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Jiangmiao Pang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiangmiao Pang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in real-world settings requires agents to process continuous visual streams and generate actions with low latency grounded in language instructions. While Video-based Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have driven recent progress, current VLN methods based on Video-LLM often face trade-offs among fine-grained visual understanding, long-term context modeling and computational efficiency. We introduce StreamVLN, a streaming VLN framework that employs a hybrid slow-fast context modeling strategy to support multi-modal reasoning over interleaved vision, language and action inputs. The fast-streaming dialogue context facilitates responsive action generation through a sliding-window of multi-turn dialogues, while the slow-updating memory context compresses historical visual states using a 3D-aware token pruning strategy. With this slow-fast design, StreamVLN achieves real-time dialogues through KV cache reuse, supporting long video streams with bounded context size and inference cost. Experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance with low latency, ensuring robustness and efficiency in real-world deployment. The project page is: https://streamvln.github.io/.

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arXiv2026

InternVLA-A1.5: Unifying Understanding, Latent Foresight, and Action for Compositional Generalization

Unified models for robot manipulation aim to equip one policy with both the semantic priors of pretrained VLMs and the physical dynamics learned through future prediction. In practice, existing designs tend to erode the semantics of the pretrained backbone, suffer interference among heterogeneous objectives, and learn future prediction from scratch in pixel space, leaving the dynamics priors of pretrained video generators unexploited. We present InternVLA-A1.5, which builds the policy on a native VLM backbone that keeps training on VQA and subtask prediction, and attaches a lightweight unified expert for continuous action generation. Future prediction is recast as a latent-querying problem, where a small set of learnable foresight tokens condenses the task-relevant future into a compact latent code under the supervision of a frozen pretrained video generation model, so the policy inherits world-model dynamics priors without ever learning pixel-level generation. The video branch is discarded at inference, keeping real-time control. Pretrained on 1.2M robot episodes and 3M multimodal samples, InternVLA-A1.5 achieves the best overall results on all six simulation benchmarks. In the real world, the preserved semantics deliver the strongest compositional generalization on held-out instruction bindings, and the two designs together sustain long-horizon execution.

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arXiv2026

Cortex: A Bidirectionally Aligned Embodied Agent Framework for Long-horizon Manipulation

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations. Hierarchical dual-system methods address this but suffer from a gap between high-level planning semantics and low-level execution kinematics. We introduce Cortex, a bidirectionally aligned embodied agent framework with a customized planning interface that conveys executable and tractable subtask plans from high-level VLM to low-level VLA. Specifically, we standardize manipulation subtasks into 32 canonical skill primitives and inject tractability principles, such as representative object attributes and improved trajectory reachability, into the data generation pipeline. This enables automatic annotation of over 4k hours of open-source video data and generation of 30 hours of simulation data. We further devise an event-balanced sampling strategy to construct training data for fine-tuning the framework to better handle planning ambiguity during subtask transitions, enhanced by carefully designed harness engineering from task contexts to skill constraints during inference. Both open-loop VLM and closed-loop system evaluations demonstrate Cortex's efficacy, e.g., it outperforms monolithic baselines by 3.1% on Libero-long and 4.1% on RoboTwin. Notably, Cortex's generalist VLM enables zero-shot completion of unseen real-world long-horizon tasks, such as multi-stage chemistry experiments, by simply combining with a fine-tuned VLA-a capability infeasible through VLA fine-tuning alone.

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arXiv2026

G$^2$TAM: Geometry Grounded Track Anything Model

Human spatial understanding arises from jointly perceiving geometry and semantics, enabling consistent object identification and localization across viewpoints and time. Current video segmentation models depend on explicit object appearance memory banks for instance tracking, yet they remain vulnerable to large viewpoint changes and long-term occlusions. Leveraging the spatial consistency afforded by modern feed-forward 3D reconstruction models, we propose the Geometry Grounded Tracking Anything Model (G$^2$TAM), a unified framework for promptable instance tracking in 3D using only unordered RGB images or videos. G$^2$TAM employs spatially aligned geometric representations as implicit memory, ensuring stable instance identity and localization across frames and views. At its core is a cross-modal spatial encoder that integrates visual and textual prompts into a shared geometric space, enabling end-to-end spatial reconstruction and instance-consistent mask prediction. To support training and evaluation, we construct InsTrack, a large-scale dataset with a dedicated validation split for benchmarking. Extensive experiments show that G$^2$TAM delivers strong cross-view consistency, promptable instance spatial tracking, video object segmentation and spatial reconstruction, establishing a foundation for interactive, geometry-grounded spatial reasoning.

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arXiv2026

EgoSim: Egocentric World Simulator for Embodied Interaction Generation

We introduce EgoSim, a closed-loop egocentric world simulator that generates spatially consistent interaction videos and persistently updates the underlying 3D scene state for continuous simulation. Existing egocentric simulators either lack explicit 3D grounding, causing structural drift under viewpoint changes, or treat the scene as static, failing to update world states across multi-stage interactions. EgoSim addresses both limitations by modeling 3D scenes as updatable world states. We generate embodiment interactions via a Geometry-action-aware Observation Simulation model, with spatial consistency from an Interaction-aware State Updating module. To overcome the critical data bottleneck posed by the difficulty in acquiring densely aligned scene-interaction training pairs, we design a scalable pipeline that extracts static point clouds, camera trajectories, and embodiment actions from in-the-wild large-scale monocular egocentric videos. We further introduce EgoCap, a capture system that enables low-cost real-world data collection with uncalibrated smartphones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoSim significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of visual quality, spatial consistency, and generalization to complex scenes and in-the-wild dexterous interactions, while supporting cross-embodiment transfer to robotic manipulation. Codes and datasets will be open soon. The project page is at egosimulator.github.io.

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arXiv2026

MemoryWAM: Efficient World Action Modeling with Persistent Memory

Robust robotic manipulation in the real world requires not only an understanding of the current observation, but also memory and dynamics modeling. World action models (WAMs) possess these capabilities by jointly modeling visual foresight and actions conditioned on both current and historical observations, making them a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation. However, existing WAMs face a fundamental trade-off: methods with efficient inference typically condition only on a bounded window of recent observations and therefore struggle in non-Markovian environments, whereas methods that preserve long histories incur time and space costs that grow substantially with sequence length. To address this challenge, we introduce MemoryWAM, a world action model with efficient persistent memory. MemoryWAM uses a hybrid memory design that combines recent frames, event-boundary anchor frames, and compact gist tokens that summarize long-range history. A tailored attention mechanism enables retrieval of both detailed short-term context and compressed long-term context, supporting memory-dependent decision-making with reduced inference latency and GPU memory usage. Across long-horizon, memory-dependent manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world, MemoryWAM outperforms strong vision-language-action (VLA) and WAM baselines while maintaining favorable computational efficiency.

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arXiv2026

Scalable and General Whole-Body Control for Cross-Humanoid Locomotion

Learning-based whole-body controllers have become a key driver for humanoid robots, yet most existing approaches require robot-specific training. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-embodiment humanoid control and show that a single policy can robustly generalize across a wide range of humanoid robot designs with one-time training. We introduce XHugWBC, a novel cross-embodiment training framework that enables generalist humanoid control through: (1) physics-consistent morphological randomization, (2) semantically aligned observation and action spaces across diverse humanoid robots, and (3) effective policy architectures modeling morphological and dynamical properties. XHugWBC is not tied to any specific robot. Instead, it internalizes a broad distribution of morphological and dynamical characteristics during training. By learning motion priors from diverse randomized embodiments, the policy acquires a strong structural bias that supports zero-shot transfer to previously unseen robots. Experiments on twelve simulated humanoids and seven real-world robots demonstrate the strong generalization and robustness of the resulting universal controller.

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arXiv2026

Thinking with Imagination: Agentic Visual Spatial Reasoning with World Simulators

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning capabilities, their spatial reasoning abilities remain largely constrained to the observed images and text-oriented chain-of-thought. They often struggle to infer unobserved layouts, maintain cross-view consistency, and reason from alternative viewpoints when only limited egocentric observations are available. In this work, we study this problem as thinking with imagination, where a VLM actively acquires imagined visual evidence by interacting with a world simulator during reasoning. We propose Astra, an agentic spatial reasoning framework that empowers VLMs with action-conditioned visual imagination. Specifically, Astra couples Astra-VL, an RL-trained VLM policy, with Astra-WM, a Bagel-based world simulator that generates novel-view observations from context images and natural-language camera motions. To provide reliable imagined evidence, Astra-WM is trained with view consistency tuning to improve pose and content consistency across views. In the RL stage, we propose a world-simulator-in-the-loop two-phase RL curriculum to stabilize tool-use exploration and advance the model's ability to invoke the simulator only when imagined observations improve over direct answering. Experiments demonstrate that both the world simulator and the agentic policy are necessary: Astra-WM improves simulator-augmented Gemini-3-Flash on MMSI-Bench from 45.1 to 49.5, while Astra-VL improves the Qwen3-VL backbone from 29.8 to 38.8 on MMSI-Bench and from 36.8 to 42.7 on MindCube. These results show that imagined observations can provide useful spatial evidence, but effective world-model-augmented reasoning requires learning when, where, and how to imagine.

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arXiv2026

Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions into robot actions. However, prevailing VLAs either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order with poor performance or attach separate diffusion heads outside the backbone that fragments information pathways and hinders unified, scalable architectures. Instead, we present Discrete Diffusion VLA that discretizes action chunks and models them with discrete diffusion pattern retaining progressive refinement inside the unified transformer backbone. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves high-confidence action elements before harder ones and employs secondary re-masking to revisit uncertain predictions, enabling robust error correction. This design preserves pretrained vision-language priors, supports parallel decoding, and improves the efficiency. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.4% avg. success on LIBERO, 71.2% visual matching on SimplerEnv-Fractal, and 54.2% overall on SimplerEnv-Bridge. On out-of-distribution tests of LIBERO-Goal, our method exhibits only 0.8% language degradation versus 8.0% of parallel decoding, and 20.4% vision degradation versus 29.0% for continuous diffusion, demonstrating well retention of pretrained vision-language capabilities. We also conduct two real-robot evaluations on AgileX Cobot Magic platform to show the method's effectiveness.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence

Spatial intelligence is essential for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) operating in the complex physical world. Existing benchmarks, however, probe only single-image relations and thus fail to assess the multi-image spatial reasoning that real-world deployments demand. We introduce MMSI-Bench, a VQA benchmark dedicated to multi-image spatial intelligence. Six 3D-vision researchers spent more than 300 hours meticulously crafting 1,000 challenging, unambiguous multiple-choice questions from over 120,000 images, each paired with carefully designed distractors and a stepwise reasoning process. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate 37 open-source and proprietary MLLMs, observing a wide gap: the strongest open-source model attains roughly 30% accuracy and OpenAI's GPT-5 reasoning model reaches 40%, while humans score 97%. These results underscore the challenging nature of MMSI-Bench and the substantial headroom for future research. Leveraging the annotated reasoning processes, we also provide an automated error analysis pipeline that diagnoses four dominant failure modes, including (1) grounding errors, (2) overlap-matching and scene-reconstruction errors, (3) situation-transformation reasoning errors, and (4) spatial-logic errors, offering insights for advancing spatial intelligence. Project page: https://runsenxu.com/projects/MMSI_Bench .

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Imagine2Real: Towards Zero-shot Humanoid-Object Interaction via Video Generative Priors

Whole-body Humanoid-Object Interaction (HOI) is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-fidelity 3D data. While video generative priors offer a promising alternative, existing methods suffer from \textit{Representation Misalignment} due to their reliance on geometric priors (e.g., explicit CAD models), and \textit{Retargeting Complexity} arising from intensive morphing and morphological mismatch. We propose Imagine2Real, a zero-shot HOI framework for flexible, geometry-free interaction. To resolve misalignment, we formulate robot and object motions as unified 4D point trajectories. To overcome retargeting complexity, our Keypoints Tracker tracks only sparse critical points (base, hands, and object), entirely bypassing the error-amplifying retargeting process. To maintain natural gaits despite these sparse signals, we utilize the latent space of a Behavior Foundation Model (BFM) as the tracker's search domain. Using a progressive training strategy, Imagine2Real learns robust behaviors with simple tracking rewards, enabling zero-shot physical deployment within a motion capture(mocap) system.

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arXiv2026

STABLE: Simulation-Ready Tabletop Layout Generation via a Semantics-Physics Dual System

Generating simulation-ready tabletop scenes from task instructions is an intriguing and promising research direction in the field of Embodied AI. However, existing task-to-scene generation methods rely exclusively on large language models (LLMs) to predict scene layouts, inevitably yielding object collisions or floating due to LLMs' inherent limitations in 3D spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present STABLE, a semantics-physics dual-system tailored for simulation-ready tabletop scene generation. STABLE consists of two complementary modules: (i) a Semantic Reasoner, a fine-tuned LLM trained on a structured tabletop scene dataset to generate coarse layouts from input task instructions, and (ii) a Physics Corrector, a physics-aware flow-based denoising model that outputs pose updates to refine layouts, which ensures the physical plausibility of scenes while preserves semantic alignment with task instructions. STABLE adopts a progressive generation paradigm: by alternating between the Semantic Reasoner and Physics Corrector, it incrementally expands the scene from task-critical objects to background objects. Experiments demonstrate that STABLE successfully generates simulation-ready tabletop scenes that strictly conform to task instructions and significantly enhances the physical validity of scenes over prior art.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation System

While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Robo3R: Enhancing Robotic Manipulation with Accurate Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

3D spatial perception is fundamental to generalizable robotic manipulation, yet obtaining reliable, high-quality 3D geometry remains challenging. Depth sensors suffer from noise and material sensitivity, while existing reconstruction models lack the precision and metric consistency required for physical interaction. We introduce Robo3R, a feed-forward, manipulation-ready 3D reconstruction model that predicts accurate, metric-scale scene geometry directly from RGB images and robot states in real time. Robo3R jointly infers scale-invariant local geometry and relative camera poses, which are unified into the scene representation in the canonical robot frame via a learned global similarity transformation. To meet the precision demands of manipulation, Robo3R employs a masked point head for sharp, fine-grained point clouds, and a keypoint-based Perspective-n-Point (PnP) formulation to refine camera extrinsics and global alignment. Trained on Robo3R-4M, a curated large-scale synthetic dataset with four million high-fidelity annotated frames, Robo3R consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reconstruction methods and depth sensors. Across downstream tasks including imitation learning, sim-to-real transfer, grasp synthesis, and collision-free motion planning, we observe consistent gains in performance, suggesting the promise of this alternative 3D sensing module for robotic manipulation.

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arXiv2026

EAG-PT: Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing for Diffuse Indoor Scene Reconstruction and Editing

Recent radiance-field-based reconstruction methods, such as NeRF and 3DGS, achieve high visual fidelity for indoor scenes, but often break down under scene editing due to baked illumination and the lack of explicit light transport. In contrast, inverse path tracing methods based on mesh representations enforce correct light transport but require highly accurate geometry, making them difficult to apply robustly to real indoor scenes. We present Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing (EAG-PT), a method for physically based reconstruction and rendering of indoor scenes using a unified 2D Gaussian representation, targeting editable diffuse global illumination. Our approach consists of three key ideas: (1) representing indoor scenes with 2D Gaussians as a transport-friendly geometric proxy that avoids explicit mesh reconstruction; (2) explicitly separating emissive and non-emissive components during reconstruction to support editing; and (3) decoupling reconstruction from final rendering by using efficient single-bounce optimization and high-quality multi-bounce path tracing, respectively. Experiments on synthetic and real indoor scenes show that EAG-PT produces more natural and physically consistent edited renderings than radiance-field reconstructions, while preserving finer geometric detail and avoiding mesh-induced artifacts compared with mesh-based inverse path tracing. These results highlight the potential of our approach for applications such as interior design, XR content creation, and embodied AI.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

InternScenes: A Large-scale Simulatable Indoor Scene Dataset with Realistic Layouts

The advancement of Embodied AI heavily relies on large-scale, simulatable 3D scene datasets characterized by scene diversity and realistic layouts. However, existing datasets typically suffer from limitations in data scale or diversity, sanitized layouts lacking small items, and severe object collisions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce \textbf{InternScenes}, a novel large-scale simulatable indoor scene dataset comprising approximately 40,000 diverse scenes by integrating three disparate scene sources, real-world scans, procedurally generated scenes, and designer-created scenes, including 1.96M 3D objects and covering 15 common scene types and 288 object classes. We particularly preserve massive small items in the scenes, resulting in realistic and complex layouts with an average of 41.5 objects per region. Our comprehensive data processing pipeline ensures simulatability by creating real-to-sim replicas for real-world scans, enhances interactivity by incorporating interactive objects into these scenes, and resolves object collisions by physical simulations. We demonstrate the value of InternScenes with two benchmark applications: scene layout generation and point-goal navigation. Both show the new challenges posed by the complex and realistic layouts. More importantly, InternScenes paves the way for scaling up the model training for both tasks, making the generation and navigation in such complex scenes possible. We commit to open-sourcing the data, models, and benchmarks to benefit the whole community.

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arXiv2026

Chat-Scene++: Exploiting Context-Rich Object Identification for 3D LLM

Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods struggle with fine-grained object grounding and contextual reasoning, limiting their ability to interpret and interact with complex 3D environments. In this paper, we present Chat-Scene++, an MLLM framework that represents 3D scenes as context-rich object sequences. By structuring scenes as sequences of objects with contextual semantics, Chat-Scene++ enables object-centric representation and interaction. It decomposes a 3D scene into object representations paired with identifier tokens, allowing LLMs to follow instructions across diverse 3D vision-language tasks. To capture inter-object relationships and global semantics, Chat-Scene++ extracts context-rich object features using large-scale pre-trained 3D scene-level and 2D image-level encoders, unlike the isolated per-object features in Chat-Scene. Its flexible object-centric design also supports grounded chain-of-thought (G-CoT) reasoning, enabling the model to distinguish objects at both category and spatial levels during multi-step inference. Without the need for additional task-specific heads or fine-tuning, Chat-Scene++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on five major 3D vision-language benchmarks: ScanRefer, Multi3DRefer, Scan2Cap, ScanQA, and SQA3D. These results highlight its effectiveness in scene comprehension, object grounding, and spatial reasoning. Additionally, without reconstructing 3D worlds through computationally expensive processes, we demonstrate its applicability to real-world scenarios using only 2D inputs.

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arXiv2026

Demystifying Action Space Design for Robotic Manipulation Policies

The specification of the action space plays a pivotal role in imitation-based robotic manipulation policy learning, fundamentally shaping the optimization landscape of policy learning. While recent advances have focused heavily on scaling training data and model capacity, the choice of action space remains guided by ad-hoc heuristics or legacy designs, leading to an ambiguous understanding of robotic policy design philosophies. To address this ambiguity, we conducted a large-scale and systematic empirical study, confirming that the action space does have significant and complex impacts on robotic policy learning. We dissect the action design space along temporal and spatial axes, facilitating a structured analysis of how these choices govern both policy learnability and control stability. Based on 13,000+ real-world rollouts on a bimanual robot and evaluation on 500+ trained models over four scenarios, we examine the trade-offs between absolute vs. delta representations, and joint-space vs. task-space parameterizations. Our large-scale results suggest that properly designing the policy to predict delta actions consistently improves performance, while joint-space and task-space representations offer complementary strengths, favoring control stability and generalization, respectively.

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