News & Research

arXiv:2602.05233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language-action models have advanced robotic manipulation but remain constrained by reliance on the large, teleoperation-collected datasets dominated by the static, tabletop scenes. We propose a simulation-first framework to verify VLA architectures before real-world deployment and introduce MobileManiBench, a large-scale benchmark for mobile-based robotic manipulation. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and powered by reinforcement learning, our pipeline autonomously generates diverse manipulation trajectories with rich annotations (language instructions, multi-view RGB-depth-segmentation images, synchronized object/robot states and actions). MobileManiBench features 2 mobile platforms (parallel-gripper and dexterous-hand robots), 2 synchronized cameras (head and right wrist), 630 objects in 20 categories, 5 skills (open, close, pull, push, pick) with over 100 tasks performed in 100 realistic scenes, yielding 300K trajectories. This de

arXiv:2512.21970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in generalist manipulation, they often lack fine-grained spatial awareness and show limited viewpoint robustness. This limitation largely stems from the reliance on pretrained RGB encoders, which lack explicit geometric cues and prioritize semantic alignment over geometric representation. We argue that effective visual representations for VLA models must jointly encode both semantic and geometric information. In this paper, we introduce StereoVLA, the first VLA model to incorporate rich geometric cues from large-scale synthetic stereo data. StereoVLA employs a Geometric-and-Semantic (GeoSem) vision encoder that extracts geometric cues from subtle stereo-view disparities for precise spatial perception, while simultaneously capturing semantic features from pixel observations to support language-conditioned manipulation. Additionally, we introduce two synergistic co-training objectives: Int

arXiv:2510.11103v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many robotic control tasks require policies to act on orientations, yet the geometry of SO(3) makes this nontrivial. Because SO(3) admits no global, smooth, minimal parameterization, common representations such as Euler angles, quaternions, rotation matrices, and Lie algebra coordinates introduce distinct constraints and failure modes. While these trade-offs are well studied for supervised learning, their implications for actions in reinforcement learning remain unclear. We systematically evaluate SO(3) action representations across three standard continuous control algorithms, PPO, SAC, and TD3, under dense and sparse rewards. We compare how representations shape exploration, interact with entropy regularization, and affect training stability through empirical studies and analyze the implications of different projections for obtaining valid rotations from Euclidean network outputs. Across a suite of robotics benchmarks, we quantify t

arXiv:2510.01642v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in robotic manipulation have integrated low-level robotic control into Vision-Language Models (VLMs), extending them into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Although state-of-the-art VLAs achieve strong performance in downstream robotic applications, supported by large-scale crowd-sourced robot training data, they still inevitably encounter failures during execution. Enabling robots to reason and recover from unpredictable and abrupt failures remains a critical challenge. Existing robotic manipulation datasets, collected in either simulation or the real world, primarily provide only ground-truth trajectories, leaving robots unable to recover once failures occur. Moreover, the few datasets that address failure detection typically offer only textual explanations, which are difficult to utilize directly in VLA models. To address this gap, we introduce FailSafe, a novel failure generation and recovery system that automat

arXiv:2410.18647v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics, particularly in robotic manipulation, and whether appropriate data scaling can yield single-task robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot for any object within the same category in any environment. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on data scaling in imitation learning. By collecting data across numerous environments and objects, we study how a policy's generalization performance changes with the number of training environments, objects, and demonstrations. Throughout our research, we collect over 40,000 demonstrations and execute more than 15,000 real-world robot rollouts under a rigorous evaluation protocol. Our findings reveal several intriguing results: the generalizatio

arXiv:2606.28152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose KL-Coupled Policy Regularization (KCPR), a policy coordination framework for Reward-Punishment Reinforcement Learning (RPRL). Based on KCPR, we derive KL-Coupled Soft Optimality (KCSO) and develop its deep realization, klDMP. Unlike existing RPRL approaches that optimize reward-seeking and punishment-related policies largely independently, KCPR enables direct interactions between companion policies by treating each as a dynamically learned prior for the other. KCSO yields coupled soft-optimal policies and KL-regularized Bellman operators, allowing reward and punishment information to jointly influence value propagation. To improve learning stability, we introduce a companion-prior softening mechanism and evaluate separate replay-buffer designs for balancing reward- and punishment-related experience. Experiments in grid-world and Gazebo robotic navigation tasks demonstrate that klDMP improves safety and learning stability whil

arXiv:2606.28128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video generation models have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied world simulation. However, both general-domain video generators and robot-specific data fine-tuned models can still produce physically implausible manipulations, including discontinuous motion trajectories and inconsistent robot-object interactions, which limits their reliability as world simulators. Through extensive experiments, we find that such physical instability mainly arises from two factors: deformation of moving objects and implausible spatio-temporal correlations among interacting entities, particularly during contact. Building on this observation, we propose PhysisForcing, a scalable training framework that strengthens physical consistency by focusing supervision on physics-informative regions through joint optimization of pixel-level and semantic-level features. The framework consists of a pixel-level trajectory alignment loss, which supervises DiT fe

arXiv:2606.27656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding human responses to autonomous vehicle (AV) behaviors is essential for socially aware interaction, which is crucial for socially compatible navigation in shared traffic environments. We characterize human driving responses in interactions with AVs as feedback laws over the coupled state space of the human driven vehicle and the AV. We model the human driver's actions using a response map, a concept based in game theory, and employ a linear representation to capture driver behaviors as a function of AV behaviors, based on empirical data from a driving simulator study. Our results show that 1) human driver acceleration behavior can be captured using response maps, and 2) human driver responses differ significantly with respect to AV behaviors of yielding, non-yielding, and responsive to the human driver.

arXiv:2606.28323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous manipulation policies can solve individual skills, but composing them to perform multiple tasks with a single hand remains challenging. Adding a new task on top of an existing manipulation skill often imposes conflicting demands on overlapping fingers and contact modes, causing destructive interference between preserving an existing manipulation outcome and executing a new one. We propose DexCompose, a role-aware residual composition framework that reuses pretrained dexterous policies for multi-task manipulation through explicit finger-level action ownership. Given two pretrained full-hand policies, DexCompose first collects successful post-task states from the first skill and performs release tests over candidate finger masks to identify which fingers are necessary for maintaining the established skill state. It then trains two asymmetric residual modules: a bounded residual stabilizer for task preservation, and a context-aware

arXiv:2606.28300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is the standard predictive layer in hierarchical quadruped controllers, but the per-cycle QP solve limits the update rate achievable on embedded processors. Because legged gaits revisit a bounded region of state space, MPC solutions admit caching and reuse. This paper proposes \emph{Certified CacheMPC}: a Locality-Sensitive-Hashed cache of horizon contact-force trajectories, partitioned by contact mode, retrieved at query time and accepted only when an a-posteriori per-query certificate confirms primal feasibility and a Lagrangian dual-gap upper bound on cost suboptimality. A bounded-budget controller schedule combines top-$K$ certified retrieval, a deadline-bounded QP solve, and a shifted last-certified fallback. The framework is evaluated on a Unitree Go2 across $2{,}038$ usable cold-controller MuJoCo trials, including a $600$-trial $n\!=\!50$ campaign at three failure-boundary cells, and a first-deploy se

arXiv:2606.28276v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training and evaluating robot policies in the real world is costly and difficult to scale. We introduce SimFoundry, a modular and automated system for zero-shot real-to-sim scene construction from a video. SimFoundry generates sim-ready digital twins and supports object, scene, and task editing, enabling the automated generation of diverse digital cousins: affordance-preserving variations of reconstructed real-world scenes. Policies trained on SimFoundry data transfer zero-shot to challenging real tasks involving multi-step manipulation, articulated object interaction, and bimanual interaction, and its digital cousins (variations of the original scene, objects, and tasks) facilitate generalization to new real-world conditions. Across 7 manipulation tasks and 5 policy architectures, SimFoundry simulation evaluations strongly predict real-world performance, with mean Pearson correlation 0.911 and mean maximum ranking violation 0.018. Wh

arXiv:2606.28237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robots have achieved remarkable locomotion, yet their behavioral repertoire remains confined to a few gaits--far from the expressive, companion-like presence long envisioned for them. Attempts to import the humanoid recipe of large-scale motion data have inherited one tacit assumption: that robot motion must first pass through an animal body, making data collection dependent on cooperative animals, reconstruction fragile across species, and retargeting ill-posed across incompatible morphologies. We propose Uni-Mo, a fully automated pipeline that removes the animal from the loop by reframing data scarcity as a generation problem: an LLM proposes motion prompts, a video diffusion model synthesizes the corresponding robot behaviors, and the generated videos are lifted into 3D reference trajectories used to train tracking policies deployed on a real Unitree Go2. To make naively-drifting generations reliably extractable, we introduce

arXiv:2606.28196v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditionally, dexterous manipulation controllers are designed using analytic models constrained by strong assumptions about the hand and the objects being manipulated. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become another common approach in which skills are explored openly in an end-to-end manner but is inefficient because of unnoticeable instability and conflicts in learning objectives. This paper attempts to efficiently explore stable and accurate manipulation skills by decomposing dexterous skills into multiple simpler/analyzable components. Each skill component is subsequently learned with constraints and guidance from classical physics and control theory. Our work shows that for stable grasp, in-grasp reposition/reorientation with different objects, sensor/motor noise, latency, and frictional conditions, skill learning becomes efficient and stable with prior knowledge from theory.

arXiv:2606.28192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bimanual manipulation is essential for advanced robotic systems because it offers higher efficiency and flexibility compared to single-arm configurations. However, existing approaches either lack inter-arm interaction or ignore the need for a dynamic division of labor, treating the arms as functionally equivalent. To address these limitations, this paper draws inspiration from human bimanual manipulation where one arm handles core operations and the other provides auxiliary support, and proposes PA-BiCoop, a new single-model bimanual cooperation framework with dynamic primary-auxiliary arm differentiation. PA-BiCoop categorizes robotic arms into primary and auxiliary arms with adaptively adjustable roles across task stages, employs two specialized decoders that share a global feature encoder: the primary decoder generates the primary arm's base-coordinate pose and core-task affordance heatmaps, and the auxiliary decoder outputs the auxili

arXiv:2606.28133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether we can learn novel manipulation skills from human actions to a bi-manual robot with parallel grippers. Human action data is cheap, abundant, and diverse, making it one of the most promising resources for scaling up robot learning. Yet transferring skills from humans to robots remains hard: most prior work treats humans as just another bi-manual 6DoF embodiment, where hand-pose estimates are noisy and the contact patterns of human fingers differ fundamentally from those of a parallel gripper. We argue that learning rotation-inclusive action signals from human data is therefore sub-optimal, and instead propose a bridging action representation: the relative wrist translation within the initial head-camera frame, an action space shared by humans and robots. To handle the potential absence of certain action components in different embodiments, we build a $\pi_0$-like vision-language-action model with interleaved action tokens