Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning

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52 papers in the last four weeks, up 550% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 232

Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

MM-ABC: Towards Generalist Mobile Manipulation via Seeing, Coordinating and Imagining

Mobile manipulation extends robot interaction beyond a fixed kinematic workspace by making the reachable region itself controllable. This flexibility introduces two central challenges: spatially grounded perception under continuous ego-motion and coordinated control of heterogeneous arm and base actions. Existing approaches strengthen geometry through explicit 3D representations or predictive world models, and often decouple mobility and manipulation into separate action streams. We argue that effective mobile manipulation requires not only decoupling, but also representations that support efficient cross-stream collaboration. We present MM-ABC, a foundation model built around Seeing, Coordinating, and Imagining Arm-Base Collaboration. MM-ABC combines sparse multi-level VLM features for spatial perception; a training-only future branch that uses world imagination and geometric intent as extra supervision, strengthening perception and manipulation-intent prediction and improving the overall learning signal; and MM-APT, which coordinates separate manipulation and mobility streams through masked joint attention and clean-action x-prediction. In controlled ablations, replacing clean-action prediction with velocity prediction lowers success on RoboCasa365 composite-seen tasks from 32.8% to 29.2%, and removing future supervision or multilevel conditioning causes larger drops. We pretrain MM-ABC on 5,000+ hours of heterogeneous robot data spanning 400K+ episodes, 12 datasets, and 17 embodiments. Experiments cover EBench, RoboCasa365, ManiSkill-HAB, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world mobile manipulation. MM-ABC achieves 44.71% success on EBench, 61.2% on RoboCasa365, 99.1% on LIBERO, 82.8% on LIBERO-Plus without perturbation training, and 83% mean success on five real-world tasks.
Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

DexWeave: Learning Dexterous Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Human Demonstrations

Learning dexterous humanoid loco-manipulation from human demonstrations requires transferring not only human motion, but also the coordinated interaction structure underlying the demonstrated behavior. This is challenging because embodiment differences distort the coupling among body motion, wrist placement, finger articulation, and object interaction, while kinematically accurate references may still be difficult to realize under robot dynamics. We present DexWeave, a unified framework that connects interaction-consistent motion retargeting with anatomy-aware whole-body policy learning. DexWeave first employs a two-stage retargeting procedure that initializes body and hand motions with specialized solvers and subsequently performs coupled refinement over the upper-body interaction chain while preserving lower-body support. The resulting references are tracked by an anatomy-aware Transformer policy that represents anatomical regions as structured tokens and uses directed masked attention to model their dependencies, with object information selectively conditioning the upper-body pathway for dexterous interaction. The policy jointly outputs body and dexterous-hand actions and is trained directly with reinforcement learning, without pretrained tracking policies, teacher-student distillation, or subsequent residual refinement. DexWeave improves retargeting fidelity and interaction consistency while achieving higher manipulation performance and faster policy convergence than MLP baselines. We further deploy the learned policies on a physical Unitree G1 humanoid equipped with Inspire dexterous hands, demonstrating dexterous whole-body loco-manipulation in the real world. See our project page (https://dexweave.github.io) for videos.
Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

From World Models to World Action Models: Rethinking Next-State Prediction

Predicting the next state is a core paradigm of World Models for modeling physical dynamics, emphasizing prediction fidelity. As World Models evolve into World-Action Models (WAMs), existing methods still fix the next state before training as RGB, a single latent feature, or a static combination of predefined targets, thereby constraining action learning to the inductive biases preserved by a particular representation. To address this limitation, we propose CF-WAM, a dynamic next-state prediction framework that samples visual, semantic, geometric, and interaction projections of the same future, standardizes them into a common video form, and supervises a unified WAM across these projections. The action-relevant constraints exposed by these projections accumulate across training steps, forcing WAM to capture the underlying state-transition structure that supports multiple projections of the same action-conditioned future. This dynamic mechanism also provides a natural cross-embodiment dynamics reference frame for Human and Robot learning. By jointly learning across different next-state parameterizations, heterogeneous Human and Robot experience can bypass appearance differences and directly contribute to shared state-transition learning, improving cross-embodiment generalization. Experiments show that CF-WAM improves both training efficiency and final control performance, while translating Human experience effectively into policy gains. CF-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on RoboCasa-GR1 with an average success rate of 82.50%, while reaching 82.65% on LIBERO-Plus and up to 84.00% in real-world evaluations.
Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

UMR: Universal Manipulation Representation

General-purpose embodied manipulation hinges on a unified action representation that generalizes across embodiments and scales readily. Yet existing policies rely on embodiment-specific action spaces, making cross-embodiment demonstrations difficult to leverage at scale and limiting transfer to new embodiments and spatial variations. To this end, we introduce Universal Manipulation Representation (UMR), a unified action representation that enables zero-shot skill transfer from human demonstrations to heterogeneous robots. UMR decomposes manipulation into two functionally distinct yet geometrically linked components: embodiment-agnostic World Flow, which describes task-relevant object motion in the world frame, and Ego Trajectory, which represents end-effector motion relative to the current pose. We instantiate UMR as World--Ego Point VLA (WEPVLA), a compact 0.5B-parameter policy that learns in the unified geometric action space through a dual-stream Point Action Adapter and a unified Point Action Expert, with an SE(3)SE(3) conjugation coupling the two components. To improve data efficiency, we complement UMR with a Data-Efficient Strategy (DES) that diversifies object configurations through stage-aware point-cloud editing while preserving demonstrated contact geometry. In simulation, WEPVLA achieves average success rates of 97.5% on LIBERO and 85.7% on the 10-task RLBench benchmark. In real-world experiments, a single policy trained on human demonstrations augmented by DES transfers zero-shot to diverse deployment conditions. With about 10 minutes of collected human demonstrations per task and no robot demonstrations, it achieves 91.7% average success across six evaluation settings, compared with 60.8% for HumanEgo. Code and additional materials are available at https://umr-wepvla.github.io/.
Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

GAE: General Action Expert for Real-Time Humanoid Teleoperation

Humanoid avatars extend human physical presence beyond the body, enabling people to participate in social, service, and labor activities through remotely operated robots. This requires teleoperation systems capable of realizing diverse and dynamic whole-body behaviors while maintaining responsive human-robot synchronization. We present General Action Expert(GAE), a unified learning framework for general-purpose, low-latency humanoid whole-body teleoperation. To cover diverse human behaviors, GAE builds a large-scale human motion dataset from heterogeneous sources, including videos, animations, and motion capture, followed by standardization and augmentation. GAE then addresses the noise and embodiment mismatch in human motions with a two-stage training paradigm: a privileged generator policy first tracks human motion references in simulation and rolls out feasible humanoid trajectories; a deployable executor policy then learns to track these generated trajectories under curriculum domain randomization. For responsive human-robot synchronization, GAE introduces a latency-conditioned anticipation mechanism that adaptively compensates for end-to-end delay during real-time teleoperation. Simulation and real-world experiments on Unitree G1 and Westlake O1 robots demonstrate that GAE enables humanoids to smoothly mirror diverse, agile, and expressive human behaviors. Project website: https://wangyf0928.github.io/gae-wlrobotics/
Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

Unified Visual-Tactile-Action Modeling from Human Demonstrations for Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation requires tactile feedback. However, robot tactile demonstrations are difficult to scale,because dexterous-hand teleoperation provides limited tactile feedback to the operator. In contrast, human demonstrations offer a substantially more scalable source of diverse tactile interactions. Motivated by a simple premise: hands can change, but the underlying physics of interaction does not. We leverage human tactile data to improve dexterous manipulation policies. Specifically, we first build a tactile motion-capture system that synchronously records images, tactile signals, and hand motions. Using this system, we construct the UVTA dataset spanning five contact-rich tasks, with 1,000 human demonstrations covering diverse interaction patterns and 150 robot demonstrations per task. To transfer the underlying physics of human interaction to robot control, we propose a Unified Visual-Tactile-Action Model that maps both embodiments into aligned tactile and action representations and jointly predicts future action and tactile trajectories. The joint objective enables human demonstrations to supervise contact-aware representation learning, while only robot actions are executed during deployment. In real-robot evaluations across five tasks, our method achieves an average success rate of 70%, outperforming the strongest visual-tactile baseline, which achieves 29%, and an architecture ablation, which achieves 42%. Performance improves consistently with additional human demonstrations and exhibits no saturation at 1,000 demonstrations per task, validating the effectiveness of scalable human tactile data for dexterous manipulation. Project page is available at https://uni-vta.github.io/.
Sep 27, 2026cs.RO

FoLD: Force-Informed Learning for Dexterous Articulated Object Manipulation

Transferring human demonstrations to dexterous robots remains challenging because differences in hand morphology and contact dynamics often cause retargeted motions to fail at producing the intended object behavior. We present \textbf{FoLD}, a framework for learning dexterous manipulation of articulated objects through explicit force guidance. FoLD compute compensatory force fields from human demonstrations together with the robot's current interaction state, yielding a force prior that promotes the demonstrated object motion. This force prior informs a residual policy that adapts retargeted hand motions to the contact requirements of the task. We evaluate FoLD on a public benchmark for articulated object manipulation, where it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across tasks and embodiments. We further validate FoLD on real dexterous robot platforms, demonstrating successful transfer of human manipulation skills to robot execution. Here is the link of our project page: https://gghgghgghgg.github.io/FoLD-project-page/.
Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

MorphIK: Morphology-Conditioned Neural Inverse Kinematics for Unknown Robots

Neural models can learn to generate various solutions to the inverse kinematics problem from data, but are usually limited to a single robot. We present MorphIK, a flow-matching model that solves inverse kinematics for revolute-joint-based kinematic chains it has never seen during training. The model uses a transformer architecture to encode the robot's morphology along with the target pose. This encoding then conditions a flow-matching head that generates poses from noise. Trained on purely synthetic data from procedurally generated robots, the model reaches a precision of about 5 cm on unseen real-world robots with 6 to 9 Degrees of Freedom. For higher precision, the model serves as an excellent Prior for further optimization algorithms, reducing error to less than 1 cm after a single step of Damped Least Squares optimization and to sub-1 mm error after 3 steps in most cases. Building on flow matching's generative capabilities to produce highly diverse outputs, our model can efficiently sample the robot's null space, providing a wide variety of configurations for the same pose. Thus, overall, MorphIK allows learning and generalizing neural inverse kinematics for a multitude of known and unknown robots.
Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

BeyondRetarget: Learning Executable Humanoid Motions Directly from Monocular Video

Learning executable motions from human videos offers a scalable solution for humanoid robots to acquire demonstration motions. However, existing pipelines typically first construct an explicit human motion representation and then convert it into robot motions via motion retargeting. Although such methods can effectively leverage large volumes of existing human data for training, the substantial differences between humans and humanoid robots in locomotion mechanisms and joint degree-of-freedom configurations make motions generated by this human-representation-centric approach difficult to execute on robots. Furthermore, errors introduced during human motion estimation inevitably propagate to the retargeting stage and cannot be eliminated via joint optimization. We propose BeyondRetarget, an end-to-end framework that directly maps monocular RGB videos to robot motions. Discarding the explicit human representation, this framework learns robot-oriented implicit representations directly from visual observations, enabling the model to capture cross-morphology motion structures. To generate motions more suitable for robot execution, we further design a contact-aware motion optimization mechanism to improve temporal consistency and physical plausibility. Experiments show that BeyondRetarget significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of generated robot motions, while achieving higher execution success rates and lower latency in both simulation environments and real humanoid robots.
Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

CrossSafe: Towards Cross-Embodiment Latent Safety Filters

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.
Sep 23, 2026cs.RO

Morphometric Imitation: From Morphology and Contact Aware Hand Retargeting to Sim-to-Real Visuomotor Policy

Human hand-object interactions (HOIs) provide a rich source of demonstrations for dexterous manipulation, but learning directly from them presents challenges in bridging morphology gaps, ensuring dynamical feasibility, and sim-to-real deployment. We present Morphometric Imitation, a three-stage framework that transforms reconstructed HOIs into zero-shot sim-to-real visuomotor policies. First, morphometric optimization (MMO) kinematically retargets human motion across hand morphologies while preserving demonstrated contacts. Second, residual reinforcement learning (RL) refines the kinematic reference using object pose and contact information from the human motion to produce dynamically feasible robot demonstrations. Third, these demonstrations are distilled into visuomotor policies. Across three robot hands and ten HOIs, MMO improves contact F1 over the strongest of five baselines by at least 8 points for every hand, while also improving the success rate of downstream dynamic retargeting by as much as 35 points. Ablations on the residual RL show complementary benefits from using object pose and contact information. Finally, the visuomotor policies achieve 89.3% zero-shot success in 300 real-world trials on 30 objects. Project page: \href\href{https://morphometricimitation.github.io}{\text{this https URL}}
Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

Intelligence Across Embodiments

Robotic embodiment encompasses the sensing, kinematics, dynamics, geometry, actuation, and control through which an agent physically interacts with the world. These properties vary across robots and change over time. We argue that general embodied intelligence requires learning that accumulates across these differences. Prevailing methods that engineer correspondences to bridge embodiment differences offer immediate practical gains, but their assumptions limit the scope of transfer in the long run. Instead, a more general approach should discover representations that support transfer to a larger range of embodiments as experience grows. We propose embodiment diversity as a promising axis of scaling, and identify broad learned priors as a complementary ingredient. We call for evaluations that better characterize embodiment gaps and transfer performance. More broadly, cross-embodiment learning connects the practical challenge of learning from heterogeneous robot experience with a broader scientific pursuit inspired by nature - physical intelligence that adapts and co-evolves with its embodiments to gain agency over its behavior and physical forms.
Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

H2RBench: A Real-to-Sim Benchmark for Evaluating Human-to-Robot Transfer

Learning robot manipulation policies from human video demonstrations constitutes a promising avenue for scalable robot learning. However, comparing different human-to-robot (H2R) transfer methods remains challenging, as existing approaches are evaluated under different settings, including differing task suites, scene layouts, object instances, and amounts of robot supervision. To address this challenge, we present H2RBench, a Real2Sim benchmark for evaluating H2R transfer methods. H2RBench provides a standardized protocol built on real human video demonstrations and simulated robot demonstrations, and includes four manipulation tasks spanning diverse interaction requirements. We evaluate multiple representative H2R transfer methods, each adopting a different strategy for bridging the embodiment gap. Using H2RBench, we systematically characterize how each method scales with the amount of human demonstrations, revealing that methods differ substantially in their ability to leverage additional human data. We further show that simulation performance is broadly predictive of real-world robot performance, with an overall Pearson correlation of r = 0.89, Spearman correlation of \r{ho} = 0.85 and Mean Maximum Rank Violation (MMRV) of 0.06 across method-task configurations. These results establish H2RBench as a practical and scalable benchmark for comparative H2R evaluation prior to real-world deployment.
Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

Dexterous Robot Manipulation from Human Demonstrations via Contact-Anchored Retargeting and Residual Policy Learning

Learning dexterous manipulation from demonstrations is bottlenecked by data: the contact forces that determine whether a grasp succeeds are absent from every scalable source of human demonstrations. This paper builds on two observations. First, what survives the change from a human hand to a robot hand is the contact structure of a demonstration - which finger regions touch which object locations, and in what order - rather than its joint motion. Second, physical consistency need not be engineered per task: a single residual reinforcement learning (RL) policy, trained once across diverse demonstrations, can repair kinematic recordings into physically consistent, contact-annotated trajectories, and the same residual formulation restores dynamic feasibility after retargeting. These observations yield a three-stage pipeline that converts human motion-capture recordings into dexterous robot policies with no real-robot training data: physics refinement with a simulated MANO hand recovers contacts and forces, contact-anchored retargeting transfers the demonstrated contact structure through an objective independent of hand morphology, and residual policy learning adapts the result to robot actuation. The pipeline reconstructs 25,454 single-hand trajectories (success 7.3% -> 59.3%) and 25 dual-hand tasks (16.0% -> 62.4%) with one shared policy per setting, transfers one human dataset to four morphologically distinct robot hands (+62.4 pp), and executes four contact-rich bimanual tasks on physical hardware with zero real-robot training data.
Sep 20, 2026cs.RO

EgoWild2Dex: Learning Dexterous Robotic Manipulation from In-the-Wild Human Experience

Egocentric human data provide a principled source of supervision for learning dexterous robot manipulation. Unlike prior approaches that often collect such data in constrained or specially constructed environments, we collect in-the-wild egocentric demonstrations in real-world settings, including homes, factories, and pharmacies, etc., where people perform their ordinary tasks while wearing head-mounted cameras. This collection protocol captures diverse workflows and hand-object interactions across long-tailed object and skill distributions, but also yields visually challenging observations due to scene clutter and head-motion-induced viewpoint changes (a mean cumulative rotation of 15.93∘15.93^{\circ}/s). To address these issues, we introduce EgoWild2Dex, which transfers in-the-wild ego-human experience to dual-arm robots with dexterous hands by jointly aligning unstable egocentric views and human motions with robot observations and actions, respectively. This work offers three benefits. First, we introduce GeoFormer, a differentiable geometric transformer that warps noisy human observations toward robot observations. Second, we design a human-robot training scheme to bridge the embodiment gap, enabling high task success with limited robot supervision. Third, we release EgoWild, a 538.9-hour in-the-wild egocentric human dataset comprising 179,049 episodes, 125,961 unique task descriptions, and 1,282 object categories. On real robots, EgoWild2Dex achieves an average success rate of 96.7% across three long-horizon bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks and an average object-level zero-shot success rate of 33.3%. The data, models, and code will be released.
Sep 18, 2026cs.CV

ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling

World Action Models bring the predictive capabilities of video models into robot action generation, providing a rich foundation for modeling future visual states. Tactile sensing complements this foundation with direct measurements of physical interaction. Some existing methods use tactile features as conditioning inputs without jointly predicting future tactile states, visual observations, and actions. Our key insight is that tactile signals, like video, provide observations of the evolving world state and should be modeled as future observations alongside video. We present ME-Dex-1.0 (MachEmbodied-Dex-1.0), a unified World Action Tactile Model for joint visual, tactile, and action learning. ME-Dex-1.0 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture comprising a Video Expert, a Tactile Expert, and an Action Expert, all trained with flow matching. We use shared attention connects the experts in intermediate layers, allowing action generation to draw on learned representations of visual and tactile dynamics during joint denoising. To support multi-source heterogeneous tactile inputs, a Canonical Hand Model and a Unified Tactile Autoencoder map tactile observations from different embodiments and sensing layouts into shared spatial and latent spaces. To address the limited availability of paired visual, tactile, and action data, we develop the Agentic Tactile Data Engine, an agent-based data production platform. It supplements RoboTwin and DexJoCo with tactile data recorded directly from force sensors during trajectory replay in simulation. Experiments on the RoboTwin, DexJoCo, and ManiFeel simulation platforms, together with real robot evaluations, demonstrate improved manipulation performance using both grippers and dexterous hands equipped with tactile sensing.
Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

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.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

AffordanceWAM: Affordance-Aware Joint World-Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation

Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act. Action-labeled robot videos directly supervise control but are costly and limited in diversity, whereas egocentric human videos capture diverse interactions but lack robot actions and differ in embodiment and appearance. We introduce AffordanceWAM, an affordance-aware generative World Action Model that represents object-centric spatiotemporal affordance through Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmap, within the generated future World. This representation grounds visual prediction in task-relevant objects and interaction regions for action generation, and provides shared interaction targets across human and robot videos. Built on a pretrained video diffusion Transformer, AffordanceWAM uses separately parameterized World and Action Experts, coupled through Masked Joint Self-Attention, to jointly predict future RGB observations, Scalar Affordance fields, Affordance Heatmaps, and continuous robot actions under a unified flow-matching objective. Human videos supervise all three future-World streams, whereas robot trajectories additionally provide action supervision, enabling transfer without human action labels or retargeting. Experiments on RoboCasa, CALVIN ABC→\rightarrowD, and real-world manipulation demonstrate consistent gains over RGB-only and robot-data-only baselines. Under fixed robot supervision, RoboCasa performance improves monotonically as affordance-annotated human video scales. These results support affordance as an effective interface for both vision-language-action learning and human-to-robot transfer.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

InterMASH: A Unified Geometric Representation for Grasp Synthesis

Grasp synthesis aims to generate stable and physically plausible hand--object interactions, and has become a fundamental problem in both human hand modeling and robotic manipulation. However, a unified representation across human and robotic hands is still lacking, mainly due to differences in hand morphology and surface modeling. Prior methods typically rely on either contact maps or dense implicit descriptors to represent interaction, but these representations are often incomplete or computationally expensive and redundant. We propose InterMASH, a unified geometric representation that establishes cross-embodiment correspondence using sphere-fixed anchors. At each anchor, low-degree spherical harmonics compactly encode local hand geometry, object geometry, and contact, forming an explicit and interpretable token sequence. Building on this natively tokenized structure, we introduce a conditional Diffusion Transformer that operates directly in the proposed InterMASH representation space and jointly generates hand geometry and contact, improving consistency and physical plausibility. Our method achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods on key physical feasibility metrics in a large-scale ShadowHand benchmark, supports joint training across multiple hands, and shows that cross-embodiment fine-tuning with human grasp data can improve robotic grasp success and diversity. Project page is available at https://inter-mash.github.io/.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

RecMorph: Topology-Guided Spatial Recurrence for Generalized Morphology Control

Generalized morphology control requires a single policy to transform information across limbs with different physical roles, coordinate whole-body motion, and remain efficient as body size grows. Existing communication mechanisms address these requirements only partially. We introduce RecMorph, a topology-guided spatial recurrent architecture that uses recurrent sequence computation to jointly perform cross-limb communication and representation transformation. A depth-first traversal converts the kinematic tree into a morphology-derived sequence, along which shared bidirectional transitions progressively transform limb information before action decoding. Residual preservation, RMS normalization, and input-dependent channel modulation stabilize this repeated spatial transformation, yielding linear token complexity at fixed model width and depth. Across five UNIMAL tasks, RecMorph achieves the strongest mean final training performance among the evaluated generalized morphology controllers and the highest measured inference throughput on FT, while generalizing to unseen variations and bodies with up to 30 limbs. We further migrate representative generalized controllers from UNIMAL benchmarks to a four-platform quadruped setting. RecMorph achieves the best macro-averaged performance under nominal and high friction, reduces nominal velocity RMSE by 43.5% relative to specialist MLPs, and one shared policy completes 40 physical Go1/Go2 trials without falls. These results show that topology-guided recurrent transformation provides an effective and efficient communication mechanism for Generalized Morphology Control and remains effective when transferred from procedural bodies to physical robot platforms. Code and experimental resources are publicly available at https://github.com/quanruirao/RecMorph.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

UMI-Bridge: Action-Anchored Latent Alignment across Human and Robot Manipulation Data

Real-robot demonstrations are limited, motivating the use of human manipulation data collected without robots, including egocentric videos and handheld Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) demonstrations. However, differences in viewpoint, embodiment, and available action supervision make it difficult to align representations across these sources according to manipulation motion rather than visual appearance. We introduce UMI-Bridge, which uses UMI as an intermediate domain to align representations according to action equivalence rather than pixel similarity. UMI action supervision anchors the latent representation to end-effector motion and gripper behavior, while synchronized head-wrist observations and paired ego-UMI clips support alignment across views and domains. We train a dual-view latent action model (LAM) on human manipulation data without robot demonstrations, then freeze its wrist teacher and dynamics model to regularize vision-language-action (VLA) post-training on UMI and robot data. The shared wrist interface enables this training-time supervision across both domains while preserving the policy's standard inference architecture. Across three real-robot tasks, UMI-Bridge achieves 91.7% mean success versus 73.3% for Naive Co-training with matched UMI and robot data. On two data-efficiency tasks, it surpasses a full-data Robot-only baseline using 25% of the robot demonstrations together with UMI data. It also achieves 85% and 90% success on two additional tasks learned from UMI demonstrations without task-specific robot demonstrations. These results support action-anchored latent alignment for data-efficient robot learning and UMI-to-robot task transfer.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

WholeBodyWAM: Learning Whole-Body World Action Models with Scalable Motion Priors

Humanoid whole-body manipulation requires coordinated whole-body dynamics, yet large-scale trajectories from a target robot are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, whole-body motion from human and humanoid sources is abundantly available, although such data cannot be directly used as embodiment-specific robot actions. This work asks whether these scalable motion resources can instead provide a transferable predictive prior for humanoid world-action modeling. We introduce WholeBodyWAM, a humanoid world-action model that learns whole-body dynamics from large-scale heterogeneous motion before target-robot training. We curate UniMotion-4K, a motion corpus spanning more than 4K hours from human videos, native 3D motion datasets, and heterogeneous humanoid platforms, and canonicalize these diverse sources into a unified motion space. A language-conditioned Motion Expert is then pretrained to predict future whole-body motion without target-robot action supervision. During robot post-training, the pretrained Motion Expert is integrated with Video and Action Experts through asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention, enabling predictive scene dynamics and whole-body motion to jointly inform embodiment-specific action generation. Experiments show that WholeBodyWAM consistently benefits from increased motion-pretraining scale, improves future-motion prediction and downstream task performance, and transfers effectively to real-world humanoid manipulation. Moreover, the pretrained motion prior substantially improves data efficiency under limited target-robot demonstrations.
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

XPACE: Joint World and Action Modeling from Heterogeneous Experience

A general-purpose robot needs to draw on diverse experience, choose actions, and anticipate how those actions will change the world. We introduce XPACE, a unified embodied world model that serves as both a world action model, jointly predicting executable robot actions and future video, and a world simulator, predicting the visual consequences of prescribed actions. Our key insight is that video prediction can both connect heterogeneous experience to action learning and generate new experience for policy improvement. With a shared video backbone between the policy and simulator, we use action-unlabeled video to learn visual dynamics and action-labeled human and robot demonstrations to jointly learn video and action prediction. Building on this architecture, a coarse-to-fine training curriculum progressively emphasizes robot control while retaining human experience, allowing the policy to learn behaviors beyond those covered by robot demonstrations. Beyond learning from recorded experience, XPACE uses its simulator to create additional recovery supervision for the policy. Specifically, we adapt the simulator to its own generated context, synthesize deviation-recovery trajectories around expert demonstrations, and fine-tune the policy on filtered recovery examples. Experiments on XPENG's IRON humanoid robot show that heterogeneous training improves robustness and enables transfer of human-observed skills to tasks absent from robot demonstrations, while recovery data generated by the model's own simulator further improves real-world task completion. Together, these results demonstrate how joint world and action modeling connects learning from heterogeneous experience with simulation-driven policy self-improvement.
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Rethinking Visual Embodiment Dependence in Visuomotor Policies

Visuomotor policies observe both the task scene and the acting embodiment, allowing embodiment-specific visual cues to influence action prediction. We study this phenomenon as visual embodiment dependence (VED) and show, through cue-conflict interventions across representative policies, that visible robot configuration can become a shortcut to task progress. Rather than eliminating VED, we argue that it should be structured around embodiment information that supports control and generalization. We realize this through embodiment canonicalization in 3D point clouds, replacing the original embodiment with a canonical end-effector representation (CER) that preserves control-relevant geometry while abstracting embodiment-specific morphology. Its editable form further enables configuration-decorrelation augmentation for unfamiliar robot configurations. Experiments show that embodiment canonicalization substantially improves human-to-robot policy transfer without robot demonstrations, while simply removing the embodiment is insufficient without preserving control-relevant geometry. We further find that CER itself can become a configuration shortcut when robot configuration becomes decoupled from task progress; configuration-decorrelation augmentation mitigates this failure mode and restores robust recovery without sacrificing performance on seen configurations. Together, these results show that robust visuomotor learning benefits from structuring, rather than removing, visual embodiment information. Project website: https://tonyfang.net/ved
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Weave: Learning Whole-Body Dexterous Loco-Manipulation from Human-Object Interactions

Learning humanoid-object interaction requires coordinating whole-body balance, locomotion, and dexterous hand contact to control both robot and object motion. Human demonstrations provide examples of coordinated interaction, but transferring these behaviors to humanoid robots requires learning how to establish and maintain effective contacts under different embodiments and dynamics. We present Weave, a unified framework for learning whole-body dexterous humanoid-object interaction from captured human demonstrations. Weave first converts captured human-object interactions into executable robot-object references through contact-aware retargeting and approach-motion completion. At its core is a contact- and geometry-aware policy that jointly commands 29 body joints and 12 actuated finger joints across multiple objects and interaction sequences. Evaluation across nine objects yields a 92.5% success rate on trained interactions and, without any additional training, 65.0% on sequences never seen during training. We additionally release ~9,000 physically executed rollouts spanning ~23 hours, providing robot-object trajectories with contact annotations for downstream interaction-policy learning and physically consistent HOI motion generation. Project website: https://xiaohu-art.github.io/Weave/
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

WLA3^3: World Latent Action Modeling for Semantics, Dynamics, and Kinematics

Scaling generalist policy models with heterogeneous data is limited by the lack of unified, low-noise action supervision. Human egocentric videos are abundant, but only a small fraction comes with high-quality hand-action labels. Observed world transitions offer a common source of action-related supervision across data sources. We introduce WLA3^3 (World Latent Action Modeling for Semantics, Dynamics, and Kinematics), a unified generalist policy model framework built around representations learned by a World Latent Action Model (WLAM). WLAM first learns how multimodal world states change over a local interval, encoding synchronized camera views and available embodiment-state changes into a compact local latent action and a richer transition feature. Reconstruction from partial modalities and consistency across overlapping windows encourage robust transition representations. WLA3^3 reuses them across semantics, dynamics, and kinematics: local latent actions support action-sensitive physical-dynamics modeling, segment-level features directly supervise the VLM through a Semantic Latent Aggregate (SLA), and an action expert jointly predicts latent actions together with embodiment-specific robot controls. Human videos provide scalable transition supervision, while robot trajectories ground the shared representation in executable native controls. On LARYBench, the final 32D latent action reaches 67.89% average classification accuracy. WLA3^3 achieves 81.9% average success across six real-robot tasks versus 66.2% for π0.5π_{0.5}. Performance improves as generalist policy model mid-training data scales, and human videos support human-to-robot transfer. Project page can be found at https://wla-3.github.io/.
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

X-WBC: A Cross-Embodiment Foundation Model for Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Scaling humanoid whole-body control toward general-purpose deployment requires large human motion corpora and training experience shared across robot bodies. Existing methods usually train one policy per robot, leaving motion experience isolated across embodiments. We introduce X-WBC, a cross-embodiment foundation framework that separates relatively shared human motion semantics from embodiment-specific physical execution. Human-centered command tokens align full human motion, robot reference motion, and sparse VR observations. A causal Transformer learns reusable temporal structure from mixed multi-robot rollouts, while lightweight robot-specific modules map the shared representation to each robot's proprioception and action space. Across nine simulated embodiments, external motions, and four real robots, experiments show that joint training improves tracking, the aligned representation supports consistent control across command sources, and the learned policy remains competitive beyond the training corpus. These results support heterogeneous humanoids as joint data sources and establish cross-embodiment joint training as a practical route toward whole-body control foundation models.
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Size Doesn't Matter: Material-State Reinforcement Learning for Excavator Transferable Soil Manipulation

Earthmoving tasks such as excavation, backfilling, or embankment construction require deliberate repositioning of deformable soil. For these tasks, human operators use all shovel faces, while autonomous systems so far are limited to excavation and dumping. Current methods often rely on heuristic models but do not incorporate soil mechanics. We address this shortcoming by using Reinforcement Learning in a GPU-parallelized Material Point Method particle simulation. Our controllers are conditioned on material state such as shape and compactness, enabling skills that use multiple contact faces of the tool and displace material both inside and outside of the shovel. To use the same learned weights across machines, our policies operate in a normalized end-effector space and are deployed through a calibrated machine interface. We evaluate this calibrated transfer on an 11.5t hydraulic excavator and a 500g tabletop robot. We validate performance through autonomous construction of a 42m long, 2.1m high embankment in 45min, executing 201 individual policy strokes without failure, retry, or operator intervention. In a direct comparison, the autonomous controller matches an expert operator's progression speed and produces a higher, more consistent embankment. Additional qualitative backfilling and compaction experiments demonstrate the material-state awareness and calibrated transfer across machines.
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Improving Imitation Learning Efficiency for Manipulation through Geometric Prior Pretraining

Applying an imitation learning policy to a new manipulation task usually requires collecting new demonstrations and retraining the model, which makes sample efficiency a practical concern. Pretraining on large-scale robot datasets is effective in this respect, but such datasets are costly to collect and train on, while data augmentation techniques typically require a new round of data generation and retraining for each task. A complementary question is what useful prior can be provided to a policy at negligible cost before any task-specific data are collected. In this study, we construct a geometric visual pretraining dataset in which each scene contains only a plane, an object, and a hand, and trajectories are generated automatically. The scenes contain neither textures nor backgrounds; pretraining primarily exposes the policy to the geometric relationship between the hand and the object. Furthermore, representing the hand as a cube avoids tailoring the dataset to a specific robot morphology. We evaluate this geometric prior using ACT on three simulated robots across five manipulation tasks each, as well as on three real-world robot tasks. Across many of these robot--task combinations, fine-tuning from the geometric prior achieves higher success rates in the early stages of training than training from scratch while using only a small number of task demonstrations. These results suggest that even highly simplified geometric scenes can provide a useful initialization that transfers across robots and to real-world tasks when task data are limited.
Sep 12, 2026cs.LG

Topological Necessities: Mechanism-Invariant Strategic Subgoals for Cross-Embodiment Goal-Conditioned Control

Long-horizon goal-conditioned reinforcement learning delegates control to a high-level module that proposes subgoals, but existing subgoals are implicit byproducts of value functions or latent actions, tied to the executor that produced them. We study a different object: a route-conditioned order of unavoidable stages that every successful executor must traverse, recoverable from offline trajectories and belonging to none of them. Its defining properties are topological: an unskippable stage is a separating set that every admissible path must cross, and a loop in free space forces a route choice. We read the two by homology in dimensions 0 and 1 over a transport-weighted carrier built from successful trajectories, yielding an enumerable gate set with shell-level certificates; the certified gates are what we call topological necessities. Certified gates enter the decision loop as a recursive topological gate hierarchy. Under a fixed, isomorphic free space, the object survives executor replacement: gates frozen on PointMaze data transfer without retraining to Ant and Humanoid, attaining the highest Humanoid aggregate under a unified interface (96.1), with +36.0 over a map-privileged reference on the multi-route task (p=1.4e-5); the planner saturates PointMaze (100+/-0) and matches or exceeds the strongest baselines on AntMaze (giant +22.9) and Kitchen (+15.8/+12.6).