Abstract
Decentralized robots often need a common view of what their team is becoming, even though each robot sees different evidence and cannot rely on a central estimate or output-level consensus. We ask whether compatible collective-state predictions can emerge under this constraint. Collective-State JEPA (CS-JEPA) trains every robot to predict the same fixed-width latent future from its own history and bounded neighbor messages, with no agreement loss; predictions and plans are never pooled at deployment. In a fresh independent replication, agreement improves for every seed and every evaluated split. Accuracy improves at the same time, ruling out the uninformative solution in which all robots merely collapse to one prediction: relative to capacity-matched raw-future reconstruction, collective-state error falls by 28.4 percent in distribution and by 64.4 to 75.6 percent under topology and swarm-size shift. Translation-free and crossed-pretraining controls preserve this joint result, while action-conditioned and rigid-body evaluations show that the receiver-local representation supports independent decisions. A shared latent future can therefore align decentralized predictions without consensus training while preserving useful, label-efficient information.
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Aug 7, 2026cs.RO
Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels.
Haodong Yan, Jiaguan Zhu, Mingyuan Jia +12
Jun 10, 2026cs.RO
Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference time to overcome partial observability. Our key insight is that the visuomotor priors of pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models should enable reactive, decentralized collaboration from each robot's local observations alone, without these inference-time assumptions. We propose CHORUS, a framework that adapts a single VLA backbone to control diverse, multi-robot teams. At inference time, each robot runs an independent copy of CHORUS, conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. In real-world experiments including mobile tape measurement, library book handovers, and laundry basket lifting, CHORUS achieves a 64% point improvement over decentralized, from-scratch models, improves reactivity to teammate behavior by 40% points, and outperforms centralized baselines. Together, these results show that a shared VLA backbone is capable of achieving decentralized multi-robot collaboration, without per-robot policies or inter-robot communication at inference.
Ria Doshi, Tian Gao, Annie Chen +2
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Generalist robot policies aim to map multimodal observations and linguistic task instructions to actions across diverse tasks. However, existing methods typically represent the future as a fixed, short video-action chunk. This short-term future captures local scene evolution for action execution, but it does not explicitly describe the stage-level future that specifies how a task should progress from its current stage to the next. We therefore distinguish two complementary futures for robot manipulation: a short-term physical future to capture local scene evolution and a stage-level semantic future to represent task progress. We introduce JEPA-WAM, which augments a Motus-based World Action Model (WAM) with Stage-JEPA, a goal-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) predictor. Given the current observation and task instruction, Stage-JEPA uses a frozen V-JEPA2 encoder to extract the current-state representation and predicts the latent target of the next inferred stage. Across 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks in clean and randomized environments, JEPA-WAM achieves 90.25% overall success and reduces the mean number of execution steps in successful rollouts by 5.97% relative to the strongest baseline.
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