arXiv subjects

Matteo Gioia

Publications and source records attributed to Matteo Gioia.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulation

The ability to react dynamically to tactile signals has long been considered crucial to agile human-level dexterity. Yet contemporary learning-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation generally either overlook the tactile modality or are limited to encoders with static cues, due in part to the scarcity of diverse training data and standardized evaluation, architectural constraints in current VLA models, and limitations of static tactile encoders. In this paper, we push the frontier of tactile-reactive manipulation by addressing all of these limitations. We propose a large-scale, 100-hour tactile-rich dataset collected via a novel, data-efficient recipe that prioritizes elementary motor primitives. To effectively exploit naturally high-frequency touch signals without sacrificing the existing capabilities of existing VLAs, we introduce a variable-rate Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture equipped with a novel temporal tactile VQ-VAE encoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of tactile-reactive policies on 12 manipulation tasks requiring delicate force control and deformable object manipulation, achieving over 30% higher average success rate than the strongest baseline.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Grasp Anything by Playing with Random Toys

Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small set of simple toys and then applying that knowledge to more complex items. Inspired by this, we study if similar generalization capabilities can also be achieved by robots. Our results indicate robots can learn generalizable grasping using randomly assembled objects that are composed from just four shape primitives: spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. We show that training on these "toys" enables robust generalization to real-world objects, yielding strong zero-shot performance. Crucially, we find the key to this generalization is an object-centric visual representation induced by our proposed detection pooling mechanism. Evaluated in both simulation and on physical robots, our model achieves a 67% real-world grasping success rate on the YCB dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches that rely on substantially more in-domain data. We further study how zero-shot generalization performance scales by varying the number and diversity of training toys and the demonstrations per toy. We believe this work offers a promising path to scalable and generalizable learning in robotic manipulation. Demonstration videos, code, checkpoints and our dataset are available on our project page: https://lego-grasp.github.io/ .

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

MonSTeR: a Unified Model for Motion, Scene, Text Retrieval

Intention drives human movement in complex environments, but such movement can only happen if the surrounding context supports it. Despite the intuitive nature of this mechanism, existing research has not yet provided tools to evaluate the alignment between skeletal movement (motion), intention (text), and the surrounding context (scene). In this work, we introduce MonSTeR, the first MOtioN-Scene-TExt Retrieval model. Inspired by the modeling of higher-order relations, MonSTeR constructs a unified latent space by leveraging unimodal and cross-modal representations. This allows MonSTeR to capture the intricate dependencies between modalities, enabling flexible but robust retrieval across various tasks. Our results show that MonSTeR outperforms trimodal models that rely solely on unimodal representations. Furthermore, we validate the alignment of our retrieval scores with human preferences through a dedicated user study. We demonstrate the versatility of MonSTeR's latent space on zero-shot in-Scene Object Placement and Motion Captioning. Code and pre-trained models are available at github.com/colloroneluca/MonSTeR.

cs.CV↗