News & Research

arXiv:2603.22078v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot action planning in the real world is challenging as it requires not only understanding the current state of the environment but also predicting how it will evolve in response to actions. Vision-language-action (VLA), which repurpose large-scale vision-language models for robot action generation using action experts, have achieved notable success across a variety of robotic tasks. Nevertheless, their performance remains constrained by the scope of their training data, exhibiting limited generalization to unseen scenarios and vulnerability to diverse contextual perturbations. More recently, world models have been revisited as an alternative to VLAs. These models, referred to as world action models (WAMs), are built upon world models that are trained on large corpora of video data to predict future states. With minor adaptations, their latent representation can be decoded into robot actions. It has been suggested that their explici

arXiv:2603.06954v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical assumption of a safe controller's existence and its constructive realization in systems with input constraints. I highlight the distinction between candidate and valid CBFs by analyzing the interplay of system dynamics, actuation limits, and class-K functions. I further show that some purported demonstrations of safe robot policies or controllers are limited to passively safe systems, such as single integrators or kinematic manipulators, where safety is already inherited from the underlying physics and even naive geometric hard constraints suffice to prevent collisions. By revisiting simple low-dimensional examples, I show when CBF formulations provide valid safety guarantees and when they fail due

arXiv:2603.04910v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning from human demonstrations has achieved significant success in robotic control, yet most visuomotor policies still condition on single-step observations or short-context histories, making them struggle with non-Markovian tasks that require long-term memory. Simply enlarging the context window incurs substantial computational and memory costs and encourages overfitting to spurious correlations, leading to catastrophic failures under distribution shift and violating real-time constraints in robotic systems. By contrast, humans can compress important past experiences into long-term memories and exploit them to solve tasks throughout their lifetime. In this paper, we propose VPWEM, a non-Markovian visuomotor policy equipped with working and episodic memories. VPWEM retains a sliding window of recent observation embeddings as short-term working memory, and introduces a Transformer-based contextual memory compressor that r

arXiv:2602.20220v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorithmic, systems, and experimental decisions that are typically left implicit in prior work. We find that some widely used defaults can be harmful, while a set of robust, readily adopted design choices within standard RL practice yield stable learning across tasks and hardware. These results provide the first large-sample empirical study of such design choices, enabling practitioners to deploy online RL with lower engineering effort.

arXiv:2602.19313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior. Yet obtaining such feedback at scale remains difficult, since existing approaches often rely on manual progress annotations, task-specific demonstrations, or reward models trained on curated robot datasets. We introduce TOPReward, a training-free progress reward method that probes pretrained Video-Language Models (VLMs) through their internal token probabilities rather than asking them to generate numerical progress values. Given a video prefix and a language instruction, TOPReward measures the model's likelihood that the instructed task has been completed, converting latent video-language understanding into a dense reward signal without task-specific reward-model training or manually annotated progress labels. We evaluate TOPReward on ManiRewardBench, our

arXiv:2512.19178v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bridging the gap between natural language commands and autonomous execution in unstructured environments remains an open challenge for robotics. This requires robots to perceive and reason over the current task scene through multiple modalities, and to plan their behaviors to achieve their intended goals. Traditional robotic task-planning approaches often struggle to bridge low-level execution with high-level task reasoning, and cannot dynamically update task strategies when instructions change during execution, which ultimately limits their versatility and adaptability to new tasks. In this work, we propose a novel language model-based framework for dynamic robot task planning. Our Vision-Language-Policy (VLP) model, based on a vision-language model fine-tuned on real-world data, can interpret semantic instructions and integrate reasoning over the current task scene to generate behavior policies that control the robot to accomplish t

arXiv:2508.16947v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite significant progress, imitation learning-based autonomous driving planners remain largely restricted to reproducing high-frequency biased behaviors, overlooking the inherent behavioral diversity of human driving. Moreover, existing systems struggle to understand user intent from human interactions and environmental contexts. In real-world advanced deployment, motion planning must accommodate diverse, context-dependent user preferences to support heterogeneous driving services, requiring the ability to interpret human intent and adapt behavior accordingly. However, existing approaches lack such user-oriented capabilities, as they neither explicitly model user intent nor enable flexible policy adaptation. To bridge this gap, we propose an RL-guided multi-strategy framework with a diffusion-based multi-head planner(M-Diffusion Planner) integrated with LLM-based semantic understanding, enabling dynamic perception of user intent an

arXiv:2508.11485v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate and reliable navigation is crucial for autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). However, current UGV datasets fall short in meeting the demands for advancing navigation techniques due to limitations in sensor configuration, time synchronization, ground truth, and scenario diversity. Hence, we present i2Nav-Robot, a large-scale dataset designed for multi-sensor fusion navigation in indoor-outdoor environments. We integrate multi-modal navigation sensors, including the newest front-view and 360-degree solid-state LiDARs, 4-dimensional (4D) millimeter-wave (MMW) radar, stereo cameras, inertial measurement units (IMU), global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, and wheeled odometers on an omnidirectional wheeled vehicle. Accurate timestamps are obtained through both online hardware synchronization and offline calibration for all sensors. The dataset includes ten large-scale sequences covering diverse UGV operating sc

arXiv:2607.21488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coordinating autonomous vehicles at unsignalized intersections remains a critical challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems, which typically struggle with combinatorial action spaces, reliance on privileged information, or rigid agent designs. We propose Master-Agent Proto-plan System (MAPS), a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) architecture in which a centralized Master agent generates a compact, continuous embedding, denoted as proto-plan, that encodes a global coordination strategy. Decentralized Worker agents integrate this embedding with local observations to execute vehicle-specific control, decoupling strategic intent from tactical execution and enabling independent optimization of each module. As a proof-of-concept evaluation of this coordination mechanism, we test MAPS across 72 intersection configurations in HighwayEnv. MAPS achieves collision-free navigation while significantly reducing avera

arXiv:2607.21281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Topological maps are key outputs of autonomous driving perception systems, delivering essential road information for path planning. They identify instances such as centerlines and traffic signs, along with their connectivity relationships. Due to the lack of explicit markings for centerlines in real-world environments, the detection of centerline instances remains a significant challenge. To tackle this problem, we propose HGeo-TopoMap, which leverages an explicit prior map and implicit spatial relations to hierarchically boost topological mapping. First, a geometric adaptive learning module is designed for the road structure map obtained via inverse perspective mapping. This module discretely encodes semantic and spatial features from the map, followed by a prior-mask attention mechanism that selectively focuses on informative regions. Then, a geometric consistency learning module is devised, which leverages the geometric properties an

arXiv:2607.21071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous biomedical laboratories increasingly rely on visual perception to recognize, localize, and manipulate transparent plasticware, yet high-quality real-world datasets for this setting remain limited. The scarcity of domain-relevant data is particularly restrictive in cluttered multi-object scenes, where mutual occlusion and view-dependent appearance changes remain challenging even for contemporary visual foundation models. Existing transparent-object datasets have advanced segmentation, depth, and pose estimation, but they usually do not evaluate the combined setting of multi-object clutter, occlusion, and calibrated multi-view capture that characterizes real laboratory manipulation scenes. To address this gap, we present TrainsBiolab, a real-world RGB-D dataset of cluttered transparent biomedical objects captured as calibrated multi-view sequences. TrainsBiolab contains 161,315 frames from 98 scenes and 1.03M instance annotatio

arXiv:2607.21588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning effective robot manipulation policies requires diverse, high-quality demonstrations, yet existing data pipelines are often difficult to scale because they rely on specialized hardware, centralized operators, or fixed task suites. We present AXIS, a growable community-driven data engine and benchmark for scalable robot learning, which enables browser-based teleoperation for large-scale demonstration collection, automatically generates and validates new manipulation tasks, and transforms community-collected demonstrations into training-ready data through automated success checking, quality filtering, trajectory smoothing, and visual and physics-based augmentation. The AXIS dataset currently contains 207 diverse tasks and 50K+ trajectories. Meanwhile, AXIS organizes data into task snapshots and evaluates policies with a systematic held-out protocol. We compare vision-language-action (VLA) policies under a unified AXIS evaluation sui

arXiv:2607.21582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional generalization is essential for robot to follow diverse instructions. However, pretrained policies are known to take shortcuts, deferring to salient cues rather than grounding language. We introduce a diagnostic framework that localizes this failure to individual \textit{instruction factors}, \textit{e.g.,} reusable semantic components such as color, verb, object, size, and spatial attribute. Our framework formalizes instruction factor bias, the tendency of fine-tuned policies to over-rely on dominant factors as shortcuts, and quantifies it through two metrics: Factor Dominance Rate (FDR), capturing pairwise bias between factors, and Factor Dominance Hierarchy (FDH), aggregating these into a global ranking. Evaluation on six foundation policies reveals broadly consistent ordering, \textit{i.e.}, color $\geq$ object $\geq$ spatial $\geq$ verb $\geq$ size, with color dominant, and verb and size most under-grounded. We further

arXiv:2607.21571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied question answering (EQA) is traditionally evaluated under an episodic formulation, where agents solve each task independently and reset internal state between episodes. However, real-world robots operate continuously and must accumulate, retain, and selectively reuse information acquired from prior interactions. Despite this practical requirement, the architectural mechanisms needed to support sequential memory in EQA remain underexplored. In this work, we investigate how different memory architectures behave when EQA agents are evaluated sequentially, with multiple questions answered in the same scene while memory is carried forward across queries. We find that simply preserving existing memory is often insufficient. Agents that retain only traversability information, such as 2D occupancy maps, remember where the robot has explored but not the visual-semantic evidence needed for later questions. Agents trained on short-horizon e

arXiv:2607.21416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing Gaussian-splatting-based monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are either tailored to short sequences, are not real-time, or suffer from prohibitive GPU memory requirements, limiting their applicability in realistic, long-horizon scenarios. To address this, we present GLAM-SLAM, a real-time, decoupled Gaussian-splatting SLAM system designed for large-scale outdoor scenes. We ensure lightweight tracking using a robust, feature-based SLAM frontend, while for mapping, we adopt a structured, sparse anchor grid representation that ensures scalable operation and maintains scene coherence across long-term sequences. To satisfy the dense initialization requirements of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we introduce a geometry-based flow-densification anchoring strategy using epipolar constraints. Furthermore, by treating mapping as a multi-scene problem, we propose a scene-partitioning strategy that introduces a stron