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At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

PrefMoE: Robust Preference Modeling with Mixture-of-Experts Reward Learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning offers a scalable alternative to manual reward engineering by learning reward structures from comparative feedback. However, large-scale preference datasets, whether collected from crowdsourced annotators or generated by synthetic teachers, often contain heterogeneous and partially conflicting supervision, including disagreement across annotators and inconsistency within annotators. Existing reward learning methods typically fit a single reward model to such data, forcing it to average incompatible signals and thereby limiting robustness. To solve this, we propose PrefMoE, a mixture-of-experts reward learning framework for robust preference modeling. PrefMoE learns multiple specialized reward experts and uses trajectory-level soft routing to combine them adaptively, enabling the model to capture diverse latent preference patterns under noisy and heterogeneous preference supervision. A load-balancing regularizer further stabilizes training by preventing expert collapse. Across locomotion benchmarks from D4RL and manipulation tasks from MetaWorld, PrefMoE improves preference prediction robustness and leads to more reliable downstream policy learning than strong single-model baselines.

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arXiv2026

RoboTok: A Scalable Data Engine for Internet Demonstration Video Retrieval and Dexterous Manipulation Learning

Robot learning increasingly depends on broad and diverse demonstrations, yet collecting robot data remains expensive and difficult to scale across the wide range of real-world tasks. To address this bottleneck, we introduce RoboTok, a scalable data engine that uses a query human manipulation video to retrieve manipulation-relevant internet demonstrations for training dexterous robot policies. Specifically, we learn a latent motion space from 3D hand trajectories expressed in estimated actor-centered reference frames. This representation enables manipulation behaviors to be compared across variations in camera viewpoint, scene appearance, and actor occlusions, while remaining compact enough for efficient indexing and retrieval over internet video collections. We evaluate RoboTok against existing robot-data retrieval approaches using retrieval metrics and downstream robot policy performance, showing that RoboTok retrieves more manipulation-relevant demonstrations and improves downstream task success. In real-world robot experiments, RoboTok-guided policies achieve a mean success improvement of 42.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline for each task, establishing hand-pose trajectory-aware retrieval as a scalable way to leverage continuously growing web video for robot learning.

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arXiv2026

SUN: Agentic Robot Policy Learning with Persistent Task Programs

Model-based control can directly execute specified objectives, while learning can amortize such behaviors into reactive policies, making their combination a natural solution to multi-stage manipulation. We introduce Semantically UNified (SUN) Programs, typed executables that compile grounded relations into aligned optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Our harness, Kuafu, equips a foundation model as a task-level agent to orchestrate scene preparation, verification, residual RL, and data production. The agent uses program feedback to repair candidate programs and training diagnostics to calibrate relative reward weights, retaining accepted task semantics across tool calls. Across nine multi-stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves 82.03% average success rate, significantly outperforming all learned baselines. Its learned controllers generate demonstrations at 10.57x the human-teleoperation rate, yielding data that improve visualpolicy success by 23.6 percentage points over the strongest baseline. The policies transfer zero-shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots, demonstrating sim-to-real generalization.

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arXiv2026

SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

Long-horizon manipulation is partially observable: the information needed to choose the next action may appear only in observations from minutes earlier. Existing memory mechanisms for VLAs, such as retrieval banks, learned compressors and recurrent states, must decide what to keep from the past before knowing what a future decision will require. They were motivated by the assumption that minute-scale history is too large to process directly, which no longer holds for modern VLM backbones. We propose SimpleMemVLA, a VLA without a dedicated memory module that uses the backbone's native video context directly as memory. It keeps the sampled history intact in the timestamped video format the backbone was pretrained to process, routes the evidence it finds to a standard flow-matching action head through the hidden states of a generated sub-task, and prefills the history shared by consecutive decisions during action execution, keeping latency close to that of a single-frame VLA. SimpleMemVLA achieves state-of-the-art results on four memory benchmarks without loss on general-purpose control, and with the same backbone and training setup it outperforms retrieval, compression and recurrent-state methods by a wide margin. History interventions show that the policy reads specific evidence from its past and follows edited histories without parameter updates, a visual form of in-context learning. On a physical dual-arm robot, it completes two tasks whose decisive evidence disappears before the robot acts. Code available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/SimpleMemVLA

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arXiv2026

ScaRF-SLAM: Scale-Consistent Reconstruction with Feed-Forward Models and Classical Visual SLAM

Recent works have explored unifying SLAM with geometric foundation models (GFMs). However, directly using GFM predictions for tracking is highly sensitive to model capability and uncertainty, as geometric inaccuracies in the predictions can adversely affect pose estimation. To address this limitation, we propose a decoupled framework that integrates classical feature-based SLAM with GFMs, which achieves higher quality and more consistent dense reconstruction. In brief, we use classical visual SLAM for robust low-latency tracking and use GFMs exclusively for mapping. By anchoring mapping to poses produced by the SLAM module and optimizing across depth scales, the proposed design avoids propagating inaccuracies from GFM predictions into pose estimation while imposing geometric constraints on the reconstruction. The system builds submaps from multiple posed keyframes and enforces scale consistency via lightweight frame and submap scale optimization. It also performs projection-based point cloud fusion within each submap, and updates submaps online to reflect trajectory updates from the feature-based SLAM. To evaluate tracking and reconstruction of our method, we introduce a loop-rich, building-scale indoor dataset with accurate sensor trajectories and LiDAR ground-truth. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior trajectory accuracy while improving reconstruction precision by 10%-20% over existing methods, with about 2 cm reconstruction error per 10 m chunk on building-scale dataset. On large-scale outdoor datasets, it attains 10 cm error per 30 m chunk (w.r.t LiDAR ground-truth models). Code and dataset: https://github.com/ori-drs/ScaRF-SLAM

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arXiv2026

ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation poses a fundamental challenge for world models: visual and tactile observations capture different aspects of physical interaction, and their utility depends critically on how this information is represented. We introduce ContactWorld, a controlled benchmark and empirical study of vision-tactile representations across 12 contact-rich manipulation tasks. Using a fixed world-model architecture, training procedure, and planning framework, we examine representation effects through three complementary properties: spatial fidelity, motion coherence, and predictive stability. Point clouds preserve task-relevant geometry and track physical motion more reliably than image observations, helping explain their higher average planning success of 32.1%, compared with 20.7% and 22.0% for wrist- and front-view RGB, respectively. Tactile observations generally reduce long-horizon prediction-error accumulation, but these gains do not translate uniformly into task success. Structured tactile force fields provide the most consistent downstream improvements, with PointCloud+TacFF achieving the highest overall simulated success rate of 36.1%. We further validate these trends through 900 physical trials spanning six tasks, two robot platforms, and three tactile sensing systems. Together, ContactWorld identifies sensory representation as a central design factor in vision--tactile world models and provides empirical guidance for predictive planning in contact-rich manipulation.

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arXiv2026

Harness VLA: Steering Frozen VLAs into Reliable Manipulation Primitives via Memory-Guided Agents

Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong local visuomotor skills, but they are trained on in-distribution task trajectories and often fail under deployment perturbations such as semantic retargeting, goal re-binding, spatial-layout shifts, and unstable local contacts. LLM coding agents provide complementary semantic and compositional reasoning, but purely analytic primitives struggle with irregular grasping, constrained placement, and articulated-object interaction. We present Harness VLA, a memory-augmented agentic framework that exposes a frozen VLA as a retryable contact-rich primitive and composes it with a small fixed library of analytic primitives for grounding, staging, transport, navigation, and release. Rather than expanding the skill library, the harness learns the operating range of these fixed primitives from task-specific execution traces, global success rules, and failure models. By lifting semantic re-grounding, non-contact execution, and VLA re-staging to the planner while reserving the frozen VLA for local contact-rich phases, Harness VLA extends pretrained VLAs beyond their original trajectory distribution without finetuning. Across perturbed tabletop, household kitchen, and clean-to-randomized bimanual manipulation, Harness VLA improves over the strongest relevant baselines by 38.6 and 25.4 percentage points on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa365, respectively, and reaches 58.4% on RoboTwin C2R. Real-world demonstrations on dual-Franka robots further show target redirection, grasp recovery, and new task compositions with the same frozen VLA. Code is available at https://github.com/RLinf/RPent.

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arXiv2026

A Taxonomy of Construction Task Activities for Robot Workers

Recent vision-language-action models offer a path toward robots with broader capabilities than conventional task-specific systems. Deploying such systems in construction, however, requires a precise inventory of worker activities and the capabilities needed to execute them. We present TARCAT, an occupation-grounded taxonomy derived from 91 O*NET task statements across seven high-employment construction occupations and 30 instructional videos. TARCAT defines 41 primitives spanning intellectual, social, and physical categories and provides a mechanism for composing parameterized primitive sequences into reusable skills. This human-interpretable vocabulary supports the specification of robot requirements and enables coding agents to retrieve and extend skill libraries for task execution. We also demonstrate selected primitives on a DOBOT CR3 arm with a CRAFT hand. TARCAT thus provides a common vocabulary for analyzing construction work and developing general-purpose construction robots. Annotations are available at https://github.com/AICPS/TARCAT-Taxonomy.

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arXiv2026

SCoCaT: Success Conditioned Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Docking

Termination-based constrained reinforcement learning is attractive for safety-critical robotic deployments: it avoids online optimization at inference, scales easily to many constraints via a single scalar per constraint, and is simpler to implement than commonly used Lagrangian methods. Instead of pricing violations through summed cost penalties, this approach makes violations structurally unprofitable by shortening the effective horizon for each violation. We identify a structural failure mode of this method class on terminal-navigation tasks: reaching a precise goal configuration while satisfying safety constraints that tighten along the final approach. When the goal sits inside the region close to where the constraints become active, the survival-weighted objective makes dwelling outside the goal region strictly preferable to entering, producing high constraint compliance with low task completion. We formalize this pathology and show that a minimal augmentation to off-the-shelf RL algorithms like PPO resolves this ``feasibility collapse''. We empirically demonstrate that adding a dense per-step success signal via an auxiliary value critic improves the task completion rate while maintaining safety-critical constraint compliance. Validation across two representative spacecraft platforms: a 6U-CubeSat spanning the mass and degree-of-freedom envelope of operational proximity operations, and a floating platform testbed for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in our laboratory, supports the generality of these findings.

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arXiv2026

Aero Hand Open: A Simulation-Ready Tendon-Driven Hand for Dexterous Manipulation Learning

Tendon-driven hands are anthropomorphic, and moving the actuators off the joints is what makes a hand of this capability affordable to build. Two effects produce that saving. Routing force through a cable removes the requirement that a motor fit inside the joint it drives, so smaller and cheaper motors suffice, and one motor can drive several joints through a single cable, so fewer motors are needed. They are also harder to learn on than a direct-drive hand. The underactuated transmission that produces the saving is itself difficult to represent in a simulator, and the joints one cable drives are not independently commandable. We present Aero Hand Open, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand that is released simulation-ready. Three things ship with it. A simulation model reproduces the cable transmission itself. An identified actuation map connects that model to the motor commands in both directions, including the three-way coupling of the thumb. A reinforcement learning package trains policies for the hand. Together they let a policy be trained entirely in simulation and run on the hand with no fine-tuning and no state estimation. We release the mechanical design, the simulation model, the identified mapping, the training environment and the deployment stack.

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arXiv2026

An Open Panoramic Aerial Robot: Airframe-Integrated Multi-Fisheye Sensing, Onboard ERP Formation, and Field Evaluation

We present an open panoramic aerial robot with four synchronized fisheye cameras integrated into a carbon-fiber airframe and an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. The robot outputs calibrated raw views and an equirectangular panorama (ERP; 1280x640 in all experiments). The ERP pipeline uses overlap-specific projection radii, gated local alignment, seam control, and multi-rate state updates, and it runs onboard on the live four-camera stream during flight. The field dataset contains 18 sequences and more than 50,000 synchronized groups from seven sites. On a 60-frame far-field sample, the method reduces the median per-frame AKAZE P90 misalignment by 40.7% compared with Fixed Radius, and with fixed parameters it gives the lowest geometric errors among the tested controls at two held-out sites. Controlled replay on the same NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX measures final-ERP continuity, timing, and module-input power at a 20 Hz input rate. Compared with external stitching software given the same calibrated projection, the onboard pipeline gives final-ERP line continuity no lower than any tested method, while every external configuration measured on the module needs 5.3 to 147 times the input period and 3.8 to 106 times the energy per output. Frozen detection and place-recognition models are used to evaluate the exported images. Code, calibration, reference hardware, and data-access documentation are available in an anonymized repository at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Open-Pano-Field-CE1F/README.md.

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arXiv2026

BIDETA: Brain-Inspired Data-Efficient Tactile Adaptation for Unseen Sensors

Vision-based tactile sensors provide high-resolution contact information for robotic perception and contact-rich manipulation, advancing embodied intelligence through more reliable physical interaction. However, device-specific sensing mechanisms cause tactile foundation models to degrade on unfamiliar hardware. Existing cross-sensor methods often require calibration data, paired observations, or iterative training. To address this problem, we propose Brain-Inspired Data-Efficient Tactile Adaptation (BIDETA), a gradient-free framework that uses a frozen tactile encoder and a few labeled target contacts to jointly predict labels for an unlabeled query batch. Inspired by the brain's rapid sensory adaptation, BIDETA combines rapid support memory, support-conditioned spectral graphs, and reliability-gated recurrence to preserve pretrained representations, repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and integrate reliable cross-query evidence. Experiments on SITR, TacVerse Shape, and TacQuad show that BIDETA substantially improves adaptation to unknown sensors: with only 10\% labeled target data on SITR, it raises mean Sparsh accuracy from 6.86\% for the frozen source classifier to 87.09\%, exceeding the strongest implemented prior comparison by 47.22 percentage points, and these gains generalize across datasets, pretrained backbones, and tactile tasks. In the SITR timing benchmark with TVL, BIDETA also achieves approximately 20x faster target-sensor adaptation than the best baseline. BIDETA thus offers a gradient-free, data-efficient route to deploying tactile models on new hardware.

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arXiv2026

Zeva: In-Context Causal Learning for Generalizable Embodied Manipulation

Generalizable embodied manipulation remains difficult to achieve through pretraining alone, due to unseen physical conditions in the real world. We argue that robots need to learn from their own physical interactions on the fly during real-world deployment and use this knowledge to inform subsequent actions. We present Zeva, the first framework that enables in-context learning from a robot's own physical interaction experience while keeping the policy model frozen. Zeva employs a Causal Interaction Extractor to encode an executed action and its induced state change into a causal interaction signal, which is stored in a dual-timescale causal memory. For subsequent actions, relevant causal interaction signals are retrieved from memory and injected into the frozen policy model as context. Experiments in simulation and real-world manipulation demonstrate that Zeva achieves the best performance among the compared frontier VLAs and WAMs and, more importantly, enables self-evolution during deployment without gradient updates. Its success rate continues to improve as the robot accumulates interaction experience. Furthermore, the acquired interaction experience can generalize across tasks.

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arXiv2026

PAMoR: Parameterized Affective Motion Generation in Real Time for Humanoid Robots

People read a humanoid robot's motion in social settings not only for the action performed but for the affect conveyed. Motion carrying that affect has so far been generated for human avatars, where style is taken from a reference clip or an emotion word, neither of which can be quantitatively parameterized. We present PAMoR, which turns affect into a measured control parameter: a valence-arousal (V-A) coordinate computed natively on robot kinematics. It is obtained in closed form from postural expansion and movement energy, and these measurements serve directly as generation conditions, with no human annotation. An action prior and two affect priors, trained in a shared latent space, are composed at each denoising step: the action prior fixes what is performed, the affect priors modulate how. Whole-body motion rolls out autoregressively on a 29-DoF Unitree G1 in real time, with action and affect both editable. Generated motion tracks the commanded V-A over its full range while text-to-motion fidelity still matches text-only baselines. In a perceptual study, raters identify the commanded emotion on 0.38 of trials, above both baselines and approaching the 0.44 reported for acted human bodies.

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arXiv2026

$N_0$-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence

We present $N_0$-Foundation, a paradigm for tactile-enabled embodied manipulation, which integrates tactile sensing hardware, large-scale multimodal data, tactile representation learning, and standardized evaluation. First, we engineer the infrastructure for scalable data collection, including a vision-based tactile sensor, a tactile Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), and a synchronized visuo-tactile data collection system supporting both robot embodiments and UMI-based demonstrations. Leveraging this infrastructure, we construct NeoData, which contains more than 30000 hours of synchronized visual and tactile demonstrations, spanning six embodiments, 450 tasks, and billions of paired RGB and tactile frames collected through a mixture of real-robot teleoperation and UMI-based demonstrations. To facilitate open research, we further release OpenNeoData, a 5000-hour open-source subset of NeoData. The dataset addresses a central limitation of existing manipulation corpora, critical for deformable-object manipulation, precise assembly, delicate force control, and sustained surface interaction. Capitalizing on the large-scale, heterogeneous tactile measurements, we propose NeoForce, a visuo-tactile representation model that learn transferable tactile representations across different sensor designs. To enable systematic evaluation of tactile embodied models built upon our infrastructure, datasets and tactile representations, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark, which combines the real-world NeoReal suite and the simulated NeoSim suite for standardized evaluation. Experiments across both suites show that policies benefit from the physical contact state rather than from the device-specific appearance of the tactile signal. We release the dataset, the representation, and the benchmark, aiming at supporting future work on tactile-enabled embodied manipulation.

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arXiv2026

P$^2$Calib: Utilizing Pattern Priors for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Target-based LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration is a prerequisite for multi-sensor fusion in robotics. However, in the widely adopted four-hole pipeline, \rt{calibration accuracy is limited by hole-center extraction in the LiDAR side, where sparse angular coverage and mixed-pixel returns displace the estimated centers}. This paper presents P$^2$Calib, which exploits \textit{pattern priors}, geometric constraints specified by the CAD model of the target board, to improve calibration accuracy. First, we incorporate the known hole radius as a fitting constraint to prevent center estimates from degrading under sparse angular coverage. Building on the improved hole estimates, we further enforce the rigid rectangular layout of the four holes as a global consistency constraint to correct residual errors across holes. Both priors are integrated into an \rt{interactive tool that runs the pipeline from target detection to the final extrinsic}. Experiments on simulated and real datasets show that P$^2$Calib reduces the joint registration residual by 90\% and 82\% and the held-out reprojection error by 96\% and 77\% over the baseline. \rt{We will release the code and data\codelink{} to facilitate future research.

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arXiv2026

Toward Physically Grounded JEPA World Models for Goal-Conditioned Robotic Planning

Action-conditioned JEPA world models enable planning toward visually specified goals without reconstructing future pixels, yet latent prediction alone does not explicitly encourage the learned representations to retain information relevant to robotic control. We introduce an end-to-end JEPA world model that augments latent prediction with inverse dynamics (IDM) and state alignment (SA). While inverse dynamics discourages latent collapse and makes latent transitions informative of the actions that produced them, state alignment grounds consecutive representations in their associated physical configuration and motion. Across four benchmark tasks, our model attains the highest success rates on TwoRoom (100%), PushT (98%), and OGBench-Cube (87%), while performing comparably to LeWorldModel on Reacher. Our ablation further shows that adding state alignment consistently improves planning success over IDM alone across all four tasks. Although LeWorldModel, our primary baseline, attains higher average straightening on OGBench-Cube, transition-subspace analysis shows that its transition energy is concentrated in a substantially lower-dimensional subspace. Our state-aligned model exhibits a higher effective transition dimension than LeWorldModel and improves planning over IDM alone, supporting state alignment as an effective complement to inverse dynamics for robotic planning.

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arXiv2026

Remote Human-Robot Interaction In Greenhouses via Virtual Reality: How Plant Canopy Structure Affects Leaf Disease and Soil Moisture Inspection

This study evaluates the effectiveness of remote human-robot interaction using virtual reality for leaf inspection and soil moisture assessment in a greenhouse environment. The robotic system comprised an unmanned ground vehicle and a robotic manipulator equipped with cameras, governed by kinematic models for navigation and manipulator control. Fourteen distinct plants were inspected across two experiments utilizing VR teleoperation, guided by a set of pre-specified research questions and hypotheses. In the leaf inspection experiments, cycle completion times varied from 3.3 to 8.0 s, and plant-based disease detection was achieved up to 88% accuracy; diseased-spot detection improved numerically in the second experiment, though this change was not statistically significant (p=0.378). For soil moisture assessment, the experiments achieved successful determination of watering needs in up to 64.3% of plants (9 of 14), with consistent success observed for plants 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, and 13; however, this improvement was likewise not statistically significant (p=0.50). A post hoc analysis instead revealed that soil moisture assessment reliability was strongly and significantly predicted by plant canopy morphology (p<0.01): plants with broad, single-leaf canopies reached 100% success by the second experiment, versus only 16.7% for dense, compound canopies. A secondary analysis showed operators became measurably faster at attempting dense-canopy plants without a corresponding gain in success, indicating that camera occlusion, not operator skill or effort, is the dominant limiting factor. These findings show occlusion imposes a sensing limitation rather than a control or training deficiency, and that adapting camera viewpoint and sensing strategy to canopy density is needed to improve the system's accuracy and robustness.

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