Motion Control

Mapless navigation in unknown and partially observable environments remains challenging for mobile robots, particularly when local minima prevent the robot from making progress toward its goal. Existing local navigation methods often lack an explicit mechanism for escaping such situations, while deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches typically learn recovery behaviors implicitly through reward design and policy optimization. In this work, we propose \textbf{LME} (Local-Minimum Escaper), a programmatic hierarchical framework that explicitly generates and reasons subgoals to guide robots out of local-minimum regions. LME operates solely on local observations and selects candidate subgoals using interpretable heuristic criteria that account for both surrounding obstacle geometry and candidate-location safety. A local planner then generates low-level motion commands toward the selected subgoal. This design enables LME to handle environments both with and without local minima within a unified framework, while remaining independent of the underlying local planner and requiring no additional training. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that LME provides robust navigation performance and generalizes to challenging unseen scenarios. Furthermore, the generated subgoals can be used to guide different local planners, substantially improving their ability to escape local minima. Successful deployments on both differential-drive and quadruped robots further demonstrate the practical applicability and generality of the proposed framework.

Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a scalable path to robot learning, yet existing action tokenizers treat tokenization as a compression problem, producing representations that are semantically misaligned with the autoregressive backbone. We propose CATok, a causal action tokenizer that reframes tokenization as a causally structured generative process. CATok introduces a conditional annealing mechanism that extracts action tokens by progressively annealing a flow-matching process: each token is conditioned on all preceding tokens and encodes the residual reconstruction signal at a specific noise level, establishing a coarse-to-fine causal token space whose generative semantics are structurally aligned with autoregressive modeling. A token-conditioned flow-matching decoder built on Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) reconstructs continuous action chunks from these discrete tokens with the precision of hybrid diffusion-head architectures. This discrete bottleneck enforces knowledge insulation by design, cleanly separating high-level semantic reasoning from low-level motor execution without requiring explicit attention masking. Extensive evaluations across three simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that CATok consistently surpasses existing tokenization methods in both reconstruction fidelity-compression tradeoff and inference efficiency, while improving VLA task success rate and training efficiency, establishing a high-performance, scalable foundation for purely autoregressive VLA systems.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms for movement control are typically evaluated and benchmarked on sequential decision tasks where imprecise actions may be corrected with later actions, thus allowing high returns with noisy actions. In contrast, we focus on an under-researched class of high-risk, high-precision motion control problems where actions carry irreversible outcomes, driving sharp peaks and ridges to plague the state-action reward landscape. Using computational pool as a representative example of such problems, we propose and evaluate State-Conditioned Shooting (SCOOT), a novel DRL algorithm that builds on advantage-weighted regression (AWR) with three key modifications: 1) Performing policy optimization only using elite samples, allowing the policy to better latch on to the rare high-reward action samples; 2) Utilizing a mixture-of-experts (MoE) policy, to allow switching between reward landscape modes depending on the state; 3) Adding a distance regularization term and a learning curriculum to encourage exploring diverse strategies before adapting to the most advantageous samples. We showcase our features' performance in learning physically-based billiard shots demonstrating high action precision and discovering multiple shot strategies for a given ball configuration.

We demonstrate that a general-purpose agent can directly drive a physical robot throughout task execution without any task-specific or environment-specific training. We introduce Agent as Policy (AGP), which places task planning and execution under the agent's control. Given a task and a robot interface, the agent interprets visual evidence, writes executable programs, issues motion commands, and revises its actions in response to physical outcomes. This brings the agent's reasoning and programming capabilities into continuous interaction with the physical world. We study AGP across multiple real-world manipulation tasks spanning precision manipulation, dynamic motions, and deformable objects. These include assembly from human videos, block construction from goal images, dice flipping, targeted throwing, and bimanual towel folding. Across assembly, block construction, and dice flipping, AGP succeeds in at least eight of ten trials for each evaluated task configuration. We further study efficiency through task experience accumulation and find that reusing saved procedures and programs shortens execution time across repeated trials. These findings support a path for general-purpose agents to act as robot policies, extending their autonomy to physical manipulation through runtime reasoning, programming, and interaction.

Most vision-language-action (VLA) models -- OpenVLA, $π_0$, RT-2, RDT-1B -- are monolithic: they emit raw motor commands or short action chunks without organizing behavior into reusable abstractions, so they degrade on long-horizon tasks and resist interpretation. Existing skill-discovery methods sidestep the core question of when two action sequences are behaviorally equivalent, either clustering contrastive embeddings or delegating the judgment to a language model uncalibrated to the robot's dynamics. We introduce REFACTOR-VLA, a wake/sleep system for learning reusable skills. Its sleep phase clusters motor-program fragments under a Behavioral-Equivalence Kernel (BEK) computed from rollouts of a learned latent world model $M_φ$; its wake phase emits typed lambda terms over a Hindley--Milner-inspired vocabulary, consumed by a library-conditioned rectified-flow action decoder. Abstractions are admitted only if they pass Minimum Description Length and return-preservation gates. On LIBERO we report two findings. First, enlarging the world model from 188M to 430M parameters worsened performance on 4 of 4 suites, so capacity alone does not help. Second, the training objective matters far more: adding an auxiliary supervised contrastive (InfoNCE) loss during world-model warmup substantially improves sleep-phase clustering, giving Normalized Mutual Information at $n=3$ seeds of $0.462 \pm 0.021$ (object), $0.867 \pm 0.025$ (spatial), $0.915 \pm 0.013$ (goal) and $0.754 \pm 0.010$ (LIBERO-10), and beating the strongest published baseline on all 4 suites by a mean $Δ= +0.184$. Across providers ($n=12$) the 95% bootstrap confidence interval for mean pairwise NMI is $[0.683, 0.729]$ (mean $0.705$). The sleep phase also yields the first real-LIBERO task-language library: the decoder uses 2 of 3 admitted abstractions and rewrites all 256 sampled demonstrations.

Tendon-driven hands are anthropomorphic, and moving the actuators off the joints is what makes a hand of this capability affordable to build. Two effects produce that saving. Routing force through a cable removes the requirement that a motor fit inside the joint it drives, so smaller and cheaper motors suffice, and one motor can drive several joints through a single cable, so fewer motors are needed. They are also harder to learn on than a direct-drive hand. The underactuated transmission that produces the saving is itself difficult to represent in a simulator, and the joints one cable drives are not independently commandable. We present Aero Hand Open, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand that is released simulation-ready. Three things ship with it. A simulation model reproduces the cable transmission itself. An identified actuation map connects that model to the motor commands in both directions, including the three-way coupling of the thumb. A reinforcement learning package trains policies for the hand. Together they let a policy be trained entirely in simulation and run on the hand with no fine-tuning and no state estimation. We release the mechanical design, the simulation model, the identified mapping, the training environment and the deployment stack.

Bidirectional propellers are often treated as signed thrust sources, but their thrust is a signed-quadratic function of rotor speed.Thus, thrust reversal necessarily occurs through zero rotor speed, where the ability of a bounded motor torque to change thrust collapses.This work formalizes this obstruction by studying exact thrust-trajectory reproducibility under bounded motor inputs with prescribed smoothness.We derive a normalized thrust-coordinate model with vanishing input gain at zero thrust, and prove necessary and sufficient reproducibility conditions in terms of the zero-crossing order of the desired thrust.Generic reversals, in which thrust crosses zero with nonzero slope, require unbounded motor input; the resulting conditions provide direct design rules for shaping thrust reversals that avoid singular motor commands.We also derive the corresponding current and voltage regularity requirements for a DC motor driving a bidirectional propeller.Experiments on a motor-propeller setup validate the predicted reversal-order effects, showing localized current/voltage peaks and thrust-tracking degradation for linear reversals, but not for higher-order reversals.These results expose an intrinsic actuator-level limitation that must be considered in force, acceleration, and interaction-control references for aerial robots.

Robot policies are typically MLPs mapping observations to actions. Yet robot observations are physical variables, and many action-relevant cues arise not from individual variables but from their interactions; power, inertial effects, contact, slip, and compliance depend on products among observable signals. We introduce PRISM, a policy representation that makes polynomial interactions among observable physical variables explicit, learnable, and compact. Rather than listing all polynomial terms, PRISM uses a factorized polynomial module to expose higher-order interaction features efficiently. In reinforcement learning, it keeps the standard MLP backbone but applies a gradually activated element-wise polynomial function after it. In imitation learning, it replaces linear proprioceptive conditioning in Diffusion Policy with a polynomial layer trained end-to-end. Across humanoid locomotion and contact-rich manipulation, PRISM improves performance over standard MLP policies and larger MLPs with matched capacity, showing that interaction structure cannot be replaced by capacity alone. It also yields sensorless compliant behavior without force, wrench, tactile input, contact labels, or admittance control. These results suggest that polynomial representations should become a standard architectural choice for embodied motor control. The project page is available at https://lsh3163.github.io/prism/

Video diffusion transformers (DiTs) generate high-fidelity and temporally coherent videos, yet motion control remains implicit, primarily relying on text prompts. As a result, achieving desired motion often requires extensive prompt engineering and repeated resampling. While fine-tuning models with additional spatial prompts (e.g., bounding boxes or point trajectories) enables explicit control, it demands substantial data curation and computation, and may compromise the generative capabilities of pretrained models. Consequently, training-free motion control using such spatial prompts has been explored in U-Net-based video diffusion models, but remains largely unexplored for DiTs. We introduce QWERTY, a training-free framework that enables flexible motion control in pretrained image-to-video DiTs via user-defined object warping and optical flow. We carefully manipulate the 3D full attention of DiTs by warping the frame-invariant semantic subspace of queries. We find that the noise predicted by the query-warped DiT naturally guides the diffusion trajectory toward the desired motion, and further show that leveraging this noise as self-guidance for latent optimization improves control stability and visual quality. Experiments show that QWERTY achieves the most effective motion control among existing training-free approaches on a recent image-to-video DiT, with performance comparable to fine-tuning-based methods.

Parkinson's disease (PD) selectively impairs distinct stages of motor control. Using backspace events as natural error-correction episodes in the public neuroQWERTY MIT-CSXPD dataset (n=57 subjects, 27 PD with UPDRS-III scores), we test whether passively-collected keystroke timing dissociates a variability-based pre-error monitoring signal from a speed-based post-error recovery signal. Pre-error typing instability does not track PD severity (r=-0.072, p=0.721), while post-error pause duration does (r=+0.656, p=0.0002; subject-level OLS p=1.2x10^-4, n=27, primary analysis given within-subject event clustering). A mixed-effects log-normal model with a random subject intercept confirms this while retaining full event-level power (coef=0.0250, p=1.2x10^-4, n=1,563 events), closely matching the subject-level OLS despite an unrelated estimation strategy. Error-detection latency also correlates with UPDRS-III (r=+0.660), confirming the dissociation is between variability and speed, not detection and correction per se. A log-normal accelerated failure time model yields a coefficient of 0.0255 (bootstrap 95% CI [0.0146, 0.0357]), a 2.6% increase per UPDRS-III point. After controlling the immediately thecoefficient attenuates to 0.0133 (p=3.1x10^-21),consistent w timingincrement above general bradykinesia. Results reacross both S2:r=+0.645), survive jackknife exclusion of every subject, andnatingfinger-tapping and mPower smartphone tapping (group AUC=0.836). cellent(ICC(2,1)=0.945, n=20).

Developing controllers capable of completing a wide range of tasks in a natural and life-like manner is a key challenge in enabling practical applications of physics-based character animation. In this work, we introduce Generative Pretrained Controllers (GPC), which leverage tokenization and next-token modeling to create general-purpose, reusable generative controllers from large-scale motion datasets. Our framework utilizes end-to-end reinforcement learning to jointly optimize a "motion vocabulary", modeled via Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ), along with a corresponding control policy that can map the discrete codes to physics-based controls. After the "codebook" has been learned, the underlying structure of this large vocabulary is modeled by training a GPT-style autoregressive transformer, leading to a powerful generative controller that generates controls for a physically simulated character by performing next-token prediction. Once the generative controller has been trained, we propose a suite of adaptation techniques for finetuning the controller for new downstream tasks. Our proposed framework greatly simplifies the training process compared to previous tokenized methods, and achieves a 99.98% success rate in reproducing a vast corpus of motion clips. The generative controller exhibits a variety of natural emergent behaviors, such as responsive behaviors to perturbations and recovery behaviors after falling. This results in highly robust general purpose controllers for a variety of downstream applications.

This work studies subject recognition from Leap Motion Controller 2 (LMC2) hand landmark data under a subject-level unknown-identity identification protocol on the Multi View Leap2 Hand Pose (ML2HP) dataset. Using only the landmark modality, we retain the original geometric representation and enrich it with fingertip-to-palm distances and palm-normalized inter-finger angular descriptors. Evaluation is performed under a Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) protocol in which, for each outer fold, one subject is excluded from the enrolled set and treated as unknown at test time. To avoid tuning on the true outer unknown subject, the unknown-rejection threshold is selected in an inner validation step by temporarily withholding one enrolled subject from the inner gallery and using it only for threshold estimation. We compare a tree ensemble baseline with two neural alternatives: a learned embedding baseline based on centroid matching and cosine-similarity-based rejection, and an MLP+OpenMax model, which represents a more established open-set recognition approach. Under this evaluation setup, Extra Trees remains the strongest overall method, indicating that the main challenge on this benchmark is not enrolled-subject discrimination alone, but robust score separation between known and unknown probes. The results support the feasibility of compact, interpretable landmark-based descriptors for contactless hand-based unknown-subject rejection and identification on a small-cohort dataset.

In robot-assisted laparoscopic minimally invasive surgery (MIS), accurate enforcement of the remote center of motion (RCM) constraint is critical for safe and stable automatic field-of-view (FoV) adjustment. Although control-based RCM strategies are widely adopted due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness, systematic comparison of different RCM formulations and image-based visual servoing (IBVS) frameworks remains challenging due to the lack of a unified and reproducible benchmark. This paper presents an open-source simulation framework integrating three representative RCM modeling approaches and six IBVS-based control architectures within a unified velocity-level formulation, enabling controlled and consistent evaluation. Through structured case studies, the framework reveals key structural sensitivities arising from modeling and controller interactions, including the impact of tangent-plane definition, constraint dimensionality, open- versus closed-loop enforcement, and robustness near kinematic singularities. All resources are released and demostrations are provided in the supplementary video, providing a reproducible foundation for RCM-constrained visual servoing research.

Filmmaking demands precise motion control and reference image compositing -- capabilities that existing methods treat separately. Point-track-conditioned image-to-video models restrict content insertion to the first frame, while reference-to-video models lack fine-grained spatial-temporal control over how reference content integrates across frames. We present Go-with-the-Track, which unifies both capabilities by jointly conditioning on multiple reference images and reference-anchored point-tracks -- extending conventional point-tracks to explicitly establish correspondences between generated frames and reference images, thus enabling precise compositing and motion control throughout the video. To achieve this, we introduce spatially-aware point-track embeddings that encode the full sequence of point-track coordinates using a coordinate-wise MLP followed by temporal pooling. This representation captures the spatial characteristics of each point-track (serving as a unique identifier), while the embedding similarity correlates directly with spatial proximity, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish and associate point-tracks. We inject these point-track embeddings into a video diffusion transformer via a lightweight adapter, resolving the pixel-to-patch resolution mismatch while avoiding the substantial motion detail loss inherent in naive point-track subsampling. We use a hybrid training strategy to train jointly on dynamic, static, and synthetic scene video datasets to boost motion controllability. Experiments demonstrate that Go-with-the-Track achieves superior motion and reference control in a single model and enables new capabilities: multi-reference conditioned video generation with point-track driven compositing, as well as camera control for both static and dynamic scenes. Project Page: https://eyeline-labs.github.io/Go-with-the-Track/

The recent popularity of robotics, combined with the steadily decreasing cost of robotic hardware, has lowered the entry barrier to robotics research and enabled rapid advancements in the field. One of the primary examples is the Unitree Go2 quadruped robot, which is often used by researchers in the areas of locomotion, navigation, control, and others. Many researchers use the Go2 robot in combination with techniques like imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and behavioral cloning to allow machine learning systems to take full control of the robot. At the same time, many of those techniques require demonstration data consisting of the robot's kinematics information and actions applied to the motors. Obtaining such data is difficult, requires building complex pipelines, and can take significant time. To aid in those kinds of efforts, we present Kine2Go - a dataset with 800 diverse gait kinematics trajectory motion data for the Unitree Go2 robot, derived from 40 distinct policies. Our pipeline accepts data from various quadruped morphologies and translates them to a Go2-compatible format. Then we use Reinforcement Learning to train policies following a given motion, and finally we gather data from those policies, which grants robust, perturbed kinematic data with corresponding motor-level actions.

We discover that VLA architectures fail in fundamentally different, predictable ways at the motor-command level. Running VQ-BeT, Diffusion Policy, and ACT on identical evaluation protocols (n=450 episodes across PushT and ALOHA 14-DOF bimanual manipulation), we find: (1) direction reversal rate is a universal failure predictor across all three architectures (AUROC=0.93, 0.79, 0.91; p<0.001); (2) jerk monitoring is predictive only for discrete-token architectures, following a discrete-to-continuous gradient (0.88, 0.69, 0.41); (3) velocity violations alone are non-predictive everywhere (AUROC 0.41-0.69), yet velocity checking is the most common safety mechanism in VLA deployment code; and (4) for continuous-family VLAs, velocity monitoring provides effectively zero predictive signal (AUROC=0.52 on ACT, 0.41 on Diffusion), proving that architecture-matched monitor selection is essential. These results quantify a monitoring consequence of the well-known discrete/continuous VLA distinction: the two families produce qualitatively different failure signatures that require different monitors. No single monitor works universally; architecture-matched selection is required. This finding was enabled by SafeContract, a training-free, black-box action monitoring toolkit with conformal calibration. Code: https://github.com/krishnam94/vla-edge

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models follow a data-driven paradigm and are constrained by the coverage of training data, making them prone to failure on edge-case configurations after deployment. To mitigate such risks, it is essential to expose high-quality failure modes and convert the resulting failures into supervisory data for model enhancement. Existing studies largely stop at failure detection and lack a mechanism for leveraging discovered failures for model repair. We propose VLAMotor, the first analysis framework for VLA enhancement, which integrates distance-aware model testing for failure exposure and agent-based data synthesis for model finetunning. First, VLAMotor estimates input uncertainty based on the distance to training samples, and combines uncertainty ranking with redundancy elimination to build compact test sets that expose diverse failures. Then, VLAMotor abstracts failure trajectories into structured semantic representations, and plans parameterized repair-skill sequences, which are then realized as executable trajectories through inverse kinematics and motion execution. The resulting successful trajectories are automatically labeled and used to fine-tune the original VLA model, yielding an enhanced VLA model. Evaluation on four representative robotic manipulation tasks shows that 92.33% of the in-simulation test cases generated by VLAMotor trigger VLA failures, and VLAMotor improves test coverage over the state-of-the-art tool by 18.93%. By fine-tuning VLA models with synthetic data derived from failed test cases, VLAMotor further enhances the overall success rate of VLA models by 49.25%. When deployed on real hardware, the simulation-enhanced models improve the success rate over the original VLA models by 57.50%, demonstrating an effective and low-cost direction for VLA enhancement.

Predicting the shape of tendon driven continuum robots (TDCRs) at steady state from actuation remains challenging due to continuous deformation, complex tendon routing, compliance, friction, and fabrication variability. In this paper, we address this problem as kinematic self modeling conditioned on action. We present a lightweight 3D printed TDCR hardware platform and an RGB-D data collection pipeline with multiple cameras, and we learn a point cloud flow matching model that maps motor actuation states to the robot's settled 3D geometry. The model is trained from randomly sampled quasi static configurations and evaluated on test motor commands within the same TDCR design family and actuation range. We compare against prior 3D deformable object and robot self modeling approaches in both MuJoCo simulation and real hardware experiments. Experiments on simulated 2-, 3-, and 5-module TDCRs and real 2- and 3-module robots show improved shape prediction accuracy under CD and EMD metrics. We further show in simulation that the same conditional formulation generalizes to tip payload as a conditioning input, enabling payload conditioned steady-state shape prediction. These results demonstrate a data driven self modeling framework for quasi static TDCR geometry prediction.

This manuscript extends our previous multimodal human-robot interaction system by introducing a controlled ablation study of the three modules that most strongly influence end-to-end performance: the large language model used for action extraction, the perception system used for visual grounding, and the controller used for motion execution. The goal is not to redesign the full pipeline, but to isolate the contribution of each component under a common experimental protocol and then evaluate the best combinations end-to-end. We therefore compare three language models, five perception configurations, and three controllers, followed by a second-stage factorial study over the best candidates. The resulting analysis is intended to clarify which choices primarily affect execution time, which primarily affect success rate, and where the largest engineering gains are likely to come from in future revisions of the system.

Humanoid control systems have made significant progress in recent years, yet modeling fluent interaction-rich behavior between a robot, its surrounding environment, and task-relevant objects remains a fundamental challenge. This difficulty arises from the need to jointly capture spatial context, temporal dynamics, robot actions, and task intent at scale, which is a poor match to conventional supervision. We propose ExoActor, a novel framework that leverages the generalization capabilities of large-scale video generation models to address this problem. The key insight in ExoActor is to use third-person video generation as a unified interface for modeling interaction dynamics. Given a task instruction and scene context, ExoActor synthesizes plausible execution processes that implicitly encode coordinated interactions between robot, environment, and objects. Such video output is then transformed into executable humanoid behaviors through a pipeline that estimates human motion and executes it via a general motion controller, yielding a task-conditioned behavior sequence. To validate the proposed framework, we implement it as an end-to-end system and demonstrate its generalization to new scenarios without additional real-world data collection. Furthermore, we conclude by discussing limitations of the current implementation and outlining promising directions for future research, illustrating how ExoActor provides a scalable approach to modeling interaction-rich humanoid behaviors, potentially opening a new avenue for generative models to advance general-purpose humanoid intelligence.

Most reinforcement-learning (RL) controllers used in continuous control are architecturally centralized: observations are compressed into a single latent state from which both value estimates and actions are produced. Biological control systems are often organized differently. Insects, in particular, coordinate navigation, heading stabilization, memory, and context-dependent action selection through distributed circuits rather than a single monolithic controller. Motivated by this contrast, we study an RL policy architecture that decomposes control into interacting modules for sensory encoding, heading representation, sparse associative memory, recurrent command generation, and local motor control, with a learned arbitration mechanism that allocates motor authority across modules. The model is evaluated on a two-dimensional navigation task that require simultaneous food seeking, obstacle avoidance, and predator escape. In a six-seed predator-navigation experiment trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for 75 updates, the modular policy achieves the strongest final mean performance among the tested controllers, with final episodic return $-2798.8\pm964.4$ versus $-3778.0\pm628.1$ for a centralized gated recurrent unit (GRU) and $-4727.5\pm772.5$ for a centralized multilayer perceptron (MLP). The modular policy also attains the lowest final value loss and stable PPO optimization statistics while driving module-assignment entropy to $0.0457\pm0.0244$, indicating highly selective control allocation. These results suggest that distributed control can serve as a useful inductive bias for RL problems involving dynamically competing behavioral objectives.

Recent advances in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have enabled high-quality joint audio-video generation, producing videos with synchronized audio within a single model. However, existing controllable generation frameworks are typically restricted to video-only control. This restricts comprehensive controllability and often leads to suboptimal cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we present MMControl, which enables users to perform Multi-Modal Control in joint audio-video generation. MMControl introduces a dual-stream conditional injection mechanism. It incorporates both visual and acoustic control signals, including reference images, reference audio, depth maps, and pose sequences, into a joint generation process. These conditions are injected through bypass branches into a joint audio-video Diffusion Transformer, enabling the model to simultaneously generate identity-consistent video and timbre-consistent audio under structural constraints. Furthermore, we introduce modality-specific guidance scaling, which allows users to independently and dynamically adjust the influence strength of each visual and acoustic condition at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMControl achieves fine-grained, composable control over character identity, voice timbre, body pose, and scene layout in joint audio-video generation.

Humanoid robots are expected to execute agile and expressive whole-body motions in real-world settings. Existing text-to-motion generation models are predominantly trained on captured human motion datasets, whose priors assume human biomechanics, actuation, mass distribution, and contact strategies. When such motions are directly retargeted to humanoid robots, the resulting trajectories may satisfy geometric constraints (e.g., joint limits and pose continuity) and appear kinematically reasonable. However, they frequently violate the physical feasibility required for real-world execution. To address these issues, we present PhyGile, a unified framework that closes the loop between robot-native motion generation and General Motion Tracking (GMT). PhyGile performs physics-prefix-guided robot-native motion generation at inference time, directly generating robot-native motions in a 262-dimensional skeletal space with physics-guided prefixes, thereby eliminating inference-time retargeting artifacts and reducing generation-execution discrepancies. Before physics-prefix adaptation, we train the GMT controller with a curriculum-based mixture-of-experts scheme, followed by post-training on unlabeled motion data to improve robustness over large-scale robot motions. During physics-prefix adaptation, the GMT controller is further fine-tuned with generated objectives under physics-derived prefixes, enabling agile and stable execution of complex motions on real robots. Extensive offline and real-robot experiments demonstrate that PhyGile expands the frontier of text-driven humanoid control, enabling stable tracking of agile, highly difficult whole-body motions that go well beyond walking and low-dynamic motions typically achieved by prior methods.

Contact-rich teleoperation logs expose a policy I/O design choice: demonstrations may contain the robot execution (E), leader command (C), or both. These signals are not interchangeable: E2E may discard contact-generating command offsets, whereas E2C preserves these offsets but omits the robot's execution response. We propose Dual-State Conditioning (EC2C), which conditions on both E and C while predicting future C, exposing command-execution mismatch as a cue for contact, latency, payload, and operator compensation; in quasi-static contact, this cue is often force-correlated. On a low-cost setup without force, tactile, or motor-current policy input, EC2C outperforms E2E and a strong E2C baseline across several real-world contact-rich, force-sensitive, and dynamic tasks. These results support EC2C as a practical default I/O setting for contact-rich imitation learning. We further formulate latency-adaptive inpainting as a temporal extension of this I/O choice for action-chunking policies, and discuss when long histories help dynamic inference or introduce causal confounding.

Disocclusion occurs when object movement reveals previously hidden content. Existing image-to-video methods provide different forms of motion and disocclusion control, yet the design space they span remains poorly understood. In this work, we systematically explore an algorithmic design space spanning motion specification (text-based versus tracking-based) and disocclusion specification (text-based versus image-based). To facilitate this study, we construct a benchmark consisting of both synthetic scenes and captured scenes, covering rigid and deformable motions, as well as static and dynamic disoccluded objects. We compare existing and adapted methods across this design space to analyze the strengths and limitations of different control strategies for handling disocclusions during motion. Our study reveals that tracking-based guidance improves motion accuracy, while image-based guidance improves the fidelity of newly revealed content. However, jointly controlling the appearance and dynamics of disoccluded objects remains a challenging open problem, particularly in scenarios where newly revealed objects undergo their own motion after becoming visible.

Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent nonlinearities. This paper presents the development of a compact 13-DOF upper-body humanoid robot. To assess the feasibility of an effective controller, we first investigate its key dynamic properties, such as actuation time delays, and confirm that its behavior is reproducible across repeated trials. Leveraging this reproducibility, we implement a preliminary data-driven controller for a 4-DOF arm subsystem based on a multilayer perceptron with explicit time delay compensation. The network was trained on random movement data to generate pressure commands for tracking arbitrary trajectories. In comparative evaluations on this subsystem, the data-driven controller achieved lower tracking errors than a traditional PID controller. This result suggests that data-driven approaches are a promising option for controlling complex, high-DOF pneumatic robots.

For effective deployment in real-world environments, humanoid robots must autonomously navigate a diverse range of complex terrains with abrupt transitions. While the Vanilla mixture of experts (MoE) framework is theoretically capable of modeling diverse terrain features, in practice, the gating network exhibits nearly uniform expert activations across different terrains, weakening the expert specialization and limiting the model's expressive power. To address this limitation, we introduce CMoE, a novel single-stage reinforcement learning framework that integrates contrastive learning to refine expert activation distributions. By imposing contrastive constraints, CMoE maximizes the consistency of expert activations within the same terrain while minimizing their similarity across different terrains, thereby encouraging experts to specialize in distinct terrain types. We validated our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot through a series of challenging experiments. Results demonstrate that CMoE enables the robot to traverse continuous steps up to 20 cm high and gaps up to 80 cm wide, while achieving robust and natural gait across diverse mixed terrains, surpassing the limits of existing methods. To support further research and foster community development, we release our code publicly.