Robot Policies

Deploying robot foundation models at scale is the next step towards realizing the potential of general-purpose robots. However, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and other foundation models are computationally demanding, and on-device compute is constrained by power and space. In this paper, we introduce the problem of serving a robot policy to multiple robots from a remote GPU and formulate it as a scheduling problem. We build Armory, a serving system validated on fleets of both simulated and real robots. Our experiments show that naive scheduling heuristics perform well when all robots are the same, but fall short when robots consume action chunks at different rates, uncovering a mismatch between conventional batching methods and the closed-loop requirements of robot policy execution. To address this, we propose a scheduling algorithm that accounts for this heterogeneity and improves overall system throughput by up to $18\%$ in real-world experiments. Additional details are available at https://gatech-rl2.github.io/actionchunkscheduling.

By relying on independent couplings from uninformative Gaussian priors, standard diffusion and flow matching models are forced to learn complex, high-cost vector fields to reach the physical action space. Generative models excel at capturing multimodal behaviors for robotic Learning from Demonstration (LfD), but often suffer from high inference cost. This paper introduces Temporal Policy, a generative framework based on stochastic interpolants that formulates action generation as a temporally coupled transport problem. By initializing the generative flow at the robot's recent history, we explicitly couple past states to future action sequences. This data-dependent coupling reduces transport cost and produces straight vector fields. We validate Temporal Policy across visuomotor simulation benchmarks and on a physical Barrett WAM 2x 7DoF teleoperation platform. Our approach reduces transport costs by nearly an order of magnitude compared to noise-initialized baselines, achieving a 19.1 ms inference latency on a single NVIDIA RTX 4080. Crucially, these geometric and computational efficiencies are achieved while matching the success rates of state-of-the-art baselines. This simplified transport geometry bypasses the computational bottleneck of independent Gaussian priors, helping enable high-frequency, closed-loop control. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/dmiller12/TemporalPolicy.

Reliable robot learning requires a world simulator that can predict action consequences before execution on physical hardware, including risky and failure-prone outcomes. Existing physics simulators require substantial asset construction and calibration and still face a sim-to-real gap, while video generators often lack precise control over their responses to fine-grained robot actions. In this paper, we present the Boundless World Model (BWM), an open-source, low-cost, high-fidelity world simulator for robot manipulation. BWM is an action-conditioned world model that combines initial-environment guidance, dynamic visual history, and temporally aligned robot-action conditioning for stateful autoregressive prediction of future observations. We construct action-aligned training clips through trajectory replay, overlapping clip sampling, and initial-observation enhancement. BWM serves as a data engine that augments imitation-learning data with action-aligned rollouts, and as a policy evaluator for closed-loop assessment, risk anticipation, and policy ranking. Experiments on the WorldArena benchmark and physical robots demonstrate improved simulator fidelity and functional utility across the data-engine and policy-evaluator settings. BWM ranks first overall in the WorldArena Challenge across Track 1 and its two Track 2 applications. We release the BWM open-source ecosystem, including model checkpoints, training and inference code, and interfaces for data generation and policy evaluation.

Human-centric data collection is emerging as a significant paradigm for robot skill acquisition, but seamlessly integrating low-cost, scalable tactile sensing systems that capture fine-grained fingertip interactions without compromising natural operation remains a key challenge. This reduces the reliability of human-to-robot transfer in contact-rich tasks. In this work, we present TacPrint, a wearable fingertip tactile sensor, where protrusions on the inner surface of the silicone skin are aligned one-to-one with 24 capacitive taxels to enable localized capacitive responses. A real-to-sim-to-real pipeline estimates a 35 $\times$ 26 contact-depth map from 24-channel capacitive signals. Against simulation-generated labels, the model achieved a contact-region RMSE of 0.223 $\pm$ 0.161 mm, a weighted-centroid error of 1.213 $\pm$ 2.379 pixels, and an IoU of 0.829 $\pm$ 0.169. With measured capacitive inputs, the network-predicted depth evaluated at the guide-calibrated contact center showed a mean absolute error of 0.085 $\pm$ 0.057 mm across all 40 controlled trials, while the mean contact-position error was 0.250 $\pm$ 0.208 mm across the 37 trials whose reference contact regions were not truncated by the sensing boundary. In human-to-robot replay, tactile-guided compensation increased grasping and wiping success rates from 0% to 91.67% and 90%, respectively. In closed-loop grasping, dense-depth feedback achieved success rates of 87.5% over all tested positions and 85% under edge-contact conditions, compared with 67.5% and 45% for raw-taxel feedback.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) modeling remains challenging because it requires joint reasoning about hand articulation, object geometry, contact, semantics, and dynamics under severe visual uncertainty. Foundation models introduce transferable prior knowledge learned from large-scale cross-domain data, offering new ways to address these challenges beyond task-specific data and models. However, the rapidly growing literature remains fragmented, and existing studies typically describe these methods simply as ``using large models'' without systematically characterizing what knowledge is introduced, where it enters the HOI pipeline, or which HOI uncertainty it helps reduce. This survey presents the first systematic review of foundation-model priors for HOI. We organize the literature into six HOI tasks spanning reconstruction and generation. More importantly, we establish a taxonomy of eight foundation-model sub-priors grouped into geometric, semantic, and visual families. Geometric priors encompass shape retrieval, shape reconstruction, and spatial reconstruction; semantic priors include semantic grounding and language reasoning; and visual priors cover visual representation, image generation, and video generation. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically analyze how different priors are represented, injected, and adapted across HOI pipelines and tasks. Beyond how foundation models empower HOI, we further examine how HOI-derived knowledge is used in robot learning, including human-data pretraining, human-to-robot skill transfer, and HOI-to-robot data generation. Finally, we summarize datasets and evaluation protocols, and discuss limitations and future directions toward more generalizable HOI systems. To support long-term progress, we curate a live repository that continuously aggregates emerging methods and benchmarks.

Building generalizable agents for diverse applications remains a fundamental challenge. While imitation learning-based policies succeed in specific training environments, they often fail to generalize to novel scenes and tasks. In this work, we propose World Action Planner, a robot planning system that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the physical grounding of a multi-task pose-image conditioned world model. Our system enables an agent to propose initial action plans and iteratively refine them via optimization and search, reasoning over imagined world model rollouts. We demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance across compositional tasks, new layouts, and zero-shot generalization scenarios, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end policy models such as VLAs and WAMs. Project website at worldactionplanner.github.io

Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging. In this work, we study the role of using behavior-aligned representations (e.g., object bounding boxes, language motions, end-effector traces of robot motion) in vision-language-action (VLA) models to promote cross-embodiment transfer. We hypothesize that by possessing invariances across embodiments while being predictive of robot actions, these representations can help unify large-scale cross-embodiment data to enhance transfer. To assess our hypothesis, we develop a simulation-based benchmark designed to assess transfer with diverse cross-embodiment data to new embodiments. Using this benchmark, we compare different representations and ways of incorporating them. We identify that end-effector traces can be particularly beneficial for transfer, representations are generally more useful with larger prior datasets, and can be used to benefit from action-free data. We also demonstrate that they can enhance sim-to-real cross-embodiment transfer, improving task completion progress of real robot policies pre-trained on simulation data by 28%. We provide videos of our evaluations at our website: https://ajaysridhar.com/barx/.

Recent advances in robotics research have created a strong demand for high-performance simulators. Surgical robotics simulation faces unique challenges due to the need to model diverse objects, such as rigid instruments, soft tissue, and fluids. While many studies simulate sutures or soft tissue independently, only a few have considered the complete soft-tissue suturing scenario, including the contact between sutures and deformable tissue during suture insertion. Building on previous work, this paper presents a novel suturing simulation environment using sutures modelled by position-based dynamics (PBD) and soft bodies modelled by the material point method (MPM) while considering two-way contact with frictional and drag forces. We introduce a contact coupling method between the PBD suture and the MPM soft tissue, enabling visually plausible suture-tissue interactions. The simulator is optimized for GPU execution with parallel scenes using multiple CUDA streams, and we present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) environment for autonomous suturing sub-tasks, including needle insertion, driving, and extraction. Using ML-Agents, RL agents trained in the simulator show stable learning and achieve 80% and 68% success rates in needle insertion and extraction, respectively, under the strictest distance threshold.

Deep reinforcement policy learning directly in physical robots (on-robot learning) remains bottlenecked by slow wall-clock training times. We present SymmGrid, a trajectory level augmentation framework inspired by parallelized symmetries that super-scales group transformations to significantly accelerate on-robot learning in both egocentric and exocentric visual setups. We model a Markov Decision Process (MDP) under a symmetry tree, in which state-action pairs have admissible parallelized invariant transformations that yield a geometric grid structure. The state is modelled with ego- or exocentric images and proprioception information. The latter require special treatment, in the form of homographies, to warp visual scenes in line with their corresponding spatial transformations. These parallelized transformations produce a large set of unique symmetric equivalences that populate the replay buffer with diverse and consistent experiences that speed up learning and improve performance. We present extensive training and evaluations performed directly on real robot manipulation contact tasks including peg-insertions, cable routing, and object relocations. Relative to SOTA, SymmGrid achieved wall-clock training convergence speed-ups of 1.37-2.17x, evaluation success rate improvements of 1.09x-1.27x, fastest training convergence times of 16.6, 10.9, and 79.3 minutes respectively. For trajectory wide assessments, we used normalized area under the curve (nAUC) ratios. SymmGrid achieved improvements of up to 2.59x. These results confirm that simple branch symmetries can have an outsized result due to super-scaling and bring us closer to sub-10 minute on-robot learning training in manipulation tasks suitable for arms and humanoids. The project page is available at symmgrid-robot.github.io

General-purpose robotic manipulation requires robots to perform diverse tasks in open-world environments while improving their skills over time. Despite recent progress in robotic manipulation, existing systems still primarily acquire manipulation skills in a static manner, where capabilities are learned for specific tasks or settings rather than adaptively evolving through physical interaction. Resembling how repeated practice enables humans to develop muscle memory, advanced manipulation proficiency requires an autonomous capability evolution mechanism that allows robots to progressively transform interaction experiences into increasingly effective manipulation abilities. To this end, we propose HERO, a self-improving hierarchical embodied agent that enables autonomous capability evolution from zero human demonstrations. HERO organizes heuristic reasoning, exemplar reuse, and reflexive execution into a unified orchestration framework, allowing robots to autonomously bootstrap manipulation experience, rapidly accumulate reusable behaviors through experience transfer, and progressively consolidate recurring interactions into efficient closed-loop visuomotor policies. By tightly coupling autonomous data collection with task execution, HERO continuously expands and dynamically schedules manipulation capabilities according to different stages of experience accumulation and execution requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HERO substantially reduces human intervention during robotic data collection while achieving robust manipulation across diverse tasks, providing a promising path toward self-improving robotic systems.

Autonomous embodied agents must sustain a long decision-making loop that involves perceiving, acting, verifying, and self-correcting over many steps. Current systems sustain this loop through task-specific workflows or embodied policies. However, these fixed workflows and policies offer limited flexibility across environments and often lack effective recovery strategies when execution goes wrong. We find that a general-purpose agent can instead sustain the loop on its own. We term this organization agentic embodied control: the reasoning model directly steers every action, keeping reasoning and control aligned. Using zero-shot navigation as a controlled testbed, we equip three coding-agent harnesses with only a monocular RGB camera and discrete actions. At default effort, replicated opus-5 runs average $70.7\pm3.5$% success, while fable-5 reaches 78% at maximum effort. When a trained waypoint tool is offered alongside primitives, the hybrid fable-5 agent reaches $76.7\pm0.6$% at default effort, using half the environment steps and under a quarter of the wall time. Across the ablations, model choice dominates performance variation. Observed harness differences are modest, and forced waypoints help weaker models but can hinder stronger ones. Although longer horizons, latency, and context growth remain barriers to sustained autonomy, these results show that a general-purpose model can already achieve competitive embodied control without a navigation policy.

World-Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with future visual prediction, but it remains unclear what the visual modality should learn for control. While photorealistic future prediction provides dense supervision, it also incurs substantial computation and can allocate capacity to texture, illumination, and background variations that are only weakly related to action selection. Recent efficient WAM variants suggest that the main benefit of the video branch may not lie in the rendered future itself, but in the control-relevant visual representations induced during training. In this work, we revisit future video prediction from a dynamic-centric perspective and ask whether an existing RGB-based WAM can be redirected from appearance-dominated reconstruction toward interaction-induced visual dynamics without introducing additional modality-specific predictions or online inputs at deployment. We propose DC-WAM, a dynamic-centric WAM framework that redistributes supervision and computation in the RGB video branch. At the supervision level, DC-WAM combines temporal-difference flow matching with trajectory-guided weighting, emphasizing dense temporal changes and localized regions where the gripper, manipulated objects, and contact areas move. At the reasoning level, DynaRoute predicts token-wise dynamic relevance and converts it into an attention bias, guiding the model toward control-relevant future tokens. Experiments in simulation and on real-world manipulation tasks show that DC-WAM consistently improves policy performance, especially under out-of-distribution perturbations in lighting, object appearance, and background texture.

Bimanual teleoperation provides an effective way to collect robot demonstrations, but it assumes that the operator and robot have matching numbers of simultaneous control channels. This assumption breaks for tri-manual systems: the robot can coordinate three arms concurrently, whereas a single operator can continuously control only two. Pairwise mode switching may therefore record otherwise independent motions sequentially, causing behaviour cloning to reproduce delays imposed by the interface rather than required by the task. We present TriManPolicy, a tri-manual imitation learning system that allows one operator to demonstrate behaviours for three arms. Its central component is Dependency-Aware Tri-Arm Scheduling (DATS). The key idea is to preserve the demonstrated arm motions while reconsidering when they occur. DATS retimes demonstrations offline by preserving local sensorimotor segments of fixed duration and repositioning them according to constraints on task order and arm usage that are reviewed by a human. The resulting data train a single synchronous policy for all three arms, while deployment requires neither the dependency graph nor the scheduler. Across six challenging tasks performed in the real world, policies trained on demonstrations retimed by DATS exhibit more efficient coordination while maintaining comparable observed task success. Offline analysis further shows that DATS changes the supervision across arms rather than merely removing idle periods. Project videos and additional material are available at https://aus.bot/trimanpolicy/.

Robotic hardware evolves over time, but demonstration data is often tied to a specific sensor and actuator configuration. This raises a practical and underexplored question: when does legacy data begin to benefit an upgraded robot? We study this question on a wheeled humanoid platform across two hardware generations, where both the camera and gripper are changed while the overall morphology remains fixed. Contrary to the common assumption that more cross-configuration data is always helpful, we observe a grokking-like transition: legacy data remains ineffective until the upgraded configuration acquires a minimum level of task competence, after which co-training gains rise sharply before diminishing near saturation. We hypothesize that this task-dependent transition is governed by a transfer threshold and characterize the resulting three-phase pattern. Across real-robot manipulation tasks, we observe all three phases: no measurable benefit at low competence ($10.0\% \rightarrow 10.0\%$), a sharp gain after crossing the threshold ($23.3\% \rightarrow 86.7\%$ on flower insertion), and diminishing returns at high competence ($85.0\% \rightarrow 93.3\%$ on pen insertion). We provide a theoretical account based on gradient alignment and residual policy uncertainty, and derive a phase-aware rule for deciding when to collect more new-hardware data and when to reuse legacy demonstrations. We further validate this three-phase pattern on a mobile dual-arm watering task, with results consistent with our predictions.

Variational Autoencoders are widely used to encode high-dimensional and noisy observations in robotics. However, their stochastic latent creates a mismatch with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO): an effective policy marginalizes over the latent distribution, whereas former implementations estimate its probability ratio and KL divergence using only one latent sample. We identify a fundamental but overlooked theoretical cause: naive single-sample approximations in stochastic latent space induce significant variance and bias in the surrogate loss. To address this, we introduce P^3 (Probabilistic Policy Propagation), a distribution-aware optimization framework for VAE-based policies. $P^3$ couples moment-based probabilistic method for stable and efficient learning with sampling-based calibration for robust policy behavior under latent uncertainty. In our experiments, P^3 boosts data efficiency from 64.6% to >96%, reduces convergence steps by >20%. Furthermore, P^3 is evaluated on challenging humanoid parkour tasks and shows an effective foundation for VAE-based PPO. Code is available at https://github.com/ylyem9x/P3_Open.

Diffusion Policies (DPs) are able to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, DPs are typically trained by minimizing a denoising objective, which provides limited control over generalization in the finite-data regimes common in robotics. In this letter, we propose PAC-DP, an approach that increases the performance of DPs in robotic manipulation tasks. By modeling the DP as a Bayesian neural network, and defining a PAC-Bayes generalization bound, we derive a novel training objective that augments the standard denoising loss with a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularizer between the posterior and prior parameter distributions. From the theoretical perspective, our approach provides a principled approach to regularize the training of DPs without significantly increasing the training time. From the practical point of view, experimental results demonstrate improved denoising performance, lower variational negative log-likelihood, and higher success rates across multiple robotic manipulation benchmarks. Crucially, the largest improvements are observed in low-data training regimes and complex tasks, establishing PAC-DP as a theoretically grounded framework for robot policy learning.

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations. Video generative models offer a promising foundation by encoding rich spatiotemporal priors through future predictions. However, existing Video-Action Models either couple video and action prediction in a shared backbone, making policy adaptation harder to optimize, or under-utilize video information when guiding the action branch. In this work, we introduce DeVA, a Decoupled Video-Action model with specialized video and action experts, multi-level feature transfer, and physically salient guidance. DeVA transfers representations from multiple video layers to the action expert, enabling rich information exchange while making policy learning more tractable. It further supervises intermediate video features and the action stream with physically salient guidance (affordance/depth). Experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world deployment demonstrate strong performance with limited data, faster convergence than a unified architecture, and clear performance gains from physical guidance.

While reinforcement learning for legged robots has achieved high motor performance, it has been constrained by the limited exploration capability of actions confined to the joint space. To address this issue, this study proposes a new method, Wrench-Augmented Reinforcement Learning (WARL), which introduces a wrenche (force and torque) into the action space. The proposed method combines wrench-guided exploration with a success rate-based curriculum mechanism to expand exploration capabilities in the early stages of learning, with the ultimate goal of acquiring behaviors based solely on joint control. Experiments using a quadruped robot demonstrated that WARL can learn robustly across diverse terrains and motor tasks without requiring terrain-specific reward adjustments or complex curriculum designs. Furthermore, an ablation study verified the effectiveness of the Switching Curriculum, which gradually eliminates the wrench. On the other hand, we also show that introducing a wrench can encourage behaviors that do not sufficiently exploit the robot's physical embodiment. These findings suggest that while wrench-based exploration enhancement is effective for improving learning efficiency, designing it in a way that is consistent with the robot's physical structure is a critical future challenge.

Many recent robot policies pursue stronger control by using large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) as the action backbone. We introduce WorldDiT, a unified diffusion transformer architecture that couples action generation with visual world modeling and achieves strong performance without a large pretrained VLM action backbone. During training, a single diffusion transformer generates continuous action chunks and predicts normalized RGB patch targets from future camera frames. Across four LIBERO simulation suites, WorldDiT lies on the reported Pareto frontier for total model parameters and mean success among methods reporting all four suites. These results provide a strong sub-billion-parameter baseline for future scaling studies.

While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail. In this work, we propose ARCHITECT, a framework that treats robot policy acquisition as an interactive program synthesis task. ARCHITECT leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLM coding agents to synthesize modular robot programs that utilize a suite of perception and control tools. Unlike end-to-end models where distribution shift leads to unpredictable, cascading failures, our modular architecture allows users to isolate failures and localize feedback at the level of abstraction required. We introduce an iterative process where a human supervisor provides natural language corrections to steer the policy. These corrections are grounded in the policy code by program execution traces and distilled into a persistent skill library, a form of long-term in-context learning which enables the agent to accumulate a repertoire of reusable, interpretable behaviors. In a benchmark evaluation on a Franka Panda robot, ARCHITECT outperforms state-of-the-art VLA models and program synthesis baselines on complex, long-horizon tasks, including articulated object manipulation and cloth folding. Our results demonstrate that the synthesized skill library enables the system to transfer to novel tasks with decreasing human intervention, providing a steerable and data-efficient alternative to black-box robot learning. Website: https://robo-architect.github.io/

Long-horizon embodied tasks require policies that execute many dependent actions before task success can be observed. Representing policies as executable control pro- grams (code-as-policy) enables their decision logic to be inspected and revised after rollout evaluation. Revised programs can then be executed and compared by rollout performance, framing policy improvement as execution-guided program search. Evo- lutionary methods driven by large language models (LLMs) provide a natural mecha- nism for this search by generating variants and selecting high-performing candidates. However, existing approaches primarily select among independently generated vari- ants and lack a sequential local improvement phase. We introduce MEMENTO, a memory-guided single-elite memetic framework for code-as-policy evolution. ME- MENTO first evolves a rollout evaluator that maps policy rollouts to scalar fitness and structured feedback metrics. Fitness selects accepted candidates and the next elite, while feedback metrics condition policy proposals generated by memory-guided hill-climbing, macro-mutation, and crossover. We evaluate MEMENTO on two long- horizon embodied domains: Robosuite Franka Tower-of-Hanoi manipulation and AI2- THOR household interaction. MEMENTO outperforms Eureka and REvolve, adapted as code-as-policy evolutionary baselines, in task success and generalization to held- out Robosuite object configurations and unseen AI2-THOR scenes. Ablations show that zero-shot generation and unevolved evaluators fail to solve either domain, and that removing policy-search branches reduces performance. Finally, we deploy the best-evolved Robosuite policy on a physical Franka robot, demonstrating the feasibil- ity of sim-to-real transfer of the evolved code-as-policy. Code, prompts, and videos are available at: https://github.com/sygkounas/MEMENTO.

Generative social robots (GSRs) powered by large language models offer new possibilities for personalized tutoring in higher education, but also introduce risks related to misinformation, missing transparency, or reinforcing incorrect student responses. Prior work identified knowledge-based design (KBD) requirements that define the informational prerequisites for GSRs to manifest responsible and effective tutoring behavior in higher education. In this paper, we operationalized selected KBD requirements in the Reachy Mini robot platform through system prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and stateful prompt orchestration. As a result, we present Teachy Mini, a GSR tutoring system that was developed using KBD. To test the system, we conducted a preliminary evaluation study. Participants (N = 24) completed a robot-guided learning session about research methodologies. They learned either with Teachy Mini or with a control version that did not follow KBD principles. Teachy Mini was perceived as significantly more aligned with responsible tutoring behavior than the control robot. Moreover, a manipulation check illustrated that Teachy Mini used personalization, slide-grounded explanations, Socratic questioning, affective support, and learner-anchored feedback more consistently than the control robot. No significant between-condition differences were found in system acceptance, intrinsic motivation, or learning effectiveness, although exploratory analyses suggested a positive effect of KBD on objective learning gains when accounting for learner preferences. Overall, the study offered an initial implementation and preliminary evaluation of KBD for GSR tutoring, indicating that KBD can shape responsible robot behavior and potentially increase learning effectiveness in robot-supported learning.

We present an action-conditioned world model framework for goal plane probe guidance in robotic ultrasound, with a focus on neck ultrasound scanning. Autonomous ultrasound tasks often require large numbers of probe-motion trajectories for training, but collecting high-quality demonstrations is labor-intensive and explicit simulators are difficult to build because ultrasound appearance depends on contact, tissue deformation, and view-dependent acoustic artifacts. We address this problem with a two-stage model-based learning pipeline. First, a latent conditional diffusion world model predicts future ultrasound observations from recent context frames, probe motions and temporal offset. Second, a goal-conditioned temporal transformer predicts ordered probe motions and is fine-tuned using rewards from the frozen world model. Experiments on the self-collected dataset show that the world model preserves action-dependent anatomical structure on target-directed scans. In real-world closed loop experiments, the framework achieves success rates of 70.0% for carotid guidance and 65.0% for thyroid guidance. These results demonstrate the potential of learned ultrasound dynamics for training goal-directed robotic probe navigation.

Learning effective robot manipulation policies requires diverse, high-quality demonstrations, yet existing data pipelines are often difficult to scale because they rely on specialized hardware, centralized operators, or fixed task suites. We present AXIS, a growable community-driven data engine and benchmark for scalable robot learning, which enables browser-based teleoperation for large-scale demonstration collection, automatically generates and validates new manipulation tasks, and transforms community-collected demonstrations into training-ready data through automated success checking, quality filtering, trajectory smoothing, and visual and physics-based augmentation. The AXIS dataset currently contains 207 diverse tasks and 50K+ trajectories. Meanwhile, AXIS organizes data into task snapshots and evaluates policies with a systematic held-out protocol. We compare vision-language-action (VLA) policies under a unified AXIS evaluation suite and analyze scaling behavior across different data volumes. Continual pretraining on AXIS substantially improves the overall success rate of $π_{0.5}$ by 5.8%, outperforms the model pretrained on RoboCasa365 by 37.3%, and exhibits consistent scaling with increasing data volume, with the largest gains observed under layout, sensor-noise, and camera perturbations.

Diffusion policies generate multimodal robot action sequences from demonstrations, but steering them toward deployment-time constraints typically relies on differentiable guidance costs. This excludes many practical safety constraints, such as binary collision checks, joint limits, and black-box rollout costs that are nondifferentiable. We propose Gradient-free Robot Action generation via Combined diffusion-MPPI posterior mean Estimation (GRACE), which guides a pretrained diffusion policy with Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control using only forward cost evaluations. Building on the common score-ascent structure of diffusion and MPPI, GRACE constructs a cost-conditioned guidance posterior at each reverse step and estimates its mean with a single MPPI update centered at the diffusion reverse mean. For differentiable costs, GRACE recovers conventional gradient guidance under a first-order, matched-covariance approximation. GRACE attains higher success rates than diffusion-based and sampling-based baselines in simulation. On a real 7-DoF manipulator, GRACE avoids a deployment-time obstacle that the unguided prior collides with in every trial. Code and experiment videos are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/grace-70BB/.

We consider the problem of learning compositional robot policies end-to-end from expert demonstrations, without any pre-specified notion of task decomposition or hierarchy. We ask whether a VLA trained with a simplified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) action head can emergently learn to decompose tasks into reusable, interpretable primitives. We find that learned experts are heavily reused across tasks and consistently correspond to qualitatively distinct low-level behaviors, suggesting that the router implicitly learns to perform high-level sequencing while experts serve as compositional primitives. Our MoE matches the task performance of a monolithic baseline while demonstrating meaningful expert specialization, a step toward modular, interpretable robot policies that emerge from data alone.

Robotic learning takes place in dynamic environments with large behavior spaces. A terminal success signal only tells the robot whether the task is completed. It does not explain whether the current behavior is making progress, remaining unchanged, or undoing earlier progress. For this reason, recent studies have increasingly explored progress rewards that provide feedback during task execution. However, the current literature lacks a shared framework. Existing methods use different observations, goal specifications, output signals, supervision sources, and evaluation protocols. This makes it difficult to compare them and understand what their results actually validate. In this survey, we provide a unified view of progress reward modeling for robotic learning. We organize the field in three connected steps. We first study the interface of a progress model. This defines the problem from the outside by asking what information the model receives and what form of progress signal it produces. We then move inside the model and study the methods used to construct this signal. This reveals the different assumptions and mechanisms behind progress estimation and reward generation. Finally, we examine the data and benchmarks that support these methods. This shows how progress supervision is obtained and what different evaluations actually measure. Together, these three perspectives connect what a progress model is, how it is built, and how its quality is validated. We further summarize the main limitations of current approaches and discuss future research directions.

The ability to acquire skills rapidly and effortlessly while retaining those already mastered is essential for robots. However, current methods still rely on a cumbersome training-time loop that is costly and slow, while eroding skills already mastered. In this paper, we introduce HOST (Human-to-robot One-Shot Skill AcquisiTion), a framework that enables a robot to acquire skills in seconds from a single human video while retaining previously mastered skills. HOST resolves skill acquisition through a cascade of self-grounded prediction. It first estimates the robot's progress within the demonstrated task, then translates the upcoming progression into the robot's own future observations, and finally derives actions from these predicted observations. This cascade is trained on targets coupled to the video demonstration, obtained by mapping the robot trajectory and the video demonstration onto a shared task progress manifold, then redefining each target to align with the future progression of the video. HOST thereby enables the robot to actively follow the demonstrated procedure and adapt it to the robot's embodiment. HOST acquires novel skills at inference time from a single human video in an average of 29 seconds and achieves a 62% average success rate. It exceeds the zero-shot baseline by 45% while retaining previously mastered skills. HOST even exceeds the baseline fine-tuned on 50 robot demonstrations per task while requiring 50 times fewer demonstrations and acquiring each skill 507 times faster. Additional information about HOST is available on the project website.

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

Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial detail and the benefits of large-scale visual pre-training. While there exist policies that do operate on dense patch features like large vision-language-action models (VLAs), they tend to be heavy and slow, inheriting the full cost of a billion-parameter vision-language model (VLM) backbone. We close this gap with Patch Policy, a minimal architectural extension that enables transformer-based policies to consume dense pre-trained patch tokens directly without the computational overhead of a full VLM. At its core is a block-causal attention mask that preserves the temporal causality of standard policies while letting the model attend over many patch tokens per observation, alongside other state information. Patch Policy is lightweight, fast, and highly effective. Across four simulated and three real-world environment suites, our method achieves a 40% relative improvement over policies using state-of-the-art global-pooled representations. Furthermore, it surpasses fine-tuned OpenVLA-OFT by 18% while using roughly 0.7% of the parameters. We believe Patch Policy provides a pipeline for the robotics community to readily leverage continuing progress in visual representation learning, without sacrificing the training efficiency or inference speed required for high-frequency, reactive control. Videos can be viewed at https://patch-policy.github.io

The gap between simulation and reality remains a fundamental challenge in deploying simulation-trained robotic policies in the real world. Real-to-sim methods narrow this gap from the real side, learning transition dynamics from real data to build a more realistic digital world. Learned dynamics models are their dominant instance. Such methods, however, face a partial observability problem: the same observation may branch to different transitions due to unobservable factors. Existing methods assume these factors can be recovered from observation history. However, this may fail whenever observation history is uninformative, such as a sudden contact event with no prior warning. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{World Translation}, which exploits a complementary strength of simulators and learned dynamics. Simulators are deterministic but physically imperfect, while learned models are accurate but underdetermined under partial observability. Rather than predicting transitions forward from history, we extract the unobservable dynamics information backward from an observed transition, then translate this feature across simulation and reality as an unpaired domain-translation problem that preserves dynamics content while transferring domain style. Experiments across humanoid, quadruped, and manipulator platforms show that our method achieves more accurate dynamics modeling than baselines, with the largest gains when unobservable factors cannot be recovered from observation history. Real-robot deployment on Go2 quadruped confirms improved policy transfer.

Long-horizon robotic tasks require diverse capabilities that no single policy can reliably provide. Heterogeneous policies offer complementary strengths, but orchestrating them requires reasoning over uncertain capability boundaries and cross-policy distribution mismatch, which are largely overlooked by existing planning methods built on homogeneous, predefined skills with fixed applicability. We propose RoboHarness, a unified framework that encapsulates independently developed robot control systems as reusable agentic skills. Although instantiated in this work with VLAs, RL policies, and task-and-motion planning (TAMP) systems, RoboHarness is designed as a general framework compatible with a broader range of robot policies, such as navigation policies, model predictive controllers, and world-action models. RoboHarness uses multi-modal execution memory and online evidence to characterize policy capability boundaries for capability-aware decomposition and routing. To stabilize policy handoffs, its Memory Bridge retrieves execution trajectories associated with the next policy, estimates its in-distribution state region, and guides the robot toward that region without joint policy retraining. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, 500 customized tasks, and 135 real-robot experiments demonstrate effective capability-aware routing and stable policy orchestration, yielding substantial improvements in zero-shot long-horizon planning and out-of-distribution robustness.

Collaborative robots are increasingly sharing workspaces with human operators, making tool handover a frequent and safety-critical micro-interaction. However, traditional static handovers often lead to awkward grasps when handling asymmetric industrial tools. This paper presents a receiver-centered voice-driven adaptive handover system for mechanical tools, built on a Franka cobot. Using an LLM for intention recognition and MediaPipe for real-time 3D hand tracking, the framework dynamically adjusts the end-effector's orientation to present tools in an ergonomically optimal, handle-first pose. A within-subjects study compared this adaptive approach with an object-agnostic static baseline. The results demonstrate that the adaptive system reduces the grasp delay for asymmetric tools, improving the fluency of the interaction. Furthermore, the adaptive strategy improved specific trust-related perceptions, particularly motion predictability and perceived task simplicity.

Safe model-based reinforcement learning (RL) often bridges control-theoretic analysis and RL for robots to safely explore (partially) unknown system dynamics while deriving control actions for task efficiency. The control performance and safety assurance typically rely on prior knowledge of partially modeled nominal system dynamics and the data-driven models that compensate for residual model uncertainties. However, existing methods often overlook the structure of residual model uncertainties (e.g., components affine in control), which could lead to overly conservative robot behaviors or invalid safety guarantees under the safe learning-based controllers. This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning framework that learns control-affine dynamics with a certifiable data-driven safe policy using control barrier functions (CBF). Specifically, we first use Control-Affine Random Fourier Features (ARFF) to model robot dynamics in a control-affine form, which offers computational efficiency that scales with dataset size and reduces potential model bias for model-based reinforcement learning. Then, a model-free, efficient uncertainty quantification method using adaptive conformal prediction (ACP) is applied to quantify the uncertainty in the safety constraint arising from the learned control-affine dynamics. This allows for data-driven safety assurance amenable to principled and efficient controller synthesis with CBF. Simulation results on the cartpole and the 3D quadrotor platforms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Perceiving multimodal cues and forecasting fine-grained actions from an egocentric (Ego) perspective is vital for applications like robot manipulation. However, previous studies either rely mainly on under-informed visual inputs to predict coarse human motions or follow the VRM/VLA paradigm, which suffers from insufficient robot data and the gap between human and robot embodiments. We observe that 3D hand pose naturally serves as a unified representation to bridge human-robot actions. Hence, we investigate an under-explored Vision-Language guided Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Forecasting (VL-EHPF) task, which aims to predict future Ego 3D hand poses from visual observations, a language instruction, and pose states. To overcome the limited field-of-view and highly dynamic motions in the Ego view, we propose a framework dubbed Exo2EgoPose, which innovatively leverages holistic and stable exocentric (Exo) demonstrations as guidance to compensate for partial and dynamic Ego-view cues. Specifically, we introduce a Dual-level Exocentric Reconstruction Module (DERM), which incorporates the paired Exo videos as supervision to reconstruct their video-level and chunked frame-level representations, thereby modeling spatial contexts and temporal dynamics. Then, the Global-to-Local Modulation Module (GLMM) utilizes the reconstructed hierarchical Exo representations for progressive feature refinement via attention mechanisms and adaptive modulation, enabling comprehensive Exo guidance for accurate Ego hand pose forecasting. Extensive experiments on \textit{AssemblyHands}, \textit{Ego-Exo4D}, and our newly constructed \textit{EgoMe-pose} benchmarks show the superiority of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Moreover, it demonstrates an effective human-to-robot transfer capability and yields improvements on the \textit{CALVIN} dataset.

Humans combine reasoning and motor control to solve complex manipulation tasks under diverse constraints. They build an understanding of the physical world that helps them convert reasoning into actions and quickly adapt to new scenes, tasks, and rules. We refer to this capability as intuitive manipulation. Existing benchmarks fail to capture this integration: they evaluate physical reasoning in isolation from execution, or measure policy performance without requiring explicit reasoning. We introduce IMBENCH, a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive manipulation as an integrated capability spanning perception, physical reasoning, action generation, and iterative execution. Our tasks require models to infer task-relevant physical structure and generate feasible action sequences under explicit constraints, including contact-rich manipulation, tool use, and multi-stage dependencies. We introduce a benchmark of 35 tasks, 14K filtered trajectories, and scalable tools for generating diverse scenarios. Experiments reveal a consistent gap: vision language models show partial physical reasoning ability but fail to produce executable plans, while state-of-the-art vision-language-action models struggle to satisfy task constraints and generalize across scenarios. These results identify intuitive manipulation as a missing axis in current foundation models and generalist robot policies, and position IMBENCH as a step toward evaluating and enabling more integrated, adaptive physical intelligence.

Human-in-the-loop Reinforcement Learning has become a popular approach to training, finetuning, and aligning robot behavior with user preferences. Our paper explores the feasibility of using brain signals via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to modulate robot learning in simulation. We compare agents trained on passive (observational) versus active (demonstrative) interaction tasks, and test multiple methods for enhancing the RL algorithm with the neural signal, focusing on parameter augmentation rather than replacement. We further examine how model granularity and noise affect agent learning. Our results show that this framework is effective: the neural signal improves learning when augmenting trajectory priorities and state-action q-values. Additionally, the framework learns successfully from offline data, offering a practical alternative for settings where real-time BCI setups are impractical or only limited data is available.

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by jointly modeling actions and future visual observations, using future scene evolution as dense supervision for physically grounded action generation. However, a common design in existing WAMs is to explicitly generate future videos at inference time, incurring substantial computational overhead and hindering real-time closed-loop deployment. GigaWorld-Policy addresses this issue with an action-centered formulation, where future visual dynamics are used during training while action-only decoding is used at inference time. Building upon this framework, we present GigaWorld-Policy-0.5, an enhanced action-centered WAM designed for more efficient robot control. During pretraining, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 adopts a mixed Action-Conditioned World Modeling (AC-WM) and WAM training strategy. This strengthens the coupling between visual dynamics and robot actions and improves the transferability of action representations for downstream policy learning. For efficient inference, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 introduces a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that separates visual dynamics modeling and action generation into specialized experts, reducing active computation during action-only inference and achieving 85 ms inference latency on a local RTX 4090 setup. In addition, we employ an agent-based AutoResearch pipeline to systematically search training configurations, enabling more efficient identification of optimal experimental setups while reducing the time and manual intervention required for hyperparameter tuning. Experiments and ablations show that GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 preserves the training benefits of future visual dynamics while improving inference efficiency for robot control.

Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide scalable supervision for embodied intelligence, yet existing resources rarely combine low-cost continuous capture, manipulation-level structured annotations, and reusable tools for robot learning. We present Open-AoE, an open, community-oriented egocentric manipulation dataset and toolchain spanning the full pipeline from smartphone capture to model training. Its first release contains approximately 2,000 hours of manipulation video collected in natural environments by 500+ contributors using 400+ smartphones. The dataset provides text annotations, MANO-based hand poses, camera trajectories, and temporally localized atomic actions. Open-AoE further includes a data processing pipeline that transforms raw recordings into structured samples through temporal action segmentation, semantic annotation, hand reconstruction, and camera trajectory reconstruction. Meanwhile, we provide a separate downstream toolchain supports visualization, cross-embodiment retargeting, model-specific data conversion, and training recipes for VLA policies, WAMs, and World Models. By integrating scalable capture, structured processing, and downstream adaptation, Open-AoE reduces the barriers to both data contribution and reuse, providing practical open infrastructure for embodied model training, human-to-robot transfer, and world modeling.

Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation. However, real-world deployment in open-ended environments requires strong safety guarantees to prevent dangerous or harmful behaviors. Safe Reinforcement Learning methods address this requirement by enforcing safety constraints. Nevertheless, learning under constraints often reduces learning speed and could lead to suboptimal task performance, as the agent must solve a more complex constrained optimization problem compared to unconstrained settings. To tackle this issue, in this work, we propose an extension of the ATACOM framework, a state-of-the-art reliable safety layer that can be integrated with existing Reinforcement Learning algorithms to enforce constraints derived from prior knowledge of the system or learned directly from data. Our proposed method, named ATACOM Directional Constraints (ATACOM-DC), significantly improves the safety-performance trade-off by introducing directional constraints that distinguish between actions approaching and moving away from constraint boundaries, activating constraint enforcement only when necessary. We evaluate our method across a range of challenging robotic control tasks in simulation, analyzing both constraint-violation costs and achieved task performance. Code and additional material at https://atacom-dc.robot-learning.net.

Aligning robot policies with human preferences is essential for deployment to diverse end users. In per-user alignment approach, preference feedback is often sparse, so learning becomes unstable and vulnerable to human preference noise, and a growing number of individualized policies makes validation difficult before deployment. A single shared policy approach to user alignment avoids this cost but fails to capture heterogeneous preferences and often neglects minority preferences. To address these challenges, we introduce Preference-based REward Clustering (PREC), a novel framework that learns a compact set of policies from binary preference labels provided by diverse users. From a dataset of user trajectories and their preference labels, PREC first sets the labels aside and aggregates trajectories across users to learn a population-level shared trajectory encoder, alleviating limited per-user coverage and avoiding label noise during representation learning. Using this representation, PREC jointly assigns users to preference-coherent clusters and learns a representative reward model per cluster using preference labels, from which a policy is optimized for each cluster. Clustering similar users compensates for the limited number of labels available from each user and mitigates the effect of label noise. At the same time, maintaining a manageable number of reward models reduces the validation burden at deployment. Experiments across diverse simulated locomotion environments show that PREC groups users who label different trajectory subsets into preference-coherent clusters more accurately than baseline methods. Under sparse and noisy feedback, policies trained with PREC improve all three social welfare metrics over an existing single shared-policy user-alignment approach and even outperform per-user alignment approaches.

Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to world modelling while remaining lightweight and focused on physical dynamics relevant to control. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that action generation quality is governed by the geometry of the latent space. We observe that standard reconstruction-based action tokenization objectives induce representations biased toward low-level signal fidelity, leading to misalignment between reconstruction quality and downstream control performance. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-stage modality pre-alignment strategy in which action representations are progressively aligned with latent world dynamics, vision, and language. This process enforces cross-modal consistency, promotes abstraction, and induces a structured latent space for predictive reasoning. We provide a systematic empirical study of latent world modelling and modality alignment, analyzing their roles in scaling laws and out-of-distribution generalization. Results show that Lumo-2 consistently outperforms strong vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) baselines, with gains on challenging real-world tasks requiring temporal reasoning, physical understanding, or high control complexity, including long-horizon and dexterous manipulation. These findings suggest that structured multimodal alignment and predictive reasoning are fundamental principles for advancing embodied intelligence.

The action space poses a major challenge in robot learning, since it is often high-dimensional, can span long time horizons, and frequently admits multi-modal optimal solutions. A good choice of action representation and loss function can help to address these concerns, but there are often trade offs. We propose Action Map Policy (AMP), which casts 3D closed-loop manipulation policy learning as a classification problem in image space. While classification has been an effective formulation in generative language models, applying it to robot action learning is difficult because naively discretizing high-dimensional continuous actions explodes the token vocabulary. Our key idea is to project 3D actions onto the camera image planes and treat each pixel location as a discrete class, thus controlling dimensionality while retaining multi-modality. This method supports millimeter-level precision for high-dimensional actions without requiring a prohibitively large vocabulary, while preserving fine-grained pixel-wise visual signals. Furthermore, it can predict the entire action chunk in a single forward pass, avoiding complex noise scheduling and iterative denoising while achieving substantially faster inference than diffusion policies. Experiments on various manipulation tasks show that AMP outperforms strong baselines, achieving higher success rates, faster inference, and enhanced spatial reasoning.

Decentralized multi-robot coordination under partial observability remains challenging, especially in communication-free settings where agents must act solely from local sensor observations. Privileged policy distillation provides a promising approach by transferring knowledge from a globally informed oracle to sensor-constrained students. However, in multi-agent systems, the same local observation may correspond to multiple global configurations requiring qualitatively different cooperative actions, making the conditional action distribution inherently multi-modal. Standard deterministic distillation collapses these modes to their mean, often yielding invalid or hesitant actions. To address this issue, we propose CoDiMAD, a three-stage framework that trains a privileged oracle with MAPPO, constructs an offline dataset of local-observation-oracle-action pairs, and distills the oracle into decentralized students parameterized as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models. By approximating the conditional oracle-action distribution through the diffusion reverse process, CoDiMAD samples decisive actions from coherent coordination modes rather than averaging across them. Theoretical analysis characterizes the mode-averaging failure of deterministic distillation and the distributional recovery property of diffusion-based distillation. Experiments on three cooperative tasks show that CoDiMAD consistently outperforms direct local MARL and deterministic distillation baselines. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Long-horizon robotic rearrangement tasks are often treated as skill sequencing problems, requiring predefined skills, skill labels, or boundaries, and task-specific switching logic. Although effective, such explicit skill abstractions can become difficult to scale as the number of behaviors and the task horizon increase. We instead formulate rearrangement as implicit-behavior coordination from unlabeled sub-task demonstrations, where skill-like behaviors are learned directly from mixed behavior data and coordinated through value-guided action selection. Experiments in Habitat rearrangement tasks support this formulation in three ways. First, our method outperforms task-specific imitation baselines on more complex rearrangement tasks and approaches an oracle-planner baseline with behavior-cloned skills, while using no oracle task plan or skill-labeled full-task demonstrations. Second, ablations show that reliable critic-guided candidate selection is essential for coordinating multi-modal behaviors. Third, scaling experiments show that the method handles larger behavior repertoires and maintains stronger performance than task-specific imitation baselines as chained targets extend the horizon. These results suggest that explicit skill abstraction is not a prerequisite for long-horizon rearrangement, and that implicit-behavior coordination offers a promising data-driven alternative to explicit skill-based pipelines.

Tactile feedback is fundamental to Hand-Object Interaction (HOI), governing contact formation, force regulation, and stable manipulation, making it essential for achieving true human-like dexterous manipulation. Yet, current human-to-robot dexterous transfer pipelines primarily rely on kinematic trajectories, resulting in motion imitation without physically grounded interaction. To address this, we introduce TactiDex, a real-world tactile-guided benchmark specifically designed to move dexterous manipulation beyond kinematic mimicry toward contact-level human-likeness. TactiDex provides a comprehensive dataset that elegantly aligns whole-hand tactile signals with multi-granularity kinematic and object states, coupled with standardized evaluation metrics. Building upon this data paradigm, we propose a tactile-driven transfer framework that effectively translates human demonstrations into physically plausible robotic execution. We introduce TactiSkill, a framework built upon a novel tri-component tactile reward that innovatively uses tactile signals as structured supervision. This reward unifies guidance, human-like alignment, and contact constraints into a single objective. Through comprehensive experiments on both single and bimanual tasks, we demonstrate that TactiSkill achieves superior performance in manipulation success and physical realism. This work lays a crucial foundation for advancing tactile-aware dexterous manipulation. Our project page at https://tactidex.github.io/.

Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions, offering a promising foundation for robot planning, policy evaluation, and data augmentation. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect in the real world. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from unlabeled videos, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual factors such as backgrounds and untouched objects. In this work, we identify this action-irrelevant bias as a key obstacle to controllable ACWMs and introduce evaluation metrics to measure latent-action bias, action following, and robustness. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three efficient fine-tuning objectives: embodiment-centric reconstruction, action-centric contrastive learning, and latent space calibration, which together encourage embodiment-focused, action-aware, and calibrated non-collapsed latent action representations. Experiments on 2B and 14B ACWM backbones show that CD-LAM substantially improves latent-action controllability, downstream robot-action following, visual fidelity, and adaptation efficiency, requiring only 6k fine-tuning steps and more than 12$\times$ fewer robot-action adaptation updates than the baseline.

Pretrained generative robot policies based on flow matching and diffusion have achieved impressive results across a wide range of manipulation tasks. Yet real-world deployments routinely expose failure modes outside the pretraining distribution. Closing these gaps typically requires large-scale data collection or online reinforcement learning on physical hardware, which is impractical for rapid and safe adaptation. We present FlowDAgger, a sample- and compute-efficient method for adapting frozen generative robot policies from human interventions in latent space. Our key idea is action inversion: each human expert action is mapped to the noise that would have produced it under the frozen base policy, using reverse-time integration followed by local refinement. The resulting inverted noise provides supervision for a lightweight latent policy that steers the base model at deployment time, enabling rapid skill acquisition while preserving its behavioral priors. We evaluate FlowDAgger in simulation and on real-world bimanual and single-arm manipulation, adapting both action-head VLAs and world-action models from a handful of interventions. FlowDAgger outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space RL baselines and preserves pretrained skills on held-out tasks, offering a practical path for adapting robot foundation models in the real world. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/FlowDAgger

Learning transferable visuomotor imitation policies that generalize across diverse manipulation tasks and adapt rapidly to new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations remains challenging. Most modern policies are trained end-to-end to map observations directly to low-level actions, offering little explicit structure for reusing and recombining behaviors across tasks and making transfer data-inefficient under limited supervision. We propose SkillPlug, a plug-in framework that augments an existing visuomotor policy with a skill-conditioning module and mines a shared, transferable skill library from raw multi-task demonstrations. SkillPlug learns skills via self-supervised objectives that promote compact, reusable, and non-redundant behavior-level primitives, forming a task-shared prior for compositional control. After skill mining, we keep the learned skills fixed and specialize to unseen tasks by fine-tuning only lightweight router and action head, enabling efficient adaptation without full end-to-end retraining. We evaluate SkillPlug on two simulation benchmarks and on a real robot, and observe that the mined transferable skills consistently improve both multi-task performance and few-shot adaptation. Overall, SkillPlug offers a scalable way to mine reusable skills that improve data-efficient generalization in robotic manipulation.

Egocentric human data offers scalable supervision for robot manipulation. However, behavior cloning entangles transferable content like objects, scenes, and task semantics, with non-transferable factors like human morphology, head motion, and behavioral style. We study whether World Action Models (WAMs) provide a better training signal by requiring policies to predict not only actions, but also how the scene evolves. The central question is what world representation best enables human-to-robot transfer. We hypothesize that an effective world target should abstract appearance, capture agent-invariant physical effects, and separate camera motion from environment change. We introduce EgoWAM, a controlled human-robot co-training framework that fixes the policy backbone, action head, and data mixture while varying only the world prediction target, comparing Pixel, DINO, and 3D motion flow. Across three real-world bimanual tasks, WAM co-training scales more effectively with in-the-wild egocentric human data than behavior cloning. Pixel-based prediction transfers weakly, while DINO and 3D flow yield substantial gains: DINO improves out-of-distribution object and scene generalization by up to 4x, and 3D flow improves in-domain performance by 20-30%. More details: https://gatech-rl2.github.io/egowam.github.io

Compositionality, by organizing complex behavior as combinations of simpler elements, enables robot learning that is scalable and data efficient. Leveraging this principle, we propose a generative learning-from-demonstration framework that enables compositional modeling of robotic behavior by connecting perception and motion through shared object-level representations. We render scenes from object-centric neural representations that integrate canonical neural fields with latent-conditioned deformations, capturing positional and geometric variations in a smooth, consistent, and interpretable way. For motion generation, a temporal mixture-of-experts (MoE) employs a gating mechanism to combine object-conditioned movement primitives over time, producing complete trajectories. This spatial-temporal compositionality maintains the data efficiency of movement primitives while grounding motion in visual structure, enabling systematic generalization across diverse scene configurations. In simulation, long-horizon manipulation tasks are successfully completed using the proposed model, which requires significantly less training data than other image-based baselines. Real-world experiments further demonstrate the method's robustness to noise, its ability to generalize at the category level through language-based segmentation models, and its capacity to operate directly on 3D scene representations.

Visual navigation policies built on large pretrained models have so far followed a common recipe: a dedicated visual encoder, a bespoke action head, and training on thousands of hours of cross-embodiment datasets. We ask whether this recipe is necessary. In this paper, we introduce GemNav, a visual robot navigation policy that adapts a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for short-to-medium horizon waypoint navigation using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on the language tower alone, with no auxiliary visual encoder and no continuous regression head. Waypoints and categorical navigation signals share a single discrete token vocabulary generated by the language-model head, and a soft-decoded auxiliary loss recovers the metric structure that pure cross-entropy training discards. On a single 8.7-hour open corpus, roughly three orders of magnitude smaller than competing training sets, the policy transfers zero-shot to four physically distinct unseen environments and stops within 0.25-0.42m of the goal across 20 real-world trials covering an open carpark, an obstacle carpark, a long outdoor chemical yard, and an indoor warehouse. Conditioning on short image histories improves offline metrics but yields no robot benefit, pointing to a ceiling on what temporal context adds once pretrained vision features are in place. These results indicate that discrete-token adaptation of frozen MLLMs can provide a data-efficient, deployable alternative for foundation model robot navigation.

Physics-informed learning promises data-efficient and stable dynamics prediction, yet its strongest geometric guarantees have largely remained confined to closed conservative systems. This excludes robotic systems of interest, where actuation, dissipation, and constraints exchange energy and momentum with the environment. We introduce CaLiSym, a lightweight framework that extends symplectic learning to such systems by changing where the geometric prior is imposed. Rather than enforcing symplecticity on the measured state, CaLiSym embeds the state and its ports into a lifted phase space, where the dynamics evolve through a symplectic map. The lift is explicit and algebraic, requiring neither recurrent latent states, transformer decoders, implicit optimization, nor inference-time numerical integration. We instantiate the framework with SympNet predictors and introduce GRB-SympNet, a B-spline variant combining approximation with exact symplectic structure. Experiments on a controlled dissipative double pendulum, a real-world quadrotor, and a contact-constrained real-world quadruped demonstrate the lowest out-of-distribution autoregressive rollout error across systems, improving by up to 69.5% while using fewer parameters and up to 85x fewer floating-point operations per step than sequence-model baselines. The lifted dynamics preserve the symplectic form to numerical precision, extending symplectic learning beyond conservative mechanics toward real-world robotics.

Recovering real-world scenes as interactive simulation environments can enable generalizable robot learning and reproducible policy evaluation. However, constructing scenes that are both physically stable and visually faithful remains slow and expensive. In this work, we present RoboSnap, a real-to-sim framework that turns a single RGB image into a simulation-ready scene. The key idea is a layered design that separates the physics-critical interaction area from the surrounding visual context: collision-aware foreground assets are refined for stable robot interaction, while a 3D Gaussian splatting visual layer preserves faithful background appearance under novel views. Experiments on DROID scenes and real-robot tasks show that RoboSnap achieves reliable trajectory replay in the recovered scenes, supports task-specific synthetic data generation for policy training, and yields meaningful sim-real correlation for policy evaluation. To further support real-to-sim research, we introduce DROID-Sim, a real-to-sim companion dataset constructed from 564 real-world scenes in DROID. Extensive experiments suggest that the value of real-to-sim methods lies not only in high-fidelity visual reconstruction, but in turning real environments into reusable infrastructure for robot learning and evaluation.

Scaling robot learning requires massive, diverse trajectory data, yet collection is currently bottlenecked by physical teleoperation, where every demonstration binds operator time to specific hardware and workspaces. We introduce digital teleoperation, a paradigm that decouples data collection from physical constraints by replacing the real robot with a generative world model. In this framework, an operator's hand-pose stream drives a robot-centric generative world model to synthesize high-fidelity egocentric videos from a single reference image. The recorded pose stream serves as an embodiment-agnostic action label transferable to any target robot via standard retargeting, yielding complete state-action trajectories for imitation learning independent of physical hardware. We instantiate this paradigm in RynnWorld-Teleop, a system that integrates depth-aware skeletal conditioning, progressive human-to-robot training on a video Diffusion Transformer, and streaming autoregressive distillation. This pipeline compresses the generative process into a single-pass inference, enabling 40+ FPS, real-time interactive generation on a single H100 GPU. Policies trained exclusively on RynnWorld-Teleop-generated data achieve effective zero-shot Sim2Real transfer across dexterous and diverse bimanual tasks. Moreover, augmenting real-world datasets with our digitally teleoperated data consistently improves success rates, demonstrating that RynnWorld-Teleop serves as a high-fidelity, scalable data engine for the next generation of robotic agents.

A learning-enabled disturbance-rejection framework based on a Neural Extended State Observer (Neural-ESO) is presented in this letter. Unlike existing learning-based control methods that largely rely on the learned model once deployed, Neural-ESO adopts a dual-pathway architecture: a predictive pathway uses a neural network to provide a feedforward disturbance estimate that accelerates convergence, while a corrective pathway employs a conventional ESO to compensate prediction errors and prevent over-reliance on the neural component. Using Lyapunov theory and a small-gain analysis, we show that enforcing a Lipschitz bound on the learning component guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop error dynamics. The proposed framework is validated on a quadrotor landing task subject to strong ground-effect disturbances across normal and out-of-distribution scenarios, demonstrating accuracy-robustness trade-off and greater operational reliability during training, deployment, and transfer compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

World models -- internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment -- have become one of the most actively debated concepts in AI. From model-based reinforcement learning and video generation to embodied robotics and ultimately, physical AI, researchers across AI subfields are building systems that they call "world models", yet there is no consensus on what a world model fundamentally is, what it should predict, or how it should be built. This perspective article provides a scientific definition of world models, discussions of their key technical aspects, and a staged roadmap for developing effective world models.

Pretrained video generative models are promising backbones for visuomotor control, but their imagined futures often drift from task intent and are not reliably action-conditional. As a result, these models can be difficult to use for planning or policy extraction. To address these limitations, we propose RoboTALES, a single-stage framework that learns task-aligned simulated futures and uses them to train robot policies. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) a hierarchical LLM-based planner that breaks complex tasks into a sequence of subgoals to guide the model's imagination; and (2) a VLM-based critic that evaluates these ``imagined'' futures and uses reward-based feedback to keep the model's internal representations focused on the goal. By anchoring the video generator in abstract reasoning, we produce temporally consistent rollouts and more coherent actions. We evaluate RoboTALES on diverse manipulation tasks from RoboCasa and LIBERO10, and show that our method consistently outperforms existing methods, especially in long-horizon tasks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/hananshafi/RoboTALES.

For robots to work reliably in commercial and industrial applications, can recent advances in agentic coding systems combine interpretable robot programming with the open-world adaptability of model-free policies? We focus on "Variational Automation" (VA), a class of tasks that have larger variations in object geometry and pose than fixed automation. Model-free policies often struggle to close the reliability gap for VA tasks, which must be executed persistently and reliably in commercial and industrial applications. Motivated by prior work on Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) and the Robot Operating System (ROS), we introduce Graph-as-Policy (GaP), a multi-agent coding harness that generates directed computation graphs with perception, planning, and control nodes from a Modular Open Robot Skill Library (MORSL). GaP then generates an internal simulation environment to rehearse task instances with different graphs in parallel to iteratively refine the graph structure and parameters to improve success rates and throughput. Evaluation with 8 new open VA task benchmarks, 4 in-simulation and 4 in real-world, suggests that GaP can achieve success rates that significantly outperform baselines. Details, code, and data can be found online: https://graph-robots.github.io/gap

Data-driven embodied AI is rapidly transitioning into a paradigm that scales training through massively parallel simulation, where GPU-accelerated simulators serve as the foundational data infrastructure. However, as computational throughput scales, the underlying trade-offs between parallel efficiency, physical fidelity, and execution determinism remain largely unexamined, hindering the development of reliable robot learning. In this paper, we expose the hidden limits of mainstream GPU-based robotic simulators (e.g., Isaac Lab, Genesis) by introducing GPUSimBench, which focuses on scalability, physical consistency, and computational determinism. First, GPUSimBench establishes a physical grounding evaluation with a controlled inclined-plane task, quantifying the distributional alignment between simulated dynamics and their real-world counterparts. Second, we benchmark parallel scalability by measuring throughput and memory footprints across scaling environment counts. Crucially, beyond standard performance metrics, we unveil and quantify the inherent non-determinism introduced by GPU-batched execution, characterized by significant run-to-run and inter-environment variability even under identical initial conditions. Finally, we identify four empirical regimes of stochasticity within current simulator stacks, highlighting that unbounded scaling can compromise reproducibility without explicit constraints.