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Zhuoyang Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhuoyang Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Lift3D-VLA: Lifting VLA Models to 3D Geometry and Dynamics-Aware Manipulation

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding and spatial reasoning. While some VLA approaches attempt to incorporate 3D information, they are constrained by limited data availability and geometric information loss in current 3D encoding pipelines, and fail to jointly capture 3D geometry and temporally structured actions in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we introduce Lift3D-VLA, a unified VLA framework that equips models with explicit 3D point cloud reasoning and enables temporally coherent action generation. First, building upon our previous work Lift3D, an enhanced 2D model-lifting strategy is proposed to geometrically align 3D points with pretrained 2D positional embeddings. This design enables direct point-cloud encoding within the VLA vision encoder while minimizing spatial information loss. Based on explicit 3D inputs, we propose Geometry-Centric Masked Autoencoding (GC-MAE), a dual-objective self-supervised framework that reconstructs the current point cloud while predicting its future geometric evolution. This formulation allows the 2D vision encoder to internalize both 3D structure and physical dynamics. To fully exploit 3D representations, we further design layer-wise temporal action modeling, which leverages multiple layers of the LLM to collaboratively predict action chunks, enabling temporally consistent predictions. Across 22 simulated tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks, Lift3D-VLA achieves 10.8% and 11.1% higher mean success rates on MetaWorld and RLBench than the best-performing prior VLA methods, and outperforms the strongest real-world baseline by 4 percentage points, while exhibiting stronger generalization to out-of-distribution perturbations.

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FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Despite the success of vision-based generalist robotic policies, existing tactile-based policies remain tied to fixed embodiments and sensor setups. This is because tactile signals are highly heterogeneous across hardware, making cross-sensor generalization difficult. We present FTP-1,the first generalist foundation tactile policy pretrained to acquire transferable tactile manipulation abilities across diverse sensors and embodiments. FTP-1 supports varied tactile inputs, including image-, array-, and state-based signals, by using heterogeneous encoders to project them into unified morphology-aware latent tokens that are jointly modeled by a shared tactile Transformer expert. Pretrained on around 3,000 hours of tactile manipulation data aggregated from 26 data sources, spanning human and robot demonstrations across 21 sensors, FTP-1 learns tactile skills that transfer beyond the sensors seen during pretraining. Across downstream finetuning experiments spanning 5 hardware configurations, FTP-1 improves contact-rich manipulation on seen sensor setups by +17.2% and, surprisingly, transfers to two previously unseen tactile-sensor setups, achieving a +31% gain in success rate. FTP-1 establishes the first unified foundation baseline for tactile manipulation, providing future tactile policies with a shared model-level starting point. Pretrained models, datasets, training code and more visualization at https://ftp1-policy.github.io.

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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.

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Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Existing vision encoders for robotics face a fundamental bottleneck: robotic datasets lack the scale necessary for large-scale pre-training. Prior work circumvents this data scarcity by turning to internet-scale image and language data or egocentric human video. While these models show promise, neither paradigm learns from paired vision and action data, which downstream visuomotor control policies require. However, robot trajectories, the most direct source of this paired signal, are not available at pre-training scale, motivating us to extract action signals from abundant human video instead. To this end, we introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training), a vision encoder that treats human hand poses from large-scale egocentric video as a proxy for end-effector actions. By extracting 3D hand keypoints, a representation that aligns naturally with downstream robot action spaces, CAIP learns a unified action-image representation through a contrastive objective. Leveraging 32,041 hours of egocentric human video and only 88 hours of robotic manipulation data, CAIP outperforms state-of-the-art vision encoders including DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and R3M. Evaluated on a challenging real-world dexterous manipulation setup using Dexmate Vega and Sharpa Wave hands, CAIP yields performance gains of more than 30% on tasks involving folding, pouring, and fine-grained manipulation. Our results show that our method of contrastive action-centric pre-training yields a scalable path to achieving robust visual representations better suited for physical interaction.

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LaST$_{0}$: Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought for Robotic Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong generalization, with some approaches seeking to explicitly generate linguistic reasoning traces or predict future observations prior to execution. However, explicit reasoning typically incurs non-negligible inference latency, which constrains the temporal resolution required for robotic manipulation. Moreover, such reasoning is confined to the linguistic space, imposing a representational bottleneck that struggles to faithfully capture ineffable physical attributes. To mitigate these limitations, we propose LaST$_0$, a framework that enables efficient reasoning before acting through a Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought (CoT), capturing fine-grained physical and robotic dynamics that are often difficult to verbalize. Specifically, we introduce a token-efficient latent CoT space that models future visual dynamics, 3D structural information, and robot proprioceptive states, and further extends these representations across time to enable temporally consistent implicit reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, LaST$_0$ adopts a dual-system architecture implemented via a Mixture-of-Transformers design, where a reasoning expert conducts low-frequency latent inference and an acting expert generates high-frequency actions conditioned on robotics-oriented latent representations. To facilitate coordination, LaST$_0$ is trained with heterogeneous operation frequencies, enabling adaptive switching during deployment. Across 10 real-world tasks spanning tabletop, mobile, and dexterous hand manipulation, LaST$_0$ improves mean success rates by 13%, 14% and 14% over prior SOTA VLA methods, respectively.

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TwinRL: Digital Twin-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Robotic Manipulation

Despite strong generalization capabilities, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain constrained by the high cost of expert demonstrations and limited real-world interaction. While online reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise, its application to real-world VLA manipulation is hindered by low exploration efficiency and restricted exploration coverage. Through systematic real-world experiments, we observe that the effective exploration space of online RL is largely constrained by the trajectory distribution induced during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Motivated by this observation, we propose TwinRL, a digital twin-real-world collaborative post-training framework that expands and guides RL exploration for VLA models through three stages: SFT warm-up, twin RL warm-up, and real-world RL. TwinRL first reconstructs a high-fidelity digital twin from smartphone-captured scenes. During the SFT stage, we introduce an exploration space expansion strategy that expands the support of the trajectory distribution beyond real demonstrations, reshaping the exploration space for more effective RL. Rather than treating the twin as a data augmentation tool, we propose a twin RL warm-up strategy that enables it to act as an exploration guide for real-world RL. Specifically, TwinRL performs efficient parallel RL in the digital twin to generate interactive trajectories that populate the replay buffer and stabilize subsequent real-world RL learning. This process also identifies failure-prone yet informative configurations, enabling targeted human-in-the-loop rollouts to further improve on-robot efficiency. Across four tasks, TwinRL achieves near-100% success in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution regions, delivering over 30% faster convergence than prior real-world RL methods with only 20 minutes of on-robot interaction.

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Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoning

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments using onboard visual observation. This task holds promise for real-world applications such as low-altitude inspection, search-and-rescue, and autonomous aerial delivery. Existing methods often rely on panoramic images, depth inputs, or odometry to support spatial reasoning and action planning. These requirements increase system cost and integration complexity, thus hindering practical deployment for lightweight UAVs. We present a unified aerial VLN framework that operates solely on egocentric monocular RGB observations and natural language instructions. The model formulates navigation as a next-token prediction problem, jointly optimizing spatial perception, trajectory reasoning, and action prediction through prompt-guided multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose a keyframe selection strategy to reduce visual redundancy by retaining semantically informative frames, along with an action merging and label reweighting mechanism that mitigates long-tailed supervision imbalance and facilitates stable multi-task co-training. Extensive experiments on the AerialVLN and OpenFly benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the challenging monocular RGB-only setting, our model achieves strong results across both seen and unseen environments. It significantly outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art panoramic RGB-D counterparts. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of our task design and architectural choices. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/return-sleep/AeroAct.

cs.CV

ZoomSpec: A Physics-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Wideband Spectrum Sensing

Wideband spectrum sensing for low-altitude monitoring is critical yet challenging due to heterogeneous protocols,large bandwidths, and non-stationary SNR. Existing data-driven approaches treat spectrograms as natural images,suffering from domain mismatch: they neglect time-frequency resolution constraints and spectral leakage, leading topoor narrowband visibility. This paper proposes ZoomSpec, a physics-guided coarse-to-fine framework integrating signal processing priors with deep learning. We introduce a Log-Space STFT (LS-STFT) to overcome the geometric bottleneck of linear spectrograms, sharpening narrowband structures while maintaining constant relative resolution. A lightweight Coarse Proposal Net (CPN) rapidly screens the full band. To bridge coarse detection and fine recognition, we design an Adaptive Heterodyne Low-Pass (AHLP) module that executes center-frequency aligning, bandwidth-matched filtering, and safe decimation, purifying signals of out-of-band interference. A Fine Recognition Net (FRN) fuses purified time-domain I/Q with spectral magnitude via dual-domain attention to jointly refine temporal boundaries and modulation classification. Evaluations on the SpaceNet real-world dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art 78.1 mAP@0.5:0.95, surpassing existing leaderboard systems with superior stability across diverse modulation bandwidths.

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MLA: A Multisensory Language-Action Model for Multimodal Understanding and Forecasting in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations.

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Look Before Acting: Enhancing Vision Foundation Representations for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, in which reliable action prediction critically depends on accurately interpreting and integrating visual observations conditioned on language instructions. Although recent works have sought to enhance the visual capabilities of VLA models, most approaches treat the LLM backbone as a black box, providing limited insight into how visual information is grounded into action generation. Therefore, we perform a systematic analysis of multiple VLA models across different action-generation paradigms and observe that sensitivity to visual tokens progressively decreases in deeper layers during action generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{DeepVision-VLA}, built on a \textbf{Vision-Language Mixture-of-Transformers (VL-MoT)} framework. This framework enables shared attention between the vision foundation model and the VLA backbone, injecting multi-level visual features from the vision expert into deeper layers of the VLA backbone to enhance visual representations for precise and complex manipulation. In addition, we introduce \textbf{Action-Guided Visual Pruning (AGVP)}, which leverages shallow-layer attention to prune irrelevant visual tokens while preserving task-relevant ones, reinforcing critical visual cues for manipulation with minimal computational overhead. DeepVision-VLA outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by 9.0\% and 7.5\% on simulated and real-world tasks, respectively, providing new insights for the design of visually enhanced VLA models.

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H2R: A Human-to-Robot Data Augmentation for Robot Pre-training from Videos

Large-scale pre-training using egocentric human videos has proven effective for robot learning. However, the models pre-trained on such data can be suboptimal for robot learning due to the significant visual gap between human hands and those of different robots. To remedy this, we propose H2R, a human-to-robot data augmentation pipeline that converts egocentric human videos into robot-centric visual data. H2R estimates human hand pose from videos, retargets the motion to simulated robotic arms, removes human limbs via segmentation and inpainting, and composites rendered robot embodiments into the original frames with camera-aligned geometry. This process explicitly bridges the visual gap between human and robot embodiments during pre-training. We apply H2R to augment large-scale egocentric human video datasets such as Ego4D and SSv2. To verify the effectiveness of the augmentation pipeline, we introduce a CLIP-based image-text similarity metric that quantitatively evaluates the semantic fidelity of robot-rendered frames to the original human actions. We evaluate H2R through comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings. In simulation, H2R consistently improves downstream success rates across four benchmark suites-Robomimic, RLBench, PushT, and CortexBench-yielding gains of 1.3%-10.2% across different visual encoders and policy learning methods. In real-world experiments, H2R improves performance on UR5 and dual-arm Franka/UR5 manipulation platforms, achieving 3.3%-23.3% success rate gains across gripper-based, dexterous, and bimanual tasks. We further demonstrate the potential of H2R in cross-embodiment generalization and its compatibility with vision-language-action models. These results indicate that H2R improves the generalization ability of robotic policies by mitigating the visual discrepancies between human and robot domains.

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Holographic Intelligence Surface Assisted Integrated Sensing and Communication

Traditional discrete-array-based systems fail to exploit interactions between closely spaced antennas, resulting in inadequate utilization of the aperture resource. In this paper, we propose a holographic intelligence surface (HIS) assisted integrated sensing and communication (HISAC) system, wherein both the transmitter and receiver are fabricated using a continuous-aperture array. A continuous-discrete transformation of the HIS pattern based on the Fourier transform is proposed, converting the continuous pattern design into a discrete beamforming design. We formulate a joint transmit-receive beamforming optimization problem for the HISAC system, aiming to balance the performance of multi-target sensing while fulfilling the performance requirement of multi-user communication. To solve the non-convex problem with coupled variables, an alternating optimization-based algorithm is proposed to optimize the HISAC transmit-receive beamforming in an alternate manner. Specifically, the transmit beamforming design is solved by decoupling into a series of feasibility-checking sub-problems while the receive beamforming is determined by the Rayleigh quotient-based method. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HISAC system over traditional discrete-array-based ISAC systems, achieving significantly higher sensing performance while guaranteeing predetermined communication performance.

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Learnable Template Matching Approach for Micro-Deformation Monitoring based on Integrated Sensing and Communication Platform

Existing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) platforms fail to fully utilize the shared spectrum and aperture resources for sensing, resulting in poor sensing performance. Specifically, weak target sensing on the ISAC platform, such as micro-deformation monitoring (mDM), suffers from inaccurate measurements due to poor sensing quality. In this paper, we propose an AI-assisted approach to alleviate the effect of poor sensing quality in the ISAC system by effectively removing the clutter. We begin by modeling the environment clutter model as a combination of the deterministic and stochastic signals to represent urban coverage scenarios around the base station (BS). A clutter suppression optimization problem is formulated to extract the micro-deformation displacement (mDD) from the original ISAC signals. We then propose a learnable template-matching (LTM) approach to mitigate the influences of clutters, thereby enhancing sensing quality. In particular, the electromagnetic (EM) signal feature of the mDD is embedded into the network to strengthen the mDM signal, and clutter filters are incorporated to suppress environmental clutter. Numerical results illustrate the superiority of our proposed approach concerning convergence speed and accuracy in mDD prediction. By deploying our approach to the BS measurement, the simulation-only trained LTM exhibits impressive performance in environment clutter separation and mDD estimation.

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Hybrid RIS-Assisted MIMO Dual-Function Radar-Communication System

Dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) technology is emerging in next-generation wireless systems. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) arrays have been suggested as a crucial sensor component of the DFRC. In this paper, we propose a hybrid RIS (HRIS)-assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) DFRC system, where the HRIS is capable of reflecting communication signals to mobile users and receiving the scattering signal reflected from the radar target simultaneously. Under such a scenario, we are interested in characterizing the fundamental trade-off between radar sensing and communication. Specifically, we study the joint design of the beamforming vectors at the base station (BS) and the parameter configuration of the HRIS so as to maximize the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) of the radar while guaranteeing a communication SINR requirement. To solve the formulated non-convex beamforming design problem, we propose an efficient alternating optimization approach. In particular, for fixed beams at the BS, we use a fast grid search-assisted auto gradient descent (FGS-AGD) algorithm to seek the best HRIS configuration; Then, a closed-form BS beamforming solution is obtained using semidefinite relaxation. Numerical results indicate that compared with benchmark schemes, the proposed approach is capable of improving the radar performance and communication quality significantly and simultaneously.

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RoboMIND 2.0: A Multimodal, Bimanual Mobile Manipulation Dataset for Generalizable Embodied Intelligence

While data-driven imitation learning has revolutionized robotic manipulation, current approaches remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse real-world demonstrations. Consequently, the ability of existing models to generalize across long-horizon bimanual tasks and mobile manipulation in unstructured environments remains limited. To bridge this gap, we present RoboMIND 2.0, a comprehensive real-world dataset comprising over 310K dual-arm manipulation trajectories collected across six distinct robot embodiments and 739 complex tasks. Crucially, to support research in contact-rich and spatially extended tasks, the dataset incorporates 12K tactile-enhanced episodes and 20K mobile manipulation trajectories. Complementing this physical data, we construct high-fidelity digital twins of our real-world environments, releasing an additional 20K-trajectory simulated dataset to facilitate robust sim-to-real transfer. To fully exploit the potential of RoboMIND 2.0, we propose MIND-2 system, a hierarchical dual-system frame-work optimized via offline reinforcement learning. MIND-2 integrates a high-level semantic planner (MIND-2-VLM) to decompose abstract natural language instructions into grounded subgoals, coupled with a low-level Vision-Language-Action executor (MIND-2-VLA), which generates precise, proprioception-aware motor actions.

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ManualVLA: A Unified VLA Model for Chain-of-Thought Manual Generation and Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged, demonstrating strong generalization in robotic scene understanding and manipulation. However, when confronted with long-horizon tasks that require defined goal states, such as LEGO assembly or object rearrangement, existing VLA models still face challenges in coordinating high-level planning with precise manipulation. Therefore, we aim to endow a VLA model with the capability to infer the "how" process from the "what" outcomes, transforming goal states into executable procedures. In this paper, we introduce ManualVLA, a unified VLA framework built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, enabling coherent collaboration between multimodal manual generation and action execution. Unlike prior VLA models that directly map sensory inputs to actions, we first equip ManualVLA with a planning expert that generates intermediate manuals consisting of images, position prompts, and textual instructions. Building upon these multimodal manuals, we design a Manual Chain-of-Thought (ManualCoT) reasoning process that feeds them into the action expert, where each manual step provides explicit control conditions, while its latent representation offers implicit guidance for accurate manipulation. To alleviate the burden of data collection, we develop a high-fidelity digital-twin toolkit based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, which automatically generates manual data for planning expert training. ManualVLA demonstrates strong real-world performance, achieving an average success rate 32% higher than the previous hierarchical SOTA baseline on LEGO assembly and object rearrangement tasks.

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DualVLA: Building a Generalizable Embodied Agent via Partial Decoupling of Reasoning and Action

To build a generalizable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with strong reasoning ability, a common strategy is to first train a specialist VLA on robot demonstrations to acquire reliable manipulation skills, and then incorporate mixed annotated robot data together with multimodal data to restore broader reasoning capabilities. However, we observe that the resulting reasoning VLA often suffers from degraded action performance compared to the specialist model before fine-tuning, a phenomenon we refer to as action degeneration. To address this issue, we propose DualVLA, which enhances action performance through carefully designed post-training while still preserving reasoning capability. We first introduce a dual-layer data pruning method that removes redundant embodied reasoning, preventing it from adversely influencing action learning. To further strengthen action generation, we design a dual-teacher adaptive distillation strategy that assigns different supervision signals to different data domains while maintaining reasoning ability. To fill the evaluation gap for generalist VLAs, we also propose VLA Score, which decouples VLA capability into reasoning, intention, action, and alignment dimensions for a more fine-grained assessment. Experiments show that DualVLA achieves an average success rate of 61.0 in SimplerEnv and an average score of 65.4 across eight competitive multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating a stronger balance between precise action execution and multimodal understanding. Project Website: https://costaliya.github.io/DualVLA/.

cs.CV

AC-DiT: Adaptive Coordination Diffusion Transformer for Mobile Manipulation

Recently, mobile manipulation has attracted increasing attention for enabling language-conditioned robotic control in household tasks. However, existing methods still face challenges in coordinating mobile base and manipulator, primarily due to two limitations. On the one hand, they fail to explicitly model the influence of the mobile base on manipulator control, which easily leads to error accumulation under high degrees of freedom. On the other hand, they treat the entire mobile manipulation process with the same visual observation modality (e.g., either all 2D or all 3D), overlooking the distinct multimodal perception requirements at different stages during mobile manipulation. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Coordination Diffusion Transformer (AC-DiT), which enhances mobile base and manipulator coordination for end-to-end mobile manipulation. First, since the motion of the mobile base directly influences the manipulator's actions, we introduce a mobility-to-body conditioning mechanism that guides the model to first extract base motion representations, which are then used as context prior for predicting whole-body actions. This enables whole-body control that accounts for the potential impact of the mobile base's motion. Second, to meet the perception requirements at different stages of mobile manipulation, we design a perception-aware multimodal conditioning strategy that dynamically adjusts the fusion weights between various 2D visual images and 3D point clouds, yielding visual features tailored to the current perceptual needs. This allows the model to, for example, adaptively rely more on 2D inputs when semantic information is crucial for action prediction, while placing greater emphasis on 3D geometric information when precise spatial understanding is required. We validate AC-DiT through extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world mobile manipulation tasks.

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