Papers for
industrial automation operators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Multi-robot world state model boosts task success across real and simulated robots
World Dreamer v5-lite: A Multi-Robot World Action Model with One Dreamer
Abstract: Multi-robot control requires integrating distributed camera views while predicting separate action sequences. Most vision-language-action and world-action models target one robot. Combining multiple views alone does not establish spatial correspondence between them. World Dreamer v5-lite is a multi-robot world-action model built around a shared world state for robot-specific action prediction. Calibrated features from a pretrained video encoder populate this state in workspace coordinates; its spatial size remains fixed as views are added. A vision-language model provides scene context and one query per robot. The queries read the shared state and exchange pose-aware information, while their action streams remain separate. Masked-view cooperative training withholds selected camera views from both visual branches while retaining all action targets. This encourages the use of observations shared by other robots. Pretraining uses more than 10,000 hours of trajectories from 20 simulated robot types, RoboFactory, and real robots. On RoboFactory, World Dreamer v5-lite achieves 74.0% mean success, 23.7 percentage points above the strongest evaluated baseline. Across four real-robot tasks, it reaches 78.8% mean success, a margin of 13.8 points. It also reaches 58.08% overall on RoboCasa365.
Single policy estimates uncertainty to guide robot learning actions
Post-hoc Epistemic Uncertainty for Vision-Language-Action Policies
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies need to recognize gaps in their training knowledge to request useful demonstrations or assistance in new situations, especially when failures are costly. Disagreement within an ensemble of independently trained policies can guide these decisions, but requires training and running multiple policies. We propose post-hoc kernel-variance heads that estimate epistemic uncertainty from the embeddings of a single policy. Each head computes the conditional variance of a Gaussian process conditioned on embeddings from the training demonstrations. Fitting requires no regression targets or gradient updates and leaves the policy unchanged. In experiments with SmolVLA on LIBERO-10, the kernel variance heads perform competitively with two-policy ensemble scores in task-level correlation with task success, in demonstration acquisition during active learning, and in referral to a stronger supervisor policy as a proxy for human assistance. For SmolVLA, the head on the vision-language backbone reduces uncertainty-scoring time by up to approximately a factor of 50 compared with ensemble scores, while also substantially reducing setup costs. We also show that the established evaluation protocol on LIBERO-10 primarily rewards recognition of coverage differences between tasks, while execution variability weakens assessment of within-task rankings. Thus, controlled perturbations provide a complementary evaluation: modality-specific heads identify unfamiliar camera, instruction, or state inputs, while fused heads can detect unfamiliar combinations of individually familiar inputs. With a supervisor proxy trained on the evaluated perturbation families, the decoder head improves within-task referral over ensemble disagreement. These findings show that useful uncertainty estimates for adaptive robot learning can be obtained from a single policy.
Adaptive control improves teamwork in multi-agent reinforcement learning
Optimizing Team Behavior via Extremum-seeking Control in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: In cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), agents must learn to coordinate their actions to achieve shared objectives. A key indicator of effective coordination is behavioral diversity, i.e., the agents' potential to enact distinct yet complementary control policies given the same set of observations. Although behavioral diversity can enable role specialization and richer joint behaviors, its appropriate level is highly context- and task-dependent and often costly to tune. We propose Adaptive Diversity Control (ADiCo), a two-timescale framework that adapts behavioral diversity online during training. On a fast timescale, Diversity Control (DiCo) regulates system diversity toward a target value. On a slower timescale, an Extremum Seeking Controller (ESC) adjusts this target using only mean episodic returns, without requiring an explicit model or analytical gradient of the diversity-performance landscape. We evaluate ADiCo on six configurations across two cooperative MARL tasks, where it maintains task-appropriate diversity levels: low diversity when homogeneous policies are beneficial and higher diversity when heterogeneous policies are required. Through this adaptation, ADiCo matches or exceeds the mean performance of DiCo (best grid-searched diversity target) and Unconstrained DiCo (diversity allowed to emerge without target regulation). These results demonstrate that incorporating classical feedback control into MARL training enables effective coordination by providing a systematic alternative to task-specific manual selection of the diversity target.