robot developers

Abstract: Vision--language--action (VLA) models increasingly run on edge devices aboard robots, where inference latency constrains closed-loop robot control. However, it remains unclear how to design VLA models, their inference software and edge hardware so that robots can run VLA inference in real time. Most VLA models report only task success, while prior studies cover limited action-generation strategies, divide inference into at most three stages, and lack comparisons of inference optimizations on the same models.benchmarking 18 open VLA models across released and alternative backends on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor and AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395, with a seven-stage inference breakdown. Our study reveals three insights. First, action-generation strategy matters more than model size. It dominates 14 of 19 Jetson configurations, latency varies by $82\times$ on Jetson and $157\times$ on AMD, and parameter count explains at most 15% of latency variance. Models that generate long action chunks in a few flow-matching steps keep up with control, whereas token-by-token decoding does not. Second, kernel fusion with 4-bit weights helps most, running $π_{0.5}$ and GR00T N1.7 2.6--2.9$\times$ faster than PyTorch with \texttt{torch.compile}, but it exists for only these two models and only on the Jetson. Optimization also moves the time to the stages it shortens least, as CPU preprocessing grows from 12\% to 39\% of the GR00T N1.7 call. Third, after optimization, memory bandwidth limits only the stages that process few tokens on the Jetson, such as the denoising steps, whereas software limits all other stages, from unfused kernels to serial preprocessing on the host CPU. Overall, low-latency edge VLAs should use few action-generation iterations, inference software should extend kernel fusion and low-bit weights to more models and platforms, and edge hardware needs high memory bandwidth and a fast host CPU.

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 removes the need to control each joint independently while retaining behaviors such as precise grasping and in-hand manipulation. We collect demonstrations across several real-world tasks and in unstructured environments without a robot arm. We then use behavior cloning to train visuomotor policies directly on the recorded wrist motions and hand commands, without skill labels. We evaluate across 4 tasks: pick-and-place with diverse objects, screwing with in-hand tool use, drawer stowage which requires simultaneous grasp and pulling, and a bimanual scanning task. We collect over 2,500 demonstrations with our portable device, in both laboratory and in-the-wild settings. Across our tasks, we see an improvement from 11% to 64% when using recorded robot commands instead of states, and an improvement from 36% to 78% for task success when using in-the-wild data.

Abstract: Scaling robot manipulation models requires large amounts of interaction data, yet collecting diverse real-robot experience remains costly. Human manipulation videos, in contrast, provide abundant and diverse task experience that could potentially benefit robot learning. However, differences in morphology, action spaces, and control mechanisms make human motions unsuitable as direct supervision for robot actions, raising a scientific question: what knowledge in human videos should be transferred across embodiments to robot manipulation? To address this question, we analyze subtask transfer through the lens of causal beams, focusing on which contextual conditions and interaction dependencies should be retained to support local task effects. Based on this perspective, we propose Causal-Beam-Guided Subtask Transfer (CBST). CBST learns manipulation-related representations from human videos and grounds them in task-level semantic variables using robot demonstrations. Within a predefined manipulation model, causal-beam constraints guide contextual information selection by requiring retained assignments to sustain local mechanism outputs while preserving nontrivial responsiveness to retained inputs. The selected semantic information conditions a world-action model, allowing the robot to generate actions from its own observations without requiring human-robot motion correspondence. Experiments on robot manipulation benchmarks show improvements in task success over the corresponding world-action model baselines.

Abstract: Safe autonomous navigation using monocular vision remains challenging because explicit obstacle states are not directly observable. This letter introduces a visual safety-certification paradigm that uses scale-free, depth-normalized relative motion encoded by monocular optical flow as the representation for collision-risk certification, without reconstructing obstacle position, velocity, geometry, or a metric world model. Unlike conventional optical-flow-based navigation approaches that rely on image motion to shape avoidance behavior, the proposed framework directly encodes collision-cone geometry and safety constraints in this relative-motion representation. An online Concurrent Learning observer estimates the normalized relative velocity and provides a computable estimation-error bound. This uncertainty is propagated into the collision cone through angular inflation and a monocular robot-footprint margin, yielding a Robust Vision-Based Collision Cone Control Barrier Function (RV-C$^3$BF). An optimal-decay CBF quadratic program minimally modifies the nominal control input to enforce the resulting robust safety constraint under the stated assumptions. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments on a TurtleBot3 in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles demonstrate collision avoidance using only monocular vision and onboard proprioception, with the estimation-error bound containing the measured error in $98.3\%$ of simulation samples and the robot achieving collision-free navigation in $93$ of $100$ real-world trials.

Abstract: Proactive robots should anticipate user needs and provide assistance before being explicitly asked. A straightforward approach is to infer human intentions from commonsense knowledge, but the same observed behavior can imply different needs across users, potentially leading to unwanted assistance. We observe that everyday routines in the real world exhibit recurring patterns, so learning these patterns can reduce ambiguity in proactive decisions. Based on this, we propose a memory-based agentic framework in which a VLM task predictor reads a Procedural Assistance Memory (PAM) alongside the current observation to decide when to assist and what task to perform, and a VLA executor performs the predicted task. PAM is structured as a finite-state machine over activity phases, per-state assistance rules, and event-driven transitions; a reflection VLM revises PAM from each day's interaction trace without weight updates or retraining. In our 5-day desk-assistance evaluation, memory-free baselines remain conservative, with limited recall on proactive tasks. Our system improves consistently with accumulated experience, achieving the highest precision, recall, and F1 and reducing first-fire delay from approximately 5 seconds on Day 1 to 1 second by Day 5. Our approach also adapts to changes in the user's routine through continued memory reflection, recovering from memory--routine misalignment after a single memory update. The project page is available at https://davian-robotics.github.io/PAM/

Abstract: Damage-recovery algorithms often rank gaits from short trials, yet a gait that performs well briefly may not remain effective during continued execution. In reset-free recovery, each trial also changes the physical state inherited by the next. We introduce persistent profile-guided reset-free recovery (PGRR), which predicts multiple outcomes over repeated gait execution and uses conservative uncertainty-aware estimates to guide short online probes without resetting the robot. Across 108 matched MuJoCo tasks spanning leg amputation, distal fracture, and joint lock, PGRR improves final quality by 0.106 and slot-averaged recovery quality (SRQ) by 0.044 relative to an IT&E-inspired Gaussian-process baseline, while reducing low-quality failures by 27.8 percentage points. Final-quality gains occur in all three damage classes. Against no adaptation, PGRR also improves final quality and reduces low-quality failures, whereas the aggregate SRQ difference is inconclusive. Development ablations identify conservative uncertainty handling as the clearest supported contributor to the observed gains. These results show that PGRR can identify stronger post-damage gaits under continuous physical state and that final-gait quality and recovery-summary performance provide complementary evidence for evaluating reset-free recovery.

Abstract: Can better feature discovery improve control over robot behavior through internal interventions and training data? Recent work in vision and language models reveals multidimensional features, motivating block-sparse featurizers (BSFs), which represent each feature in a low-dimensional subspace. We investigate whether recovering this structure provides an interpretable interface for steering vision-language-action models and shaping the data from which they learn. We show that BSFs recover several multi-dimensional task-relevant features underlying the model's computation (e.g., perception, language, proprioceptive state, episode phase, and control variables). We causally validate these features through fine-grained steering: targeted changes in visual perception, semantic representation, and spatial localization produce predictable changes in downstream action prediction. Finally, we use feature-based data attribution to isolate where a specific behavior (failure recovery) arises in the training dataset, identifying fewer than $1.4\%$ of training tokens whose masking is sufficient to remove the targeted behavior. Overall, our results show how matching featurizers to representation geometry can provide more effective tools for understanding and changing robot behavior.

Abstract: Existing robot policy memories typically evolve with observation sequences, implicitly treating each update as the same amount of physical time. Yet identical observation histories can span different durations and require different actions, exposing physical time as a missing dimension of policy memory. We introduce Temporal Flow Policy (TFP), which learns memory dynamics to retain past events and evolve the memory state over measured time intervals. Observations and prior memory determine the content and time scales of each transition; elapsed time determines how far the state advances. TFP conditions diffusion and flow-matching policies through this memory state and is trained with their native imitation objectives. We evaluate TFP with Diffusion Policy and $π_{0.5}$ through controlled comparisons of memory designs. These experiments show that successful timing depends on both measured intervals and retained history. TFP achieves higher average success than the recurrent and state-space memories we equip with the same intervals and than a variant that feeds the interval to a learned gate. Memory readouts recover the time since an event and motion information after occlusion. Changing the supplied intervals systematically delays or advances actions, linking time inputs to behavior. Real-robot tasks requiring timing or memory, together with LIBERO evaluations, demonstrate benefits in physical and general manipulation. These results suggest viewing robot memory not as stored observation history, but as a state that retains past events and evolves with physical time.

Abstract: Multimodal models and agents have emerged to enable AI systems to learn from and interact with the real world more like humans by integrating information across multiple modalities. However, enabling multimodal agents to continually acquire useful information from complex, heterogeneous multimodal data remains a significant challenge as they move toward long-horizon tasks and lifelong settings. Addressing this challenge requires effective memory mechanisms that can maintain continuity across sessions, adapt to changing users and environments, and refine memory-management policies through accumulated experience. We introduce a two-axis analytical framework for multimodal agent memory structured around two key questions: how multimodal information is formed and represented (Axis I, Formation and Representation), and how its management adapts with accumulated experience (Axis II, Memory Management). Axis I, Formation and Representation, characterizes what information is retained and how it is encoded (e.g., modality-specific embeddings, textual and structured records, latent and parametric representations) to support subsequent reasoning and action. Axis II, Memory Management, distinguishes three tiers: T1 Static Memory reuses fixed memory; T2 Dynamic Memory updates memory through a stable policy; and T3 Self-Evolving Memory updates memory through an evolving policy. Based on this framework, we synthesize recurring design patterns and derive principles for balancing source fidelity with abstraction, maintaining temporal validity and provenance, grounding memory use in recoverable evidence, and evolving memory policies over time. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and potential future directions for the memory mechanism of multimodal agents.

Abstract: Bringing general-purpose agents into the physical world calls for an executable representation of physical intelligence. Compared with vision-language-action (VLA) models, which map observations and language instructions directly to actions, code makes control logic explicit and reusable. Code can serve not only as a policy representation but also as the workspace in which the agent solves a task. Rather than following a prescribed workflow of planning, execution, and verification, the agent can autonomously inspect the state, revise and execute code, and use feedback to choose the next step. The success of this SWE-style loop in digital environments motivates its extension to physical tasks. Yet physical execution remains prone to recurring failures. To retain and refine experience for later scenes, we introduce EmbodiedEvo, where a coding agent evolves reusable Skills and Lessons through feedback on a single Playground scene, then freezes the resulting harness for diverse new scenes. On RoboDojo-Sim, EmbodiedEvo achieves an average score of 44.48 and a success rate of 37.82\%, surpassing all officially verified results. Paired tests show the largest gains on memory-dependent tasks and successful reuse of coordinated procedures, while fine contact control remains difficult. Experience from stronger models also improves weaker executors: Astra's experience raises Sol and Luna's success rates by 8.86 and 5.50 percentage points over no experience. Compared with raw interaction history, Skills and Lessons achieve comparable task performance at 53.0\% lower execution cost.

Abstract: Robots are increasingly autonomous in task execution, yet their improvement remains largely human-driven. This study investigates Physical Recursive Self-Improvement (Physical RSI), in which physical experience guides lasting updates to both a robot's capabilities and its improvement procedure, making subsequent improvement more effective across tasks. Physical RSI faces challenges from noisy observations, continuous dynamics, costly trials, and irreversible consequences. We present an L0-L5 framework that differentiates capability-level from meta-level updates and within-task from across-task gains, reserving L5 for independently verified recursive gain. We study existing methods around harness adaptation and model training, alongside safety and control mechanisms that govern execution and successive updates. Our analysis reveals that, despite substantial progress in self-improvement, the surveyed literature does not yet demonstrate Physical RSI as defined by our framework. We identify research priorities in reliable feedback, causal attribution, safety preservation, and benchmarking, outlining a path toward robots that autonomously improve how they learn while ensuring safety. The GitHub repository for Physical RSI is available at https://github.com/SAIL-Research-Lab/Physical-RSI.

Abstract: Egocentric human videos offer a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation for collecting dexterous manipulation data. However, two challenges limit their use as reliable training data: accurate hand-object interaction (HOI) reconstruction from monocular RGB and high-quality robot demonstrations, especially visual observations. We present EgoMatrix, an end-to-end data engine that converts monocular egocentric human videos into bimanual dexterous trajectories and paired robot observation videos, with the trajectories directly replayable on real robots. It reconstructs HOI with emphasis on relative geometry and contact rather than exact metric scene recovery, then uses retargeting and reinforcement learning (RL) to reproduce the demonstrated tasks in simulation. We jointly render robot hands and objects from these simulated trajectories to produce physically faithful observations synchronized with state and control records. Rendering the same trajectories in diverse, task-compatible backgrounds expands paired training data while preserving robot-object motion and contact. Across TACO, OakInk2, and self-collected data, EgoMatrix achieves 54.84% end-to-end success in simulation versus 14.52% for the strongest baseline. Reconstruction reaches state-of-the-art performance on most metrics of the two public benchmarks. Qualitative results show more faithful hand-object interactions than prior methods, while feature-space analysis shows closer alignment with real-robot observations than GPT-6 Astra.Our project page is available at https://spikew726.github.io/EgoMatrix/.

Abstract: Wheel-legged robots operating in outdoor spaces shared with humans require accurate perception, socially compliant navigation, future-scene reasoning, and scene reconstruction. However, existing datasets typically support these capabilities in isolation and rarely provide dense spatial and behavior-level supervision on real wheel-legged platforms. We introduce LynxScenes, a large-scale real-world dataset and benchmark collected with a LYNX M20 wheel-legged robot. It contains approximately 100K 30-s navigation clips spanning 833.6 h and 3,294.7 km, with 3.0M annotated frames. The synchronized recordings include four fisheye cameras, dual LiDARs, IMU, odometry, and robot states. Annotations comprise 20.82M oriented 3D boxes across 27 categories, 13.89M road-structure annotations, and 20 navigation instructions organized into three layers and aligned with continuous future trajectories. LynxScenes supports four complementary tasks: instruction-conditioned trajectory prediction, BEV-based perception of 3D objects and road structures, future scene prediction, and multi-view scene reconstruction. For trajectory prediction, we further introduce a log-replay-based pseudo-closed-loop evaluator that measures safety, progress, and instruction compliance beyond trajectory imitation. Extensive evaluations across representative navigation, perception, world-model, and reconstruction methods reveal substantial remaining challenges in close-range outdoor robot navigation. The dataset and evaluation toolkit are planned for public release.

Abstract: General-purpose robot manipulation policies learn short-horizon skills effectively, but degrade rapidly on long-horizon tasks. Existing benchmarks cannot isolate failures because task horizon is either too short or entangled with scene and object variations. We propose LADDER, a long-horizon robot manipulation benchmark scaling from 1 to 10 subgoals within the same environment over three suites (SimplerEnv-Long, RobotArena-$\infty$-Long, and RoboLab-Long), 145 tasks, eight categories, two embodiments, and 2,024 simulated episodes per system. We evaluate two orchestration paradigms: text subgoals for learned low-level policies (VoLo) and tool selection orchestration (CaP-X, GPT-Policy, PSP-Agent, TiPToP). Given the full instruction directly, low-level policies achieve 85.4% on single-subgoal tasks, but drop to near zero on extended tasks. While orchestration remedies this, it remains bounded by physical execution errors of the low-level policy rather than high-level planning and achieves only ~25%. Tool selection orchestration with GPT-Policy on GPT-6 Astra significantly outperforms learned-policy methods, but incurs significant time and cost budget and succeeds only ~62%. Real-world experiments across two embodiments confirm the collapse of the low-level policy and the gain from orchestration. Project website: https://ladder.insait.ai

Abstract: There is a specific challenge designers face in developing autonomous robots capable of open-ended learning. This challenge is how one can develop such systems in an ethically sound way when there are many unknowns during design time about their manner of deployment, what they can and will learn, and how these systems will act on the basis of what they have learned. One response to this challenge is to align, as far as possible, the activities and goals of autonomous robots with human values, raising the question of how to make this alignment possible, a question known as the value alignment problem. We argue that the value alignment problem faces a number of challenges that show that full alignment is both theoretically and practically impossible, meaning that misalignment incidents will keep occurring. This undermines current alignment approaches, as the attempt to maximize alignment cannot properly deal with the possibility that the risk of misalignment that remains after alignment methods have been implemented might still be unacceptable to society. To overcome this difficulty, we argue that a shift in perspective is required from a focus on the maximization of alignment to the conditions under which misalignment incidents become acceptable. In this paper, we explore what this shift in perspective entails. We introduce the concept of acceptable misalignment, formulate normative requirements for alignment mechanisms aimed at bringing misalignment incidents to an acceptable level, and we conclude by presenting a new methodological framework that consists of alignment mechanisms that can meet these requirements.

Abstract: LLM agents increasingly control robots using VLA policies, perception models, and procedural knowledge. These modules are difficult to reuse because their interfaces, embodiment assumptions, and conditions of use differ, and their benefits on physical tasks remain unclear. We package them as embodied skills that extend agent skills with explicit embodiment assumptions and conditions of use, building 250 action, perception, and experience skills from 1,052 resources. On this basis we introduce EmbodiedSkillBench, which runs an agent in a closed observation-action loop and records success, actions, tokens, and wall-clock time. It supports three modes: native control, skill-only execution, and Agent-Directed Reuse (ADR), a mode we propose in which the agent keeps its native controls and decides for each skill whether to invoke, modify, or ignore it. Across four agents on 100 perturbed LIBERO-Pro tasks, we find that skills help an agent only as far as they exceed what it can already do. Skill-only execution lifts GPT-5.6-Sol from 11% to 63% and Kimi-K3 and Claude-Opus-5 by about 20 points, while cutting their token usage by 58% to 85%. Yet all four agents then end up between 61% and 64%, and GPT-6-Astra falls from 92% under native control to 61%. This suggests that as agents grow stronger, the role of embodied skills shifts from supplying missing capability to reducing cost: GPT-6-Astra already solves most tasks through native control, so restricting it to skills removes more than it adds. Under ADR, which lets it keep native control and call skills selectively, GPT-6-Astra recovers to 85%, within 7 points of native control, while using 14.1% fewer tokens and 11.9% less time. With Jev as a skill choosing motion directions and gripper actions, it reaches 81% with 50% fewer tokens and 57% less time. The code is available at https://github.com/HanZhi306/EmbodiedSkill-Bench.

Abstract: Situated 3D Question Answering requires models to interpret a 3D scene relative to an agent's pose. Existing methods commonly convey that pose through a natural-language situation description, which may be unavailable or costly to obtain in real-world deployments. While some methods additionally incorporate numerical pose, we find that randomly shuffling the agent pose causes little performance degradation, indicating limited functional dependence on the numerical pose. To address this gap, we introduce EgoAlign, a simple 3D language model that represents a scene in an agent-centric coordinate frame, together with a dedicated egocentric alignment stage comprising four complementary tasks: object category recognition, egocentric direction prediction, metric distance estimation, and spatial relation prediction. This stage teaches the model to consistently interpret scene geometry relative to the agent's pose before task-specific fine-tuning. EgoAlign achieves the strongest performance on SQA3D, Real-3DQA, and MSQA among compared methods while remaining highly efficient. More importantly, removing textual situation descriptions yields comparable or better downstream performance, whereas shuffling EgoAlign's numerical pose causes substantial degradation. These results show that EgoAlign establishes agent-centric spatial context directly from numerical pose without requiring textual situation descriptions.

Abstract: Words are increasingly becoming an interface for action: large language models (LLMs) can now invoke tools, operate devices, and make decisions that affect the physical world. However, current benchmarks largely evaluate LLMs through static text responses, offline tool calls, or simulated tasks, leaving open the question of how well they can act in real physical environments. We present a benchmark for measuring LLMs in closed-loop physical interaction, where models control a harness system connected to real-world components including robotic arms, cameras, and sensors. In each task, the model must issue instructions, receive physical feedback from the environment, interpret the resulting state, and adapt its next action accordingly. This setting evaluates capabilities beyond language understanding, including grounded perception, action planning, tool selection, spatial reasoning, feedback-driven correction, and robustness to execution uncertainty. Through experiments with representative LLMs, we characterize their ability to translate linguistic reasoning into physical actions and identify common failure modes such as hallucinated state changes, poor recovery from unexpected outcomes, and unstable long-horizon plans. Our benchmark aims to provide a systematic foundation for evaluating LLMs as interactive agents that connect words, tools, and the physical world.

Abstract: World-action models inherit broad visual and physical priors from video pre-training. However, standard within-video next-frame prediction allows them to rely on appearance shared between the context and future, rather than learning interactions that transfer across scenes and embodiments. We introduce WATCH, a cross-video pre-training that learns from task-paired human demonstrations collected across diverse environments. Conditioned on the video and actions of one demonstration, the model jointly predicts another demonstration's actions and future frames from its current observation. Predicting one demonstration from another encourages the model to learn task-relevant interactions that transfer across scenes and demonstrators. Our pre-training shows that these capabilities can be learned from readily scalable human-human pairs alone, without requiring matched human-robot demonstrations. Analyses before robot post-training show improved motion alignment across embodiments and better action and video prediction on unseen robots, with representations closer to those learned from robot pairs. After robot post-training, WATCH improves MimicDroid in-context success from 40.9% to 68.3% with Cosmos Policy and from 59.8% to 77.7% with Cosmos3, with the largest gains on the unseen levels. Gains persist under context-free post-training across robot embodiments. WATCH outperforms within-video pre-training and co-training baselines, supporting cross-video prediction as a scalable approach to learning transferable world-action representations.

Abstract: Deploying language-model agents onboard mobile robots requires task reasoning and responsive execution within limited compute and memory. We propose BT-Agent, an onboard architecture combining LLM-driven task decisions with predefined behavior-tree (BT) skills. These skills enforce execution conditions and return structured failure feedback. We demonstrate fully onboard operation with a 9B model on a quadruped across five task categories. Intervention tests show that local checks stop ongoing navigation without waiting for another model decision, while the agent remains active to retry or report constraints. To compare agent designs efficiently, we introduce a 161-task multi-fidelity benchmark, evaluated in text on all tasks and in Habitat on 39. Text supports 10.9$\times$ higher evaluation throughput, while simulation reveals how perception and motion failures change task outcomes. BT-Agent's largest success gains over the strongest Act/ReAct baseline occur at 4B and 9B: approximately 10 and 5 percentage points. Ablations identify structured tool calls and informative failure feedback as the most useful components.

Abstract: Humanoid tennis requires reactive whole-body coordination under rapidly changing ball dynamics, yet collecting task-specific motion-capture demonstrations that cover diverse approach states, contact locations, and timing conditions is costly. Inspired by how humans acquire new skills by combining reusable motor experience with task-specific demonstrations, we present ATHLETE, a framework for learning reactive humanoid tennis from generic locomotion data and ordinary tennis videos. ATHLETE combines LAFAN1 locomotion with video-derived striking motions and uses Trajectory-Guided Motion Matching (TGMM) to construct diverse task-conditioned whole-body references. These references are transformed into a reactive policy through physics-based teacher--student learning with online DAgger distillation, followed by PPO fine-tuning for the tennis task. The resulting policy responds directly to robot and ball observations without requiring reference-motion inputs at deployment. On a real humanoid robot, ATHLETE achieves forehand and backhand hit rates of $90.00\%$ and $86.67\%$, respectively, and enables multi-shot rallies with human players. These results demonstrate that ATHLETE can learn dynamic humanoid tennis skills from reusable locomotion data and video demonstrations. Result videos and code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/ATHLETE2027/.

Abstract: Indoor navigation to task-relevant targets remains difficult when the target is small, occluded, or visually indistinct. Meanwhile, smart appliances, mobile devices, and IoT tags emit Wi-Fi signals during everyday communication, providing a pervasive but underused spatial cue. We study visual-Wi-Fi navigation, where a robot reaches a signal-emitting device in an unmapped environment using onboard visual observations and Wi-Fi packets overheard from the device, without connecting to the device or modifying infrastructure. Realizing this requires pose-dependent Wi-Fi observations during closed-loop policy learning and reliable spatial cues from bearing measurements corrupted by indoor multipath propagation on a moving robot. We present WiFiSpaces, which extends the Habitat embodied simulator with online ray-traced Wi-Fi sensing, rendering Wi-Fi observations for a robot-mounted antenna array at continuous poses during policy rollouts. On top of it, we build ViFiNav, a localization-aware navigation framework: an online source-localization algorithm exploits robot motion to disambiguate and robustly aggregate bearings from multiple viewpoints into a confidence-aware source estimate, and a learned policy fuses this evolving estimate with depth observations and learns to act on it as it is refined. Experiments show that exploiting robot motion is key to accurate source estimates, and that fine-tuning on ray-traced Wi-Fi observations in WiFiSpaces improves the success rate of ViFiNav. The policy transfers zero-shot to unseen scene datasets, and we deploy it on a real robot with a Wi-Fi sensor built from a commodity router, without any real-world training.

Abstract: Social and service robots in public spaces need to anticipate which nearby person is about to approach and touch them, so that a response can be prepared before contact. It is largely unknown which cues support this anticipation when a model trained with one robot is used on another robot at a different site. We study this question with a fixed-reference pose residual (FRPR) model: a geometry predictor built from the person's bounding box and mask is trained and frozen, and a temporal network then learns from body pose an additive correction to its logit, so that every prediction splits exactly into a geometry term and a pose term. Between two public egocentric datasets recorded by different robots, HUI360 and SSUP-A, with every choice made on source data, the pose correction raised average precision (AP) from 0.277 to 0.321 from SSUP-A to HUI360 and gave no measurable gain in the opposite direction; the same asymmetry held over a stronger, source-selected geometry reference. Freezing gave no AP advantage over joint training, and simple geometric baselines and tree ensembles remained competitive or better, so the construction serves measurement rather than prediction accuracy. A head-orientation residual added small gains in both directions. Post hoc, whether a person faces the camera kept its discriminative direction across datasets, whereas head pitch reversed. With thresholds chosen on source data, the neural models that use geometry detected at most 17% of target interactions. Code and processed data are available at https://github.com/WeiZhou96/FRPR-interaction-anticipation.

Abstract: Teach-and-repeat navigation systems employing advanced visual place recognition techniques for localization exhibit key attributes for long-term mobile robot navigation, such as the ability to operate in unstructured and dynamic environments. However, existing solutions based on deep-learning techniques are computationally demanding, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a novel and efficient teach-and-repeat system built on the modern visual place recognition method MixVPR. Real-world testing demonstrated its ability to operate both indoors and outdoors, achieving robustness and navigation precision comparable to other state-of-the-art systems. In addition, its lower hardware requirements make it suitable for a wide range of robotic platforms and practical applications.

Abstract: Learning from demonstrations (LfD) provides a framework for inferring unknown constraints from locally optimal, constraint-satisfying expert behavior. Existing approaches largely fall into two paradigms, constrained inverse optimal control (CIOC) and inverse constrained reinforcement learning (ICRL). CIOC exploits optimality conditions such as the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) conditions but typically assumes known dynamics and structured constraint representations. Meanwhile, ICRL accommodates complex unknown constraints and unknown transition dynamics but often requires extensive online exploration, during which unsafe constraint violations may occur. In this work, we introduce Counterfactual KKT (CF-KKT), a constraint learning framework that leverages learned dynamics and locally optimal demonstrations to recover unknown constraints without requiring known dynamics or additional risky exploration, thereby combining the data efficiency and safety advantages of CIOC with the flexibility of ICRL. First, we use a locally learned differentiable dynamics model to impose KKT-inspired optimality conditions directly on the demonstrations. Second, we use the learned dynamics to generate reward-improving counterfactual behaviors near the demonstrations, revealing behaviors that would be preferable in the absence of the unknown constraint and thus providing synthetic infeasible data. When the constraint parameterization is known, the same learned-dynamics framework enables direct CIOC-based parameter recovery, and we characterize its sensitivity to dynamics misspecification. Across high-dimensional robotic control tasks, our approach learns neural constraint representations with improved safety and data efficiency relative to state-of-the-art offline ICRL baselines.

Abstract: Recent advances in robot learning have enabled generalist control policies capable of completing a wide range of tasks. However, their performance degrades when deployed in unseen environments, making it critical to detect failures and teach recovery behaviors. Existing runtime monitoring methods often require task- and policy-specific training or hyperparameter tuning, limiting cross-task deployment and introducing additional overhead during iterative policy updates. We present Reward-DAgger, a robot-gated interactive imitation learning framework that uses dense progress signals from a general-purpose reward model to determine when human intervention is needed. Our approach is agnostic to the underlying policy architecture, requires no access to policy internals, and can be applied across tasks without retuning the gating mechanism. Our results show that Reward-DAgger achieves a better failure-detection accuracy-latency tradeoff than existing runtime monitoring baselines. Across eight simulated and real-world tasks, Reward-DAgger consistently improves the downstream policy's autonomous success rate throughout interactive learning and achieves strong return on human effort, outperforming the baselines in most settings. Importantly, the same gating configuration is used across tasks without task-specific hyperparameter tuning, demonstrating transfer across tasks, environments, and policy architectures. Code and videos are available at https://liralab.usc.edu/reward-dagger.

Abstract: Genuine embodied agency requires robots to turn continuous real-world experience into lasting, transferable skills. This demands continual learning that integrates new capabilities without eroding prior knowledge as tasks and environments evolve. Experience replay mitigates forgetting, but storing complete demonstrations becomes costly as tasks accumulate. World-action models offer a generative alternative, reconstructing past experience through joint predictions of actions and future observations. However, visually coherent rollouts may contain actions that cannot realize the predicted transitions, while new-task adaptation can disrupt previously learned behavior. RIFAR therefore combines reliability screening with drift-aware replay selection. It reconstructs trajectories from compact demonstration prefixes and uses a frozen inverse-dynamics model to assess action-visual consistency. Training first combines current demonstrations with the highest-quality screened trajectories. RIFAR then compares action predictions before and after this adaptation on identical historical inputs, reselecting trajectories with larger normalized drift from the same screened pool for continued training. Across three LIBERO suites and real-world experiments, RIFAR surpasses the previous state of the art in WAM-based generative replay. On LIBERO-Goal, it achieves 90.97 AUC while retaining only 320 historical time steps per task, approximately 4.9% of the steps retained using 50-demonstration replay.

Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) predict visual futures and robot actions, yet they remain susceptible to task-incomplete imagination, where plausible, action-consistent predictions omit the transition needed for task completion. In this paper, we show that this failure is not inherent to the world model backbone, but emerges when adapted for short-chunk control, which can repeatedly favor plausible local continuations over task-completing transitions. To address this, we introduce Completion Aware Guidance (CAG), a training-free sampling method that guides generation toward task completion. Across representative WAMs, CAG improves success from 64% to 70% on a RoboTwin 2.0 subset and from 69% to 75% in zero-shot simulation, while reducing task-incomplete imagination from 79% to 40%.

Abstract: We present ASENA, an embodied agent system that connects general-purpose coding agents to robot sensing, computation, supervised execution, and persistent experience. Agents can write and execute programs, inspect recorded outcomes, repair failures, and reuse notes and executable skills while keeping their model weights fixed. We further introduce ASENA-VLN, a 4B monocular navigation policy that serves as an optional tool within this programmable system. ASENA-VLN predicts body-frame trajectories for both extended routes and short-horizon behaviors using a shared vision-language decoder trained on route instructions, visual question answering, and a newly curated dataset of geometry-derived atomic navigation tasks. As a standalone policy, ASENA-VLN achieves state-of-the-art success rates of 68.7% on R2R and 70.2% on RxR. When integrated with a coding agent, learned navigation improves ASENA's success rate by 11 percentage points on both agentic benchmarks while reducing execution time. Through persistent workspace evolution and simulator feedback, ten passes over recurring 100-task subsets further improve success from 72% to 98% on R2R and from 65% to 89% on RxR. On embodied question answering, ASENA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with fewer interaction steps. Finally, real-world demonstrations on a Unitree G1 combine search, visual inspection, spatial reasoning, and synthesized gestures without a pre-built map, illustrating how online programming extends robot behavior beyond route following and predefined skills.

Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without policy-improvement training? Our random-walk analysis explains what temporal relations contain: short horizons reveal geodesic geometry in the diffusion limit, while longer horizons reveal connectivity between regions before mixing removes these distinctions. We learn these relations with a conditional energy-based model that estimates temporal log-density ratios through horizon-conditioned embeddings. The model is trained on observation pairs by noise-contrastive estimation, without action or reward labels. The planner queries these learned relations at different horizons as it moves toward the goal. At test time, a separate local dynamics model predicts candidate action outcomes, and the temporal model evaluates their progress toward the goal by selecting or aggregating estimated improvements across horizons. The agent executes one action and replans with both models fixed. Experiments demonstrate long-range maze planning from random exploration using states and images. Learned score fields, embedding probes, and planned routes exhibit properties of a multiscale cognitive map. We further demonstrate egocentric navigation from random exploration and manipulation planning from suboptimal data.

Abstract: Existing LLM-driven robot task planners rely on a taken-for-granted assumption of an ideal user whose instructions are clear, complete, and task-focused. However, when interacting with real-world users, especially those experiencing cognitive impairments, such as people living with dementia (PLWD), the planners often make mistakes and even pose physical safety risks. We proposed TALK-Dem (Talking Attributes and Linguistic Knowledge in Dementia), the first benchmark for evaluating LLM-driven robot task planning under dementia-associated verbal communication. TALK-Dem contains 4,800 instructions and covers five typical communication patterns, including Referential Imprecision, Object Substitution, Empty Speech, Topic Drift, and Intrusion, at three intensity levels. Experiments across six open-weight LLMs reveal a substantial robustness gap. Across communication patterns, open-weight models exhibited performance drops of up to 22.3 percentage points compared to ideal instructions. This revealed a critical gap and even danger for real-world applications, especially in assistive robotics, where locally deployable models are necessary due to privacy concerns and connectivity constraints. To mitigate this issue, we proposed the Context-Aware Retrieval from Experience (CARE) method, which retrieves relevant previously resolved tasks to provide task-specific interpretation and planning context. CARE generally outperformed standard prompting baselines across the six open-weight models, improving average task success by 18.1 percentage points over the vanilla prompt. These results highlighted the importance of both evaluating communication robustness and developing effective adaptation strategies for locally deployable assistive robots. The TALK-Dem dataset is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TALK-Dem-A6B3/.

Abstract: Training agents to follow arbitrary instructions is an important goal of multi-task reinforcement learning (RL). Linear temporal logic (LTL) provides a precise and structured formalism for specifying instructions to agents, and has been successfully adopted for training generalist multi-task policies. However, differences in implementations, task distributions, and evaluation protocols make existing methods difficult to compare, while high computational costs limit the scale and statistical reliability of experiments. We introduce Jaxolotl, a unified high-performance benchmark suite for multi-task LTL-RL to address these concerns. Jaxolotl provides a modular, end-to-end JAX implementation of six representative algorithms and four environments, together with newly curated task suites and a standardised, statistically robust evaluation protocol. By precompiling symbolic task representations into static arrays, Jaxolotl enables fully JIT-compiled training and evaluation, achieving end-to-end speedups of up to $220\times$ and supporting controlled comparisons at substantially greater experimental scale. We use this framework to systematically evaluate existing approaches, revealing complementary strengths and limitations: general methods capable of non-myopic reasoning struggle as the number of propositions grows, while methods with stronger scaling rely on environment-specific assumptions and suffer from myopia.

Abstract: The ability to navigate toward sound sources extends a robot's reach beyond its visual field, enabling response to auditory events in unknown environments. To equip robots with this capability, existing methods couple acoustic and visual information through joint audio-visual learning in acoustic simulators. However, acoustic simulation is both low-fidelity and expensive, producing a domain gap that prevents reliable real-world deployment, while the discrete action spaces inherited from grid-based simulators introduce an additional kinematic gap on physical robots. To alleviate these issues, we propose BCNav, a decoupled framework that separates the acoustic module from the learned navigation policy using direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation: an estimator provides a scalar bearing to the sound source, so the navigation policy only processes depth images and a bearing angle, two inputs whose domain gaps are well characterized. We collect shortest-path demonstrations with calibrated bearing noise injection and train the policy via imitation learning to output continuous velocity commands directly executable on ground robots. We demonstrate the method in simulation and on a physical robot, navigating unknown environments without any acoustic fine-tuning, prior mapping, or real-world audio data collection. Code is available at https://github.com/york1to/bcnav.

Abstract: Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI) is an emerging research area, aiming to shift embodied agents from reactive assistance toward proactively understanding human needs and executing socially desirable actions. Prior work has largely centered on the average user. However, human expectations are inherently diverse, and prior work overlooks individual nuances. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobotEQ 3.0, a benchmark for Personalized SPI. (Dataset) We first profile participants via a structured questionnaire covering factors that are correlated with human expectations of embodied agents, such as basic demographics and personality traits. Participants then select their preferred actions from a set of candidates. Unlike prior SPI benchmarks that focus on assessing behavioral appropriateness, our task centers on predicting the actions preferred by a specific user, thereby capturing human subjectivity. The resulting dataset establishes explicit links between individual traits and behavioral preferences. (Solution) We observe substantial inter-annotator variance, confirming that user preferences over actions are highly individualized. This motivates our exploration of Personalized SPI, in which user traits serve as additional inputs to predict individual preferences. Experimental results show that incorporating user traits can aid personalized prediction. This work aims to shift the research paradigm from developing agents suited for the average user to designing systems tailored to specific individuals.

Abstract: General-purpose robots must infer what a new task requires and translate that understanding into appropriate physical action. In-context learning (ICL) for robots supports this process by using demonstrations and interaction to direct existing competence with neural parameters held fixed during deployment. We organize this literature review around the interfaces connecting contextual evidence to execution, distinguishing four families: context-conditioned policies, geometric demonstration transfer, world-model-based control, and skill- and agent-based execution. Comparing these interfaces clarifies their transfer assumptions and the roles of training, correspondence, and memory in making context useful. Across manipulation and navigation, we examine how these mechanisms preserve taught requirements as objects, environments, and execution conditions change. This analysis links method design to evaluation practices that distinguish responsiveness to teaching, physical transfer, and benefits from retained experience. The resulting agenda connects compositional task acquisition and faithful transfer with physical recursive self-improvement, in which experience improves the ability to learn subsequent tasks.

Abstract: Vision-language navigation (VLN) models perform well but target compute-rich platforms, limiting deployment on memory- and power-constrained robotic edge devices. Compression alone does not establish whether a VLN model fits the memory, latency, and energy budgets of an edge platform while preserving navigation behavior. We introduce EdgeVLN, a runtime-aware, deployment-ready quantized VLN model that closes this gap. EdgeVLN combines a quantized StreamVLN model with Latent Trajectory Termination Extractor (LATTE), a lightweight causal transformer that improves real-time stopping by predicting a Stop Action verifier rank. Both execute through our llama.cpp VLN driver, which reconstructs streaming context and prunes memory tokens on-board. We characterize a pretrained StreamVLN backbone across weight quantization from 8 to 2 bits and multiple inference runtimes to identify a feasible operating point. LATTE reuses backbone hidden states within the budget freed by quantization, requiring neither a second vision encoder nor an additional backbone forward pass. We evaluate six backbone precisions and seven candidate stop heads on BF16 and IQ4 NL across all 1,839 R2R VLN-CE val-unseen episodes. We measure success rate (SR) in simulation and latency, energy, and resident memory on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB. LATTE achieves our highest SR, 58.02 percent on the deployed 4-bit model, exceeding the BF16 baseline with only 0.013 s additional latency per navigation step. Four-bit formats achieve nearly identical SR, but step energy varies 36.8 times by execution path. Only IQ4 NL under our VLN driver fits the board, using 11.35 GB resident memory while running 20.8 times faster and using 13.3 times less energy than storage-streamed BF16. INT2 collapses. Runtime selection, memory-token pruning, and quantization are essential for efficient edge deployment.

Abstract: A robot should be able to learn through experiments how unfamiliar objects behave and interact, then plan with that knowledge. It need not start from scratch: physics engines supply knowledge of motion and contact, but can omit entire mechanisms, such as glue curing, water heating, or wind. We present EMPIRIC, an agent that learns a residual world model: a physics engine extended with code for the missing mechanisms. The learned programs can introduce new forces, constraints, and hidden state, and Bayesian inference estimates their parameters and states from noisy observations. The resulting model lets the agent predict the outcomes of actions, choose informative experiments, and revise its hypotheses when predictions fail. Across five simulated domains, EMPIRIC learns interpretable, reusable models, and solves more tasks with fewer environment interactions than all three baselines. On a physical robot, it learns wind forces and domino masses to solve a manipulation task. Website and code: https://yichao-liang.github.io/empiric

Abstract: Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to serve as embodied social agents that communicate naturally with humans through face-to-face interaction. During such communication, humanoid robots require body behaviors that are synchronized with speech, affectively expressive, and suitable for real-time execution. However, existing co-speech methods are primarily developed for digital humans and lack joint support for affective control and low-latency continuous generation on physical embodiments. To bridge this gap, we present SocialHumanoid, a system for expressive humanoid behavior via one-step co-speech motion generation. Given response speech and a specified affective condition, SocialHumanoid generates each full-body motion window in a single forward pass and connects successive windows through motion-history conditioning. The generated human motion is further converted online into embodiment-compatible robot references and tracked by a whole-body controller for physical execution. To provide explicit supervision for affective body expression, we further introduce AffectMoCap, a 4-hour dataset captured from two professional actors, containing synchronized speech, body motion, fine-grained hand motion, and emotion annotations. On BEAT2, SocialHumanoid achieves the best FGD among the compared generation methods, competitive speech-motion synchrony, and approximately $6\times$ faster inference than GestureLSM under the same protocol. Perceptual evaluations further show that training with AffectMoCap improves affect recognition from generated body motion, while real-robot experiments demonstrate continuous affect-conditioned behavior and stable long-horizon execution. Our project page is https://rex0191.github.io/SocialHumanoid/.

Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires agents to answer natural language questions about surrounding environments from visual observations. In this work, we focus on open-vocabulary episodic-memory EQA (EM-EQA), where an agent answers free-form questions using recorded observation histories. Omnidirectional images are promising for this task, as they provide wide field-of-view observations that can capture surrounding context without requiring explicit camera rotations. However, omnidirectional images introduce two challenges for EQA: (i) equirectangular projection causes severe geometric distortion that degrades vision-language model (VLM) recognition accuracy, and (ii) feeding equirectangular images directly into VLMs introduces excessive irrelevant background information, reducing answer accuracy and increasing the visual-token burden. To address these challenges, we propose a viewpoint selection method for EM-EQA using omnidirectional images. Our method converts equirectangular observations into perspective views via cubemap projection, estimates question-conditioned relevance with fine-tuned BLIP-2, and selects informative and diverse viewpoints through diversity-aware greedy selection. Experiments on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) subset of OpenEQA show that our method achieves state-of-the-art model performance among the reported model results with equirectangular observations. Moreover, after removing rotation views, which reduces observation frames by 65.5%, our method largely maintains its answer accuracy.

Abstract: Human-robot interaction (HRI) failures remain a major barrier to deploying robots in real-world environments. Prior work often treats failures as isolated technical faults or focuses on post-hoc recovery behaviors. In practice, many breakdowns arise because humans and robots operate under inconsistent assumptions about the current world state. We propose WSM-Aware HRI, an IoT-enhanced modular framework that unifies diverse HRI breakdowns as World-State Mismatches (WSMs) between a human's instruction-implied assumptions and a robot's grounded world model built from multimodal perception and digital augmentation. A Large Language Model (LLM) is used to make implicit assumptions explicit, map them to a small set of mismatch types, and specify the evidence needed for verification against the robot's world state. WSM-Aware HRI shifts failure handling from execution-time recovery to proactive mismatch detection during intention formation, enabling interventions guided by safety, norm compliance, and multi-user coordination with transparent explanations. We evaluate mismatch identification in ten everyday cases spanning both visual and latent-state mismatches. The system can accurately produce the expected output results, and ablations show that reliable identification depends on appropriate grounding representations and verification-oriented refinement. These results indicate that treating interaction breakdowns as explicit world-state mismatches enables earlier detection of impending failures and offers a principled mechanism for integrating external evidence and social constraints into human-robot interaction.

Abstract: High-speed racket sports provide a demanding testbed for humanoid robots, requiring time-critical decisions, precise striking, and dynamic whole-body coordination. In badminton, fast-changing shuttle trajectories require timely contact decisions, while successful returns demand precise racket pose and velocity within a brief contact window and across a broad three-dimensional striking workspace. Human motion data provide valuable priors for such athletic skills, but usable badminton references are limited and imperfect. Direct tracking provides insufficient executable variation for diverse shuttle conditions, while purely task-driven optimization may produce unnatural motion. To address these challenges, we present a three-stage hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for dynamic humanoid badminton. First, task-randomized motion augmentation expands sparse annotated hitting events into executable target-conditioned stroke variations, forming a continuous latent skill space. Second, a high-level planner outputs continuous latent skill codes to compose these skills online according to the observed shuttle state. Third, a context-conditioned adversarial regularizer encourages more natural planner-level skill usage while preserving return performance. When deployed on a real humanoid robot, our system achieves sustained multi-skill rallies with human players, including forehand, backhand, and highly dynamic jump returns. This is the first real-world humanoid racket-sport system to demonstrate multi-skill human--robot rallies including highly dynamic jump returns.

Abstract: High-level robotic supervisors coordinate capabilities whose reported outcomes determine the robot's next action. Reactive synthesis can generate such supervisors with formal guarantees, but deployment requires more than proving a Generalized Reactivity (1) (GR(1)) specification realizable. Designers must encode failure-prone capabilities, choose liveness assumptions that match retry intent, audit strategies, and translate them into robot software. We present an open-source pipeline for Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 Flexible Behavior Engine (FlexBE) supervisors that generates capability-based GR(1) specifications, analyzes assumptions before synthesis, audits strategies, reduces states with a behavior-preservation proof, and emits executable state machines. Across four case studies (six comparisons), including hardware on two quadcopter platforms, we compare enumerated and one-hot encodings and two liveness formulations. Under the tested backend, enumerated encoding usually synthesizes faster, although fewer propositions do not reliably predict smaller controllers or lower symbolic cost. System-Goal without pending memory is the only liveness treatment confirmed to yield executable controllers under both encodings across the reported grid; Fair-Outcome can permit realizable cycles without designer-intended completion. For this backend and model, we recommend enumerated encoding with System-Goal and auditing every realized strategy, since proposition count and realizability do not measure deployability. The auditor is sound and complete for four structural defect classes (protocol violations, deadlocks, bounded-failure violations, goal-unreachable traps) but is not a general liveness verifier, and the reduction preserves capability-level behavior. Together, these stages narrow the gap between formal realizability and controllers that pass protocol and structural-progress checks.

Abstract: Cross-embodiment learning has shown that a single model, such as a vision-language-action (VLA) model, can learn state representations and manipulation skills that can be applied across heterogeneous robots to accomplish various tasks. We hypothesize that the same holds for safety enforcement. The reasoning required to satisfy a safety constraint, such as detecting an obstacle, recognizing that it should be avoided, and selecting a safe abstract action, is largely shared across robots. What differs across embodiments is how the abstract safe action is realized: morphology, kinematics, and dynamics determine which actions are safe and feasible. Consequently, the same action can be safe for one robot and unsafe for another. This is especially important for generalist manipulation policies that operate in a common end-effector action space without explicitly capturing how safety depends on the robot's morphology and kinematics. We propose embodiment-conditioned safety filtering, in which a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability-based value function and its corresponding safety-maximizing policy are shared across robots. Using a morphology-aware latent representation of the robot and its environment, we perform Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis directly in latent space so that the learned safety concepts can generalize across embodiments while remaining explicitly conditioned on each robot's morphology and kinematics. We evaluate our approach across five bimanual robot embodiments and five manipulation tasks with whole-body collision-avoidance constraints. Our results show that a single policy, jointly trained across five manipulation tasks and four embodiments, exhibits zero-shot generalization to a held-out embodiment, reducing the nominal policy's collision rate. They also show that training using more embodiments improves generalization.

Abstract: Behaviora is a preliminary conceptual architecture for representing agent and robot behavior, external and internal alike, in an addressable form. A behaving robot or agent performs a Behavior Episode composed of episode components, which can be derived from behavior taxonomies (BTax) and assigned persistent identifiers. We denote these identifiers as IoB (Internet of Behaviors) Addresses. A Behavior Episode specifies what the system does, while a Style Profile (SP) specifies how this behavior is expressed. Style can communicate characteristics of the actor and qualities such as competence and cultural manners. An Experience Profile (EP) represents behaviorally relevant internal state that modulates the execution of an Episode. Finally, a Behavior Compiler maps these behavioral representations to platform-specific actions. We use a primitive touching arm model to show these components and their relations. External Behavior is a result of addressable movements and their styles. Internal Behavior is represented through the same episodic principle and can be rendered as inner speech. Sensing, perception and complex task contexts have not been included in the present implementation, although a conceptual place is reserved for them.

Abstract: Long-term autonomy in human-populated environments requires anticipating whether and how people will move at times a robot has not yet observed. Existing representations of pedestrian motion face a tradeoff: they either forecast future activity, reducing each location to a scalar rate, or model the full directional distribution, holding it fixed in time. We present Kairos, a predictive directional-flow memory that extends a hierarchical 3D scene graph (3DSG) to a 4D scene graph (4DSG). Every observed voxel of the reconstructed geometry stores a directional mixture and a presence rate, and spectral predictors forecast, for any future query time, both the probability that people are present and the full directional distribution of their motion. Pairwise flow dependence between adjacent voxels supports conditional queries, and per-voxel predictive variances yield calibrated credible intervals that tighten as observations accumulate. We evaluate Kairos on three real pedestrian environments: a robot-collected campus dataset, a shopping mall, and a station concourse recorded continuously for eleven months. Its learned state remains consistent under loop-closure corrections, and its forecasts are competitive with dedicated occupancy and flow models trained on the full detection stream, although Kairos learns from only the small fraction available to a patrolling robot. Finally, we validate the representation on a downstream encounter-probability planning task, where plans computed over the Kairos forecasts encounter more people than plans computed over any time-invariant map at an equal success rate. We provide the code at https://github.com/IacopomC/kairos.

Abstract: 2D point cloud registration arises in laser odometry and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for mobile robots. Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is one of the most widely used approaches. Still, its iterative procedure recomputes correspondences via nearest-neighbor search at every iteration, whereas correspondence-free alternatives focus on scan-to-map alignment. This paper proposes a 2D point cloud registration approach based on unsigned distance maps, precomputing the Euclidean distance to the nearest reference point, along with its spatial derivatives, over a discrete grid, replacing the per-iteration search with O(1) lookups. Moreover, point-to-point and point-to-plane error formulations are derived on the SE(2) manifold and solved via Gauss-Newton optimization. On a synthetic benchmark and the real-world IILABS 3D dataset, the precomputed point-to-point variant outperforms its analytical counterparts, achieving competitive laser-odometry drift compared to point-to-plane formulations, as the precomputed gradient regularizes correspondences in the presence of sensor noise.

Abstract: How should a robot learn to manipulate objects so fragile that sub-Newton contact forces can cause irreversible damage? Existing visuo-tactile policy learning typically treats tactile sensing as an additional policy input. In direct-contact force-sensitive manipulation, however, the bottleneck can arise earlier, during data collection: manual gripper control is too delayed and coarse-grained to reliably maintain the narrow force range required for stable grasping. We therefore use a deterministic 25 Hz tactile reflex controller as a collection-time teacher, producing demonstrations with controller-shaped grasping behavior for tactile-free policy learning. On Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), policies trained from reflex-shaped demonstrations recover the teacher's grasping profile and achieve 95% stable grasps on the nominal plastic-cup task, substantially outperforming visually screened manual demonstrations. The same intervention improves in-distribution stability on $π_{0.5}$ and shows a favorable exploratory trend on an unseen paper-cup variant. Under randomized external disturbance, however, the reflex-data $π_{0.5}$ policy still fails in 45% of policy-only trials, whereas a deployment-time reflex arbiter retains all grasps. These results reveal a new role for tactile feedback in force-sensitive manipulation: rather than integrating tactile into the policy, we use it as a collection-time teacher that shapes grasping behavior in demonstrations for policy learning, while disturbance rejection remains controller-dependent, revealing the boundary of tactile-free policy.

Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) jointly generate robot actions and predict future world states, transferring priors from video pretraining to robot control. However, future visual prediction is computationally expensive, so existing WAMs often rely on long action chunks to amortize inference cost across control steps, at the cost of closed-loop responsiveness. We present \method, a dual-system WAM that preserves broader-horizon world-action generation while enabling high-frequency closed-loop action updates by decoupling global planning and local refinement. \systwo periodically performs high-noise bidirectional denoising over a broader world-action chunk to establish a global plan, while wrist-only \sysone extracts a temporally aligned short window from the intermediate denoising state and completes low-noise refinement using the latest wrist observations, which provide action-aligned cues about local geometry, motion, and contact during interaction. The two systems operate asynchronously along a shared denoising trajectory: each global plan is reused across multiple local updates, while \sysone repeatedly incorporates fresh interaction feedback. Across zero-shot manipulation tasks on Franka and Galbot, \method improves success over the strongest evaluated baseline by 4.5 percentage points on average, while achieving a 16.6$\times$ critical-path speedup. Further studies show that role-matched egocentric and UMI data improve success by 14 percentage points, and that the decoupled design naturally supports edge--cloud deployment with substantially lower communication overhead than the baseline.

Abstract: Current embodied systems largely rely on pretrained capabilities that remain fixed after deployment, limiting their ability to learn from physical interaction. We introduce MachEmbodied-Brain (ME-Brain), a self-evolving embodied system organized around a closed loop of action execution, experience acquisition, experience evolution, and improved execution. Evolvable Memory consolidates multimodal trajectories into hierarchical, reusable experience; Cognitive Core transforms physical experience into transferable skills; and the Action Model combines event-driven keyframes, EventCell local-world prediction, and action-conditioned memory modulation to focus computation on decision-critical moments, regions, and historical evidence. Together, these modules shift embodied intelligence from train-and-freeze to deploy-and-evolve without model retraining. Cognitive Core outperforms the strongest comparison models by 8.2 and 9.6 points on embodied and agent benchmarks. The Action Model achieves 47.88% mean success on RoboMME, a 3.26-point improvement over the strongest baseline. On RoboDojo, it reaches a 21.51 mean Score and 16.03% success rate, exceeding $π_{0.5}$ by 10.10 and 9.12 points. On the six-task ME-RealBench, ME-Brain achieves a 69.5 mean Score and 66.7% success rate, outperforming DM0.5 by 12.8 and 11.7 points, respectively.

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) planners can decompose natural-language instructions and select reusable robot skills, but choosing the correct skill does not guarantee successful physical execution. This gap is especially important in humanoid loco-manipulation, where errors during approach, grasping, transport, or placement can invalidate the remainder of a long-horizon plan. We present FRAMES, a failure-aware supervisory framework for the Unitree G1 humanoid that operates above the CEER whole-body controller. A Planner Agent selects subtasks through parameterized mid-level skills, while a vision-language-model-based Monitor Agent evaluates each skill using temporal multi-view observations and structured robot and contact evidence. Detected failures stop the active skill and provide grounded feedback to a Recovery Agent. The framework further includes a Memory Module for reusing prior skill experience, and geometric grounding via depth and segmentation. We independently evaluate the monitoring module of the framework in MuJoCo using 100 trials comprising 50 failed and 50 successful executions across five tasks. The monitor detects 48 of 50 failures, correctly accepts 46 of 50 successful executions, and achieves 94.0% overall accuracy. These results provide initial evidence for the monitoring component, while end-to-end evaluation of the complete recovery loop remains ongoing.

Abstract: The performance improvement of high-power flat BLDC motors has accelerated the development of dynamic robots. However, many commercially available servo motors assume operating voltages of 48 V or lower, which limits the maximum rotational speed. Dynamic robots require rapid energy generation, so this voltage constraint restricts motion performance. Therefore, driving motors beyond the rated voltage is desirable to increase the instantaneous maximum speed. On the other hand, semiconductor devices used in motor drivers have a trade-off between voltage rating and current capacity. Conventional drivers using Si MOSFETs have difficulty achieving both high-voltage and high-current operation. Although GaN FETs are promising, compact drivers that can be mounted on the rear side of flat BLDC motors remain limited. In this study, a motor driver for high-power flat BLDC motors using GaN FETs is developed. The effect of delay compensation in the high-speed region beyond the rated operating range is also investigated. In the experiments, under 96 V operation, a continuous current of 30 A was achieved with a heat sink attached. A peak current of 80 A and a maximum electrical frequency of 3110 Hz were confirmed. A high-speed load lifting experiment driven by a LiPo battery 24S (100 V) was also conducted, demonstrating applicability to dynamic robot operation.

Abstract: Learning predictive models of contact-rich dexterous manipulation requires dense tactile interaction, but such data are costly to scale on real robots and remain tied to embodiment-specific sensors. We introduce DexTouch-WM, an action-conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to jointly predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics. Our insight is that human and robot manipulation share transferable contact dynamics when their tactile observations and action spaces are made compatible. We deploy flexible piezoresistive arrays with a shared sensing layout on both human and dexterous robot hands, and retarget human motion into the robot action space so that human interaction can supervise the same dynamics model used for real-robot prediction. DexTouch-WM couples a pretrained video expert with a lightweight tactile expert using anatomy-aware tactile tokens and aligned action conditioning. In human-to-robot scaling experiments, we keep five hours of real-robot supervision fixed while increasing human interaction from 0 to 100 hours, and observe substantial improvements in held-out robot-domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction despite disjoint human and robot task sets. Beyond prediction, we evaluate the world models as surrogate environments for policy evaluation and as generators of synthetic trajectories for real-robot policy learning, showing that scalable human interaction provides a complementary data axis for learning dexterous robot world models.

Abstract: We study GPT-6-Astra in a zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) system, where it interprets instructions, assesses its surroundings, and proposes actions. The system uses a common observation--decision--execution workflow with direct model API calls, without a packaged agent harness or navigation-specific fine-tuning. In this workflow, each request receives selected observations, execution feedback, and retained progress records. Evaluation covers the complete system, including context management and action control. We evaluate the system on 50 of the 100 R2R-CE val-unseen episodes used by Open-Nav. It achieves a success rate of 52.0\%, an SPL of 48.9\%, and an nDTW of 70.8\%. Our analysis highlights three findings. First, recorded responses link landmarks and earlier actions to instructions using observations and supplied history. Second, reviews include requests for additional views and revisions of uncertain judgments. Third, the results suggest a gap between task understanding and autonomous completion: an unfinished crossing is recognized while rotation continues. At termination, 36.0\% of episodes succeed with a workflow-accepted STOP, while another 16.0\% meet the distance criterion at the step limit. These results highlight a central challenge: translating correct local judgments into sustained progress and appropriate stopping.

Abstract: Imitation-learned robot policies are frequently overfit to the visual conditions present in their training demonstrations. Consequently, variations in object color or background appearance often induce substantial performance degradation. A common mitigation strategy is to acquire additional demonstrations in each novel visual context; however, this approach is resource-intensive, requiring repeated access to a robot, a controlled environment, and human operation for every appearance condition to be covered. We introduce ReShoot, a framework that synthesizes visual diversity by re-rendering previously recorded demonstrations under altered appearances, thereby shifting the burden from data collection to generation. A vision-language model captions the scene, edits a targeted attribute (e.g., background, object color, or material), and an edge-conditioned video generator re-renders both camera views to match. The instruction is updated accordingly. The action sequence and proprioceptive trajectory are copied verbatim without relabeling, so each generated episode retains the recorded action and proprioceptive labels. On LIBERO, a policy trained on an equal mixture of recorded and re-rendered demonstrations matches the performance of recorded-only training (96.5% vs. 96.9%). Moreover, the mixed training set improves robustness to scene perturbations on LIBERO-Plus (85.5% vs. 82.3%). Across two physical robotic platforms, deploying ReShoot with 43 and 100 pre-collected demonstrations increased the success rate on recolored objects from 0.0% to 42.9% and 47.5%, respectively, while maintaining performance under the original recorded appearance.

Abstract: Robots are moving out of the structured factory floor and into unstructured environments such as disaster sites, planetary surfaces, and agricultural fields, for which the right robot often does not yet exist. We present GLAMDRING, a framework that synthesizes the optimal robot for a locomotion task and, jointly, learns the controller that drives it. For the given specifications of forward-velocity bounds, a per-actuator power budget, an actuator library, and a payload requirement, GLAMDRING returns a matched quadruped morphology (link geometry and per-joint actuators) and a Hopf-oscillator Central Pattern Generator (CPG) gait policy. We rank feasible designs against a target design objective, viz., maximum speed, minimum Cost of Transport (CoT), or max Payload Margin. Because body and locomotion are coupled, the optimal morphology dictates how a robot is driven, while optimal gait depends on the physical body. We train a small number of CPG policies by reinforcement learning across the space of candidate morphologies, co-learning the gait with the underlying robot hardware. Link lengths and actuators are then resolved post-hoc from the policy's logged operating envelope, reducing synthesis cost to a small, fixed number of reinforcement-learning runs instead of one per candidate. Our experiments show three key findings: co-designing body and gait is necessary to satisfy locomotion constraints; actuator-envelope feasibility, rather than locomotion success alone, determines realizable payload capacity; and canonical animal gaits emerge naturally in most designs from morphology and constraints alone. A real-world demonstration further highlights the efficacy of our work.

Abstract: Open datasets describing human behavior in environments shared with mobile robots remain limited, particularly for retail activities that combine locomotion, reaching, object handling, and robot guided movement. This paper introduces OHRID Retail, an open, human centered multimodal dataset collected from 16 healthy adults performing a simulated shelf picking task under three within participant conditions: no robot, low speed robot guidance, and high speed robot guidance. Each participant completed two trials per condition. Whole body kinematics were recorded using 17 Xsens Awinda inertial sensors and muscle activity was measured at 10 locations using Delsys Trigno surface electromyography sensors. Descriptive analyses demonstrate variation in whole body movement intensity and muscle activation across robot interaction conditions and body locations. OHRID Retail provides openly available raw recordings, processed measures, documentation, and reproducible analysis resources. The dataset can support research in human activity recognition, multimodal sensor fusion, occupational biomechanics, ergonomics, human aware robot navigation, and human robot interaction in retail and related shared environments.

Abstract: Billion-parameter vision--language--action (VLA) policies demand substantial onboard power, while communication delays in remote inference hinder timely responses. We propose VLA-ULAP, which interleaves remote VLA calls with an Ultra-Lightweight Local Action Predictor (ULAP). With approximately 7.4M parameters including the frozen vision encoder, ULAP combines current views, proprioception, and executed action history to predict chunks in one pass. Trained independently, it requires no VLA hidden states, online verification, or server round trips. On Jetson Orin Nano, ULAP takes 19.9 ms and 0.183 J per inference, compared with 284.3 ms and 50.55 J for GR00T on RTX A6000. Across three simulated base-policy/benchmark pairs, selected operating points remove 48.8--76.7\% of VLA calls while retaining 95.0--97.5\% of the baseline success rate. Against local VLA-acceleration alternatives on VLA-JEPA, ULAP uses an estimated 49.2\% less inference time and 51.0\% less GPU energy per successful episode than ACT at comparable success rates, and 77.1\% less time and 79.9\% less energy than SP-VLA at equal success rates. Physical SO-101 experiments retain 95.2--100\% of the baseline success rate across seen and held-out placements while reducing inference time by an estimated 47.9--58.0\% and inference-device energy by 52.1--62.5\%, based on successful-episode call counts and measured device costs. Faster responses also improve dynamic-task success rates: in latency-aware LIBERO-Safety simulation, VLA-ULAP exceeds $π_{0.5}$ by 11.0 and 15.5 percentage points on two tasks while approximately halving VLA calls.

Abstract: State-of-the-art visual locomotion controllers are increasingly capable at handling complex visual environments, making evaluating their real-world performance before deployment increasingly difficult. This work intends to narrow this train/evaluation gap by developing a collection of hyper-photo-realistic, closed-loop evaluation environments - The Neverwhere Benchmark Suite - comprised of over sixty 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of urban indoor and outdoor scenes. Our goal is to encourage large-scale and reproducible robot evaluation by making it easier to create and integrate Gaussian splats-based reconstructions into simulated continuous testing setups. We also underscore the potential pitfalls of relying exclusively on 3D Gaussian-generated data for training, by providing policy checkpoints trained over multiple Neverwhere scenes and their performance when evaluated in novel scenes. Our analysis illustrates the necessity of sourcing diverse data to ensure performance. Code and data are available on the project page: https://ziyc.github.io/neverwhere-bench/.

Abstract: A robot following language instructions needs its semantic memory to keep naming the same physical object while the SLAM pose graph underneath is optimized, loop-closed and compressed. Maps committing each detection to a world coordinate cannot: a closure moves the anchor it was measured from, or the solver marginalizes that anchor, and the query then selects a different object although both graphs represent the same posterior. P-POSEMEM stores each observation as an immutable event at its birth keyframe, retains the Bayes-tree elimination conditional of every marginalized keyframe, and integrates the semantic likelihood over the reconstructed joint posterior of poses, anchors and identities. Dproj, the total-variation defect between the language-goal distributions of inference-equivalent full and marginalized graphs, measures this directly. Over 40 HM3DSem scenes and 112,000 queries, P-POSEMEM reproduces the full-graph oracle (Dproj = 0) and reduces goal flips against every memory-reducing baseline. On an eight-run campaign whose 761 closures rewrote the map by up to 47 m, Dproj stays below 10^-13 with 0/288 goal flips when elimination follows the closures, where every ablation and a coordinate committed at insertion flip goals it does not; under a live bounded solver the same memory flips 23/288 against 53 for that frozen coordinate. A pre-registered negative control is detected by Dproj while leaving calibration error and navigation success unchanged, indicating that these measures capture distinct failure modes. Retrieval is held fixed by a shared frozen detector, isolating the gain to memory consistency. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/posemem-2328/.

Abstract: Robotic manipulation tasks are often decomposed into behaviors or skills. However, one often needs to predefine these behaviors for specific tasks or try to cover a wide range of tasks using generic skills. As a result, these behaviors can remain too coarse to expose the geometric, control, and scene-dependent decisions required for execution. We introduce Grounded Task Axes v2 (GTA-2), a modular multi-VLM framework that constructs executable, task-bespoke manipulation skills from reusable object-centric task-axis components. Rather than predicting actions end-to-end or composing fixed task-level primitives, GTA-2 represents each skill as semantic subtasks comprising task-relevant keypoints and axes, controller compositions, and scene-dependent parameters. Four specialized VLM agents separately decompose the task, construct an abstract task-axis skill, assign controller parameters, and ground the required visual features from RGB-D observations. This abstraction-to-grounding factorization enables zero-shot skill generation without task-specific robot demonstrations, policy training, or fine-tuning. It also keeps intermediate decisions explicit, allowing targeted human feedback to refine an incorrect stage while preserving correct components. We evaluate GTA-2 on 14 real-robot manipulation tasks against a VLA policy pi_{0.5} and two Code-as-Policies baselines using task-axis controllers or conventional robot primitives. GTA-2 achieves an average zero-shot success rate of 73.9%, exceeding the strongest baseline by 31.4 percentage points, while targeted refinement raises GTA-2's average success rate to 90.7%. Project page: https://gta2-project.github.io/