comes entirely from the policy's own predictions, requiring no disruption annotations, expert actions, or target-domain demonstrations, and a lightweight adaptation gate calibrated only on nominal trajectories decides when updates begin. On LIBERO-10, SALT increases average success across five persistent visual corruptions from 43.9% to 53.2% with SmolVLA and from 58.7% to 66.0% with GR00T N1.7, while largely preserving nominal performance. On a real robot, it raises task progress averaged over digital and physical disruptions from 0.49 to 0.61.

Visual disruptions can arise while a robot is executing a task, leaving a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to respond without knowing the disruption type or timing.

World Action Models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video foundation models for robot manipulation, but their large backbones and video-action co-prediction are expensive. Although existing acceleration techniques offer many ways to reduce this cost, selecting and composing them requires substantial engineering for each model and hardware platform. To tackle this bottleneck, we present WAMJET, an agentic harness that accelerates WAM inference by equipping coding agents with reusable optimization guidance and measurement and validation tools. WAMJET follows a bottleneck-driven workflow where the agent profiles inference, modifies targeted code, validates effects, and iteratively refines the acceleration stack as bottlenecks shift, while preserving action quality. Experiments span six WAMs, three coding agents, and two GPU architectures. WAMJET achieves up to 9.95x lossless speedup over upstream implementations. Approximation and hardware-aware optimization yield additional latency reductions, with comparable success rates. The results show that WAMJET can produce effective acceleration stacks for WAM deployment.

World Action Models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video foundation models for robot manipulation, but their large backbones and video-action co-prediction are expensive.

Demonstration-conditioned policies provide a natural interface for specifying robot behavior, yet long-horizon manipulation remains difficult when visually similar states recur across different stages or when demonstrations and executions proceed at different speeds. We identify the resulting failure mode as stage confusion and introduce Progress-Aligned Context for Execution (PACE), a stateful method that continually reinterprets a complete demonstration according to realized execution progress. PACE compresses the demonstration into ordered multimodal prompt tokens and uses training-only dual-edge attention supervision to expose its latent stage structure. During execution, an episode-local fast-weight memory causally encodes realized action-observation transitions and modulates prompt cross-attention, producing a progress-aligned context for a unified diffusion action expert without test-time stage labels or stage-specific policies. PACE improves success from 88.9% to 94.0% on LIBERO-Gen Goal Chain, from 79.1% to 83.3% on Spatial Combination, and from 33.3% to 73.3% on the two-step Block Routing tasks. Failure analysis further indicates that structured demonstration alignment and causal execution memory jointly mitigate stage confusion.

Demonstration-conditioned policies provide a natural interface for specifying robot behavior, yet long-horizon manipulation remains difficult when visually similar states recur across different stages or when demonstrations and executions proceed at different speeds.

Successfully manipulating many everyday objects, such as potato chips, requires precise force regulation. Failure to modulate force can lead to task failure or irreversible damage to the objects. Humans can precisely achieve this by adapting force from tactile feedback, even within a short period of physical contact. We aim to give robots this capability. However, commercial grippers exhibit high cost or high minimum force, making them unsuitable for studying force-controlled policy learning with everyday force-sensitive objects. We introduce TF-Gripper, a low-cost (~$150) force-controlled parallel-jaw gripper that integrates tactile sensing as feedback. It has an effective force range of 0.45-45 N and is compatible with different robot arms. Additionally, we designed a teleoperation device paired with TF-Gripper to record human-applied grasping forces. While we can train standard low-frequency policies with the collected force data, achieving reliable performance remains challenging due to the reactive and contact-dependent nature of force-regulated manipulation. To overcome this, we propose RETAF (REactive Tactile Adaptation of Force), a framework that decouples grasping force control from arm pose prediction. RETAF regulates force at high frequency using wrist images and tactile feedback, while a base policy predicts end-effector pose and gripper open/close action. Our experiments show that, compared to position control, direct force control with TF-Gripper improves grasp stability and overall task performance across six real-world tasks. We further show that tactile feedback is essential for force regulation, and that RETAF consistently outperforms baselines and can be integrated with various base policies. We hope this work opens a path for scaling the learning of force-controlled policies in robotic manipulation. Project page: https://force-gripper.github.io .

Successfully manipulating many everyday objects, such as potato chips, requires precise force regulation.

Efficient post-quantum cryptography on resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices requires implementations that exploit the target processor architecture while resisting practical implementation attacks. This paper presents an ISA-accelerated and implementation-hardened realization of Ring Binary Learning with Errors (RBLWE) encryption on a commodity ARM Cortex-M33 microcontroller. Packing four 8-bit polynomial coefficients into the byte lanes of a 32-bit register and processing them with SIMD-style instructions, together with a packed message codec, accelerates encryption and decryption, while a buffered hardware-TRNG entropy source drawn from the on-die Secure Element drives the key-generation gain. Together these give same-core cold-start speedups of $4.06\times$, $3.35\times$, and $3.01\times$ for key generation, encryption, and decryption over a scalar baseline, and $3.52\times$/$3.18\times$ lower encryption/decryption cycle counts than a reference Cortex-M0 implementation. On top of this accelerated core, we add four staged countermeasures: constant-time execution, fault hardening against zeroing, random-corruption, and instruction-skip faults, a Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO)-style CCA2 transform, and first-order shared (masked) CPA decryption, reporting each layer's cost individually. Binary-level inspection confirms these countermeasures survive compilation and identifies a compiler-induced masking flaw resolved with a hand-written assembly replacement. Dudect-style timing tests, debugger-assisted fault-injection campaigns, and component-level TVLA then provide implementation-level evidence for the staged protections. The results demonstrate a practical acceleration-security tradeoff for RBLWE on off-the-shelf microcontrollers and reusable architecture-aware techniques for lightweight post-quantum implementations.

Efficient post-quantum cryptography on resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices requires implementations that exploit the target processor architecture while resisting practical implementation attacks.