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Jiangmiao Pang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiangmiao Pang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

SIM1: Physics-Aligned Simulator as Zero-Shot Data Scaler in Deformable Worlds

Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from the cost of real-world data acquisition, prevailing sim-to-real pipelines remain rooted in rigid-body abstractions, producing mismatched geometry, fragile soft dynamics, and motion primitives poorly suited for cloth interaction. We posit that simulation fails not for being synthetic, but for being ungrounded. To address this, we introduce SIM1, a physics-aligned real-to-sim-to-real data engine that grounds simulation in the physical world. Given limited demonstrations, the system digitizes scenes into metric-consistent twins, calibrates deformable dynamics through elastic modeling, and expands behaviors via diffusion-based trajectory generation with quality filtering. This pipeline transforms sparse observations into scaled synthetic supervision with near-demonstration fidelity. Experiments show that policies trained on purely synthetic data achieve parity with real-data baselines at a 1:15 equivalence ratio, while delivering 90% zero-shot success and 50% generalization gains in real-world deployment. These results validate physics-aligned simulation as scalable supervision for deformable manipulation and a practical pathway for data-efficient policy learning.

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UniCon: A Unified System for Efficient Robot Learning Transfers

Deploying learning-based controllers across heterogeneous robots is challenging due to platform differences, inconsistent interfaces, and inefficient middleware. To address these issues, we present UniCon, a lightweight framework that standardizes states, control flow, and instrumentation across platforms. It decomposes workflows into execution graphs with reusable components, separating system states from control logic to enable plug-and-play deployment across various robot morphologies. Unlike traditional middleware, it prioritizes efficiency through batched, vectorized data flow, minimizing communication overhead and improving inference latency. This modular, data-oriented approach enables seamless sim-to-real transfer with minimal re-engineering. We demonstrate that UniCon reduces code redundancy when transferring workflows and achieves higher inference efficiency compared to ROS-based systems. Deployed on over 12 robot models from 7 manufacturers, it has been successfully integrated into ongoing research projects, proving its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

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Tac2Real: Reliable and GPU Visuotactile Simulation for Online Reinforcement Learning and Zero-Shot Real-World Deployment

Visuotactile sensors are indispensable for contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. However, policy learning with tactile feedback in simulation, especially for online reinforcement learning (RL), remains a critical challenge, as it demands a delicate balance between physics fidelity and computational efficiency. To address this challenge, we present Tac2Real, a lightweight visuotactile simulation framework designed to enable efficient online RL training. Tac2Real integrates the Preconditioned Nonlinear Conjugate Gradient Incremental Potential Contact (PNCG-IPC) method with a multi-node, multi-GPU high-throughput parallel simulation architecture, which can generate marker displacement fields at interactive rates. Meanwhile, we propose a systematic approach, TacAlign, to narrow both structured and stochastic sources of domain gap, ensuring a reliable zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. We further evaluate Tac2Real on the contact-rich peg insertion task. The zero-shot transfer results achieve a high success rate in the real-world scenario, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. The project page is: https://ningyurichard.github.io/tac2real-project-page/

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Feel Robot Feels: Tactile Feedback Array Glove for Dexterous Manipulation

Teleoperation is a key approach for collecting high-quality, physically consistent demonstrations for robotic manipulation. However, teleoperation for dexterous manipulation remains constrained by: (i) inaccurate hand-robot motion mapping, which limits teleoperated dexterity, and (ii) limited tactile feedback that forces vision-dominated interaction and hinders perception of contact geometry and force variation. To address these challenges, we present TAG, a low-cost glove system that integrates precise hand motion capture with high-resolution tactile feedback, enabling effective tactile-in-the-loop dexterous teleoperation. For motion capture, TAG employs a non-contact magnetic sensing design that provides drift-free, electromagnetically robust 21-DoF joint tracking with joint angle estimation errors below 1 degree. Meanwhile, to restore tactile sensation, TAG equips each finger with a 32-actuator tactile array within a compact 2 cm^2 module, allowing operators to directly feel physical interactions at the robot end-effector through spatial activation patterns. Through real-world teleoperation experiments and user studies, we show that TAG enables reliable real-time perception of contact geometry and dynamic force, improves success rates in contact-rich teleoperation tasks, and increases the reliability of demonstration data collection for learning-based manipulation.

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M^3: Dense Matching Meets Multi-View Foundation Models for Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM

Streaming reconstruction from uncalibrated monocular video remains challenging, as it requires both high-precision pose estimation and computationally efficient online refinement in dynamic environments. While coupling 3D foundation models with SLAM frameworks is a promising paradigm, a critical bottleneck persists: most multi-view foundation models estimate poses in a feed-forward manner, yielding pixel-level correspondences that lack the requisite precision for rigorous geometric optimization. To address this, we present M^3, which augments the Multi-view foundation model with a dedicated Matching head to facilitate fine-grained dense correspondences and integrates it into a robust Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM. M^3 further enhances tracking stability by incorporating dynamic area suppression and cross-inference intrinsic alignment. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in both pose estimation and scene reconstruction. Notably, M^3 reduces ATE RMSE by 64.3% compared to VGGT-SLAM 2.0 and outperforms ARTDECO by 2.11 dB in PSNR on the ScanNet++ dataset.

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ForceVLA2: Unleashing Hybrid Force-Position Control with Force Awareness for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Embodied intelligence for contact-rich manipulation has predominantly relied on position control, while explicit awareness and regulation of interaction forces remain under-explored, limiting stability, precision, and robustness in real-world tasks. We propose ForceVLA2, an end-to-end vision-language-action framework that equips robots with hybrid force-position control and explicit force awareness. ForceVLA2 introduces force-based prompts into the VLM expert to construct force-aware task concepts across stages, and employs a Cross-Scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in the action expert to adaptively fuse these concepts with real-time interaction forces for closed-loop hybrid force-position regulation. To support learning and evaluation, we construct ForceVLA2-Dataset, containing 1,000 trajectories over 5 contact-rich tasks, including wiping, pressing, and assembling, with multi-view images, task prompts, proprioceptive state, and force signals. Extensive experiments show that ForceVLA2 substantially improves success rates and reliability in contact-rich manipulation, outperforming pi0 and pi0.5 by 48.0% and 35.0%, respectively, across the 5 tasks, and mitigating common failure modes such as arm overload and unstable contact, thereby actively advancing force-aware interactive physical intelligence in VLAs. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/force-vla2/home.

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One-Policy-Fits-All: Geometry-Aware Action Latents for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

Cross-embodiment manipulation is crucial for enhancing the scalability of robot manipulation and reducing the high cost of data collection. However, the significant differences between embodiments, such as variations in action spaces and structural disparities, pose challenges for joint training across multiple sources of data. To address this, we propose One-Policy-Fits-All (OPFA), a framework that enables learning a single, versatile policy across multiple embodiments. We first learn a Geometry-Aware Latent Representation (GaLR), which leverages 3D convolution networks and transformers to build a shared latent action space across different embodiments. Then we design a unified latent retargeting decoder that extracts embodiment-specific actions from the latent representations, without any embodiment-specific decoder tuning. OPFA enables end-to-end co-training of data from diverse embodiments, including various grippers and dexterous hands with arbitrary degrees of freedom, significantly improving data efficiency and reducing the cost of skill transfer. We conduct extensive experiments across 11 different end-effectors. The results demonstrate that OPFA significantly improves policy performance in diverse settings by leveraging heterogeneous embodiment data. For instance, cross-embodiment co-training can improve success rates by more than 50% compared to single-source training. Moreover, by adding only a few demonstrations from a new embodiment (e.g., eight), OPFA can achieve performance comparable to that of a well-trained model with 72 demonstrations.

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Humanoid Goalkeeper: Learning from Position Conditioned Task-Motion Constraints

We present a reinforcement learning framework for autonomous goalkeeping with humanoid robots in real-world scenarios. While prior work has demonstrated similar capabilities on quadrupedal platforms, humanoid goalkeeping introduces two critical challenges: (1) generating natural, human-like whole-body motions, and (2) covering a wider guarding range with an equivalent response time. Unlike existing approaches that rely on separate teleoperation or fixed motion tracking for whole-body control, our method learns a single end-to-end RL policy, enabling fully autonomous, highly dynamic, and human-like robot-object interactions. To achieve this, we integrate multiple human motion priors conditioned on perceptual inputs into the RL training via an adversarial scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through real-world experiments, where the humanoid robot successfully performs agile, autonomous, and naturalistic interceptions of fast-moving balls. In addition to goalkeeping, we demonstrate the generalization of our approach through tasks such as ball escaping and grabbing. Our work presents a practical and scalable solution for enabling highly dynamic interactions between robots and moving objects, advancing the field toward more adaptive and lifelike robotic behaviors.

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FutureVLA: Joint Visuomotor Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Model

Predictive foresight is important to intelligent embodied agents. Since the motor execution of a robot is intrinsically constrained by its visual perception of environmental geometry, effectively anticipating the future requires capturing this tightly coupled visuomotor interplay. While recent vision-language-action models attempt to incorporate future guidance, they struggle with this joint modeling. Existing explicit methods divert capacity to task-irrelevant visual details, whereas implicit methods relying on sparse frame pairs disrupt temporal continuity. By heavily relying on visual reconstruction, these methods become visually dominated, entangling static scene context with dynamic action intent. We argue that effective joint visuomotor predictive modeling requires both temporal continuity and visually-conditioned supervision decoupling. To this end, we propose FutureVLA, featuring a novel Joint Visuomotor Predictive Architecture. FutureVLA is designed to extract joint visuomotor embeddings by first decoupling visual and motor information, and then jointly encoding generalized physical priors. Specifically, in the pretraining stage, we leverage heterogeneous manipulation datasets and introduce a Joint Visuomotor Gating mechanism to structurally separate visual state preservation from temporal action modeling. It allows the motor stream to focus on continuous physical dynamics while explicitly querying visual tokens for environmental constraints, yielding highly generalizable joint visuomotor embeddings. Subsequently, in the post-training stage, we employ a latent embeddings alignment strategy, enabling diverse downstream VLA models to internalize these temporal priors without modifying their inference architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FutureVLA consistently improves VLA frameworks.

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Towards Human-Like Manipulation through RL-Augmented Teleoperation and Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable success in robotic manipulation, their application has largely been confined to low-degree-of-freedom end-effectors performing simple, vision-guided pick-and-place tasks. Extending these models to human-like, bimanual dexterous manipulation-specifically contact-rich in-hand operations-introduces critical challenges in high-fidelity data acquisition, multi-skill learning, and multimodal sensory fusion. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to address these bottlenecks, built upon two components. First, we introduce IMCopilot (In-hand Manipulation Copilot), a suite of reinforcement learning-trained atomic skills that plays a dual role: it acts as a shared-autonomy assistant to simplify teleoperation data collection, and it serves as a callable low-level execution primitive for the VLA. Second, we present MoDE-VLA (Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA), an architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous force and tactile modalities into a pretrained VLA backbone. By utilizing a residual injection mechanism, MoDE-VLA enables contact-aware refinement without degrading the model's pretrained knowledge. We validate our approach on four tasks of escalating complexity, demonstrating doubled success rate improvement over the baseline in dexterous contact-rich tasks.

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$π^3$: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning

We introduce $π^3$, a feed-forward neural network that offers a novel approach to visual geometry reconstruction, breaking the reliance on a conventional fixed reference view. Previous methods often anchor their reconstructions to a designated viewpoint, an inductive bias that can lead to instability and failures if the reference is suboptimal. In contrast, $π^3$ employs a fully permutation-equivariant architecture to predict affine-invariant camera poses and scale-invariant local point maps without any reference frames. This design not only makes our model inherently robust to input ordering, but also leads to higher accuracy and performance. These advantages enable our simple and bias-free approach to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks, including camera pose estimation, monocular/video depth estimation, and dense point map reconstruction. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yyfz/Pi3.

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UltraDexGrasp: Learning Universal Dexterous Grasping for Bimanual Robots with Synthetic Data

Grasping is a fundamental capability for robots to interact with the physical world. Humans, equipped with two hands, autonomously select appropriate grasp strategies based on the shape, size, and weight of objects, enabling robust grasping and subsequent manipulation. In contrast, current robotic grasping remains limited, particularly in multi-strategy settings. Although substantial efforts have targeted parallel-gripper and single-hand grasping, dexterous grasping for bimanual robots remains underexplored, with data being a primary bottleneck. Achieving physically plausible and geometrically conforming grasps that can withstand external wrenches poses significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce UltraDexGrasp, a framework for universal dexterous grasping with bimanual robots. The proposed data-generation pipeline integrates optimization-based grasp synthesis with planning-based demonstration generation, yielding high-quality and diverse trajectories across multiple grasp strategies. With this framework, we curate UltraDexGrasp-20M, a large-scale, multi-strategy grasp dataset comprising 20 million frames across 1,000 objects. Based on UltraDexGrasp-20M, we further develop a simple yet effective grasp policy that takes point clouds as input, aggregates scene features via unidirectional attention, and predicts control commands. Trained exclusively on synthetic data, the policy achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and consistently succeeds on novel objects with varied shapes, sizes, and weights, attaining an average success rate of 81.2% in real-world universal dexterous grasping. To facilitate future research on grasping with bimanual robots, we open-source the data generation pipeline at https://github.com/InternRobotics/UltraDexGrasp.

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InstructVLA: Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning from Understanding to Manipulation

To operate effectively in the real world, robots should integrate multimodal reasoning with precise action generation. However, existing vision-language-action (VLA) models often sacrifice one for the other, narrow their abilities to task-specific manipulation data, and suffer catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained vision-language capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce InstructVLA, an end-to-end VLA model that preserves the flexible reasoning of large vision-language models (VLMs) while delivering leading manipulation performance with the help of embodied reasoning. InstructVLA introduces a novel training paradigm, Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning (VLA-IT), which employs multimodal training with mixture-of-experts adaptation to jointly optimize embodied reasoning and action generation on both standard VLM corpora and a curated 650K-sample VLA-IT dataset. On in-domain SimplerEnv tasks, InstructVLA achieves 33% improvement over SpatialVLA. To evaluate generalization, we introduce SimplerEnv-Instruct, an 80-task benchmark requiring closed-loop control and high-level instruction understanding, where it outperforms a fine-tuned OpenVLA by 96% and an action expert aided by GPT-4o by 29%. Additionally, InstructVLA surpasses baseline VLMs on multimodal tasks and exhibits inference-time scaling by leveraging textual reasoning to boost manipulation performance in both simulated and real-world settings. These results demonstrate InstructVLA's potential for bridging intuitive and steerable human-robot interaction with efficient policy learning.

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Embodiment-Aware Generalist Specialist Distillation for Unified Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Humanoid Whole-Body Controllers trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have recently achieved remarkable performance, yet many target a single robot embodiment. Variations in dynamics, degrees of freedom (DoFs), and kinematic topology still hinder a single policy from commanding diverse humanoids. Moreover, obtaining a generalist policy that not only transfers across embodiments but also supports richer behaviors-beyond simple walking to squatting, leaning-remains especially challenging. In this work, we tackle these obstacles by introducing EAGLE, an iterative generalist-specialist distillation framework that produces a single unified policy that controls multiple heterogeneous humanoids without per-robot reward tuning. During each cycle, embodiment-specific specialists are forked from the current generalist, refined on their respective robots, and new skills are distilled back into the generalist by training on the pooled embodiment set. Repeating this loop until performance convergence produces a robust Whole-Body Controller validated on robots such as Unitree H1, G1, and Fourier N1. We conducted experiments on five different robots in simulation and four in real-world settings. Through quantitative evaluations, EAGLE achieves high tracking accuracy and robustness compared to other methods, marking a step toward scalable, fleet-level humanoid control. See more details at https://eagle-wbc.github.io/

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InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulation

Prevalent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and demonstrate exceptional proficiency in semantic understanding, but they inherently lack the capability to deduce physical world dynamics. Consequently, recent approaches have shifted toward World Models, typically formulated via video prediction; however, these methods often suffer from a lack of semantic grounding and exhibit brittleness in the presence of video prediction errors. To synergize semantic understanding with dynamic predictive capabilities, we present InternVLA-A1. This model employs a unified Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, coordinating three experts for scene understanding, visual foresight generation, and action execution. These components interact seamlessly through a unified masked self attention mechanism. Building upon InternVL3 and Qwen3-VL, we instantiate InternVLA-A1 at 2B and 3B parameter scales. We pre-train these models on heterogeneous data sources over real-world robot data, synthetic simulation data, and human videos, covering over 692M frames. This hybrid training strategy effectively harnesses the diversity of synthetic simulation data while minimizing the sim-to-real gap. We evaluated InternVLA-A1 on 12 real-world robotic tasks and a simulation benchmark. The results show that InternVLA-A1 consistently outperforms prior leading models: compared with pi0.5, it achieves +4.4\% on static manipulation tasks and +2.6\% on the RoboTwin 2.0 simulation benchmark, and delivers a +26.7\% boost on dynamic manipulation tasks.

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RoboInter: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite Towards Robotic Manipulation

Advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have stimulated growing interest in vision-language-action (VLA) systems for robot manipulation. However, existing manipulation datasets remain costly to curate, highly embodiment-specific, and insufficient in coverage and diversity, thereby hindering the generalization of VLA models. Recent approaches attempt to mitigate these limitations via a plan-then-execute paradigm, where high-level plans (e.g., subtasks, trace) are first generated and subsequently translated into low-level actions, but they critically rely on extra intermediate supervision, which is largely absent from existing datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RoboInter Manipulation Suite, a unified resource including data, benchmarks, and models of intermediate representations for manipulation. It comprises RoboInter-Tool, a lightweight GUI that enables semi-automatic annotation of diverse representations, and RoboInter-Data, a large-scale dataset containing over 230k episodes across 571 diverse scenes, which provides dense per-frame annotations over more than 10 categories of intermediate representations, substantially exceeding prior work in scale and annotation quality. Building upon this foundation, RoboInter-VQA introduces 9 spatial and 20 temporal embodied VQA categories to systematically benchmark and enhance the embodied reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Meanwhile, RoboInter-VLA offers an integrated plan-then-execute framework, supporting modular and end-to-end VLA variants that bridge high-level planning with low-level execution via intermediate supervision. In total, RoboInter establishes a practical foundation for advancing robust and generalizable robotic learning via fine-grained and diverse intermediate representations.

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DexImit: Learning Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Data scarcity fundamentally limits the generalization of bimanual dexterous manipulation, as real-world data collection for dexterous hands is expensive and labor-intensive. Human manipulation videos, as a direct carrier of manipulation knowledge, offer significant potential for scaling up robot learning. However, the substantial embodiment gap between human hands and robotic dexterous hands makes direct pretraining from human videos extremely challenging. To bridge this gap and unleash the potential of large-scale human manipulation video data, we propose DexImit, an automated framework that converts monocular human manipulation videos into physically plausible robot data, without any additional information. DexImit employs a four-stage generation pipeline: (1) reconstructing hand-object interactions from arbitrary viewpoints with near-metric scale; (2) performing subtask decomposition and bimanual scheduling; (3) synthesizing robot trajectories consistent with the demonstrated interactions; (4) comprehensive data augmentation for zero-shot real-world deployment. Building on these designs, DexImit can generate large-scale robot data based on human videos, either from the Internet or video generation models. DexImit is capable of handling diverse manipulation tasks, including tool use (e.g., cutting an apple), long-horizon tasks (e.g., making a beverage), and fine-grained manipulations (e.g., stacking cups).

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ST4VLA: Spatially Guided Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Large vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but fall short when extended to embodied tasks, where instructions must be transformed into low-level motor actions. We introduce ST4VLA, a dual-system Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages Spatial Guided Training to align action learning with spatial priors in VLMs. ST4VLA includes two stages: (i) spatial grounding pre-training, which equips the VLM with transferable priors via scalable point, box, and trajectory prediction from both web-scale and robot-specific data, and (ii) spatially guided action post-training, which encourages the model to produce richer spatial priors to guide action generation via spatial prompting. This design preserves spatial grounding during policy learning and promotes consistent optimization across spatial and action objectives. Empirically, ST4VLA achieves substantial improvements over vanilla VLA, with performance increasing from 66.1 -> 84.6 on Google Robot and from 54.7 -> 73.2 on WidowX Robot, establishing new state-of-the-art results on SimplerEnv. It also demonstrates stronger generalization to unseen objects and paraphrased instructions, as well as robustness to long-horizon perturbations in real-world settings. These results highlight scalable spatially guided training as a promising direction for robust, generalizable robot learning. Source code, data and models are released at https://internrobotics.github.io/internvla-m1.github.io/

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