Motion

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Period ending 2026-09-21

24 new papers

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Period ending 2026-09-14

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A weekly snapshot of new work published in Motion.

Period ending 2026-09-07

12 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Motion.

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447 papers

Latest in Motion

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

DSAR: Dual-Stream Autoregressive Modeling of Temporal Cloth Dynamics for Photorealistic Animatable Avatars

Creating photorealistic and temporally coherent animatable human avatars from RGB videos remains challenging. Current methods struggle to capture realistic cloth dynamics, producing over-smoothed appearance or severe artifacts on out-of-distribution poses. This limitation stems from a fundamental oversight: existing approaches neglect the temporal causality inherent in cloth physics, where current states emerge from previous states through temporal evolution rather than instantaneous skeletal configurations alone. Without explicit modeling of this causal structure, networks learn pose-appearance correlations instead of motion evolution, leading to poor generalization. We introduce a dual-stream autoregressive framework that explicitly models both observable geometric information and implicit internal state. The geometric stream propagates surface displacement from the previous frame, while the state stream fuses current features with historical states retrieved from a memory bank. Motion-adaptive aggregation handles spatially-varying dynamics, and adaptive regularization balances smoothness with flexibility. Experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate significant improvements in rendering quality, temporal consistency, and generalization to motion patterns beyond training distributions, validating that dual-stream temporal modeling enables realistic cloth dynamics.
Haozhong Xiong, Yao Yu, Yu Zhou +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.RO

Whole-Body Planning for Humanoids Navigating Confined Spaces via Self-Collision Avoidance References

Humanoid locomotion in highly confined environments requires navigating dense environmental obstacles and complex self-collision bounds while maintaining multi-contact dynamic feasibility. Traditional trajectory optimizers frequently struggle in these restricted spaces, as navigating the large collision space with splines on particle abstractions is insufficient and leads to poor local minima. To address this, we propose a three-stage whole-body planning framework that formulates kinematic path planning directly over kinematically reachable rigid-body volumes. By integrating differentiable collision avoidance into a reachability-constrained formulation, our framework synthesizes volume-informed guides that reliably guide a full-order trajectory optimizer over long horizons. We show that these optimized plans serve as high-quality references to train a residual reinforcement learning policy for robust online execution. We validate our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid across three benchmark testbeds exceeding NIST emergency response standards, achieving restricted confinement ratios (Cr<1.5C_r < 1.5). Our framework generates feasible trajectories across 12-to-18-second tasks with complex foot and hand contacts where standard baselines fail, while the learned policy successfully tracks these plans under extensive domain randomization in physics simulation.
Carlos Gonzalez, Luis Sentis
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Learning How the World Evolves: Extrapolative Video World Models via Latent Dynamics Reasoning

The world evolves following its dynamics, i.e., its laws of motion. However, leading video diffusion models largely fit the pixels without modeling how the pixels transit over time. Thus, they render visually plausible frames but may not accurately obey the laws. To capture the dynamics purely from pixels, we introduce Latent Dynamics Reasoning (LDR). LDR casts the latent transition as an explicit kinematic integration, where the lower-order dynamics are integrated numerically and the model regresses only the third- and higher-order residual that drives the rollout. For this integration to extrapolate better, LDR runs it on a structured latent rather than dense convolutional features. Following PhyWorld, we validate LDR on a controlled white-box physics benchmark spanning five tasks (uniform motion, parabola, collision, bouncing, looming), focusing on out-of-distribution scenarios that reveal whether a model has truly learned the underlying dynamics. LDR extrapolates the learned dynamics far better: the gap between its in- and out-of-distribution error is over 20×\times smaller than the video diffusion baseline's, under both single- and joint-task training at 2562^2 resolution, while using 26×\times fewer parameters and running 143×\times faster. LDR can even generalize under severe shift: for example, trained only on red balls moving left-to-right, it correctly predicts the motion of a blue square moving right-to-left. To our knowledge, this is the first video world model that extrapolates learned dynamics beyond its training distribution. Project page: https://lat-dyn-reason.github.io/
Haodong Li, Shaoteng Liu, Tianyu Wang +7
Aug 10, 2026cs.RO

Energy-Structured Latent World Models with Neural Time Fields for Physically Constistent Open-World Motion Planning

Physically consistent motion planning remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as generated trajectories must strictly conform to real-world execution dynamics. While latent world models offer a promising approach by predicting these dynamics, existing methods learn unconstrained future representations where absorbed physics remains implicit. Therefore, they fail to form reusable physical knowledge, which compromises reliability in unpredictable open-world navigation. To address this, we propose a novel Energy-Structured Latent World Model (ELWM). Our key idea is to structure the ELWM latent state to explicitly carry energy and momentum, ensuring strictly causal transitions via dissipation and control ports. Trained on multimodal RGB-D and inertial interaction histories, our model guarantees physically consistent predictions. We further implement this for motion planning by constructing Physics-Conditioned Neural Time Fields (PC-NTF), a key technical cornerstone that integrates ELWM into an arrival time field via the Eikonal equation to yield a physically-informed navigation policy. Across held-out scenes, our evaluation reveals significant improvements. Compared to generic latent models, PC-NTF reduces 0.8-s motion-prediction NRMSE from 0.36 to 0.29. Against Active Neural Time Fields, it improves navigation success from 81.3% to 89.7% and SPL from 0.64 to 0.73, while cutting the physical collision rate from 12.1% to 5.8% and the Eikonal residual from 0.083 to 0.031. Beyond these targeted gains, our results demonstrate that embedding explicit physical structures into latent spaces intrinsically bridges the gap between predictive world models and safe, dynamically feasible motion planning.
Yapeng Liu, Yuanzhao Zhai, Bo Ding +2
Aug 10, 2026cs.HC

Intuitive Directional Sense Presentation to the Torso Using McKibben-Based Surface Haptic Sensation in Immersive Space

In recent years, systems that utilize immersive space have been developed in various fields. Immersive spaces often contain considerable amounts of visual information; therefore, users often fail to obtain their desired information. Therefore, various methods have been developed to guide users toward haptic sensations. However, many of these methods have limitations in terms of the intuitive perception of haptic sensation and require practice for familiarization with haptic sensation. Fabric actuators are wearable haptic devices that combine fabric and McKibben artificial muscles to provide wearers with surface haptic sensation. These sensations can be provided to a wide area of the body with intuitive perception, instead of only to a part of the body. This paper presents a novel air pressure adjustment method for whole-body motion guidance using surface haptic sensations provided by a wearable fabric actuator. The proposed system can provide users with a directional sense without visual information in an immersive space. The effectiveness of the proposed system was evaluated through subject experiments and statistical data analysis. Finally, a directional sense presentation was conducted for users performing micromanipulations in a mixed-reality space to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed system for teleoperation.
Kenta Yokoe, Tadayoshi Aoyama, Yuki Funabora +2
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

UniMoFlow: Grounding Instruction-Driven 3D Human Motion Editing in Generation

Instruction-driven editing of 3D human motion requires precise spatiotemporal localization, rich semantic grounding, and strict preservation of unmodified content. Existing methods either resort to training-free adaptation of generative models or rely solely on triplet supervision; however, adaptation often yields suboptimal control, and manually curated triplet datasets remain severely limited in scale and semantic diversity. To overcome this bottleneck, we ground motion editing directly within text-to-motion generation across data, architecture, and inference. At the data level, we develop a closed-loop synthesis-and-verification pipeline that produces Omni-MoEdit, a large-scale dataset spanning body-part, amplitude, temporal, action, and style edits. At the architectural level, we introduce UniMoFlow, a unified latent flow-matching model that shares broad semantic and kinematic knowledge between generation and editing. At the inference level, SAFE (Source-Anchored Flow Editing) complements UniMoFlow with controllable, source-anchored refinement. Furthermore, we augment standard evaluations with semantics-aware metrics to account for valid edits that inherently deviate from a single ground-truth reference. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved target-text alignment, edit effectiveness, and cycle consistency, while maintaining competitive source fidelity and text-to-motion generation quality.
Yilei Hua, Beibei Jing, Ce Zheng +3
Aug 9, 2026cs.CV

ERF-GS: Reconstructing Fast Motion from Disjoint Event-RGB Viewpoints

Deep learning-driven representations such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) have revolutionized the field of dynamic 3D scene reconstruction with improved visual precision and scalability. However, the reconstruction of fast-moving objects remains a challenge; existing methods based on conventional frame-based videos often struggle in scenarios such as sports events and animal videography. We propose an event-RGB fusion Gaussian splatting (ERF-GS) framework that integrates event information into both optimization and densification stages of the Gaussian splatting pipeline, taking advantage of novel event sensors with high frame-rate. Unlike many other event-assisted scene reconstruction methods, ERF-GS was developed using realistic simulation settings and realizes event-based learning detached from RGB inputs. This design enables its application beyond straightforward synthetic data into the realm of natural video with complex layout, low frame rates and severe motion blur. Our experiments show that ERF-GS outperforms both the 4DGS baseline and the concurrent E-D3DGS on different variants of the Neu3D and Nvidia datasets which include blurry RGB frames and disjoint RGB-event viewpoints. Our code is available at https://github.com/andrewbxy/ERF-GS.
Xiaoyang Bai, Zhenyang Li, Weiwei Xu +2
Aug 8, 2026cs.RO

SurgWMBench: A Vision-Based Benchmark for World-Modeling Surgical Instrument Motion Planning

Reliable surgical planning requires models that move beyond recognizing the current surgical step or imitating expert demonstrations, and instead anticipate how instrument motion reshapes subsequent operative states. Most surgical video understanding methods focus on recognizing phases, actions, or workflow states, while providing limited support for explicitly modeling instrument motion. Conversely, existing tool motion prediction methods can forecast instrument trajectories, but they generally do not capture the coupled evolution of future surgical video states. World models offer a natural framework for jointly modeling visual state transitions and instrument motion dynamics. However, existing surgical world model studies remain largely centered on visual generation quality, relying on generation-oriented metrics such as FVD and CD-FVD. These metrics are poorly aligned with instrument motion planning, as they do not directly measure whether predicted trajectories are geometrically accurate, temporally coherent, or actionable for downstream planning. This limitation is partly structural, since the field lacks public datasets and standardized evaluation protocols that provide the benchmarking infrastructure needed to assess motion-centric capabilities in surgical world models. In this paper, we introduce SurgWMBench, a vision-based benchmark for short-horizon surgical motion planning and dynamics prediction. Given intraoperative image sequences and historical instrument trajectory, SurgWMBench evaluates both near-future instrument motion prediction and stability under continuous rollout or input perturbations.
Huanrong Liu, Weiliang Huang, Bob Zhang +3
Aug 8, 2026cs.CV

EvBS: Event-guided Blur Synthesis for Domain-adaptive Motion Deblurring

Motion deblurring has achieved remarkable progress with deep learning, yet pre-trained deblurring models often suffer from performance degradation in real-world scenarios due to the domain shift between training and testing distributions. To remedy this, we propose EvBS, an event-guided blur synthesis framework that generates diverse training pairs for calibrating pre-trained models to the target domain. While existing methods are constrained by the inherent entanglement between motion and visual content, our method leverages the high temporal resolution of event cameras to effectively decouple them. This enables us to utilize not only the intrinsic motion that is inherent to the given content but also extrinsic motion transferred from different sources within the target domain, thereby facilitating effective adaptation via fine-tuning. Specifically, EvBS comprises two complementary strategies: Intrinsic-Blur Synthesis, which blurs sharp contents with their own motion patterns, and Extrinsic-Blur Synthesis, which transfers motion from blurry patches to distinct sharp content. This approach generates a diverse set of training pairs that break the inherent constraints of naturally coupled motion and content, resulting in enhanced domain-adaptive deblurring performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that EvBS effectively enhances the robustness of existing deblurring models on unseen testing datasets.
Junsik Jung, Seokryun Choi, Yoonki Cho +3
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

VSMP-IMU: Video-Grounded Semantic Motion Programs for Sensor-Aware Synthetic IMU Generation

Wearable human activity recognition (HAR) is often limited by the scarcity of labeled sensor data, especially in low-resource, class-imbalanced, and subject-generalization settings. Synthetic IMU generation can reduce this dependency and enhance HAR machine learning model's performance, but existing approaches face a trade-off without addressing all factors: video-driven methods are visually grounded but sensitive to pose-estimation errors, while text-driven methods are controllable but often weakly grounded in how activities are actually performed. We present VSMP-IMU, a video-grounded framework for controllable synthetic IMU generation based on a structured Semantic Motion Program (SMP), which separates activity-defining semantics from label-preserving variation. Given an input video, VSMP-IMU extracts and augments an SMP, uses it to synthesize motion, converts the motion into virtual IMU signals, and grounds the resulting signals to the target wearable domain. We evaluate VSMP-IMU against state-of-the-art synthetic data generation methods on five public IMU-HAR datasets under leave-one-person-out evaluation. VSMP-IMU achieves an average Macro-F1 of 78.33%, improving over real-only training by 9.77% and over the strongest prior synthetic baseline by 4.04%. In low-resource settings with reduced training data-samples, it improves over real-only training by 18.54% and over the strongest prior synthetic baselines by more than 6% on average. Under long-tail evaluation in imbalanced datasets, it improves tail-class Macro-F1 by 19.86% over Real-only training and by 4.76% over SOTA. These results show that structured video-grounded semantics provide a practical foundation for controllable, wearable-relevant synthetic sensor data generation.
Lala Shakti Swarup Ray, Vitor Fortes Rey, Mengxi Liu +2
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Multi-View Face and Gesture Animation with Dynamic Gaussians

Creating photorealistic 3D human avatars with realistic upper-body motion remains challenging. Existing approaches either focus on the head and overlook hand gestures, or reconstruct the full body but fail to preserve fine-grained facial fidelity and hand pose accuracy. As a result, current methods struggle to capture the subtle dynamics of facial expressions and hand gestures that are crucial for natural human communication. While methods based on full-body parametric models enable avatar reconstruction from monocular or multi-view inputs, they often lack accurate facial animation and detailed hand articulation. To address these limitations, we propose MVFGA, a novel multi-view-consistent pipeline for generating realistic upper-body avatars. Our approach models the face and hands separately and fuses them with a parametric upper-body mesh model, enabling the capture of fine-grained facial expressions and hand poses for accurate upper-body avatar reconstruction. We then splat 3D Gaussians onto the obtained mesh, enabling high-quality rendering of dynamic avatars from novel viewpoints. Furthermore, we introduce MVFGA-MoCap, a multi-view upper-body motion capture dataset featuring controlled facial expression sequences, diverse hand gestures, and free-form communication. Experiments show that MVFGA generates visually realistic avatars with high-fidelity facial expressions and hand motions, outperforming baselines for upper-body avatar animation. Project page: https://dfki-av.github.io/MVFGA/
Alireza Javanmardi, Vippin Kumar Jeetmal, Christen Millerdurai +2
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

DAC-Pose: Dual-Agent Collaborative Framework for Pose-Guided Human Generation

AI agents have emerged as a powerful new paradigm in generative image synthesis, enabling systems to perform complex semantic reasoning rather than passive pixel-level mapping. In pose-guided human generation, conventional methods inevitably produce severe visual artifacts under drastic viewpoint shifts, fundamentally because they lack the cognitive capacity to logically deduce unseen regions and model complex spatial deformations. To bridge this gap, we propose DAC-Pose, a novel agent-driven multimodal framework that reformulates single-view human generation as a collaborative dual-agent system. DAC-Pose integrates two complementary components, namely, the Prior Semantic Reasoning (PSR) agent and the Discrepancy-Aware Visual Encoding (DAVE) agent. Functioning as a cognitive engine, PSR utilizes collaborative reasoning to deduce the fine-grained attributes of unseen regions. Concurrently, acting as a specialized visual perception agent, DAVE quantifies and encodes viewpoint-induced spatial misalignments, continuously feeding robust spatial constraints back into the generative process. This autonomous feedback loop between semantic deduction and visual perception ensures high-fidelity detail synthesis. Extensive experiments on the DeepFashion and Market-1501 benchmarks validate the superiority of our agent-driven paradigm. Notably, DAC-Pose excels in preserving texture alignment and identity consistency under drastic viewpoint changes. The code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/DAC-Pose.
Haotian Yang, Zhile Yang, Huiyu Zhou +1
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Learning Biomechanically Plausible Human Motion from Sparse Radar Point Clouds

Radar-based human pose estimation has focused on improving learning algorithms while representing the body as unconstrained keypoint coordinates. We address the underexplored dimension of anatomical fidelity by integrating a full-body skeletal model into a differentiable, end-to-end trainable radar-based pose estimation framework, in which the pose network is supervised through forward kinematics while subject-specific geometry is fitted beforehand. Subject-specific body segment proportions are predicted from radar point cloud features to scale a biomechanical skeleton. A motion prediction network maps temporal radar sequences to generalized coordinates, and differentiable forward kinematics converts predicted joint angles into 3D positions. A contact classification loss encourages physically plausible foot-ground interaction. Under leave-one-subject-out cross-validation on 11 healthy participants performing rehabilitation exercises, the framework achieves 6.456 +/- 1.759 cm mean per-joint position error (MPJPE), 8.083 +/- 0.884 degrees mean per-joint angle error (MPJAE), 0.935 +/- 0.009 contact classification F1, and 3.4 +/- 1.3 % scaling error. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of recovering interpretable biomechanical descriptors from a single low-cost radar sensor in a controlled laboratory setting, a prerequisite for future clinical motion analysis.
Jonas Leo Mueller, Markus Gambietz, Alexander Weiss +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Residual Flow Matching with Dynamic Cross-Interaction for 3D Multi-Person Motion Prediction

3D multi-person motion prediction requires modeling both individual kinematics and inter-person interactions. While Flow Matching is effective for multi-hypothesis generation to improve prediction accuracy, directly predicting skeletal sequences from pure noise often compromises structural consistency and introduces unreliable cross-agent interactions during early noise-dominated integration steps. To address this, we propose a Prior-Guided Residual Flow Matching framework. First, a Deterministic Coarse Prior (DCP) establishes a kinematic anchor, formulating the generative process as a conditional flow over motion residuals to simplify the generative objective and preserve structural stability. Second, a Dynamic Cross-Interaction (DCI) mechanism temporally synchronizes inter-agent message-passing with the integration progress, ensuring the extraction of reliable social contexts and improving multi-person motion fidelity. Finally, a decoupled joint-motion architecture with bidirectional fusion effectively preserves fine-grained kinematic coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy across multiple datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Wei-Wei-a/Residual-Flow-Matching-with-Dynamic-Cross-Interaction-for-3D-Multi-Person-Motion-Prediction.
Wei Wei, Yinyuan Zhao, Ruixuan Yu
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

PLS-Calib: A Partial Least Squares Framework for Event Camera and Odometry Calibration under Ground Motion Constraints

Accurate extrinsic rotation calibration between sensors is fundamental to the performance of robotic perception systems. However, most existing calibration techniques rely on full 6-DoF motion to excite all degrees of freedom, which is often infeasible for ground-constrained robots with limited motion capabilities. Recent approaches designed for such restricted settings, such as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA)-based methods, suffer from ill-conditioned covariance matrices that lead to numerical instability and suboptimal calibration accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel rotation calibration framework named PLS-Calib that, for the first time, leverages Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression to model the latent kinematic correlations between asynchronous, heterogeneous sensor streams. Specifically, we apply our method to the calibration of an event camera and an odometry onboard a ground robot. To improve event-based pattern detection, we introduce a polarity-aware event representation, which enhances spatiotemporal contrast in circular calibration targets. Our PLS-based formulation yields a closed-form, stable solution that avoids matrix singularities inherent in CCA-based approaches. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating significant improvements in calibration robustness and accuracy over state-of-the-art methods. This work offers a practical and theoretically grounded solution for rotation calibration in constrained robotic systems and opens up new directions for applying statistical learning techniques in neuromorphic vision.
Guangyu Li, Xiao Li, Yujie Wu +5
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Learning Context-Aware Motion Priors for Humanoid Control

Motion priors provide powerful guidance for learning naturalistic humanoid behaviors. However, existing methods typically learn a general, task-agnostic prior from the entire reference dataset and apply it uniformly throughout policy training. As a result, the prior cannot distinguish which reference motions are relevant to the current task context, potentially providing irrelevant or conflicting guidance. We present Context-Aware Motion Priors (CMP), a framework that adapts a general motion prior to the current task context without manual skill labels, dataset partitioning, or a separate skill discovery stage. Specifically, CMP learns context-motion compatibility using high-advantage policy rollouts, while a demonstration-based objective keeps the learned relevance grounded in the reference distribution. The resulting relevance scores reweight reference supervision for training a lightweight context-conditioned adapter. To evaluate the effectiveness and generality of CMP, we instantiate it with both Adversarial Motion Priors and Score-Matching Motion Priors. Across five humanoid control tasks, CMP consistently improves task performance and sample efficiency, learns meaningful context-motion alignment, and remains robust to imbalanced reference distributions. These results show that adapting motion priors to task contexts provides more relevant guidance for humanoid policy learning.
Yunyang Mo, Yi Gu, Yangchen Zhou +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Surface Keypoint Representation for Multi-Object and Articulated Human-Object Interaction Generation

Daily activities require humans to coordinate whole-body motion with the motion of surrounding objects. Despite recent progress in human-object interaction (HOI) generation, most existing methods assume interactions with a single rigid object and do not extend well to scenarios involving a variable number of objects or articulated objects with diverse joint mechanisms. We propose surface keypoint trajectories as an object motion representation: for each rigid component, whether a standalone object or one part of an articulated assembly, we track a small set of non-collinear surface points over time. This representation handles multi-object coordination and diverse articulation mechanisms directly from point dynamics without requiring explicit joint-type specification. To model when and where each body region contacts each object, we introduce a spatio-temporal contact distance field that extends distance-based contact modeling to whole-body, multi-object, and articulated settings. We factorize HOI generation into three stages: generating object motions from text or waypoints, predicting the contact distance field, and synthesizing whole-body motion with contact-guided optimization. Experiments on ParaHome, HIMO, ARCTIC, and OMOMO demonstrate better or comparable performance to existing methods across single-object, multi-object, and articulated interaction settings.
Xiaogang Peng, Zeyu Han, Zichong Meng +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

DigitCode: Symbolic Tokenization of Hand Motion by Anatomical Units

Hand motion carries the finest-grained information in human activity, yet the representations behind hand generation, understanding, and robot learning are overwhelmingly continuous--joint angles or MANO parameters. These are accurate but unstructured: a finger cannot be indexed or edited as a symbol, and nothing marks a pose as anatomically valid. Discrete symbolic representations supply exactly this structure, and Hand Labanotation (HL) has shown they are feasible for the hand, writing motion as a T x 40 grid of one fixed direction symbol per bone. Building on this grid, we ask the question underneath it: the anatomical unit a symbol should span--bone, finger, or whole hand. DigitCode answers it by adapting, grouping, and layering HL's alphabet along the hand's unit hierarchy within one code, cutting the symbolic representation's quantization error by three quarters. The lever is the unit, not the quantizer family: at a fixed unit, training-free and learned strong quantizers are interchangeable on reconstruction, while moving down the anatomical hierarchy is what shifts accuracy. The hierarchy also tracks what downstream tasks need. Because a finger is a genuine, enumerable unit, one per-finger token doubles as a training-free, editable handle for jobs a continuous representation cannot address--repairing malformed generated hands, and retargeting them onto robots. We release HandTok, a reproducible testbed, so hand tokenizers can be compared unit-for-unit. Project page: https://digitcode-demo.github.io.
Haoyu Gu, Haotian Lu, Jingrun Du +1
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Shooting for Contact: Contact-Implicit Multiple Shooting for Dynamic Motion Retargeting

Motion retargeting approaches often prioritize kinematic similarity over whole-body dynamics, contact consistency, and actuation limits, yielding references that are difficult for reinforcement learning (RL) policies to reproduce, particularly for contact-rich behaviors. We present a contact-implicit, direct simulation-based multiple shooting (DSMS) framework that transforms kinematically feasible references into dynamically feasible whole-body trajectories. By embedding a differentiable simulator within a nonlinear program, DSMS resolves contact, friction, impacts, self-collision, and joint limits internally while enforcing tracking, actuation, and task constraints without prescribing a contact schedule or introducing explicit contact constraints. Compared with existing retargeting methods, DSMS accelerates motion-imitation RL training and yields policies with high success rates and low tracking error. We further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the Unitree G1 through command-conditioned contact-rich crawling and a highly dynamic 180-degree jump-turn.
Sergio A. Esteban, Jason H. K. Siu, Derrick Mach +4
Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

StableMimic: Smooth Human-Like Recovery for Humanoid Motion Tracking - Learning Beyond the Tracking Distribution for Structured Post-Fall Behavior

Humanoid motion trackers perform reliably within learned tracking distributions, but falls can move the robot into low-height, contact-rich states from which an advancing command is temporarily unreachable. Tracking-only policies may chase infeasible references, producing rapid, large-amplitude limb corrections that increase risk to the robot and its surroundings. We present StableMimic, a unified tracker trained beyond the nominal tracking distribution. Perturbed resets around multiple human get-up references expose prone, supine, off-balance, and intermediate ground-contact states, shaping structured recovery that returns the robot to the trackable region. Because tracking and recovery occupy markedly different state--action distributions, StableMimic uses dedicated experts for each regime and a proprioceptive gate that continuously blends their actions. A hidden successor-state objective teaches human-reference-shaped recovery without exposing reference identity or phase to the deployed Actor; deployment requires no get-up reference, recovery command, trajectory retrieval, or external policy switch. On the complete retargeted LAFAN1 dance subset, StableMimic achieves the lowest errors on all four tracking metrics among five methods. Across 100 matched push-to-fall trials per method, it recovers in 100/100 and attains the lowest values on six of seven post-fall motion and load measures, supporting improved interaction safety under this protocol. Real Unitree G1 dance and standing-reference deployments qualitatively demonstrate bounded limb motion, autonomous recovery, and command resumption.
Weihao Wu, Ming Huang, Ruofei Liu +3
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Sen-Cap: Sensor-Flexible and Noise-Resilient Human Motion Capture via LiDAR-Camera Integration

We propose Sen-Cap, a Sensor-Flexible and Noise-Resilient 3D human motion Capture framework that integrates multi-modal data from LiDAR and camera. While multi-modal sensors provide richer information than single-modal sensors, existing approaches still suffer from two core challenges. First, multi-modal alignment/matching across arbitrarily deployed sensors is typically handled by explicit calibration, which propagates errors under changing viewpoints and in turn constrains deployment to fixed, highly overlapped layouts. Second, prior methods degrade under severe noise or partial sensor failures, which are common in real-world environments. To address these challenges, Sen-Cap introduces a Unified Across-Sensor Motion Estimator that reconstructs local pose and shape in a human-centric space without calibrations between sensors, supporting a flexible number of sensors, as well as a Noise-Resistant Trajectory Tracker that maintains robustness under severe point cloud noise through iterative refinement. These sensor-flexible and noise-resilient features make Sen-Cap more practical in real-world deployment. Notably, operating in real time, Sen-Cap achieves state-of-the-art performance on major metrics on Human-M3 and FreeMotion, as well as strong cross-domain performance on LiDARHuman26M and RELI11D. This combination of flexibility and robustness opens new opportunities for motion capture in real-world scenarios, e.g. sports analytics, field robotics, and large-scale immersive environments.
Aoru Xue, Yujing Sun, Yiming Ren +3
Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Learning Panorama-Aware VLA for Mobile Manipulation with Whole-Body Teleoperation

Mobile manipulation is a key capability for embodied intelligence, enabling robots to accomplish complex multi-stage tasks in open-world environments. However, mobile manipulation poses two key challenges for vision-language-action (VLA) policies: At the data level, the efficient collection of high-quality whole-body demonstrations demands the coordinated control of both the mobile base and the robotic arms; at the model level, existing VLA models predominantly rely on local camera observations, whose limited field of view hinders global spatial understanding. To address these challenges, we develop a whole-body teleoperation system and a panoramic-aware VLA policy. The system enables coordinated control of a wheeled bimanual robot through a single VR interface and supports the acquisition of a real-world mobile manipulation dataset comprising 5.5 hours of multimodal demonstrations. Building upon this dataset, we propose PanoVLA, a panorama-aware vision-language-action policy for mobile bimanual manipulation. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PanoVLA introduces global spatial context through dedicated panorama encoding and fusion modules, enabling effective integration of panoramic observations with language instructions and robot states for action generation. Evaluation on four real-world mobile manipulation tasks demonstrates that PanoVLA achieves an average stage completion rate of 91.3% and an end-to-end success rate of 73.4%, substantially outperforming local-view baselines. These results demonstrate that incorporating panoramic spatial context improves spatial understanding and closed-loop manipulation performance in mobile robots.
Donglin Yang, Haoran Chen, Xingyu Chen +6
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

UniMoCa: Unifying Motion and Camera Controls as Visual Proxies for Faithful Human Video Generation

Controlling human motion and camera movement is essential for faithful human-oriented video generation, yet remains challenging in multi-person scenes with large body motions, occlusions, and dynamic cameras. Existing pipelines typically rely on visual motion sequences, such as skeleton maps, pose maps, or rendered body representations, for motion control, while using camera embeddings for camera control. Such heterogeneous control interfaces force video generation models to reconcile pixel-aligned visual cues with non-visual geometric embeddings, making motion-camera attribution difficult and sensitive to camera estimation errors. We propose \textbf{UniMoCa}, a representation-driven framework that unifies motion and camera controls in visual space. At the core of UniMoCa is \textbf{Motion-Camera Visual Proxy} (\textbf{MCVP}), a mutually-sharable novel representation that converts 3D human motion and camera trajectories extracted from driving videos into an identity-neutral visual proxy. MCVP renders temporally aligned human geometry under the recovered camera trajectory and augments it with explicit camera trajectory markers, replacing heterogeneous visual-parametric controls with distinguishable visual cues. As both control factors are represented in the same visual space, they become mutually compatible rather than heterogeneous, enabling consistent joint reasoning and editing during video generation. We further curate a \textbf{MCVP-Video} dataset covering complex actions, multi-person interactions, and diverse camera trajectories. Experiments based on the Wan2.2 I2V show that UniMoCa achieves substantial gains in human motion control, camera control, temporal consistency, and camera-aware robustness with minimal additional complexity. More details are shown in our Project page: https://tanliming-daniel.github.io/UniMoCa/.
Liming Tan, Ye Chen, Hao Zhang +3
Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Teleopit: A Full-Embodiment Humanoid Teleoperation System

Humanoid teleoperation for demonstration collection requires coordinated whole-body motion, continuous dexterous hand control, and viewpoint control. Existing systems either simplify hand commands or depend on dedicated wearable sensors for fine-grained hand motion. We introduce Teleopit, a full-embodiment teleoperation system that maps body, hand, and head signals from VR to a humanoid body, configurable dexterous hands, and a 2-DoF active vision module. A history encoder and failure-aware rewind sampling improve the motion tracker on both motion-capture and live VR references. An optimization-based hand retargeter combines normalized finger directions, fingertip closure, and thumb-frame alignment to map human hand motion to different dexterous hands without tuning hand-specific objective or solver hyperparameters. Component experiments evaluate tracking success rate and retargeting behavior, while real-robot teleoperation demonstrates coordinated locomotion, manipulation, and viewpoint control. ACT and GR00T N1.7 policies trained on 96 successful demonstrations collected with Teleopit achieve task success rates of 90.0% and 95.0%, respectively, when deployed on the humanoid. The project page is available at https://botrunner64.github.io/teleopit-page.
Bingqian Wu, Zicheng Xu, Xianghui Fan +2
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

When Extreme Darkness Meets Motion Blur: MeanFlow for Unified RAW Restoration

Extremely low-light RAW enhancement aims to recover severely attenuated sensor signals, yet existing methods often focus on illumination and noise while overlooking the motion-induced degradations inherent in practical low-light imaging. We present a framework for robust extremely low-light RAW enhancement under realistic acquisition degradations. First, we introduce See in the Degraded Extremely Dark (SIDED), a new dataset that applies controlled motion degradation to extremely low-light RAW pairs while retaining their original sensor noise. Second, we propose a unified RAW tokenizer equipped with explicit domain-conditioned representation calibration to align extremely low-light and well-exposed RAW data, followed by a MeanFlow that performs enhancement in a single function evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate extremely low-light RAW enhancement under realistic motion-degraded acquisition and address it with MeanFlow. We further introduce a physics-guided refinement model to strengthen illumination--reflectance consistency, pixel fidelity, and color preservation without incurring additional inference cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in extremely low-light RAW enhancement, and robustly handles coupled motion and noise degradations.
Zepu Wang, Jingze Liang, Weijie Xiao +1
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Motion Beyond Morphology: Bootstrapping Cross-Category Motion Transfer from Abstract Motion Representations

Video motion transfer aims to animate a target object using dynamics from a reference video. Existing formulations largely rely on fixed structural correspondence, which becomes ill-defined when reference and target objects differ substantially in morphology, articulation, or deformation mechanisms. We introduce Motion Beyond Morphology, a perspective that seeks to transfer motion beyond fixed structural correspondence, by preserving dynamics that remain meaningful across different target morphologies. To realize this, we propose a two-stage framework. StageI learns complementary multi-granularity abstract motion views and uses them to bootstrap cross-category video pairs that preserve transferable dynamics across diverse morphologies. StageII internalizes this supervision into direct reference-video-conditioned generation, removing the need for explicit motion extraction at inference. We further introduce OpenVMT-Dataset and OpenVMT-Bench for training and evaluating image- and text-conditioned motion transfer across Same, Near, and Far category gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art motion fidelity and target preservation. Project page: https://miniz233.github.io/MotionBeyondMorphology/
Zhixue Fang, Zhimin Zhang, Bi'an Du +6
Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

GenTrack: Physical Alignment for Robot-Native Motion Generation and Zero-Shot Humanoid Tracking

General-purpose humanoid trackers can execute diverse references, but their zero-shot coverage depends on large embodied corpora that are costly to extend. Text-to-motion generators offer scalable supervision, yet models trained on human motion or retargeted data inherit a gap between kinematic plausibility and robot executability. Existing one-way pipelines fix either the generated corpus or the reward tracker. We introduce GenTrack, an online generator--tracker framework that alternates execution-grounded, group-relative generator alignment with tracker training on newly generated references; anchoring and rehearsal constrain drift. On Unitree G1, we evaluate GenTrack with ProtoMotions and SONIC backbones across three zero-shot tracking splits including public AMASS and LAFAN benchmarks, and a private out-of-distribution test set of 1,024 prompt-motion pairs in the wild. The online co-training strategy consistently produces generators that output more robot-executable motions with strong semantic alignment, and trackers with markedly broader zero-shot coverage and improved tracking accuracy, especially on out-of-distribution references. These results demonstrate that joint online post-training effectively narrows the executability gap between retargeted references and robot-native motion, advancing zero-shot humanoid control without additional data collection and beyond the limitations of a static reference pool.
Zeyu Ling, Xinyao Yu, Renye Yan +4
Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

FineMoLA: Towards Fine-Grained Motion-Language Alignment from Clip-Level Supervision

Text-conditioned human motion generation has made rapid progress with the emergence of large-scale motion--language datasets. However, even datasets with rich long-form descriptions typically provide supervision only at the clip level, without explicit temporal correspondence between motion frames and language. This limits fine-grained motion--text grounding and temporally precise generation. We propose FineMoLA, a weakly supervised framework that learns fine-grained frame--phrase correspondence directly from clip-level annotations. Our method first segments long-form descriptions into action-bearing phrases, and then formulates motion--language alignment as an optimal transport problem, which naturally models many-to-many relations between motion frames and text under global constraints. With entropic regularization and Sinkhorn iterations, FineMoLA efficiently infers pseudo frame-level alignments without human labeling. Experiments on SnapMoGen demonstrate that the learned alignments outperform baselines in motion--text grounding.
Tongyan Wang, Zhengyuan Li, Muhan Lin +5
Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Astrolabe: Spherical-Map Guidance Across Diffusion Pipelines for Full-Body Capture from Unconstrained Images

Full-body capture from unconstrained photographs requires global correspondence across arbitrary views, poses, crops, and occlusions. Yet pose, geometry, and foundation features estimated in this setting are too unreliable for dense matching or appearance transfer, while diffusion rectifiers and optimization pipelines expose no common interface for consuming such uncertain correspondence. Our insight is that correspondence need not be locally accurate: its coarse viewpoint and body layout can still organize how a diffusion prior adapts and guides reconstruction. We introduce \emph{Astrolabe}, a host-portable adapter built on frozen viewpoint-guided spherical maps (SPH). A fixed bounded transform converts SPH into a spatial noise shift, which is matched during prior adaptation and reused during downstream denoising or score-distillation guidance in both pipeline categories. When a rectifier exposes a reference router, the same target/reference SPH additionally supplies coarse compatibility scores to select native appearance features; router-free optimization uses only the shared shift path. Astrolabe therefore follows one SPH--shift--adapt--guide process without dense warping or a learned control branch. Across Puzzle-IOI and 4D-Dress, it improves all reported image metrics in both hosts and all paired Puzzle-IOI geometry metrics; image gains extend to rear views, while 4D-Dress geometry remains stable overall.
Shuliang Zhu, Qi Wang, Ryugo Morita +1
Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

Complete Motion Planning using Workspace-Fibered Decomposition for nR-Planar Manipulator

We propose a workspace-fibered decomposition framework for motion planning in nR planar redundant manipulators operating in cluttered environments. Rather than planning directly in the full n-dimensional configuration space, the method incrementally constructs obstacle-constrained reachable workspaces of lower-dimensional non-redundant sub-chains and recursively lifts them through redundant orientation fibers. This yields a sequence of reduced planning manifolds that preserve branch-consistent reachability structure while avoiding explicit construction of the full configuration-space obstacle geometry. We first establish that, for planar position-only manipulators, the obstacle-constrained reachable workspace induced by the minimal non-redundant sub-chain provides an exact characterization of feasibility with respect to the connected component of the start configuration, enabling early infeasibility detection prior to introducing redundant degrees of freedom (DOF). We then introduce an incremental fiber-lifting procedure that propagates reachable workspace structure through successive redundant links while enforcing local inverse-kinematic branch consistency using Jacobian determinant continuity constraints. The resulting representation admits efficient reduced-space planning directly on recursively-constructed workspace-fiber manifolds. Experimental results on redundant nR planar manipulators demonstrate that the proposed construction preserves collision-free connectivity structure across successive lifting stages while substantially reducing collision checking complexity relative to direct configuration space reasoning.
Aayush Rath, Antony Thomas
Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

RIT*: Riemannian Informed Trees for Cost-Adaptive Optimal Motion Planning

We present Riemannian Informed Trees (RIT*), a planning framework that replaces Euclidean primitives in batch-informed search with their Riemannian counterparts. RIT* constructs a tighter, cost-consistent informed set, performs a nearest-neighbour search under an anisotropic distance metric, and evaluates edge costs efficiently via a cascading scheme. We further introduce a Collision-Adaptive Metric Refinement (CARM), which learns an obstacle-proximity cost field online from collision feedback, reducing the reliance on prior metric design in practical settings. Experiments across environments from 2-D to 14-D show that RIT* is competitive in low-dimensional and spatially constant-metric settings and produces substantially lower-cost solutions when the metric varies spatially in high-dimensional configuration spaces. Performance gains scale with anisotropy and dimension, reaching up to 13.0% improvement in median initial cost over BIT* in the 3-D anisotropic benchmark, up to 9.0% in median final cost over BIT* in 6-DOF manipulation, and 24.8-63.5% in a 14-DOF bimanual planning problem, where Euclidean-informed baselines degrade. Videos and code can be found here: https://muhayyuddin.github.io/ritstar/
Muhayy Ud Din, Ahmed Nadar, Jan Rosell +1
Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

LooperMuscle: Fast and Stable Learning of Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking via Structured Mixture-of-Experts

FastSAC-style methods significantly reduce humanoid motion training time but often suffer from notable performance degradation compared with PPO in whole-body tracking tasks. We target this speed-performance gap by introducing LooperMuscle, a composed expert policy learning framework that restores tracking quality while preserving high training efficiency. LooperMuscle combines a semantically structured mixture-of-experts actor, an expert-aware distributional critic, and contribution-routed replay with deferred curriculum scheduling. These three components form a closed training loop in which expert contributions guide data routing, routed data shape value learning, and value gradients in turn refine expert specialization. Empirically, our approach substantially outperforms vanilla FastSAC in motion tracking accuracy while requiring far less wall-clock time than PPO: where FastSAC trains in about 15 minutes but underperforms, and PPO achieves stronger results but requires about 6 hours, LooperMuscle recovers a substantial fraction of the remaining gap to PPO in roughly 45 minutes of simulation training, delivering practical efficiency for rapid policy iteration. The code will be released to benefit the research community at https://loopermuscle.github.io/.
Boyi Liu, Qijin Li, Tianqi Yu +2
Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulation

Dynamic manipulation requires robots to infer target motion and respond promptly, yet existing World-Action Models (WAMs) typically condition only on the current frame and execute large backbones synchronously, limiting motion awareness and responsive control in dynamic scenes. We propose DynamicWAM, a compact WAM for dynamic object manipulation with dual-path motion conditioning. DynamicWAM introduces history-flow conditioning, encoding temporally aligned optical-flow frames alongside the current observation through a frozen pretrained video VAE to preserve spatial motion structure, while injecting kinematic descriptors of displacement, duration, velocity, and acceleration into the action expert to provide motion magnitude and timing. The two complementary paths are fused through joint world-action attention. A distilled compact backbone and real-time chunking (RTC)-based asynchronous execution further enable responsive control. On DOMINO, DynamicWAM achieves a 38.2% success rate and a 53.2 manipulation score, outperforming all evaluated baselines. Across 12 real-world tasks spanning linear, circular, and compound target motion, it achieves a 46.7% average success rate, exceeding the strongest baseline by 22.9 percentage points.
Yunfan Lou, Hewen Gao, Xiyu Zhu +6
Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

First Deployable Dynamic-CoM: A Unified Policy and Method-Agnostic Benchmark for Humanoid Single-Leg Balance

Unified humanoid policies handle agile whole-body motion, yet stumble on a simple demand: staying balanced on one leg. On our single-leg-balance benchmark, eight released state-of-the-art general policies hold a clean single-leg stance on 0 of 90 test motions; they stay up only by stepping or hopping, recovering from imbalance rather than preventing it. Prevention needs the capture point (xCoM), the center of mass (CoM) extrapolated by its velocity, which has never driven a hardware policy because it requires a base linear velocity no on-board sensor provides; expressed relative to the support foot, that velocity cancels exactly, leaving an observation reconstructible from encoders and IMU alone. We put this first deployable dynamic-CoM observation directly into the actor that runs on hardware, and pair it with a reward library translated term by term from human postural control, under one principle: prevention over repair. Trained by asymmetric FastSAC with a privileged critic and no distillation, the resulting policy, FDDC (First Deployable Dynamic-CoM), holds clean single-leg balance on 86 of 90 held-out motions across nine stratified pose classes and transfers to a real Unitree G1; in ablation, the dynamic-CoM observation is the single largest driver: removing it alone costs 40 points of clean single-leg balance. We release the full stack with the first method-agnostic, reproducible sim2sim benchmark for humanoid single-leg balance, scoring each policy in a simulator distinct from its training one, a step toward turning balance from a per-task trick into a capability the field can measure.
Yikai Zhou, Xingyun Wang, Jieming Cui +4
Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Decoding Children's Gait Behavior

We introduce a new problem domain for human action recognition: the fine-grained analysis of children's gait behaviors from standard RGB video. We specifically target the ambulatory patterns of children aged 3-17 years. Such behaviors arise naturally in the diagnosis and treatment of several critical developmental and neuromuscular disorders, such as cerebral palsy and hemiplegia. Despite their clinical value, current 3D sensor-based gait analysis systems are expensive, intrusive, and often impractical for young subjects. To address this, we introduce a new dataset comprising over 1,100 high-frame-rate (60 FPS) video sequences from 110 subjects, accompanied by synchronized, anonymized pose sequences. In each session, the child performs a 5-second "walk-around" task, capturing the gait cycle from multiple viewpoints. Crucially, we demonstrate that current state-of-the-art approaches, including gait foundation models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), fail to effectively resolve these clinical nuances. We identify the key technical challenges in analyzing these erratic and subtle motor patterns and describe a unified end-to-end framework for decoding fundamental components of pediatric gait. Through comprehensive experimental results, we demonstrate the potential of this dataset to drive novel research questions and establish a rigorous baseline for automated child gait assessment.
Yifan Shen, Boyi Li, Meihuan Huang +12
Jul 30, 2026cs.RO

PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball

We present PAC-MAN, a perception-aware CBF-RL framework that couples control-barrier safety with deployment-realistic onboard sensing for whole-body humanoid dodgeball. The deployed policy sees the ball only as segmentation-masked depth from a head-mounted camera, while training-time CBF guidance represents clearance to every body link, and an adversarial motion prior regularizes the resulting evasive reflexes. We evaluate on a controlled any-link contact benchmark with seeded throws in two regimes: single throws and a deployment loop in which the robot walks back to its station and recovers between throws. On this benchmark, the policy comes within a few points of a privileged state oracle: a fixed onboard camera alone is adequate for evasion. We find that usable barrier structure depends on perceptual observability: Joint-CBF gives the best performance with accurate ball states, degrades under fixed-camera observations when used only as training guidance, and recovers with a ball-tracking gimbal or privileged runtime filter. We therefore deploy a lightweight Link-CBF policy zero-shot on the Unitree G1 in the real world, where it tolerates imperfect perception, succeeds on 95% of throws, and uses semantic segmentation to dodge different balls.
Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Aaron D. Ames
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

ENCORE: Event-Assisted Complementary Motion Refinement for Learned Video Compression

Learned video compression relies on accurate temporal modeling to remove redundancy between adjacent frames. However, most existing codecs infer motion solely from discretely sampled RGB frames, making their estimates vulnerable to fast motion, blur, occlusion, weak texture, low illumination, and abrupt brightness changes. Event cameras asynchronously capture fine-grained intensity changes between RGB timestamps and therefore provide complementary evidence about inter-frame dynamics. We propose ENCORE, an Event-Assisted Complementary Motion Refinement framework for learned video compression. ENCORE first employs Complementary Motion Representation (CMR) to decompose aligned RGB-event features into common and modality-specific motion representations. Spatial Energy and Redundancy-Informed Calibration (SERIC) then identifies event-specific responses that are active and novel relative to RGB, suppresses weak or redundant evidence, and predicts a candidate flow correction. Finally, Energy-Aware Routing (EAR) determines where and how strongly the correction should refine the RGB flow. Events serve solely as an auxiliary modality for motion modeling, while RGB remains the only coding and reconstruction target. Experiments on BS-ERGB, HQ-EVFI, and CED demonstrate consistent gains across datasets and GOP lengths. On BS-ERGB, ENCORE achieves up to 20.80% PSNR-RGB and 22.14% MS-SSIM-RGB BD-rate savings, while retaining clear improvements on the other two datasets.
Shuhan Ye, Hongbin Yu, Chenqi Kong +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Learning to Understand Body Language from Flight through Robust 3D Avatar Placing

Perceiving human motion and intent at long range is a prerequisite for socially intelligent aerial robots, yet the data to learn it barely exists. We introduce Drones2BodyLanguage, a dataset grounding human motion in real UAV footage: avatars manifesting ten communicative intents are placed into unmodified 4K drone scenes with metrically correct position, scale and orientation, maintained over hundreds of frames of camera motion. Enabling it is a lightweight geometric world model of the local scene - semantically selected anchors lifted to 3D through streaming monocular depth - in which a placement point is predicted as an affine anchor combination with provably rigid-invariant weights, and re-rendered under an SVD-fitted ground rotation. Across twelve architectures on scene- and motion-disjoint splits, training on placed data lifts mean intent accuracy by a wide margin for real, retargeted and generated motion alike, with gains confirmed on two in-the-wild scenes.
Dragos Costea, Alina Marcu, Cristina Lazar +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

4DHumanDiff: Direct Text-to-4DGS Generation for Consistent 360-Degree Dynamic Humans

Generating high-quality 360-degree dynamic human assets from text prompts is challenging. Existing methods usually synthesize monocular or multi-view videos first and then fit a 4D representation, which is expensive and often causes incomplete geometry or view-inconsistent renderings. We present 4DHumanDiff, a diffusion framework that directly generates dynamic humans represented by 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) from text prompts. By modeling the structured 4D representation space end-to-end, 4DHumanDiff avoids video pre-generation and per-scene reconstruction, making it better suited for view-consistent and temporally coherent asset generation. The model uses a 3D U-Net backbone with temporal attention for motion-aware generation. We further construct a large-scale text-to-4DGS dataset with 60,000 high-quality pairs, and introduce 2D regularization and training-free 4D interpolation to improve rendering quality and motion smoothness. Experiments show that 4DHumanDiff generates consistent 360-degree dynamic humans within one minute, achieves better temporal and multi-view consistency, and reduces inference time by more than 10x.
Renlong Wu, Haoran Chen, Yuxiang Wei +3
Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

MUGEN: A Unified Framework for Efficient Motion Understanding and Generation

Grounding human motion in language, and language in motion, is a central step toward physical AI systems that can understand, generate, and communicate human behavior. Unified motion--language systems first coupled the two directions through a shared discrete motion codebook, but quantization limits generation quality. The strongest generators buy quality back at growing cost: stacked residual codebooks enlarge the representation; masked decoding stages, long autoregressive rollouts, and denoising chains of tens to hundreds of steps stretch inference; even the continuous-latent designs among them reach their latent only through an iterative diffusion head; and none of this decoding machinery serves understanding. We therefore propose MUGEN, a unified motion--language framework that pays neither cost: no codebook, one draw. A single adaptive-length autoencoder compresses any-length motion into a few continuous latent slots, the system's only motion representation: the language model generates them for text-to-motion and reads them back for motion understanding. Depth-routed hidden states let each slot read from the transformer depth it needs, and a calibrated head predicts a joint distribution over the full latent set, so a single draw carries the text-conditional, cross-slot variation a description permits. At a decoding cost of K language-model steps, one draw, and one decoder pass, MUGEN leads language-model baselines on FID on HumanML3D while raising retrieval precision above the real-motion reference under the standard evaluator, achieves the best CIDEr and BLEU@4 scores, and surpasses the discrete-token state of the art on every retrieval and alignment metric on SnapMoGen.
Zhankai Ye, Yukai Jin, Bingyang Wei +5
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

HumanCLAW: Can Vision-Language Models Act Through a Body?

Evaluating whether a vision-language model (VLM) can act through a physical body is challenging. The outcome of an action couples the VLM's decision with motor control. When a task fails, it is hard to tell whether the VLM made a bad choice or the motor controller simply failed to execute it, e.g., losing balance and falling. In this work, we introduce HumanCLAW, an evaluation framework that decouples action decision-making from low-level execution. At every step, a harnessed, off-the-shelf VLM issues an atomic skill command, and the command is translated into a sub-second chunk of continuous full-body motion with real physical consequences, including gravity and collisions. The body can therefore act freely in the physical world, while execution-side disturbances, balance and motor errors, are factored out. What remains measurable is the model's action intelligence: its moment-to-moment choice of what the body should execute next. Based on this framework, we build HumanCLAW-Bench: 1,218 long-horizon, egocentric find-navigate-interact episodes across 41 indoor scenes. We test nine state-of-the-art VLMs and find that none solves the benchmark; the best model reaches only a 16.8% success rate. Recognizing the target is not the bottleneck. What current VLMs lack is embodied self-awareness: they lose track of their own body, failing to tell where it is, whether it has reached the goal, or whether it has hit an obstacle.
Li Siyao, Jiawei Gu, Shuai Liu +15
Jul 29, 2026cs.SD

SKY-Piano: A Multimodal Piano Performance Dataset

Music information retrieval research on piano performance increasingly involves diverse modalities of data and annotations beyond audio and MIDI. We present SKY-Piano, a multimodal piano performance dataset that includes 11 hours of performance recordings of motion, multi-view video, audio, MIDI from 7 professional and 12 amateur pianists along with MusicXML scores. The performance pieces were selected considering playing technique, difficulty, and performer expertise on a shared core repertoire. The motion data include both hand and body motion, released in both flagged form, where samples lost to marker occlusion are marked as unreliable, and imputed form, where those gaps are reconstructed, together with Visual3D body-segment kinematics and other time-synchronized modalities. To easily browse different modalities of data at a glance, we provide an interactive web browser. In addition, we developed a fingering annotation model and tool for deriving pseudo fingering annotations from the MIDI and motion data. Lastly, we present MIDI-to-motion generation through a fine-tuning experiment as a use case of the dataset.
Joonhyung Bae, Dawon Park, Taegyun Kwon +10
Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

MoMo: Dial Motion Mode in Robot Manipulation with Spatiotemporal Action Tokenization

To operate effectively across diverse contexts, robots must not only perform manipulation tasks accurately but also adapt how their actions unfold to the task, object, and interaction setting. We ask whether this execution-level variation can be learned as a reusable behavioral factor shared across tasks. We present \textbf{MoMo}, a two-stage imitation-learning framework consisting of a spatiotemporal action tokenizer and a behavior-cloning transformer that takes task and a continuous motion-mode condition as inputs. Across six real-robot manipulation tasks, varying this condition produces steady, dynamic, and intermediate behaviors that human raters can distinguish and that differ in joint speed, acceleration, and end-effector approach pitch. On tasks demonstrated in only one mode, MoMo transfers the unseen requested mode while largely preserving task success. Together, these results provide evidence of compositional generalization to unseen task--mode combinations and show that motion mode can be reused across tasks to control how a manipulation skill is performed.
Yuhan Hu, Hugues Thomas, Peide Huang +3
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

MoSAIC: Aligned Intervention Supervision for Part-Local Motion Style Transfer

Editing character motion often requires transferring a gesture or gait from one or more reference motions while preserving the source action, timing, root trajectory, and unselected body regions. Existing motion datasets, however, rarely provide paired targets for arbitrary part-local content--reference combinations, and self-reconstruction training may allow a diffusion model to reproduce the content motion while underusing the routed reference. We present MoSAIC, a latent diffusion framework for part-local reference-conditioned motion style transfer. MoSAIC factorizes content and reference features by anatomical region, preserves the root trajectory through a separate conditioning pathway, and routes user-selected references to individual body parts. Its central contribution is aligned intervention supervision, which constructs synchronized references and counterfactual targets through controlled local transformations, making both the requested regional response and the motion to be preserved directly observable during training. In a frozen evaluation comprising 128 motions and 896 routed conditions, part-masked routing reduces preserved-region error from 70.64 to 66.45mm and matched-noise off-target leakage from 18.08 to 9.88mm relative to whole-body routing, while retaining a positive selected-region response. A matched-budget continuation study further shows that retaining aligned intervention supervision produces an 8.8% relative increase in selected-target response and a 2.0-percentage-point increase in requested-route influence concentration. These results demonstrate that MoSAIC improves the response--preservation trade-off required for selective and controllable part-local motion editing.
Nazanin Amini, Kevin Desai
Jul 28, 2026cs.GR

Two2Four: Generative Quadruped Puppeteering from Human Motion

Realistic animal motion for virtual production is typically obtained either through motion capture of highly trained performers who accurately mimic animal behavior, or by retargeting ordinary human motion using complex control setups. Both approaches are challenging and often fail to fully reproduce the nuances of natural animal motion, motivating data-driven alternatives. We present an automatic human-to-quadruped puppeteering framework that produces plausible and controllable quadruped motions from ordinary human motion data. Our approach employs a two-stage generative diffusion model trained purely on quadruped motion data. By introducing a structured conditioning and inpainting strategy, our method supports a wide range of actions, including walking, running, jumping, sitting, and lying. Furthermore, we enable fine-grained intuitive control of the quadruped motion such as head movement control and individual limb puppeteering. Experimental results demonstrate improved motion realism and controllability compared to existing retargeting approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of our framework as a tool for animation and virtual production applications.
Fatemeh Zargarbashi, Zehong Qiu, Dhruv Agrawal +4
Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

SONG: A Photorealistic 3D Gaussian Simulation Platform for Benchmarking Social Navigation

Social navigation has progressed from simplified 2D environments toward a more general vision-based setting, in which a robot needs to achieve socially compliant behavior purely from onboard visual observations. Yet supporting simulation platforms have not kept pace: existing options either lack visual observations, lack moving human avatars, or fall short of real-world fidelity in appearance and pedestrian behavior, offering limited support for advancing vision-based social navigation. We introduce SONG, a SOcial Navigation platform powered by 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). It leverages 3DGS for both scene and avatar representations, drives pedestrians using semantically grounded trajectories generated by a large language model, and synthesizes their full-body motion with a trajectory-conditioned generator to produce continuous, natural movement. On top of the platform, we curate SONG-Bench, a set of evaluation episodes stratified by difficulty, and propose a multi-dimensional metric suite covering effectiveness, safety, and social compliance. A systematic evaluation of representative navigation baselines reveals three findings: (a) vision-based social navigation is far from solved; (b) a critical safety deficit precedes social etiquette; (c) real-world data matters more than model scale. Crucially, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on our curated data effectively improves the success rate in real-world environments. We hope our platform provides a faithful and rigorous testbed for the next generation of vision-based social navigation research.
Weiqi Huang, Dianyi Yang, Jiaxin Li +4
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

Multiview Multi-Person Human Mesh Recovery Under Large Scenes with Occlusions

Human mesh recovery (HMR) aims to recover 3D human meshes from images. Most existing HMR benchmarks and methods focus on either multi-person reconstruction from a single view or single-person reconstruction from multiple views, where the number of subjects and the scene scale are relatively limited. Such settings are insufficient for real-world applications with large scenes and severe inter-person occlusions. To address this limitation, we introduce a large-scale synthetic benchmark for multiview multi-person HMR, termed MVMP-HMR. The proposed dataset contains 15 complex scenes with up to 50 camera views and 30 interacting persons, featuring large spatial coverage and severe occlusions, which significantly increases the difficulty of human mesh recovery. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a multiview multi-person whole-body human mesh recovery model, referred to as MVMP-HMR model. The model first fuses multiview features into a scene-level 3D feature volume, and then leverages pelvis joints predicted by a 3D pose estimation network to extract person-specific queries from the 3D feature volume. These human queries are cross-attended with the 3D feature volume and integrated to decode each person's 3D mesh. Moreover, we introduce two novel losses--the orientation loss and the 3D joint density loss--to alleviate orientation and pose ambiguities under severe occlusions. Experiments demonstrate that existing state-of-the-art HMR methods struggle on the proposed MVMP-HMR benchmark, while our method consistently outperforms prior SOTAs in large-scale scenes with severe occlusions.
Qi Zhang, Tao Yu, Jiechao He +2
Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

Head Avatars with Dynamic Explicit Hair

We present DynHair, a novel method for tracking and modeling dynamic hair for human head avatars. From video input, we reconstruct a dynamic head avatar with an explicit strand-based hair representation using structured 3D Gaussian Splatting. In contrast to the face region of human head avatars, which can be modeled with 3D Gaussians that are attached or generated with respect to some expressive 3D head model, hair is particularly challenging as it exhibits dynamic motion effects. Therefore, we present a novel method that models the dynamic deformations of the hair strands using a temporal network that is conditioned on angular velocity and acceleration of the head, as well as relative gravity. Specifically, an LSTM encodes the motion history and modulates per-point strand features via FiLM conditioning which further used by MLP to produce physically plausible displacements to canonical hairstyle. We jointly optimize this motion and appearance representation of the hair, with a 3DGS-based representation of the face-region, via differentiable Gaussian splatting with photometric, geometric, and physics-based supervision. As a result of our method, we retrieve hair tracking of the training video data and an animatable head avatar with controllable hair dynamics. In our experiments, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in terms of hair dynamics, temporal consistency, and generalization across subjects.
Vanessa Sklyarova, Haonan Chen, Berna Kabadayi +8
Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

Markerless Motion Capture in Routine Clinical Upper Limb Assessments: Validity and Insights Beyond Ordinal Scoring

The Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) is a widely-used upper limb outcome measure in neurorehabilitation, but its ordinal scoring is subjective and suffers from limited sensitivity and specificity. We evaluated whether artificial-intelligence (AI)-based markerless motion capture (MMC), embedded into ARAT assessments during clinical routine, accurately reconstructs upper limb movement and yields valid, objective kinematic metrics carrying clinically meaningful information beyond the ordinal score. Across 47 sessions from 20 mixed-neurological patients (1,174 ARAT tasks), biomechanical reconstruction was accurate and robust across impairment levels, and kinematic metrics showed the discrimination pattern expected of a construct-valid measure. In longitudinal case studies, the metrics added the specificity and sensitivity the ordinal score lacks: a domain decomposition exposed patient-specific recovery profiles underlying equal ARAT gains (specificity), and kinematic improvement continued to be detected after the ARAT had saturated (sensitivity). MMC in clinical routine can thus provide valid, objective, sensitive, and specific kinematic measurement complementing ordinal scoring.
Tim Unger, Olivier Lambercy, Roger Gassert +3
Jul 25, 2026cs.CV

mmSimPrior: Learning Simulation Priors for Data-Efficient and Generalizable Real-World Radar-based Human Motion Reconstruction

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-preserving and illumination-robust human motion reconstruction, but training generalizable models typically requires costly paired radar-motion recordings. Simulation can scale such supervision, yet even physics-based simulators cannot fully reproduce real-world multipath, clutter, hardware-specific response statistics, or distance-dependent resolution degradation, leaving a sim-to-real gap. We present mmSimPrior, a simulation-pretrained framework that factorizes transferable knowledge into signal, motion, and radar-to-motion mapping priors. To learn transferable signal and motion priors, we pretrain a multimodal radar encoder with a physics-informed domain-randomization curriculum designed to mitigate the sim-to-real gap by approximating real-world propagation- and acquisition-level variations, while a joint-temporal tokenizer learns a discrete prior over plausible human motion. A dual-mode mapping module predicts either motion-code distributions for structurally constrained zero-shot reconstruction or continuous motion parameters for flexible adaptation from limited real data. We further construct a 4.2M-frame, 31K-sequence dataset suite and introduce a No-Overlap Setting that prevents any exact subject-environment-location-motion tuple from appearing in both the adaptation and test sets. Experiments on mmSimPrior-Real and RT-Pose demonstrate consistent gains: with only 24 paired real sequences, mmSimPrior-Reg reduces MPJPE by 24.7-39.0% over the strongest baseline across the three environments, while mmSimPrior-Cls reduces zero-shot MPJPE by 8.5% without fine-tuning.
Cheng Guo, Qiming Cao, Shengkai Xu +4
Jul 24, 2026cs.CV

SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction

Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motion as independent point-wise displacements, ignoring the structured nature of physical motion. However, real-world objects usually obey rigid-body kinematics, and points thus usually move collectively, not in isolation. Motion itself possesses geometric structure: physical objects undergo a set of rigid-body transformations governed by SE(3), rather than unstructured point-wise displacements. Building on this insight, we propose SM4RT, a Structured Motion 4D Reconstruction Transformer for end-to-end 3D reconstruction and structured motion perception. SM4RT introduces Structure-of-Motion to represent scene dynamics, where scene motion is decomposed into a compact set of motion bases, each represented as a temporal sequence of 6D twists in SE(3). Dense scene motion is then recovered by sparse, time-shared per-pixel assignment weights over these bases, ensuring points on the same object share a common rigid-body motion trajectory. SM4RT introduces a parallel motion geometry encoder and decoder that jointly infer 3D geometry, world-coordinate motion, and scene kinematic structure in a single forward pass from monocular RGB video. SM4RT achieves strong motion reconstruction performance while preserving the geometric structure of scene motion.
Shing Ho J. Lin, Wenzhao Zheng, Dong Zhuo +3
Jul 24, 2026cs.CV

fMRI2Face: A Full-HD fMRI-Video Dataset and Geometry-Guided Neural Decoding Framework for Dynamic Human Face Reconstruction

Reconstructing dynamic human faces from brain activity provides a powerful way to study how the mind perceives identity, expression, and facial motion. However, progress in fMRI-based face decoding has been limited by scarce controlled, high-resolution neural datasets and by methods that struggle to recover both identity-specific appearance and time-varying facial dynamics. We present fMRI-Face, the first fMRI dataset paired with controllable full-HD digital human facial videos rendered at 1920×\times1080 resolution. During scanning, participants watched photorealistic, background-free facial videos with controlled identity, expression, and head pose, while fMRI activity was recorded. The resulting dataset contains 62,856 paired fMRI-video samples, providing a structured resource for studying dynamic face perception and reconstruction. Building on this dataset, we propose fMRI2Face, a geometry-guided neural video decoding framework for reconstructing facial videos from fMRI signals. fMRI2Face derives two complementary neural controls from brain activity: Brain-derived Appearance Context, which captures global identity-related visual attributes, and Morphable 3D Facial Control, which provides explicit geometry-aware guidance for pose, expression, and non-rigid facial dynamics. These controls are integrated through Neural-Controlled Video Diffusion with auxiliary latent completion, enabling high-fidelity facial video reconstruction directly from brain activity. Experiments show that fMRI2Face consistently improves reconstruction fidelity, identity preservation, facial geometry, and motion consistency over representative neural decoding baselines. Together, fMRI-Face and fMRI2Face establish a controlled platform for studying dynamic face perception and provide a new benchmark for fMRI-based digital human reconstruction.
Jingyang Huo, Xiangru Huang, Chentao Shen +6
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

Distributed Motion Planning with Safety Guarantees for Self-Reconfiguring Robotic Boats

Aquatic self-reconfigurable robots must assemble into desired shapes while ensuring safe interactions among multiple agents. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that combines distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for multi-agent shape formation and reconfiguration. Given a desired shape and target assignment, a distributed MPC scheme, solved via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), computes coordinated trajectories through local optimization and information exchange. To ensure safety in real time, distributed CBF-based filters are applied to enforce inter-agent collision avoidance. The proposed approach leverages the predictive capabilities of MPC to mitigate local minima, while CBFs provide formal safety guarantees despite the nonconvexity of the underlying optimization problem. Simulation results with up to 25 agents and experimental validation with four physical robots demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the framework.
Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia, Wei Wang, Wei Xiao +4
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

Extreme-RGMT: Continual Learning of Highly Dynamic Skills for Robust Generalist Humanoid Control

Humans can progressively acquire highly dynamic motor skills while preserving reliable everyday motor abilities. In contrast, existing humanoid controllers face a trade-off between generalist and specialist capabilities: generalist motion tracking policies struggle to reliably execute rare highly dynamic motions, whereas specialist training can degrade previously acquired behaviors. We introduce Extreme-RGMT, a two-stage continual learning framework for robust generalist humanoid control. The method first learns a generalist motion-tracking base policy from diverse multi-source motion data, then employs an asymmetric skill acquisition and capability consolidation mechanism to constrain policy drift on mastered motions while emphasizing difficult dynamic segments. To address the scarcity of highly dynamic motions, their high failure rates, and the resulting shortage of informative samples, Extreme-RGMT combines difficulty-aware sampling with advantage-prioritized trajectory resampling to emphasize critical segments. Experiments show that Extreme-RGMT achieves state-of-the-art generalist whole-body motion-tracking performance, including substantially improved completion of challenging highly dynamic motions. The resulting controller directly executes diverse unseen highly dynamic motions under fixed references and online inertial motion-capture inputs, advancing generalist whole-body motion-tracking controllers toward highly dynamic motor capabilities at the human-expert level.
Yubiao Ma, Han Yu, Kai Guo +5
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

What Matters in Humanoid General Motion Tracking? An Empirical Study

Humanoid general motion tracking requires policies that can follow diverse whole-body references while maintaining balance. Building such policies involves many practical design choices, and their individual effects are often hard to assess. We address this issue with an empirical study of common modeling and training factors used in recent humanoid motion-imitation pipelines. To make the study controlled and reproducible, we developed YAHMP, an open-source modular framework for training, evaluating, and deploying whole-body motion tracking policies on the Unitree G1. Within YAHMP, we define a nominal configuration and compare variants that differ in motion-command representation, observation history, action representation, actuation profile, hand-force randomization during training, and training approach. We evaluate the resulting policies on a test set of retargeted human motions and compare the nominal policy with TWIST2 as an external baseline trained on the same motion set. The results distinguish choices with clear tracking effects from choices that mainly change actuation effort, training complexity, or physical interaction capability. Finally, we deploy YAHMP policies zero-shot on the real Unitree G1, demonstrating diverse whole-body motion tracking, balance under external perturbations, and forceful interaction.
Fabio Amadio, Enrico Mingo Hoffman
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

Learning Diverse Humanoid Tasks via Synthetic Video Scenarios without Real World Data

The human-like morphology of humanoid robots grants them exceptional potential for agile and versatile motor capabilities, but it also introduces significant challenges in acquiring complex skills. Traditional Learning-from-Demonstrations methods are often constrained by the high cost of collecting real-world data, the difficulty of capturing motion-specific behaviors, and the limited diversity of demonstrations across individuals. Moreover, even for the same task, humans may execute the motion in multiple distinct ways. In this paper, we propose a new framework that leverages the power of Generative AI to convert textual prompts into realistic and diverse sequences of human body movements, enabling the robot to observe multiple variations of how a single task can be performed. These synthetic demonstrations are then used as a training resource, allowing the robot to learn a broad range of task-execution styles without requiring direct human intervention. We evaluate the proposed method across four simulation scenarios. Experimental results show that the robot not only completes the tasks successfully but also demonstrates strong adaptability to complex variations in motion.
Yun-Hao Tsai, Cong-Thanh Vu, Yen-Chen Liu
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

Gimbal-Based Human Tracking for Companion Robots Using Continual Learning

Reliable and continuous human tracking is essential for natural human-robot interaction, particularly for companion robots. However, many existing approaches rely on wearable tags or fixed cameras with limited fields of view, which reduces system flexibility and often causes tracking failures when the target moves outside the sensing range. In this paper, we present a human tracking approach based on a gimbal-mounted camera integrated into a mobile robot. By actively controlling the gimbal mechanism, the camera can dynamically adjust its viewing direction to maintain the target within the field of view, even under substantial relative motion between the robot and the human. Furthermore, a continual learning strategy is applied to the person re-identification (ReID) task to adapt to changes in appearance and environmental conditions during long-term tracking. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves the stability and continuity of human tracking, enables real-time re-identification, and provides responsive feedback for reliable tracking of human motion from walking to running. User studies further indicate that the proposed approach enhances user comfort by eliminating the need for wearable tags.
Cong-Thanh Vu, Ching-Chieh Liu, Yen-Chen Liu
Jul 21, 2026cs.RO

Pose-Parameterized Motion Planning and CBF-QP Self-Collision Filtering for a Long-Reach Drilling Boom

Long-reach drilling booms must reach successive poses without self-collision. Moving from operator-supervised control toward autonomy requires collision-aware motion planning and execution. For the Sandvik SB60, this study adapts established methods by integrating pose-parameterized planning with a capsule-based control barrier function quadratic program (CBF-QP) in measured-state inverse kinematics (IK). A fixed task-specific parameter set within each task generates waypoints, detours, timed references, and chained motion without target-specific retuning. The offline detour planner screens candidate waypoints using 23 selected rod-segment-to-body-region distances, whereas the online CBF-QP filters joint velocities using 14 configured capsule-pair constraints from a nine-primitive whole-body capsule model. Evaluation considers two drilling tasks in a manufacturer-developed SB60 Simscape Multibody model: a five-target restricted-orientation tour and a three-target full-pose tour. Across several hundred thousand samples, the method produced zero IK failures, generated several detour waypoints, achieved millimetre-level mean final-position error, and recorded no sampled CBF margins below the reported thresholds.
Mehdi Heydari Shahna, Tuomo Kivelä, Jouni Mattila
Jul 21, 2026cs.RO

Motion Primitive Discovery in a Humanoid Robot via Self-Organising Maps for Phase Recognition

Understanding the computational basis of action recognition is a central challenge in social cognition as well as in human-robot interaction. Inspired by the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we propose a two-level architecture for motor primitive discovery and online phase recognition applied to the NICO humanoid robot. At the first level, two Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) learn topographic representations of arm kinematics (A-SOM) and hand kinematics (H-SOM) from simulated trials covering seven motor actions. The maps are trained on non-redundant features identified through hierarchical correlation analysis of motion trajectories. The results show that the two SOMs encode complementary aspects of motor behaviour. At the second level, an Echo State Network (ESN) evaluates whether temporal trajectories of SOM activations, represented by consecutive best-matching units, are sufficient for online recognition of the currently executed movement phase. The results show that SOM-based trajectories preserve the dominant phase-discriminative structure of the movement, while contextual information provides only a secondary refinement. Our contribution is the integration of established SOM and ESN methods within an MNS-inspired architecture for motor primitive representation and online phase recognition. The results are compatible with the computational hypothesis that self-organised motor representations, when temporally integrated, can support accurate online recognition of ongoing movement phases.
Radovan Gregor, Igor Farkaš
Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

Closing the Loop in Humanoid VLA: Persistent 3D Object Tokens for Verifiable Loco-Manipulation

Vision-language-action policies are a promising foundation for general robot control, but long-horizon humanoid loco-manipulation requires the robot to treat task objects as persistent physical entities across movement, contact, occlusion, and recovery. We study this problem as object-state divergence: the object state used to condition a whole-body action can differ from the state used to decide whether the action achieved the intended physical relation. We propose \emph{Persistent Object Tokenization} (POT), which maintains role-indexed 3D object records from RGB-D observations and converts them into object tokens for a whole-body action expert. Instantiated as \emph{POT-VLA}, the same object records condition action generation and support geometric predicate checks, yielding a closed-loop execution system in which object state is both actionable and verifiable. On a Unitree G1, POT-VLA improves a matched direct GR00T-N1.7 baseline from 39/80 to 71/80 successes over eight real-world task families. In an external Being-0-aligned reference, POT-VLA achieves 44/50 successes on aligned service tasks, compared with the 37/50 success reported by the Being-0 paper. The largest gains occur on tasks requiring maintained 3D relations, suggesting that persistent object-centered state is a useful abstraction for verifiable humanoid VLA execution.
Peng Ren, Haoyang Ge, Jiang Zhao +4