News & Research

arXiv:2610.28589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic robotics systems combine planners with robot harnesses to perform complex manipulation tasks. Recent work improves these systems through better harnesses and external memory, but relies on powerful closed-source models as planners and does not improve the planners' own capabilities. In contrast, coding agents have improved substantially by post-training the model itself. We therefore investigate whether post-training can also improve robot planners. However, applying it across robot harnesses requires accommodating different execution mechanisms, including VLA skill invocation and control-code generation. To this end, we introduce AgenticRoboRL, a framework for post-training robot planners across different harnesses. The training recipe combines supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning. To accommodate different execution mechanisms, harness-specific adapters connect recorded planner interactions with task outc

arXiv:2610.28585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation is a powerful tool for robotics, but building diverse, simulation-ready scenes at scale remains difficult. Reconstructing scenes from single images is a promising alternative, but visual similarity alone is insufficient: objects must also be recovered, accurately placed, and physically grounded. Existing methods that rely on post-hoc physics settling often misplace objects, producing scenes that look correct but behave poorly under manipulation. We present SceneRig, an agentic system that turns a single image into an editable, simulation-ready scene. SceneRig combines geometric, visual, and physical tools to reconstruct a faithful 3D scene. An agent then performs edit-and-validate loops inside a physics simulator to achieve physical stability. Across diverse inputs, SceneRig improves instance segmentation, object-centric appearance, and 3D placement while keeping the reconstructed scenes physically stable. Furthermore, SceneRig

arXiv:2610.28566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots exploring unknown indoor environments must decide where to move while much of the environment remains unseen. Predicting the occupancy of unseen space beyond the current sensor range can improve these decisions, but recent approaches commonly rely on learned models that require offline training and repeated inference during exploration. We introduce the Mondrian-Anchored Prior for Learning-free Indoor Exploration (MAPLE), a training-free predictive approach that adapts the Mondrian process into an online generative prior conditioned on observed geometric cues in the current partial map. MAPLE generates multiple plausible map hypotheses and evaluates visibility separately within each to estimate frontier gain, preserving differences in predicted visibility across hypotheses. Across KTH floor-plans and real-SLAM environments at multiple sensor ranges, MAPLE consistently improves over non-predictive exploration and remains competitive

arXiv:2610.28523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid-human interaction requires robots to operate under severe partial observability: during close physical contact, the human partner is occluded, truncated, or outside the robot's field of view, causing pose estimation to fail and often necessitating external tracking or privileged human state. At the same time, heavy mutual occlusions introduce errors into the human-human motion-capture data used for learning. We present REACT, a framework for learning deployable humanoid-human interaction policies from human-human demonstrations. REACT treats semantic contact structure as the key supervisory signal connecting demonstration processing, interaction learning, and onboard control. First, a VLM-guided contact modeling and retargeting pipeline identifies semantically meaningful contacts and transfers them onto humanoid-human geometry while preserving interaction structure. Using these annotations, privileged interaction policies learn p

arXiv:2610.28480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tracking large human-motion datasets has become the dominant route to general, expressive humanoid whole-body control, but scaling across many motions is expensive. Current pipelines use model-free reinforcement learning, either merging per-motion specialists through lossy distillation, or brute-forcing a single policy with cluster-scale compute. SuperMimic amortizes learning across all motions with one differentiable world model of their shared dynamics, fit from logged transitions of a standard rigid-body simulator. The world model and the tracking policy train together in one loop, and backpropagation-through-time over short imagined rollouts gives the policy analytic gradients. Fast imagined rollouts and analytic gradients make policy learning efficient. In 3 hours on a single GPU, SuperMimic surpasses the return of a state-of-the-art motion tracker baseline trained for 7 days on 128 GPUs. It reduces GPU-hours by more than $1000\times

arXiv:2610.28470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While large-scale human motion capture datasets provide a rich source of demonstrations for humanoid robot learning, retargeting the diverse motions to different humanoid robots remains a nontrivial challenge. Existing kinodynamic trajectory optimization pipelines are computationally expensive and often require manual adjustments per motion. We present FRDV (Fast Retargeting with Dynamics Validation), a scalable framework consisting of rapid constrained kinematic retargeting and an additional dynamics validation pipeline. Its kinematic stage integrates a custom Sequential Quadratic Programming solver, Real-Time Iteration, and parallel chunk-based processing, achieving up to 9,156 frames per second, approximately up to 136 times faster than GMR and ProtoMotions, while robot-specific constraints are incorporated into the optimization to reduce common retargeting artifacts, such as ground penetration and self-collision. For motions requiring

arXiv:2610.28457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose multimodal models have shown promise as direct robot action policies, yet whether they grasp the physics underlying real-world interactions and can apply that understanding to guide action remains underexplored. We investigate this question using contact-rich manipulation as a representative testbed, examining tactile understanding as a concrete instance of this broader capability. Contact-rich manipulation requires interpreting tactile feedback and adjusting actions after obstruction. Existing learned tactile policies acquire these capabilities through specialized pretraining and per-task optimization, with substantial data and training costs. We present GPT-as-Tactile-Policy, which summarizes expert demonstrations into task guidance and tactile references for contact assessment and corrective action. GPT-6-Astra combines this context with multimodal observations and interaction history to generate control commands and ad

arXiv:2610.28432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical robot navigation stacks are reliable but often require re-engineering for each new robot type and site. Learning-based navigation shifts this effort from hand-tuned parameters to data generation and training, where a policy adapts to each new embodiment or facility by fine-tuning in simulation. Whether policies adapted this way stay reliable on real industrial robots has seen little systematic testing. We study this for NVIDIA's X-Mobility and COMPASS workflow for training learned navigation policies on Idealworks robots. In simulation, we extend the COMPASS benchmark with two embodiments, the differential-drive iw.hub and an omnidirectional Humanoid Mobile Platform (HMP), and with a digital twin of the Idealworks R&D center. For the real world, we fine-tune X-Mobility on data from this digital twin, with and without sim-to-real variants generated by NVIDIA Cosmos, train COMPASS on top of it from scratch in the digital twin, dep

arXiv:2610.28431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied generalist policies by jointly modeling future world evolution and robot actions across diverse manipulation tasks. However, representing diverse futures is only the first step: a capable WAM must also generate futures that match the requirements of the current task and execution progress. In long-horizon manipulation where similar observation-action segments occur across different tasks and stages, existing approaches may generate locally plausible yet misdirected rollouts to drift toward wrong task stage, i.e., a phenomenon we term Stage Confusion. To address this problem, we propose TaskWAM, a closed-loop, stage-aware framework that represents fine-grained task requirements with Mode Tokens and tracks execution progress with State Tokens, forming a structured task state to steer world--action generation toward intended future. We further introduce StageBench,

arXiv:2610.28362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) requires a robot to rearrange objects that block access to its goal. For a pushing robot, progress may depend on a setup push that enables a later opening without itself clearing a passage. The number of candidate sequences can grow exponentially with sequence length, making physics-based search costly. We introduce the Search-trained Push Action Ranker (SPAR), which learns to prioritize push primitives from simulated search outcomes. Searches over sequences of up to two pushes per object provide supervision that distinguishes immediate openings from setup pushes. A transformer trained with regression and ranking losses scores primitives using contact tokens conditioned on scene geometry and reachability regions. The same model guides simulator evaluations in SPAR Search and selects actions for direct execution in SPAR Policy. Both modes solve successive keyhole problems that open access to neighb

arXiv:2610.28329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory tracking for compliant robots is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and modeling uncertainties, often requiring learning-based methods to avoid explicit parameter identification. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) ensures theoretically high precision and preserves the passive compliance of the robot. However, traditional ILC requires a separate learning phase for each new trajectory. Conversely, Reinforcement Learning (RL) generalizes to new trajectories, but practically suffers from high sample complexity and limited tracking precision. This work proposes Reinforced Iterative Learning Control (RILC) that combines the strengths of both approaches to achieve fast adaptation and guaranteed tracking convergence across diverse trajectories. By establishing a concurrent coupling between the two controllers, RILC overcomes the high initial errors and slow adaptation of traditional ILC, enabling high-performance tracking from the ver

arXiv:2610.28259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in visuospatial understanding and agentic reasoning enable direct robotic manipulation with general-purpose multimodal models, but their embodied capabilities remain poorly understood. This paper systematically evaluate GPT-6 Astra for closed-loop robotic manipulation using a lightweight agent execution framework. We first probe three fundamental embodied capabilities-depth perception, embodied in-context learning, and tactile understanding-and demonstrate that the model can exploit depth information, acquire simple manipulation strategies from contextual demonstrations, and use tactile feedback to correct its actions. We then evaluate GPT-6 Astra across five established manipulation benchmarks along six capability dimensions. Despite competitive performance on several benchmarks-26.92\% success on RoboDojo and 76.0\% on RoboTwin 2.0-our analysis reveals a pronounced gap between semantic reasoning and physical execution, p

arXiv:2610.28251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot swarms coordinate through directed, time-varying local communication links, some of which may be compromised to allow the transmission of arbitrary malicious data. We provide an algorithm that acts as a wrapper around robot communication---when a robot seeks to update its state using data from some incoming links, our wrapper provides a subset of trusted links whose data can be safely incorporated. It selects these links by testing a stream of trust values---data collected from an anomaly detector on each robot---using Safe Anytime-Valid Inference. We require only that the detector be better than chance. This wrapper ensures safe and performant autonomy by providing two powerful statistical guarantees: it uniformly excludes all compromised links for all time with high user-chosen probability, but nevertheless quickly learns to trust legitimate links. Both guarantees are vital to secure generic tasks, but no previous work provides th

arXiv:2610.28166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies increasingly reason before acting, but existing reasoning models compress this intermediate decision into a single representation. When several plans are valid, this commitment hides alternatives that could otherwise be selected or revised. We introduce the Generative Plan Latent (GPL), which represents the reasoning state as a low-dimensional conditional distribution over plans, such as which object, grasp, or route to use. This makes the reasoning state addressable: without retraining the VLA, plans can be sampled (coverage), selected on request (steering), and reweighted by deployment outcomes (outcome adaptation). We test all three on SimplerEnv manipulation with $\pi_0$, and extend the analysis to RoboCasa, LIBERO, and a maze domain. Steering the plan raises the fraction of executions that follow the request from 0.48 to 0.94, while the same guidance on the native action distribution shows no rel

arXiv:2610.28164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective manipulation requires a policy to capture not only about the current scene geometry, but also about how that geometry will evolve under interaction. Existing approaches either augment policies with geometric information from current observations or introduce future prediction as auxiliary supervision, leaving open how predictive geometry should be represented for action generation. Therefore, we propose a two-stage framework, which learns complementary predictive representations from multi-view video clips. During pretraining, a frozen 3D foundation model provides dense geometric features that are compressed into predictive geometric representations and optimized to preserve scene structure and its temporal evolution. Action supervision is then applied to geometric transitions to extract a complementary motor representation that emphasizes action-relevant transitions. During downstream post-training, predictive geometry is trans