ActiveAlign: Aligning Egocentric Manipulation via Active Perception

Robots manipulating objects in clutter must decide not only how to act, but also where to look. Although active camera motion can expose an occluded target, it may move the robot into an initial observation-state distribution that differs from the manipulation policy's training distribution. We identify this problem as first-frame distribution sensitivity: under perturbed starts in LIBERO, naively prepending camera repositioning to pi_0.5 reduces success from 46.3% to 11.5%. We introduce ActiveAlign, a data-adaptation framework that trains a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy from the states at which active perception terminates. A learned viewpoint module first generates a camera trajectory. Offline, ActiveAlign uses closed-loop alignment to connect the trajectory endpoint to an existing demonstration, replays the remaining manipulation trajectory, and retains successful continuations for fine-tuning. At deployment, the same viewpoint module precedes the adapted VLA without modifying its architecture. Across 40 LIBERO tasks, ActiveAlign achieves 70.7% success with pi_0 and 72.7% with pi_0.5, outperforming their standard-training baselines by 40.0% and 26.4% respectively. Matched-state and data-matched controls support gains beyond prefix shortening and generic viewpoint augmentation; OpenVLA and GR00T N1 also show the same trend. Success rate under physical occlusion in real world increases from 35/90 to 83/90. These results show that active perception benefits manipulation when policy training is aligned with the observation and robot-state distribution induced by viewpoint selection.

Multi-agent manipulation naturally produces multiple task-driven viewpoints: every arm carries a wrist camera and moves through the scene while acting. Yet these observations are typically underutilized, and active perception in manipulation is still often treated as requiring a dedicated sensing agent. We introduce MAAP (Multi-Agent Active Perception), in which every arm is dual-purpose: it executes manipulation actions and, through the wrist camera it carries, simultaneously serves as a moving viewpoint for the team. We pair this with RAIL (Role-Aware Imitation Learning), a controller that predicts each arm's current role alongside its action chunk and conditions action generation on it, representing role-dependent actions within one network. Across four simulated tasks, widening the perception regime lifts average success from 56.5% with a fixed camera to 62.5% with one active wrist view and 70.0% with all of them, while MAAP+RAIL reaches 79.2%. RAIL's additional gain is concentrated on the three-arm Microwave task, where success rises from 47% to 82% on identical multi-wrist inputs. On a dual-arm platform, MAAP+RAIL succeeds in 14 of 20 placement trials compared with 0 of 20 for fixed-view ACT. Collaborative manipulation can thus serve as an active perception mechanism in its own right.

Large-scale real-world robot data collection is a prerequisite for bringing robots into everyday deployment. However, existing pipelines often rely on specialized handheld devices to bridge the embodiment gap, which not only increases operator burden and limits scalability, but also makes it difficult to capture the naturally coordinated perception-manipulation behaviors of human daily interaction. This challenge calls for a more natural system that can faithfully capture human manipulation and perception behaviors while enabling zero-shot transfer to robotic platforms. We introduce ActiveGlasses, a system for learning robot manipulation from ego-centric human demonstrations with active vision. A stereo camera mounted on smart glasses serves as the sole perception device for both data collection and policy inference: the operator wears it during bare-hand demonstrations, and the same camera is mounted on a 6-DoF perception arm during deployment to reproduce human active vision. To enable zero-transfer, we extract object trajectories from demonstrations and use an object-centric point-cloud policy to jointly predict manipulation and head movement. Across several challenging tasks involving occlusion and precise interaction, ActiveGlasses achieves zero-shot transfer with active vision, consistently outperforms strong baselines under the same hardware setup, and generalizes across two robot platforms.