arXiv subjects

Jindou Jia

Publications and source records attributed to Jindou Jia.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Physics Filtering Favors the Generalization of Robot Learning

Living organisms exhibit extraordinary adaptability to unseen environments through their intrinsic physical structures and lifelong feedback-driven learning. Endowing robots with comparable generalization is critical for reliable operation in the real world. While recent approaches attempt to improve generalization by scaling training data, such strategies remain impractical for robotics, where collecting real-world demonstrations at the scale of large language models is prohibitively costly and slow. Contrary to this reliance on massive datasets, we show that robots can generalize effectively under dynamics uncertainties even with limited training data by leveraging a feedback mechanism, namely PhyFilter, that corrects learning outputs with physics-filtered learning residuals. PhyFilter operates as a lightweight, model-agnostic module whose parameters can be automatically optimized through an auto-learning algorithm, eliminating manual tuning and enabling seamless integration with diverse robot policies. We validate PhyFilter across four representative robotic systems, demonstrating that it enables quadruped robots to generalize to unseen terrains, payload variations, and speed ranges; drones to flight under unseen wind disturbances; aerial manipulators to achieve centimeter-level in-air capture despite wind and mass uncertainties; and acceleration differentiators to remain robust with distribution shift. These results show that physics-filtered feedback can serve as a powerful alternative to massive data scaling.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

APEX: Adaptive Policy Execution for Precise Manipulation

Modern imitation learning methods, including visuomotor and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, typically output high-level action references that are executed by low-level controllers. However, the absence of higher-order reference signals, together with the policy's lack of awareness of the underlying low-level control dynamics during training, inevitably induces an execution gap. As a result, realized actions deviate systematically from policy-commanded ones, with a critical impact on precision-sensitive manipulation. Prior work either modifies the policy architecture or the low-level controller, both requiring intrusive changes to the pretrained policy or packaged controller. This raises a natural question: when the policy and controller are both treated as inaccessible black boxes, can we bridge the execution gap? We propose Adaptive Policy Execution (APEX), a plug-and-play framework inserted between the policy and the controller that reconstructs a dynamically feasible reference from policy outputs and adapts at test-time according to low-level state feedback, with a provable convergence guarantee. Extensive empirical studies show that APEX reduces controller-induced tracking error by 41.2% on demonstration replay and improves manipulation success by 4.8--25.8 percentage points across four visuomotor and VLA policy classes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

ADAPT: Analytical Disturbance-Aware Policy Training for Humanoid Locomotion

Humanoids deployed in human-centered environments must handle force-interactive tasks, where external contacts introduce unexpected disturbances that disrupt locomotion accuracy and stability. Existing learning-based approaches rely on broad domain randomization, task-specific force objectives, or learning-based force estimators from motion history, each of which compromises accuracy, task transferability, or out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. We present Analytical Disturbance-Aware Policy Training (ADAPT), a framework that equips humanoid policies with a physically grounded disturbance observer. The core of ADAPT is an analytical whole-body disturbance observer that estimates residual force/torque online with the accessible robot dynamics, without requiring force/torque sensors. Fed directly into the policy, the estimated disturbances give the humanoid an explicit, physics-derived sense of external force/torque that can generalize across diverse unseen scenes. Experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid show that ADAPT achieves accurate disturbance prediction and stronger robustness than a proprioception-only baseline under torso perturbations, standing pushes, and asymmetric hand payloads, with improved velocity tracking even on OOD disturbances. Moreover, ADAPT enables penalizing inferred disturbances at lower-body joints to encourage lighter locomotion.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

GIVE: Grounding Human Gestures in Vision-Language-Action Models

Human communication is inherently multimodal, where language is often accompanied by non-verbal cues such as gestures to convey intentions. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models treat robotic manipulation as a pure text-driven task, overlooking the important role of gestures in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This often leads to inaccurate intent grounding and unreliable manipulation when language instructions are ambiguous or underspecified. To address this challenge, we propose GIVE (Gesture Intent via Visual-Semantic Enhancement), an effective approach that enhances pre-trained VLA models with human gesture understanding without architectural modifications. Specifically, GIVE incorporates gesture information through two complementary pathways: a visual pathway that overlays hand skeletons and fingertip rays onto robot observations for explicit object grounding, and a semantic pathway that generates high-level descriptions of human gestures and task instructions for robust intent grounding. By jointly leveraging visual and semantic guidance, GIVE enables VLA policies to better associate gestures with manipulation behaviors and adapt to dynamic interaction intents. In real-world HRI experiments, GIVE substantially outperforms the baseline, improving target object recognition accuracy by 40% and overall task success rate by 80%, while demonstrating strong robustness and generalization to unseen spatial layouts and diverse participants.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

DIPOLE: Fusing Vision and Geometry for Robust Visuomotor Generalization

Imitation learning has emerged as a crucial approach for acquiring visuomotor skills from demonstrations, where designing effective observation encoders is essential for policy generalization. However, existing methods tend to struggle once test-time conditions differ from the demonstrations, such as changes in lighting, texture, viewpoint, object placement, or object identity. To address this challenge, we propose DIffusion POlicy with compLementarity Encoders (DIPOLE), a visuomotor policy that learns to fuse complementary modalities through a training-time mechanism rather than a specialized fusion architecture. A modality-wise dropout masks one branch at each training step, encouraging each modality to remain individually informative. A lightweight cross-attention layer then exchanges complementary cues between the two. This design endows DIPOLE with five core strengths: stable high performance across diverse tasks, robustness to visual changes, spatial generalization at sub-centimeter precision, emergent capability beyond either modality, and zero-shot transfer to unseen objects. Across 18 simulated and 4 real-world tasks, DIPOLE outperforms six baselines by 39.1% on average, with gains of 41.5% under unseen visual distractors and 15.2% under randomized object placement.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MARS Policy: Multimodality Only When It Matters

Imitation learning has become a cornerstone for solving complex robotic manipulation tasks. In particular, multimodality, which enables robots to capture diverse yet valid behavioral patterns, has driven the rapid emergence of generative policies as a dominant paradigm in robot learning. However, achieving such multimodality typically relies on stochastic noise initialization and iterative denoising procedures, resulting in substantial training complexity and low inference efficiency. Meanwhile, not all phases of a robotic task inherently require behavioral diversity. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Modality-Adaptive Robot Sampling (MARS) policy, which adaptively invokes tailored stochasticity only when it is truly beneficial, while reverting to an efficient deterministic learning during single-modal phases. In other words, the proper amount of noise is injected only at the proper time. By selectively activating multimodal generation, MARS policy bridges the gap between the multimodal capability of generative policies and the superior training and inference efficiency of deterministic models. Empirical studies across 8 simulated and 4 real-world tasks demonstrate that MARS exhibits robust multimodal expressivity and high efficiency, with a 16.67% success rate improvement and an 83.20% inference latency reduction in real-world tests. Counterintuitively, MARS also outpaces deterministic policies in training efficiency on near-deterministic tasks by more effectively modeling nuanced action diversity.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

CompassAD: Intent-Driven 3D Affordance Grounding in Functionally Competing Objects

When told to "cut the cake," a robot must choose the knife over nearby scissors, despite both objects affording the same cutting function. In real-world scenes, multiple objects may share identical affordances, yet only one is appropriate under the given task context. We call such cases confusing pairs. However, existing 3D affordance methods largely sidestep this challenge by evaluating isolated single objects, often with explicit category names provided in the query. We formalize Intent-Driven Confusable Affordance Grounding, a new 3D affordance setting that requires predicting a per-point affordance mask on the correct object within a multi-object point cloud, conditioned on implicit natural language intent. To study this problem, we construct CompassAD, the first benchmark centered on implicit intent in confusing multi-object compositions. It comprises 30 confusing object pairs spanning 16 affordance types, 6,422 compositions, and 88K+ query-answer pairs. Furthermore, we propose CompassNet, a framework that incorporates two dedicated modules tailored to this task. Instance-bounded Cross Injection (ICI) constrains language-geometry alignment within object boundaries to prevent cross-object semantic leakage. Bi-level Contrastive Refinement (BCR) enforces discrimination at both geometric-group and point levels, sharpening distinctions between target and confusable surfaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both seen and unseen queries, and deployment on a robotic manipulator confirms effective transfer to real-world grasping in confusing multi-object compositions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FLASH: Efficient Visuomotor Policy via Sparse Sampling

Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have become dominant paradigms for visuomotor policy learning, yet their reliance on iterative denoising incurs high inference latency incompatible with real-time robotic control. We present Fast Legendre-polynomial Action policy via Sparse History-anchored flow (FLASH Policy), which replaces discrete action-chunk generation with continuous Legendre polynomial trajectory representation. Specifically, by fitting expert demonstrations under sparse temporal sampling, FLASH enables a single inference to cover a significantly extended action horizon. To further accelerate generation, FLASH initiates the flow matching process from history polynomial coefficients rather than uninformative Gaussian noise, shortening the transport distance and enabling accurate single-step inference. Moreover, analytic polynomial differentiation directly provides desired velocity feed-forward signals to the torque controller without numerical approximation. Extensive experiments on five simulated and two real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that FLASH achieves state-of-the-art success rates ($\ge 92\%$ across all tasks), a per-episode inference time of $31.40\,ms$ (up to $175\times$ faster than diffusion policies and $18\times$ faster than prior flow matching policies), up to $4\times$ faster training convergence than ACT, and $5\times$ to $7\times$ reduction in controller tracking error compared to discrete-action baselines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Feedback World Model Enables Precise Guidance of Diffusion Policy

World models aim to improve robotic decision making by predicting the consequences of actions. However, in practice, their predictions often become unreliable once the robot encounters states outside the training distribution, limiting their effectiveness at deployment. We observe that execution itself provides a natural but underutilized signal: after each action, the robot directly observes the true next state, revealing the mismatch between predicted and actual outcomes. Building on this insight, we propose feedback world model, a new paradigm that closes the loop between prediction and observation at inference time. Instead of treating the world model as a static open-loop predictor, our method maintains a lightweight feedback state that is updated online to iteratively correct future predictions, compensating for model errors using real-time observations without additional training data or parameter updates. We show that this process can be interpreted as a latent-space observer and admits convergence guarantees under mild conditions. We further introduce action-aware guidance to better translate corrected predictions into control by emphasizing action-controllable components while suppressing irrelevant variations. Experiments on LIBERO-Plus, Robomimic, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method substantially improves both prediction accuracy and policy performance under distribution shift. In particular, it reduces world model prediction error by up to 76.4% and improves out-of-distribution (OOD) success rate by 30%. These results show that incorporating real-time feedback at inference time provides a simple yet powerful alternative to static world modeling.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Action-to-Action Flow Matching

Diffusion-based policies have recently achieved remarkable success in robotics by formulating action prediction as a conditional denoising process. However, the standard practice of sampling from random Gaussian noise often requires multiple iterative steps to produce clean actions, leading to high inference latency that incurs a major bottleneck for real-time control. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of uninformed noise sampling and propose Action-to-Action flow matching (A2A), a novel policy paradigm that shifts from random sampling to initialization informed by the previous proprioceptive action. Unlike existing methods that treat proprioceptive action feedback as static conditions, A2A leverages historical proprioceptive sequences, embedding them into a high-dimensional latent space as the starting point for action generation. This design bypasses costly iterative denoising while effectively capturing the robot's physical dynamics and temporal continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A2A exhibits high training efficiency, fast inference speed, and improved generalization. Notably, A2A enables high-quality action generation in as few as a single inference step, and exhibits superior robustness to visual perturbations and enhanced generalization to unseen configurations. Lastly, we also extend A2A to video generation, demonstrating its broader versatility in temporal modeling. Project site: https://lorenzo-0-0.github.io/A2A_Flow_Matching.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Trace-Focused Diffusion Policy for Multi-Modal Action Disambiguation in Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Generative model-based policies have shown strong performance in imitation-based robotic manipulation by learning action distributions from demonstrations. However, in long-horizon tasks, visually similar observations often recur across execution stages while requiring distinct actions, which leads to ambiguous predictions when policies are conditioned only on instantaneous observations, termed multi-modal action ambiguity (MA2). To address this challenge, we propose the Trace-Focused Diffusion Policy (TF-DP), a simple yet effective diffusion-based framework that explicitly conditions action generation on the robot's execution history. TF-DP represents historical motion as an explicit execution trace and projects it into the visual observation space, providing stage-aware context when current observations alone are insufficient. In addition, the induced trace-focused field emphasizes task-relevant regions associated with historical motion, improving robustness to background visual disturbances. We evaluate TF-DP on real-world robotic manipulation tasks exhibiting pronounced multi-modal action ambiguity and visually cluttered conditions. Experimental results show that TF-DP improves temporal consistency and robustness, outperforming the vanilla diffusion policy by 80.56 percent on tasks with multi-modal action ambiguity and by 86.11 percent under visual disturbances, while maintaining inference efficiency with only a 6.4 percent runtime increase. These results demonstrate that execution-trace conditioning offers a scalable and principled approach for robust long-horizon robotic manipulation within a single policy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Learning-based Observer for Coupled Disturbance

Achieving high-precision control for robotic systems is hindered by the low-fidelity dynamical model and external disturbances. Especially, the intricate coupling between internal uncertainties and external disturbances further exacerbates this challenge. This study introduces an effective and convergent algorithm enabling accurate estimation of the coupled disturbance via combining control and learning philosophies. Concretely, by resorting to Chebyshev series expansion, the coupled disturbance is firstly decomposed into an unknown parameter matrix and two known structures dependent on system state and external disturbance respectively. A regularized least squares algorithm is subsequently formalized to learn the parameter matrix using historical time-series data. Finally, a polynomial disturbance observer is specifically devised to achieve a high-precision estimation of the coupled disturbance by utilizing the learned portion. The proposed algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations and real flight tests. We believe this work can offer a new pathway to integrate learning approaches into control frameworks for addressing longstanding challenges in robotic applications.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Optimizing Control-Friendly Trajectories with Self-Supervised Residual Learning

Real-world physics can only be analytically modeled with a certain level of precision for modern intricate robotic systems. As a result, tracking aggressive trajectories accurately could be challenging due to the existence of residual physics during controller synthesis. This paper presents a self-supervised residual learning and trajectory optimization framework to address the aforementioned challenges. At first, unknown dynamic effects on the closed-loop model are learned and treated as residuals of the nominal dynamics, jointly forming a hybrid model. We show that learning with analytic gradients can be achieved using only trajectory-level data while enjoying accurate long-horizon prediction with an arbitrary integration step size. Subsequently, a trajectory optimizer is developed to compute the optimal reference trajectory with the residual physics along it minimized. It ends up with trajectories that are friendly to the following control level. The agile flight of quadrotors illustrates that by utilizing the hybrid dynamics, the proposed optimizer outputs aggressive motions that can be precisely tracked.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Unified Meta-Representation and Feedback Calibration for General Disturbance Estimation

Precise control in modern robotic applications is always an open issue due to unknown time-varying disturbances. Existing meta-learning-based approaches require a shared representation of environmental structures, which lack flexibility for realistic non-structural disturbances. Besides, representation error and the distribution shifts can lead to heavy degradation in prediction accuracy. This work presents a generalizable disturbance estimation framework that builds on meta-learning and feedback-calibrated online adaptation. By extracting features from a finite time window of past observations, a unified representation that effectively captures general non-structural disturbances can be learned without predefined structural assumptions. The online adaptation process is subsequently calibrated by a state-feedback mechanism to attenuate the learning residual originating from the representation and generalizability limitations. Theoretical analysis shows that simultaneous convergence of both the online learning error and the disturbance estimation error can be achieved. Through the unified meta-representation, our framework effectively estimates multiple rapidly changing disturbances, as demonstrated by quadrotor flight experiments. See the project page for video, supplementary material and code: https://nonstructural-metalearn.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Accurate Control under Voltage Drop for Rotor Drones

This letter proposes an anti-disturbance control scheme for rotor drones to counteract voltage drop (VD) disturbance caused by voltage drop of the battery, which is a common case for long-time flight or aggressive maneuvers. Firstly, the refined dynamics of rotor drones considering VD disturbance are presented. Based on the dynamics, a voltage drop observer (VDO) is developed to accurately estimate the VD disturbance by decoupling the disturbance and state information of the drone, reducing the conservativeness of conventional disturbance observers. Subsequently, the control scheme integrates the VDO within the translational loop and a fixed-time sliding mode observer (SMO) within the rotational loop, enabling it to address force and torque disturbances caused by voltage drop of the battery. Sufficient real flight experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme under VD disturbance.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Feedback Favors the Generalization of Neural ODEs

The well-known generalization problem hinders the application of artificial neural networks in continuous-time prediction tasks with varying latent dynamics. In sharp contrast, biological systems can neatly adapt to evolving environments benefiting from real-time feedback mechanisms. Inspired by the feedback philosophy, we present feedback neural networks, showing that a feedback loop can flexibly correct the learned latent dynamics of neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs), leading to a prominent generalization improvement. The feedback neural network is a novel two-DOF neural network, which possesses robust performance in unseen scenarios with no loss of accuracy performance on previous tasks.} A linear feedback form is presented to correct the learned latent dynamics firstly, with a convergence guarantee. Then, domain randomization is utilized to learn a nonlinear neural feedback form. Finally, extensive tests including trajectory prediction of a real irregular object and model predictive control of a quadrotor with various uncertainties, are implemented, indicating significant improvements over state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Fault Separation Based on An Excitation Operator with Application to a Quadrotor UAV

This paper presents an excitation operator based fault separation architecture for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) subject to loss of effectiveness (LoE) faults, actuator aging, and load uncertainty. The actuator fault dynamics is deeply excavated, containing the deep coupling information among the actuator faults, the system states, and control inputs. By explicitly considering the physical constraints and tracking performance, an excitation operator and corresponding integrated state observer are designed to estimate separately actuator fault and load uncertainty. Moreover, a fault separation maneuver and a safety controller are proposed to ensure the tracking performance when the excitation operator is injected. Both comparative simulation and flight experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme while maintaining high levels of tracking performance.

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