Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are gaining attention in autonomous driving, inheriting commonsense priors from large language models (LLMs) and widening the navigation interface from a fixed command set to free-form natural-language instructions. However, this open-ended interface exposes a new vulnerability surface: an inattentive driver may issue instructions that are unsafe given the current scene, and a malicious user may issue dangerous ones on purpose. We present the first benchmark suite that evaluates navigation following and conflict awareness together, along with adversarial robustness. Existing VLAs fall short on both: SimLingo completes no language-instructed lane change in closed loop, and all models degrade sharply under conflicting signals. We propose SafeDriveVLA, the first driving VLA that (1) explicitly predicts a three-level navigation-compliance mode to decouple conflict reasoning from action generation, and (2) uses navigation-conditioned world model dreaming to inform this prediction. Unlike prior world models that roll out expert or planned actions, ours dreams of strictly following the navigation signal, showing when following is safe. SafeDriveVLA reaches 88.16 Driving Score (DS) and 68.64% Success Rate (SR) on Bench2Drive, lifts closed-loop language following by 49.3% and reduces collisions under unsafe instructions from 60 to 38 compared to the best SimLingo variant. Video demonstrations are available on our project page.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are gaining attention in autonomous driving, inheriting commonsense priors from large language models (LLMs) and widening the navigation interface from a fixed command set to free-form natural-language instructions.

This paper rethinks steady-hand robotic manipulation by using a weakly supervised framework that fuses calibration-aware perception with admittance control. Unlike conventional automation that relies on labor-intensive 2D labeling, our framework leverages reusable warm-up trajectories to extract implicit spatial information, thereby achieving calibration-aware, depth-resolved perception without the need for external fiducials or frame-by-frame manual depth annotation. By explicitly characterizing residuals from observation and calibration models, the system establishes a task-space error budget from recorded warm-ups. Under the evaluated laboratory conditions, the recorded trajectories yielded an empirical lateral error level of approximately 49μm and a conservative axial error estimate of approximately 291 μm during large in-plane moves. In a within-subject user study (N=8), the learned agent reduces overall NASA-TLX workload by 77.1% relative to the simple steady-hand assistance baseline. Together, these results demonstrate successful closed-loop micromanipulation and reduced subjective workload under the evaluated laboratory conditions, without external fiducials or frame-by-frame manual depth annotation, supporting the proposed approach as a framework for microscope-guided robotic assistance.

This paper rethinks steady-hand robotic manipulation by using a weakly supervised framework that fuses calibration-aware perception with admittance control.

Long-horizon precise manipulation produces mixed-quality data for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models: even successful demonstrations and intervention-assisted rollouts may contain detours, hesitations, failed attempts, and imperfect recoveries. The key challenge is to identify which action chunks actually advance the task, rather than uniformly cloning or discarding imperfect trajectories. We propose Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning (GR-BC), an offline iterative post-training framework that builds a task-conditioned goal-reachability graph over demonstrations and iteratively collected rollouts, including both successful and failed episodes with human interventions. Reverse graph search computes minimal remaining steps to task success within the dataset support, and each action chunk is weighted by how much its execution reduces this potential. This consequence-based weighting reuses recoverable segments from failed trajectories, leverages interventions as recovery paths, and down-weights locally regressive chunks even inside successful trajectories. New rollouts are incorporated by appending them to the graph and rerunning search, without training a reward model, action-conditioned critic, or progress predictor. Across four precise manipulation tasks and three VLA backbones, GR-BC improves single-round supervised fine-tuning and reaches 91% success after a few offline iterations, without trajectory comparisons or progress labels. More details and videos are available at: https://gr-bc.github.io

Long-horizon precise manipulation produces mixed-quality data for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models: even successful demonstrations and intervention-assisted rollouts may contain detours, hesitations, failed attempts, and imperfect recoveries.

Navigation for humanoid robots is critical, yet large-scale evaluation on physical hardware is often impractical due to cost and safety concerns, making simulation benchmarks essential. Existing VLN benchmarks achieve physically executable navigation, but still assume (1) all hazards are observable from elevation maps; (2) realized motions closely match desired motions. In real environments, however, fallen bottles may be ambiguous in elevation maps, while phones and water spills may be difficult to differentiate; hazard avoidance by the locomotion policy can cause the robot's actual trajectory to deviate from the path intended by the VLN policy. Such command-execution mismatch can accumulate and lead the robot toward unintended locations. To expose these failure modes, we introduce a benchmark that models both elevation-subtle hazards and execution deviations, together with a closed-loop VLN + locomotion control framework that continuously realigns high-level navigation with the robot's actual state. We evaluate navigation in simulation and further validate the locomotion policy on a physical Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Results show that semantic input reduces contact with hazards poorly represented in elevation maps, while anti-deviation improves navigation success. These findings highlight the need to evaluate humanoid navigation jointly in terms of route completion and hazard avoidance.

Navigation for humanoid robots is critical, yet large-scale evaluation on physical hardware is often impractical due to cost and safety concerns, making simulation benchmarks essential.

It has been difficult to accurately model the physics of the interaction between a robot and the objects it manipulates, including contact mechanics, coupled contact dynamics, deformations, stiffness and friction. We present RoboSimStudio (RSS), an interactive toolkit that makes choices of solver, contact model, and physical parameters explicit and editable, allowing both humans and coding agents to quickly create and iteratively refine simulations based on observed physical behavior. We implement RSS with the open Newton physics simulation system and describe experiments with human-guided real2sim using (1) visual evaluation, (2) force-feedback and (3) agentic Real2Sim2Real. Code, video and additional information can be found on the project website: https://robosimstudio.github.io

It has been difficult to accurately model the physics of the interaction between a robot and the objects it manipulates, including contact mechanics, coupled contact dynamics, deformations, stiffness and friction.

Pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) often fail midway through unseen long-horizon tasks. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a remedy, but embodied RSI methods either refine the harness around a frozen executor and so cannot add a missing motion, or train the executor on persistent failures without asking whether a failure lies in how the executor is called or in what it can do. We ask when a self-improving embodied system should change the weights of its executor, and propose AdaRSI, an on-demand RSI framework for embodied agents. A coding agent first improves its skills and harness, then attributes persistent failures by retrying failing sub-steps from saved states, and fine-tunes only the sub-steps that remain unreliable, with demonstrations it collects itself and experience carried over from earlier tasks. On all 50 target tasks of RoboCasa365, with GR00T N1.5 as the executor and no human demonstrations, AdaRSI improves the VLA on all three suites and raises its success on unseen composite tasks from 4.6% to 13.8%. Compared with fine-tuning every sub-step, it reaches slightly higher success while using only 28% of the GPU time and 22% of the self-collected demonstrations, and fine-tuning without a harness trains more yet gains far less.

Pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) often fail midway through unseen long-horizon tasks.

Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to coordinate not only where to move, but also how contact and force should evolve throughout an interaction. Yet most robot policies represent actions primarily as motion trajectories, using tactile signals as inputs or auxiliary prediction targets without explicitly encoding contact dynamics in the action representation. We propose ILA (Interaction Latents as Actions), which uses decodable interaction latents that jointly capture the evolution of motion, contact, and force application as policy action units, providing a shared representation for action generation, evaluation, and offline improvement. We learn these latents through visually conditioned joint action-tactile reconstruction with a time-conditioned implicit decoder. Using them as flow-matching generation targets supports post-training of pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world action models (WAMs), as well as training flow-matching policies from scratch. A shared decoder maps generated latents to executable actions. For offline improvement, we learn a tactile-conditioned expert reference model from interaction latents encoded from expert demonstrations. The resulting expert-consistency rewards guide weighted learning from successful rollouts, while observation-compatible expert references guide correction of low-reward predictions from failed rollouts. Across three policy families, ILA improves success rates averaged over four real-world tasks by 21.0-36.5 percentage points relative to tactile-conditioned direct-action baselines. Ablations highlight the benefit of encoding contact evolution in action targets beyond tactile conditioning, while the same latent space supports expert-guided offline improvement. Project website: https://mrsecant.github.io/ILA/.

Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to coordinate not only where to move, but also how contact and force should evolve throughout an interaction.

Ensuring safety of learning-enabled robotic manipulation across diverse embodiments and tasks still requires significant manual engineering. For collision avoidance, existing approaches typically rely on embodiment-specific learned safety approximations or simplified robot models together with stopping-based fallback controllers that compromise performance. In this paper, we propose an embodiment-agnostic safeguarding approach, X-Safe, which provides formal probabilistic guarantees for collision avoidance without model simplifications or learned safety functions. By operating in the configuration space, our safeguarding method works with different types of robot policies. X-Safe reasons locally around the current configuration to establish safe regions and uses action masking to restrict the policy's support to these safe regions. We demonstrate X-Safe on two embodiments and three policies, both in simulation and on hardware. We observe less than half of the performance degradation compared to state-of-the-art safeguarding, and empirically corroborate our formal collision avoidance guarantees.

Ensuring safety of learning-enabled robotic manipulation across diverse embodiments and tasks still requires significant manual engineering.

Though modern AI models like LLMs predict discrete tokens, today's robotic foundation models represent actions as continuous vectors. In this paper, we challenge this common consensus by asking if continuous action parametrizations are superior to their discrete counterparts. We conduct an extensive comparison of single-step regression and multi-step flow variants of both continuous and discrete policies in both from-scratch single-task and multi-task VLA training, in both simulation and on real hardware. In all regimes, we find that discrete action prediction, even the most naive, uniform-bin quantization, can match or even outperform continuous-action policies in task success rate. Moreover, we find that the challenge to discrete action policies is \emph{not} action precision, but rather factorization error introduced by product-distribution predictions across time and action dimensions. We show that, when paired with the correct interventions---iterative computation through discrete flows, or distribution sharpening through classifier-free guidance---discrete flow policies can turn this weakness into a strength, enabling more responsive action changes during a predicted action chunk. Lastly, we show that attempts to explicitly inject geometric information into discrete policies, e.g. through corruption processes that emulate continuous flow matching, do \emph{not} yield consistent improvements. Taken together, our findings question existing assumptions that robotic action prediction requires distinct design decisions compared to other AI domains, and motivates the possibility of discrete action prediction as a compelling alternative to today's continuous action parametrizations. Link for the webpage \href{https://iscoyizj.github.io/discrete-action-website/}{https://iscoyizj.github.io/discrete-action-website/}

Though modern AI models like LLMs predict discrete tokens, today's robotic foundation models represent actions as continuous vectors.

We develop a self-supervised reinforcement learning algorithm that learns to build towers of up to eight cubes from scratch, without prior data, rewards, demonstrations, or pretrained models. Our method, Contrastive Planning via Spherical Linear Interpolation (C-Slerp), uses contrastive representations as reusable building blocks and repeatedly composes them to infer a sequence of intermediate waypoints. Under our hyperspherical parameterization, the learned representations allow intermediate waypoints to be inferred in closed form through spherical linear interpolation, without training a separate high-level policy or performing graph search. Importantly, the representation geometry also tells us how to adjust the number of waypoints based on the difficulty of each goal-reaching problem. Experiments show that our method succeeds on long-horizon navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, including settings where strong baselines fail to achieve a single success. Ablations further show that using a fixed number of waypoints substantially degrades performance, highlighting the importance of adapting the plan to task difficulty.

We develop a self-supervised reinforcement learning algorithm that learns to build towers of up to eight cubes from scratch, without prior data, rewards, demonstrations, or pretrained models.

Automating biological laboratories requires robots to perform dexterous tool interactions under realistic visual conditions while handling dynamic experimental phenomena, presenting significant challenges for robotic manipulation. To enable systematic evaluation under these conditions, we introduce DexBioLab, a simulation benchmark and framework for dexterous manipulation in realistic biological laboratory environments. DexBioLab comprises 14 tasks across 4 robot embodiments, spanning functional tool use, precision manipulation, language-conditioned visual grounding, and instrument operation. We introduce controllable dynamic experimental phenomena, including flames, vapor, and bubbles, to capture the evolving visual conditions of laboratory procedures. To further enhance environmental realism, we develop a hybrid rendering pipeline that integrates interactive simulated foreground objects with Gaussian-splatting backgrounds reconstructed from 6 real laboratory scenes. For efficient large-scale data generation and evaluation, we further build a parallel simulation framework on top of mjlab, proposing Parallel Finite-State Machine (PFSM) and integrating batched rendering with decoupled trajectory replay for demonstration generation and model-independent closed-loop policy evaluation. Our evaluation reveals substantial variation in policy performance across tasks, exposing distinct strengths and weaknesses of current manipulation policies. Real-world experiments further demonstrate a reduced sim-to-real gap, supporting the validity of AutoBio+ for realistic manipulation evaluation. Supplementary materials are available at https://cumulusalpha.github.io/DexBioLabWebPage.

Automating biological laboratories requires robots to perform dexterous tool interactions under realistic visual conditions while handling dynamic experimental phenomena, presenting significant challenges for robotic manipulation.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation, enabling robots to generate actions from visual observations and language instructions. However, most existing VLA models still operate on image-level visual representations inherited from pretrained vision-language backbones, while lacking fine-grained object understanding for manipulation. As a result, their robustness can degrade under out-of-distribution object layouts, clutter, and background variations. To address these limitations, we introduce ObjDream, an object-centric VLA framework centered on object-level understanding and future object state prediction. ObjDream uses a spatio-temporal object encoder to organize visual observations into temporal object slots, where persistent object identity and dynamic object state are represented through separate channels. These structured object representations are inserted into the token sequence of the vision-language model (VLM), where identity-guided routing modulates VLM attention to the corresponding object tokens. In addition, an action-conditioned object dynamics module predicts compact future object states relevant to manipulation during training, explicitly supervising object state evolution under robot actions without requiring future prediction at inference. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0 show that ObjDream improves generalization under diverse distribution shifts and scene perturbations. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate that ObjDream transfers to physical manipulation settings with novel object arrangements and background changes.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation, enabling robots to generate actions from visual observations and language instructions.

Tactile sensing is becoming central to robust, adaptive, and dexterous robotic manipulation. Beyond its traditional role in contact detection and reactive control, touch is increasingly used to learn transferable representations, condition manipulation policies, and support embodied physical reasoning. Yet existing surveys largely emphasize tactile hardware and perception, leaving the rapid shift toward learning-based tactile manipulation insufficiently synthesized. This paper reviews tactile-guided skill learning from a learning-centric perspective, organized by the functional role of touch across the learning and control pipeline. We examine tactile representation and policy learning, tactile foundation models, predictive and adaptive control, and generalization across objects, tasks, sensors, embodiments, and simulation-to-real transfer. Across these directions, we identify common design principles and remaining challenges in learning transferable physical representations, integrating semantic reasoning with contact-level control, and scaling tactile learning across heterogeneous data and hardware. Finally, we outline emerging directions toward tactile foundation and world models that can predict, reason about, and adapt physical interactions. Together, this review characterizes the transition of touch from a task-specific feedback signal toward a core modality for general-purpose embodied intelligence. An accompanying database of the reviewed literature and associated resources is available at https://sites.google.com/view/touch-in-robot-learning-review.

Tactile sensing is becoming central to robust, adaptive, and dexterous robotic manipulation.

Robot actions vary in both extent and mode: how much change they produce and what kind of change they produce. A latent action space that reflects this structure may make it easier for downstream policies to map latent actions to robot actions. However, existing latent action methods typically rely on visual reconstruction from observation pairs without explicitly encouraging such structure. We introduce Polar Latent Actions with Radial structure (PoLAR), which imposes a radial-direction structure on latent actions, encouraging radius to encode transition extent and direction to retain transition mode. PoLAR uses temporal offsets between observations as a weak proxy for transition extent, encouraging transitions with larger offsets to occupy larger radii. We instantiate this structure in hyperbolic space, whose expanding volume with radius offers a natural fit for more diverse transition modes at larger extents. Across in-task and large-scale pretraining settings, PoLAR improves downstream policy performance in simulation and real-world robot experiments, outperforming latent action baselines and strong pretrained VLAs. These results suggest that structuring latent actions by extent and mode helps transfer visual pretraining to robot policy learning.

Robot actions vary in both extent and mode: how much change they produce and what kind of change they produce.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have rapidly advanced generalist robot manipulation by harnessing the semantic knowledge of pretrained vision-language backbones. However, their visual representations are typically grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than calibrated camera geometry. This limitation is especially pronounced in multi-camera systems, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics but processed as independent images. We propose G$^3$VLA, a camera-aware geometric module that injects calibrated structure into the visual-token stream of a pretrained VLA without altering its action space or original action-learning objective. G$^3$VLA combines intrinsic-conditioned ray embeddings, projective positional encoding (PRoPE), and bidirectional cross-view fusion to establish geometrically consistent representations across camera views. Geometric supervision is provided by ground-truth point maps or confidence-gated $π^3$X teacher predictions, enabling training without depth sensors or manual geometric annotations. On $π_0$, G$^3$VLA consistently improves performance on LIBERO and RoboCasa24 under both supervision regimes, while ground-truth supervision improves five-task RoboTwin2.0 averages with three cameras. Experiments on camera-shifted LIBERO-Goal and real robots demonstrate improved robustness to unseen camera viewpoints. Controlled calibration studies across $π_0$ and $π_{0.5}$ show that these gains depend on correct camera geometry while remaining stable under mild calibration perturbations. These results demonstrate that grounding VLA visual tokens in calibrated camera geometry provides a simple and general mechanism for improving geometric consistency, multi-view reasoning, and viewpoint robustness in pretrained robot policies.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have rapidly advanced generalist robot manipulation by harnessing the semantic knowledge of pretrained vision-language backbones.

We present FoveaVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that replaces the wrist camera with learned foveation actions. Wrist cameras provide close-up detail but restrict the view to the end-effector's surroundings. External cameras see the whole scene, but the policy receives them at low resolution, so the fine detail needed for manipulation is lost. FoveaVLA recovers this detail by predicting, alongside each action chunk, the interaction region to observe at the next policy query. The policy then receives crops of these regions, taken from the original-resolution images, together with the full views. We build FoveaVLA on $π_{0.5}$ in two configurations, Single and Dual, using one or two external stereo cameras with full and foveal RGB and depth inputs, and post-train both on DROID with RoboInter interaction annotations. Across four real-world task suites, FoveaVLA-Single achieves 70.8% success with one external RGB-D view, and FoveaVLA-Dual achieves 77.1%, versus 52.1% for the wrist-equipped $π_{0.5}$. Both match the baseline on plain pick-and-place and improve success with distractors, cloth manipulation, and far-away objects.

We present FoveaVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that replaces the wrist camera with learned foveation actions.

Progress toward general intelligence in the physical world requires scaling robot learning across diverse environments and interactions. However, existing robot policies use shared parameters that remain fixed across interaction contexts. When different operations favor competing parameter adjustments, fitting their mixture can leave individual operations insufficiently adapted. Our atomic-task diagnostics reveal competing update directions in both vision-language and action parameters, with source-improving updates increasing loss on other tasks. This motivates MorphAct, a contextual parameterization framework that dynamically adjusts robot policy parameters as interaction contexts change. Two coupled generators produce context-dependent low-rank updates for the vision-language and action modules. Their coupling follows the policy's computational dependency: vision-language updates shape the representations that condition action-side parameter generation. Both generators are trained jointly through the native action objective, without operation labels or expert-adapter targets. MorphAct improves performance across three VLA backbones on LIBERO and Meta-World, with gains of up to 16.30%. In real-world evaluation, it achieves gains of up to 14% over $π_{0.5}$. Ablations support the benefits of contextual parameter generation and representation coupling.

Progress toward general intelligence in the physical world requires scaling robot learning across diverse environments and interactions.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models with flow-matching action heads, such as π0 and π0.5, have become a standard recipe for generalist robot manipulation, but every action chunk is produced by integrating a learned velocity field over about ten sequential action-expert evaluations, so action generation dominates model latency and caps the achievable control frequency. Existing remedies either shrink each evaluation through layer distillation or pruning while leaving the sequential solver in place, or import one-step objectives from image generation that were designed for training from scratch, rely on an exponential-moving-average teacher or an external critic, and regress finite-span targets onto the conditional velocity, whose variance around the marginal field biases the learned map. We introduce SnapFlow, a self-distillation method that adapts a pretrained flow-matching VLA to one-step action generation. SnapFlow mixes local flow-matching supervision with shortcut samples whose target is the model's own two-step Euler endpoint under stop-gradient, and adds a single zero-initialized destination-time projection so that one action expert serves both objectives while the pretrained predictor is preserved at initialization; no separate teacher network or critic is required. On π0.5, whose 10-NFE teacher operates near ceiling, the archived one-NFE SnapFlow checkpoint reaches 98.75% LIBERO success versus 97.75% for the teacher; under a separate paired evaluation of π0, the one-NFE model surpasses its teacher by 10.5 percentage points. SnapFlow also lowers mean and tail action error on held-out data, cuts batch-one model latency by about 3.3x, and transfers to shelf retrieval on a dual-arm humanoid.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models with flow-matching action heads, such as π0 and π0.5, have become a standard recipe for generalist robot manipulation, but every action chunk is produced by integrating a learned velocity field over about ten sequential action-expert evaluations, so action generation dominates model latency and caps the achievable control frequency.

Transferring robotic skills from simulation to reality requires task knowledge that remains usable across differences in perception, dynamics, and embodiment. We introduce Skill2Real, an agentic policy framework that learns executable skills through a shared application programming interface (API). A Proposer-Verifier-Governor (PVG) loop uses privileged simulation evidence to diagnose outcomes and validate updates, while keeping learned skills grounded in public observations and API semantics. The Cerebellum first acquires local manipulation skills; the Brain then learns task-level composition with the Cerebellum frozen. Both memories transfer to the real robot without task-policy fine-tuning or skill-memory updates. As GPT-5.6 Sol learns skills on LIBERO-90, evaluating each frozen checkpoint with GPT-6 Astra raises LIBERO-Pro Long success from 2.0% to 56.3%, without training on Pro Long. Independent Robosuite training reaches 85.1% and 89.4% mean success with Sol and Opus 5 across seven tasks, respectively. Frozen Sol-trained LIBERO-90 skills achieve 78.75% mean completion across four real-world manipulation tasks with Astra. Removing the Verifier or Governor during LIBERO-90 training lowers final Pro Long success by 17.3 and 13.3 percentage points, respectively. These results support learning and transferring a hierarchy of executable skills through a common robot interface.

Transferring robotic skills from simulation to reality requires task knowledge that remains usable across differences in perception, dynamics, and embodiment.

Learning and executing long-horizon robot manipulation as complete task trajectories raises data-collection costs, lim?its capability reuse, and causes local failures to cascade into later task stages. We introduce manipulation units (MUs) as reusable operations, each defined by a local goal, an initi?ation condition, and observable success and failure criteria. MUs are learned and verified individually. During execution, consecutive MUs remain coupled through shared environ?ment dynamics. We formulate MU-Structured Manipulation (MUSM) and realize it through MU-Centric Orchestration (MUCO). Given language and vision, MUCO constructs an MU sequence, matches each MU to compatible policy models in a frozen capability registry, and dispatches the model with the highest calibrated success rate. Visual verification checks MU outcomes against success and failure criteria and governs transitions, enabling retry or fallback to another model from the current state without re-executing verified MUs. Canonical keys enable checkpoint reuse for equivalent MUs across tasks without new demonstrations or updates. We evaluate MUCO on RLBench, RoboTwin 2.0, and five real-world tasks. MUCO achieves higher complete-task success and verified progress, stronger failure containment, and lower error propagation than baselines. Results demonstrate cross-task MU reuse and het?erogeneous policy composition without joint training, shared backbones, or common action representations.

Learning and executing long-horizon robot manipulation as complete task trajectories raises data-collection costs, lim?its capability reuse, and causes local failures to cascade into later task stages.

Integrating world models into Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) has emerged as a promising direction, enabling policies to anticipate future dynamics beyond reactive observation-to-action mapping. However, existing approaches vary simultaneously in their world representations, integration paradigms, and policy backbones, making it difficult to determine what truly matters for effective world model integration. To disentangle these factors, we categorize existing efforts into four representative paradigms, namely Implicit Future Alignment, Explicit Future Query, MoT Future Expert, and External World Predictor. We instantiate each within a unified framework and systematically evaluate these paradigms with diverse world representations and policy backbones across in-domain, out-of-domain, long-horizon, dynamic, few-shot, and real-world settings. Our study yields four main findings: 1) world representation effectiveness is paradigm-dependent, whereas 2D semantic representations offer robust, cross-paradigm gains; 2) no single paradigm is universally optimal, yet the decoupled MoT Future Expert offers competitive overall performance, particularly in OOD robustness; 3) world modeling consistently benefits policies built on standard VLMs, while decoupled designs exhibit greater compatibility with pretrained VLAs; and 4) world modeling improves performance over action-only baselines across multiple settings, with notable gains on long-horizon and dynamic tasks. Project page and video demonstrations are available at https://dylanmqs.github.io/WM-in-VLAs/.

Integrating world models into Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) has emerged as a promising direction, enabling policies to anticipate future dynamics beyond reactive observation-to-action mapping.

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environments, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions such as reinforcement learning (RL). The high cost of data gathering in robotics encourages data-efficient approaches such as model-based RL, which builds a dynamic model of the robot to conduct most policy learning on cheaper simulations, while enabling data reuse and transfer between tasks. In this work, we employ Bayesian deep learning (BDL) with a double purpose. First, we increase the model quality by improving its calibration. Second, we improve data efficiency by performing active learning of the dynamic model during a preliminary exploration phase, actively estimating the information gain of each transition and using it as the exploration reward. We compare several BDL methods in a realistic robot manipulation setup. Our experiments show that our approach matches the quality of relevant alternatives with much lower robot execution requirements and, unlike previous studies validated only on standard RL environments, we tackle robotic arm end-tasks on a complete manipulator simulator such as \texttt{CoppeliaSim}. Code is available at https://github.com/ropertunizar/BayesianActiveExploration.

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environments, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions such as reinforcement learning (RL).

Multi-zone HVAC control is a shared-resource problem: zones on a floor share one fan and cooling coil, so each zone's demand affects its neighbours and the building's peak power. One controller per zone scales well and isolates faults, but each controller then observes only its own zone, not the shared air loop. In this work, we present a decentralised controller that assigns each zone an independent active-inference agent, which plans by minimising expected free energy and learns its zone dynamics online. The agents exchange no messages, so none depends on peers or a coordinator; each accounts for the unobserved coupling through a latent disturbance and a congestion signal derived from the metered power of the other floors. Fifteen agents are evaluated in EnergyPlus on a Sinergym office building against three rule-based controllers and three MADDPG fleets, one given the same floor meters. On five noisy weather years unseen during training, the fleet attains the lowest mean building peak (88.3 kW, 3 to 17 % below the baselines) and staggers the floor peaks better than any baseline, with a coincidence factor (building peak over the sum of the floor peaks) of 0.929 versus 0.936 to 0.994. Compared with a reactive rule at similar comfort (0.912 versus 0.916), it lowers the sum of monthly peaks, on which demand charges are billed, by 33 kW (4 %) in every year, at the cost of about 10 % more energy. It costs 9% less per year than the proactive rule (at lower comfort) and 1% less than the MADDPG fleet given the same floor meters, in every test year. The whole fleet runs on a single low-cost Raspberry Pi 5, closing the observation-to-action loop over MQTT in 442 ms at p95, far below the 15-minute control step.

Multi-zone HVAC control is a shared-resource problem: zones on a floor share one fan and cooling coil, so each zone's demand affects its neighbours and the building's peak power.

Population health stratification frameworks, such as the Italian DM77, organize patients by clinical need and care pathways but offer limited guidance on which care changes to prioritize under constrained resources. We present PROMETHEUS (Proactive Resource Optimization through Multi-treatment Effect-based Targeting in Healthcare Environments Using Stratification), a framework that formulates population health stratification as a multi-treatment causal ranking problem. Its objective is to order eligible patient-treatment opportunities by expected incremental benefit rather than obtain perfectly calibrated individual treatment-effect estimates. Each clinically admissible care intensification is compared with maintaining the patient's current pathway. Treatments are learned jointly to produce a globally comparable ranking across patients and care profiles, within domains sharing a reference condition, outcome, follow-up horizon, and benefit scale. This separates clinical need, treatment benefit, and resource-constrained allocation. PROMETHEUS combines doubly robust causal signals with a Siamese neural ranking model and contrastive representation pretraining. The shared representation captures similarities across care transitions, supporting prioritization under capacity constraints. Synthetic experiments and semi-synthetic experiments using real administrative covariates from ASL Benevento evaluate ranking quality, allocation value, robustness, and failure modes. The results support the framework's ability to recover generated benefit orderings and prioritize care opportunities in the evaluated settings. PROMETHEUS provides a preclinical approach to actionable stratification; validation with observed treatment-outcome data is required before clinical use.

Population health stratification frameworks, such as the Italian DM77, organize patients by clinical need and care pathways but offer limited guidance on which care changes to prioritize under constrained resources.

Computationally lightweight manipulation policies predict executable actions with low inference latency, but prediction errors can limit task success. Iterative generative policies can achieve higher task success rates, but repeated network evaluations increase inference latency. Refining action proposals from computationally lightweight policies can combine these strengths, but the amount of refinement needed varies across states. We introduce RAIN (Refine Actions If Needed), a framework that predicts action errors at different refinement levels to decide whether and how much to refine each executable proposal, before performing any refinement. We train an ensemble to predict these errors by comparing action proposals and their refined versions with expert actions from offline demonstrations, without requiring explicit labels of refinement needs. Calibration balances uncertainty, computation, and temporal consistency. We evaluate RAIN on eight ManiSkill tasks and four real-robot tasks. In simulation, our policy achieves 66.6% success, approaching the best evaluated diffusion-policy success rate with 5.71 times lower policy latency. On the real robot, success increases from 55.0% with Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) to 72.5%, with comparable average successful completion time. Matched controls show that dynamic routing maintains the strongest observed fixed-refinement success level with 26.6% fewer refiner evaluations. Project page: https://rain-policy.github.io/.

Computationally lightweight manipulation policies predict executable actions with low inference latency, but prediction errors can limit task success.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but extending them to bimanual dexterous manipulation introduces a high-dimensional and structured action space. Existing bimanual VLA policies commonly concatenate right- and left-side arm--hand actions at each control timestep, leaving cross-hand interactions implicit within a single action vector. We introduce Coordi-$π$, a structured action representation for bimanual dexterous manipulation. Coordi-$π$ represents the right- and left-side arm--hand actions as individual action tokens and organizes them into an interleaved sequence, explicitly exposing the two sides within the action sequence. To explicitly encode hand identity and temporal synchronization in this interleaved representation, a learnable hand-identity embedding distinguishes the two sides, while sequence--control-timestep factorized rotary positional encoding (RoPE) separates sequence position from control timestep, allowing actions at the same control timestep to share a temporal coordinate while retaining distinct sequence positions. Across all five bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks in DexJoCo, Coordi-$π$ achieves state-of-the-art performance under both \textit{rand-obj} and \textit{rand-full}, improving the average success rate over $π_{0.5}$ from 31.9\% to 51.3\% and from 18.3\% to 32.3\%, respectively. Coordi-$π$ also consistently outperforms $π_{0.5}$ across four real-world bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but extending them to bimanual dexterous manipulation introduces a high-dimensional and structured action space.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging large-scale robot datasets and foundation models for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their ability to rapidly adapt to novel manipulation tasks beyond the training distribution remains limited. Existing approaches often require task-specific robot demonstrations and additional training, which are labor- and compute-intensive, limiting the scalability of VLA adaptation to open-world scenarios. To reduce this dependence on target-task robot data, we propose CapPro, a framework that enables a VLA policy to adapt to previously unseen manipulation tasks using only a single human demonstration video. CapPro consists of two components. First, a phase-aware human video representation module constructs a compact video representation through learned visual token selection and learns task-relevant query representations under phase-caption supervision. Second, a video-conditioned adaptation module jointly incorporates the compact video and query-derived representations into the action-conditioning context of the pretrained VLA policy. % This design introduces task-specific guidance while largely preserving the original VLA action-generation backbone. In this way, the human demonstration provides task-specific execution guidance rather than an embodiment-aligned trajectory to imitate, without requiring target-task robot demonstrations or target-task fine-tuning. Experiments across source and unseen target tasks show that CapPro improves average performance across unseen target groups while maintaining comparable performance on the source tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-video guidance for cross-task VLA adaptation.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging large-scale robot datasets and foundation models for general-purpose robot manipulation.

Large protein language models provide a powerful framework for learning sequence-function relationships and guiding experimental design. However, architectural improvements are underexplored, especially in low-compute regimes of relevance for resource-constrained research laboratories. We show that the training cost for encoder-only transformer architectures can be reduced by leveraging modern architectural refinements, offering an encouraging performance / compute-efficiency trade-off. We introduce ProtModernBERT, a modernized BERT-style model pre-trained on amino acid sequences, and compare it with ProtBert, Amplify, and ESM2 across a set of supervised structural tasks -encompassing secondary structure prediction, disorder prediction, and subcellular localization- and ProteinGym's zero-shot functional benchmark. We find that ProtModernBERT matches or closely tracks the performance of Amplify-120M and ProtBert with up to 80-90\% reduction in pre-training FLOPs, and narrows the gap to ESM2 when controlling for pre-training. Our analysis using a cluster-based validation protocol for hyperparameter selection and randomly initialized models disentangles the contributions of architecture and data, showing that modern components provide stronger inductive biases that are more consequential than parameter count in low-compute regimes.

Large protein language models provide a powerful framework for learning sequence-function relationships and guiding experimental design.

Executing a vision-language-action (VLA) policy involves deciding when to continue an attempt and when to intervene to improve its chances of success. We introduce ACRO, an Actor--Critic rollout orchestration layer that makes these decisions for a fixed VLA. ACRO seeks interventions that offer a more promising continuation, are physically feasible, and leave sufficient time to complete the task. A Critic learned from policy rollouts estimates success prospects to decide when to intervene and select a re-entry target along the executed trajectory. Trajectory Retraction shortcuts the visited path to return the robot to that target, where the same VLA resumes execution from a fresh observation. We evaluate ACRO with GR00T N1.7 and $π_{0.5}$ across SimplerEnv, RoboCasa, and real-robot manipulation. Under the same physical execution budget, including all return motion, ACRO improves success by 10.4, 7.3, and 21.7 percentage points, respectively. It also completes additional tasks as the execution budget grows. These results show that controlling when and where a policy resumes can turn its existing capabilities into more successful task executions. Project page: https://junhoo.me/acro

Executing a vision-language-action (VLA) policy involves deciding when to continue an attempt and when to intervene to improve its chances of success.

A central challenge in mobile manipulation is preserving multiple plausible action modes while remaining reactive during execution. For example, grasping a bottle in a cluttered scene can be achieved through multiple physically feasible base-arm motion plans. Deterministic VLA policies trained with $L_1$ regression are efficient, but they tend to average across valid modes and may produce physically invalid actions. Diffusion-based generative policies can better represent multimodal action distributions, yet their proposals may be weakly constrained when generated from pure noise, and iterative sampling can increase inference cost. Action chunking helps amortize inference, but it also introduces partially open-loop execution, allowing small mismatches to accumulate into drift. We present MobiGuide, a generative VLA model for efficient mobile manipulation, where action generation is guided by a structured trajectory vocabulary. Constructed from expert demonstrations, this vocabulary encodes plausible whole-body motion patterns and provides structured priors for feasible action generation. Given the current observation and instruction, MobiGuide locally refines these reference trajectories into context-compatible action proposals and selects the most suitable trajectory for execution. This preserves multimodal action candidates while keeping generation constrained around feasible expert-like motion modes. To mitigate chunk-induced drift, we further introduce a lightweight residual correction module that performs high-frequency, per-step adjustments during rollout. Across diverse mobile manipulation tasks, MobiGuide improves success and stability under execution disturbances while maintaining low-latency inference.

A central challenge in mobile manipulation is preserving multiple plausible action modes while remaining reactive during execution.