Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2601.18733

Advances and Innovations in the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge

Li Kang·Heng Zhou·Xiufeng Song·Rui Li·Bruno N. Y. Chen·Ziye Wang·Ximeng Meng·Stone Tao·Yiran Qin·Xiaohong Liu·Ruimao Zhang·Lei Bai·Yilun Du·Hao Su·Philip Torr·Zhenfei Yin·Ruihao Gong·Yejun Zeng·Fengjun Zhong·Shenghao Jin·Jinyang Guo·Xianglong Liu·Xiaojun Jia·Tianqi Shan·Wenqi Ren·Simeng Qin·Jialing Yang·Xiaoyu Ma·Tianxing Chen·Zixuan Li·Zijian Cai·Yan Qin·Yusen Qin·Qiangyu Chen·Kaixuan Wang·Zhaoming Han·Yao Mu·Ping Luo·Yuanqi Yao·Haoming Song·Jan-Nico Zaech·Fabien Despinoy·Danda Pani Paudel·Luc Van Gool
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models and vision-languageaction models have significantly driven progress in Embodied AI. As the field transitions toward more complex task scenarios, multi-agent system frameworks are becoming essential for achieving scalable, efficient, and collaborative solutions. This shift is fueled by three primary factors: increasing agent capabilities, enhancing system efficiency through task delegation, and enabling advanced human-agent interactions. To address the challenges posed by multi-agent collaboration, we propose the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge, held at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on SpaVLE. The competition focuses on two critical areas: planning and control, where participants explore multi-agent embodied planning using vision-language models (VLMs) to coordinate tasks and policy execution to perform robotic manipulation in dynamic environments. By evaluating solutions submitted by participants, the challenge provides valuable insights into the design and coordination of embodied multi-agent systems, contributing to the future development of advanced collaborative AI systems.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.AIcs.CV

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Li Kang, Heng Zhou, Xiufeng Song, Rui Li, Bruno N. Y. Chen, Ziye Wang, Ximeng Meng, Stone Tao, Yiran Qin, Xiaohong Liu, Ruimao Zhang, Lei Bai, Yilun Du, Hao Su, Philip Torr, Zhenfei Yin, Ruihao Gong, Yejun Zeng, Fengjun Zhong, Shenghao Jin, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu, Xiaojun Jia, Tianqi Shan, Wenqi Ren, Simeng Qin, Jialing Yang, Xiaoyu Ma, Tianxing Chen, Zixuan Li, Zijian Cai, Yan Qin, Yusen Qin, Qiangyu Chen, Kaixuan Wang, Zhaoming Han, Yao Mu, Ping Luo, Yuanqi Yao, Haoming Song, Jan-Nico Zaech, Fabien Despinoy, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool. 2026-01-26. Advances and Innovations in the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18733

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗