Robotic Manipulation

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95 papers in the last four weeks, up 459% on the four weeks before. 0.9% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 459

Apr 6, 2026cs.RO

Veo-Act: Enhancing VLA Policies with Frontier Video Models

Video generation models can produce coherent vi- sual sequences depicting object motion and interactions. We in- vestigate how frontier video generation models can complement vision-language-action policies to enhance generalizable robotic manipulation. VLA policies have become a dominant paradigm for robot learning, but their action-oriented adaptation of pretrained VLMs can weaken semantic generalization, limiting robustness in ambiguous or out-of-distribution manipulation scenarios. We use video models as visual planners, motivated by their potential to generalize across complex scenes and their priors over hand motion. However, manipulation methods based on video models often lack the precision and temporal responsiveness needed for low-level dexterous interaction. To address this gap, we present Veo-Act, a hierarchical framework with Veo-3.1 as a high-level motion planner and a VLA policy as the low-level executor. A multi-head inverse dynamics model converts generated frame pairs into actions and learns an interaction gate to trigger the handoff to reactive VLA control. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot show improved instruction following and overall task success over the baseline VLA in novel and semantically complex manipulation settings, supporting the complementary roles of video planning and reactive interaction.

Zhongru Zhang, Chenghan Yang, Qingzhou Lu +4

Tsinghua University

Robotic Manipulation Reactive

Mar 24, 2026cs.RO

Grounding Sim-to-Real Generalization in Robotic Manipulation: An Empirical Study with Vision-Language-Action Models

Learning a generalist control policy for robotic manipulation typically relies on large-scale datasets. Given the high cost of real-world data collection, a practical alternative is to generate synthetic data through simulation. However, the resulting synthetic data often exhibits a significant gap from real-world distributions. While many prior studies have proposed algorithms to bridge the Sim-to-Real discrepancy, there remains a lack of principled research that grounds these methods in real-world manipulation tasks, particularly their performance on generalist policies such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. In this study, we empirically examine the primary determinants of Sim-to-Real generalization across four dimensions: multi-level domain randomization, photorealistic rendering, physics-realistic modeling, and reinforcement learning updates. To support this study, we design a comprehensive evaluation protocol to quantify the real-world performance of manipulation tasks. The protocol accounts for key variations in background, lighting, distractors, object types, and spatial features. Through experiments involving over 10k real-world trials, we derive critical insights into Sim-to-Real transfer. To inform and advance future studies, we release both the robotic platforms and the evaluation protocol for public access to facilitate independent verification, thereby establishing a realistic and standardized benchmark for robotic manipulation policies.

Ruixing Jin, Zicheng Zhu, Ruixiang Ouyang +4

School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

Robotic Manipulation Policies Robotic Manipulation Sim-To-Real Gap Real-World Manipulation Tasks Synthetic Data

Mar 23, 2026cs.RO

CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation

"Code-as-Policy" considers how executable code can complement data-intensive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) methods, yet their effectiveness as autonomous controllers for embodied manipulation remains underexplored. We present CaP-X, an open-access framework for systematically studying Code-as-Policy agents in robot manipulation. At its core is CaP-Gym, an interactive environment in which agents control robots by synthesizing and executing programs that compose perception and control primitives. Building on this foundation, CaP-Bench evaluates frontier language and vision-language models across varying levels of abstraction, interaction, and perceptual grounding. Across 12 models, CaP-Bench reveals a consistent trend: performance improves with human-crafted abstractions but degrades as these priors are removed, exposing a dependence on designer scaffolding. At the same time, we observe that this gap can be mitigated through scaling agentic test-time computation--through multi-turn interaction, structured execution feedback, visual differencing, automatic skill synthesis, and ensembled reasoning--substantially improves robustness even when agents operate over low-level primitives. These findings allow us to derive CaP-Agent0, a training-free framework that recovers human-level reliability on several manipulation tasks in simulation and on real embodiments. We further introduce CaP-RL, showing reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves success rates and transfers from sim2real with minimal gap. Together, CaP-X provides a principled, open-access platform for advancing embodied coding agents.

Letian Fu, Justin Yu, Karim El-Refai +13

1NVIDIA · 2UC Berkeley · 3Stanford University +1

Robotic Manipulation Embodied Agents Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Coding Agents

Mar 17, 2026cs.RO

CABTO: Context-Aware Behavior Tree Grounding for Robot Manipulation

Behavior Trees (BTs) offer a powerful paradigm for designing modular and reactive robot controllers. BT planning, an emerging field, provides theoretical guarantees for the automated generation of reliable BTs. However, BT planning typically assumes that a well-designed BT system is already grounded -- comprising high-level action models and low-level control policies -- which often requires extensive expert knowledge and manual effort. In this paper, we formalize the BT Grounding problem: the automated construction of a complete and consistent BT system. We analyze its complexity and introduce CABTO (Context-Aware Behavior Tree grOunding), the first framework to efficiently solve this challenge. CABTO leverages pre-trained Large Models (LMs) to heuristically search the space of action models and control policies, guided by contextual feedback from BT planners and environmental observations. Experiments spanning seven task sets across three distinct robotic manipulation scenarios demonstrate CABTO's effectiveness and efficiency in generating complete and consistent behavior tree systems.

Yishuai Cai, Xinglin Chen, Yunxin Mao +6

National University of Defense Technology · PsiBot · PKU-Psibot Lab +1

Behavior Tree Robot Planning Robotic Manipulation Robot Systems

Mar 16, 2026cs.CV

Towards Generalizable Robotic Manipulation in Dynamic Environments

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in static manipulation but struggle in dynamic environments with moving targets. This performance gap primarily stems from a scarcity of dynamic manipulation datasets and the reliance of mainstream VLAs on single-frame observations, restricting their spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities. To address this, we introduce DOMINO, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for generalizable dynamic manipulation, featuring 35 tasks with hierarchical complexities, over 110K expert trajectories, and a multi-dimensional evaluation suite. Through comprehensive experiments, we systematically evaluate existing VLAs on dynamic tasks, explore effective training strategies for dynamic awareness, and validate the generalizability of dynamic data. Furthermore, we propose PUMA, a dynamics-aware VLA architecture. By integrating scene-centric historical optical flow and specialized world queries to implicitly forecast object-centric future states, PUMA couples history-aware perception with short-horizon prediction. Results demonstrate that PUMA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding a 6.3% absolute improvement in success rate over baselines. Moreover, we show that training on dynamic data fosters robust spatiotemporal representations that transfer to static tasks. All code and data are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/DOMINO.

Heng Fang, Shangru Li, Shuhan Wang +3

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China · Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, China

Robotic Manipulation Dynamic Environments Spatiotemporal Representations Optical Flow

Mar 16, 2026cs.RO

From Passive Observer to Active Critic: Reinforcement Learning Elicits Process Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation

Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A primary bottleneck is that current video MLLMs, trained primarily under a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) paradigm, function as passive "Observers" that recognize ongoing events rather than evaluating the current state relative to the final task goal. In this paper, we introduce PRIMO R1 (Process Reasoning Induced Monitoring), a 7B framework that transforms video MLLMs into active "Critics". We leverage outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to incentivize explicit Chain-of-Thought generation for progress estimation. Furthermore, our architecture constructs a structured temporal input by explicitly anchoring the video sequence between initial and current state images. Supported by the proposed PRIMO Dataset and Benchmark, extensive experiments across diverse in-domain environments and out-of-domain real-world humanoid scenarios demonstrate that PRIMO R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance. Quantitatively, our 7B model achieves a 50% reduction in the mean absolute error of specialized reasoning baselines, demonstrating significant relative accuracy improvements over 72B-scale general MLLMs. Furthermore, PRIMO R1 exhibits strong zero-shot generalization on difficult failure detection tasks. We establish state-of-the-art performance on RoboFail benchmark with 67.0% accuracy, surpassing closed-source models like OpenAI o1 by 6.0%.

Yibin Liu, Yaxing Lyu, Daqi Gao +5

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Northeastern University · The University of Hong Kong +2

Robotic Manipulation Video Multimodal Large Language Models Soft Actor-Critic Passive

Mar 16, 2026cs.RO

MoE-ACT: Scaling Multi-Task Bimanual Manipulation with Sparse Task-Conditioned Mixture-of-Experts Transformers

Developing a unified policy for multi-task robotic manipulation remains challenging due to policy degradation from task interference and negative transfer. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Experts-Enhanced Action Chunking Transformer (MoE-ACT), a parameter-efficient multi-task visuomotor framework tailored for bimanual manipulation. MoE-ACT incorporates sparse MoE layers into the ACT encoder, dynamically routing image tokens to selected experts based on task context, visual observations, and proprioceptive states. Furthermore, the framework incorporates task-conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) in the action decoder alongside multi-scale cross-attention, ensuring precise task grounding and capturing fine-grained spatial cues. Extensive evaluations on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark across 16 challenging bimanual tasks demonstrate that MoE-ACT achieves an average success rate of 62.0%, outperforming standard ACT by 17.4 percentage points. Crucially, with only 195M activated parameters, MoE-ACT surpasses the 16-fold larger foundation model

π

0 (3.24B) by 5.1 percentage points, exhibiting substantial gains in parameter efficiency and deployment feasibility. Real-robot dual-arm experiments consistently confirm its superior multi-task execution capabilities. Our open-source project page can be found at https://j3k7.github.io/MoE-ACT/.

Kangjun Guo, Haichao Liu, Yanji Sun +3

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511453, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China

Bimanual Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Visuomotor Policy Multimodal Action Distributions Transformer Architectures

Mar 12, 2026cs.CV

Ada3Drift: Adaptive Training-Time Drifting for One-Step 3D Visuomotor Robotic Manipulation

Diffusion-based visuomotor policies model complex action distributions through iterative denoising, but repeated inference adds latency to robotic control. One-step generators reduce this cost, motivating training objectives that retain useful action structure with few demonstrations. We present Ada3Drift, a point-cloud-conditioned policy that builds on Drifting Models to perform distribution refinement during training and generate action chunks in one forward pass. Our central design is a regression-to-drifting curriculum: paired action regression first emphasizes observation--action correspondence, while a sigmoid schedule progressively increases a batch-level action-distribution regularizer. The drifting term combines attraction to demonstrated actions and repulsion among generated samples using inherited multi-temperature aggregation. A timestep-free generator preserves single-step inference throughout. On Adroit, Meta-World, RoboTwin, and five real-world tasks, Ada3Drift achieves the highest reported average success rates among the evaluated baselines with 1 NFE, compared with 10 NFE for the diffusion baselines. Controlled ablations favor sigmoid scheduling at matched demonstration budgets. We will release our code and pretrained model weights.

Chongyang Xu, Yixian Zou, Tianyu Yang +4

College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

Visuomotor Policy Robotic Manipulation Goal-Conditioned Value Function

Mar 9, 2026cs.RO

RoboRouter: Training-Free Policy Routing for Robotic Manipulation

Research on robotic manipulation has developed a diverse set of policy paradigms, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-action (VA) policies, and code-based compositional approaches. Concrete policies typically attain high success rates on specific task distributions, but limited generalization beyond it. Rather than proposing another monolithic policy, we propose to leverage the complementary strengths of existing approaches through intelligent policy routing. We introduce RoboRouter, a training-free framework that maintains a pool of heterogeneous policies and learns to select the best-performing policy for each task through accumulated execution experience. Given a new task, RoboRouter constructs a semantic task representation, retrieves historical records of similar tasks, predicts the optimal policy choice without requiring trial-and-error, and incorporates structured feedback to refine subsequent routing decisions. Integrating a new policy into the system requires only a lightweight evaluation and does not incur training overhead. Across simulation benchmark and real-world evaluations, RoboRouter consistently outperforms individual policies, improving the average success rate by more than 3% in simulation and 13% in real-world settings, while preserving execution efficiency. Our results demonstrate that intelligent routing across heterogeneous, off-the-shelf policies provides a practical and scalable pathway toward building more capable robotic systems.

Yiteng Chen, Zhe Cao, Hongjia Ren +9

South China University of Technology · Nanjing University · University of New South Wales +5

Robotic Manipulation Robocasa

Mar 5, 2026cs.RO

EmboAlign: Aligning Video Generation with Compositional Constraints for Zero-Shot Manipulation

Video generative models (VGMs) pretrained on large-scale internet data can produce temporally coherent rollout videos that capture rich object dynamics, offering a compelling foundation for zero-shot robotic manipulation. However, VGMs often produce physically implausible rollouts, and converting their pixel-space motion into robot actions through geometric retargeting further introduces cumulative errors from imperfect depth estimation and keypoint tracking. To address these challenges, we present EmboAlign, a data-free framework that aligns VGM outputs with compositional constraints generated by vision-language models (VLMs) at inference time. The key insight is that VLMs offer a capability complementary to VGMs: structured spatial reasoning that can identify the physical constraints critical to the success and safety of manipulation execution. Given a language instruction, EmboAlign uses a VLM to automatically extract a set of compositional constraints capturing task-specific requirements, which are then applied at two stages: (1) constraint-guided rollout selection, which scores and filters a batch of VGM rollouts to retain the most physically plausible candidate, and (2) constraint-based trajectory optimization, which uses the selected rollout as initialization and refines the robot trajectory under the same constraint set to correct retargeting errors. We evaluate EmboAlign on six real-robot manipulation tasks requiring precise, constraint-sensitive execution, improving the overall success rate by 43.3 percentage points over the strongest baseline without any task-specific training data.

Gehao Zhang, Zhenyang Ni, Payal Mohapatra +3

Northwestern University · Stanford University

Robotic Manipulation Brain Alignment Autoregressive Rollout Generative Models Spatial Reasoning Structural Constraints

Mar 5, 2026cs.RO

Safe-Night VLA: Seeing the Unseen via Thermal-Perceptive Vision-Language-Action Models for Safety-Critical Manipulation

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely primarily on RGB perception, preventing them from capturing modalities such as thermal signals that are imperceptible to conventional visual sensors. Moreover, end-to-end generative policies lack explicit safety constraints, making them fragile when encountering obstacles and novel scenarios outside the training distribution. To address these limitations, we propose Safe-Night VLA, a multimodal manipulation framework that enables robots to see the unseen while enforcing rigorous safety constraints for thermal-aware manipulation in unstructured environments. Specifically, Safe-Night VLA integrates long-wave infrared thermal perception into a pre-trained vision-language backbone, enabling semantic reasoning grounded in thermodynamic properties. To ensure safe execution under out-of-distribution conditions, we incorporate a safety filter via control barrier functions, which provide deterministic workspace constraint enforcement during policy execution. We validate our framework through real-world experiments on a Franka manipulator, introducing a novel evaluation paradigm featuring temperature-conditioned manipulation, subsurface target localization, and reflection disambiguation, while maintaining constrained execution at inference time. Results demonstrate that Safe-Night VLA outperforms RGB-only baselines and provide empirical evidence that foundation models can effectively leverage non-visible physical modalities for robust manipulation.

Dian Yu, Qingchuan Zhou, Bingkun Huang +2

Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM), 80992 Munich, Germany

Robotic Manipulation Recent Vision-Language Models Safety-Critical Scenarios Complementary Modalities

Mar 4, 2026cs.RO

RoboLight: A Dataset with Linearly Composable Illumination for Robotic Manipulation

In this paper, we introduce RoboLight, the first real-world robotic manipulation dataset capturing synchronized episodes under systematically varied lighting conditions. RoboLight consists of two components. (a) RoboLight-Real contains 2,800 real-world episodes collected in our custom Light Cube setup, a calibrated system equipped with eight programmable RGB LED lights. It includes structured illumination variation along three independently controlled dimensions: color, direction, and intensity. Each dimension is paired with a dedicated task featuring objects of diverse geometries and materials to induce perceptual challenges. All image data are recorded in high-dynamic-range (HDR) format to preserve radiometric accuracy. Leveraging the linearity of light transport, we introduce (b) RoboLight-Synthetic, comprising 196,000 episodes synthesized through interpolation in the HDR image space of RoboLight-Real. In principle, RoboLight-Synthetic can be arbitrarily expanded by refining the interpolation granularity. We further verify the dataset quality through qualitative analysis and real-world policy roll-outs, analyzing task difficulty, distributional diversity, and the effectiveness of synthesized data. We additionally demonstrate three representative use cases of the proposed dataset. The full dataset, along with the system software and hardware design, will be released as open-source to support continued research.

Shutong Jin, Jin Yang, Muhammad Zahid +1

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Large-Scale Robot Demonstration Datasets Robotic Manipulation Illumination Variations Low-Light Images Fog

Feb 16, 2026cs.RO

Replanning Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks with Vision-Language Models via Semantic and Physical Dual-Correction

Human-robot collaborative assembly requires robots to interpret ambiguous corrective instructions while producing physically executable motions. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide semantic reasoning but may select logically inconsistent targets or misjudge execution outcomes. We propose a replanning framework that maps human instructions to Action Target candidates, including grasp poses and tool selections, and combines an Internal Correction Model for pre-execution logical verification with an External Correction Model for post-execution visual verification. The framework integrates VLM reasoning with 6-DoF grasp generation and collision-free trajectory planning. Simulation ablations show configuration-dependent effects: internal correction improves candidate validity, whereas external correction enables recovery for a low-latency VLM but can reduce success when visual verification produces false negatives. Experiments with an upper-body humanoid robot achieved 66.7% success in real-world object fixation, 100% in initial tool selection, and 75.0% in corrective tool selection. These results demonstrate interactive replanning across spatial and semantic collaborative tasks while identifying visual-state verification as a key limitation.

Taichi Kato, Takuya Kiyokawa, Namiko Saito +1

aDepartment of Systems Science, School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan · bDepartment of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan · cMicrosoft Research Asia, Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan +1

Human-Robot Collaboration Robotic Manipulation Iterative Re-Planning Assembly

Feb 9, 2026cs.RO

Combined Constrained Sampling and Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Training non-prehensile manipulation policies in contact-rich settings is a core challenge in robotics. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its strength in such settings, it may struggle to sufficiently explore and discover complex manipulation strategies. To address this, we combine two basic ideas: First, designing appropriate reset strategies (the start state distribution of episodes) has shown promise in improving RL exploration and effectiveness. Second, while model-based approaches to finding trajectories through manipulation are hard, recent work showed that model-based approaches to sampling states on constrained manifolds can be highly efficient. Based on these observations, we propose a novel state sampler that boosts the performance of goal-conditioned RL in complex contact-rich manipulation tasks. Our sampler explicitly takes into account the structure of contact in order to provide a rich covering of diverse contact modes. By combining constrained sampling resets with projected interpolation and curriculum learning, our novel approach outperforms RL without constrained sampling and alternative reset methods, and effectively trains universal, non-prehensile, and dynamic manipulation policies in contact-rich settings. See https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mtoussai/26-CSRL/ for supplementary material.

Marc Toussaint, Cornelius V. Braun, Armand Jordana +5

Technische Universität Berlin · Robotics Institute Germany · LAAS-CNRS +1

Robotic Manipulation Policies Robotic Manipulation Real-World Manipulation Tasks

Feb 5, 2026cs.RO

PACT-WAM: Predicting Actions and Visual Foresight with Compact Temporal Encoding for Robot Manipulation

Robot manipulation uses temporal context to select actions and visual foresight to assess their consequences, yet dense representations of past and future observations incur substantial processing costs. We introduce PACT-WAM, a world-action model that jointly generates a 16-step action trajectory and its temporally corresponding visual forecast through conditional flow sampling. Hierarchical history encoding assigns coarse spatial representations to earlier observations and finer representations to recent ones, retaining 16 observations with 256 tokens per view, 75% fewer than dense encoding of the same frames. A shared flow module jointly updates continuous action and visual states through two modality-specific heads under transition-wise causal attention, and a TiTok-VAE decoder reconstructs multi-view future images from the visual latents. Decoded forecasts also support Proposal Review (PR), a vision-language model component for execution-prefix selection and proposal rejection. Without PR, PACT-WAM achieves average success rates of 98.6%, 92.3%, and 78.0% on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world Piper tasks, respectively. PR provides a test-time enhancement, raising these rates to 99.5%, 93.4%, and 86.7%. Ablations show that hierarchical history allocation and joint action-visual generation improve control success, while analyses of visual capacity and forecast-guided execution characterize the trade-offs between success and proposal-generation cost.

Yushan Liu, Jingjing Fan, Shoujie Li +3

Tsinghua University · Nanyang Technological University · Xspark AI

Robotic Manipulation Foresight Robot Systems World Models Spatial Encoding Visual Generation+1

Feb 5, 2026cs.RO

MobileManiBench: Simplifying Model Verification for Mobile Manipulation

Vision-language-action models have advanced robotic manipulation but remain constrained by reliance on the large, teleoperation-collected datasets dominated by the static, tabletop scenes. We propose a simulation-first framework to verify VLA architectures before real-world deployment and introduce MobileManiBench, a large-scale benchmark for mobile-based robotic manipulation. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and powered by reinforcement learning, our pipeline autonomously generates diverse manipulation trajectories with rich annotations (language instructions, multi-view RGB-depth-segmentation images, synchronized object/robot states and actions). MobileManiBench features 2 mobile platforms (parallel-gripper and dexterous-hand robots), 2 synchronized cameras (head and right wrist), 630 objects in 20 categories, 5 skills (open, close, pull, push, pick) with over 100 tasks performed in 100 realistic scenes, yielding 300K trajectories. This design enables controlled, scalable studies of robot embodiments, sensing modalities, and policy architectures, accelerating research on data efficiency and generalization. We benchmark representative VLA models and report insights into perception, reasoning, and control in complex simulated environments, with all code, datasets, and models publicly released.

Wenbo Wang, Fangyun Wei, QiXiu Li +5

University of Sydney · 1Microsoft Research Asia · 3Tsinghua University

Robotic Manipulation Teleoperation

Jan 30, 2026cs.RO

CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation

Learning long-horizon robotic manipulation requires jointly achieving expressive behavior modeling, real-time inference, and stable execution, which remains challenging for existing generative policies. Diffusion-based approaches offer strong modeling capacity but incur high inference latency, while flow matching enables fast, near-single-step generation yet often suffers from unstable execution when operating directly in the raw action space. We propose Continuous Latent Action Flow Policy (CoLA-Flow Policy), a trajectory-level imitation learning framework that performs flow matching in a continuous latent action space. By encoding action sequences into temporally coherent latent trajectories and learning an explicit latent-space flow, CoLA-Flow Policy decouples global motion structure from low-level control noise, enabling smooth and reliable long-horizon execution. The framework further integrates geometry-aware point cloud conditioning and execution-time multimodal modulation, using visual cues as a representative modality to enhance real-world robustness. Experiments in simulation and on real robots show that CoLA-Flow Policy achieves near-single-step inference, improves trajectory smoothness by up to 93.7% and task success by up to 25 percentage points over raw action-space flow baselines, while remaining significantly faster than diffusion-based policies.

Wu Songwei, Jiang Zhiduo, Sun Wandong +4

Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China · Honor Device Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China

Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning Flow Policies Multimodal Action Distributions Robotic Manipulation Latent Flow

Jan 29, 2026cs.RO

Spotlighting Task-Relevant Features: Object-Centric Representations for Better Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

The generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies are heavily influenced by the choice of visual representations. Existing approaches typically rely on representations extracted from pre-trained encoders, using two dominant types of features: global features, which summarize an entire image via a single pooled vector, and dense features, which preserve a patch-wise embedding from the final encoder layer. While widely used, both feature types mix task-relevant and irrelevant information, leading to poor generalization under distribution shifts, such as changes in lighting, textures, or the presence of distractors. In this work, we explore an intermediate structured alternative: Slot-Based Object-Centric Representations (SBOCR), which group dense features into a finite set of object-like entities. This representation permits to naturally reduce the noise provided to the robotic manipulation policy while keeping enough information to efficiently perform the task. We benchmark a range of global and dense representations against intermediate slot-based representations, across a suite of simulated and real-world manipulation tasks ranging from simple to complex. We evaluate their generalization under diverse visual conditions, including changes in lighting, texture, and the presence of distractors. Our findings reveal that SBOCR-based policies outperform dense and global representation-based policies in generalization settings, even without task-specific pretraining. These insights suggest that SBOCR is a promising direction for designing visual systems that generalize effectively in dynamic, real-world robotic environments.

Alexandre Chapin, Bruno Machado, Emmanuel Dellandréa +1

LIRIS, imagine

Robotic Manipulation Policies Robotic Manipulation Object-Centric Representations Real-World Manipulation Tasks Pretraining

Jan 28, 2026cs.RO

STORM: Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation

Visual foundation models provide strong perceptual features for robotics, but their dense representations lack explicit object-level structure, limiting robustness and controllability in manipulation tasks. We propose STORM (Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation), a lightweight object-centric adaptation module that augments frozen visual foundation models with a small set of task-aware slots for robotic manipulation. Rather than fully tuning large backbones on the task, STORM employs an efficient two-stage training strategy: few layers of object-centric representation are first trained on top of the frozen backbone through visual--semantic pretraining using language embeddings, then jointly adapted with a downstream manipulation policy for task alignement. This staged learning prevents degenerate slot formation and preserves semantic consistency while aligning perception with task objectives. Experiments on object discovery benchmarks and robotic manipulation tasks show that STORM improves control performance and generalization to visual shifts (distractors, textures, lighting) compared to directly using frozen or fine-tuned foundation model features, or existing object-centric representations. STORM serves not only as an efficient mechanism for refining generic foundation model features, but also as a novel way of injecting beneficial structural and semantic bias into policy learning.

Alexandre Chapin, Emmanuel Dellandréa, Liming Chen

LIRIS · Ecole Centrale de Lyon, LIRIS, 69130, Ecully, France

Robotic Manipulation Object-Centric Representations Frozen Vision-Language Models

Jan 28, 2026cs.RO

Demonstration-Free Robotic Control via LLM Agents

Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift. We investigate whether general-purpose large language model (LLM) agent frameworks, originally developed for software engineering, can serve as an alternative control paradigm for embodied manipulation. We introduce FAEA (Frontier Agent as Embodied Agent), which applies an LLM agent framework directly to embodied manipulation without modification. Using the same iterative reasoning that enables software agents to debug code, FAEA enables embodied agents to reason through manipulation strategies. We evaluate an unmodified frontier agent, Claude Agent SDK, across the LIBERO, ManiSkill3, and MetaWorld benchmarks. With privileged environment state access, FAEA achieves success rates of 84.9%, 85.7%, and 96%, respectively. This level of task success approaches that of VLA models trained with less than 100 demonstrations per task, without requiring demonstrations or fine-tuning. With one round of human feedback as an optional optimization, performance increases to 88.2% on LIBERO. This demonstration-free capability has immediate practical value: FAEA can autonomously explore novel scenarios in simulation and generate successful trajectories for training data augmentation in embodied learning. Our results indicate that general-purpose agents are sufficient for a class of manipulation tasks dominated by deliberative, task-level planning. This opens a path for robotics systems to leverage actively maintained agent infrastructure and benefit directly from ongoing advances in frontier models. Code is available at https://github.com/robiemusketeer/faea-sim

Brian Y. Tsui, Alan Y. Fang, Tiffany J. Hwu

All authors are independent researchers.

Robotic Manipulation Embodied Agents Large Language Model Agents

Jan 26, 2026cs.RO

Eval-Actions: Fine-Grained Execution Quality Evaluation for Robotic Manipulation

Although Vision--Action (VA) and Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies have advanced robotic manipulation, their evaluation remains dominated by binary success rates, which obscure process-level differences among executions that complete the same task. We introduce Eval-Actions, a diagnostic evaluation methodology and real-robot benchmark for fine-grained execution-quality assessment of learned manipulation policies. Eval-Actions combines criteria-based Expert Grading (EG), Rank-Guided (RG) labels that align measurable motion indicators with expert rankings, and Chain-of-Thought-style (CoT) annotations that explain observable quality differences. The benchmark contains 13K+ teleoperated and policy-generated real-robot episodes covering 150+ tasks and approximately 52 hours of recordings with RGB-D videos, robot-state trajectories, task descriptions, and success/failure labels. Its densely annotated subset provides EG/RG/CoT supervision for training and evaluation. We further provide AutoEval, a reference multimodal evaluator that predicts quality scores, task outcomes, and diagnostic explanations from RGB temporal evidence and compact kinematic summaries. On the annotated Eval-Actions test split, AutoEval-S achieves Spearman rank correlations (SRCCs) of 0.81 and 0.84 under EG and RG, with success detection accuracies of 90.6% and 91.0%; AutoEval-P reaches 0.70 SRCC under CoT. Analyses of expert consistency, physical-metric baselines, modality ablations, structured generalization, and offline policy ranking show that Eval-Actions provides standardized, interpretable diagnostic signals complementary to success-rate evaluation.

Mengyuan Liu, Juyi Sheng, Peiming Li +4

Robotic Manipulation Multimodal Evaluation Grading

Dec 30, 2025cs.RO

World In Your Hands: A Large-Scale and Open-Source Ecosystem for Learning Human-Centric Manipulation in the Wild

We introduce World In Your Hands (WIYH), a large-scale open-source ecosystem comprising over 1,000 hours of human manipulation data collected in-the-wild with millimeter-scale motion accuracy. Specifically, WIYH includes (1) the Oracle Suite, a wearable data collection kit with an auto-labeling pipeline for accurate motion capture; (2) the WIYH Dataset, featuring over 1,000 hours of multimodal manipulation data across hundreds of skills in diverse real-world scenarios; and (3) extensive annotations and benchmarks supporting tasks from perception to action. Furthermore, experiments based on the WIYH ecosystem show that integrating WIYH's human-centric data improves robotic manipulation success rates from 8% to 60% in cluttered scenes. World In Your Hands provides a foundation for advancing human-centric data collection and cross-embodiment policy learning. All data and hardware design will be open-source.

Yupeng Zheng, Jichao Peng, Weize Li +22

TARS Robotics

Robotic Manipulation Hand Motion Capture Human Agency World Ecosystems+1

Dec 20, 2025cs.RO

Learning Semantic Atomic Skills for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

Scaling imitation learning to diverse multi-task robot manipulation remains challenging due to suboptimal demonstrations, behavioral multi-modality, and destructive interference across tasks. While skill-based methods offer a promising direction by decomposing behaviors into reusable abstractions, existing approaches often learn skills that are either biased toward linguistic structure or lack semantic alignment across tasks, limiting generalization. In this work, we propose AtomSkill, a novel framework that learns a semantically aligned Atomic Skill Space from demonstrations and enables robust long-horizon execution through keypose imagination. Our method introduces: (1) semantic contrastive skill alignment, which partitions demonstrations into variable-length atomic skills and employs a contrastive objective to jointly enforce semantic consistency and temporal coherence, yielding a compact and reusable skill library; and (2) action decoding with keypose imagining, where the policy predicts both a skill's terminal keypose and immediate actions, thereby supporting progress-aware skill transitions. During inference, an atomic skill diffusion sampler generates plausible skill sequences, while predicted keyposes autonomously trigger smooth skill chaining. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world settings show that AtomSkill consistently outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning and skill-based baselines. Project page: https://atom-skill.github.io.

Yihang Zhu, Weiqing Wang, Shijie Wu +2

ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · InstAdapt

Robotic Manipulation Strong Imitation Learning Skills

Dec 12, 2025cs.RO

UniBYD: A Unified Framework for Learning Robotic Manipulation Across Embodiments Beyond Imitation of Human Demonstrations

In embodied intelligence, the embodiment gap between robotic and human hands brings significant challenges for learning from human demonstrations. Although some studies have attempted to bridge this gap using reinforcement learning, they remain confined to merely reproducing human manipulation, resulting in limited task performance. Moreover, current methods struggle to support diverse robotic hand configurations. In this paper, we propose UniBYD, a unified framework that uses a dynamic reinforcement learning algorithm to discover manipulation policies aligned with the robot's physical characteristics. To enable consistent modeling across diverse robotic hand morphologies, UniBYD incorporates a unified morphological representation (UMR). Building on UMR, we design a dynamic PPO with an annealed reward schedule, enabling reinforcement learning to transition from offline-informed imitation of human demonstrations to online-adaptive exploration of policies better adapted to diverse robotic morphologies, thereby going beyond mere imitation of human hands. To address the severe state drift caused by the incapacity of early-stage policies, we design a hybrid Markov-based shadow engine that provides fine-grained guidance to anchor the imitation within the expert's manifold. To evaluate UniBYD, we propose UniManip, the first benchmark for cross-embodiment manipulation spanning diverse robotic morphologies. Experiments demonstrate a 44.08% average improvement in success rate over the current state-of-the-art. Our project page is https://zhanheng-creator.github.io/UniBYD.

Tingyu Yuan, Biaoliang Guan, Wen Ye +8

CASIA · UCAS · XJTU +3

Robotic Manipulation Policies Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Transfer Robotic Hands Embodiment Imitation Learning+2

Dec 9, 2025cs.RO

VLSA: Vision-Language-Action Models with Plug-and-Play Safety Constraint Layer

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generalizing across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, deploying these models in unstructured environments remains challenging due to the critical need for simultaneous task compliance and safety assurance, particularly in preventing potential collisions during physical interactions. In this work, we introduce a Vision-Language-Safe Action (VLSA) architecture, named AEGIS, which contains a plug-and-play safety constraint (SC) layer formulated via control barrier functions. AEGIS integrates directly with existing VLA models to improve safety with theoretical guarantees, while maintaining their original instruction-following performance. To evaluate the efficacy of our architecture, we construct a comprehensive safety-critical benchmark SafeLIBERO, spanning distinct manipulation scenarios characterized by varying degrees of spatial complexity and obstacle intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, AEGIS achieves over 50% improvement in obstacle avoidance rate while substantially increasing the task success rate by nearly 10%. All benchmark datasets, code, and supplementary materials are publicly available at https://vlsa-aegis.github.io/.

Songqiao Hu, Zeyi Liu, Shuang Liu +5

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. · Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. · 3TetraBOT. +1

Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Robotic Manipulation Safety Constraints Obstacle Avoidance

Nov 19, 2025cs.CV

AnyBox: Efficient Zero-Shot 9DoF Pose Estimation of Boxes for Robotic Manipulation

Recovering the 9D pose of objects, both their 6D pose and 3D dimensions, under clutter and occlusion is a core requirement for warehouse automation, logistics, and manufacturing. Model-based methods are accurate but assume an instance-specific CAD model for every object, which is costly to maintain as inventories change. Model-free and category-level methods relax this assumption, yet they remain vulnerable to the symmetry, weak texture, and heavy occlusion that characterize stacked storage boxes, and they ignore the strong structural priors such scenes provide. We present \textbf{AnyBox}, an efficient zero-shot framework that exploits the geometric regularity of boxes to jointly recover pose and dimensions from a single RGB-D observation. Starting from a canonical category template, AnyBox alternates between pose and scale estimation, using the discrepancy between the reprojected template and the observed mask to drive a binary search over box dimensions. Two lightweight components make this practical: a depth-consistency filter that rejects the implausible hypotheses induced by box symmetry, and an early-stopping rule that replaces the remaining search with a single closed-form update. On public benchmarks and an in-house warehouse dataset, AnyBox improves detection AP by up to 36 points, more than doubling the previous best, and approaches instance-level pipelines that have access to ground-truth CAD models. These gains transfer downstream, raising success by 28% on a cluttered robotic box-shelving task.

Yintao Ma, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Charles Eret +5

1Huawei Technologies Canada · University of Waterloo

Category-Level Object Pose Estimation Bounding Box Robotic Perception Rgb-Depth Cameras Robotic Manipulation Zero-Shot+1

Nov 10, 2025cs.RO

SlotVLA: Towards Modeling of Object-Relation Representations in Robotic Manipulation

Inspired by how humans reason over discrete objects and their relationships, we explore whether compact object-centric and object-relation representations can form a foundation for multitask robotic manipulation. Most existing robotic multitask models rely on dense embeddings that entangle both object and background cues, raising concerns about both efficiency and interpretability. In contrast, we study object-relation-centric representations as a pathway to more structured, efficient, and explainable visuomotor control. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce LIBERO+, a fine-grained benchmark dataset designed to enable and evaluate object-relation reasoning in robotic manipulation. Unlike prior datasets, LIBERO+ provides object-centric annotations that enrich demonstrations with box- and mask-level labels as well as instance-level temporal tracking, supporting compact and interpretable visuomotor representations. Second, we propose SlotVLA, a slot-attention-based framework that captures both objects and their relations for action decoding. It uses a slot-based visual tokenizer to maintain consistent temporal object representations, a relation-centric decoder to produce task-relevant embeddings, and an LLM-driven module that translates these embeddings into executable actions. Experiments on LIBERO+ demonstrate that object-centric slot and object-relation slot representations drastically reduce the number of required visual tokens, while providing competitive generalization. Together, LIBERO+ and SlotVLA provide a compact, interpretable, and effective foundation for advancing object-relation-centric robotic manipulation.

Taisei Hanyu, Nhat Chung, Huy Le +10

University of Arkansas, USA · FPT Software AI Center, Vietnam · University of Stuttgart, Germany +5

Robotic Manipulation Visuomotor Control

Nov 4, 2025cs.RO

3D Cal: An Open-Source Software Library for Depth Reconstruction on Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

Tactile sensing plays a key role in enabling dexterous and reliable robotic manipulation, but realizing this capability requires substantial calibration to convert raw sensor readings into physically meaningful quantities. Despite its near-universal necessity, the calibration process remains ad hoc and labor-intensive. Here, we introduce 3D Cal, an open-source library that transforms a low-cost 3D printer into an automated probing device capable of generating large volumes of labeled training data for calibrating vision-based tactile sensors. 3D Cal also provides an end-to-end, user-friendly pipeline for training custom convolutional networks to produce high-quality depth reconstructions. Using 3D Cal, we systematically explore the relationship between training data volume and spatial reconstruction performance on two commercially available sensors, DIGIT and GelSight Mini, and derive practical, empirically-grounded guidelines for calibrating these sensors. Finally, we demonstrate depth reconstruction performance on the DIGIT and GelSight Mini comparable to state-of-the-art methods, achieving average reconstruction errors of 156

\mathrm{μm}

and 205

\mathrm{μm}

on unseen objects, respectively. By automating tactile sensor calibration, 3D Cal can accelerate tactile sensing research, simplify sensor deployment, and facilitate the integration of tactile sensing in robotic platforms.

Rohan Kota, Kaival Shah, J. Edward Colgate +1

McCormick School of Engineering, Center for Robotics and Biosystems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA

Tactile Robotic Perception 3D Generation Robotic Manipulation Open-Source

Oct 10, 2025cs.RO

RoDyn: Taming Interactive Robot-Dynamic 2.5D World Model for Robotic Manipulation

Learned world models hold significant potential as neural simulators for robotic manipulation. However, prevalent 2D video-based models inherently lack the spatial and kinematic reasoning crucial for physical interactions. We introduce RoDyn, a novel Robot-Dynamic 2.5D World Model that formulates environmental dynamics within a highly efficient, geometry-aware latent space. Through the proposed Robot-Dynamic Tokenizer, we explicitly couple semantic visual appearances with spatial and agent-centric priors via an RGB-dominated cross-attention mechanism and dynamic mask guidance. Furthermore, by injecting these mask priors directly into sequence transitions, our Mask-guided Autoregressive architecture drives the model to focus on active robot-object interaction regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoDyn establishes SOTA generation fidelity across large-scale datasets. Crucially, it translates these predictive capabilities into substantial downstream gains, accelerating model-based reinforcement learning and achieving a 42% improvement in real-world imitation learning success rates over pure 2D baselines.

Chuanrui Zhang, Zhengxian Wu, Guanxing Lu +2

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Robotic Manipulation Imitation Learning World Models Cross-Attention

Oct 1, 2025cs.RO

RTFF: Random-to-Target Fabric Flattening Policy using Dual-Arm Manipulator

Robotic fabric manipulation remains challenging due to fabric deformability and occlusions from wrinkles and the manipulator. This paper defines Random-to-Target Fabric Flattening (RTFF) as the task of bringing a randomly wrinkled fabric to an arbitrary user-specified wrinkle-free target pose. RTFF requires simultaneous flattening and pose alignment, where the two objectives are inherently coupled since flattening the fabric displaces its pose, while realigning it tends to introduce wrinkles. To solve this task, this paper anchors both the current and target fabric states to the same template mesh, enabling direct vertex-level wrinkle and pose assessment without registration. Building on this representation, a hybrid Imitation Learning--Visual Servoing (IL--VS) RTFF policy is proposed. A novel Mesh Action Chunking Transformer (MACT) leverages structured mesh observations to achieve goal-conditioned coarse alignment from a compact demonstration set, after which VS ensures precise convergence to the target. The policy is validated on a real dual-arm teleoperation system, demonstrating precise alignment to unseen target poses, fabric types, and scales. Code and videos: https://kaitang98.github.io/RTFF_Policy/

Kai Tang, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Hang Xu +3

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom · JD.COM, Shenzhen, China +2

Robotic Manipulation Teleoperation Random

Sep 15, 2025cs.RO

Learning Contact Dynamics through Touching: Action-conditional Graph Neural Networks for Robotic Peg Insertion

We present a learnable physics-based model that predicts motion of the robot end effector and reaction force-torque in contact-rich manipulation. The model represents the end effector and the environment as interacting meshes in a graph structure, and conditions its prediction explicitly on the applied control input. It predicts object-level pose update directly, while the reaction torque emerges from a per-vertex force field. Training is self-supervised using only joint encoder and force-torque data while the robot is randomly touching the environment without task context. In simulation, our model transfers to peg insertion with unseen concave geometry, where an MPC agent using it reaches up to 98% success rate, and after fine-tuning on self-collected data matches an agent planning with the ground truth dynamics at the tightest 1 mm clearance. In the real world, it outperforms the system-identified MuJoCo model by 45% in position and by 74% and 63% in force and torque error.

Zongyao Yi, Joachim Hertzberg, Martin Atzmueller

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI Niedersachsen, Osnabrück, Germany · Osnabrück University, Institute of Computer Science, Osnabrück, Germany

Rigid-Body Dynamics Contact-Rich Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Torque Category-Level Object Pose Estimation Graph Neural Networks

Jul 7, 2025cs.CV

VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting

Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language. However, current VLA models suffer from two drawbacks: (i) generation of massive tokens leading to high inference latency and increased training cost, and (ii) insufficient utilization of generated actions resulting in potential performance loss. To address these issues, we develop a training framework to finetune VLA models for generating significantly fewer action tokens with high parallelism, effectively reducing inference latency and training cost. Furthermore, we introduce an inference optimization technique with a novel voting-based ensemble strategy to combine current and previous action predictions, improving the utilization of generated actions and overall performance. Our results demonstrate that we achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art VLA models, achieving significantly higher success rates and 39

\times

faster inference than OpenVLA with 46 Hz throughput on edge platforms, demonstrating practical deployability. The code is available at https://github.com/LukeLIN-web/VOTE.

Juyi Lin, Amir Taherin, Arash Akbari +11

Northeastern University, Boston, USA · EmbodyX,San Mateo,USA

Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Robotic Manipulation Ensemble Majority Voting

Jun 14, 2025cs.RO

AntiGrounding: Executable Robot Trajectories as Visual Prompts for VLM-Guided Manipulation

Natural-language manipulation instructions specify the task goal but leave the underlying robot trajectory unspecified. We present AntiGrounding, a visual action-selection framework built around a dual geometric-visual trajectory interface. After feasibility filtering, each retained short trajectory is both an explicit motion plan for execution and a rendered prompt for instruction-conditioned vision-language model (VLM) evaluation. Structured multi-view visual question answering (VQA) scores safety, task alignment, efficiency, and physical plausibility; weighted view fusion aggregates the trajectory scores. These scores guide subsequent translational trajectory proposals; separate orientation and gripper controls coordinate interaction. An initialized digital twin provides the planning state and validates selected segments before the real robot executes the same waypoint sequences. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, AntiGrounding with a single GPT-6 Astra evaluator achieves 71.25% overall success, compared with 50.00% for pi0.5 and 47.50% for a PIVOT-style visual proposal-selection baseline using the same evaluator under the reported deployment protocol. Component ablations and evaluator-sensitivity analyses examine trajectory evaluation, proposal search, orientation control, and evaluator choice. The interface connects general-purpose multimodal reasoning to executable trajectories, with performance bounded by digital-twin fidelity and physical interaction.

Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Wenhao Li +1

School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

Robot Trajectories Robotic Manipulation Grounding Robot Systems Visual In-Context Learning Single Trajectory+1

Jun 12, 2025cs.RO

Gondola: Grounded Vision Language Planning for Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promising progress in robotic manipulation. However, directly mapping visual observations and language instructions to low-level actions often results in limited interpretability and weak robustness in complex, long-horizon tasks. To address these challenges, we employ a modular manipulation framework that separates high-level planning from low-level control. At its core is Gondola, a grounded vision-language planning model that generates structured plans with explicit pixel-level object grounding before action execution. Given multi-view observations and planning history, Gondola predicts the next-step plan as interleaved textual instructions and multi-view segmentation masks corresponding to target objects and goal locations. To train Gondola, we construct synthetic datasets that provide explicit supervision for short-horizon grounded planning, multi-view referring expression, and long-horizon compositional reasoning. By coupling grounded plan generation with a 3D-based execution policy, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging GemBench benchmark. The system further demonstrates promising transfer to real robots. Ablation studies confirm that pixel-level grounding and the proposed planning-oriented supervision are critical for effective high-level reasoning. Project webpage: https://cshizhe.github.io/projects/robot_gondola.html

Shizhe Chen, Ricardo Garcia, Paul Pacaud +1

Inria, École normale supérieure, CNRS, PSL Research University

Robotic Manipulation Robotic Systems Planning Modular Framework Autonomous Racing

Mar 20, 2025cs.RO

CONTHER: Context-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation with Sparse Rewards

This paper investigates whether sequential context improves goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning in sparse-reward manipulation tasks. While Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) addresses reward sparsity through goal relabeling, its operation on isolated transitions limits its ability to capture temporal dependencies inherent in joint-space control. We hypothesize that incorporating motion history can enhance policy learning and introduce CONTHER, which integrates a Transformer-based architecture with a modified HER replay buffer. The Transformer encodes sequences of prior states and goals to provide temporal awareness, while the buffer populates experience with artificially successful trajectories. Two architectural variants are analyzed to examine how contextual information should be integrated. In simulated point-reaching tasks with a UR3 manipulator, CONTHER achieves a 38.46% higher average success rate compared to baselines and outperforms the strongest baseline by 28.21%, with faster convergence and more stable learning. The framework is further evaluated on three dynamic tasks requiring complex trajectory following and obstacle avoidance, where temporal context is critical. By operating directly on joint velocities, the approach provides a foundation for transfer to physical systems. The primary contribution is a systematic investigation into fusing sequential context with goal relabeling, offering insights into how temporal awareness benefits policy learning.

Maria Makarova, Qian Liu, Dzmitry Tsetserukou

Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Center for Digital Engineering, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), 121205 Moscow, Russia · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, China

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Robotic Manipulation Hindsight

Mar 7, 2025cs.RO

Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments

Monte Carlo tree search is attractive for robotic manipulation because it can improve action selection through simulation without requiring a fully differentiable policy. In uncertain domains, however, sparse terminal rewards and noisy transitions can make shallow search brittle: many candidate branches remain indistinguishable until late rollouts, and small simulation budgets amplify this ambiguity. This paper presents Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a decision-making framework that decomposes intermediate feedback into rule, heuristic, optional neural, and value-estimation channels, centers the resulting process signal against matched task contexts, and uses it to bias or repair search while preserving terminal-task evaluation. The primary evidence is intentionally tiered. Local tasks and matched ManiSkill diagnostics isolate reward-center mechanisms and ablations; matched option-level ManiSkill sweeps test robustness under primitive failure, observation noise, and initial-pose shifts while not claiming standard benchmark superiority; and an official same-backbone OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO bridge tests bounded VLA action repair. The OpenVLA-OFT clean reproduction reaches 10/10 LIBERO-Spatial successes both with and without RCRM-Guard. A single-suite same-backbone action-channel stress artifact over ten paired LIBERO-Spatial action-channel stress episodes records 0/10 unguarded successes and 9/10 guarded successes. Additional observation-noise, language-perturbation, and visual-distractor probes are reported as coverage and negative-result context rather than superiority evidence. The resulting claim is bounded: Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS is an inspectable test-time verifier for same-backbone high-uncertainty manipulation, not a replacement VLA policy or a broad standard-benchmark superiority claim.

Xibai Wang

NeuroQuant Labs Limited Hong Kong SAR, China

Robotic Manipulation Action Selection Libero Manipulation Benchmark Uncertainty Environment

Oct 24, 2024cs.RO

Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics, particularly in robotic manipulation, and whether appropriate data scaling can yield single-task robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot for any object within the same category in any environment. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on data scaling in imitation learning. By collecting data across numerous environments and objects, we study how a policy's generalization performance changes with the number of training environments, objects, and demonstrations. Throughout our research, we collect over 40,000 demonstrations and execute more than 15,000 real-world robot rollouts under a rigorous evaluation protocol. Our findings reveal several intriguing results: the generalization performance of the policy follows a roughly power-law relationship with the number of environments and objects. The diversity of environments and objects is far more important than the absolute number of demonstrations; once the number of demonstrations per environment or object reaches a certain threshold, additional demonstrations have minimal effect. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient data collection strategy. With four data collectors working for one afternoon, we collect sufficient data to enable the policies for two tasks to achieve approximately 90% success rates in novel environments with unseen objects.

Fanqi Lin, Yingdong Hu, Pingyue Sheng +3

Tsinghua University · Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Imitation Learning Robot Policies Robotic Manipulation Imitation Scaling Laws Scaling

Dec 17, 2023cs.RO

Bridging Language and Action: A Survey of Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

Language-conditioned robot manipulation is an emerging field aimed at enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents by teaching robots to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language. This interdisciplinary area integrates scene understanding, language processing, and policy learning to bridge the gap between human instructions and robot actions. In this comprehensive survey, we systematically explore recent advancements in language-conditioned robot manipulation. We categorize existing methods based on the primary ways language is integrated into the robot system, namely language for state evaluation, language as a policy condition, language for cognitive planning and reasoning, and language in unified vision-language-action models. Specifically, we further analyze state-of-the-art techniques from five axes of action granularity, data and supervision regimes, system cost and latency, environments and evaluations, and task specification. Additionally, we highlight the key debates in the field. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions, focusing on potentially enhancing generalization capabilities and addressing safety issues in language-conditioned robot manipulators.

Xiangtong Yao, Hongkuan Zhou, Oier Mees +12

Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Corporate Research, Robert Bosch GmbH, Renningen, Germany · Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany +10

Robotic Manipulation Goal-Conditioned Dynamic Manipulation Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Bridging Language Survey

Date pendingcs.RO

RoMu4o: A Robotic Manipulation Unit For Orchard Operations Automating Proximal Hyperspectral Leaf Sensing

Driven by the need to address labor shortages and meet the demands of a rapidly growing population, robotic automation has become a critical component in precision agriculture. Leaf-level hyperspectral spectroscopy is shown to be a powerful tool for phenotyping, monitoring crop health, identifying essential nutrients within plants as well as detecting diseases and water stress. This work introduces RoMu4o, a robotic manipulation unit for orchard operations offering an automated solution for proximal hyperspectral leaf sensing. This ground robot is equipped with a 6DOF robotic arm and vision system for real-time deep learning-based image processing and motion planning. We developed robust perception and manipulation pipelines that enable the robot to successfully grasp target leaves and perform spectroscopy. These frameworks operate synergistically to identify and extract the 3D structure of leaves from an observed batch of foliage, propose 6D poses, and generate collision-free constraint-aware paths for precise leaf manipulation. The end-effector of the arm features a compact design that integrates an independent lighting source with a hyperspectral sensor, enabling high-fidelity data acquisition while streamlining the calibration process for accurate measurements. Our ground robot is engineered to operate in unstructured orchard environments. However, the performance of the system is evaluated in both indoor and outdoor plant models. The system demonstrated reliable performance for 1-LPB hyperspectral sampling, achieving 95% success rate in lab trials and 79% in field trials. Field experiments revealed an overall success rate of 70% for autonomous leaf grasping and hyperspectral measurement in a pistachio orchard.

Mehrad Mortazavi, David J. Cappelleri, Reza Ehsani

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Merced, CA, 95343, USA · School of Mechanical Engineering and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering (By Courtesy), Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA 47907

Agricultural Robotics Robotic Perception Robotic Manipulation Hyperspectral Image Precision Agriculture Robotic Grasping