Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Yiran Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Yiran Qin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

MA-VLA: Multi-Arm Vision-Language-Action Model for Collaboration and Compositional Generalization

Multi-arm collaboration is becoming a core capability in embodied manipulation. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models integrate perception, language, and control, but most represent language as a single global instruction and do not provide an explicit mechanism for assigning and composing arm-specific behaviors. This design limits transfer to collaboration patterns that differ from those observed during training. We present MA-VLA, a unified framework for multi-arm collaboration via atomic action assignment. MA-VLA decomposes cooperative behavior into mid-level atomic prompts and allocates them to individual arms, enabling explicit subgoal specification and compositional reuse across tasks. To reduce reliance on fixed execution roles, we introduce Arm Shuffle, a training-time permutation of the observation, state, and assigned atomic prompts for each arm. This permutation enforces role-agnostic instruction following and supports recomposition into unseen coordination patterns, which we term multi-arm compositional generalization. We also construct a benchmark in which test-time collaboration patterns are absent in training set. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, prior state-of-the-art VLAs largely fail under these unseen collaborations, while MA-VLA consistently succeeds. These results indicate that structured, per-arm atomic action assignment offers a practical route to scalable generalization in multi-arm embodied systems. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/future-robots

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Dissecting Embodied Abilities in Multimodal Language Models through Skill-level Evaluation and Diagnosis

Understanding the capability bottlenecks of embodied multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for improving embodied agents. However, existing embodied benchmarks mainly focus on task-level evaluation and fail to provide actionable insights into the underlying causes of model failures. To address this limitation, we introduce BEAR, a benchmark that decomposes embodied tasks into 14 atomic skills for fine-grained skill-level evaluation. BEAR comprises 4,469 interleaved image-video-text samples spanning 14 skills across 6 categories, ranging from low-level perception to high-level planning. We evaluate 20 MLLMs on BEAR under a hierarchical skill-level diagnosis framework and uncover two key findings: (1) perceptual capabilities are major bottlenecks behind reasoning failures, and (2) current models suffer from unstable spatiotemporal modeling that remains largely unexposed in prior benchmarks. Motivated by these findings, we further propose BEAR-Agent, a multimodal conversational agent that augments MLLMs with visual and spatial reasoning tools. BEAR-Agent substantially improves performance across embodied skills, achieving a relative improvement of 17.5% on GPT-5 over the base model on BEAR, while also outperforming strong baselines in both simulation and real-world robotic experiments. Project page: https://bear-official66.github.io/

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MemLearner: Learning to Query Context memory for Video World Models

Video World Models are interactive video generation models that predict future world states based on user actions and history video frames. A critical challenge in video world models is the lack of memory, causing inconsistent generated scenes over extended durations. Previous methods explored rule-based context frame retrieval as memory, but they fail to generalize in scenarios with scene occlusions and dynamic objects. We propose MemLearner, a learning-based adaptive context query method using query tokens to bridge context and predicted tokens. By leveraging the video generation model itself for context querying, MemLearner exploits pre-trained visual priors without training additional modules from scratch, and incorporates efficient strategies for training and inference. We collect a dataset of long videos with scene occlusions and dynamic objects, paired with camera pose annotations, and propose a multi-dataset training strategy leveraging both annotated rendered and unannotated real-world videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemLearner significantly outperforms prior video world models in terms of scene consistency and memory, particularly under challenging occlusion and dynamic scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Trans2Occ: Voxel Occupancy Estimation and Grasp for Transparent Objects from Simulation to Reality

Transparent objects remain challenging for robotic perception due to unreliable depth sensing caused by refraction and reflection. While prior approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or depth completion, they are often difficult to scale or deploy in real-world robotic systems. In this paper, we present a practical framework for transparent object perception and manipulation based on single-view RGB input. Our approach predicts voxel-space occupancy directly from a single image, providing a geometry-aware representation that supports downstream robotic grasping. To enable large-scale training, we construct a simulation pipeline that generates paired RGB images and voxel occupancy annotations under diverse materials and lighting conditions. We demonstrate that the predicted occupancy representation is robust to domain shifts and transfers effectively from simulation to real-world robotic setups without fine-tuning. A simple rule-based grasping strategy built on top of the occupancy further achieves reliable grasp performance on transparent objects. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our framework provides accurate 3D understanding and enables practical manipulation of transparent objects. These results suggest that single-view occupancy prediction offers a scalable and effective solution for transparent object perception in robotics.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidance

Fine-grained and contact-rich manipulation remain challenging for robots, largely due to the underutilization of tactile feedback. To address this, we introduce TouchGuide, a novel cross-policy visuo-tactile fusion paradigm that fuses modalities within a low-dimensional action space. Specifically, TouchGuide operates in two stages to guide a pre-trained diffusion or flow-matching visuomotor policy at inference time. First, the policy produces a coarse, visually-plausible action using only visual inputs during early sampling. Second, a task-specific Contact Physical Model (CPM) provides tactile guidance to steer and refine the action, ensuring it aligns with realistic physical contact conditions. Trained through contrastive learning on limited expert demonstrations, the CPM provides a tactile-informed feasibility score to steer the sampling process toward refined actions that satisfy physical contact constraints. Furthermore, to facilitate TouchGuide training with high-quality and cost-effective data, we introduce TacUMI, a data collection system. TacUMI achieves a favorable trade-off between precision and affordability; by leveraging rigid fingertips, it obtains direct tactile feedback, thereby enabling the collection of reliable tactile data. Extensive experiments on five challenging contact-rich tasks, such as shoe lacing and chip handover, show that TouchGuide consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visuo-tactile policies.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ComSim: Building Scalable Real-World Robot Data Generation via Compositional Simulation

Recent advancements in foundational models, such as large language models and world models, have greatly enhanced the capabilities of robotics, enabling robots to autonomously perform complex tasks. However, acquiring large-scale, high-quality training data for robotics remains a challenge, as it often requires substantial manual effort and is limited in its coverage of diverse real-world environments. To address this, we propose a novel hybrid approach called Compositional Simulation, which combines classical simulation and neural simulation to generate accurate action-video pairs while maintaining real-world consistency. Our approach utilizes a closed-loop real-sim-real data augmentation pipeline, leveraging a small amount of real-world data to generate diverse, large-scale training datasets that cover a broader spectrum of real-world scenarios. We train a neural simulator to transform classical simulation videos into real-world representations, improving the accuracy of policy models trained in real-world environments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the sim2real domain gap, resulting in higher success rates in real-world policy model training. Our approach offers a scalable solution for generating robust training data and bridging the gap between simulated and real-world robotics.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Select-then-Solve: Paradigm Routing as Inference-Time Optimization for LLM Agents

When an LLM-based agent improves on a task, is the gain from the model itself or from the reasoning paradigm wrapped around it? We study this question by comparing six inference-time paradigms, namely Direct, CoT, ReAct, Plan-Execute, Reflection, and ReCode, across four frontier LLMs and ten benchmarks, yielding roughly 18,000 runs. We find that reasoning structure helps dramatically on some tasks but hurts on others: ReAct improves over Direct by 44pp on GAIA, while CoT degrades performance by 15pp on HumanEval. No single paradigm dominates, and oracle per-task selection beats the best fixed paradigm by 17.1pp on average. Motivated by this complementarity, we propose a select-then-solve approach: before answering each task, a lightweight embedding-based router selects the most suitable paradigm. Across four models, the router improves average accuracy from 47.6% to 53.1%, outperforming the best fixed paradigm at 50.3% by 2.8pp and recovering up to 37% of the oracle gap. In contrast, zero-shot self-routing only works for GPT-5 at 67.1% and fails for weaker models, all trailing the learned router. Our results argue that reasoning paradigm selection should be a per-task decision made by a learned router, not a fixed architectural choice.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CoEnv: Driving Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration via Compositional Environment

Multi-agent embodied systems hold promise for complex collaborative manipulation, yet face critical challenges in spatial coordination, temporal reasoning, and shared workspace awareness. Inspired by human collaboration where cognitive planning occurs separately from physical execution, we introduce the concept of compositional environment -- a synergistic integration of real-world and simulation components that enables multiple robotic agents to perceive intentions and operate within a unified decision-making space. Building on this concept, we present CoEnv, a framework that leverages simulation for safe strategy exploration while ensuring reliable real-world deployment. CoEnv operates through three stages: real-to-sim scene reconstruction that digitizes physical workspaces, VLM-driven action synthesis supporting both real-time planning with high-level interfaces and iterative planning with code-based trajectory generation, and validated sim-to-real transfer with collision detection for safe deployment. Extensive experiments on challenging multi-arm manipulation benchmarks demonstrate CoEnv's effectiveness in achieving high task success rates and execution efficiency, establishing a new paradigm for multi-agent embodied AI.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Referring-Aware Visuomotor Policy Learning for Closed-Loop Manipulation

This paper addresses a fundamental problem of visuomotor policy learning for robotic manipulation: how to enhance robustness in out-of-distribution execution errors or dynamically re-routing trajectories, where the model relies solely on the original expert demonstrations for training. We introduce the Referring-Aware Visuomotor Policy (ReV), a closed-loop framework that can adapt to unforeseen circumstances by instantly incorporating sparse referring points provided by a human or a high-level reasoning planner. Specifically, ReV leverages the coupled diffusion heads to preserve standard task execution patterns while seamlessly integrating sparse referring via a trajectory-steering strategy. Upon receiving a specific referring point, the global diffusion head firstly generates a sequence of globally consistent yet temporally sparse action anchors, while identifies the precise temporal position for the referring point within this sequence. Subsequently, the local diffusion head adaptively interpolates adjacent anchors based on the current temporal position for specific tasks. This closed-loop process repeats at every execution step, enabling real-time trajectory replanning in response to dynamic changes in the scene. In practice, rather than relying on elaborate annotations, ReV is trained only by applying targeted perturbations to expert demonstrations. Without any additional data or fine-tuning scheme, ReV achieve higher success rates across challenging simulated and real-world tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Ego to World: Collaborative Spatial Reasoning in Embodied Systems via Reinforcement Learning

Understanding the world from distributed, partial viewpoints is a fundamental challenge for embodied multi-agent systems. Each agent perceives the environment through an ego-centric view that is often limited by occlusion and ambiguity. To study this problem, we introduce the Ego-to-World (E2W) benchmark, which evaluates a vision-language model's ability to fuse heterogeneous viewpoints across three tasks: (i) global counting, (ii) relational location reasoning, and (iii) action-oriented grasping that requires predicting view-specific image coordinates. To address this setting, we propose CoRL, a two-stage framework that combines Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning using Group-Relative Policy Optimization. Its core component, the Cross-View Spatial Reward (CVSR), provides dense task-aligned feedback by linking reasoning steps to visual evidence, ensuring coherent cross-view entity resolution, and guiding the model toward correct final predictions. Experiments on E2W show that CoRL consistently surpasses strong proprietary and open-source baselines on both reasoning and perception-grounding metrics, while ablations further confirm the necessity of each CVSR component. Beyond that, CoRL generalizes to external spatial reasoning benchmarks and enables effective real-world multi-robot manipulation with calibrated multi-camera rigs, demonstrating cross-view localization and successful grasp-and-place execution. Together, E2W and CoRL provide a principled foundation for learning world-centric scene understanding from distributed, ego-centric observations, advancing collaborative embodied AI.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Reading $\neq$ Seeing: Diagnosing and Closing the Typography Gap in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models achieve near-perfect accuracy at reading text in images, yet prove largely typography-blind: capable of recognizing what text says, but not how it looks. We systematically investigate this gap by evaluating font family, size, style, and color recognition across 26 fonts, four scripts, and three difficulty levels. Our evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals a striking perception hierarchy: color recognition is near-perfect, yet font style detection remains universally poor. We further find that model scale fails to predict performance and that accuracy is uniform across difficulty levels, together pointing to a training-data omission rather than a capacity ceiling. LoRA fine-tuning on a small set of synthetic samples substantially improves an open-source model, narrowing the gap to the best closed-source system and surpassing it on font size recognition. Font style alone remains resistant to fine-tuning, suggesting that relational visual reasoning may require architectural innovation beyond current patch-based encoders. We release our evaluation framework, data, and fine-tuning recipe to support progress in closing the typographic gap in vision-language understanding.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

State Rank Dynamics in Linear Attention LLMs

Linear Attention Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a compelling recurrent formulation that compresses context into a fixed-size state matrix, enabling constant-time inference. However, the internal dynamics of this compressed state remain largely opaque. In this work, we present a comprehensive study on the runtime state dynamics of state-of-the-art Linear Attention models. We uncover a fundamental phenomenon termed State Rank Stratification, characterized by a distinct spectral bifurcation among linear attention heads: while one group maintains an effective rank oscillating near zero, the other exhibits rapid growth that converges to an upper bound. Extensive experiments across diverse inference contexts reveal that these dynamics remain strikingly consistent, indicating that the identity of a head,whether low-rank or high-rank,is an intrinsic structural property acquired during pre-training, rather than a transient state dependent on the input data. Furthermore, our diagnostic probes reveal a surprising functional divergence: low-rank heads are indispensable for model reasoning, whereas high-rank heads exhibit significant redundancy. Leveraging this insight, we propose Joint Rank-Norm Pruning, a zero-shot strategy that achieves a 38.9\% reduction in KV-cache overhead while largely maintaining model accuracy.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Advances and Innovations in the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models and vision-languageaction models have significantly driven progress in Embodied AI. As the field transitions toward more complex task scenarios, multi-agent system frameworks are becoming essential for achieving scalable, efficient, and collaborative solutions. This shift is fueled by three primary factors: increasing agent capabilities, enhancing system efficiency through task delegation, and enabling advanced human-agent interactions. To address the challenges posed by multi-agent collaboration, we propose the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge, held at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on SpaVLE. The competition focuses on two critical areas: planning and control, where participants explore multi-agent embodied planning using vision-language models (VLMs) to coordinate tasks and policy execution to perform robotic manipulation in dynamic environments. By evaluating solutions submitted by participants, the challenge provides valuable insights into the design and coordination of embodied multi-agent systems, contributing to the future development of advanced collaborative AI systems.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

VIKI-R: Coordinating Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation via Reinforcement Learning

Coordinating multiple embodied agents in dynamic environments remains a core challenge in artificial intelligence, requiring both perception-driven reasoning and scalable cooperation strategies. While recent works have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for multi-agent planning, a few have begun to explore vision-language models (VLMs) for visual reasoning. However, these VLM-based approaches remain limited in their support for diverse embodiment types. In this work, we introduce VIKI-Bench, the first hierarchical benchmark tailored for embodied multi-agent cooperation, featuring three structured levels: agent activation, task planning, and trajectory perception. VIKI-Bench includes diverse robot embodiments, multi-view visual observations, and structured supervision signals to evaluate reasoning grounded in visual inputs. To demonstrate the utility of VIKI-Bench, we propose VIKI-R, a two-stage framework that fine-tunes a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) using Chain-of-Thought annotated demonstrations, followed by reinforcement learning under multi-level reward signals. Our extensive experiments show that VIKI-R significantly outperforms baselines method across all task levels. Furthermore, we show that reinforcement learning enables the emergence of compositional cooperation patterns among heterogeneous agents. Together, VIKI-Bench and VIKI-R offer a unified testbed and method for advancing multi-agent, visual-driven cooperation in embodied AI systems.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledge

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on question answering often relies on static benchmarks that reward memorization and understate the role of retrieval, failing to capture the dynamic nature of world knowledge. We present LiveSearchBench, an automated pipeline for constructing retrieval-dependent benchmarks from recent knowledge updates. Our method computes deltas between successive Wikidata snapshots, filters candidate triples for quality, and synthesizes natural-language questions at three levels of reasoning difficulty, each guaranteed to admit a unique, verifiable answer through SPARQL validation. The pipeline is fully automated, scalable across time, and minimizes human intervention, enabling continual regeneration of temporally grounded benchmarks. Experiments show a pronounced performance drop when models confront facts that post-date pretraining, with the gap most salient on multi-hop queries. Retrieval augmented methods and larger, instruction-tuned models provide partial gains but fail to close this recency gap. By design, LiveSearchBench shifts evaluation from static memorization toward tasks that require up-to-date retrieval and reasoning, offering a foundation for systematic, long-term assessment of LLMs under evolving knowledge.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

GauDP: Reinventing Multi-Agent Collaboration through Gaussian-Image Synergy in Diffusion Policies

Recently, effective coordination in embodied multi-agent systems has remained a fundamental challenge, particularly in scenarios where agents must balance individual perspectives with global environmental awareness. Existing approaches often struggle to balance fine-grained local control with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in limited scalability and compromised collaboration quality. In this paper, we present GauDP, a novel Gaussian-image synergistic representation that facilitates scalable, perception-aware imitation learning in multi-agent collaborative systems. Specifically, GauDP constructs a globally consistent 3D Gaussian field from decentralized RGB observations, then dynamically redistributes 3D Gaussian attributes to each agent's local perspective. This enables all agents to adaptively query task-critical features from the shared scene representation while maintaining their individual viewpoints. This design facilitates both fine-grained control and globally coherent behavior without requiring additional sensing modalities (e.g., 3D point cloud). We evaluate GauDP on the RoboFactory benchmark, which includes diverse multi-arm manipulation tasks. Our method achieves superior performance over existing image-based methods and approaches the effectiveness of point-cloud-driven methods, while maintaining strong scalability as the number of agents increases.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2025

Towards Robust Evaluation of STEM Education: Leveraging MLLMs in Project-Based Learning

Project-Based Learning (PBL) involves a variety of highly correlated multimodal data, making it a vital educational approach within STEM disciplines. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), researchers have begun exploring their potential to enhance tasks such as information retrieval, knowledge comprehension, and data generation in educational settings. However, existing benchmarks fall short in providing both a free-form output structure and a rigorous human expert validation process, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating real-world educational tasks. Additionally, few methods have developed automated pipelines to assist with the complex responsibilities of teachers leveraging MLLMs, largely due to model hallucination and instability, which lead to unreliable implementation. To address this gap, we introduce PBLBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate complex reasoning grounded in domain-specific knowledge and long-context understanding, thereby challenging models with tasks that closely resemble those handled by human experts. To establish reliable ground truth, we adopt the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), utilizing expert-driven pairwise comparisons to derive structured and weighted evaluation criteria. We assess the performance of 15 leading MLLMs/LLMs using PBLBench and demonstrate that even the most advanced models achieve only 59% rank accuracy, underscoring the significant challenges presented by this benchmark. We believe PBLBench will serve as a catalyst for the development of more capable AI agents, ultimately aiming to alleviate teacher workload and enhance educational productivity.

cs.CL↗