Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation often requires acting on information that is no longer visible, yet Vision-Language-Action policies are usually evaluated when the current observation largely determines the next action. Existing robotic memory benchmarks expose this gap, but they still rely mainly on final task success and therefore conflate forgetting with manipulation failure. We present MEMOBench, a benchmark for process level memory evaluation in robotic manipulation. MEMOBench includes 30 history dependent tasks, 1{,}500 expert demonstrations, and 4{,}200 executable checkpoint instances from 84 templates. Each checkpoint pairs coarse to fine language with a simulator predicate and labels one memory operation: Storage, Update, or Compression. These annotations define Memory Storage Rate, Memory Update Rate, and Memory Compression Rate, which measure memory fidelity alongside task success. Across standard and memory augmented VLA policies, the strongest memory module baseline reaches only 31.9% average success rate, and high storage often coexists with weak update and compression. Checkpoint language also supervises semantic, contrastive, and framewise memory alignment objectives, yielding modest gains across different memory operations. MEMOBench provides a diagnostic evaluation suite and training supervision for memory grounded robotic policies. The project page is available at https://github.com/Collab-Gen/MEMOBench.

Compared with relying solely on initial observations and language instructions, predicting goal images with generative models as high-level visual guidance can significantly enhance the robustness of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, most existing foundation models have not systematically incorporated goal image conditioning due to the high computational training cost. To this end, we propose Goal-Injected Fine-Tuning (GIFT), a lightweight and efficient fine-tuning framework that seamlessly integrates generated goal images into multiple representative pretrained VLA models. Our approach introduces goal image features into observations via a zero-initialized convolution which progressively grows parameters from zero and prevents harmful noise from disrupting the pretrained policy during fine-tuning. As training proceeds, goal information is gradually incorporated, enabling efficient goal understanding without disrupting model stability. We further introduce a refined image editing method to generate semantically and visually consistent goal images from initial observations and task instructions. Experiments show that goal-aware VLA models achieve substantial performance gains across tasks: with only a single epoch of fine-tuning, GIFT outperforms the base model by 6.0% and 13.4% on two SIMPLER settings, and by 4.7% on LIBERO, demonstrating both efficiency and effectiveness.

Predicting hand--object interaction fields requires locating the nearest object-surface point for each hand joint, often from small and partially occluded image regions. We view this task as joint-conditioned surface-endpoint estimation: each joint has its own nearest endpoint, while endpoints from the same hand can draw on shared local surface evidence. This structure motivates Joint-Conditioned Stereo Surface Reasoning (JSSR). A temporal-stereo network jointly predicts 3D joints, a direct interaction field, and per-view endpoint evidence. Calibrated candidate search evaluates endpoint hypotheses using joint-specific image compatibility and cross-view correspondence. A hand-shared candidate support lets joints draw on common surface evidence, and a learned residual gate controls the geometric correction when observations are ambiguous. Our system built on this method ranked third on the SHOW3D Interaction Field Challenge leaderboard.

Distributed Dexterous Manipulation (DDM) is a novel paradigm that presents significant control challenges due to high action-space redundancy, inter-robot cooperation, and dynamic object-robot interactions. This paper introduces a framework based on spatially conditioned Multi-Agent Transformers (MATs) to efficiently learn robust control policies for a DDM system grounded in an array of 64 soft delta robots arranged in an 8x8 grid. Our three core contributions are: (i) an MAT with adaptive layer norm for compute efficiency, (ii) spatial contrastive embeddings to ground transformer embeddings in the spatial configuration of the robots, and (iii) an MAT-based behavior cloning method fine-tuned using Soft Actor Critic. We also propose an action selection formulation to analyze the trade-off between task performance and the number of robots utilized. Our experiments show that MATs iteratively refine their actions through the stacked attention blocks. This further informs the benefit of spatial conditioning in transformers to learn DDM policies. We demonstrate long-horizon planar manipulation tasks with objects of various geometries in simulation and real-world. Finally, we show how action selection mitigates robot maintenance by reducing wear and tear due to inter-robot collisions while maintaining the ability to manipulate objects along various trajectories in the real-world, achieving an average error of ~1.5 cm, while using ~65% fewer robots.

Although highly effective in vision and language domains, applying in-context learning to robotics remains challenging. Existing autoregressive in-context imitation methods discretize continuous actions and exacerbate the accumulation of early prediction errors through next-token prediction, limiting their generalization on unseen task configurations. Meanwhile, flow-matching policies have been explored for continuous robot control and can help mitigate compounding errors; however, in-context imitation learning within a flow-matching framework remains underexplored. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a conditional flow-matching model that learns continuous action distributions for in-context imitation learning. ContextFlow conditions flow-based action prediction on demonstrations and observations, enabling robust generation from noisy action distributions. To better encode multimodal in-context demonstrations, we adapt perceiver-style multimodal context compressors that distill visual, proprioceptive, and action sequences into compact, task-relevant latent representations. On LIBERO, ContextFlow outperforms ICRT by 35 percentage points in average success rate on unseen task configurations, while matching the performance of the task-specific fine-tuned VLA model $π_0$ without any fine-tuning on unseen tasks. On real robots, it generalizes to unseen configurations of both single-arm and bimanual tasks, achieving 40% success on a new pen-uncapping configuration. Project Page: https://dingjiansw101.github.io/contextflow-page/.

Behavior-cloned visuomotor policies can remain accurate near their training distribution yet fail when object position and camera viewpoint change together. A successful reference trajectory contains the geometry needed to transfer the same interaction, but the policy must align that geometry with the current scene and remain sensitive to it during denoising. To address these challenges, we present MemCorr-DP, a diffusion policy that lifts frozen RoMa v2 matches into explicit 3D relations between the current scene and the reference trajectory. A counterfactual paired objective assigns opposite behaviors the same physical state and noisy action while retaining reference-specific denoising targets. Mixed-condition fine-tuning then adapts the policy from ground-truth geometry to measured correspondence errors. Our strongest evaluation places the Door in the outermost position bands beyond the training support and changes the query camera by $\pm15^\circ$. Under this combined shift, MemCorr-DP achieves 96.67% closed-loop success, compared with 88.00% for a visual Transformer with the same action architecture. Objective ablations and reference interventions show that behavior responds to the selected reference, while matched controls favor the complete relation set over future motion or centroid geometry alone. These results support explicit 3D reference relations as a robust conditioning interface when spatial and viewpoint changes are compounded in the evaluated task.

Developing unified physics-based humanoid controllers that can navigate complex 3D scenes and manipulate objects remains a longstanding challenge. Existing approaches are often specialized for either locomotion or object-centric manipulation, or rely on task-specific reward engineering that does not scale well across diverse behaviors. We present CHIP, a unified, physics-grounded framework for learning reusable humanoid interaction skills from heterogeneous motion data. Central to our approach is a conditional interaction prior that models a context-dependent distribution over these skills within a shared discrete space. Our method is trained in three stages. We first learn physics-based motion-imitation policies that acquire grounded teacher behaviors from heterogeneous interaction data. We then distill these behaviors into a context-conditioned interaction prior that captures reusable motion structure across locomotion and manipulation. Finally, we initialize downstream task policies from the pretrained prior and adapt them through prior-regularized online RL post-training. Experiments on a diverse suite of humanoid interaction tasks show that our approach supports scene-aware locomotion, contact-rich object manipulation, and compositional behaviors such as environment-aware object transport and long-horizon skill sequencing, while producing smooth transitions and physically plausible motion.

We study how physical-state inputs affect a 0.8B hybrid language model adapted for manipulation with 6.2M trainable parameters. Six conditions are trained on three LIBERO-Spatial tasks and evaluated over three seeds and 540 held-out rollouts. Conditioning recurrent decay gates on geometric increments yields 28.9% success, compared with 36.7% when those increments are shuffled during training and 24.4% without explicit object/goal geometry. Both geometry policies receive correct inputs at evaluation. A token adapter using the same increments scores 27.8%; differences vary across seeds and remain inconclusive. Token-clock conditioning scores 11.1%, including one seed that fails to converge. In separate robustness tests, a state-only relative-coordinate policy retains 7/10 success under frame relabeling, whereas all four tested visual policies fall to at most 3/20 after a 5 cm object displacement. These results show no reliable advantage from training-time geometric alignment under this recipe and illustrate the gap between coordinate invariance and physical-layout generalization. Episode records, seed-level analyses, and figure-generation code accompany the paper.

Learning-based manipulation requires supervision that is both semantically meaningful and physically executable, but current data pipelines often provide only one of these properties. Human demonstrations capture intent but are costly to collect and constrained by the human-robot embodiment gap, while simulation can scale data generation but often under-specifies functional behavior. We present IM-ENGINE, a simulator-grounded pipeline that uses image editing as an intermediate representation for embodied data generation. Given a rendered scene with known geometry, depth, segmentation, and camera parameters, IM-ENGINE edits the image to inject task-relevant semantics, recovers explicit 3D state using simulator priors and an unchanged anchor object, refines the state in physics, and converts it into robot-executable supervision. We instantiate the pipeline for dexterous grasp synthesis and goal-state generation. For grasping, IM-ENGINE generates a human grasp in image space, recovers the hand-object interaction, retargets it to a robot hand, and refines it into physically validated robot grasps. For goal generation, it edits a rendered scene into a desired outcome, recovers the target-object pose, and refines it into physically valid, semantically meaningful goals and trajectories. This combination of generative semantic priors and simulator grounding enables scalable task-relevant supervision for robot learning.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promising generalization for language-conditioned robot manipulation, but deploying them in unstructured environments remains challenging. A single end-to-end VLA policy must simultaneously solve long-range transport of the end effector to task-relevant regions and short-horizon, contact-rich interaction upon arrival. This formulation is inefficient and brittle: small visual shifts, distractors, clutter, occlusions, or unfavorable initial gripper poses can push the policy outside the local state distribution in which it was trained, leading to task failure. We introduce GloVLA, a hybrid framework that explicitly separates object-centric manipulation into two complementary regimes: a geometric transport controller moves the end-effector into interaction-centric handoff regions, and local VLA policies handle only the short-horizon interaction phases. GloVLA is model-agnostic and can be integrated with different VLA backbones with no additional demonstrations and no changes to the action space or success predicate. Experiments on standard LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus Object tasks together with a newly introduced LIBERO-Challenge benchmark ettings with clutter, distractors,illumination changes, visual shifts, and obstruction show that GloVLA improves task success and substantially lowers VLA inference cost compared with full end-to-Challenge, full-trajectory GR00T N1.6execution degrades to 20.9% average success while GloVLA retains 88.5%; on a physical UR10e, overall success improves from 35.6% to 90.0% while mean inference time is more than halved. Videos and additional results are available at https://glovla-project.github.io/

Vision-language-action (VLA) models adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) inherit a structural asymmetry: expert demonstrations teach the policy where success behavior lies, but provide no signal about where it ceases to be reliable. We argue that robust VLA adaptation should therefore be viewed not as further demonstration fitting, but as Failure-Boundary Learning -- the problem of Discovering, Localizing, and Shaping the boundary between recoverable deviations and task failure. To instantiate this view, we propose DLS: built on a real-grounded behavioral prior from few real demonstrations and simulated co-training, DLS discovers failure boundaries at scale through on-policy digital twin rollouts. Rather than reducing each rollout to a binary label, semantic progress localization uses privileged simulator states to assign progress-aware signals that capture where the failure boundary is crossed, not merely whether. These signals drive directional boundary shaping in the flow dynamics -- reinforcing success-producing denoising directions and suppressing failure-producing ones, without action likelihoods or auxiliary critics. Across real-robot manipulation tasks, DLS improves robustness over SFT and online RL baselines, especially under randomized initial states and unseen visual conditions.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to guide action generation for robot control. VLMs provide hierarchical visual-semantic representations that evolve across layers, from local visual geometry to abstract, language-aligned semantics; different manipulation tasks may therefore require different mixtures of layer representations. Meanwhile, the action module maintains intermediate representations that evolve throughout action computation and may provide useful information for subsequent decisions. However, existing VLA interfaces offer limited flexibility in representation access: VLM information is exposed through fixed layer assignments for each action layer, while intermediate action states are only propagated implicitly through residual streams without explicit reuse. We introduce LayerRoute, an action-conditioned representation routing interface that enables adaptive access to VLM layers and action representations. The Layer Mixture Router dynamically forms mixtures of cached VLM representations, while Action-State Reread reuses earlier action representations. Across diverse simulation and real-world benchmarks, LayerRoute consistently improves StarVLA-$π$ and $π_{0.5}$, achieving up to 7.2 gains on LIBERO Long with only 0.31% / 3.87% additional parameters. Ablation studies validate the benefit of action-conditioned layer routing, while routing analyses reveal structured allocation patterns across action layers and task settings.

Multi-fingered dexterous manipulation remains a frontier for real-world reinforcement learning (RL) due to the high-dimensional action space and the prohibitive cost of hardware failures. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) RL allows operators to intervene before failures occur, current pipelines often treat these interventions as reactive corrections, discarding the rich safety signal inherent in the operator's decision to take control. In this paper, we ask: How can we learn from what a human would avoid? We present WHIRL, a safety-aware RL framework that transforms binary human interventions into forward-predictive signals for proactive risk avoidance. Our approach centers on an intervention-aware latent world model with four prediction heads: dynamics, reward, termination, and a novel per-state intervention-probability head that learns to predict the likelihood of a human takeover at future states. This head provides an actor-side risk-shaping term that discourages the policy from entering "intervention-prone" regions, modeling the operator's internal safety threshold. We evaluate our framework on a 16-DoF LEAP Hand across tasks spanning convex and irregular object grasping, prismatic manipulation, and long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Our results show that predictive risk-shaping enables the system to achieve a 96.7 percent success rate on complex grasping tasks while reducing the operator intervention burden by up to 84 percent in step-weighted terms. By closing the loop between human intuition and predictive world modeling, this work provides a practical safety-aware recipe for training complex dexterous agents in the real world while reducing operator fatigue and hardware-risk exposure.

Robot manipulation foundation models require scalable evaluation and data generation across diverse scenarios, with simulation providing an environment for both. Automated scene generation offers a promising path, yet prior work has largely emphasized coarse-grained scene layouts rather than fine-grained functional object compositions. Motivated by this gap, we present GIF, an agentic Generation framework for Interactive and Functional object compositions. In this framework, we recast this problem as disentangled reconstruction followed by relative pose recovery. CoGen produces instance-disentangled meshes with coarse initial poses leveraging complementary strengths of 2D and 3D generative models. GPRM refines the relative pose under joint geometric and physical guidance, and a VLM verifier selects the candidate that best matches the structured specification. We further construct a benchmark spanning eight representative contact-geometry classes and compare with state-of-the-art generators; GIF improves both asset quality and relation matching, while reducing collision rate to below 1%. Finally, we synthesize data for policy learning, revealing diversity scaling in both simulation and real-world deployment.

Human demonstrations contain rich manipulation knowledge, but it remains unclear what information can be transferred effectively to robot control. Existing affordance representations are typically formulated as 2D masks, 3D regions, contact points, or actionability scores, and therefore primarily identify where interaction may occur. However, effective manipulation also requires modeling how interaction-relevant geometry evolves during task execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce action-oriented 4D affordances, which represent the language-conditioned future trajectories of interaction-relevant 3D points. These trajectories capture task-conditioned geometric evolution rather than embodiment-specific actions, enabling transferable interaction priors across humans and robots. Based on this representation, we construct a large-scale action-oriented 4D affordance dataset from existing human--object interaction video data and complementary RGB-D demonstrations, and introduce A4A, an affordance-to-action framework that uses 4D affordance trajectory prediction to pretrain robot policies before manipulation fine-tuning. Experiments in both simulation and the real world validate the effectiveness of A4A, showing that pretraining with action-oriented 4D affordance data consistently improves the manipulation performance of diverse VLA policies. These results establish action-oriented 4D affordances as an effective cross-embodiment representation for transferring manipulation knowledge from human demonstrations to robot control.

Visuomotor imitation policies can achieve high performance under in-distribution visual conditions yet fail when visually similar objects or receptacles are introduced. We study this behavior as a problem of conditional visual grounding: the visual target required for successful control changes with the manipulation phase and, in more complex tasks, with the observed task state. Using Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), we systematically introduce distractor objects and receptacles with controlled color and shape similarity and localize failures to picking and placement. We find that distractor sensitivity is specific to both the type of visual similarity and the manipulation stage. Guided by this diagnosis, we evaluate distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting as complementary interventions for improving target selection while preserving spatial information required for control. These interventions substantially improve robustness in simulation and on a physical UR3e. We further examine the same failure pattern in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned instrument-handling task, where the observed state of a medical instrument determines the correct destination. Together, the results show that visual distractors can cause incorrect object or destination selection even when the underlying manipulation skill remains intact, and that explicitly improving target selection can substantially recover performance across distinct visuomotor policy-learning regimes.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising progress in language-conditioned robotic manipulation. However, existing datasets and benchmarks mainly evaluate task completion under predefined settings, offering limited insight into model reasoning under increasing spatial and procedural complexity. We introduce RoboSPA (Robot Spatial-Procedural Assessment), a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in VLA models. RoboSPA focuses on two core dimensions, Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning and Long-Horizon Procedural Planning, covering 10 task categories and 56 base tasks. Each task is instantiated across five difficulty levels, yielding 280 variants with increasing spatial ambiguity and procedural complexity. We collect 527K trajectories across multiple embodiments and diverse scenes. Beyond binary success rate, RoboSPA introduces diagnostic metrics for more detailed evaluation. Experiments on representative VLA models show that current systems still struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning. These results establish RoboSPA as a challenging diagnostic benchmark for developing more capable, reliable, and generalizable embodied agents. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/fanzhenxuan/RoboSPA.

Robotic hands vary widely in anatomical fidelity and mechanical complexity, and these structural choices influence the coordination of joint motions and the difficulty of controlling the system. A unified framework is presented in which the kinematic and actuation stages are analysed separately and in composition, through the conditioning of the task Jacobian, the actuation matrix, and their product. It is applied to two hands representing opposing design philosophies, the Shadow Dexterous Hand and the Anatomically Correct, Biomechatronic Hand, along four morphological aspects: joint axis geometry, actuator-to-DOF ratio, coupling architecture, and authority distribution. All parameters are derived from the hands' canonical digital representations. Anatomical fidelity carries no uniform advantage: oblique axes improve thumb conditioning but leave the long fingers worse conditioned than the orthogonal-axis design, while the branching tendon network improves the effective control mapping at every long finger and worsens it significantly at the thumb, where actuator authority is concentrated on thumb opposition. Predictions derived from these metrics are evaluated against reinforcement learning experiments using PPO, DDPG+HER, and TQC+HER, across three different tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or World Action (WAM) models have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in robotic manipulation. On LIBERO, SOTA method have achieved nearly 100% success rates, seemingly suggesting that the models are ready for deployment in real world. However, near perfect performance on existing benchmarks can be misleading: success under ideal conditions does not imply real world robustness. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate task completion from predefined initial states, while real world interactions inevitably involve failures such as failed grasps, collisions, and unintended object movements. A robot must therefore not only execute tasks successfully, but also recognize and recover from failures to continue the task. Yet this capability remains largely unmeasured, revealing a critical gap between benchmark performance and real world reliability. To address this gap, we introduce LIBERO-Recover Benchmark, a large scale benchmark for failure recovery in robotic manipulation. Built upon LIBERO, we collect real execution failures from SOTA embodied models and construct 1,000+ scenarios across four recovery levels: (1) Action Retry, (2) Action Adaptation, (3) Object State Recovery, and (4) Environmental Recovery. We evaluate four core capabilities: spatial understanding, object structure reasoning, interaction understanding, and topological reasoning. As the first large-scale benchmark for embodied failure recovery, LIBERO-Recover shifts evaluation from Can the robot succeed?'' to Can the robot recover after failure?'', promoting robust and generalizable embodied agents. The project will be avaible in \textcolor{blue}{https://liulin815.github.io/LIBERO-Recovery/}.

We study dark manipulation: after a brief lit Write encodes z0 = Enc(rgb), a policy pi(z) and open-loop dynamics f(z,a) complete contact-rich skills without further pixels (dark_f). On ManiSkill StackCube (n=160; seed packs 0/1000), dark_f attains 68.1% stacked on the five-rung chain (near_A -> grasped -> lifted -> on_B -> stacked), compared with 35.6% for per-step lit_reenc and 0% for freeze/encode_black. On a shared Write->HOLD protocol (n=40), occlusion and camera-aligned GT contact-neighbor masks drive lit lift from 43% to 0%, while dark_f holds 82.5%; shuffling actions inflates dynamics MSE by ~9.4x; write-time appearance shifts break encoding (night: 0% stacked), yet the same shifts during HOLD leave dark_f lift unchanged; Write length Tw is flat once the stop phase is reached, while earlier stops and write-time blur/JPEG sharply cut stacked. A dedicated pi_write reaches 35% vision-budget stacked (n=80); matched Dreamer-style/pixel nulls without privileged geom stay at 0%. Privileged state-RSSM MPC reaches ~35% stacked with 9D dark observations -- a stronger-observation null, not a matched visual baseline.

Personalized autonomous packing requires robots to account for resident preferences that cannot be inferred from scene geometry alone. Expert teleoperators can interpret these preferences and translate them into feasible robot actions, but continuous expert involvement limits scalable deployment. In this paper, we investigate triadic human-robot collaboration among a resident, a correction mediator, and a robot by comparing human-expert and voice-agent mediation. We evaluate the two conditions in a user study across Protection, Compactness, andGrouping tasks, using a Show-Correct-Generalize process to assess preference correction and subsequent generalization after the surrounding objects are rearranged. Results show that voice-agent mediation achieves outcomes comparable to human-expert mediation in two of the three preference categories, despite receiving shorter and less detailed instructions. Both mediators are similarly easy to use, although the human expert is perceived as more reliable. These findings demonstrate the potential of voice agents to reduce expert involvement while identifying perceived reliability and preference generalization as remaining challenges.

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation but remain unreliable in tasks demanding precision and repeatability. Applying real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) to VLA post-training enables autonomous trial-and-error improvement beyond demonstrations alone, but exposes two bottlenecks: 1) unreliable value signals can induce policy drift; 2) large-VLA overhead constrains throughput and sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we present VLA-Precision, an efficient real-world online RL framework featuring the Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB-Stream architecture. Specifically, ACoB establishes asymmetric co-bootstrapping across timescales: early intervention-guided behavioral learning rapidly improves policy performance while enhancing online experience quality. As autonomous experience accumulates, global return propagation and local preference ranking progressively calibrate value estimates, yielding relative action advantages for reference-regularized policy improvement while suppressing drift. To enable ACoB on large VLAs, we develop ACoB-Stream, a closed-loop experience--policy architecture that establishes invariant-state decoupling and on-demand streaming as design principles, delivering up to 10.9$\times$ improvements in throughput and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations on nine high-precision chemistry tasks across four categories and four robot embodiments show that VLA-Precision achieves 98.3% mean success rate in 45.8 min/task, with 27.6 s episodes running at 1.2$\times$ and 1.8$\times$ the speeds of VLA and RL baselines. Resources are available at https://vla-precision.github.io.

Vision-language pre-training and predictive world modeling provide robot policies with rich semantic and dynamic visual features, but their native action and visual-prediction objectives may omit critical physical and task structure while retaining control-irrelevant visual redundancy. We call this mismatch between visual richness and control utility the action-sufficiency gap. We investigate whether this gap can be bridged by guiding intermediate features to preserve three control-relevant structure in robotic manipulation: geometry governing motion feasibility, affordance encoding instruction-relevant entities, and goals grounding instructions in task-relevant regions. To this end, we present GIFT (Guided Intermediate Feature Training), an architecture-flexible framework for learning intermediate features that translates these structures into training-time constraints through geometry alignment, affordance prediction, and goal-region reconstruction. We instantiate GIFT in a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy, a direct-action World-Action Model (WAM), and an inverse-dynamics WAM while retaining each model's action formulation. Under zero-shot transfer to LIBERO-Plus, GIFT-VLA, GIFT-WAM-Fast, and GIFT-WAM-IDM outperform StarVLA-OFT, Fast-WAM, and Fast-WAM-IDM by 4.6, 12.6, and 5.2 points, reaching 79.6%, 72.6%, and 87.8%, respectively. On RoboCasa, the three GIFT variants reach 61.4%, 83.6%, and 82.3%, outperforming their counterparts by 12.6, 9.0, and 8.4 points, respectively. Together, these results establish learning functionally structured intermediate features as a reusable principle across model-specific action formulations, with especially large gains on articulated-object tasks and high-precision real-world manipulation under unseen visual and spatial perturbations. Project page: https://openphoenix-team.github.io/GIFT-pages.

Post-training VLA policies typically rely on supervised fine-tuning with costly expert demonstrations or reinforcement learning with expensive and potentially unstable real-world exploration. World models offer a promising alternative by evaluating candidate behaviors through imagined futures, yet effective post-training requires more than accurate prediction: imagination must be scheduled where it is useful, bounded within reliable horizons, and translated into trustworthy policy supervision. In robotic manipulation, the value of imagination varies substantially across execution stages, while extended rollouts can accumulate prediction errors and introduce unreliable learning signals. We introduce WISE (World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models), a unified framework that coordinates when and how world-model imagination is used during policy refinement. WISE selectively invokes imagination at interaction-relevant states, performs bounded multi-view rollouts, evaluates candidate futures using progress and completion signals, and uses their relative outcomes to refine actions generated from real interaction contexts. Extensive experiments with both $π_0$ and $π_{0.5}$ demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse manipulation tasks while reducing GPU computation time by approximately 80% compared with full imagination. Real-world evaluations further show substantial gains in robustness and generalization under diverse real-world distribution shifts.

Grasping and holding tools while using them presents a considerable challenge not only for robots but also for humans. Such a challenge is particularly noticeable in processes involving assembly and disassembly, where efficiency and consistency depend on performing rapidly adaptive tasks. Nonetheless, contemporary robotic grasping technologies that can securely manipulate tools during operation frequently have significant constraints. In this paper, introduce ARTiS (Adaptive Robotic Tool Gripper in Disassembly Systems), a novel gripper that combines the adaptability of soft grippers, the dexterity of anthropomorphic hands, and the robustness of rigid mechanisms with a soft palm and fingertips. This unique combination makes it possible to hold tools securely in a variety of situations through using active jamming in the palm and fin-ray adaptation in fingertips. Furthermore, high finger dexterity is achieved through the seven degrees of freedom design, which enables the fingertips to orient to any surface, both for automated solutions and collaborative tasks. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted using a range of conventional disassembly tools to assess the gripper's compliance, durability, and functional versatility. More information, hardware instructions, and videos at https://romanmykhailyshyn.github.io/artis/

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they can still fail unpredictably during long-horizon execution, making reliable failure detection essential for safe deployment. Existing methods either rely on visual models that typically detect failures only after erroneous actions have occurred, or use lightweight proactive detectors trained on VLA internal representations. However, these proactive methods are often supervised with trajectory-level labels, causing normal pre-failure behavior in unsuccessful trajectories to be incorrectly labeled as failure. This supervision mismatch introduces label noise and limits both trajectory-level detection accuracy and precise timestamp-level failure localization. In this work, we study fine-grained timestamp-level VLA failure detection while addressing the cost of dense annotation. We propose a data-efficient framework that first leverages unlabeled VLA action chunks to construct action-derived weak supervision signals, capturing abnormal patterns such as inconsistent consecutive chunks, frozen or idle actions, and aggressive random motions. We then use active learning to select only the most uncertain trajectories for timestamp-level annotation and fine-tune the detector with these informative labels. Experiments across multiple VLA policies show that our method improves both timestamp-level and trajectory-level failure detection performance.

Robot learning increasingly depends on broad and diverse demonstrations, yet collecting robot data remains expensive and difficult to scale across the wide range of real-world tasks. To address this bottleneck, we introduce RoboTok, a scalable data engine that uses a query human manipulation video to retrieve manipulation-relevant internet demonstrations for training dexterous robot policies. Specifically, we learn a latent motion space from 3D hand trajectories expressed in estimated actor-centered reference frames. This representation enables manipulation behaviors to be compared across variations in camera viewpoint, scene appearance, and actor occlusions, while remaining compact enough for efficient indexing and retrieval over internet video collections. We evaluate RoboTok against existing robot-data retrieval approaches using retrieval metrics and downstream robot policy performance, showing that RoboTok retrieves more manipulation-relevant demonstrations and improves downstream task success. In real-world robot experiments, RoboTok-guided policies achieve a mean success improvement of 42.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline for each task, establishing hand-pose trajectory-aware retrieval as a scalable way to leverage continuously growing web video for robot learning.

Humans can perform complex manipulations given a simple intent through an overall instruction, while continuously adapting to evolving visual observations. However, current vision-language action (VLA) models and other action policies struggle to realize this high-level intelligent behavior under dense, evolving visual inputs and sparse language guidance. Visual correlations can then dominate semantic intent, leading actions to follow visual shortcuts rather than human goals. We present HINT (Human-INTent INcepTion), an agentic framework inspired by the human manipulation principles: semantic intent changes sparsely at manipulation-pattern transitions, whereas continuous control primarily depends on the evolving object-hand relationship. HINT invokes semantic reasoning only at pattern transitions to resolve the current subtask and target, then maintains this commitment through multi-view grounding and visual tracking. We explore two visual interfaces-image-space semantic highlighting and attention-prior injection-to communicate the tracked intent to the action policy without introducing additional trainable parameters into the foundation action model. Experiments across three long-horizon tasks and out-of-distribution variants show that HINT substantially improves intent understanding, task progress, and end-to-end success across two foundation policies while preserving low-latency control. Project page: https://robot-hint.github.io/

Zero-shot generalization to unseen embodiments is important for generalizable vision-language-action (VLA) models as robot hardware evolves and task-specific data collection remains costly. However, a systematic understanding of this problem remains limited, in part because the literature lacks a unified zero-shot transfer definition and controlled evaluation settings that isolate embodiment changes from differences in tasks, scenes, or protocols. To address this gap, we first distinguish strict zero-shot transfer, where the target embodiment is absent from all training data, from pretrain-exposed zero-shot transfer, where it appears only during pretraining. We then introduce a controlled benchmark spanning 14 held-out target embodiments across simulation and real-world validation. Within this framework, we conduct a controlled analysis of four factors: state-action representations, pretraining embodiment diversity, auxiliary co-training objectives, and target-embodiment exposure. Experimental results show that local end-effector (EEF) state-action representations, the source embodiment diversity, and auxiliary co-training improve cross-embodiment transfer by around 15, 18, and 7 percentage points, respectively. We further find that adding only 5% target-embodiment data during pretraining improves average target-embodiment progress by 13.4 percentage points, showing that strict and pretrain-exposed zero-shot transfer are distinct and should be reported separately. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for evaluating and improving cross-embodiment VLA transfer in stationary tabletop manipulation with two-finger grippers, while motivating future investigation of broader settings including mobile-base control, dexterous hands, and long-horizon tasks.

World Action Models (WAMs) leverage the capabilities of large-scale pretrained video diffusion models to jointly predict future observations and actions, inheriting rich visual and physical priors from internet-scale video. This has made them a promising paradigm for robot policy learning, yet the prevailing models operate exclusively on RGB observations and do not leverage 3D information. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Spatially Aware World Action Model (SA-WAM), which repurposes a pretrained video model for joint action, RGB, and depth prediction, enabling 3D-aware world modeling and action prediction within a single diffusion backbone. We use a nonlinear encoding that maps the unbounded depth signal into the bounded input domain expected by the frozen VAE tokenizer. This allows us to reuse the tokenizer without 3D-specific fine-tuning, incorporating geometric information without sacrificing the pretrained priors. SA-WAM achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoboCasa and LIBERO-Plus benchmarks, while simultaneously improving future-state predictions. Furthermore, SA-WAM outperforms strong baselines in real-world evaluation using a UR5 robotic arm, with strong gains in randomized environments. We analyze the correlation between world model prediction quality and rollout success, providing insights into WAM performance and avenues for its improvement.