arXiv subjects

Daniel Seita

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Seita.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models

Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a task without contact. In addition, contacts range from relatively benign (e.g. brushing a soft pillow) to more dangerous (e.g. toppling a glass vase), making it difficult to characterize which may be acceptable. In this paper, we propose IMPACT, a novel motion planning framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer environment semantics, identifying which parts of the environment can best tolerate contact based on object properties and locations. Our approach generates an anisotropic cost map that encodes directional push safety. We pair this map with a contact-aware A* planner to find stable contact-rich paths. We perform experiments using 20 simulation and 10 real-world scenes and assess using task success rate, object displacements, and feedback from human evaluators. Our results over 3200 simulation and 200 real-world trials suggest that IMPACT enables efficient contact-rich motion planning in cluttered settings while outperforming alternative methods and ablations. Our project website is available at https://impact-planning.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Preference-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Space-Time Efficient Online 3D Bin Packing

Robotic bin packing is widely deployed in warehouse automation, with current systems achieving robust performance through heuristic and learning-based strategies. These systems must balance compact placement with rapid execution, where selecting alternative items or reorienting them can improve space utilization but introduce additional time. We propose a selection-based formulation that explicitly reasons over this trade-off: at each step, the robot evaluates multiple candidate actions, weighing expected packing benefit against estimated operational time. This enables time-aware strategies that selectively accept increased operational time when it yields meaningful spatial improvements. Our method, STEP (Space-Time Efficient Packing), uses a preference-conditioned, Transformer-based reinforcement learning policy, and allows generalization across candidate set sizes and integration with standard placement modules. It achieves a 44% reduction in operational time without compromising packing density. Additional material is available at https://step-packing.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Causally Robust Reward Learning from Reason-Augmented Preference Feedback

Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious features that merely co-occur with preferred trajectories during training, collapsing when those correlations disappear or reverse at test time. We introduce ReCouPLe, a lightweight framework that uses natural language rationales to provide the missing causal signal. Each rationale is treated as a guiding projection axis in an embedding space, training the model to score trajectories based on features aligned with that axis while de-emphasizing context that is unrelated to the stated reason. Because the same rationales (e.g., "avoids collisions", "completes the task faster") can appear across multiple tasks, ReCouPLe naturally reuses the same causal direction whenever tasks share semantics, and transfers preference knowledge to novel tasks without extra data or language-model fine-tuning. Our learned reward model can ground preferences on the articulated reason, aligning better with user intent and generalizing beyond spurious features. ReCouPLe outperforms baselines by up to 1.5x in reward accuracy under distribution shifts, and 2x in downstream policy performance in novel tasks. We have released our code at https://github.com/mj-hwang/ReCouPLe

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

V-MORALS: Visual Morse Graph-Aided Estimation of Regions of Attraction in a Learned Latent Space

Reachability analysis has become increasingly important in robotics to distinguish safe from unsafe states. Unfortunately, existing reachability and safety analysis methods often fall short, as they typically require known system dynamics or large datasets to estimate accurate system models, are computationally expensive, and assume full state information. A recent method, called MORALS, aims to address these shortcomings by using topological tools to estimate Regions of Attraction (ROA) in a low-dimensional latent space. However, MORALS still relies on full state knowledge and has not been studied when only sensor measurements are available. This paper presents Visual Morse Graph-Aided Estimation of Regions of Attraction in a Learned Latent Space (V-MORALS). V-MORALS takes in a dataset of image-based trajectories of a system under a given controller, and learns a latent space for reachability analysis. Using this learned latent space, our method is able to generate well-defined Morse Graphs, from which we can compute ROAs for various systems and controllers. V-MORALS provides capabilities similar to the original MORALS architecture without relying on state knowledge, and using only high-level sensor data. Our project website is at: https://v-morals.onrender.com.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

D-REX: Differentiable Real-to-Sim-to-Real Engine for Learning Dexterous Grasping

Simulation provides a cost-effective and flexible platform for data generation and policy learning to develop robotic systems. However, bridging the gap between simulation and real-world dynamics remains a significant challenge, especially in physical parameter identification. In this work, we introduce a real-to-sim-to-real engine that leverages the Gaussian Splat representations to build a differentiable engine, enabling object mass identification from real-world visual observations and robot control signals, while enabling grasping policy learning simultaneously. Through optimizing the mass of the manipulated object, our method automatically builds high-fidelity and physically plausible digital twins. Additionally, we propose a novel approach to train force-aware grasping policies from limited data by transferring feasible human demonstrations into simulated robot demonstrations. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our engine achieves accurate and robust performance in mass identification across various object geometries and mass values. Those optimized mass values facilitate force-aware policy learning, achieving superior and high performance in object grasping, effectively reducing the sim-to-real gap.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

SCOOP'D: Learning Mixed-Liquid-Solid Scooping via Sim2Real Generative Policy

Scooping items with tools such as spoons and ladles is common in daily life, ranging from assistive feeding to retrieving items from environmental disaster sites. However, developing a general and autonomous robotic scooping policy is challenging since it requires reasoning about complex tool-object interactions. Furthermore, scooping often involves manipulating deformable objects, such as granular media or liquids, which is challenging due to their infinite-dimensional configuration spaces and complex dynamics. We propose a method, SCOOP'D, which uses simulation from OmniGibson (built on NVIDIA Omniverse) to collect scooping demonstrations using algorithmic procedures that rely on privileged state information. Then, we use generative policies via diffusion to imitate demonstrations from observational input. We directly apply the learned policy in diverse real-world scenarios, testing its performance on various item quantities, item characteristics, and container types. In zero-shot deployment, our method demonstrates promising results across 465 trials in diverse scenarios, including objects of different difficulty levels that we categorize as "Level 1" and "Level 2." SCOOP'D outperforms all baselines and ablations, suggesting that this is a promising approach to acquiring robotic scooping skills. Project page is at https://scoopdiff.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Robot Learning from Any Images

We introduce RoLA, a framework that transforms any in-the-wild image into an interactive, physics-enabled robotic environment. Unlike previous methods, RoLA operates directly on a single image without requiring additional hardware or digital assets. Our framework democratizes robotic data generation by producing massive visuomotor robotic demonstrations within minutes from a wide range of image sources, including camera captures, robotic datasets, and Internet images. At its core, our approach combines a novel method for single-view physical scene recovery with an efficient visual blending strategy for photorealistic data collection. We demonstrate RoLA's versatility across applications like scalable robotic data generation and augmentation, robot learning from Internet images, and single-image real-to-sim-to-real systems for manipulators and humanoids. Video results are available at https://sihengz02.github.io/RoLA .

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

ManipBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Low-Level Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence and robotics due to their commonsense reasoning capabilities. In robotic manipulation, VLMs are used primarily as high-level planners, but recent work has also studied their lower-level reasoning ability, which refers to making decisions about precise robot movements. However, the community currently lacks a clear and common benchmark that can evaluate how well VLMs can aid low-level reasoning in robotics. Consequently, we propose a novel benchmark, ManipBench, to evaluate the low-level robot manipulation reasoning capabilities of VLMs across various dimensions, including how well they understand object-object interactions and deformable object manipulation. We extensively test 33 representative VLMs across 10 model families on our benchmark, including variants to test different model sizes. Our evaluation shows that the performance of VLMs significantly varies across tasks, and there is a strong correlation between this performance and trends in our real-world manipulation tasks. It also shows that there remains a significant gap between these models and human-level understanding. See our website at: https://manipbench.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

D-CODA: Diffusion for Coordinated Dual-Arm Data Augmentation

Learning bimanual manipulation is challenging due to its high dimensionality and tight coordination required between two arms. Eye-in-hand imitation learning, which uses wrist-mounted cameras, simplifies perception by focusing on task-relevant views. However, collecting diverse demonstrations remains costly, motivating the need for scalable data augmentation. While prior work has explored visual augmentation in single-arm settings, extending these approaches to bimanual manipulation requires generating viewpoint-consistent observations across both arms and producing corresponding action labels that are both valid and feasible. In this work, we propose Diffusion for COordinated Dual-arm Data Augmentation (D-CODA), a method for offline data augmentation tailored to eye-in-hand bimanual imitation learning that trains a diffusion model to synthesize novel, viewpoint-consistent wrist-camera images for both arms while simultaneously generating joint-space action labels. It employs constrained optimization to ensure that augmented states involving gripper-to-object contacts adhere to constraints suitable for bimanual coordination. We evaluate D-CODA on 5 simulated and 3 real-world tasks. Our results across 2250 simulation trials and 300 real-world trials demonstrate that it outperforms baselines and ablations, showing its potential for scalable data augmentation in eye-in-hand bimanual manipulation. Our project website is at: https://dcodaaug.github.io/D-CODA/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Sequential Multi-Object Grasping with One Dexterous Hand

Sequentially grasping multiple objects with multi-fingered hands is common in daily life, where humans can fully leverage the dexterity of their hands to enclose multiple objects. However, the diversity of object geometries and the complex contact interactions required for high-DOF hands to grasp one object while enclosing another make sequential multi-object grasping challenging for robots. In this paper, we propose SeqMultiGrasp, a system for sequentially grasping objects with a four-fingered Allegro Hand. We focus on sequentially grasping two objects, ensuring that the hand fully encloses one object before lifting it and then grasps the second object without dropping the first. Our system first synthesizes single-object grasp candidates, where each grasp is constrained to use only a subset of the hand's links. These grasps are then validated in a physics simulator to ensure stability and feasibility. Next, we merge the validated single-object grasp poses to construct multi-object grasp configurations. For real-world deployment, we train a diffusion model conditioned on point clouds to propose grasp poses, followed by a heuristic-based execution strategy. We test our system using $8 \times 8$ object combinations in simulation and $6 \times 3$ object combinations in real. Our diffusion-based grasp model obtains an average success rate of 65.8% over 1,600 simulation trials and 56.7% over 90 real-world trials, suggesting that it is a promising approach for sequential multi-object grasping with multi-fingered hands. Supplementary material is available on our project website: https://hesic73.github.io/SeqMultiGrasp.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

HRIBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Real-Time Human Perception in Human-Robot Interaction

Real-time human perception is crucial for effective human-robot interaction (HRI). Large vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising generalizable perceptual capabilities but often suffer from high latency, which negatively impacts user experience and limits VLM applicability in real-world scenarios. To systematically study VLM capabilities in human perception for HRI and performance-latency trade-offs, we introduce HRIBench, a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across a diverse set of human perceptual tasks critical for HRI. HRIBench covers five key domains: (1) non-verbal cue understanding, (2) verbal instruction understanding, (3) human-robot object relationship understanding, (4) social navigation, and (5) person identification. To construct HRIBench, we collected data from real-world HRI environments to curate questions for non-verbal cue understanding, and leveraged publicly available datasets for the remaining four domains. We curated 200 VQA questions for each domain, resulting in a total of 1000 questions for HRIBench. We then conducted a comprehensive evaluation of both state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source VLMs (N=11) on HRIBench. Our results show that, despite their generalizability, current VLMs still struggle with core perceptual capabilities essential for HRI. Moreover, none of the models within our experiments demonstrated a satisfactory performance-latency trade-off suitable for real-time deployment, underscoring the need for future research on developing smaller, low-latency VLMs with improved human perception capabilities. HRIBench and our results can be found in this Github repository: https://github.com/interaction-lab/HRIBench.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

The MOTIF Hand: A Robotic Hand for Multimodal Observations with Thermal, Inertial, and Force Sensors

Advancing dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands requires rich sensory capabilities, while existing designs lack onboard thermal and torque sensing. In this work, we propose the MOTIF hand, a novel multimodal and versatile robotic hand that extends the LEAP hand by integrating: (i) dense tactile information across the fingers, (ii) a depth sensor, (iii) a thermal camera, (iv), IMU sensors, and (v) a visual sensor. The MOTIF hand is designed to be relatively low-cost (under 4000 USD) and easily reproducible. We validate our hand design through experiments that leverage its multimodal sensing for two representative tasks. First, we integrate thermal sensing into 3D reconstruction to guide temperature-aware, safe grasping. Second, we show how our hand can distinguish objects with identical appearance but different masses - a capability beyond methods that use vision only.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Granular Loco-Manipulation: Repositioning Rocks Through Strategic Sand Avalanche

Legged robots have the potential to leverage obstacles to climb steep sand slopes. However, efficiently repositioning these obstacles to desired locations is challenging. Here we present DiffusiveGRAIN, a learning-based method that enables a multi-legged robot to strategically induce localized sand avalanches during locomotion and indirectly manipulate obstacles. We conducted 375 trials, systematically varying obstacle spacing, robot orientation, and leg actions in 75 of them. Results show that the movement of closely-spaced obstacles exhibits significant interference, requiring joint modeling. In addition, different multi-leg excavation actions could cause distinct robot state changes, necessitating integrated planning of manipulation and locomotion. To address these challenges, DiffusiveGRAIN includes a diffusion-based environment predictor to capture multi-obstacle movements under granular flow interferences and a robot state predictor to estimate changes in robot state from multi-leg action patterns. Deployment experiments (90 trials) demonstrate that by integrating the environment and robot state predictors, the robot can autonomously plan its movements based on loco-manipulation goals, successfully shifting closely located rocks to desired locations in over 65% of trials. Our study showcases the potential for a locomoting robot to strategically manipulate obstacles to achieve improved mobility on challenging terrains.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Cross-domain Few-shot Object Detection with Multi-modal Textual Enrichment

Advancements in cross-modal feature extraction and integration have significantly enhanced performance in few-shot learning tasks. However, current multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods often experience notable performance degradation when encountering substantial domain shifts. We propose that incorporating rich textual information can enable the model to establish a more robust knowledge relationship between visual instances and their corresponding language descriptions, thereby mitigating the challenges of domain shift. Specifically, we focus on the problem of Cross-Domain Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection (CDMM-FSOD) and introduce a meta-learning-based framework designed to leverage rich textual semantics as an auxiliary modality to achieve effective domain adaptation. Our new architecture incorporates two key components: (i) A multi-modal feature aggregation module, which aligns visual and linguistic feature embeddings to ensure cohesive integration across modalities. (ii) A rich text semantic rectification module, which employs bidirectional text feature generation to refine multi-modal feature alignment, thereby enhancing understanding of language and its application in object detection. We evaluate the proposed method on common cross-domain object detection benchmarks and demonstrate that it significantly surpasses existing few-shot object detection approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Cross-domain Multi-modal Few-shot Object Detection via Rich Text

Cross-modal feature extraction and integration have led to steady performance improvements in few-shot learning tasks due to generating richer features. However, existing multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods degrade when facing significant domain-shift and are sample insufficient. We hypothesize that rich text information could more effectively help the model to build a knowledge relationship between the vision instance and its language description and can help mitigate domain shift. Specifically, we study the Cross-Domain few-shot generalization of MM-OD (CDMM-FSOD) and propose a meta-learning based multi-modal few-shot object detection method that utilizes rich text semantic information as an auxiliary modality to achieve domain adaptation in the context of FSOD. Our proposed network contains (i) a multi-modal feature aggregation module that aligns the vision and language support feature embeddings and (ii) a rich text semantic rectify module that utilizes bidirectional text feature generation to reinforce multi-modal feature alignment and thus to enhance the model's language understanding capability. We evaluate our model on common standard cross-domain object detection datasets and demonstrate that our approach considerably outperforms existing FSOD methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding

Understanding the physical world is a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, critical for enabling agents to perform complex tasks and operate safely in real-world environments. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in reasoning and task planning for embodied agents, their ability to comprehend physical phenomena remains extremely limited. To close this gap, we introduce PhysBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' physical world understanding capability across a diverse set of tasks. PhysBench contains 10,002 entries of interleaved video-image-text data, categorized into four major domains: physical object properties, physical object relationships, physical scene understanding, and physics-based dynamics, further divided into 19 subclasses and 8 distinct capability dimensions. Our extensive experiments, conducted on 75 representative VLMs, reveal that while these models excel in common-sense reasoning, they struggle with understanding the physical world -- likely due to the absence of physical knowledge in their training data and the lack of embedded physical priors. To tackle the shortfall, we introduce PhysAgent, a novel framework that combines the generalization strengths of VLMs with the specialized expertise of vision models, significantly enhancing VLMs' physical understanding across a variety of tasks, including an 18.4\% improvement on GPT-4o. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that enhancing VLMs' physical world understanding capabilities can help embodied agents such as MOKA. We believe that PhysBench and PhysAgent offer valuable insights and contribute to bridging the gap between VLMs and physical world understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

GPT-Fabric: Smoothing and Folding Fabric by Leveraging Pre-Trained Foundation Models

Fabric manipulation has applications in folding blankets, handling patient clothing, and protecting items with covers. It is challenging for robots to perform fabric manipulation since fabrics have infinite-dimensional configuration spaces, complex dynamics, and may be in folded or crumpled configurations with severe self-occlusions. Prior work on robotic fabric manipulation relies either on heavily engineered setups or learning-based approaches that create and train on robot-fabric interaction data. In this paper, we propose GPT-Fabric for the canonical tasks of fabric smoothing and folding, where GPT directly outputs an action informing a robot where to grasp and pull a fabric. We perform extensive experiments in simulation to test GPT-Fabric against prior methods for smoothing and folding. GPT-Fabric matches the state-of-the-art in fabric smoothing, and also achieves comparable performance with most prior fabric folding methods tested, even without explicitly training on a fabric-specific dataset (i.e., zero-shot manipulation). Furthermore, we apply GPT-Fabric in physical experiments over 10 smoothing and 12 folding rollouts. Our results suggest that GPT-Fabric is a promising approach for high-precision fabric manipulation tasks

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Learning to Singulate Objects in Packed Environments using a Dexterous Hand

Robotic object singulation, where a robot must isolate, grasp, and retrieve a target object in a cluttered environment, is a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. This task is difficult due to occlusions and how other objects act as obstacles for manipulation. A robot must also reason about the effect of object-object interactions as it tries to singulate the target. Prior work has explored object singulation in scenarios where there is enough free space to perform relatively long pushes to separate objects, in contrast to when space is tight and objects have little separation from each other. In this paper, we propose the Singulating Objects in Packed Environments (SOPE) framework. We propose a novel method that involves a displacement-based state representation and a multi-phase reinforcement learning procedure that enables singulation using the 16-DOF Allegro Hand. We demonstrate extensive experiments in Isaac Gym simulation, showing the ability of our system to singulate a target object in clutter. We directly transfer the policy trained in simulation to the real world. Over 250 physical robot manipulation trials, our method obtains success rates of 79.2%, outperforming alternative learning and non-learning methods.

cs.RO↗