arXiv subjects

Ziyuan Jiao

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyuan Jiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Touch2Robot: Robot Touch in the Human Demonstration Loop

Human demonstrations offer a scalable way to collect manipulation data, but their contacts may be unstable or infeasible when transferred to a robot hand. Collecting demonstrations directly on the target robot avoids this mismatch but substantially increases the cost of data collection. To address this trade-off, we present Touch2Robot, a framework that lets humans collect demonstrations while seeing how the target robot hand would contact the object. We capture human hand motion, tactile-glove measurements, and object motion during human manipulation. These recordings guide object-specific RL policies to reproduce the demonstrated object motion while favoring contacts consistent with the recorded human touch. We distill the learned behaviors into a unified real-time retargeter that maps incoming human observations and object geometry to robot hand configurations. During collection, the predicted robot configuration is synchronized with the tracked object pose in simulation to reconstruct robot-object contacts, which are visualized to help the demonstrator adapt subsequent interactions to the target hand. Across four real-world tasks, Touch2Robot improves average real-robot replay completion from 37.9% to 72.1% over visual-only feedback, while reducing the collection time per replay-successful demonstration from 58.6s to 18.2s. Reconstructed target-hand contacts achieve 44.2% F1 against real-robot tactile measurements, and policies trained on Touch2Robot demonstrations improve downstream Diffusion Policy performance by 29.1 percentage points over visual-only feedback. These results show that bringing robot touch into the human demonstration loop improves both the quality and efficiency of scalable dexterous data collection. Project webpage: https://Touch2Robot.github.io/.

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arXiv2026

HT-Bench: Benchmarking and Learning Dexterous Full-Hand Tactile Representations with Egocentric Vision

Establishing a universal benchmark for tactile representation learning in robotic manipulation remains challenging due to the diversity of tactile sensor designs, data formats, and robot embodiments. Rather than seeking to establish such, we explore a scalable and promising direction for future development: egocentric vision paired with full-hand tactile data. To this end, we introduce \textbf{HT-Bench}, a large-scale multi-task benchmark for dexterous full-hand tactile sensing, comprising 10M RGB frames and 7.8M tactile frames collected across 226 tasks. HT-Bench evaluates tactile representations from three key perspectives: whether they encode meaningful contact geometry, whether they can align tactile observations with visual information, and whether they generalize to unseen tasks. To assess these capabilities, HT-Bench includes four tasks: fine-grained tactile similarity retrieval, masked tactile inpainting, vision-to-tactile synthesis, and multimodal tactile frame prediction. We further propose \textbf{HandTouch}, a vector-quantized vision--tactile encoder that learns tactile representations through progressive spatial, cross-modal, and temporal training. Across HT-Bench, HandTouch consistently outperforms representative tactile encoder baselines, improving Recall@5 on fine-grained tactile similarity retrieval from 74.65\% to 85.23\%, reducing RMSE on masked tactile inpainting from 0.022 to 0.010, and increasing OOD cIoU on vision-to-tactile synthesis from 0.628 to 0.705. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of HandTouch and suggest that large-scale egocentric full-hand tactile data provides a scalable basis for evaluating and advancing tactile representation learning in dexterous manipulation.

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arXiv2026

Ego2Robot: Scalable Robot Data Synthesis from Egocentric Human Data

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse demonstration data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer rich scene and task diversity, and prior work has shown that retargeting and rendering such videos into robot-format data can yield effective per-task policies at small scale. However, whether this approach can provide pretraining benefits for vision-language-action models at scale remains unexplored. We present \textbf{Ego2Robot}, a scalable pipeline that converts egocentric human manipulation videos into robot training data through action retargeting, robot-arm visual synthesis, and multi-level quality curation. Ego2Robot supports both curated datasets and in-the-wild videos, producing 18,561 hours of robot training data spanning 15 robot morphologies, making it the largest ego-to-robot dataset to date. To evaluate generalization, we extend RoboTwin2.0 with disentangled perturbation axes covering visual appearance, scene layout, embodiment morphology, and task semantics. Experiments show that joint pretraining on Ego2Robot-synthesized and robot data consistently improves out-of-distribution generalization across multiple perturbation types, with benefits validated on real-robot deployment. Project page: https://www-ye.github.io/ego2robot_blog/

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arXiv2026

CAAT: Contact-Aware Attention Scaling and Tactile Masking for Data-Efficient Contact-Rich Manipulation

In contact-rich manipulation, visual observations primarily guide motion in free space, whereas tactile observations become particularly informative during contact. However, standard Transformer-based visuo-tactile policies typically rely on either token concatenation or learnable gating. These approaches lack explicit contact-aware priors, making it difficult to efficiently learn effective cross-modal representations from demonstrations. To address this limitation, we propose CAAT, a lightweight contact-aware framework that explicitly incorporates contact priors through attention scaling and dynamic tactile masking. Specifically, CAAT emphasizes visual information before contact and tactile information during contact. It also suppresses static background tokens by comparing the current tactile observation with a non-contact reference. CAAT can be integrated into commonly used Transformer-based policies without modifying their action decoders. In simulation, integrating CAAT with ACT improves the average success rate by 18.0 percentage points over direct visuo-tactile fusion and by 10.0 percentage points over gated fusion. In real-world experiments using a visuo-tactile UMI platform, CAAT achieves an average success rate of 60.0% across ACT, Diffusion Policy, and $π_0$, outperforming the strongest baseline by an average of 21.1 percentage points. These results demonstrate that explicit contact priors and dynamic tactile masking are effective in improving visuo-tactile policy learning and task performance of diverse policy architectures. https://mrjiangjm.github.io/caat/

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arXiv2026

DexMani: Human-Derived Manipulability Guidance for Dexterous Rotation

Dexterous object rotation is a sequential contact problem: each support, release, and re-contact decision must both produce the desired object motion, and prepare the hand configuration for continued rotation. Existing reinforcement learning methods discover such movement patterns through trial and error on specific robotic hand embodiments, without explicitly accounting for how each contact transition affects the hand's ability to sustain object rotation in subsequent steps. We introduce DexMani, a framework that transfers human demonstrations as contact-conditioned manipulability evolution. This prior captures how successful human contact transitions reshape the object-rotation directions available to the hand. DexMani then learns this manipulability evolution and uses it to guide downstream reinforcement learning, enabling rotation skills to be acquired across robot embodiments with distinct kinematics and active-contact configurations. Across the Shadow Hand, Allegro Hand, and XHand, DexMani achieves the highest success rates in every evaluated setting for both seen and unseen objects. DexMani reaches an average success rate of 57.5% on LEAP Hand, outperforming other baselines and producing smoother rotatory motions. Project site: https://dexmani.github.io

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arXiv2026

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

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arXiv2026

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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arXiv2026

Scalable Trajectory Generation for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation

Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion -- simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm -- to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets far larger than those sufficient for fixed-base manipulation. Yet existing acquisition methods, including teleoperation and planning, are either labor-intensive or computationally prohibitive at scale. The core bottleneck is the lack of a scalable pipeline for generating large-scale, physically valid, coordinated trajectory data across diverse embodiments and environments. Here we introduce AutoMoMa, a GPU-accelerated framework that unifies AKR modeling, which consolidates base, arm, and object kinematics into a single chain, with parallelized trajectory optimization. AutoMoMa achieves 5,000 episodes per GPU-hour (over $80\times$ faster than CPU-based baselines), producing a dataset of over 500k physically valid trajectories spanning 330 scenes, diverse articulated objects, and multiple robot embodiments. Prior datasets were forced to compromise on scale, diversity, or kinematic fidelity; AutoMoMa addresses all three simultaneously. Training downstream IL policies further reveals that even a single articulated-object task requires tens of thousands of demonstrations for SOTA methods to reach $\approx 80\%$ success, confirming that data scarcity -- not algorithmic limitations -- has been the binding constraint. AutoMoMa thus bridges high-performance planning and reliable IL-based control, providing the infrastructure previously missing for coordinated mobile manipulation research. By making large-scale, kinematically valid training data practical, AutoMoMa showcases generalizable whole-body robot policies capable of operating in the diverse, unstructured settings of the real world.

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arXiv2026

Integrated Exploration and Sequential Manipulation on Scene Graph with LLM-based Situated Replanning

In partially known environments, robots must combine exploration to gather information with task planning for efficient execution. To address this challenge, we propose EPoG, an Exploration-based sequential manipulation Planning framework on Scene Graphs. EPoG integrates a graph-based global planner with a Large Language Model (LLM)-based situated local planner, continuously updating a belief graph using observations and LLM predictions to represent known and unknown objects. Action sequences are generated by computing graph edit operations between the goal and belief graphs, ordered by temporal dependencies and movement costs. This approach seamlessly combines exploration and sequential manipulation planning. In ablation studies across 46 realistic household scenes and 5 long-horizon daily object transportation tasks, EPoG achieved a success rate of 91.3%, reducing travel distance by 36.1% on average. Furthermore, a physical mobile manipulator successfully executed complex tasks in unknown and dynamic environments, demonstrating EPoG's potential for real-world applications.

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arXiv2026

TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as powerful generalists for robotic manipulation. However, due to their predominant reliance on visual modalities, they fundamentally lack the physical intuition required for contact-rich tasks that require precise force regulation and physical reasoning. Existing attempts to incorporate vision-based tactile sensing into VLA models typically treat tactile inputs as auxiliary visual textures, thereby overlooking the underlying correlation between surface deformation and interaction dynamics. To bridge this gap, we propose a paradigm shift from tactile-vision alignment to tactile-force alignment. Here, we introduce TaF-VLA, a framework that explicitly grounds high-dimensional tactile observations in physical interaction forces. To facilitate this, we develop an automated tactile-force data acquisition device and curate the TaF-Dataset, comprising over 10 million synchronized tactile observations, 6-axis force/torque, and matrix force map. To align sequential tactile observations with interaction forces, the central component of our approach is the Tactile-Force Adapter (TaF-Adapter), a tactile sensor encoder that extracts discretized latent information for encoding tactile observations. This mechanism ensures that the learned representations capture history-dependent, noise-insensitive physical dynamics rather than static visual textures. Finally, we integrate this force-aligned encoder into a VLA backbone. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that TaF-VLA policy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tactile-vision-aligned and vision-only baselines on contact-rich tasks, verifying its ability to achieve robust, force-aware manipulation through cross-modal physical reasoning.

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arXiv2026

IKDiffuser: a Diffusion-based Generative Inverse Kinematics Solver for Kinematic Trees

Solving Inverse Kinematics (IK) for arbitrary kinematic trees presents significant challenges due to their high-dimensionality, redundancy, and complex inter-branch constraints. Conventional optimization-based solvers can be sensitive to initialization and suffer from local minima or conflicting gradients. At the same time, existing learning-based approaches are often tied to a predefined number of end-effectors and a fixed training objective, limiting their reusability across various robot morphologies and task requirements. To address these limitations, we introduce IKDiffuser, a scalable IK solver built upon conditional diffusion-based generative models, which learns the distribution of the configuration space conditioned on end-effector poses. We propose a structure-agnostic formulation that represents end-effector poses as a sequence of tokens, leading to a unified framework that handles varying numbers of end-effectors while learning the implicit kinematic structures entirely from data. Beyond standard IK generation, IKDiffuser handles partially specified goals via a masked marginalization mechanism that conditions only on a subset of end-effector constraints. Furthermore, it supports adding task objectives at inference through objective-guided sampling, enabling capabilities such as warm-start initialization and manipulability maximization without retraining. Extensive evaluations across seven diverse robotic platforms demonstrate that IKDiffuser significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy, solution diversity, and collision avoidance. Moreover, when used to initialize optimization-based solvers, IKDiffuser significantly boosts success rates on challenging redundant systems with high Degrees of Freedom (DoF), such as the 29-DoF Unitree G1 humanoid, from 21.01% to 96.96% while reducing computation time to the millisecond range.

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arXiv2025

In-situ Value-aligned Human-Robot Interactions with Physical Constraints

Equipped with Large Language Models (LLMs), human-centered robots are now capable of performing a wide range of tasks that were previously deemed challenging or unattainable. However, merely completing tasks is insufficient for cognitive robots, who should learn and apply human preferences to future scenarios. In this work, we propose a framework that combines human preferences with physical constraints, requiring robots to complete tasks while considering both. Firstly, we developed a benchmark of everyday household activities, which are often evaluated based on specific preferences. We then introduced In-Context Learning from Human Feedback (ICLHF), where human feedback comes from direct instructions and adjustments made intentionally or unintentionally in daily life. Extensive sets of experiments, testing the ICLHF to generate task plans and balance physical constraints with preferences, have demonstrated the efficiency of our approach. Project page: https://iclhf.github.io .

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arXiv2025

Integration of Robot and Scene Kinematics for Sequential Mobile Manipulation Planning

We present a Sequential Mobile Manipulation Planning (SMMP) framework that can solve long-horizon multi-step mobile manipulation tasks with coordinated whole-body motion, even when interacting with articulated objects. By abstracting environmental structures as kinematic models and integrating them with the robot's kinematics, we construct an Augmented Configuration Apace (A-Space) that unifies the previously separate task constraints for navigation and manipulation, while accounting for the joint reachability of the robot base, arm, and manipulated objects. This integration facilitates efficient planning within a tri-level framework: a task planner generates symbolic action sequences to model the evolution of A-Space, an optimization-based motion planner computes continuous trajectories within A-Space to achieve desired configurations for both the robot and scene elements, and an intermediate plan refinement stage selects action goals that ensure long-horizon feasibility. Our simulation studies first confirm that planning in A-Space achieves an 84.6\% higher task success rate compared to baseline methods. Validation on real robotic systems demonstrates fluid mobile manipulation involving (i) seven types of rigid and articulated objects across 17 distinct contexts, and (ii) long-horizon tasks of up to 14 sequential steps. Our results highlight the significance of modeling scene kinematics into planning entities, rather than encoding task-specific constraints, offering a scalable and generalizable approach to complex robotic manipulation.

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arXiv2025

SuperMag: Vision-based Tactile Data Guided High-resolution Tactile Shape Reconstruction for Magnetic Tactile Sensors

Magnetic-based tactile sensors (MBTS) combine the advantages of compact design and high-frequency operation but suffer from limited spatial resolution due to their sparse taxel arrays. This paper proposes SuperMag, a tactile shape reconstruction method that addresses this limitation by leveraging high-resolution vision-based tactile sensor (VBTS) data to supervise MBTS super-resolution. Co-designed, open-source VBTS and MBTS with identical contact modules enable synchronized data collection of high-resolution shapes and magnetic signals via a symmetric calibration setup. We frame tactile shape reconstruction as a conditional generative problem, employing a conditional variational auto-encoder to infer high-resolution shapes from low-resolution MBTS inputs. The MBTS achieves a sampling frequency of 125 Hz, whereas the shape reconstruction sustains an inference time within 2.5 ms. This cross-modality synergy advances tactile perception of the MBTS, potentially unlocking its new capabilities in high-precision robotic tasks.

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arXiv2025

PP-Tac: Paper Picking Using Tactile Feedback in Dexterous Robotic Hands

Robots are increasingly envisioned as human companions, assisting with everyday tasks that often involve manipulating deformable objects. Although recent advances in robotic hardware and embodied AI have expanded their capabilities, current systems still struggle with handling thin, flat, and deformable objects such as paper and fabric. This limitation arises from the lack of suitable perception techniques for robust state estimation under diverse object appearances, as well as the absence of planning techniques for generating appropriate grasp motions. To bridge these gaps, this paper introduces PP-Tac, a robotic system for picking up paper-like objects. PP-Tac features a multi-fingered robotic hand with high-resolution omnidirectional tactile sensors \sensorname. This hardware configuration enables real-time slip detection and online frictional force control that mitigates such slips. Furthermore, grasp motion generation is achieved through a trajectory synthesis pipeline, which first constructs a dataset of finger's pinching motions. Based on this dataset, a diffusion-based policy is trained to control the hand-arm robotic system. Experiments demonstrate that PP-Tac can effectively grasp paper-like objects of varying material, thickness, and stiffness, achieving an overall success rate of 87.5\%. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to grasp paper-like deformable objects using a tactile dexterous hand. Our project webpage can be found at: https://peilin-666.github.io/projects/PP-Tac/

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arXiv2025

Closed-Loop Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation with GPT-4V

Autonomous robot navigation and manipulation in open environments require reasoning and replanning with closed-loop feedback. In this work, we present COME-robot, the first closed-loop robotic system utilizing the GPT-4V vision-language foundation model for open-ended reasoning and adaptive planning in real-world scenarios.COME-robot incorporates two key innovative modules: (i) a multi-level open-vocabulary perception and situated reasoning module that enables effective exploration of the 3D environment and target object identification using commonsense knowledge and situated information, and (ii) an iterative closed-loop feedback and restoration mechanism that verifies task feasibility, monitors execution success, and traces failure causes across different modules for robust failure recovery. Through comprehensive experiments involving 8 challenging real-world mobile and tabletop manipulation tasks, COME-robot demonstrates a significant improvement in task success rate (~35%) compared to state-of-the-art methods. We further conduct comprehensive analyses to elucidate how COME-robot's design facilitates failure recovery, free-form instruction following, and long-horizon task planning.

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arXiv2024

LLM3:Large Language Model-based Task and Motion Planning with Motion Failure Reasoning

Conventional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) approaches rely on manually crafted interfaces connecting symbolic task planning with continuous motion generation. These domain-specific and labor-intensive modules are limited in addressing emerging tasks in real-world settings. Here, we present LLM^3, a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based TAMP framework featuring a domain-independent interface. Specifically, we leverage the powerful reasoning and planning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs to propose symbolic action sequences and select continuous action parameters for motion planning. Crucially, LLM^3 incorporates motion planning feedback through prompting, allowing the LLM to iteratively refine its proposals by reasoning about motion failure. Consequently, LLM^3 interfaces between task planning and motion planning, alleviating the intricate design process of handling domain-specific messages between them. Through a series of simulations in a box-packing domain, we quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM^3 in solving TAMP problems and the efficiency in selecting action parameters. Ablation studies underscore the significant contribution of motion failure reasoning to the success of LLM^3. Furthermore, we conduct qualitative experiments on a physical manipulator, demonstrating the practical applicability of our approach in real-world settings.

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arXiv2024

Flight Structure Optimization of Modular Reconfigurable UAVs

This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) designed to reconfigure a large group of modular Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), each with different weights and inertia parameters, into an over-actuated flight structure with improved dynamic properties. Previous research efforts either utilized expert knowledge to design flight structures for a specific task or relied on enumeration-based algorithms that required extensive computation to find an optimal one. However, both approaches encounter challenges in accommodating the heterogeneity among modules. Our GA addresses these challenges by incorporating the complexities of over-actuation and dynamic properties into its formulation. Additionally, we employ a tree representation and a vector representation to describe flight structures, facilitating efficient crossover operations and fitness evaluations within the GA framework, respectively. Using cubic modular quadcopters capable of functioning as omni-directional thrust generators, we validate that the proposed approach can (i) adeptly identify suboptimal configurations ensuring over-actuation while ensuring trajectory tracking accuracy and (ii) significantly reduce computational costs compared to traditional enumeration-based methods.

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