Actualités & Recherche

arXiv:2610.16411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying robots in human-shared environments requires deciding not only how to navigate, but also when dedicated social signals are worth emitting. Classic observation-based inference can be misleading in such settings: confounding factors may bias the estimated relationship between a signal and the task outcome, leading to incorrect decisions. Causal inference provides a framework for disentangling these relationships by modelling the mechanisms linking observations, actions, and outcomes, and by estimating interventional effects after accounting for confounding paths. We study a human-robot interaction scenario in a corridor and use a causal model to estimate whether a social navigation signal causally improves transit success. We represent the interaction as a causal DAG involving robot action, pedestrian occupancy, available space, task outcome, and a controlled confounder (static obstacles). We compare the interventional estimate wi

arXiv:2610.16398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot learning has undergone significant advancements in the domain of compliant control and robotic assembly. The development of novel methodologies has transcended the capacity to address discrete tasks, such as grasping or inserting, and has evolved to encompass the comprehensive construction of entire assemblies. Conventional benchmarks, which are predominantly focused on single tasks, are no longer adequate to address the complexity and interconnected nature of modern manufacturing processes. Consequently, the necessity for benchmarks to encompass a broader spectrum of assembly and subassembly steps is becoming apparent. In light of these developments, we propose LABIT, an industrial robotic assembly benchmark for long-horizon manipulation. This benchmark encompasses DIN-norm assembly tasks, including screwing, placing, inserting, and snapping, under both high and low tolerance conditions. The successive nature of these assembly step

arXiv:2610.16369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language agents increasingly modify robot software, but whether they can repair it is unmeasured, because the domain supplies no oracle to inherit: a robot bug manifests as behavior, and robot repositories ship almost no tests that capture it. We present RoboBugBench, a benchmark of 33 real, execution-validated defects in a pinned ROS 2 navigation stack, in which a candidate patch is graded by compiling it and driving the robot through a physics simulation rather than by running a unit test. Three frontier models, each given 1 attempt per instance, repair 24.2%-36.4%, with no pairwise difference significant; difficulty tracks the oracle rather than the domain, at 66.7% on instances graded by process survival against 22.2% on those graded by what the robot did (instance-level p = 0.0027). Because the oracle is constructed rather than inherited we audit it adversarially, and report the decomposition that audit yields: counterfeit patches wh

arXiv:2610.16355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot manipulation can benefit from pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) for semantic reasoning and video generation models (VGMs) for world modeling. However, existing unified models that directly fuse them through shared attention at multiple layers can make it harder to draw on their specialized capabilities. We introduce PINT, a unified model that coordinates semantic reasoning, world modeling, and action generation through a shared chunk-level Predictive Intent while preserving expert-specific pathways. PINT inserts learnable Intent Tokens into the VLM sequence to form this representation, conditioning both the VGM and an Action Expert (AE). It replaces only the VGM's prompt conditioning and retains the VGM at inference, where the AE reads its representations through one-way attention. Rather than prescribing what Predictive Intent should encode, PINT learns it jointly from the native prediction objectives of the VLM,

arXiv:2610.16334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot errors can disrupt human-robot collaboration by reducing user trust and willingness to rely on the robot. Robot apologies can support trust recovery after such errors, but their effects may vary with apology strategy and error severity. This study therefore presents a user experiment based on a 2x2 between-subjects factorial design to examine the effect of humorous robot apologies on user trust recovery and the moderating role of error severity. The design crosses robot error severity (low vs. high) with apology strategy (generic vs. humorous). An online experiment will be conducted using the open-source Warehouse Robot Interaction Simulator. Participants will complete a collaborative task, experience a robot error followed by an apology, and report trust, trust recovery, interaction experience and reuse intention. We hypothesize that humorous apologies will produce greater trust recovery than generic apologies after low-severity er

arXiv:2610.16316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Articulated object manipulation tasks such as opening doors, tightening bolts, and pulling drawers impose kinematic constraints on a robot end-effector's motion that neural policies may fail to satisfy. Unlike hybrid force-position control that strictly separates force and position control into orthogonal subspaces, impedance control modulates a mechanical impedance system in the form of a virtual inertia, damping, and stiffness. However, selecting task-appropriate impedance gains remains challenging for robot policies. In this paper, we address this problem for the case of manipulating articulated objects. Our constraint-decomposed impedance control method uses the sampling diversity of a generative policy to estimate the feasible motion directions in twist space. The key idea is to infer the feasible and constrained subspaces of twists from an ensemble of trajectories generated by the policy from the same observation. Principal componen

arXiv:2610.16313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by connecting visual perception and language instructions to action generation. However, many manipulation tasks depend on auditory cues that cannot be reliably inferred from visual observations and may need to be elicited through physical interaction. To address this gap, we present ListenVLA, an audio-conditioned VLA policy built on GR00T N1.7 for sound-guided manipulation. ListenVLA combines semantic audio embeddings with waveform-derived acoustic cues over a causal audio history and conditions continuous action generation through audio tokens and feature modulation. Moreover, we introduce an audio-action binding objective that uses context-matched demonstrations to link auditory differences to demonstrated action differences. The objective supervises short-horizon differences between flow-velocity predictions under different audio conditions, with shared pure-noise

arXiv:2610.16309v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite rapid progress, generalist robot policies remain brittle during execution. Reliable deployment therefore requires runtime monitoring that provides timely warnings of failure. Existing monitors commonly estimate risk from current observations or policy signals without explicitly predicting the future consequences of proposed actions. To anticipate such risks before action execution, we introduce ReAP, a future-aware runtime monitoring framework that combines visual failure recognition with action-conditioned failure prediction. Specifically, ReAP first trains a visual detector on successful and failed rollouts to learn a failure-relevant representation space and estimate current risk. An action-conditioned predictor then forecasts the resulting future representation in this space to estimate future failure risk. At runtime, the detector and predictor provide complementary signals for current-state failure recognition and future-awa

arXiv:2610.16308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich insertion requires robots to combine visual alignment with tactile adjustment. However, existing visuotactile chunk-based policies collapse tactile feedback into a single generation-time fusion pathway, leaving persistent contact states, abrupt contact events, and future contact consequences implicitly modeled in a single representation. We present PACE (Phase-Aware Contact-Event Conditioning), a temporal-role tactile conditioning framework for chunk-based insertion policies. PACE organizes a shared tactile stream into three temporal roles: persistent contact states condition action-chunk generation, abrupt contact events correct the generated chunk, and contact-consequence prediction shapes action representations during training. This design preserves chunk-level action continuity while assigning distinct pathways to different temporal roles of contact feedback. Across five real-robot insertion tasks, PACE achieves an averag

arXiv:2610.16242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-action models should preserve the intended manipulation across equivalent descriptions of a spatial goal. We evaluate this consistency in 864 rollouts from three models across four RoboLab scenes, holding initial states and task goals fixed. Describing relations through the reference object rather than the object-to-move lowers the rate of reaching a stable placement by 12.2 percentage points on average. The effect of instruction rephrasing varies across spatial relations, so aggregate scores can hide sensitivity to wording. Standalone tests of the policies' language understanding identify relation reversals and show that adding images can disrupt otherwise correct text-only interpretations. Rollout analysis also distinguishes spatial placement from instruction following: moving the wrong object can satisfy the requested relation, and rates of stable placement fall from 43.2% at any time to 21.8% at episode end. These findings motiv

arXiv:2610.16238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly control robots using VLA policies, perception models, and procedural knowledge. These modules are difficult to reuse because their interfaces, embodiment assumptions, and conditions of use differ, and their benefits on physical tasks remain unclear. We package them as embodied skills that extend agent skills with explicit embodiment assumptions and conditions of use, building 250 action, perception, and experience skills from 1,052 resources. On this basis we introduce EmbodiedSkillBench, which runs an agent in a closed observation-action loop and records success, actions, tokens, and wall-clock time. It supports three modes: native control, skill-only execution, and Agent-Directed Reuse (ADR), a mode we propose in which the agent keeps its native controls and decides for each skill whether to invoke, modify, or ignore it. Across four agents on 100 perturbed LIBERO-Pro tasks, we find that skills help an agent only

arXiv:2610.16179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latte art is a complex task requiring dexterity and precision, making it a challenging and commercially relevant task. A one-shot learning system is employed in which a single barista demonstration is segmented into five functionally distinct phases, each encoded as an independent Cartesian Dynamic Movement Primitive (CDMP) with its own parameters. Against a single-CDMP baseline, per-phase encoding reduces transition endpoint error by 3.2-4.5 times and art-stroke shape error by 2.7 times, reproducing jug tilt to below 1 degree RMS in the pouring phases. The learnt pour scales from a 280mL to a 400mL cup through a single spatial offset and a scaled recipe, with no re-demonstration. The phase-based CDMP approach generalises beyond latte art to any demonstration task whose phases have distinct spatial or temporal requirements whilst demonstrating the ability to adapt reproductions to suit different task requirements.

arXiv:2610.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel wire-driven systems are a framework in which multiple wires are connected to an end effector, and the end effector is driven by the tensions of those wires. Because they can transmit large forces, up to the breaking strength of the wires, over lengths on the order of several tens of meters, they can realize powerful actuation in large workspaces. In recent years, studies have also investigated connecting wires to external environments such as trees and columns and forming parallel wire actuation on site. However, conventional parallel wire-driven systems often assume a single end effector, and because of interference between wires and links in a shared workspace, it has been difficult to handle multiple floating links simultaneously. In this study, we realize multi-floating-link parallel wire actuation by introducing an inter-body wire. In real-robot experiments, the two bodies supported and lifted a mannequin and transferred it

arXiv:2610.16160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in 3D reconstruction enable the extraction of temporally consistent 3D motion from RGB observations; however, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models still predominantly rely on 2D image-text priors. Therefore, they do not accurately represent the fundamental dynamics of the 3D world associated with physical actions. This over-reliance on static 2D visual cues limits the capacity of VLA models in achieving robust robot manipulation. To address these limitations, we introduce FlowVLA, a reconstruction-guided, pluggable 3D flow learning framework aimed at empowering VLA models with an inherent understanding of action-relevant dynamics. Instead of requiring explicit 3D sensor inputs or altering the inference-time architecture, our method is designed to utilize temporally aligned 3D flow only during training. This allows the model to learn the dynamic evolution of the physical scene while preserving the computational effic

arXiv:2610.16103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist visual-navigation policies tell a robot which direction to go but not how far. A separate lifting step is needed at deployment to convert their unitless trajectory into a metric path that a controller can track; existing scalar lifters apply uniform scaling that misses per-waypoint corrections, while in-policy approaches that inject monocular depth into the policy inherit the prediction errors of the depth model near obstacles and at close range. We present PathLift, a per-waypoint depth-conditioned adapter that lifts a pre-trained visual-navigation policy by consuming an explicit, sensor-grade depth source (RGB-D, stereo, or projected LiDAR) and fitting per-waypoint magnitude and lateral residuals to a canonicalized prior. PathLift consistently improves closed-loop navigation across diverse visual-navigation policies in simulation and on a real wheeled robot under both stereo and LiDAR depth. By turning the policy's unitless i