Adversarial Motion Priors

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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Period ending 2026-09-07

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47 papers

Latest in Adversarial Motion Priors

Sep 20, 2026cs.RO

PRIMO: Prior-Informed Odometry from Human-Motion Tracking for Humanoid Robots

Simulation-trained humanoid proprioceptive odometry faces two transfer challenges: training trajectories generated by specific robot control policies intended for deployment cover only a limited range of motions, while sim-to-real mismatch can make unconstrained predictions unreliable. We address both with Prior-Informed Odometry from Human-Motion Tracking (PRIMO). On the data side, we generate odometry supervision by having the humanoid track diverse retargeted human motions in simulation, decoupling supervision from the deployment policies and broadening the training motion distribution. On the model side, a Prior-Informed estimator uses physics- and symmetry-informed priors to structure velocity and rotation prediction and a coarse raw-context pathway to preserve sensor context alongside encoded features, thereby strengthening sim-to-real generalization. Under a unified real-robot protocol, PRIMO reduces mean error by 31.6%-61.7% relative to the strongest evaluated external baseline in each domain-metric comparison. Across two locomotion-policy revisions, policy specialists exhibit symmetric crossover, whereas Tracking-Locomotion training reduces mean opposite-policy simulation error by 86.8%-94.6%. On real dynamic motion, Tracking-Locomotion training reduces mean error by 69.2%-81.7% relative to training on the union of both deployment policies. Across the tested motion compositions, the Prior-Informed estimator consistently lowers mean trajectory errors relative to its Unconstrained counterpart in both simulation and real-robot evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/Agibot-Spatial-Intelligence/PRIMO.
Xu Han, Angsong Li, Shaopeng Zhang +5
Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Bayesian Continuum Robot Dynamics and State Estimation

Recent factor graph approaches to continuum robot state estimation have been successful for quasi-static applications and spatiotemporal estimation using white-noise kinematic motion priors. However, when inertial effects are significant, these approximations may fail to capture the underlying physics, limiting accuracy during dynamic motions. In contrast, our approach approximates the Cosserat rod dynamics of continuum robots. We write inertia and damping as equivalent applied loads, so that the dynamic balance retains the algebraic form of the static one from prior work with quasi-static robots. Without backbone observations, the framework reduces to a stochastic forward simulation of the robot's motion. Given observations, it jointly refines kinematic and dynamic states and infers external loads, among other states. We validate the approach through simulation and experiments, demonstrating stochastic forward simulation as well as state estimation on tendon-driven continuum robots.
James M. Ferguson, Tucker Hermans, Alan Kuntz
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

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

Humanoid whole-body manipulation requires coordinated whole-body dynamics, yet large-scale trajectories from a target robot are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, whole-body motion from human and humanoid sources is abundantly available, although such data cannot be directly used as embodiment-specific robot actions. This work asks whether these scalable motion resources can instead provide a transferable predictive prior for humanoid world-action modeling. We introduce WholeBodyWAM, a humanoid world-action model that learns whole-body dynamics from large-scale heterogeneous motion before target-robot training. We curate UniMotion-4K, a motion corpus spanning more than 4K hours from human videos, native 3D motion datasets, and heterogeneous humanoid platforms, and canonicalize these diverse sources into a unified motion space. A language-conditioned Motion Expert is then pretrained to predict future whole-body motion without target-robot action supervision. During robot post-training, the pretrained Motion Expert is integrated with Video and Action Experts through asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention, enabling predictive scene dynamics and whole-body motion to jointly inform embodiment-specific action generation. Experiments show that WholeBodyWAM consistently benefits from increased motion-pretraining scale, improves future-motion prediction and downstream task performance, and transfers effectively to real-world humanoid manipulation. Moreover, the pretrained motion prior substantially improves data efficiency under limited target-robot demonstrations.
Bowei Zhang, Qiyao Zhang, Shuanghao Bai +8
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Dissecting Motion-Prior Regularization for Data-Scarce Robotic Insertion

This study asks whether training-time motion-prior regularization can improve insertion success when a diffusion policy is learned from only 15 demonstrations. Minimum jerk discourages abrupt changes in predicted translational acceleration; speed-curvature regularization instead couples movement speed to path geometry. These are candidate mechanisms for task completion, not safety guarantees. We compare the priors individually and jointly, neither prior, and generic smoothness, with 80 real-robot trials per setting pooled over four recorded condition classes. Joint and minimum-jerk-only settings each achieved 70/80 successes (87.5%), versus 69/80 (86.3%) for speed-curvature only, 66/80 (82.5%) for neither prior, and 67/80 (83.8%) for generic smoothness. Success rates and Wilson 95% confidence intervals are visualized for direct comparison. Joint regularization exceeded neither by 5.0 percentage points but provided no observed gain over minimum jerk alone. The results motivate minimum jerk as the simpler candidate for replication, without establishing synergy, biomechanical specificity, improved safety, or distribution-shift robustness.
Ning Hu, Shuai Li, Jindong Tan
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Flow-Matched Motion Priors: Online Optimal-Transport Rewards for Imitation Learning

Learning a motion prior requires a reward that guides a policy from its current behavior toward demonstrated motion. Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP) provide such a reward with a discriminator. However, adversarial objectives can become uninformative when policy and expert supports are far apart. A naive use of optimal transport (OT) averages matched expert successors into a barycentric target. Averaging across gait phases can weaken the target's joint motion. We introduce Flow-Matched Motion Priors (FMP), an online scalar reward learned from paths connecting current rollout histories to an expert motion bank. Entropic OT supplies the coupling. Before each policy update, we train a neural potential with flow matching (FM) along the rollout-to-expert paths, endpoint-gradient supervision, and relative-value calibration. The actor receives only physical observations and the reward remains a scalar, as in AMP. Controlled reward-model experiments show substantially better generalization beyond the fitting rollout than value-only or endpoint-only fitting. On Unitree G1, matched 50-million-transition experiments compare FMP with AMP, a barycentric OT reward, and nested ablations under demonstration and fixed-pose initialization. FMP produces stable forward walking at 0.727 m/s from demonstration resets and 0.338 m/s from a fixed default pose. In the fixed-pose condition, it incurs 129 falls versus 243 for the endpoint-only control. Against a static score-gradient teacher, dynamic FM reduces score-increment error at interpolation fractions 0.25 and 0.50 while using 29% less offline fitting time.
Yilin Zou, Chenghua Liu, Chenglong Wu +1
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

EECTracker: Swarm Motion Prior-Guided Feature Compensation for Airborne Optical UAV Swarm Tracking

Airborne optical tracking of uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms is challenging due to extremely small target scales, rapid viewpoint changes, and cluttered backgrounds, which can weaken target feature responses and lead to intermittent or temporarily missing detector responses. Existing multi-object tracking methods generally depend on reliable target-specific detector responses to maintain target states and identities across frames. When such responses become unreliable, target states cannot be reliably updated and cross-frame association cues become ambiguous, resulting in fragmented trajectories and identity switches. To address this problem, we propose EECTracker, a swarm-motion-prior-guided joint detection-and-tracking framework for airborne optical UAV swarm tracking. EECTracker constructs a probabilistic swarm motion prior from reliable historical tracklets to capture the shared short-term image-plane motion tendency of the swarm and its uncertainty, providing spatial guidance for cross-frame feature compensation. Building on this prior, we introduce Energy--Entropy Consistency Activation (EEC Activation) to evaluate motion-prior-conditioned feature consistency using feature residual energy and local residual entropy. The resulting Local EEC score guides pixel-level feature compensation by enhancing motion-prior-consistent feature responses in potential target regions while suppressing inconsistent background responses. Experiments on AIRMOT and UAVSwarm show that EECTracker achieves superior overall tracking performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the strongest competing method SCT-MOT, EECTracker improves MOTA/IDF1 by 3.89/1.79 percentage points on AIRMOT and by 2.81/1.74 percentage points on UAVSwarm, while maintaining online inference speed.
Zhaochen Chu, Tao Song, Ren Jin +2
Sep 7, 2026cs.CV

TFTrack: A Template-Free Framework for Efficient 3D Point Cloud Tracking

LiDAR-based 3D Single Object Tracking (3D SOT) is critical for robotic perception and navigation and aims to localize dynamic objects across frames in sparse point clouds. Existing methods, rooted in the Siamese tracking paradigm from 2D vision, rely on costly dual-input designs and excessive motion modeling guided by template priors, hindering their efficiency. Our in-depth analysis reveals: (i) the template paradigm is redundant, as the previous bounding box center encodes sufficient historical context; (ii) complex motion modeling is unnecessary, as geometric alignment provides adequate motion priors. Based on the above findings, we propose the first Template-Free Tracking framework (TFTrack). The novel framework eliminates the need for template-search pairings and operates directly on the current frame guided solely by the prior bounding box center and size. We instantiate this paradigm into three variants: TFTrack-Voxel, TFTrack-Pillar, and TFTrack-Point, to explore different 3D representations under a unified framework, ensuring flexibility across sparse and dense scenes. Extensive experiments on KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks show that TFTrack is competitive with leading template-based trackers, while reducing FLOPs by approximately 50% and running at approximately 120 FPS. By simplifying overcomplicated motion-centric designs, TFTrack establishes a new minimalist paradigm for efficient 3D point cloud tracking, paving the way for real-time and resource-efficient deployment in embedded robotic systems, such as autonomous vehicles. The code is available at https://github.com/tftrack-anonymous/TFTrack/tree/main.
Zhaofeng Hu, Sifan Zhou, Jiahao Nie +3
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Residual Kalman Dynamics for Event-Based UAV Forecasting

We study short- and mid-horizon UAV bounding-box forecasting on the FRED event-camera dataset. We use a constant-velocity Kalman filter over a full center-size box state as a strong physical baseline, and train a residual model to predict acceleration-like corrections from recent box history, filtered state features, and local event representations. This simple residual formulation consistently improves over the Kalman baseline, with event-conditioned models giving the strongest results among the evaluated methods. We further show that part of the residual target is predictable from anchor position and velocity alone, indicating that canonical FRED results can reflect both visual evidence and dataset-specific motion priors. To analyze this effect, we introduce decorrelated subsets as a diagnostic stress test, showing that event-conditioned residual models retain useful predictive signal even when measured position- and velocity-based shortcuts are weakened.
Per Nyblom, Hannes Ovrén, David Gustafsson
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight

World action models (WAMs) built on video generation backbones are a rising recipe for robot learning, yet remain confined to tabletop manipulation. Mobile manipulation demands simultaneous locomotion and whole-body manipulation amid scene-scale dynamics, yet is still dominated by dynamics-blind visual encoders with hand-crafted coordination. We bridge this gap with MobileWAM, a mixture-of-transformers architecture that fuses a pretrained video diffusion transformer with a lightweight action expert through layerwise joint attention, translating internet-scale motion priors into whole-body control. To reconcile the heterogeneous dynamics of moving and manipulating, each feed-forward layer of the action expert becomes a three-expert mixture of shared, locomotion, and manipulation experts, softly routed by the motion intent in the action tokens. To densify supervision, we further propose Chain-of-Foresight (CoF): intermediate representations sequentially predict a chain of future latent chunks, each step conditioned on its predecessor. CoF pairs naturally with our decoupled video--action denoising scheme. At deployment, the WAM serves as a pure current-frame encoder; foresight acts only through gradients, so at inference the foresight chain and video generation are discarded, leaving only policy-level cost. MobileWAM surpasses state-of-the-art mobile manipulation policies on ManiSkill-HAB and fine-tunes to a real ARX Lift2 mobile manipulator across diverse tasks with strong generalization. Code will be released soon.
Zehua Fan, Junjie He, Wenxuan Song +14
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.RO

PFM-HR: Pose Flow Matching for Humanoid Robots

Motion priors improve reinforcement learning for physics-based humanoid tracking, but temporal priors require ordered motion clips, while pose priors provide limited guidance for policy-induced pose transitions. We present Pose Flow Matching for Humanoid Robots (PFM-HR), a reusable flow matching prior trained directly on large scale unordered pose data. PFM-HR introduces the Pose Geometry Score (PGS), which quantifies how joint coordinate changes during rollouts align with the local geometry of pose variation captured by the prior. Using PGS to modulate the tracking reward guides policy exploration toward structured pose changes while keeping the prior frozen across tracking tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PFM-HR improves both single motion and general motion tracking, especially for highly dynamic motions.
Yukang Gao, Yi Gu, Yangchen Zhou +9
Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Models as Tools: An Agentic Coordination Framework for Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking

Most current visual trackers adopt a matching-based architecture trained exclusively on tracking datasets, whose performance gains depend heavily on the length of the input context, and have now reached a bottleneck. While high-performance tracking increasingly relies on foundation models, existing methods use them monolithically, adapting a foundation model into a tracker or modify a segmentation foundation model into a tracking pipeline, which fails to exploit complementary strengths. Matching-based trackers excel at instance-level correspondence but lack semantic discrimination and fine-grained foreground perception, whereas segmentation foundation models produce precise masks yet struggle with instance discrimination and multimodal extension. Both paradigms also lack error-correction capabilities for long-term tracking. To address these issues, we propose ACTrack, an agentic coordination framework that treats heterogeneous models as invocable tools under an event-triggered mechanism. ACTrack coordinates a Tracker-based Instance Matching Tool for target discrimination, a SAM3 Motion Tool for mask-derived motion priors, a SAM3 Perception Tool for detecting distractors and instance-conflict cues, and a VLM Reprompt Tool activated only under persistent conflict to mitigate error accumulation. We design a complete tool-invocation trigger mechanism and an inter-tool coordination mechanism, enabling the complementary strengths of different model tools to be fully integrated. Experiments show that ACTrack substantially surpasses the strongest and the largest trackers on eight RGB benchmarks. Furthermore, a parameter-efficient adaptation strategy enables parameter sharing and reuse across tools, achieving unified multimodal tracking with only 30% trainable parameters while substantially outperforming prior methods on multimodal benchmarks such as LasHeR, VisEvent, TNL2K, and DepthTrack.
Wenrui Cai, Yuzhe Li, Qingjie Liu +1
Jul 28, 2026cs.LG

AMPBench-MT: A Homology-Controlled Benchmark for Antimicrobial Peptide Potency, Spectrum, and Safety Prediction

Computational AMP discovery is often evaluated through AMP/non-AMP recognition, yet follow-up decisions depend on assay-derived evidence such as target-species potency, hemolysis, toxicity, and selectivity. Existing AMP and peptide benchmarks cover binary recognition, multilabel annotation, assay regression, or broader peptide-model comparison, but they do not jointly place AMP recognition, species-conditioned potency, spectrum, safety-facing proxy endpoints, and cross-endpoint behavior within one sequence-homology-controlled protocol. To address this problem, we introduce AMPBench-MT, a provenance-preserving benchmark that standardizes canonical peptide records and organizes them into binary recognition, species-conditioned pMIC regression, and endpoint-specific potency and safety-facing readouts. Across 161 endpoint-specific model evaluations, high binary performance does not reliably indicate assay-endpoint behavior. Frozen protein-language-model embeddings form the leading pMIC error cluster, while graph and classical regressors remain close. Spectrum labels further reveal that PR-oriented metrics can be misleading under scarce observed negatives, whereas low-toxicity, HC50 hemolysis, and selectivity expose smaller but more assay-facing signals. AMPBench-MT shows that AMP evaluation should move beyond recognition leaderboards toward endpoint-aware evidence auditing. Our proposed benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZihengZhou06/AMPBench-MT.
Ziheng Zhou, Huiyu Luo, Xiaohu Zhu +4
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Learning Reusable Hybrid Motion Priors for Humanoid Locomotion from Motion Imitation

Reinforcement learning can produce robust humanoid controllers, but each new task is typically trained as a separate policy with its own reward design and training process. Motion imitation provides an alternative source of motor competence by training policies to track retargeted human motions, yet the resulting controllers remain reference trackers and are not directly usable as task policies. We propose a three-stage pipeline that turns motion-imitation skills into a reusable hybrid motion prior (HMP) for humanoid locomotion. First, an expert policy is trained to imitate retargeted human motion-capture clips. Second, the expert is distilled into a frozen architecture composed of a proprioceptive encoder, a residual vector-quantized (RVQ) codebook, and an action decoder. Third, task-level policies are trained to solve locomotion tasks by selecting discrete codebook entries while the HMP remains frozen. We evaluate the method on velocity tracking, point-goal navigation, and fall-recovery velocity tracking in simulation, and deploy the velocity-tracking policy on a real Unitree G1 robot. The distillation process preserves the tracking behavior of the expert, while the resulting HMP can be reused without retraining as the action interface for different downstream locomotion policies. The learned HMP reveals an interpretable codebook structure in which the number of active RVQ stages modulates the available gait patterns. We further show that training the codebook with the rotation trick improves latent organization and reduces downstream falls compared with a standard straight-through estimator.
Valerio Belli, Valerio Modugno, Enrico Mingo Hoffman +1
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 17, 2026cs.RO

Vision-Language-Motion Maps: An Open-Vocabulary, Uncertainty-Aware, Queryable Motion Attribute for 3D Scene Maps

Open-vocabulary 3D maps let robots answer language queries about what and where, but they assume a static world and cannot answer queries about how scene elements behave. We introduce Vision-Language-Motion Maps (VLMM), an open-vocabulary, language-queryable 3D map - queried through a rule-based intent router over open-vocabulary object nouns, not a general natural-language interface - in which each element carries a fused motion attribute: a VLM/LLM semantic movability prior combined with geometrically observed cross-frame motion, together with a per-element uncertainty. Queries reduce to attribute filters that distinguish what has been seen to move, what could move but has not, and what stays still. On a controlled simulator benchmark with exact ground truth (AI2-THOR, three scene types) we show through ablation that the schema fields are non-substitutable: a semantic-only baseline fails motion queries even with strong features, and neither motion field substitutes for the other (the prior cannot answer "what is moving," observed motion cannot answer "what could move"). On real dynamic RGB-D (TUM and Bonn, six sequences) we show the uncertainty channel - our key difference from prior fused-motion work - consistently improves moving-vs-static average precision and reduces false motion flags, and that it is robust to estimated (noisy) poses. The raw confidence is not calibrated, but post-hoc isotonic calibration reaches an expected calibration error of 0.10. VLMM is a representation contribution: the closest prior maps each lack at least one of the four properties - open-vocabulary, language-queryable, fused prior-and-observed motion, and per-element uncertainty - that our combination provides.
Dibyendu Ghosh, Ayushi Shakya
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Reverse to Advance: Teleoperation-Cost Effective Hard Policy Learning from Reversed Easy Tasks

High-quality teleoperation datasets are costly to collect, particularly for hard tasks. We observe that many tasks exhibit directional asymmetry: completing the forward hard task is difficult, whereas reversing it by relaxing or disrupting the environment is comparatively easy. This suggests that reversed easy-task trajectories can serve as a scalable supervision signal for the hard task, reducing the cost of manual demonstration collection. However, reversed data can be noisy, and directly training on it may yield suboptimal policies. To enable largely automated acquisition and effective use of reversed data, we propose a teleoperation-cost effective framework for hard policy learning via temporal reversal of easy tasks, consisting of three key components: a closed-loop data collection pipeline that alternates between hard-task and easy-task policies to autonomously reset the environment and generate diverse trajectories; a hierarchical data refinement pipeline that temporally inverts easy-task rollouts and filters low-quality motion using kinematic priors and a critic-guided advantage filter; and an iterative policy learning method that trains the hard-task policy using both initial reversed easy-task demonstrations and the filtered reversed data in a continuous online learning loop. By combining automated collection, hierarchical refinement, and iterative learning, our method enables scalable, reliable training of complex, high-precision manipulation tasks. Across two simulated benchmarks and real-robot experiments, we demonstrate that our method improves hard-task success rates with higher data efficiency and more stable training compared to reversal-based and reinforcement-learning baselines, without requiring extensive hard-task teleoperation.
Qiyuan Qiao, Ge Yuan, Can Wang +1
Jul 12, 2026cs.RO

Learning Roller-Skating Motions of Humanoid Robots Based on Adversarial Motion Priors

Humanoid roller-skating is difficult because the robot must coordinate whole-body balance, rolling contacts, and velocity-dependent posture regulation. This paper presents an adversarial motion prior based reinforcement learning framework for two humanoid roller-skating gaits: Pump Glide skating and Push Glide skating. The two gait datasets are collected independently through motion capture and retargeted to the humanoid robot separately. The retargeted data are then smoothed and resampled into reference motion states for AMP training. The two gaits are learned by independent AMP training pipelines with separate reference datasets, separate policies, and independent reward architectures. Simulation experiments are designed to evaluate gait quality, velocity tracking, turning, and gait-specific reward ablations.
Yunkang Cheng, Yutong Wu, Menghan Li +2
Jul 11, 2026cs.GR

Learn2Chat: Rethinking Dyadic Talking Heads via Interaction-Modulated Monologic Priors

Dyadic conversational motion generation is essential for realistic interactive digital humans. Existing approaches typically model conversational behaviors within unified dyadic generators. However, such holistic formulations tend to couple self-speech-driven motion with partner-responsive social feedback, leaving the interaction-specific component implicit and underutilizing the speech-motion correspondence already learned by pretrained monologic motion models. We propose Learn2Chat, a unified framework that models dyadic motion as interaction modulation over pretrained monologic motion priors. This design separates intrinsic speech-driven motion from social interaction effects and enables more structured interaction modeling. Specifically, we introduce a Monologic-Anchored Motion Factorization scheme that leverages the semantic motion manifold learned from monologic data to disentangle audio-driven motion dynamics from interaction-induced modulation, yielding clean interaction representations from dyadic sequences. On top of this representation space, a Cross-Attentive Interaction Latent Prediction module maps paired speech signals to interaction latents through cross-branch attention and interaction alignment. During inference, the predicted interaction latents modulate canonical monologic motion to generate coherent and synchronized dyadic behaviors in a data-efficient manner. Extensive experiments on the DualTalk benchmark demonstrate that Learn2Chat achieves state-of-the-art performance across both quantitative metrics and perceptual evaluations. Moreover, the framework is model-agnostic and seamlessly integrates with diverse pretrained monologic motion backbones, highlighting the effectiveness of prior reuse and interaction adaptation for scalable conversational motion generation. More visual results are available on the project page.
Zikai Huang, Siyue Chen, Xuemiao Xu +4
Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

PhysV2A: Reachability-Gated and Semantic-Mask-Constrained Feasibility Completion for Video-to-Robot Manipulation

Video-based manipulation provides object-centric motion priors from human demonstrations, generated videos, or RGB-D observations, but such priors are typically embodiment-agnostic and cannot be directly executed by a specific robot. This paper presents \textbf{PhysV2A}, a reachability-gated and semantic-mask-constrained feasibility-completion framework for converting video-derived 6D object motion into robot-executable manipulation trajectories. The key idea is to treat grasp feasibility as trajectory-conditioned rather than local: each RGB-D-generated 6-DoF grasp candidate is rigidly coupled with the recovered object motion to form a grasp-conditioned TCP trajectory hypothesis. PhysV2A then performs hierarchical reachability-gated selection, where infeasible grasp--trajectory pairs are rejected by robot-centric kinematic checks and surviving candidates are ranked by downstream execution suitability. For the selected reachable trajectory, a VLM-assisted and rule-validated S-Mask identifies task-critical and relaxable Cartesian components, enabling semantic-mask-constrained manipulability refinement through redundancy-first optimization and bounded Cartesian relaxation. Real-robot experiments on four tabletop manipulation tasks show that PhysV2A improves task success over representative video-prior and IK-only baselines, reduces kinematic-feasibility failures, and produces better-conditioned trajectories with bounded semantic deviations.
Haohui Huang, Junda Duan, Tao Teng +1
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

LAMP: Latent Motion Prior-Guided Real-World Learning for Dexterous Hand Manipulation

Real-world learning for dexterous hands remains brittle because high-dimensional hand actions amplify imitation errors and make reinforcement-learning exploration prone to contact-breaking motion. While combining imitation learning (IL) with online reinforcement learning (RL) can reduce manual supervision, unconstrained exploration in raw hand-action spaces is sample-inefficient and risky for physical hardware. We introduce a latent motion prior module (\prior{}) that maps recent hand-action histories to a compact, history-conditioned latent prior and decodes continuous latent commands into executable high-dimensional hand targets. Built on this prior, \method{} is a three-stage real-world dexterous learning framework: it pretrains \prior{} from demonstrations, trains a visuomotor policy that predicts native arm commands and latent hand-action offsets, and improves the policy with online residual RL in the same latent hand-action space. This shared, decodable interface lets residual exploration make local corrections near demonstrated, contact-consistent hand motions rather than perturbing every finger joint independently. We evaluate \method{} on four real-robot dexterous manipulation tasks against raw, linear, and discrete hand-action interfaces. Starting from small task-specific demonstration sets, \method{} achieves a 56.25% average IL success rate and raises it to 98.75% after online RL, reaching 100% final success on three tasks and 95% on the remaining task.
Xinye Yang, Zhiyuan Ma, Hongze Yu +5
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

MP-MPPI: A Motion Primitive Guided Sampling-Based Optimizer for Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a novel method that extends the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) method with motion primitives for additional structured sampling, which enhances the convergence towards a globally optimal solution. By evaluating motion primitives and perturbed control sequences in a real-time sampling-based optimization loop, this work addresses the limitations of the path planning capabilities of sampling-based controllers. The algorithm is implemented on a quadcopter simulator and tested on an obstacle field navigation task. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach enhances exploration of the control space while maintaining the fast, reactive behavior required for real-time control.
Marlon Mathisen, Aksel Vaaler, Olav Egeland +1
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

ADP: Adversarial Dynamics Priors for Physically Grounded Humanoid Locomotion

In this paper, we propose Adversarial Dynamics Priors (ADP) for perturbation-resilient humanoid locomotion control. Existing motion prior-based methods induce natural motion styles by imitating kinematic motion features, but they do not directly regularize dynamics features, such as CoM motion, centroidal momentum, contact forces, and contact states. To address this limitation, we replace kinematic motion-style feature with selected dynamics features extracted from locomotion trajectories as the target of adversarial regularization. To this end, we use trajectory optimization to construct a reference dataset and train a discriminator to evaluate whether policy-induced temporal windows are consistent with the resulting reference distribution. Without explicit motion tracking, ADP encourages policy rollouts to remain close to the reference support, even after perturbations. Experimental results show that, compared with AMP, the strongest baseline in our evaluation, ADP improves the 80%80\%-success impulse threshold (J80J_{80}) by 16.7%16.7\%, while reducing direction-averaged recovery time and velocity tracking error by 47.9%47.9\% and 35.4%35.4\%, respectively.
Seokju Lee, Jeongtae Lee, Jeonghyeok Lim +6
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

From General Actions to Domain-Specific Monitoring: Prior-Adaptive Transfer for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition models have recently shown strong performance on large-scale benchmarks with general actions. However, directly transferring them to domain-specific tasks e.g., healthcare monitoring, is often suboptimal, as such tasks are narrow in scope and may be relevant to only a subset of general motion priors. Moreover, not all pretrained motion patterns are equally useful for a specific task, and retaining less relevant components may hinder adaptation and increase computational cost. To address these challenges, we propose Prior-Adaptive Transfer of Skeletons (PATS), a framework that adapts general skeleton-based models by selectively retaining task-relevant motion priors while filtering redundant ones during transfer. PATS follows a standard pipeline that extracts skeleton signals from videos and employs a spatio-temporal backbone pre-trained on general actions. The key contribution lies in a novel Adaptive Prior Transfer module, which performs model compression as a prior selection mechanism through iterative pruning and refinement. Experiments on two specific action recognition tasks, Alzheimer's detection and fall detection, show consistent improvements in both performance and efficiency over competitive baselines. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Hao Wang, Di Yang, Jiangtao Wang
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Learning Cardiac Motion Priors for Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit neural representations (INRs) are well suited to cardiac motion estimation, providing continuous, compact representations of motion fields. However, fitting an INR to each image sequence is time-consuming and sensitive to the optimisation trajectory. Learned priors can help guide optimisation towards plausible motion fields and enable faster adaptation, but learning priors for cardiac motion INRs remains under-explored. In this work, we compare four strategies for learning cardiac motion priors, including a population prior learned by joint optimisation, a consensus prior obtained by weight averaging, auto-decoders, and meta-learning. Using short-axis tagged cardiac magnetic resonance images from the UK Biobank, we evaluate their impact on tracking accuracy, motion behaviour, and adaptation trajectory. All learned priors substantially improved early adaptation performance compared with random initialisation. While the simple consensus prior was effective, auto-decoders recovered large deformations faster during early adaptation. Meta-learning achieved strong early performance and maintained the best adaptation trajectory over 50 iterations.
Andrew Bell, George Webber, Andrew P King +3
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Local Motion Matters: A Deconstruct-Recompose Paradigm for Reinforcement Learning Pre-training from Videos

Pre-training on large-scale videos to improve reinforcement learning efficiency is promising yet remains challenging. Existing methods typically treat the agent as an indivisible entity, modeling motion patterns globally. Such global modeling is tightly coupled with the morphology, hindering transfer across domains. In contrast, despite the vast disparity in global motions, the local components exhibit similar motion patterns across different agents. Building on this insight, we propose a novel Deconstruct-Recompose Paradigm (DRP) for learning transferable local motion representations. Specifically, in the Deconstruct phase, we identify multiple local points and track their frame-wise motions, defining each as an Atomic Action. We introduce a Dual-Attention Encoder (DAE) to learn local motion representations from these Atomic Actions, capturing their spatiotemporal relationships. In the Recompose phase, we compose local motion representations with a learnable Motion Aggregation Token [MAT] via latent dynamics model learning. Additionally, an adapter bridges local motion and downstream action-specific dynamics to accelerate policy learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively transfers to diverse robotic control and manipulation tasks, significantly improving sample efficiency and performance.
Jinwen Wang, Youfang Lin, Xiaobo Hu +2
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

X-Morph: Human Motion Priors for Scalable Robot Learning Across Morphologies

Recent progress in humanoid behavior models has been driven in large part by abundant human motion data, but comparable motion data is scarce for non-humanoid legged robots such as quadrupeds, hexapods, and quadruped manipulators. A promising alternative is to repurpose human motion across embodiments; however, direct retargeting often produces motions that are visually plausible yet physically inconsistent or difficult to track under robot dynamics. We present X-Morph, a human-motion-to-robot-behavior pipeline that converts human motion into deployable locomotion and loco-manipulation policies for diverse non-humanoid legged morphologies. A cross-morphology retargeting stage converts human motions into kinematically plausible, intent-preserving robot references, which are then tracked by a privileged RL policy and distilled into a causal student policy. We evaluate X-Morph on three morphologically distinct platforms: a quadruped, a hexapod, and a quadruped equipped with a manipulator. The resulting policies track diverse retargeted motions, generalize to unseen human motions, and support downstream use cases including video-based teleoperation, behavior-prior control, and text-conditioned motion generation. These results suggest that large-scale human motion can serve as a substrate for learning broad, reusable behavior priors beyond humanoid robots. Project page: https://maker-rat.github.io/morph/
Ritwik Sharma, Shivam Sood, Arhaan Jain +3
Jun 28, 2026cs.RO

Empowering a Single-Frequency GNSS Receiver to Achieve High-Precision Positioning with Relative Observations

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) navigation is widely used to provide absolute, outdoor positioning in field robotics. Advances in Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) technology can achieve centimeter-level accuracy, facilitating autonomous navigation tasks. However, the cost and extra infrastructure used for RTK still hinder the application and more cost-effective solutions are desired. In this letter, we present a novel tightly-coupled state estimation framework that achieves high-precision localization by using low-cost, mass-market single-frequency GNSS receivers with any relative motion sensors (e.g., wheel encoder, camera, LiDAR). We propose a sliding-window factor graph that integrates generic relative motion with global epoch-to-anchor constraints derived from continuous carrier phase tracking. To eliminate the reliance on physical base stations, we introduce a virtual anchor mechanism: upon the initial observation of a satellite, its state is locked as a virtual reference to establish global epoch-to-anchor constraints. By substituting multi-frequency hardware redundancy with single-frequency multi-modal kinematic priors and a robust cycle-slip recovery technique, our approach ensures carrier-phase integrity on cheap receivers. Extensive real-world experiments on heterogeneous low-cost sensor suites validate that our method improves the accuracy of a single-frequency receiver from several meters to decimeter-level precision across diverse environments, providing an accurate, cost-effective and reliable alternative for autonomous navigation.
Xingpeng Wang, Ziwen Qu, Juncheng Chen +8
Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.
Jiye Lee, Yonghun Choi, Jungdam Won
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

MotionPyramid: Hierarchical Motion Representation and Residual Interfaces

We ask whether the representational hierarchy seen in perception, from local primitives such as edges to higher level structures such as parts and objects, can be established for motion. In humanoid control, low level actions specify immediate motor commands, while meaningful behavior is organized over longer temporal scales, including contacts, gait fragments, balance recovery, reaching, and whole body skills. We introduce MotionPyramid, a hierarchical action representation that learns such structure from motion data. Starting from a motion tracking teacher, it trains a recursive stack of latent decoders: low level latents decode to immediate full body motor commands, while higher level latents unfold through lower levels into temporally extended motion programs. After pretraining, the hierarchy is frozen and reused by downstream reinforcement learning policies as a family of action interfaces at different control resolutions. Experiments show the learned levels form a motion hierarchy: coarser interfaces improve early learning and motion regularity by constraining exploration to structured segments, while finer interfaces preserve feedback control and final task precision. Representation probes show the hierarchy supports traversal, interpolation, transition, and qualitative composition, exposing editable control handles across temporal scales. Finally, we introduce Residual Interfaces, letting a downstream policy maintain coarse, segment level, and frame level residual commands through the frozen hierarchy. Analogous to residual or skip connections in deep networks, this allows coarse motion programs and fine residual corrections to coexist within one controller. MotionPyramid shows that motion, like perception, can be organized into a reusable multi level representation, providing structured abstraction without sacrificing controllability.
Gao Zhu, Zaishuo Xia, Yubei Chen
Jun 14, 2026cs.RO

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.
Loukas Kordos, Leonard T. Franz, Simon Rappenecker +4
Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.
Amir Mann, Gal Michael Harari, Merav Keidar +1
Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animation

The explosion of generative 3D assets has created a massive demand for animation, yet current motion capture methods remain brittle, restricted to species-specific templates (e.g., SMPL) or requiring labor-intensive manual rigging. We introduce TopoCap, the first unified framework capable of extracting motion from monocular video and retargeting it onto characters with arbitrary, unseen skeletal topologies, i.e., from bipeds to hexapods and inanimate objects, without test-time optimization. Our key insight is that while skeletal structures are combinatorial and discrete, the underlying physics of motion occupy a continuous, low-dimensional manifold. We materialize this insight via a two-stage generative pipeline. First, we learn a Universal Motion Manifold using a Graph CVAE that compresses heterogeneous kinematic chains into a shared, fixed-length latent code. By explicitly conditioning the decoder on a structural embedding of the target rig, we disentangle motion dynamics from skeletal topology. Second, we treat video-to-animation as a conditional flow matching problem, predicting these topology-agnostic codes from visual features. To learn this generalized prior, we introduce Mobjaverse, a massive-scale dataset curated from Objaverse-XL. Comprising over 5,000 unique skeletal topologies and 2 million frames, it exceeds the structural diversity of existing datasets by two orders of magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodMotion outperforms specialist models on human and quadruped benchmarks while enabling zero-shot retargeting for the long tail of 3D creatures. Dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/duckduckplz/Mobjaverse.
Cheng-Feng Pu, Jia-Peng Zhang, Meng-Hao Guo +2
Jun 8, 2026cs.RO

MosaicIMU: Composing Carrier Experts for Generalizable Neural Inertial Odometry

Robust inertial odometry is essential for various carriers when external sensing is unreliable. Learning-based methods reduce integration drift by capturing local motion priors, but these methods often remain tied to a particular carrier, limiting generalization across heterogeneous platforms. We present MosaicIMU, a carrier-conditioned Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pretraining-and-adaptation framework for generalizable neural inertial odometry. MosaicIMU uses a prototype-based router to compose carrier-specific expert features, decodes local velocity and uncertainty constraints, and integrates them with a history-aware EKF. For unseen domain adaptation, it freezes the pretrained base model and learns a new lightweight expert residual branch. For edge-deployment, it further reuses the router to select informative online samples for efficient incremental updates. Experiments show that MosaicIMU consistently outperforms learning-based baselines, reducing average ATE and RTE-10s by 40% and 34%, respectively. These results highlight that MosaicIMU provides a scalable pretraining-to-deployment paradigm for generalizable and adaptive neural inertial odometry.
Junye Zou, Huiyi Yan, Xinning Xu +4
Jun 7, 2026cs.RO

EgoPriMo: Egocentric Motion Generation for Interactive Humanoid Control

Humanoid robots require whole-body motions that adapt to scene context, task requirements, and user intent. Motion tracking reproduces specified trajectories, and humanoid vision-language-action systems provide semantic interfaces, but neither offers a scalable and interactive prior for broad full-body behavior. We introduce EgoPriMo (Egocentric Motion Prior for Humanoid Robots), a unified framework that learns such priors from egocentric human demonstrations. Given egocentric observations and a text prompt, EgoPriMo reconstructs, generates, and forecasts SMPL-based full-body motion. Language is used as a high-level control signal rather than a complete motion specification. At the core of EgoPriMo is a Triple-stream DiT that jointly models body dynamics, egocentric visual context, and text; task-conditioning masks route different tasks and missing-modality data through the same checkpoint. Experiments on Nymeria and EgoExo4D show that one checkpoint improves egocentric motion generation over UniEgoMotion while supporting reconstruction and forecasting; the generated SMPL motions can also be executed by a Unitree humanoid controller. These results indicate a practical path from scalable egocentric observations to generalizable and interactive humanoid motion priors.
Haoyang Ge, Peng Ren, Yukun Shi +3
Jun 6, 2026cs.RO

Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model: Adapting Human Motion Priors to Robot-Centric Terrain

Humanoid behavior foundation models aim to acquire reusable whole-body control policies from broad human motion priors, enabling a single controller to produce diverse and expressive behaviors. However, existing motion-centric foundation policies largely assume that the reference motion is already physically compatible with the robot's surroundings. This assumption breaks when the demonstrator, operator, and robot inhabit different environments: a human motion may specify the intended behavior, but not the footholds, clearance, body height, or contact timing required by the robot's local terrain. We introduce \emph{Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model} (Perceptive BFM), a terrain-aware humanoid control framework that grounds human motion priors in robot-centric perception. The model preserves raw kinematic motion references as the behavioral interface, while using local terrain observations to adapt contacts, posture, and timing. To provide scalable terrain supervision, we develop \emph{terrain-conformal reference synthesis} (TCRS), which converts locomotion-oriented human motion clips into terrain-consistent references through contact-aware foothold construction, foot-geometry-aware swing optimization, support-aware root reconstruction, collision repair, and multi-point inverse kinematics. We then train a blind adapted-reference teacher and transfer its terrain-conformal behavior to a deployed raw-reference student through target-frame action alignment. The student is an identity-gated Transformer tracker whose terrain features enter through residual pathways initialized to preserve the motion-tracking prior and trained to produce local corrections only when needed.
Zifan Wang, Yizhao Li, Teli Ma +5
Jun 5, 2026cs.RO

T-GMP: Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors for Versatile and Natural Humanoid Locomotion

Achieving both anthropomorphic naturalness and robust terrain traversal remains a fundamental challenge in humanoid locomotion. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches typically rely on fixed motion priors, limiting their adaptability to varying environments. We propose Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors (T-GMP), a module that captures a terrain-conditioned latent motion manifold from a few expert state-terrain demonstrations using a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). The learned priors enable smooth style transitions, facilitating a unified policy that adapts to terrain variations. We integrate T-GMP into an adversarial learning pipeline with our proposed Foothold Penalty, where a discriminator dynamically modulates naturalness constraints conditioned on local terrain features, guiding the generation of versatile and human-like motions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines in traversal success rate and motion smoothness, while preserving biomimetically natural and physically coordinated motions.
Junhong Guo, Hao Hu, Chen Chen +6
May 29, 2026cs.RO

SSR: Scaling Surefooted and Symmetric Humanoid Traversal to the Open World

Extending humanoid traversal to the open world is key to practical deployment in human environments, but remains challenging. The robot must use vision to ensure safe and reliable foot placement on heterogeneous terrain under highly dynamic motion, while producing coordinated, natural whole-body behaviors. We propose SSR, an efficient end-to-end framework for egocentric vision-based humanoid traversal that jointly learns these capabilities. SSR introduces imagined foothold guidance, which learns to model forthcoming swing-foot contacts and evaluates their support to guide pre-touchdown swings toward stable regions, reducing edge slips. It further employs equivariant latent-space symmetry augmentation to efficiently induce bilateral coordination under high-dimensional visual observations, and uses terrain-specific multi-discriminator motion priors to encourage human-like behavior across scenes. Extensive experiments show that SSR achieves safe, stable, and high-quality locomotion on diverse real-world terrains, including stairs with varied structures and extreme challenges such as wide gaps and high platforms, while enabling reliable long-horizon traversal in open outdoor environments.
Ruiqi Yu, Yiwen Wang, Yuan Hao +2
May 27, 2026cs.RO

Visualizing Latent Phase Structures in Locomotion Policies: A Multi-Environment Study with Temporal Feature Extension

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to achieve high performance on locomotion control tasks in MuJoCo benchmarks such as HalfCheetah, Ant, and Walker2D. However, visualizing the motion structures internally obtained by a trained policy function implemented as a deep neural network remains challenging. It is known from biomechanics and related fields that locomotion control is realized through the repetition of motion phases such as the stance phase and swing phase. In this study, we propose a framework for uncovering latent motion phase structures from trajectories generated by locomotion control policies through interaction with the environment. The proposed method extends the clustering features from state observations alone to augmented features including actions, next states, and next actions, and introduces a method for determining the number of clusters that suppresses self-transitions. Applying the proposed method to three environments -- Ant-v5, HalfCheetah-v5, and Walker2D-v5 -- we successfully identified phase structures with clearer and more regular transition rules than those obtained by the existing method.
Daisuke Yasui, Toshitaka Matuki, Hiroshi Sato
May 18, 2026cs.RO

Unified Walking, Running, and Recovery for Humanoids via State-Dependent Adversarial Motion Priors

We propose a unified reinforcement learning framework that enables a single policy to perform walking, running, and fall recovery on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, validated on physical hardware without any explicit mode-switching command at deployment. The framework extends Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP) by replacing the conventional global reference distribution with a state-dependent gate that routes each training transition to one of two discriminators: a dedicated recovery discriminator and a velocity-conditioned locomotion discriminator that jointly covers walking and running. The gate is defined by a single fixed threshold on projected gravity: the recovery discriminator is activated when body tilt exceeds approximately 3737^\circ from vertical (gz+1>0.6|g_z+1|>0.6); otherwise the locomotion discriminator is used, with the normalized commanded velocity serving as a condition that selects the appropriate reference trajectory between walk and run clips. Only three LAFAN1 reference clips are required to regularize the complete behavior set. At deployment, a single frozen ONNX policy executes at 50,Hz with no runtime mode logic; hardware experiments demonstrate successful recovery from both prone and supine falls and smooth walk-to-run transitions under the same controller.
Yidan Lu, Yichao Zhong, Liu Zhao +2
May 16, 2026cs.CV

Observation-Aligned Mask Priors for Learning Physical Dynamics from Authentic Occlusions

Learning physical dynamics directly from incomplete observations is challenging because authentic occlusions are structured, sample-dependent, and often missing not at random, whereas existing methods typically rely on heuristic masking rules or predefined mask distributions. We propose Observation-Aligned Mask Priors, a framework that learns the distribution of authentic observation masks and uses it to construct context-query partitions for training from incomplete data. Specifically, we pretrain a Bayesian Flow Network (BFN) on binary observation masks to capture real occlusion topologies, then guide BFN sampling with a globally normalized cross-entropy objective to generate sample-specific masks aligned with each sparse observation. The intersection between the guided mask and the observed mask defines the context, and the remaining observed entries become query targets for a diffusion-based reconstruction model. We show that this intersection-based partitioning gives every valid observed dimension a strictly positive probability of being queried, preventing zero-query dead zones and local generative collapse. Experiments on three real-world oceanographic datasets with authentic satellite occlusions, across resolutions up to 256×\times256, show consistent improvements over strong diffusion baselines in MSE and PSNR. These results demonstrate that learning mask priors from authentic occlusions is an effective alternative to heuristic masking for learning from incomplete physical observations without access to fully observed fields.
Chiyuan Ma, Zihan Zhou, Tianshu Yu
May 9, 2026cs.RO

Constraint-Aware Diffusion Priors for High-Fidelity and Versatile Quadruped Locomotion

Reinforcement learning combined with imitation learning has significantly advanced biomimetic quadrupedal locomotion. However, scaling these frameworks to massive, multi-source datasets exposes fundamental bottlenecks. First, traditional GAN-based discriminators are prone to mode collapse, struggling to capture diverse motion distributions from uncurated datasets. Second, existing kinematic priors suffer from out-of-distribution (OOD) tracking conflicts, leading to severe unintended heading drifts during complex maneuvers. Furthermore, deploying unconstrained priors to physical hardware poses critical safety risks by disregarding actuator dynamics. To overcome these challenges, we propose Diff-CAST (Diffusion-guided Constraint-Aware Symmetric Tracking), a novel motion prior framework leveraging the multi-modal distribution modeling capabilities of diffusion models for stylistic rewards. Diff-CAST effectively replaces traditional GAN discriminators, unlocking robust data scaling on heterogeneous collections. To ensure high-fidelity intent execution and reliable real-world deployment, we introduce a comprehensive Sim2Real architecture integrating Symmetric Augmented Command Conditioning (SACC) for drift-free tracking, and Constrained RL for hardware safety. Experiments on a quadruped demonstrate that Diff-CAST mitigates mode collapse, enables seamless transitions between diverse skills, and ensures robust, hardware-compliant locomotion.
Jianhui Chen, Ruixin Zhan, Liu Liu +2
May 4, 2026cs.CV

Unified Map Prior Encoder for Mapping and Planning

Online mapping and end-to-end (E2E) planning in autonomous driving remain largely sensor-centric, leaving rich map priors, including HD/SD vector maps, rasterized SD maps, and satellite imagery, underused because of heterogeneity, pose drift, and inconsistent availability at test time. We present UMPE, a Unified Map Prior Encoder that can ingest any subset of four priors and fuse them with BEV features for both mapping and planning. UMPE has two branches. The vector encoder pre-aligns HD/SD polylines with a frame-wise SE(2) correction, encodes points via multi-frequency sinusoidal features, and produces polyline tokens with confidence scores. BEV queries then apply cross-attention with confidence bias, followed by normalized channel-wise gating to avoid length imbalance and softly down-weight uncertain sources. The raster encoder shares a ResNet-18 backbone conditioned by FiLM with scaling and shift at every stage, performs SE(2) micro-alignment, and injects priors through zero-initialized residual fusion, so the network starts from a do-no-harm baseline and learns to add only useful prior evidence. A vector-then-raster fusion order reflects the inductive bias of geometry first, appearance second. On nuScenes mapping, UMPE lifts MapTRv2 from 61.5 to 67.4 mAP (+5.9) and MapQR from 66.4 to 71.7 mAP (+5.3). On Argoverse2, UMPE adds +4.1 mAP over strong baselines. UMPE is compositional: when trained with all priors, it outperforms single-prior models even when only one prior is available at test time, demonstrating powerset robustness. For E2E planning with the VAD backbone on nuScenes, UMPE reduces trajectory error from 0.72 to 0.42 m L2 on average (-0.30 m) and collision rate from 0.22% to 0.12% (-0.10%), surpassing recent prior-injection methods. These results show that a unified, alignment-aware treatment of heterogeneous map priors yields better mapping and better planning.
Zongzheng Zhang, Sizhe Zou, Guantian Zheng +12
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

PKS4\text{PKS}^4:Parallel Kinematic Selective State Space Scanners for Efficient Video Understanding

Temporal modeling remains a fundamental challenge in video understanding, particularly as sequence lengths scale. Traditional video models relying on dense spatiotemporal attention suffer from quadratic computational costs for long videos. To circumvent these costs, recent approaches adapt image models for videos via Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as adapters. However, deeply inserting these modules incurs prohibitive activation memory overhead during back-propagation. While recent efficient State Space Models (SSMs) introduce linear complexity, they disrupt 2D spatial relationships and rely on extensive masked pre-training to recover spatial awareness. To overcome these limitations, we propose Parallel Kinematic Selective State Space Scanners (PKS4^4). We retain a standard 2D vision backbone for spatial semantics and insert a single plug-and-play PKS4^4 module with linear-complexity temporal scanning, avoiding temporal attention and multi-layer adapters. We first extract kinematic priors via a Kinematic Prior Encoder, which captures local displacements and motion boundaries through inter-frame correlations and differences. These priors drive linear-complexity SSMs to track underlying kinematic states, adaptively modulating update speeds and read-write strategies at each time step. Instead of global scanning, we deploy parallel scanners along the temporal dimension for each spatial location, preserving spatial structures while reducing overhead. Experiments on spatial-heavy and temporal-heavy action recognition benchmarks show that PKS4^4 achieves state-of-the-art performance. Remarkably, our method converges in merely 2020 epochs, achieving approximately 10×10\times lower training compute than pure video SSMs, establishing a new paradigm for efficient video understanding.
Lingjie Zeng, Hailun Zhang, Xiwen Wang +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

Quadruped Parkour Learning: Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts with Visual Input

Robotic parkour provides a compelling benchmark for advancing locomotion over highly challenging terrain, including large discontinuities such as elevated steps. Recent approaches have demonstrated impressive capabilities, including dynamic climbing and jumping, but typically rely on sequential multilayer perceptron (MLP) architectures with densely activated layers. In contrast, sparsely gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have emerged in the large language model domain as an effective paradigm for improving scalability and performance by activating only a subset of parameters at inference time. In this work, we investigate the application of sparsely gated MoE architectures to vision-based robotic parkour. We compare control policies based on standard MLPs and MoE architectures under a controlled setting where the number of active parameters at inference time is matched. Experimental results on a real Unitree Go2 quadruped robot demonstrate clear performance gains, with the MoE policy achieving double the number of successful trials in traversing large obstacles compared to a standard MLP baseline. We further show that achieving comparable performance with a standard MLP requires scaling its parameter count to match that of the total MoE model, resulting in a 14.3% increase in computation time. These results highlight that sparsely gated MoE architectures provide a favorable trade-off between performance and computational efficiency, enabling improved scaling of control policies for vision-based robotic parkour. An anonymized link to the codebase is https://osf.io/v2kqj/files/github?view_only=7977dee10c0a44769184498eaba72e44.
Michael Ziegltrum, Jianhao Jiao, Tianhu Peng +2
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Gait Learning for Humanoid Robots Using Reinforcement Learning with Selective Adversarial Motion Prior

Learning diverse locomotion skills for humanoid robots in a unified reinforcement learning framework remains challenging due to the conflicting requirements of stability and dynamic expressiveness across different gaits. We present a multi-gait learning approach that enables a humanoid robot to master five distinct gaits -- walking, goose-stepping, running, stair climbing, and jumping -- using a consistent policy structure, action space, and reward formulation. The key contribution is a selective Adversarial Motion Prior (AMP) strategy: AMP is applied to periodic, stability-critical gaits (walking, goose-stepping, stair climbing) where it accelerates convergence and suppresses erratic behavior, while being deliberately omitted for highly dynamic gaits (running, jumping) where its regularization would over-constrain the motion. Policies are trained via PPO with domain randomization in simulation and deployed on a physical 12-DOF humanoid robot through zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Quantitative comparisons demonstrate that selective AMP outperforms a uniform AMP policy across all five gaits, achieving faster convergence, lower tracking error, and higher success rates on stability-focused gaits without sacrificing the agility required for dynamic ones.
Yuanye Wu, Keyi Wang, Linqi Ye +1
Date pendingcs.RO

SkillX: Unified Multi-Skill Policy Learning for Humanoid Soccer

Humanoid soccer is a challenging testbed for dynamic whole-body control, requiring robots to coordinate balance, locomotion, object interaction, and skill switching over long horizons. Existing humanoid sports methods often rely on task-specific multi-stage pipelines, making it difficult to jointly learn and compose multiple object-interactive skills within a single deployable policy. To address this, we present SkillX, a unified reinforcement learning framework that learns and composes multiple atomic soccer skills through a single command-conditioned policy. SkillX integrates three core designs: skill-specific adversarial motion priors, skill-specific critics, and an object-aware temporal encoder, enabling the robot to execute atomic skills and transition among them such as dribbling, trapping, and shooting. Experiments in simulation and on a real Noetix E1 humanoid demonstrate robust multi-skill execution, long-horizon skill composition, and successful sim-to-real deployment.
Zhangchen Ye, Enxuan Ruan, Yifei Bao +10