News & Research

arXiv:2604.09487v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tendon drives paired with soft muscle actuation enable faster and safer robots while potentially accelerating skill acquisition. Still, these systems are rarely used in practice due to inherent nonlinearities, friction, and hysteresis, which complicate modeling and control. So far, these challenges have hindered policy transfer from simulation to real systems. To bridge this gap, we propose a sim-to-real pipeline that learns a neural network model of this complex actuation and leverages established rigid body simulation for the arm dynamics and interactions with the environment. Our method, called Generalized Actuator Network (GenAN), enables actuation model identification across a wide range of robots by learning directly from joint position trajectories rather than requiring torque sensors. Using GenAN on PAMY2, a tendon-driven robot powered by pneumatic artificial muscles, we successfully deploy dynamic but precise goal-reaching, b

arXiv:2601.14323v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical robotic applications, yet their security vulnerabilities remain underexplored. We identify a fundamental security flaw in modern VLA systems: the combination of action chunking and delta pose representations creates an intra-chunk visual open-loop. This mechanism forces the robot to execute K-step action sequences, allowing per-step perturbations to accumulate through integration. We propose SILENTDRIFT, a stealthy black-box backdoor attack exploiting this vulnerability. Our method employs the Smootherstep function to construct perturbations with guaranteed C2 continuity, ensuring zero velocity and acceleration at trajectory boundaries to satisfy strict kinematic consistency constraints. Furthermore, our keyframe attack strategy selectively poisons only the critical approach phase, maximizing impact while minimizing trigger exposure. The resulting p

arXiv:2604.14344v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Animals in nature combine multiple modalities, such as sight and feel, to perceive terrain and develop an understanding of how to walk on uneven terrain in an efficient manner. Similarly, legged robots need to develop their ability to stably walk on complex terrains by developing an understanding of the relationship between vision and proprioception. Most current terrain-adaptation methods remain susceptible to failure on complex off-road terrain because they do not explicitly model the context between exteroceptive terrain appearance and proprioceptive physical interaction. This experience-based learning often creates a Visual-Texture Paradox between what has been seen and how it actually feels. In this work, we introduce CART, a high-level controller built on a context-aware terrain adaptation approach that integrates proprioception and exteroception from onboard sensing to achieve a robust understanding of terrain. We evaluate our

arXiv:2604.22896v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Indoor positioning is an essential technology for a wide range of applications in GNSS-denied environments, including indoor navigation and IoT systems. Combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and magnetic field-based features offers a low-cost, infrastructure-free solution for precise positioning. While magnetic fingerprints are a promising approach for indoor positioning, models trained on raw 3D magnetometer data are highly sensitive to device orientation. We address this by using two rotation invariant features derived from the 3D magnetic field: the norm (Mn) and the projection onto the gravity axis (Mg). We train a lightweight 7-layer dilated CNN (MagNetS/XL) on magnetic sequences to directly regress (x, y) positions. Using the MagPie dataset (three buildings, handheld trajectories), we systematically evaluate fixed and random rotations of test and/or train data. Raw 3D inputs (Mx, My , Mz) exhibit isotropic error increas

arXiv:2605.12369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn task-relevant features. However, without explicit guidance, these models often overfit to spurious correlations, such as visual shortcuts or environmental noise, limiting their generalization. In this paper, we introduce GuidedVLA, a framework designed to manually guide the action generation to focus on task-relevant factors. Our core insight is to treat the action decoder not as a monolithic learner, but as an assembly of functional components. Individual attention heads are supervised by manually defined auxiliary signals to capture distinct factors. As an initial study, we instantiate this paradigm with three specialized heads: object grounding, spatial geometry, and temporal skill logi

arXiv:2605.12689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel hybrid approach that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) for adaptive 3D local navigation of high-degree-of-freedom robotic systems. Our method leverages sparse point cloud data to dynamically adjust both the motion and the shape of a deformable microrobot, enabling the system to navigate toward a goal in complex, constrained environments while maximizing the occupied volume. We evaluate our framework in a simulated vascular network. Experimental results, based on 1080 trials, indicate that integrating RL with a DWA-based local planner significantly enhances both deformation and navigation capabilities compared to pure RL and model-based methods. In particular, the proposed autonomous controller consistently achieves high deformation and near-perfect path completion during training and maintains robust performance in unseen scenarios. These findings highlight the po

arXiv:2606.01840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many difficult search problems cannot be solved by algorithms such as A* using only RAM. Search algorithms which use external memory such as SSDs and HDDs with much higher capacity than RAM have been proposed in previous work, but previous work has focused on delayed duplicate detection approaches, as well as complex immediate duplicate detection (IDD) methods, and relatively simple methods for IDD have not been systematically studied. In addition, the effect of OS-level mechanisms for managing and speeding up accesses to external memory, such as page caches, has not been studied. This paper addresses these gaps in the literature by evaluating and analyzing the performance of simple baseline approaches for IDD-based A*.

arXiv:2605.29973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot behavior is often validated through simulation-based testing, yet the replicability of such campaigns depends critically on transparent documentation of how tests are configured, executed, and post-processed. We argue that data provenance, coupled with the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability), addresses this gap by explicitly tracking links between artifacts and by attaching machine-readable metadata about file origins and key design decisions. Moreover, provenance and metadata cannot be treated as an afterthought confined to final datasets; they must be integrated into the testing processes that generate those datasets so that evidence can be reconstructed end-to-end. We demonstrate this by augmenting an existing simulation-based testing framework with provenance tracking and metadata collection mechanisms, and by using these extensions to enrich a mobile robot navigation dataset with

arXiv:2412.12036v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: System identification, the process of deriving mathematical models of dynamical systems from observed input-output data, has undergone a paradigm shift with the advent of learning-based methods. Addressing the intricate challenges of data-driven discovery in nonlinear dynamical systems, these methods have garnered significant attention. Among them, Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) has emerged as a transformative approach, distilling complex dynamical behaviors into interpretable linear combinations of basis functions. However, SINDy's reliance on domain-specific expertise to construct its foundational 'library' of basis functions limits its adaptability and universality. In this work, we introduce a nonlinear system identification framework LeARN that transcends the need for prior domain knowledge by learning the library of basis functions directly from data. To enhance adaptability to evolving system dynamics

arXiv:2504.16129v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (LaMAS) have demonstrated strong capabilities on complex agentic tasks requiring multifaceted reasoning and collaboration, from high-quality presentation generation to scientific research. Meanwhile, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely recognized for enhancing agent intelligence, but limited work has studied fine-tuning LaMAS with foundational RL techniques. Directly applying conventional Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to LaMAS also introduces major challenges due to the unique mechanisms of LaMAS. To address these challenges, this article presents a comprehensive study of LLM-based MARL and proposes Multi-Agent Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (MARFT). We introduce Flex-MG, a new Markov Game formulation aligned with real-world LaMAS optimization, together with a universal algorithmic framework tailored to LaMAS. We review the evolution from traditional RL to Reinforceme

arXiv:2508.20072v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions into robot actions. However, prevailing VLAs either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order with poor performance or attach separate diffusion heads outside the backbone that fragments information pathways and hinders unified, scalable architectures. Instead, we present Discrete Diffusion VLA that discretizes action chunks and models them with discrete diffusion pattern retaining progressive refinement inside the unified transformer backbone. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves high-confidence action elements before harder ones and employs secondary re-masking to revisit uncertain predictions, enabling robust error correction. This design preserves pretrained vision-language priors, supports parallel decoding, and improves the efficiency. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.4%

arXiv:2511.15645v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pedestrian inertial odometry (PIO) estimates autonomous pedestrian motion using only acceleration and angular velocity measurements collected by an inertial measurement unit (IMU), making it highly valuable for consumer level localization applications. However, under a dual device acquisition setting, IMU signals collected by a freely carried mobile device are inherently composite signals in which the global motion of the human torso is coupled with perturbations induced by local limb motion. This coupling makes accurate human motion modeling more challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes frequency decomposed inertial odometry (FDIO). The proposed method first decomposes input IMU signals into low frequency and high frequency components using a Laplacian pyramid. It then adopts a Mamba module to model long range motion information from the low frequency component and uses a multi scale convolution module to extract

arXiv:2512.04069v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong qualitative visual understanding, but struggle with metrically precise spatial reasoning required for embodied applications. The agentic paradigm promises that VLMs can use a wide variety of tools that could augment these capabilities, such as depth estimators, segmentation models, and pose estimators. Yet it remains an open challenge how to realize this vision without solely relying on handcrafted prompting strategies or enforcing fixed, predefined tool pipelines that limit VLMs' ability to discover optimal tool-use patterns. Reinforcement Learning could overcome this gap, but has so far been limited to reasoning with a single visual tool due to the large search space in multi-tool reasoning. We introduce Double Interactive Reinforcement Learning (DIRL), a two-phase training framework where VLMs learn to coordinate multiple tools through interactive exploration and feedback. In t

arXiv:2602.08058v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of occlusions and measurement noise, geometrically accurate scene reconstructions -- which fit the sensor data -- can still be physically incorrect. For instance, when estimating the poses and shapes of objects in the scene and importing the resulting estimates into a simulator, small errors might translate to implausible configurations including object interpenetration or unstable equilibrium. This makes it difficult to predict the dynamic behavior of the scene using a digital twin, an important step in simulation-based planning and control of contact-rich behaviors. In this paper, we posit that object pose and shape estimation requires reasoning holistically over the scene (instead of reasoning about each object in isolation), accounting for object interactions and physical plausibility. Towards this goal, our first contribution is Picasso, a physics-constrained reconstruction pipeline that builds multi-object

arXiv:2602.20807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Combining 3D Gaussian splatting with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has gained popularity as it enables continuous 3D environment reconstruction during motion. However, existing methods struggle in dynamic environments, particularly moving objects complicate 3D reconstruction and, in turn, hinder reliable tracking. The emergence of 4D reconstruction, especially 4D Gaussian splatting, offers a promising direction for addressing these challenges, yet its potential for 4D-aware SLAM remains largely underexplored. Along this direction, we propose a robust and efficient framework, namely Reweighting Uncertainty in Gaussian Splatting SLAM (RU4D-SLAM) for 4D scene reconstruction, that introduces temporal factors into spatial 3D representation while incorporating uncertainty-aware perception of scene changes, blurred image synthesis, and dynamic scene reconstruction. We enhance dynamic scene representation by integrating m