News & Research

arXiv:2610.32676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The pace of a robot demonstration is often determined by the teleoperator rather than by the task itself. As a result, the same motion can appear at widely different speeds across demonstrations, and policies trained on such data may inherit operator-specific timing along with task behavior. We propose to learn a speed prior directly from large-scale demonstration data. Given a task instruction, a motion path and the images along it, it predicts a distribution over execution speed along the path, from which a chosen quantile defines a consistent clock for retiming each demonstration. Existing methods derive the acceleration signal from the very data they accelerate, so each new task costs another fit, annotation, or pair of predefined rates. A single trained speed prior instead covers every task in a corpus. We fit a speed prior on both robot teleoperation data and handheld demonstrations in which a human arm, rather than a robot arm, m

arXiv:2610.32022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent recognition in human-robot interaction requires agents to resolve ambiguous natural language instructions by inferring the speaker's underlying goals. Research has increasingly focused on two notable paradigms for addressing this task: structured symbolic reasoning and multimodal input enrichment. However, it remains unclear whether enrichment-based methods provide benefit in settings where the ambiguity concerns unstated human intent rather than missing observable scene information. In this paper, we present a comparative and diagnostic study benchmarking FISER - a framework utilizing structured social and embodied reasoning - against CEMIR (Context-Enriched Multimodal Intent Recognition), a method that performs multimodal enrichment by synthesizing narratives and photorealistic images from textual prompts. By evaluating both approaches across four Large Language Models (LLMs), ranging from Qwen2.5-Omni-3B to GPT-5, on the HandM

arXiv:2610.31923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As humanoid robots move from research laboratories toward deployment in human-centered environments such as homes, hospitals, and warehouses, safe operation around nearby people and objects becomes a fundamental requirement. Safety filters have emerged as a promising technique to address this challenge by providing mathematical guarantees that generated control actions do not result in collisions. This paper shows that these guarantees hold only when the safety parameters are configured correctly. However, correct parameter configurations are task- and environment-specific, and no general method exists to determine them across diverse deployments. As a result, safety filters shipped with humanoid robots can fail after deployment in specific scenarios. We show that attackers can exploit these failures through only normal user interactions without any additional privileges or capabilities. To demonstrate this risk, we present goal inserti

arXiv:1303.7276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving effective locomotion on diverse terrestrial substrates can require subtle changes of limb kinematics. Biologically inspired legged robots (physical models of organisms) have shown impressive mobility on hard ground but suffer performance loss on unconsolidated granular materials like sand. Because comprehensive limb-ground interaction models are lacking, optimal gaits on complex yielding terrain have been determined empirically. To develop predictive models for legged devices and to provide hypotheses for biological locomotors, we systematically study the performance of SandBot, a small legged robot, on granular media as a function of gait parameters. High performance occurs only in a small region of parameter space. A previously introduced kinematic model of the robot combined with a new anisotropic granular penetration force law predicts the speed. Performance on granular media is maximized when gait parameters minimize body

arXiv:2610.32969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collecting high-quality demonstrations remains a central bottleneck for learning dexterous manipulation. Teleoperation records executable robot actions, but it requires a complete robot setup and places the burden of coordinating many finger joints on the operator. Human demonstrations are easier to collect, but their motions must be estimated and retargeted to the robot, and they do not directly provide robot actions. In this paper, we introduce DexPort, a portable data-collection interface for high-DoF robot hands. It uses the same hand hardware for collection and deployment, avoiding a hand embodiment gap, and records both commanded joint targets and measured joint states. Our key observation is that a small set of skills can support a wide range of dexterous tasks. During collection, the operator moves the hand-held interface to specify the robot wrist motion and selects or adjusts skills that coordinate the finger motion. This remove

arXiv:2610.32966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning humanoid control from monocular human videos offers a scalable way to acquire diverse whole-body behaviors. Yet, existing reconstruction-retargeting-tracking pipelines are limited in system-level scalability by separately optimized intermediate stages and cannot directly optimize reference motion executability using downstream tracking feedback. We present ViT-H, a video-to-humanoid control framework following a generation-and-tracking paradigm. ViT-H directly generates humanoid reference motions from videos with a diffusion model, bypassing human motion reconstruction and retargeting, and uses motion-tracking outcomes to post-train the generator with direct preference optimization. We further introduce an autoregressive variant that enables real-time humanoid video teleoperation with sub-400 ms latency. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that ViT-H outperforms state-of-the-art reconstruction-retargeting-tracking

arXiv:2610.32965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce RynnUnify, a 16B unified embodied model that combines strong embodied understanding with long-horizon visual planning through interleaved video--language reasoning. With capabilities spanning spatial reasoning, physical prediction, and grounding, RynnUnify connects an understanding of the physical world with visual anticipation of how it evolves across successive subtasks. Building on these capabilities, we further develop an agentic extension through reinforcement learning to selectively use video predictions for reasoning about unobserved states and interaction outcomes. We also develop a world-action extension of the full RynnUnify model, translating its understanding and prediction capabilities into robot control. To evaluate these capabilities, we introduce Rynn-VP and Rynn-GEU for long-horizon visual planning and anticipatory reasoning. Experiments show that RynnUnify achieves the highest average embodied understanding

arXiv:2610.32961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In medical robotics, data-driven soft-tissue shape control requires deforming tissue toward desired morphologies through sequential physical interactions. This challenge is particularly important in microscale manipulation, where localized deformation is difficult to observe, represent, and control, while physics-based models can be computationally expensive and difficult to adapt to realistic environments. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides high-resolution volumetric perception of tissue deformation, but target-conditioned control requires effective representations of both observed and desired tissue states. In this work, we introduce an OCT-guided data-driven framework for tissue shape control, learned from user-guided demonstrations and executed with closed-loop OCT feedback. We study full-volume, tissue-masked sparse-volume, and voxelized point-cloud representations, with or without residual conditioning, using deterministic

arXiv:2610.32941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models perform well on robotic manipulation, yet remain brittle once their own actions carry them into states their training data barely covers. Recovering from such failures usually requires recovery demonstrations, policy retraining, or a separate model at inference time. We introduce Backtrack, a lightweight failure detection and recovery mechanism for frozen VLAs that needs none of these. A small failure prediction head, trained only on outcome-labeled rollouts of the frozen policy, reads the VLA's existing internal representations to estimate whether the current episode will fail. When the predicted failure probability exceeds a threshold, a controller pauses the policy, retraces the arm's recently achieved motion, and hands control back to the unchanged policy so it can retry from an earlier configuration. The head adds only 0.48-0.88% to the policy's parameter count. We evaluate Backtrack on LIBERO with

arXiv:2610.32909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: HoloBoxing presents a simple recipe for learning humanoid boxing by building on a pretrained whole-body controller. The recipe separates reusable motor skills from task decisions: a compact planner requests future body-point targets, while the frozen controller handles joint-level execution. A learned decoder maps 32-dimensional actions to structured target windows, and measured-state imitation initializes the planner before reinforcement learning. Task learning then refines interaction behavior while reusing the decoder and controller, avoiding the need to relearn whole-body control. This combination keeps task optimization focused on a compact upper policy and supplies an initial behavior before reward-driven exploration. Starting from that available controller, the recipe accounts for about seven minutes of additional training, including reused representation fitting and a single-GPU task run. This excludes controller pretraining, data

arXiv:2610.32888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can adapt to local human intervention, while federated learning can combine distributed robot experience without pooling raw records. We examine their prospective intersection: sharing adaptations derived from diverse human corrections across tasks, environments, people, and robot embodiments. Corrections differ in modality, safety semantics(urgency, behavioral scope, etc.), and privacy sensitivity. A shared update that improves mean task success may suppress a rare safety intervention or produce an unsafe response on another robot. We argue for three requirements: preserve the context and uncertainty of multimodal corrections when deciding what to share; assess candidate updates in each receiving robot's closed loop before deployment; and evaluate leakage alongside retention of safety-critical evidence. Immediate, legible defensive behavior remains necessary during human interaction. We offer counter

arXiv:2610.32776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantitative and dense task progress feedback is essential for robotic manipulation across data curation, policy evaluation, and reinforcement learning. Existing progress annotations often rely on sparse keyframe markings derived from subjective manual judgments, limiting their scalability and cross-task consistency, particularly in long-horizon manipulation. To overcome these challenges, we propose action-aware quantification, a unified progress specification that decomposes long-horizon trajectories into object-level subtasks via a vision-language model (VLM) and assigns weighted action credits to capture fine-grained execution dynamics. Using VLM auto-labeling and human calibration, we construct an 800+ hour training video dataset and LOOM, a long-horizon progress benchmark containing 19,618 human-calibrated evaluation frames. To model these dense progress dynamics, we introduce NimCritic, a predictive progress critic trained via Joint

arXiv:2610.32742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unrecognized anomalies in critical infrastructure can rapidly cascade into catastrophic physical or operational failures. Current anomaly detection approaches often rely on direct access to the monitored system by utilizing onboard sensors, such as motor encoders, to detect anomalous states. However, legacy hardware often lacks these sensors, or strict security protocols may prohibit access altogether. We therefore present AWARE, a world model framework that is capable of anomaly detection using only external camera monitoring via system dynamics estimation and state prediction. Evaluated across 240 real-world robotic crane trajectories, including payload collisions and motor degradations, AWARE demonstrates a 26% improvement in anomaly classification over our strongest baseline under noisy, camera-only state estimation. Furthermore, the inferred dynamics parameter can be decoded to identify the source of faults, localizing the degrading

arXiv:2610.32688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inspired by infants' ability to learn novel tasks by imitating others, in this work we evaluate to what extent Conditional Neural Processes can autonomously learn representations of actions that are informative about their underlying goal. We show that the addition of an attention mechanism in the hidden space fosters the emergence of robust goal representations early on in the observation of an action sequence, making it a promising model for a robotic self-supervised general learner.

arXiv:2610.32666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving accurate, real-time lane-keeping control during high-speed cornering on large-curvature roads while ensuring robust vehicle stability is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this study developed a robust offset-free model predictive control (OF-MPC) framework for vision-based autonomous vehicle lane-keeping. The regulation problem in this framework is solved using several algorithms. Numerical simulation results indicated that the interpolation-tube-based constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (itube-CILQR) algorithm outperformed solvers based on the standard Interior Point Optimizer (IPOPT) and Operator Splitting Quadratic Program (OSQP), achieving a mean computation time of less than 5 ms. The itube-CILQR algorithm was then used for vehicle control in vision-based lane-keeping experiments in a simulation environment to quantify the perceptual uncertainty of a visual perception model