ニュース＆研究

arXiv:2610.03333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning for contact-rich manipulation requires high-quality expert data that is expensive to obtain. This makes learning a sample-efficient policy a key issue. To address this, we propose VISTA, a workspace-level equivariant visuotactile diffusion policy for data-efficient contact-rich imitation learning. VISTA projects visual and tactile observations into spherical tokens, injects tactile contact cues into visual spherical directions through permutation-equivariant spherical fusion, and rotates the fused harmonic representation using the end-effector orientation. The resulting representation conditions an equivariant diffusion policy to predict spatially consistent actions. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic settings show that VISTA substantially improves data efficiency over strong visuotactile imitation learning baselines. Project website: https://vista-paper.github.io/

arXiv:2610.03283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The ability of a device to localize itself within its surroundings is a fundamental prerequisite for spatial computing. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) has proven to be a cost-effective and accurate solution for this task. Robots, wearables, XR devices, and drones can benefit significantly from efficient implementations of VIO since they allow for cooler, lighter, and cheaper devices with longer battery life and a better user experience. In this work, we propose to enhance the efficiency of a VIO system by leveraging the Hexagon DSP, a commodity co-processor present in many modern smartphones and XR devices. Our approach offloads the visual frontend of a stereo-inertial odometry system to the DSP while keeping the backend on the main CPU. By optimizing the implementation for the DSP architecture, we achieve significant reductions in power consumption and latency compared to CPU-only execution. Our system, HexVIO, demonstrates a 67% reducti

arXiv:2610.03278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As dexterous hands proliferate, collecting data and training policies separately for every morphology becomes increasingly impractical. Scalable cross-embodiment learning therefore requires a unified representation that captures shared manipulation structure while preserving morphology-specific control. Differences in hands, tasks, datasets, and control interfaces prevent existing studies from isolating the effects of representation, pretraining, and architecture. We introduce DexJoCo-X, a benchmark and toolkit for controlled comparison across seven representative dexterous hands, six single-arm and bimanual tasks, and 2,100 balanced demonstrations. DexJoCo-X provides a matched multi-hand, multi-task protocol with common scenes, success criteria, and execution interfaces, redesigned glove-to-hand mappings, and an automated pipeline that expands reviewed demonstrations across randomized scenes. Using $\pi_{0.5}$, Ego-Pi, and Being-H0.5, we

arXiv:2610.03196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A reinforcement-learning (RL) pipeline for a legged robot is assembled from proxies. A reward stands in for intended behaviour, a curriculum gate stands in for competence, an evaluation statistic stands in for robustness, and a reference motion stands in for an achievable skill. The traditional view treats only the first of these as optimised against, and so locates specification failure (reward hacking) in the reward alone. I argue that all four are proxies in the same formal sense, that each has a characteristic divergence mechanism, and that each admits a reformulation that closes it. For every layer I state the traditional formulation, derive the condition under which it diverges from its target, and give the alternative: first-order (L1) costs where quadratic kernels are flat, peak and outcome statistics where curriculum gates average, gate reachability and information checks, deterministic and phase-desynchronised evaluation, curric

arXiv:2610.02991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lower-limb exoskeletons have made considerable progress in reducing energy expenditure during walking. However, designing optimal assistance strategies remains challenging, particularly given inter-individual variability in anthropometry and biomechanics. This study explores energy-optimal lower-limb joint-assistance strategies using predictive simulations with musculoskeletal models. Subject-specific models of six able-bodied subjects, with BMI-based muscle strength scaling, were used in predictive simulations to generate gait at self-selected walking speeds. Ideal actuators were incorporated to simulate various combinations of joint assistance at peak levels of 25 Nm and 50 Nm to examine the effects of assistance on gait and metabolic savings. The effects of each assistance configuration were assessed through cost of transport (COT), joint kinematics, muscle activations, assistive torques, and joint-level power metrics to characterize t

arXiv:2610.02974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image-based traversability estimation is inherently dependent on the robot platform, deployment domain, and mission preferences, which limits the applicability of purpose-trained models. To facilitate domain adaptation, this work aims to reduce the number of required annotations in the target domain using sample-efficient preference learning. Our method represents traversability through von Mises-Fisher mixture prototypes in a frozen vision-language feature space. Relative natural-language rules provide a commonsense prior, while sparse relative image annotations adapt the prototype directions and utilities to a target domain through computationally and sample-efficient fine-tuning. Experiments on WayFAST demonstrate accuracy competitive with end-to-end trained estimators while enabling sample-efficient image-based adaptation. Qualitative experiments further demonstrate the language prior's zero shot applicability and the fine-tuned estim

arXiv:2610.02898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable advances in robotic manipulation, yet their zero-shot generalization under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains limited. These models often entangle task-relevant invariant structure with environment-specific non-invariant factors, causing policies to rely on spurious appearance cues during action prediction. In this work, we propose \textbf{MixVLA}, a model-agnostic training framework that improves the generalization of VLA models without requiring additional OOD data or architectural modifications. The key component of MixVLA is \textbf{Adaptive Mixing of Non-Invariant Information (AMI)}. AMI stochastically mixes non-invariant representations to regularize distribution-specific variability while preserving complementary predictive cues. The mixed non-invariant features are then fused with invariant representations for final action prediction, resulting in improved robu

arXiv:2610.02848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer policies are attractive for multi-agent robot learning because self-attention can model interactions among agents. However, multi-agent teams are unordered, while transformers typically process agents as ordered token sequences. We study how this mismatch affects cooperative navigation policies under agent-order permutations. Our results show that low permutation error alone can be misleading: policies may appear robust simply because all agents choose the same action. We therefore evaluate policies using both permutation-consistency metrics and action-collapse diagnostics, including action diversity, same-action fraction, and maximum action frequency. A PPO-ID baseline yields non-collapsed behavior but remains order-sensitive, while strong equivariance regularization can still induce homogeneous behavior. A weak equivariance penalty improves the robustness while preserving more diverse actions for teams with \(N=3\) agents, w

arXiv:2610.02840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World action models jointly learn to forecast world dynamics and predict robot actions, such that the learned internal world dynamics guide accurate actions. Existing approaches typically represent the world as RGB frames or latent counterparts while predicting actions as end-effector poses or joint angles, but they often struggle to capture the 3D spatial structure and contact geometry central to dexterous manipulation. We introduce Point World Action Model (PointWAM), a 3D world action model that decomposes the world into a scene (i.e., environment) and hands (i.e., actor), and jointly forecasts both as 3D point trajectories within a shared space-time coordinate frame. This explicit, disentangled representation enables effective pre-training on large-scale human demonstration videos without requiring any task-specific object or keypoint selection. Given a colored point cloud and a language instruction, PointWAM predicts how the scene an

arXiv:2610.02832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have scaled rapidly to enhance manipulation performance and generalizability, but this scaling incurs high computational costs that render real-world deployment increasingly challenging. Existing approaches typically mitigate this issue by designing smaller architectures or reducing the iterative denoising steps in flow-based policies. In this work, we propose FastOPD, a foundation-to-lightweight VLA framework that enables the practical deployment of large-scale VLAs through efficient on-policy distillation. Specifically, FastOPD adapts a flow map for single-state teacher supervision and combines it with a self-consistency objective to construct a compact student that learns the teacher dynamics. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate that minimizing this objective allows the distilled student to recover a distribution on par with that induced by an ideal few-step teacher model. We evaluat

arXiv:2610.02813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visuomotor imitation policies combine high-dimensional visual observations with compact signals such as proprioception, and their fusion topology determines when and through which tokens these streams interact. In dense token fusion, visual tokens may attend directly to compact tokens from the first encoder layer, allowing action-predictive compact cues to influence spatial visual representations early in their formation. We ask whether controlling this route improves visual responsiveness and policy behavior. We introduce Register-Routed Delayed Fusion (RRDF), which masks direct compact-visual attention and stages cross-modal interaction through a learned register workspace. Its isolate-collect-route schedule protects an early stream-separated prefix and later permits only register-mediated exchange, while compact conditioning remains available to the native action generator. Across five simulation tasks and three real-robot tasks, RRDF

arXiv:2610.02811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: During contact-rich manipulation, interactions between a robot and its environment carry information about local geometry: a surface prevents penetration, a bore guides a peg. A controller that exploits these interactions can comply with environmental constraints while preserving task intent. Robot-earning systems commonly use position, hybrid force-position, or Cartesian impedance control. Their prescribed tracking objectives, stiffness, or force-control directions may not match local constraints and may degrade performance. We learn a proprioceptive reflex policy in simulation on three simple interaction primitives: a spring, a plane, and a rail. The policy maps task-space commands to joint-position targets using state history, without direct force or geometrical measurements. Once trained, it serves as a frozen execution layer beneath higher-level controllers. We evaluate it in dual-arm box lifting, peg insertion, and surface following

arXiv:2610.02804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models often require costly real-world demonstrations to adapt to contact-rich manipulation tasks, particularly when generalization across object placements is needed. We propose SARI (Simulated Approach, Real Interaction), a phase-split sim-and-real co-training framework built on a simple insight: spatial coverage and contact physics should be acquired from the domains best suited to them. Specifically, free-space approaches require spatial diversity but tolerate modest simulation gaps, making them ideal for synthetic generation; conversely, contact interactions demand accurate physics but vary little across object placements, allowing a few real demonstrations to generalize across the workspace. SARI generates diverse simulated approaches in a photorealistic digital twin while collecting real contact interactions at only a few placements. Post-trained on these phase-segmented demonstrations, a single policy

arXiv:2610.02803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured, real-world environments, the ability to reason about complex spatial and semantic relationships among objects remains a fundamental challenge in enabling robust and generalizable manipulation and navigation. For example, deciding where to search for an object that is not in plain sight depends on where it is physically plausible as well as semantically likely. Popular methods such as cosine similarity with CLIP struggle to disambiguate between spatially and semantically similar objects that could contain a target object. We propose Landmark-Oriented Container Discrimination Using Spatial Graphs (LOCUS). To jointly reason about spatial information and semantics, we train a GNN to update CLIP embeddings on a full environment scene graph by passing embedding information between nodes based on proximity. CLIP embeddings, augmented by semantic knowledge from a fusion of household ontologies

arXiv:2610.02802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to perform diverse manipulation tasks, but task success in existing rigid-body benchmarks does not indicate whether they preserve objects. We introduce ManiPhysicsZoo, which consolidates literature-supported material properties, 3D meshes, and supporting references into reusable object assets. Using these assets, a solver-based assessment computes grasp-specific damage thresholds from object geometry, material properties, and recorded grasp conditions and compares them with recorded contact forces to assess potential deformation and fracture. Building on these components, ManiPhysicsBench evaluates object preservation in LIBERO and SimplerEnv across three physics axes and three difficulty levels. Public VLA checkpoints show a substantial gap between task success and safe success, defined as task completion while preserving the object. Their gripper commands concentrate near full opening and closure,