ニュース＆研究

arXiv:2610.14155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable manipulation requires policies that generalize across tasks, layouts, and object interactions. Vision-language-action (VLA) models combine pretrained multimodal understanding with learned control, but their performance remains limited on unfamiliar task compositions. We present Axiom-0, a VLA policy that addresses both the quality of its representations and their use in action generation through hierarchical self-refinement. Intra-VLM Representation Refinement (IVRR) strengthens selected intermediate features through consistency supervision with learned feature projections during training. VLM-Action Interface Refinement (VAIR) recursively updates the resulting conditioning before action generation. Joint optimization of the supervised VLM layers, VAIR, and the action generator connects the two components. On RoboCasa365, Axiom-0 achieves 62.32% overall success in our evaluation, exceeding the highest published leaderboard score

arXiv:2610.14142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deformable-object manipulation requires accurate modeling of highly localized contact while maintaining simulation speeds suitable for interactive use. Uniformly fine tetrahedral meshes can resolve these interactions, but they introduce unnecessary degrees of freedom throughout the object. Coarse meshes are more efficient, yet they may under-resolve contact-induced deformation. We present a contact-adaptive mesh refinement framework that introduces spatial resolution only where it is most useful. The method uses geometric, elastic, and contact quantities already available from the deformable-body solver to score candidate edges. A fully GPU-parallel procedure then selects a conflict-free subset and updates both mesh topology and physical state directly within the simulation loop. We evaluate the approach on real deformable-object manipulation sequences. Adaptive refinement reduces simulation-to-real error, improves agreement with a fine-m

arXiv:2610.14117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GPT-6 Astra provides robust embodied reasoning, but frequent external queries increase inference time and token costs. We equip a frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ policy with a lightweight CALL head that learns to predict when assistance is necessary. CALL reuses features from the standard policy forward pass and operates locally without consulting external models. Astra is activated solely for critical recovery events and returns control to $\pi_{0.5}$ upon stabilization. Evaluated across 40 LIBERO tasks (200 episodes), our system achieves a 97.5% success rate, outperforming the 95.5% baseline of pure $\pi_{0.5}$. In the Object, Goal, and Spatial suites, Astra executes only 5.49% of environment steps, consuming approximately 5,027 tokens per test episode. This selective intervention preserves the fast ordinary execution of $\pi_{0.5}$ while seamlessly integrating Astra's reasoning on demand. Our project page is available at https://kykgeek.github.io/P

arXiv:2610.14106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can translate natural-language instructions into plausible manipulation plans, but robotic execution requires physically grounded decisions that respect robot embodiment, workspace geometry, reachability, collision constraints, and grasp feasibility. This paper presents a hardware-aware large language model-vision-language model (LLM-VLM) manipulation framework for a simulated Franka Research 3 robot in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The framework separates symbolic reasoning from metric execution: an API-hosted LLM planner receives a structured scene summary and generates only symbolic task information, including the object to manipulate, target relation, approach preference, and objects to avoid. A local Qwen3-VL 8B VLM verifier supports semantic confirmation of ambiguous objects and open-container surrogates. Both the LLM planner and the VLM verifier are prohibited from generating robot coordinates, grasp poses, keepout dimens

arXiv:2610.14090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exterior Gaussian-splat twins for real-estate listings are captured to a fixed recipe: a consumer drone orbits a single property in several overlapping passes at stepped altitudes, with occasional vertical ascents, so the imagery is dense, sequential, GPS- and time-tagged, and revisits each facade from many angles. This structure is tantalizing: it suggests camera poses could be recovered by a dense pose-graph optimization (PGO) whose only unknowns are the poses, far fewer than the joint pose-and-point problem bundle adjustment (BA) solves. PGO is mature in robotics, but almost always as post-processing: it redistributes the drift of an already-decent trajectory once loop closures tie it together. Splatting captures push that regime to its limit, every frame closing loops with dozens of others, raising a clean question: does pose-only optimization reach BA accuracy? We built a system specialized to this capture structure, not a general-pu

arXiv:2610.14082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic perception must remain reliable when extreme environmental conditions severely degrade the primary RGB observation. Although robotic platforms commonly carry complementary sensors such as depth and infrared, much of the modern perception stack remains RGB-centric, creating a mismatch between multimodal onboard sensing and pretrained downstream models. We study whether complementary sensing can be used upstream to recover a task-compatible RGB observation that preserves existing perception capabilities without modifying or retraining the downstream stack. To this end, we introduce SenseWeather, a controlled multimodal benchmark for robotic perception under severe rain, snow, dust, fog, and darkness, with registered RGB, depth, and infrared observations, clean references, and grounded high-level perception tasks. We further develop Fusion-to-RGB, with two parameter-efficient sensor-fusion realizations based on token-space fusion for

arXiv:2610.14075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-view perception is often treated as a safe design choice for robot manipulation: if one camera is useful, more cameras should be better. We revisit that assumption in tabletop bimanual manipulation by comparing policies trained with two large-field-of-view (FoV) wrist cameras against policies that additionally receive a head view, using controlled-variable experiments on a real bimanual platform. Across three tabletop tasks, adding a head view does not consistently improve task completion or execution quality: when the wrist cameras already observe the objects, grippers, and goal regions, wrist-only policies form a strong baseline. Restricting the wrist-camera FoV increases the potential value of a head view, but performance improves most reliably when the added view supplies concentrated, task-relevant information: region-of-interest (ROI) cropping yields more consistent head-view gains than the uncropped image, which is dominated

arXiv:2610.14067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Competitive humanoid table tennis requires two distinct abilities: executing a desired return and deciding where to return the ball. We separate these two problems, with the ball landing target serving as an interface between motor control and strategy. (1) We first train a whole-body motor policy conditioned on the desired landing target, which maps the target to an executable humanoid stroke through a model-based strike planner and a learned controller. (2) We then improve the motor policy through self-play in closed-loop rallies, where the robot learns to handle incoming balls generated by another player rather than only prescribed incoming balls. At this stage, the landing targets are still sampled without considering the opponent, so the policy improves its execution without learning game strategy. (3) Finally, we freeze the entire motor stack and train a stroke-level strategic policy to choose landing targets through competitive sel

arXiv:2610.14064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling-based model predictive control (SMPC) is increasingly practical for contact-rich manipulation because GPU-based physics simulators enable real-time evaluation of large numbers of non-differentiable contact rollouts. However, this computation budget is finite and can be spent in competing ways, including denser control exploration, representing dynamics or state uncertainty, replanning more frequently, or aligning the simulation better with the physical state. Yet, the resulting trade-offs are not well understood in real-world sim-to-real control. In this work, we address this question through a systematic study of how to allocate a fixed computation budget for SMPC in contact-rich manipulation. To enable controlled comparisons, we develop a GPU-based framework named Budget-Allocating Model Predictive Control (BAMPC), which runs on MuJoCo Warp and exposes dynamics uncertainty, state uncertainty, and temporal alignment as independe

arXiv:2610.14061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art perceptive humanoid locomotion is mostly built on retargeted motion capture, a generative motion prior, and a distillation stage. We report a complete system that does not require this pipeline for a humanoid to cross varied terrain. In its place, we provide a five-expert mixture routed by a terrain classifier over a sensed elevation grid, and target every foothold with a model-based planner, refined by six closed-form-gradient steps on an interpolated terrain-cost field instead of picked from a fixed grid. Driven through the same perception-to-actuation software a robot would run, inside a second, deployment-fidelity simulator, it crosses an $85$\,m five-segment waypoint course $18$ of $20$ times end-to-end ($90\%$, Wilson $95\%$ CI $70$--$97$) and succeeds $20/20$ on four of five segments scored alone, where an ablated configuration without the mixture and without refinement reaches $0\%$ on both the stair and the hurdl

arXiv:2610.14042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A longstanding goal for robot reinforcement learning (RL) is that robots learn from their own physical experience, as humans and animals do. A key obstacle to learning directly from physical experience, especially outside instrumented lab environments, is that the state of the world is usually unobservable to the learner and must be estimated from on-board sensing. Errors in that estimate corrupt both the policy input and potentially the reward signal. We study this challenge using the contact-rich task of a bipedal robot learning to score soccer goals. We estimate all key state variables on-board with an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and no external instrumentation (e.g., motion capture or overhead cameras). Because the UKF may incorrectly estimate state when the ball is unobserved, we learn a new state representation with a recurrent state-space model (RSSM) that, critically, only corrects the RSSM's latent state when the ball is observ

arXiv:2610.14039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing vision-language-action (VLA) models benefit from large-scale vision-language pretraining, but tend to memorize training trajectories, limiting their ability to adapt learned interactions to new task and scene configurations. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{Region-Aware Interaction Networks (RAIN)}, which formulates a task as a sequence of goal-conditioned subtasks, each specified by an action type and a target-region mask. This formulation allows learned skills to be reused across different objects and scene layouts and composed into task sequences not seen during training. Its Target-adaptive Cross-View Encoder (TCE) conditions multi-view features on target masks and exchanges information across views, while PlanDiT predicts target-directed trajectories and actions. A Transition Head estimates subtask completion to enable automatic transitions. We also introduce a \textbf{Reference-based Retargeting Strategy (RRS)},

arXiv:2610.14035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires a robot to be precise in free space to establish the intended contacts, and compliant once in contact to avoid excessive forces. Imitation learning has proven effective for simpler manipulation tasks, but the compliance underlying a demonstration is not directly observable and is therefore difficult to infer from demonstration data alone. We present a framework that makes compliance explicit at every stage. During data collection, the operator teleoperates the real robot while a synchronized digital twin visualizes the error between the commanded reference and the achieved pose, making the current compliance visible, and selects between two discrete compliance modes. To generalize across object poses, we combine Laplacian editing, which retargets trajectories efficiently but is not physics-consistent during contact, with simulation-based trajectory optimization, which enforces physical plausibility but o

arXiv:2610.14034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are expanding robot capabilities, enabling robots to handle more diverse objects, follow sophisticated instructions, and operate in complex environments. These advances bring us to a future in which robots become part of everyday household life. However, cluttered, dynamic household environments also expose robots to unfamiliar objects, tasks, and interactions, making reliable zero-shot task completion an ongoing challenge for robotics research. From a security perspective, we argue for open-world safety: household robots should preserve specified safety requirements in unseen situations, including when they cannot complete the requested task. Safety protections must account for context and interactions that persist across actions and tasks. In this position paper, we examine why existing safety methods can fail to provide this protection. Protection can fail through misinterpreted context, overlooked past interactions,

arXiv:2610.14033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in learned whole-body controllers for humanoid robots has enabled robust free-space motion by tracking kinematic targets such as joint or end-effector trajectories. This interface provides a useful abstraction for upstream systems, including motion capture, teleoperation, or generative models, which can specify desired motion without reasoning about forces or balance. However, this abstraction has largely been limited to robot motion, requiring task-specific controllers or retraining for object interaction. We introduce OIL, an Object Interaction Layer that extends the kinematic command interface of whole-body control to include desired object motion and contact. OIL augments a standard controller with object-centric commands and translates them into coordinated whole-body behavior while preserving locomotion and balance. This design enables a single learned policy to execute non-prehensile interactions, including pushing,