News & Research

arXiv:2610.32460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale human motion data, motion retargeting, and motion imitation have enabled increasingly capable whole-body control for individual humanoids. Cooperative carrying is more challenging because successful coordination requires not only plausible individual motions, but also consistent cross-agent and agent-object relations, including shared grasp, relative configuration, and whole-body support. We introduce CoCarry, a cooperative-carrying dataset containing 220 synchronized two-person sequences across 21 task schemes, five shared-object geometries, four terrain types, and approximately 61 minutes of motion. We further propose Contact-Support-Structured Retargeting, which starts from nominal individual motions and jointly refines both humanoids around the same prescribed object trajectory. Cooperation-aware object-local hand anchors preserve compatible four-hand grasp relations, while complementary upper object-int

arXiv:2610.32365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Graphs of Trajectory Bundles (GTB) method for motion planning of systems with nonlinear and black-box dynamics, combining sampling-based motion planning with trajectory optimization and graph search. Based on a graph-of-convex-sets decomposition of the workspace, GTB iteratively constructs a graph of trajectory bundles that captures the local dynamics of the system at any vertex. By solving a shortest-path problem on this graph, we find maximally dynamically feasible iterates that satisfy the system's dynamics in the limit and any constraints such as collision avoidance or additional safety or specification constraints by construction of the underlying graph. As a result, GTB can handle highly nonlinear, unstable, and even black-box dynamics with complex collision and specification constraints, making it a powerful tool for motion planning of complex systems.

arXiv:2610.32348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many manipulation tasks require a robot to remember what it has done and what it has seen. Frontier vision-language models can plan such tasks without task-specific training, but how such a planner should remember an episode is an open question. We argue that its memory must keep track of what the planner has done and learned, and must let the planner choose what to look at, since every frame costs tokens; a note rewritten at every step meets both poorly. We propose LogLook, whose execution-grounded memory lets the system keep the record, an execution log and the model's earlier notes, while the model decides where to look: frames are returned only where it expects a change, and demonstrations are skimmed before it inspects the parts it chooses. Measured with the benchmark's motion planner, LogLook matches the success of a note-only memory with 43% fewer tokens and less than half the images, and fails far fewer episodes through what it re

arXiv:2610.32330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulation involves localized changes: picking up a cup moves the cup while leaving the surrounding scene largely unchanged. Yet existing 3D visual pretraining methods, including recent dynamics-aware variants, model state transitions at the scene level, compressing the motion of everything in a scene into a single global latent action. This conflates semantically distinct transitions in scenes with multiple moving parts, obscures dependencies between changing regions, and leaves the learned representation vulnerable to task-irrelevant scene content. We introduce DynaSlots, an action-free, label-free pretraining framework that decomposes each point cloud frame into a small set of temporally consistent slots and models dynamics at this per-slot level rather than the scene level. A temporal slot propagation module promotes consistent slot assignments across frames; an inverse dynamics model then extracts one latent action per slot f

arXiv:2610.32312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot manipulation requires a single vision-language-action (VLA) policy to execute diverse skills across scenes and instructions. However, current multi-skill VLA policies often leave two aspects of an instruction insufficiently modeled: which primitive skill to execute and where/how to contact and move objects. We propose MAST-VLA (Multi-skill Adaptation with Skill-conditioned experts and Trajectory-affordance priors), a dual-conditioning framework for robot manipulation. MAST-VLA introduces skill-conditioned LoRA Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) adapters in the LLM backbone, where skill-query tokens and routing biases guide low-rank expert specialization, and converts a predicted affordance heatmap into a patch-level trajectory-affordance spatial prior for the action head. On the CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D long-horizon multi-skill cross-scene generalization setting, MAST-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an Avg.

arXiv:2610.32277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned humanoid controllers are usually trained in one simulator and then checked in a second one before they go near hardware. We ask what that check says about command delay. We train motion-tracking policies for a 24-joint humanoid on five motions taken from monocular video and test them in an independent CPU MuJoCo harness, which we first verify against the training model. Every policy completes its motion in at least 26 of 30 episodes under the training randomization. With 40 ms of constant command delay, however, survival drops to 15% on average (0% - 45%), and the delay margin is only 20 - 30 ms. Randomizing the delay during training (0 - 50 ms) lifts survival at 40 ms to 95% on average (75% - 100%) and moves the margin to 50 - 70 ms. A control arm trained for the same number of extra iterations without delay does not improve, so the gain comes from the randomization itself. This holds for all five motions with three training seed

arXiv:2610.32271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are typically pretrained on broad, diverse datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on a comparatively small dataset tailored to a specific target robot. Such adaptation recipe is now widely established, achieving its most mature results on fixed-base arms due to their static base dynamics and consistent reference frame. Mounting the same arm on a quadruped extends the workspace to the entire floor, but fundamentally changes the embodiment: rather than controlling the arm in isolation, the policy must jointly coordinate base navigation, body posture, and end-effector motion. In this work, we study the practical demands of this embodiment change across data collection, model adaptation, and inference design to achieve closed-loop loco-manipulation on a Unitree Go2 with an AgileX Piper arm. We report the choices that made this real-robot deployment feasible, namely model variant, action horizon, and demonstra

arXiv:2610.32225v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent robot manipulation policies commonly predict continuous action chunks directly from observations, without explicitly modeling reusable structure in the action space. However, manipulation demonstrations often contain recurring short-horizon motion patterns that are shared across tasks. We introduce \textsc{RoboCode}, which learns these patterns through a shared soft-gated primitive action interface. Rather than assigning each action chunk to a single discrete code, \textsc{RoboCode} represents it as a soft composition of multiple learned primitives, providing a flexible intermediate representation of short-horizon actions. The primitive interface is learned from action chunks pooled across multiple tasks and then frozen while task-specific state encoders are trained to map current state inputs into the shared latent space. Experiments on five ManiSkill manipulation tasks address three questions. First, the learned primitive interfa

arXiv:2610.32208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as powerful general-purpose robot policies, but their successes and failures remain difficult to diagnose and understand. In this work, we show that sparse autoencoder (SAE) representations of OpenVLA activations contain outcome-predictive information and can be used to predict task failure before the robot reaches an unrecoverable state. Moreover, to provide insights into what common behaviors may contribute to these outcomes, we identify individual SAE features whose strong activations are associated with specific stages of success or failure, and uncover recurring behavioral patterns by localizing temporal intervals where these features exhibit significant activation changes. We further develop a VLM-based interpretation pipeline to generate behavioral descriptions of these patterns and validate their correspondence to feature activations on held-out intervals.

arXiv:2610.32188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact angle (CA) is a common parameter measured in the development of novel contact lens materials and surface coating technologies. Existing literature on in vitro CA of contact lenses via the sessile drop method is hindered in repeatability, reliability, and comparability due to inter-laboratory and inter-operator protocol variation. In this work, the Robotic Autonomous Imaging Surface Evaluator for vision applications (RAISE-Vision) is introduced as an automated platform for CA measurement on curved hydrogel surfaces, with specific application to in vitro contact lens wettability analysis throughout air exposure. Customized 3D printed hardware, such as lens mounts, camera holders and drying apparatuses, was designed to facilitate an automated repeated sessile drop workflow within a liquid handler. Collected images were directly fed to a custom open-source image processing script for CA determination on a curved surface that combines

arXiv:2610.32143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot-assisted dressing is particularly challenging due to narrow openings and articulated body parts. Even small errors in the relative pose between the body part and garment opening can cause snagging, missed insertion, or incomplete dressing. To address these challenges, we formulate dressing as a geometry-aware insertion problem that represents task-relevant spatial relationships between the body part and object opening, rather than relying on the full deformable-object state. Based on this formulation, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework combining a staged curriculum, which progressively guides the policy from coarse alignment to insertion and final placement, with a finger-wise insertion soft gate that provides continuous feedback on individual finger insertion progress and helps suppress premature insertion. We evaluate the framework on rigid and deformable bracelet dressing tasks through component ablations, systema

arXiv:2610.32130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traversability analysis in off-road settings remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robots. Key difficulties include constructing an accurate and expressive local map from multimodal sensor data, and using the map to design traversability rules that yield desirable navigation behavior. Importantly, this system must be resilient to the limited sensing regime brought about by complex environments and high speeds. In this paper, we present TravSUITE, a traversability system suitable for high-speed navigation in off-road environments. TravSUITE consists of two major components: 1) an efficient voxel mapper that leverages visual foundation models (VFMs) to build a rich geometric-semantic local map from streams of on-board sensor data, and 2) a unified neural network that jointly predicts traversability-relevant quantities in bird's eye view (BEV), including geometry, semantics, speed and cost. Our training strategy is entirely annotation-f

arXiv:2610.32102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generate expressive continuous trajectories for robotic manipulation, yet balancing real-time responsiveness with execution stability remains a persistent challenge. Standard deployment workflows typically treat numerical solver depth and execution horizon as decoupled choices. The horizon amortizes inference latency, while solver depth is kept high to preserve integration fidelity. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental compute-execution coupling in flow-matching VLAs governed by a systematic sign reversal. While coarse numerical integration degrades precision under rapid replanning, it markedly improves task performance under extended open-loop commitment. Geometrically, numerical truncation contracts lateral action dispersion around an invariant trajectory centroid, serving as an implicit regularizer that suppresses compounding open-loop drift. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-worl

arXiv:2610.32094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot tasks require retaining and using past information. We integrate Test-Time Training (TTT), which stores context in fast weights, into InternVLA-A1 and Pi0.5 to study action generation conditioned on human demonstrations through training on paired demonstrations and robot trajectories. We implement memory transfer between the two phases and truncated backpropagation, and examine training objectives, gradient coverage, and contrastive regularization across video, short-video, and single-frame cue tasks. In our experiments, adding TTT and training on paired data at the current scale did not lead to consistent target selection based on demonstrations. Under the tested settings, shorter sequences, full trajectory gradient connectivity, and contrastive regularization did not clearly improve responsiveness to demonstrations. When demonstrations were reduced to single-frame cues, real-robot execution still showed a preference f

arXiv:2610.32093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior cloning for robotic manipulation is highly sensitive to the coverage of its training data, yet collecting diverse successful demonstrations remains costly. We study reinforcement learning (RL) not as a deployable controller, but as a data generator for downstream visuomotor imitation learning. Our key premise is that multiple successful solution modes cover a broader range of successful trajectories than repeatedly collecting a single narrow solution. We introduce DiscoDemo, which trains a privileged latent-conditioned RL generator with a parallel reverse curriculum and a success-gated diversity objective to discover diverse solutions while preserving task success. The trained generator produces multiple successful closed-loop behaviors, which are safety-filtered and exported as a static dataset for downstream imitation learning. Across four manipulation tasks, DiscoDemo produces broader successful-state coverage and improves dow