News & Research

arXiv:2609.07211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse outcome feedback limits what robots can learn from unsuccessful attempts at complex manipulation. Failed multi-stage surgical attempts can contain grasps, lifts, or transfers worth reusing. In sparse-reward reinforcement learning, terminal rewards collapse such attempts to the same outcome, while scalar vision-language model (VLM) ratings reveal neither what progress merits credit nor when it occurred. We introduce phase-and-first-arrival feedback: one VLM query per recorded episode identifies the furthest visually verified task phase and when that phase is first reached, allowing the learner to reuse partial behavior and localize credit. We instantiate it in SurgPhaseBench, a phase-structured suite spanning rigid and deformable tasks, and evaluate it in simulation and hardware. Across five simulated tasks, our method reaches 75.2% mean success, compared with 52.1% for a reward based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP

arXiv:2609.07165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-by-Demonstration (LbD) enables intuitive robot programming by capturing expert skills, which is crucial for agility in high-mix, low- volume manufacturing. This systematic literature review analyzes passive LbD for industrial assembly processes, focusing on the perception architecture and the generalization of the perceived demonstration. We specifically investigate one-shot approaches where only a single demonstration is required. The review evaluates how systems adapt to new assemblies using this limited data. We identify a shift towards object-centric perception, allowing learned primitives to be transferred to new product variants with minimal training.

arXiv:2609.07111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robot locomotion policies are often trained using reinforcement learning, which in turn relies heavily on hand-crafted reward functions. Designing reward functions requires substantial manual engineering, and it is often unclear which local rewards will induce the desired global behavior. Shaped rewards from formal specifications in languages like Signal Temporal Logic (STL) can make rewards more interpretable, but writing STL specifications itself still requires domain expertise. We study whether large language models (LLMs) can fill this gap by generating Parametric Signal Temporal Logic (PSTL) specifications that are subsequently used for policy learning. Given a natural language locomotion objective and a constrained specification grammar, GPT-5.5 and Qwen 3.6 independently propose STL templates for command tracking, safety, and gait structure. We instantiate the parameters of the generated PSTL templates using expert trajec

arXiv:2609.07109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automation in underground mining has the potential to significantly enhance safety, operational efficiency, and sustainability. However, effectively coordinating fleets of autonomous vehicles in dynamic mine environments introduces substantial challenges in both optimization and motion planning. To address these challenges, we introduce and formalize the \emph{Block Cave Mining (BCM)} problem, which focuses on computing a transport plan that maximizes ore throughput while satisfying draw ratio constraints. To solve this problem, we propose SAMM, an eventually optimal anytime solver that jointly integrates task assignment, scheduling, and path planning via a mixed-integer linear programming formulation. To improve scalability, we also introduce SAMMS, a variant of SAMM that trades optimality guarantees for efficiency by decomposing the problem into shorter planning subcycles. Experimental evaluations using realistic industrial mine scenari

arXiv:2609.07096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid locomotion requires control policies that remain stable under imperfect sensing while exploiting temporal context for consistent motion. We present RoboDreamer, a two-stage teacher--student framework that combines next-observation consistency with randomized continuous temporal masking. A teacher is first trained on clean observations, and a student is then distilled under masked recent observations, encouraging the policy to infer missing current information from history. At inference, the same masking interface is reused for implicit closed-loop action refinement and optional multi-step action chunking. Mamba is used as the temporal backbone, while matched ablations show that masking/distillation provides a substantial part of the gain and Mamba contributes additional tracking improvements with real-time latency. Experiments in IsaacLab, MuJoCo, and on a Unitree G1 demonstrate robust motion tracking under observation masking an

arXiv:2609.07091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots performing person-following tasks often suffer from temporary occlusions and sensor track loss in dynamic environments. This research presents an end-to-end autonomous navigation stack that addresses target occlusion through map-informed spatial reasoning. The proposed system features a multi-modal perception pipeline, fusing deep learning-based visual tracking with 2-dimensional LiDAR point clustering to maintain high-fidelity tracking of a tagged person. A continuous state estimator integrates this perception data with wheel odometry and IMU sensors for stable localization. When the active track is lost due to occlusion, the system activates a map-based recovery framework. Leveraging a predefined topological map, the system executes a graph-based search to propagate the target's last known trajectory along structurally defined walking lanes, adhering to left-hand regional conventions. By generating a discrete se

arXiv:2609.07049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior policies are often formulated as continuous generative models, whose iterative denoising processes are expressive but difficult to interpret and prone to producing implausible actions. We propose the Large Discrete Policy (LDiP), a fully discrete behavior modeling framework that selects actions from a large vocabulary of physically plausible candidates. Rather than perturbing actions, LDiP improves expressivity through stochastic iterative scoring: it progressively re-scores and prunes candidates with score-space stochasticity, enabling fine-grained ranking and exploration among plausible actions while preserving an explicit decision process. Across end-to-end planning, closed-loop driving, robotic manipulation, and vision-language-action settings, LDiP consistently outperforms strong discrete and continuous baselines in autonomous driving, and exceeds or matches continuous generative policies in robotic manipulation. These resul

arXiv:2609.07047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation often requires acting on information that is no longer visible, yet Vision-Language-Action policies are usually evaluated when the current observation largely determines the next action. Existing robotic memory benchmarks expose this gap, but they still rely mainly on final task success and therefore conflate forgetting with manipulation failure. We present \textbf{MEMOBench}, a benchmark for process level memory evaluation in robotic manipulation. MEMOBench includes 30 history dependent tasks, 1{,}500 expert demonstrations, and 4{,}200 executable checkpoint instances from 84 templates. Each checkpoint pairs coarse to fine language with a simulator predicate and labels one memory operation: Storage, Update, or Compression. These annotations define Memory Storage Rate, Memory Update Rate, and Memory Compression Rate, which measure memory fidelity alongside task success. Across standard and memory augmented VLA policies

arXiv:2609.07002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable and robust dexterous in-hand manipulation requires a policy to infer object pose, geometry, contact, and potential slip from partial and noisy observations. Although recent tactile and visuotactile RL methods achieve strong in-hand rotation in controlled settings, their robustness often degrades under pose shifts, force disturbances, and object variation. We propose WM-Craftnet, a world-model-conditioned framework that learns compact action-conditioned latent dynamics from proprioception, depth, tactile sensing, and actions, supervised by multimodal reconstruction and reward prediction. Rather than using the world model for latent imagination or policy optimization, WM-Craftnet uses the learned World Synesthesia Model (WSM) as recurrent task context for an asymmetric actor--critic policy. Importantly, WSM is trained to reconstruct clean depth targets from noisy depth inputs, providing a denoised geometric state for real-robo

arXiv:2609.06958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become the leading paradigm in legged locomotion, enabling complex behaviors from backflips to parkour through massively parallel simulation. Under PPO's non-stationarity, shallow networks remain the de facto architecture, supported by carefully staged curricula and environments, yet the representations these policies learn stay poorly understood, leaving no training-time signal of how they will behave on hardware. In this work, we empirically study locomotion policies through the effective rank of the policy Jacobian and show that conditioning rank on the gait phase exposes architectural structure that global rank averages away. In particular, we find that standard architectural choices, namely layer normalization and residual connections, allocate roughly two more dimensions of effective rank to swing than to stance, which is fully absent in vanilla MLPs. Building on this, we propose a simple recipe that turns

arXiv:2609.06930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed Dexterous Manipulation (DDM) is a novel paradigm that presents significant control challenges due to high action-space redundancy, inter-robot cooperation, and dynamic object-robot interactions. This paper introduces a framework based on spatially conditioned Multi-Agent Transformers (MATs) to efficiently learn robust control policies for a DDM system grounded in an array of 64 soft delta robots arranged in an 8x8 grid. Our three core contributions are: (i) an MAT with adaptive layer norm for compute efficiency, (ii) spatial contrastive embeddings to ground transformer embeddings in the spatial configuration of the robots, and (iii) an MAT-based behavior cloning method fine-tuned using Soft Actor Critic. We also propose an action selection formulation to analyze the trade-off between task performance and the number of robots utilized. Our experiments show that MATs iteratively refine their actions through the stacked attention

arXiv:2609.06896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed learning control for multirobot systems (MRS) offers significant flexibility in presence of uncertainties but lacks provable performance guarantees. A promising direction involves integrating reinforcement learning (RL) into distributed model predictive control (DMPC), leveraging the strengths of RL in nonlinear policy design and the receding-horizon replanning capabilities of DMPC. However, ensuring secure control within such a learning framework under malicious cyber attacks, particularly stealthy ones, remains a critical challenge, because the distributed policies generation depends on information exchange among neighbors, where compromised agents can rapidly influence the behavior of others through the communication network. This article proposes a distributed secure learning control (DSLC) framework for large-scale MRS under malicious, stealthy actuator attacks. Our framework offers two key features: (i) a unified approac

arXiv:2609.06888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive coding characterizes adaptive behavior as a dynamic balance between internally generated predictions and external sensory evidence, yet how an embodied cognitive system can regulate this balance online during ongoing interaction remains poorly understood. This study proposes a predictive-coding-based mechanism for regulating internally generated and externally coupled processing during physical human--robot interaction. The framework employs a predictive-coding-inspired variational recurrent neural network (PV-RNN), in which a meta-prior controls the degree to which posterior inference is constrained by learned prior dynamics. We extend this architecture with an online mechanism that uses reconstruction error accumulated over recent interaction history to select between predefined meta-prior regimes. The mechanism was evaluated across three physical human--robot interaction tasks involving fixed structured, changing structured,

arXiv:2609.06852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although highly effective in vision and language domains, applying in-context learning to robotics remains challenging. Existing autoregressive in-context imitation methods discretize continuous actions and exacerbate the accumulation of early prediction errors through next-token prediction, limiting their generalization on unseen task configurations. Meanwhile, flow-matching policies have been explored for continuous robot control and can help mitigate compounding errors; however, in-context imitation learning within a flow-matching framework remains underexplored. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a conditional flow-matching model that learns continuous action distributions for in-context imitation learning. ContextFlow conditions flow-based action prediction on demonstrations and observations, enabling robust generation from noisy action distributions. To better encode multimodal in-context demonstrations, we adap

arXiv:2609.06820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active mapping requires a robot to select camera viewpoints that efficiently reconstruct an unknown 3D scene. To reason about unobserved regions, recent systems use pretrained occupancy networks as world models that complete missing geometry. The predicted structure contributes to expected coverage gain and constrains feasible robot motion. Consequently, occupancy errors can change both what the robot chooses to explore and where it is able to move. We diagnose these effects by holding the planner fixed and varying only the occupancy representation provided to it. We consider planning without completion, with learned occupancy, with false positives removed by a ground truth oracle, with false negatives restored by an oracle, and with ground truth occupancy. Our experiments show that correcting false positives or false negatives alone does not consistently improve final coverage. This finding reveals a gap between occupancy accuracy and do