home automation engineers

Abstract: Mobile robots must open doors and drawers, yet their scene maps record what each object is and whether it has moved, not how it will respond to a pull. This paper proposes PhysVLMM, a method that maintains a physical belief for every articulated part of a Vision-Language-Motion Map and answers a planner's queries about it, with two algorithms: a map update and a query. Watching a part move provably cannot identify its dynamics, and a measured pull identifies only the pulled part, up to one direction. PhysVLMM therefore (i) keeps that direction as a posterior instead of a point estimate, (ii) passes the evidence of each pull in closed form to the untouched look-alike parts of the map, and (iii) answers whether an action will succeed at a stated risk, or abstains. On real doors and drawers in 18 homes, it identifies the joint type in 86% of held-out pulls (48% for a learned single-view method) and predicts the response to a pull with 41% lower error than differentiable simulation (CRPS 0.323 vs. 0.544), four orders of magnitude faster (13 ms vs. 230 s per case). The posterior lowers the final-position error from 0.460 to 0.270, sharing lowers the force error of untouched parts from 56% to 42%, and at every stated risk from 0.02 to 0.30 the false-safe answers stay within it. Pooling all measured parts of a home does as well as the look-alike groups, and simpler variants predict where a pulled part stops at least as well.

Abstract: We present a low-cost miniature Ackermann vehicle for embedded neural-driving research, organized as a hardware-partitioned perceive-decide-act agent: an ESP32 camera node streams frames over Wi-Fi to a host computer, where neural inference and state estimation run, while an ESP32-S3 chassis controller executes safety-critical actuation in a 100 Hz per-wheel proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loop beneath a micro-ROS client. The partition isolates real-time control and safety on the vehicle while learning-based components run off-board, supervised by an operator from a gamepad. We characterize the complete pipeline during real closed-loop neural driving. Wireless sensing, rather than neural inference, dominates latency, with a 59.5 ms median capture-to-actuation delay; the platform absorbed wireless variability by holding the last safe command under a firmware watchdog, operating across twelve autonomous sessions with zero collisions or manual interventions; and encoder-inertial-measurement-unit (IMU) fusion cut odometry loop-closure error by 22%. These results indicate that carefully partitioned microcontroller-class vehicles support reproducible experiments in embedded AI, wireless control, and operator-supervised autonomous driving. The platform software is open source.

Abstract: Memory allows large language model (LLM) agents to use past experience, often stored as textual records, when responding to requests. For embodied agents that control robots, visual and spatial observations introduce a broader choice of memory modalities, affecting both the information available for subsequent tasks and the model inference costs of constructing and using memory. We introduce MeMoREval, a benchmark for studying this problem through a controlled experience-request protocol. Agents first experience a sequence of events without knowing the subsequent tasks, and subsequently they use memory to respond to information and action requests without receiving new observations. The benchmark comprises 53 tasks across four simulated indoor environments and measures task success alongside the inference costs of memory construction and use. Our reference evaluations reveal that storing frames outperforms storing generated descriptions at lower write-time inference cost for the primary model, while storing frames with scene graphs achieves the highest aggregate task success for every tested model. Extensions to accumulated experience, selective frame retention, and visual input to memory writers demonstrate how the benchmark accommodates further memory-design investigations. Two physical-robot demonstrations establish the feasibility of applying its protocol beyond simulation.

Abstract: Realistic household simulation must capture not only diverse environments but also the lived-in object arrangements and spatial constraints that shape robot motion and interaction. Existing resources often trade off scale, real-world correspondence, and interaction readiness, leaving a gap in faithful, interactive replicas of how real homes are actually arranged. To this end, we introduce LIVIN, a benchmark for spatial and embodied intelligence built on digital twins of 30 diverse lived-in homes. These replicas preserve observed room layouts, furniture configurations, and everyday belongings. To construct them, we design a human-in-the-loop workflow comprising instance recognition, architectural reconstruction, and object generation and placement, with intermediate results reviewed and corrected by humans against the source observations at each stage. We evaluate four tasks in LIVIN: 3D detection, 3D reconstruction, navigation, and loco-manipulation. Our evaluations show that current methods remain challenged by the dense object arrangements, occlusions, limited free space, and constrained interaction regions found in realistic lived-in homes. We hope LIVIN will help advance embodied AI in real-world homes, from spatial understanding to robotic interaction, and ultimately bring embodied intelligence into everyday home environments.

Abstract: Lifelong physical agents must reason over extended interactions where past events continue to shape the world long after they disappear from view. Beyond recalling what happened, agents must infer how history changes the current state and constrains future actions. Yet existing embodied and video-memory benchmarks largely focus on historical retrieval and summary, leaving such history-dependent causal reasoning underexplored. We introduce EMBER-Bench, an egocentric benchmark for cross-event causal reasoning in long-horizon embodied tasks, for which we newly created the task design, video recording, and data annotation. It contains 189 household tasks and 699 QA pairs, spanning task progress, failure recovery, external interventions, and compound long-horizon tasks with distant dependencies and prerequisites, with fine-grained event and causal-chain annotations. EMBER-Bench evaluates reasoning in both directions: next-action prediction selects the next action from history, and causal traceback, given that action, identifies the historical event that makes it necessary. Input ablations that add action logs or privileged cause-and-consequence annotations to the video indicate which kind of historical information models fail to use. Among the 16 evaluated models, the highest overall accuracy is 61.2%, compared with a mean of 98.3% across two human evaluators. At paired decision points, correct traceback is not associated with correct next-action prediction. Adding action logs yields a gain of 1.6 points, whereas cause-and-consequence annotations yield an additional gain of 13.0 points on top of that. These results suggest that extracting causal information from past events and converting it into constraints on current actions remains a key difficulty for long-horizon embodied agents. Project Page: https://zhaoalexgoat.github.io/EMBER-Bench/

Abstract: Agents based on large language models (LLMs) can access heterogeneous devices through tools and APIs, but reliable execution must account for unmet effects, uncertain outcomes, and changing prerequisites. A command may be acknowledged without producing its intended effect, while missing feedback may obscure an action that has already succeeded. We present Agent Device Foundation--Execution Assurance (ADF-EA), an architecture that connects agent planning and device execution through shared capability contracts. Device Capability Contracts (DCCs) unify invocation conditions, intended effects, evidence requirements, and recovery rules across heterogeneous interfaces. Agents use these contracts to plan, while the runtime applies the same semantics to authorize actions, verify effects, and govern continuation and completion. Persistent execution state retains verified progress, unresolved outcomes, and remaining budgets across plan revisions, enabling observation-based recovery, authorized retries, and necessary state repair. We formalize the execution lifecycle and establish conditional soundness properties for completion and recovery authorization. Evaluations span multiple LLMs, five agent frameworks, and simulated process-control, household, and robotic manipulation domains. Compared with direct invocation and existing execution-checking approaches, ADF-EA reduces false completion and unnecessary repetition, supports necessary state repair, prevents calls to unavailable capabilities, and preserves permitted task completion and recovery. These results demonstrate DCCs as a reusable semantic foundation for agent autonomy across heterogeneous devices, unifying capability-based planning, evidence-grounded execution, and authorized recovery within one architecture.

Abstract: Audio-language models (ALMs) integrate acoustic perception with the knowledge encoded in language models, enabling contextual understanding of auditory events. Making these capabilities practical on devices with limited memory and computation motivates our focus on small ALMs with fewer than 200M parameters. We introduce a recipe that brings together architecture, data, and three-stage training to build Mizar, a 159.3M-parameter ALM. Its architecture connects a compact CED-Small audio encoder to SmolLM2-135M through a frequency-merging mapper. With supervision drawn from ReasonAQA, AudioMCQ, and AVQA, the model undergoes three training stages: audio-language alignment (Stage 1), audio-dependent fine-tuning (Stage 2), and post-training (Stage 3) aimed at strengthening weak skills while retaining learned capabilities. Across five random seeds, Mizar achieves mean accuracies of 52.92% on MMAU, 42.42% on MMAR, and 36.02% on ADQA-clean, surpassing the previous best-performing ALM below 200M parameters on all three benchmarks. It also supports local inference on a single CPU: on questions from the MMAU benchmark, the mean latency from opening the audio file to generating a complete answer is 1.09 seconds. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/KaiyangLi1992/Mizar_159M.

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance in embodied manipulation, but still lack a clear mechanism to balance behavioral stability with task-semantic sensitivity. We identify two complementary failure modes. Under task-preserving changes, where task semantics remain unchanged but scene appearance varies (e.g., style, illumination, clutter, or paraphrasing), policies often exhibit unnecessary action drift. Conversely, under semantic-breaking changes, where key task semantics such as the target object or constraint are altered, policies frequently fail to produce sufficiently distinct behaviors and instead follow the original trajectory. To address this gap, we propose BAS-VLA, a task-semantic action calibration framework built on top of a frozen base VLA. BAS-VLA adopts a breaking-centered calibration core as the default path, and introduces a selective evidence-gated preserving auxiliary that activates only when nuisance variation is detected while task semantics remain consistent. On the OpenPI-pi0.5 / LIBERO-Object Milk-Swap benchmark, BAS-VLA maintains high success on clean (98.0%) and semantics-preserving conditions (97.5%), while reducing clean-criterion success to 0.0% under deliberate target-object swaps, demonstrating strong stale-task suppression and task-semantic separation. On validated style-preserving shifts, it improves success from 42% to 70% without degrading clean performance. These results highlight that reliable VLA behavior requires moving beyond appearance robustness toward explicit task-semantic action calibration.