News & Research

arXiv:2608.01535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are emerging as a key component of embodied intelligence, with growing applications in auto-labeling and end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing approaches for improving spatiotemporal reasoning in VLMs often rely on complex preprocessing pipelines, expensive human annotations, or synthetic data, which limit scalability and introduce potential sim-to-real gaps. Moreover, although these methods have improved spatiotemporal understanding, they still lack strong metric reasoning capabilities for dynamic scenes, such as estimating object motion in real-world units. Prior work has explored LiDAR-based metric depth supervision to enhance spatial perception, but it does not directly address temporal reasoning. We introduce STAR-VLM, an automotive radar-supervised framework that enhances spatiotemporal VLMs with motion reasoning and metric velocity estimation for autonomous driving. Automotive radar is a l

arXiv:2608.01024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of optimizing physical layouts for automated warehouses, where hundreds to thousands of robots are coordinated to transport packages. Previous works have shown that optimizing the warehouse layout (e.g., the physical location of the storage shelves) significantly improves throughput. However, state-of-the-art layout optimization approaches are based on evolutionary optimization methods, which treat the entire warehouse as a black box and rely on random mutation to search for high-quality layouts. While the optimization outcomes are promising, these methods require a massive number of simulations to evaluate candidate solutions, making them sample-inefficient. In this paper, we present Stress-Relief Annealing (SRA), a polynomial-time simulation-free layout optimization algorithm. SRA turns the task demand into a per-vertex \emph{stress field} that predicts where traffic will concentrate in the warehouse; the field's

arXiv:2608.00959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixed complementarity problems (MCPs) arise as the first-order optimality conditions of nonlinear programs and noncooperative games, and provide a natural formulation for multi-agent trajectory optimization problems that appear throughout robotics. The dominant solver for problems of this form is PATH, which offers strong performance on robotics problems but remains closed-source. We present MixedComplementarityProblems.jl, an open-source, pure Julia implementation of an interior point method for parametric MCPs that: (i) matches PATH's reliability on standard benchmarks, (ii) natively supports batched, parallel processing of many parameter instances, either across CPU threads or on an NVIDIA GPU, and (iii) supports efficient automatic differentiation of solutions with respect to problem parameters. On a multi-agent lane-change trajectory game representative of robotics planning problems, our CPU-multithreaded batched solver clears a ba

arXiv:2608.00406v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate indoor localization is essential for emerging applications in robotic navigation and search and rescue. While classical methods typically focus on single-point estimates, complex indoor environments with heavy blockage and multipath propagation often lead to multimodal likelihood surfaces where a single estimate is insufficient. This paper proposes LOCUS-DT (Localization via Observation-Conditioned Uncertainty Scoring with Digital Twins), a framework that treats snapshot localization as posterior inference over the transmitter location. By leveraging a ray-tracing-based digital twin (DT) of the known environment, LOCUS-DT generates synthetic multipath profiles for candidate locations and compares them against the measured channel profile. Central to our approach is a novel learned scoring function designed to compare a fixed number of dominant specular paths, providing robustness against errors in both the DT environmen

arXiv:2608.00289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recognizing Human-Object Interactions (HOI) is essential for intelligent systems, underpinning applications in virtual and augmented reality, embodied AI, and assistive robotics. However, vision-based HOI methods face challenges in privacy concerns and poor light conditions. In this work, we introduce RF-HOI, the first framework that only uses radio frequency (RF) signals for HOI recognition. A key challenge of RF-HOI is that single-modality RF sensing is insufficient to recognize both actions and the objects being interacted with. RF-HOI addresses this through a novel modality fusion that combines mmWave radar and RFID, enabling simultaneous action recognition and target identification. Another challenge is limited training data across diverse setups, which impairs the generalizability of the recognition model. To overcome this, we develop a simulator that synthesizes multimodal RF data for diverse HOIs at scale, allowing us to fine-tu

arXiv:2608.02580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse demonstration data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer rich scene and task diversity, and prior work has shown that retargeting and rendering such videos into robot-format data can yield effective per-task policies at small scale. However, whether this approach can provide pretraining benefits for vision-language-action models at scale remains unexplored. We present \textbf{Ego2Robot}, a scalable pipeline that converts egocentric human manipulation videos into robot training data through action retargeting, robot-arm visual synthesis, and multi-level quality curation. Ego2Robot supports both curated datasets and in-the-wild videos, producing 18,561 hours of robot training data spanning 15 robot morphologies, making it the largest ego-to-robot dataset to date. To evaluate generalization, we extend RoboTwin2.0 with disentangled perturbation axes cove

arXiv:2608.02578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned predicted futures, but a plausible future alone does not justify changing the action that a bimanual policy would execute. We present CoWAM, a selective intervention layer that expresses synchronization, role compatibility, and collision convergence as coordination contracts. Each contract combines typed admissibility checks with event-conditioned verification and calibrated intervention gates. CoWAM preserves the nominal action unless an alternative satisfies every active obligation and provides a clear, low-risk improvement; when the nominal action is also inadmissible, it invokes a predefined abstention fallback. To separate selector quality from proposal quality, all methods operate on identical candidate pools and commit their decisions before shared oracle labeling. Across eight simulated bimanual tasks, CoWAM improves coordination-valid selection by 16.7 perc

arXiv:2608.02571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robots are a promising platform for search and rescue missions because they can navigate cluttered indoor environments that may be restrictive for wheeled systems. However, in unknown rescue scenarios, autonomous exploration must balance map expansion with the likelihood of finding victims, which is not explicitly addressed by clas- sical frontier selection strategies. This paper presents a situation aware frontier prioritization method for single robot quadruped search and rescue. The proposed approach preserves the frontier exploration framework, but extends frontier ranking with information gain, observation deficit, rescue relevance, terrain penalty, and travel cost. The method is eval- uated in Gazebo simulation with a quadruped robot in two indoor rescue scenarios with different levels of difficulty. The first scenario is used as a sanity check, while the second introduces stronger clutter and frontier ambiguity. Experimen

arXiv:2608.02547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Action chunking---predicting and executing multiple actions instead of a single action---has proven to be a critical component for learning effective robotic control policies. However, our precise understanding of why action chunking improves performance has remained limited. In this work we seek to close this gap. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in both simulated and real-world settings, we show that existing hypotheses for the success of action chunking---temporal consistency, horizon reduction, and representation learning---fail to explain the success of action chunking. Instead, we find that action chunking benefits from greater non-Markovian expressivity and reduced compounding error compared to Markovian policies, but, in many settings of interest, these effects can be fully captured by delayed policies, which at each step predict a single action based on the observation $k$ steps in the past. We then show that there exist

arXiv:2608.02545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reachability analysis for visuomotor policies is difficult because large visual encoders make end-to-end set propagation computationally expensive and excessively conservative. We therefore freeze the visual encoder and confine set propagation to a low-dimensional interface between it and the downstream policy, with the interface set calibrated from held-out camera-pose perturbations. Propagating this set through the policy with zonotopes yields a terminal output-enclosure width that set-based training optimizes directly. During evaluation, camera-pose perturbations are sampled from the prescribed distribution, and rollout-level split conformal calibration converts the resulting action-deviation scores into a probabilistic reachable-action radius with finite-sample coverage. In controlled manipulation experiments, set-based training reduces this radius while preserving closed-loop task capability, and matched behavior-only, observational-

arXiv:2608.02497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but suffer catastrophic performance drops when canonical instructions are simply paraphrased. Although this brittleness is typically addressed through costly data scaling, our probing reveals that the root cause is architectural rather than a lack of semantic understanding. Specifically, we demonstrate that current VLAs successfully retain the correct task identity internally. The failure actually stems from the joint encoding of dynamic visual observations and text, which introduces systematic feature shifts. Because the downstream action policy is highly vulnerable to these variations, it fails to translate the preserved semantics into correct control commands. To resolve this structural bottleneck, we propose Grounded Semantic Re-binding (GSR), an elegant intervention that bypasses unstable joint routing by explicitly fusing independently extracted task semantics with na

arXiv:2608.02453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sim-to-real policies are designed under nominal dynamics, but target-system trials may yield only a few isolated one-step transitions. We study pre-execution certification of a fixed control sequence, such as an action chunk produced by a learned policy. If the sequence reaches an unobserved state-input region, the observations remain consistent with target systems whose trajectories separate along it by an arbitrarily large amount. Any deterministic certifier sound for all of them must then decline to certify or return a reachable tube with arbitrarily large projected width. For bounded smooth classes of the target-nominal model error, we derive a finite plan-dependent projected-width lower bound. These results expose a trilemma among uniform trajectory containment, finite projected width, and unrestricted model-error behavior beyond the observations. ForeReach requires a supplied componentwise Lipschitz bound on the model error. Observe

arXiv:2608.02411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Care robots are increasingly being introduced into healthcare settings, raising important questions about their acceptance and ethical implementation. To better understand these challenges, this study investigates caregivers' perceptions of four categories of care robots: delivering supplies, helping patients into bed, monitoring vital signs, and assisting with mobility. We conducted a mixed-methods study employing a mixed-factorial design in which 298 caregivers from the United States, Mexico, and Chile evaluated all four robot categories. Quantitative measures integrated constructs from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the Cognitive-Affective-Normative model, and overall acceptance ratings. Qualitative data were collected through open-ended questions and analyzed using a literature-informed ethical framework. The results indicate that participants across countries generally evaluated care robots positively, partic

arXiv:2608.02385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid motion trackers perform reliably within learned tracking distributions, but falls can move the robot into low-height, contact-rich states from which an advancing command is temporarily unreachable. Tracking-only policies may chase infeasible references, producing rapid, large-amplitude limb corrections that increase risk to the robot and its surroundings. We present StableMimic, a unified tracker trained beyond the nominal tracking distribution. Perturbed resets around multiple human get-up references expose prone, supine, off-balance, and intermediate ground-contact states, shaping structured recovery that returns the robot to the trackable region. Because tracking and recovery occupy markedly different state--action distributions, StableMimic uses dedicated experts for each regime and a proprioceptive gate that continuously blends their actions. A hidden successor-state objective teaches human-reference-shaped recovery without

arXiv:2608.02326v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans perform long-horizon manipulation by retaining knowledge of what earlier actions have established while continuously adapting the motion underway. By contrast, action-chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly replan from the current input at each query. Existing methods preserve either long-term task evidence through memory or short-term motion through action reuse and ensembling, leaving the cross-query handoff incomplete. We introduce ChainVLA, a 1.2B-parameter VLA policy that chains successive queries through a joint and revisable execution state. Progress Context combines a recurrent Working State with sparse event memory to carry observation-derived task progress, while Motion Tail feeds the preceding prediction's unexecuted continuation into state construction and action generation. Together, the two components condition a decoder that regenerates each action horizon under the latest observation, allowing t