Robotic Manipulation

Quadruped manipulators enable mobile grasping in complex environments, yet their whole-body control policies remain vulnerable to unreliable onboard visual perception. Existing methods are typically developed under relatively reliable observations and have not systematically examined how occlusion, segmentation-mask dropout, depth noise, and target-localization jitter affect grasp reasoning and target tracking. To address this gap, we introduce DeViGrasp-Bench, a benchmark for mobile grasping under degraded vision that incorporates controlled visual degradations, seen and unseen objects, multiple difficulty levels, and complex terrains, and evaluates task success, execution efficiency, and action smoothness. We further propose DeViGrasp-Net, a teacher--student framework that combines state-conditioned grasp reasoning with reliability-aware temporal target estimation. The privileged teacher attends to offline grasp candidates conditioned on object, robot, end-effector, and task states, while the deployable student fuses dual-view segmented-depth observations with current, memory, and recovery target hypotheses through Target Hold Memory and Temporal Memory Attention. DeViGrasp-Net outperforms VBC across degradation levels, unseen objects, and complex terrains, and surpasses an adapted DQ-Net across all evaluated degradation levels. Under the Difficult setting, it achieves a success rate of 62.3%, improving upon VBC and DQ-Net by 16.1 and 4.3 percentage points, respectively; under the Hard setting, its margin over DQ-Net increases to 10.5 percentage points. Ablation studies confirm the complementary benefits of grasp-aware supervision and reliability-aware temporal memory.

We present GeomVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, latent scene motion prediction, and action generation within a shared robot-centric 3D coordinate frame. Our approach lifts pretrained VLM features into spatially grounded 3D scene tokens using depth and camera calibration, while retaining the semantic representations learned during VLM pretraining. We further introduce a 3D Scene Trajectory Denoiser, a task-conditioned module that learns a latent representation of how scene points are expected to move in 3D. Rather than executing the predicted trajectory as an open-loop plan, GeomVLA extracts intermediate motion tokens from the trajectory denoiser and uses them to condition a 3D flow-based action denoiser through geometry-aware attention. GeomVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on CALVIN, competitive performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin2.0, and outperforms strong baselines in real-world manipulation settings without robot-action pretraining. Extensive ablations show that future-motion reasoning alone is insufficient: the primary gains are associated with maintaining geometric consistency among scene representation, motion prediction, and robot actions throughout the perception-to-action pipeline.

In-hand manipulation allows multi-fingered dexterous hands to reconfigure grasped objects without releasing and regrasping them. This improves manipulation efficiency by reducing repeated grasp acquisition and large arm motions. However, most learning-based methods focus on reorientation, continuous rotation, or translation, whereas many tasks require joint control of object position and orientation. We formulate this capability as in-hand 6D object pose reaching: starting from an existing grasp, coordinated finger motions move the object to a palm-relative target pose. We present POISE (Palm-relative Object reaching In SE(3)), a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for this task. POISE combines diverse stable-grasp initialization, goal- and geometry-conditioned control, an adaptive 6D goal curriculum, and a compact reward scheme for pose reaching and grasp preservation. In simulation, diverse initialization raises held-out-grasp success from 40.1% to 51.5% and post-drop recovery from 33.8% to 72.9%; the curriculum raises full-range success from 6.2% to 59.5%. On hardware, the grasp-maintenance reward improves three-target sequence success from 20% to 80%. In real-world experiments, POISE reaches successive 6D targets without manual reset across multiple object geometries and wrist orientations, and recovers from external disturbances. To support further research in dexterous manipulation, we will release our code at https://junxiaolin.github.io/poise-website/.

Magnetic levitation (MagLev) systems have great potential for application in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing due to their scalability and flexibility, enabling highly reconfigurable in-machine material flow. However, their manipulation capabilities remain largely unexploited, as current applications almost exclusively focus on transportation. To enable grasping and manipulation directly on MagLev systems without requiring additional costly handling equipment, such as industrial robot arms, we present the Gripper MagBot, a low-cost parallel 6-DoF manipulator with an integrated 1-DoF gripper that mechanically couples three MagLev movers. The Gripper MagBot supports two operating configurations: a default mode and a single-track mode, selectable depending on the required stability and workspace footprint. To reconfigure a machine, the MagBot can be autonomously dropped off and picked up using a docking station. We showcase pick-and-place examples in simulation, as well as with the real Gripper MagBot using our inverse kinematics controller. CAD files, assembly instructions, a component list, and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/gripper-magbot.

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

Dexterous manipulation requires coordinated multi-finger control and effective tactile feedback, yet learning these capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale real-world data and the difficulty of extracting effective representations from sparse tactile signals. We build a robot platform and teleoperation system to collect a 200-hour bimanual dexterous manipulation dataset with synchronized visual, tactile, and language annotations, comprising 10,576 trajectories across 65 tasks, 69.5% of which involve dexterous multi-finger manipulation. We further propose STAR, an integrated training recipe for vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) models that addresses the spatial, temporal, and informational sparsity of tactile signals through visual-tactile joint pre-training, sparse-global tactile token representation, and sparse future tactile prediction. Trained on this dataset, STAR achieves a 61% average success rate across four real-world tasks with 100 post-training trajectories per task, demonstrating dexterous performance under task-specific post-training.

We demonstrate that a general-purpose agent can directly drive a physical robot throughout task execution without any task-specific or environment-specific training. We introduce Agent as Policy (AGP), which places task planning and execution under the agent's control. Given a task and a robot interface, the agent interprets visual evidence, writes executable programs, issues motion commands, and revises its actions in response to physical outcomes. This brings the agent's reasoning and programming capabilities into continuous interaction with the physical world. We study AGP across multiple real-world manipulation tasks spanning precision manipulation, dynamic motions, and deformable objects. These include assembly from human videos, block construction from goal images, dice flipping, targeted throwing, and bimanual towel folding. AGP achieves success rates of at least 80% in seven of eight task configurations and significantly outperforms previous agentic robot systems. We further study efficiency through task experience accumulation and find that reusing saved procedures and programs shortens execution time across repeated trials. These findings support a path for general-purpose agents to act as robot policies, extending their autonomy to physical manipulation through runtime reasoning, programming, and interaction.

Autonomous precision milling of biological structures is challenged by incomplete knowledge of target geometry, local material thickness, and critical internal boundaries. Subject-specific preoperative models can address geometric and thickness variations, but static models cannot determine boundary status encountered during execution, while repeated target-specific imaging limits scalability. This article presents an uncertainty-aware autonomous milling framework that assigns complementary roles to generic anatomical priors and active boundary perception. A generic anatomical prior provides conservative global guidance and is transformed through semantic-guided registration and hybrid vision-force calibration into robot-executable guidance for individual targets. As milling approaches uncertain boundaries, the robot actively probes the remaining structure and uses relative stiffness changes to estimate boundary status and structural detachability. A state-adaptive controller governs transitions between active perception and spatially selective incremental refinement, repeating this cycle until the termination criterion is satisfied. Hierarchical experiments on biological surrogates and in vivo mouse cranial window creation demonstrate accurate anatomical prior transfer, reliable boundary adaptation, and autonomous precision milling of biological structures.

Due to the highly deformable nature of garments, training a generalizable policy for robotic T-shirt folding and unfolding remains a significant challenge. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset for robotic T-shirt folding and unfolding, covering 6 robotic embodiments, 1K T-shirts, 1K environmental assets, and 120K episodes with rich annotations, which can be used to train a wide range of manipulation policies. We first follow the FoldNet pipeline to generate a large-scale dataset of physically simulatable T-shirts with diverse appearances and annotated semantic keypoints. Based on these semantic keypoints, we then generate manipulation demonstrations for different robotic embodiments through a unified rule-based framework. We use these demonstrations to train visuomotor policies, and experimental results demonstrate that models trained solely on our synthetic data can achieve over 90% end-to-end task success rates when directly deployed to unseen real-world environments and previously unseen T-shirts from arbitrary initial configurations. Project URL: https://pku-epic.github.io/FoldNetXX/.

Collecting high-quality robot data remains a fundamental challenge for training robot foundation models. Task and motion planning (TAMP) offers a scalable way to generate demonstrations, but our experiments show that raw TAMP trajectories provide surprisingly little benefit when used to fine-tune pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models, despite successfully solving the target tasks. We hypothesize that this failure arises from a behavioral distribution mismatch between planner-generated trajectories and the data used to pretrain the VLA. To address this mismatch, we introduce DATAFARM: Distribution-Aligned Task And motion planning for Fine-tuning A Robot foundation Model, an approach that incorporates the pretraining distribution directly into TAMP trajectory generation. DATAFARM aligns generated trajectories with the pretraining data in robot joint configurations, motion style, and temporal execution profiles. We evaluate DATAFARM on three tabletop manipulation tasks that TAMP can perform and a cloth-folding task beyond the capability of TAMP. DATAFARM achieves an average success rate of 56.7%, substantially outperforming raw TAMP (8.3%) while approaching human teleoperation (61.7%). On Deformable Object Manipulation, which is outside the fine-tuning distribution, the fine-tuned model retains 85% success, compared with 90% for the pretrained model. These results show that aligning planner-generated demonstrations with the pretraining distribution can make TAMP an effective source of data for VLA fine-tuning. Website and code: https://prpl-group.com/datafarm/

3D point-cloud observations are inherently ambiguous in complex, cluttered manipulation scenes, where target objects may be partially occluded or tightly intermingled with visually similar distractors. As a result, standard 3D diffusion policies often struggle to localize and exploit task-relevant geometry as scene complexity grows. We propose Attention-DP3, a spatially object-aware 3D diffusion policy that injects object-level geometric cues via attention while keeping the DP3 diffusion backbone unchanged. Our pipeline performs open-vocabulary 2D segmentation on RGB images, then lifts predicted target masks into 3D using calibrated camera geometry to obtain object-centric geometric priors. We incorporate these cues through Tri-field Attentional Conditioning, which constructs three complementary fields: (i) a targetness field to anchor the target object, (ii) an intra-target saliency field to emphasize task-relevant geometry within the target, and (iii) a backgroundness field to suppress distractors and clutter. Experiments on Adroit, DexArt, MetaWorld, and the real-world SO101 platform show consistent improvements over DP3, achieving state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks. Notably, as distractor objects increase, DP3 drops sharply, whereas Attention-DP3 remains stable and outperforms DP3 by up to 31% under heavy clutter. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangzhongbo2213/Attention-DP3.

Slender rod insertion arises in precision manufacturing, where millimetre scale diameter and tight clearances demand accurate perception and control. Conventional peg-in-hole methods assume a rigid object whose tip pose is fixed relative to the gripper. This assumption breaks down for a high aspect ratio rod, which can bend during manipulation, making its tip motion dependent on the rod configuration, grasp, material properties, and contact. We present RodForesight, a learning framework that factorises the task into two stages: 1) coarse approaching, which uses visual servoing to map diverse initial configurations into a compact near hole hand-off region; and 2) predictive insertion, which performs fine alignment and completes the insertion. It is worth noting that the two stages can be wrapped into an end-to-end design. During insertion, a diffusion policy generates candidate action chunks, while an action conditioned world model predicts their effects on rod-hole alignment. This pre-execution evaluation enables RodForesight to select the best action chunk based on predicted tilt and radial errors before execution. Experiments investigate the performance of different stages and the end-to-end setting, where RodForesight improves the success rate from 88.9% to 96.7%, compared to baseline methods such as diffusion policy.

Mobile manipulation requires perceptual evidence at different spatial scales for base motion and arm control, while the two action modalities remain kinematically coupled. Existing policies often employ specialized action generation for different subsystems but condition heterogeneous action branches on a shared perceptual representation, leaving subsystem-specific perception-action correspondence implicit. We present MoPA, a framework that aligns perceptual conditioning with mobility and manipulation while preserving coordination at the action level. Dual Perceptual Streams employ two mutually masked query banks to extract separate perceptual representations from a shared vision-language context. Perception2Action Adaptation jointly updates each query bank and its corresponding action stream at every layer of a structured Mixture-of-Transformers decoder, while enabling information exchange between the two action streams. Coupled conditional flow matching learns a joint vector field for coordinated generation of both action chunks. On the ManiSkill-HAB benchmark, MoPA achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three task suites. Across four real-world tasks, MoPA achieves a mean full-task success rate of 76.3%, outperforming the best baseline by 12.5 percentage points. Ablation studies and further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed design. Website is available at: https://mopa-policy.github.io/.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have improved robotic manipulation, yet observation-to-action learning remains limited by a fundamental transition realizability gap, manifested in three tightly coupled problems: (i) Transition ambiguity. Visually similar current observations may correspond to different manipulation phases and imply different subsequent transitions. (ii) Prediction--execution mismatch. A visually plausible predicted future observation does not necessarily correspond to a physically realizable transition. (iii) Experience--realization mismatch. A historically executable action pattern may not necessarily realize the intended transition in the current scene and therefore requires context-aware adaptation. Accordingly, we propose UniMPA, a Unified Memory-Prediction-Action model that addresses these problems through a shared action-grounded transition interface. (i) UniMPA introduces Persistent-Selective Future Prediction to resolve transition ambiguity by modeling the intended future state evolution. A persistent latent stream continuously tracks task-level progress, while a transition-critical pixel stream selectively resolves fine-grained interaction changes through memory-grounded prediction. (ii) To assess the physical executability of the anticipated transition, the predicted transition queries a temporal Visual-Action Memory Bank. The bank retrieves historically realized visual-action experience, grounding future prediction in executable evidence. (iii) To adapt executable experience to the current scene, an Action-Visual Memory Bank retrieves visually grounded action prototypes from historical action evolution. Prototype-Biased Flow then shifts the flow source toward a historically supported action manifold for context-aware refinement.

Imitation learning for dexterous hands is bottlenecked by the difficulty of collecting contact-rich demonstrations that transfer faithfully to the robot. Prior wearable-exoskeleton systems record only on the human side and retarget via open-loop mappings calibrated in free space, which degrade under contact. We present SEED-UMI, a framework in which both the human and the robot wear the same exoskeleton: joint encoders become a physically shared measurement, and wrist cameras mounted to the exoskeleton observe the same outer mechanism during both human data collection and robot policy rollouts. This turns retargeting into paired cross-embodiment supervision and lets policies train directly on raw exoskeleton-centric wrist images, without segmentation or inpainting. On five contact-rich tasks, SEED-UMI achieves 3.0x greater data collection efficiency than exoskeleton-based teleoperation and a 70.0% average rollout success rate.

Skill adaptation frameworks based on reinforcement learning often require restrictive assumptions to maintain stability, such as fixed observations or tightly controlled exploration schedules. In cluttered and dynamic environments, however, unrestricted exploration can lead to unsafe behaviour and unstable learning, particularly when task-relevant observations lie near obstacles or involve moving objects. In this work, we present Dist-GPRL, a distance-aware and safety-guided reinforcement learning framework for structured robot skill adaptation. Building upon Gaussian Process (GP)-based skill parameterisation, our framework sequentially adapts overlapping local windows of sparse trajectory via-points rather than modifying the complete skill at every policy step. Raw policy outputs are correlated through the GP covariance structure, producing temporally coherent trajectory updates while reducing the action-space and credit-assignment difficulties associated with global trajectory adaptation. Safety is incorporated through two complementary forms of guidance. A safe-subspace prior derived from the Hausdorff Approximation Planner (HAP) biases policy exploration toward feasible regions, while dynamically updated distance field clearance and gradient rewards provide local obstacle awareness. A trajectory-kinematics similarity regulariser further preserves the demonstrated velocity and acceleration characteristics during adaptation. We evaluate the framework on two dynamic object-manipulation tasks in simulation and transfer the learned policy to real-world robot execution. Experimental results demonstrate higher task success, lower collision frequency, and more stable learning than the baselines, while preserving the kinematic characteristics of the demonstrated skill.

Multi-agent robotic manipulation tasks require coordination among agents to satisfy task-level temporal, logical, and safety constraints. Recently, diffusion policies have been used to perform the task. However, they still suffer from desynchronization, incorrect action ordering, and coordination failures in tasks that require simultaneous or sequential multi-agent interaction. Therefore, LTLDiff is proposed as a framework that combines Finite Linear Temporal Logic (LTLf) specification learning for both the generation of demonstrations and learning via diffusion policies. Each task has a specific LTLf formula that is learned from a set of natural language instructions using a large-scale language model. To enable a fixed-dimensional vector embedding of the learned specification from the language model, LTLf uses an abstract syntax tree representation scheme. This embedding of logic serves as a condition for (i) logic-guided data collection and (ii) diffusion-based policy training, encouraging trajectories that are consistent with the desired ordering and coordination requirements. Experiments on multi-agent LTLDiff manipulation tasks demonstrate improved task success rates compared to the baseline. Together, these contributions demonstrate the effectiveness of LTLDiff for coordinated multi-agent manipulation.

Enabling robots to perform musical instruments with human-level expressivity represents a frontier in bridging the gap between mechanical precision and artistic interpretation. Despite advances in robotic dexterity, replicating the fluid finger transitions and nuanced dynamic control characteristic of human pianists remains a significant challenge. Through a reinforcement learning-based control framework, we demonstrate that a dexterous robotic hand can achieve high-fidelity performance across a diverse piano repertoire. Central to our approach is a graph-based optimization strategy that guides the robot to generate natural pre-press and key-press fingering strategies that closely resemble human movement patterns. To achieve expressive sound production, the control system is coupled with a physics-inspired acoustic model that modulates keypress velocity to accurately reproduce the dynamic variations specified in musical scores. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our expressive control model significantly outperforms baseline methods in both finger morphology similarity and dynamic velocity accuracy. In a perceptual test involving participants from diverse listener groups, performances generated by our system are significantly preferred over baseline robotic performances and are indistinguishable from human performances for non-professional audiences. Furthermore, extensive experiments across multiple musical styles confirm that our method maintains high note-level accuracy while achieving expressive performance. Our approach provides a robust pathway for robotic systems to move beyond mere mechanical accuracy, elevating robotic musicianship to a level of expressive performance comparable to human pianists.

Action-conditioned latent world models predict future visual representations, enabling zero-shot goal-conditioned robot planning and control. However, their predictions for fine-grained spatial and rotational actions are unreliable for full 7-DoF end-effector control. To address this gap, we introduce DUET-DINO, a simultaneous cross-view latent world model that jointly learns action-conditioned predictions from static side- and wrist-camera observations through cross-view conditioning. By exploiting complementary global scene and gripper-centric information, DUET-DINO enables latent planning over the full 7-DoF action space. Across spatially diverse reach, orientation-intensive angled-reach, and multi-goal grasp-and-lift tasks, DUET-DINO consistently outperforms single-view and independent dual-view baselines, achieving 92% success on reach, 72.5% on angled-reach, and 60.0% on lift tasks. DUET-DINO is trained from scratch on DROID and RoboArena datasets and generalizes robustly under visual distribution shifts. We further show that while V-JEPA 2 wrist-view predictions underestimate visual dynamics induced by fine-grained actions, DINOv3 predictions better capture action-conditioned scene changes, leading to stronger downstream planning. The code and model checkpoints will be open-sourced. Project page: https://utn-air.github.io/DUET-DINO

Generated hand-object interaction (HOI) videos provide a controllable way to propose manipulation motions. Simulation-based HOI tracking can translate such kinematic references into feasible low-level control, but its scalability is limited by the lack of reliable reference motions. We therefore combine generated videos with simulation-based HOI grounding: during training, generated videos provide diverse motion references for learning a multi-object, multi-trajectory HOI tracker, and at deployment, the video model produces motion plans that are executed by the learned tracker. In particular, we propose a method that enables scalable reference generation by HOI reconstruction with minimal manual intervention and successfully grounds more than 1,500 generated videos in simulation, achieving success rates over 25 percentage points higher than those of baselines during simulation-based training. In real-world closed-loop experiments, it achieves diverse grasps, including functional grasps, non-prehensile manipulation, and post-grasp object-pose tracking. Videos and code are available at https://boyuan-an.github.io/GALATEA/.

Robotic manipulation tasks are often decomposed into behaviors or skills. However, one often needs to predefine these behaviors for specific tasks or try to cover a wide range of tasks using generic skills. As a result, these behaviors can remain too coarse to expose the geometric, control, and scene-dependent decisions required for execution. We introduce Grounded Task Axes v2 (GTA-2), a modular multi-VLM framework that constructs executable, task-bespoke manipulation skills from reusable object-centric task-axis components. Rather than predicting actions end-to-end or composing fixed task-level primitives, GTA-2 represents each skill as semantic subtasks comprising task-relevant keypoints and axes, controller compositions, and scene-dependent parameters. Four specialized VLM agents separately decompose the task, construct an abstract task-axis skill, assign controller parameters, and ground the required visual features from RGB-D observations. This abstraction-to-grounding factorization enables zero-shot skill generation without task-specific robot demonstrations, policy training, or fine-tuning. It also keeps intermediate decisions explicit, allowing targeted human feedback to refine an incorrect stage while preserving correct components. We evaluate GTA-2 on 14 real-robot manipulation tasks against a VLA policy pi_{0.5} and two Code-as-Policies baselines using task-axis controllers or conventional robot primitives. GTA-2 achieves an average zero-shot success rate of 73.9%, exceeding the strongest baseline by 31.4 percentage points, while targeted refinement raises GTA-2's average success rate to 90.7%. Project page: https://gta2-project.github.io/

Accurate tactile forecasts need not improve force-constrained control. We study a 652,157-parameter action-conditioned visuotactile world model with matched behavior cloning, policy learning in imagination, independent reactive implicit Q-learning, and model-assisted force feedback. A fixed protocol executes 34 policies on 120 fresh MuJoCo environments spanning geometry and physical-parameter shifts, plus 324 independently replayed action branches on 12 additional ID environments. Visuotactile dynamics reduce force action-effect MAE from 0.413 N for persistence to 0.338 N. Model-assisted feedback raises ID force-budgeted success from 73.3% to 93.3%, with paired difference +20.0 [+6.7,+33.4] percentage points (95% CI), with the difference occurring during scripted lowering. Its pooled difference is +3.9 [-4.5,+11.7] points. Imagined RL achieves 11.9% pooled joint success versus 25.0% for reactive IQL. An empirical tactile-residual stress test adds 330 executions. The evidence concerns rigid-box lifting after a common approach, without physical-robot transfer or a closed-loop safety guarantee.

Generalist robot policies carry broad manipulation priors from large-scale data, but specializing them to a new task remains the deployment bottleneck. This requires eliciting task-specific behavior from limited demonstrations without degrading their broad capabilities. We introduce Proxy Policy Steering (PPS), an inference-time adaptation method that resolves this challenge by training two lightweight proxy policies whose calibrated velocity-space difference steers the frozen base sampler. A reference proxy models the frozen base's behavior on target-task observations, and a task proxy, initialized from the reference, captures how this behavior changes under task supervision. Their difference forms a calibrated velocity-space residual that steers the frozen base sampler at every denoising step. We identify the conditions under which this residual isolates the change induced by task supervision, and validate them empirically. Because the base is never directly modified, its broad capabilities remain available at inference, including behaviors such as recovery from failure that the demonstrations themselves do not exercise. Adaptation requires only forward velocity predictions from the base, making PPS lightweight to train and applicable even without access to the base's parameters. On 8 real-world and 4 simulation manipulation tasks, PPS lifts the state-of-the-art pi 0.5 base policy by 53% absolute success rate on average, with zero-to-one gains on tasks the base never solves, while preserving the base's broad capabilities. PPS outperforms LoRA fine-tuning, from-scratch specialists, residual policies, and prior inference-time steering methods.

Dexterous manipulation involves contact-rich and fine-grained interactions with the physical world, posing significant challenges for existing vision-language-action (VLA) models due to severe visual occlusions and complex contact dynamics. While recent works have incorporated tactile sensing into robotic manipulation, most approaches still rely on homogeneous multimodal fusion, lacking adaptive tactile integration and explicit modeling of physical dynamics. In this work, we present DeCAL, a physically-grounded dexterous vision-language-action model that unifies understanding, imagination and action generation for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, DeCAL leverages specialized experts for each capability while enabling efficient information flow among them. To effectively leverage tactile information, we introduce Adaptive Visuo-Tactile Fusion that dynamically regulates tactile interactions via a contact-aware gating strategy. Furthermore, we propose Visuo-Tactile Latent Co-Imagination to jointly model visual and tactile dynamics, equipping the policy with implicit physical world knowledge. Experimental results show that DeCAL consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, attaining a 71% average success rate and an 83.4% progress success rate, while also demonstrating strong generalization to unseen scenarios. The website is available at https://aureleopku.github.io/DeCAL.

Workspace analysis measures where a robot can place its end effector. For visually guided manipulation, reachability alone is insufficient: a kinematically reachable target may not be visible in the specific pose required to reach it. The robot must then redirect its sensing or move its body to acquire a view, turning a perception limitation into additional motion. Existing humanoids largely inherit this limitation when copying human form factors. We introduce the visible-reachable workspace (VRW), a design-stage measure that conditions visibility on feasible reaching configurations and extends it to concurrent visibility of spatially separated work regions. We apply VRW by building a 31-DoF humanoid with independently actuated RGB-D cameras. On the same robot, camera articulation increases visible-reachable coverage from 38% to 97%. With actuated camera layouts, a second camera raises pairwise coverage from 0.45 to 0.95, while a third changes it only to 0.97. In a controlled two-target reach-and-grasp benchmark, our dual-actuated design reduces mean completion time by 17% and mechanical energy by 19% relative to the same robot with its cameras fixed. Hardware experiments demonstrate simultaneous observation and manipulation of front/back and left/right target pairs without torso reorientation. The results suggest that reachability becomes a more informative design quantity for perception-driven humanoid manipulation when it is evaluated together with the sensing configurations that make the reachable space observable. We will open-source all software and the humanoid hardware design. Our website is https://generalroboticslab.com/DukeHumanoidv2

Object-centric manipulation policies improve generalization by modeling object motion instead of directly predicting robot actions. However, existing methods are often limited by representations which are either too simplistic to capture interaction dynamics or too dense to learn efficiently. We observe that many rigid relational manipulation tasks are governed by short interaction phases where the relative motion between task-relevant objects is tightly constrained. Based on this observation, we propose Foci Policy, an interaction-centric framework that achieves a two-fold abstraction: (1) temporally, by automatically extracting compact interaction segments from demonstrations;(2) spatially, by representing skills as relative $SE(3)$ motion between task-relevant objects, yielding invariance to scene configurations and robot embodiment. Experiments on RLBench, COLOSSEUM, and real-world tasks show that Foci Policy achieves strong performance with substantially less training data than prior object-centric and action-centric policies. These results suggest that modeling object-object interactions provides a simple and efficient inductive bias for rigid relational manipulation. Project page: fitz0401.github.io/foci-page/.

Observing objects grasped by a robot hand is challenging due to severe visual occlusions. Although in-hand manipulation can expose hidden surfaces, existing approaches often rely on predefined or open-loop reorientation strategies that do not explicitly target under-observed regions. We propose AURORA, an active 3D reconstruction framework that closes the loop between online object-centric reconstruction and in-hand reorientation. At its core, Ray-GPIS estimates direction-wise reconstruction uncertainty along candidate viewing rays and selects next-best-view targets using an uncertainty--novelty objective, which are realized through an axis-conditioned in-hand rotation policy. The resulting RGB-D observations are fused incrementally using CAD-free 6D pose tracking and lightweight geometric reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that AURORA improves reconstruction quality and information-acquisition efficiency over non-active rotation strategies, while Ray-GPIS also outperforms active view-planning baselines in reconstruction performance, action-ranking quality, and planning efficiency. Targeted ablations further validate its robustness to hand occlusion and pose errors. The project webpage is available at https://aurorahand.github.io/

Human videos are an abundant source of dexterous manipulation behaviors, but they lack tactile information that is crucial for contact-rich interaction. This raises a fundamental question: can robots learn deployable visual-tactile dexterous manipulation policies from human video demonstrations without robot-side data collection? We present DEX-X, a framework for learning visual-tactile dexterous manipulation from human videos through simulation. Our key insight is that simulation can serve as a tactile completion engine. Given monocular human demonstrations, DEX-X reconstructs hand-object interactions in simulation, where physically grounded contact dynamics provide tactile supervision unavailable in the original videos. Leveraging this recovered tactile information, we train visual-tactile dexterous manipulation policies and distill them into deployable policies operating on point-cloud observations and tactile sensing. We demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a dexterous hand-arm platform across diverse grasping and contact-rich tool-use tasks. The teacher policy achieves 65.9% average success across six task categories in simulation, while the distilled visual-tactile policy achieves 93% success on real-world cube picking and 53% on the challenging table-cleaning task. Zero-shot generalization to unseen object geometries is also observed on object-picking tasks. Our results suggest that simulated interaction is a key bridge between human videos and deployable dexterous manipulation policies, providing the missing physical supervision needed for scalable robot skill learning from Internet-scale human video data.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly adapted to new manipulation settings through additional gradient updates, which limits rapid deployment when task-specific data or compute is scarce. We present ICI-VLA, a training and retrieval framework that equips a text-action VLM with few-shot test-time adaptation through in-context demonstrations. Unlike mainstream VLA designs based on action-specific multimodal fusion, ICI-VLA retains the native text-generation interface. ICI-VLA updates its parameters only during offline training; at inference, the policy remains fixed and conditions action generation on retrieved micro-demonstrations. The framework decomposes long trajectories into short, semantically labeled examples and trains an RD-Encoder with positives mined by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), aligning the retrieved context with the phase and geometry of the current subtask. We further introduce Target Action Masking, a context-corruption objective designed to reduce direct action copying and increase reliance on the current observation. ICI-VLA reaches average success rates of 97.7% on LIBERO and 60.4% on RoboTwin 2.0, exceeding the highest reported baseline average on RoboTwin 2.0 by 19.3 percentage points. It also achieves 83.2% across four physical tasks. These results indicate that a fixed VLA policy can benefit from conditioning on spatiotemporally aligned demonstrations at test time.

Transferring human hand demonstrations to robotic grippers has recently emerged as a cost-effective solution for robot learning. However, existing methods are largely confined to simple, planar tasks and fail to handle complex spatial movements (e.g., intricate trajectories involving rotations or flips) that are essential for robot manipulation. Motivated by this gap, we adopt an implicit, data-driven approach guided by fine-grained hand-pose motions. To this end, we introduce a scalable acquisition pipeline to collect hand-gripper paired demonstrations, governed by a rigorous protocol that prioritizes motion complexity and leverages a handheld gripper for seamless action mimicry. This yields a large-scale paired dataset comprising 6,189 episodes across 1,254 unique objects, exhibiting significantly higher spatial complexity than existing benchmarks. However, learning such complex mappings remains challenging. We observe that naive end-to-end generation of full gripper pose sequences is insufficient, as minor trajectory deviations compound rapidly under intricate dynamics. To address this, we propose a two-stage framework: Stage I predicts sparse gripper keyframes (initial and terminal) to simplify the mapping objective, while Stage II generates the full continuous action sequence conditioned on these keyframes. Furthermore, to mitigate cumulative drift, we keep the gripper's orientation being learned while post-optimizing its translation based on the grasping heuristic and kinematic consistency. In both simulation and real-robot experiments, our framework enables stable and precise hand-to-gripper transfer of complex spatial manipulations, significantly outperforming traditional baselines. Project page: https://cosmoh2g.github.io.