News & Research

arXiv:2610.24747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The scan-then-revisit workflow of upper gastrointestinal endoscopy requires bringing a previously observed suspicious region back into view for closer inspection. Acquiring such targets requires translating anatomical and appearance descriptions into camera motions from partial observations of a confined, deformable environment. We present EndoVLA-OOV, a language-conditioned vision-language-action policy for out-of-view target acquisition in robotic endoscopy. The policy adapts a pretrained backbone to continuous two-degree-of-freedom distal bending commands and combines initial, intermediate, and current images to guide search. To support policy learning, we provide an open-source VLA dataset containing 1,050 episodes across six tasks and approximately 262k observation-action pairs. Physical evaluation spans wet-lens and low-light conditions, two unseen stomach phantoms, and cross-embodiment transfer to an unseen ex-vivo environment. In

arXiv:2610.24705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial understanding is essential for robots to perceive their surrounding environments and execute actions. Existing approaches typically encode 3D awareness into vision-language-action (VLA) models by directly aligning their representations with pre-trained 3D foundation models. However, we observe that such direct geometric feature alignment essentially exploits 3D foundation priors as a form of low-rank regularization in the feature space, resulting in severe rank collapse of the pre-trained VLA representations. In contrast, we shift the focus from enforcing point-wise equality to aligning pair-wise relationships. We propose a representation-alignment method that enables the injection of 3D spatial awareness without compromising the model's original expressivity. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks, our new spatial reasoning benchmark, and real-world manipulation scenarios demonstrate that our approach effectively incorporates

arXiv:2610.24675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning a single perceptive policy for diverse humanoid loco-manipulation requires unifying high-level task decisions without losing the state-dependent physical responses that make each interaction succeed. This makes the representation between high-level planning and whole-body control critical: kinematic or contact targets provide compact abstractions but do not directly encode interaction-specific control responses, while directly predicting low-level actions requires the planner to model high-frequency closed-loop feedback. We propose FIBER, a framework that uses the executable latent space of a frozen behavioral foundation model (BFM) as a shared planning representation for heterogeneous interaction skills. Our latent policy projection (LPP) maps independently acquired task-specific policies into this representation by identifying latent commands whose induced actions match their local control responses, enabling lower-rate plannin

arXiv:2610.24674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 3D manipulation policies derive actions from explicit scene geometry rather than color images alone, enabling them to reason over metric distances, object relations, and robot-scene reachability. This geometric interface is also a vulnerability: commodity RGB-D sensors return missing measurements, boundary artifacts, and plausible but wrong surfaces around transparent, reflective, thin, or textureless objects. We study this failure under realistic depth corruption and observe a sharp depth-noise cliff across modern 3D policies, even when they are trained with matched noisy depth. This residual gap motivates a spatial-encoding approach: corrupted depth becomes entangled with the token coordinates and geometry features consumed by the action expert. We propose Noise-Invariant Spatial Encoding (NISE), a 3D policy architecture that learns trustworthy geometry features even facing imperfect depth. NISE uses Geometric Cross-View Self-Supervisio

arXiv:2610.24610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pedipulating a freestanding articulated object requires controlling its pose and internal configuration while maintaining balance. We demonstrate this capability by autonomously solving a giant Rubik's Cube with a quadruped using only its feet. The task demands repeated precise interactions, since unintended layer motion can invalidate subsequent operations. We develop an onboard RGB-D perception pipeline that estimates the cube's metric pose and its full color state from partial views acquired through locomotion and flipping. A planner converts the computed solve into robot-executable skill sequences. Learned whole-body skills reorient the cube while preserving its layer configuration and turn its layers with one foot pinning the cube as the other pushes. We train these skills using reinforcement learning with privileged observations and distill them into policies that map onboard depth and proprioception to joint targets. The deployed p

arXiv:2610.24605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is emerging as a practical way to build a representation for robotics applications. However, deploying it on real-world platforms exposes multiple challenges. Rapid maneuvers of a robot induce motion-blurred images, which corrupt the reconstructed geometry and cause camera pose drift. Furthermore, the number of Gaussians grows without bound during continuous online mapping. In this study, we present RoMo-GS, an online 3DGS system designed to address these challenges. Instead of averaging N discrete sub-frames as in prior motion blur-aware 3DGS, we analytically integrate each projected Gaussian over the exposure interval, yielding an O(1) complexity per Gaussian. Building on this, we bound the Gaussians' growth with a Hessian-based pruning score, while jointly refining pose, velocity, and Gaussians with Adam and an online LM step over the Gaussians. On multiple public datasets and a self-collected datase

arXiv:2610.24603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in embodied AI for robotic manipulation and planning, but their deployment in physical systems exposes vulnerabilities such as jailbreak attacks that induce unsafe behavior. Existing inference-time defenses are mainly evaluated on short instructions containing a single hazard, whereas realistic tasks may interleave safe and unsafe sub-tasks, conceal hazardous steps, or combine individually safe actions into unsafe outcomes. Such compound instructions make it harder for a single safety decision to distinguish hazardous sub-tasks from legitimate ones, risking either overlooking the hazard or rejecting the whole instruction. We introduce safe task completion, a task that requires an LLM-enabled robot to refuse the harmful part of an instruction while completing its legitimate part. To address this problem, we propose RuleGraph, a multi-agent Graph-of-Rules planning framework that distributes

arXiv:2610.24587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LIBERO has emerged as a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating robotic manipulation policies. However, strong performance on LIBERO does not necessarily indicate robust embodied capabilities, as models may exploit benchmark-specific regularities rather than generalize to diverse operating conditions. In this work, we introduce LIBERO-Pro2.0, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating the robustness of embodied foundation models under distribution shifts. LIBERO-Pro2.0 encompasses 22 static perturbations and 20 runtime interventions across six dimensions: Condition, Environment, Observation, Execution, Robot State Configuration, and Language, yielding 1,648 validated shifted task instances. To support robustness-oriented learning, we further collect 39,390 training trajectories through model-generated and human demonstrations. All shifted task instances undergo six rounds of iterative human review and correction to ensure phy

arXiv:2610.24579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most simulation benchmarks for robotic manipulation keep target objects static and treat policy inference as instantaneous. These assumptions simplify evaluation but hide how a moving target evolves during computation and how stale an observation is when an action is executed. We introduce LIBERO-Dynamic, a dynamic extension of all 40 LIBERO tasks. It drives objects through contact friction along three trajectory families and speed tiers, while advancing the physical world according to calibrated, model-specific inference latency. The same mechanism supports training by replaying verified static demonstrations and compensating robot actions online for target displacement, producing 9,000 quality-filtered dynamic trajectories. We evaluate six pretrained policies on 1,800 dynamic conditions per configuration, compare execution strategies and action horizons with fixed checkpoints, and fine-tune three architectures using dynamic and mixed da

arXiv:2610.24573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frozen Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies cannot incorporate previously encountered failures without updating the underlying model. We present retrieval-triggered projection correction (RTPC), an auditable external-memory wrapper for frozen OpenVLA policies that retrieves stress-collected local-depth records and applies translation-only projection correction while keeping rotation and gripper commands unchanged. RTPC is evaluated on CALVIN single-task manipulation using primary and independent replication cohorts. In the primary evaluation, RTPC reduced a depth-based near-collision or stall proxy event rate without changing task-success count. However, this reduction was not reproduced in the independent replication, and retrieved correction directions were not distinguishable from random same-family directions. Analysis identifies endpoint coupling, batch sensitivity, and the lack of a trigger-matched memory-free baseline as limitatio

arXiv:2610.24559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling humanoid robots to participate effectively in social interactions is important for their integration into human-centered environments. Existing methods, however, typically map pre-generated speech directly to continuous motion trajectories but have limited awareness of complex social environments and lack explicit high-level semantic action planning. We introduce SocialCoAct, a unified agent-centered framework for VLM-based egocentric social co-action. We formulate egocentric social co-action as an end-to-end agent task and develop SocialCoAct-Agent, which transforms egocentric observations and dialogue history into verbal responses and atomic action sequences, aligns each action with its corresponding utterance span, and executes the resulting behaviors in MuJoCo and on a physical humanoid robot. To evaluate the VLM capabilities required by this task, we construct SocialCoAct-Bench from continuous egocentric recordings of natura

arXiv:2610.24512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation is essential to everyday activities, yet evaluating robots' ability to perform these activities remains challenging because of their diverse contact behaviors and the difficulty of reproducing tasks across laboratories. Drawing on observations of everyday human manipulation, we identify eight recurring skill categories that provide a practical framework for studying these capabilities. We introduce ContactBench 1.0, an extensible benchmark that instantiates these skills through 36 reference tasks and more than 40 object assets. The assets capture task-relevant geometry and contact behavior, support reproducible fabrication using consumer-grade 3D printers, and are paired with simulation models with tunable resistance loads. Controlled task variations enable evaluation of policy generalization. We evaluate recent vision-based and vision-tactile policy learning methods on six benchmark tasks. The results reveal tha

arXiv:2610.24507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies must ground language instructions in the right objects, contact points, and target locations for reliable manipulation. Human gaze provides a natural signal for this grounding, but existing robot datasets rarely pair real human gaze with the multi-camera observations used by modern policies. We introduce GazeAct, a gaze-equipped real-robot manipulation dataset and training framework for multi-view VLA policies. Using screen-based teleoperation, we record gaze directly on the robot camera feed viewed by the operator, yielding 12000 demonstrations across 40 tasks and five domains with 300 Hz gaze synchronized with images, proprioception, and actions. We transfer gaze from the operator-selected view to the remaining synchronized cameras, producing spatially consistent targets across the policy's visual inputs. We then use these gaze-derived targets to regularize language-conditioned visual attention duri

arXiv:2610.24485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual imitation policies can organise task motion, yet contact-rich object use demands gripper adjustments beyond coarse opening and closing. We study fine-grained gripper control as a local feedback problem within ongoing task execution. Our approach assigns tactile feedback a dedicated control role during contact-rich task stages. We introduce ContactPolicy, a learned local controller that takes over the gripper while a visual base policy continues to control the arm. ContactPolicy combines tactile and force histories with current robot state to jointly predict gripper increments and their modulation, updating the gripper target from each new observation. An Intent policy manages control handover between the visual base policy and ContactPolicy. Real-world experiments on container opening, object handling, and tool operation show improved task success over both the Visuomotor Policy and Tactile-Force Policy baselines. Execution analysi

arXiv:2610.24449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tethered mobile robots can sustain long-duration operation through continuous power supply and stable communication via their cables. However, cable-environment interaction causes unintended obstacle displacement, cable snagging or entanglement, and even cable damage, leading to mission failure. To assess the risk of individual cable-obstacle contacts, this study investigates cable tension as a sensing modality for estimating whether a contacted obstacle is movable or non-movable. We conducted experiments with a tethered mobile robot and collected tension data while varying robot velocity, contact angle between the obstacle and cable, obstacle mass, and obstacle side-surface material. The results show that obstacle movability is characterized by the initial tension rise and, more importantly, by whether the tension relaxes or remains high after its peak. Based on these observations, we select six features from the tension profiles and tra