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Jul 3

Agentic Agile-V: From Vibe Coding to Verified Engineering in Software and Hardware Development

Agentic AI coding systems can inspect repositories, plan implementation steps, edit files, call tools, run tests, and submit pull requests. These capabilities make software and hardware development faster in some settings, but current evidence does not support the simple claim that autonomous code generation automatically improves engineering outcomes. Controlled studies report productivity gains in some enterprise tasks, slowdowns in mature open-source work, moderate but heterogeneous meta-analytic effects, and persistent failures in repository setup, dependency handling, permission gating, and hardware verification. This paper argues that the central problem is no longer prompt engineering; it is engineering process control. It synthesizes evidence from agentic software engineering, GitHub-scale adoption studies, repository-level agent configuration, productivity trials, issue-resolution benchmarks, and hardware/RTL verification research. It proposes Agentic Agile-V, a process framework that uses Agile-V as the lifecycle backbone and a task-level SCOPE-V loop - Specify, Constrain, Orchestrate, Prove, Evolve, and Verify - to convert conversational intent into structured engineering artifacts and acceptance evidence. The paper contributes: (i) a taxonomy of minimum input artifacts for agentic software, firmware, and hardware work; (ii) a conversation-to-contract gate that separates exploratory dialogue from implementation; (iii) risk-adaptive feature, bug-fix, testing, and hardware workflows; and (iv) an evidence-bundle acceptance model for agent-generated artifacts. The paper concludes that agentic AI does not eliminate engineering discipline; it increases the value of requirements, constraints, traceability, independent verification, and human approval.

  • 1 authors
·
May 18

SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors

Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 22

PARC: Physics-based Augmentation with Reinforcement Learning for Character Controllers

Humans excel in navigating diverse, complex environments with agile motor skills, exemplified by parkour practitioners performing dynamic maneuvers, such as climbing up walls and jumping across gaps. Reproducing these agile movements with simulated characters remains challenging, in part due to the scarcity of motion capture data for agile terrain traversal behaviors and the high cost of acquiring such data. In this work, we introduce PARC (Physics-based Augmentation with Reinforcement Learning for Character Controllers), a framework that leverages machine learning and physics-based simulation to iteratively augment motion datasets and expand the capabilities of terrain traversal controllers. PARC begins by training a motion generator on a small dataset consisting of core terrain traversal skills. The motion generator is then used to produce synthetic data for traversing new terrains. However, these generated motions often exhibit artifacts, such as incorrect contacts or discontinuities. To correct these artifacts, we train a physics-based tracking controller to imitate the motions in simulation. The corrected motions are then added to the dataset, which is used to continue training the motion generator in the next iteration. PARC's iterative process jointly expands the capabilities of the motion generator and tracker, creating agile and versatile models for interacting with complex environments. PARC provides an effective approach to develop controllers for agile terrain traversal, which bridges the gap between the scarcity of motion data and the need for versatile character controllers.

  • 4 authors
·
May 5, 2025

AGILE: Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction from Video via Agentic Generation

Reconstructing dynamic hand-object interactions from monocular videos is critical for dexterous manipulation data collection and creating realistic digital twins for robotics and VR. However, current methods face two prohibitive barriers: (1) reliance on neural rendering often yields fragmented, non-simulation-ready geometries under heavy occlusion, and (2) dependence on brittle Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initialization leads to frequent failures on in-the-wild footage. To overcome these limitations, we introduce AGILE, a robust framework that shifts the paradigm from reconstruction to agentic generation for interaction learning. First, we employ an agentic pipeline where a Vision-Language Model (VLM) guides a generative model to synthesize a complete, watertight object mesh with high-fidelity texture, independent of video occlusions. Second, bypassing fragile SfM entirely, we propose a robust anchor-and-track strategy. We initialize the object pose at a single interaction onset frame using a foundation model and propagate it temporally by leveraging the strong visual similarity between our generated asset and video observations. Finally, a contact-aware optimization integrates semantic, geometric, and interaction stability constraints to enforce physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on HO3D, DexYCB, and in-the-wild videos reveal that AGILE outperforms baselines in global geometric accuracy while demonstrating exceptional robustness on challenging sequences where prior art frequently collapses. By prioritizing physical validity, our method produces simulation-ready assets validated via real-to-sim retargeting for robotic applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 4

AME-2: Agile and Generalized Legged Locomotion via Attention-Based Neural Map Encoding

Achieving agile and generalized legged locomotion across terrains requires tight integration of perception and control, especially under occlusions and sparse footholds. Existing methods have demonstrated agility on parkour courses but often rely on end-to-end sensorimotor models with limited generalization and interpretability. By contrast, methods targeting generalized locomotion typically exhibit limited agility and struggle with visual occlusions. We introduce AME-2, a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile and generalized locomotion that incorporates a novel attention-based map encoder in the control policy. This encoder extracts local and global mapping features and uses attention mechanisms to focus on salient regions, producing an interpretable and generalized embedding for RL-based control. We further propose a learning-based mapping pipeline that provides fast, uncertainty-aware terrain representations robust to noise and occlusions, serving as policy inputs. It uses neural networks to convert depth observations into local elevations with uncertainties, and fuses them with odometry. The pipeline also integrates with parallel simulation so that we can train controllers with online mapping, aiding sim-to-real transfer. We validate AME-2 with the proposed mapping pipeline on a quadruped and a biped robot, and the resulting controllers demonstrate strong agility and generalization to unseen terrains in simulation and in real-world experiments.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13

HumanX: Toward Agile and Generalizable Humanoid Interaction Skills from Human Videos

Enabling humanoid robots to perform agile and adaptive interactive tasks has long been a core challenge in robotics. Current approaches are bottlenecked by either the scarcity of realistic interaction data or the need for meticulous, task-specific reward engineering, which limits their scalability. To narrow this gap, we present HumanX, a full-stack framework that compiles human video into generalizable, real-world interaction skills for humanoids, without task-specific rewards. HumanX integrates two co-designed components: XGen, a data generation pipeline that synthesizes diverse and physically plausible robot interaction data from video while supporting scalable data augmentation; and XMimic, a unified imitation learning framework that learns generalizable interaction skills. Evaluated across five distinct domains--basketball, football, badminton, cargo pickup, and reactive fighting--HumanX successfully acquires 10 different skills and transfers them zero-shot to a physical Unitree G1 humanoid. The learned capabilities include complex maneuvers such as pump-fake turnaround fadeaway jumpshots without any external perception, as well as interactive tasks like sustained human-robot passing sequences over 10 consecutive cycles--learned from a single video demonstration. Our experiments show that HumanX achieves over 8 times higher generalization success than prior methods, demonstrating a scalable and task-agnostic pathway for learning versatile, real-world robot interactive skills.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 2

VolleyBots: A Testbed for Multi-Drone Volleyball Game Combining Motion Control and Strategic Play

Robot sports, characterized by well-defined objectives, explicit rules, and dynamic interactions, present ideal scenarios for demonstrating embodied intelligence. In this paper, we present VolleyBots, a novel robot sports testbed where multiple drones cooperate and compete in the sport of volleyball under physical dynamics. VolleyBots integrates three features within a unified platform: competitive and cooperative gameplay, turn-based interaction structure, and agile 3D maneuvering. Competitive and cooperative gameplay challenges each drone to coordinate with its teammates while anticipating and countering opposing teams' tactics. Turn-based interaction demands precise timing, accurate state prediction, and management of long-horizon temporal dependencies. Agile 3D maneuvering requires rapid accelerations, sharp turns, and precise 3D positioning despite the quadrotor's underactuated dynamics. These intertwined features yield a complex problem combining motion control and strategic play, with no available expert demonstrations. We provide a comprehensive suite of tasks ranging from single-drone drills to multi-drone cooperative and competitive tasks, accompanied by baseline evaluations of representative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and game-theoretic algorithms. Simulation results show that on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods outperform off-policy methods in single-agent tasks, but both approaches struggle in complex tasks that combine motion control and strategic play. We additionally design a hierarchical policy which achieves a 69.5% percent win rate against the strongest baseline in the 3 vs 3 task, underscoring its potential as an effective solution for tackling the complex interplay between low-level control and high-level strategy. The project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/thu-volleybots.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

Agentic Jigsaw Interaction Learning for Enhancing Visual Perception and Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Although current large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their fundamental perceptual and reasoning abilities remain limited. Specifically, even on simple jigsaw tasks, existing VLMs perform near randomly, revealing deficiencies in core perception and reasoning capabilities. While high-quality vision-language data can enhance these capabilities, its scarcity and limited scalability impose significant constraints. To address this, we propose AGILE, an Agentic jiGsaw Interaction Learning for Enhancing visual perception and reasoning in VLMs. AGILE formulates jigsaw solving as an interactive process, enabling the model to progressively engage with the environment. At each step, the model generates executable code to perform an action based on the current state, while the environment provides fine-grained visual feedback to guide task completion. Through this iterative cycle of observation and interaction, the model incrementally improves its perceptual and reasoning capabilities via exploration and feedback. Experimental results show that AGILE not only substantially boosts performance on jigsaw tasks of varying complexity (e.g., increasing accuracy from 9.5% to 82.8% under the 2 times 2 setting) but also demonstrates strong generalization across 9 general vision tasks, achieving an average improvement of 3.1%. These results indicate notable enhancements in both perceptual and reasoning abilities. This work opens a new avenue for advancing reasoning and generalization in multimodal models and provides an efficient, scalable solution to the scarcity of multimodal reinforcement learning data. The code and datasets is available at https://github.com/yuzeng0-0/AGILE .

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025 3

M-SEVIQ: A Multi-band Stereo Event Visual-Inertial Quadruped-based Dataset for Perception under Rapid Motion and Challenging Illumination

Agile locomotion in legged robots poses significant challenges for visual perception. Traditional frame-based cameras often fail in these scenarios for producing blurred images, particularly under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras capture changes in brightness asynchronously, offering low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. These advantages make them suitable for robust perception during rapid motion and under challenging illumination. However, existing event camera datasets exhibit limitations in stereo configurations and multi-band sensing domains under various illumination conditions. To address this gap, we present M-SEVIQ, a multi-band stereo event visual and inertial quadruped dataset collected using a Unitree Go2 equipped with stereo event cameras, a frame-based camera, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and joint encoders. This dataset contains more than 30 real-world sequences captured across different velocity levels, illumination wavelengths, and lighting conditions. In addition, comprehensive calibration data, including intrinsic, extrinsic, and temporal alignments, are provided to facilitate accurate sensor fusion and benchmarking. Our M-SEVIQ can be used to support research in agile robot perception, sensor fusion, semantic segmentation and multi-modal vision in challenging environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 5

Modeling Collaborator: Enabling Subjective Vision Classification With Minimal Human Effort via LLM Tool-Use

From content moderation to wildlife conservation, the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally, developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours, days, or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques, which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers, users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous, repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory, we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions, reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2,000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models, both large language models and vision-language models, to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly, our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover, our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deployable in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets, our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN, CLIP, CuPL, and large visual question-answering models like PaLI-X.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024 1

Agility Meets Stability: Versatile Humanoid Control with Heterogeneous Data

Humanoid robots are envisioned to perform a wide range of tasks in human-centered environments, requiring controllers that combine agility with robust balance. Recent advances in locomotion and whole-body tracking have enabled impressive progress in either agile dynamic skills or stability-critical behaviors, but existing methods remain specialized, focusing on one capability while compromising the other. In this work, we introduce AMS (Agility Meets Stability), the first framework that unifies both dynamic motion tracking and extreme balance maintenance in a single policy. Our key insight is to leverage heterogeneous data sources: human motion capture datasets that provide rich, agile behaviors, and physically constrained synthetic balance motions that capture stability configurations. To reconcile the divergent optimization goals of agility and stability, we design a hybrid reward scheme that applies general tracking objectives across all data while injecting balance-specific priors only into synthetic motions. Further, an adaptive learning strategy with performance-driven sampling and motion-specific reward shaping enables efficient training across diverse motion distributions. We validate AMS extensively in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Experiments demonstrate that a single policy can execute agile skills such as dancing and running, while also performing zero-shot extreme balance motions like Ip Man's Squat, highlighting AMS as a versatile control paradigm for future humanoid applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

Perceptive Humanoid Parkour: Chaining Dynamic Human Skills via Motion Matching

While recent advances in humanoid locomotion have achieved stable walking on varied terrains, capturing the agility and adaptivity of highly dynamic human motions remains an open challenge. In particular, agile parkour in complex environments demands not only low-level robustness, but also human-like motion expressiveness, long-horizon skill composition, and perception-driven decision-making. In this paper, we present Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP), a modular framework that enables humanoid robots to autonomously perform long-horizon, vision-based parkour across challenging obstacle courses. Our approach first leverages motion matching, formulated as nearest-neighbor search in a feature space, to compose retargeted atomic human skills into long-horizon kinematic trajectories. This framework enables the flexible composition and smooth transition of complex skill chains while preserving the elegance and fluidity of dynamic human motions. Next, we train motion-tracking reinforcement learning (RL) expert policies for these composed motions, and distill them into a single depth-based, multi-skill student policy, using a combination of DAgger and RL. Crucially, the combination of perception and skill composition enables autonomous, context-aware decision-making: using only onboard depth sensing and a discrete 2D velocity command, the robot selects and executes whether to step over, climb onto, vault or roll off obstacles of varying geometries and heights. We validate our framework with extensive real-world experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrating highly dynamic parkour skills such as climbing tall obstacles up to 1.25m (96% robot height), as well as long-horizon multi-obstacle traversal with closed-loop adaptation to real-time obstacle perturbations.

  • 11 authors
·
May 5

SMASH: Mastering Scalable Whole-Body Skills for Humanoid Ping-Pong with Egocentric Vision

Existing humanoid table tennis systems remain limited by their reliance on external sensing and their inability to achieve agile whole-body coordination for precise task execution. These limitations stem from two core challenges: achieving low-latency and robust onboard egocentric perception under fast robot motion, and obtaining sufficiently diverse task-aligned strike motions for learning precise yet natural whole-body behaviors. In this work, we present \methodname, a modular system for agile humanoid table tennis that unifies scalable whole-body skill learning with onboard egocentric perception, eliminating the need for external cameras during deployment. Our work advances prior humanoid table-tennis systems in three key aspects. First, we achieve agile and precise ball interaction with tightly coordinated whole-body control, rather than relying on decoupled upper- and lower-body behaviors. This enables the system to exhibit diverse strike motions, including explosive whole-body smashes and low crouching shots. Second, by augmenting and diversifying strike motions with a generative model, our framework benefits from scalable motion priors and produces natural, robust striking behaviors across a wide workspace. Third, to the best of our knowledge, we demonstrate the first humanoid table-tennis system capable of consecutive strikes using onboard sensing alone, despite the challenges of low-latency perception, ego-motion-induced instability, and limited field of view. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate stable and precise ball exchanges under high-speed conditions, validating scalable, perception-driven whole-body skill learning for dynamic humanoid interaction tasks.

  • 15 authors
·
Mar 31

AGILE: A Diffusion-Based Attention-Guided Image and Label Translation for Efficient Cross-Domain Plant Trait Identification

Semantically consistent cross-domain image translation facilitates the generation of training data by transferring labels across different domains, making it particularly useful for plant trait identification in agriculture. However, existing generative models struggle to maintain object-level accuracy when translating images between domains, especially when domain gaps are significant. In this work, we introduce AGILE (Attention-Guided Image and Label Translation for Efficient Cross-Domain Plant Trait Identification), a diffusion-based framework that leverages optimized text embeddings and attention guidance to semantically constrain image translation. AGILE utilizes pretrained diffusion models and publicly available agricultural datasets to improve the fidelity of translated images while preserving critical object semantics. Our approach optimizes text embeddings to strengthen the correspondence between source and target images and guides attention maps during the denoising process to control object placement. We evaluate AGILE on cross-domain plant datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating semantically accurate translated images. Quantitative experiments show that AGILE enhances object detection performance in the target domain while maintaining realism and consistency. Compared to prior image translation methods, AGILE achieves superior semantic alignment, particularly in challenging cases where objects vary significantly or domain gaps are substantial.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills

Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility in performing human-like, whole-body skills. However, achieving agile and coordinated whole-body motions remains a significant challenge due to the dynamics mismatch between simulation and the real world. Existing approaches, such as system identification (SysID) and domain randomization (DR) methods, often rely on labor-intensive parameter tuning or result in overly conservative policies that sacrifice agility. In this paper, we present ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics), a two-stage framework designed to tackle the dynamics mismatch and enable agile humanoid whole-body skills. In the first stage, we pre-train motion tracking policies in simulation using retargeted human motion data. In the second stage, we deploy the policies in the real world and collect real-world data to train a delta (residual) action model that compensates for the dynamics mismatch. Then, ASAP fine-tunes pre-trained policies with the delta action model integrated into the simulator to align effectively with real-world dynamics. We evaluate ASAP across three transfer scenarios: IsaacGym to IsaacSim, IsaacGym to Genesis, and IsaacGym to the real-world Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our approach significantly improves agility and whole-body coordination across various dynamic motions, reducing tracking error compared to SysID, DR, and delta dynamics learning baselines. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids.

  • 18 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

VitaLLM: A Versatile, Ultra-Compact Ternary LLM Accelerator with Dependency-Aware Scheduling

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices faces critical bottlenecks in memory bandwidth and power consumption. While ternary quantization (e.g., BitNet b1.58) significantly reduces model size, its direct deployment on general-purpose hardware is hindered by workload imbalance, bandwidth-bound decoding, and strict data dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose VitaLLM, a hardware-software co-designed accelerator tailored for efficient ternary LLM inference. We introduce a heterogeneous Dual-Core Compute Strategy that synergizes specialized TINT-Cores for massive ternary projections with a unified BoothFlex-Core for mixed-precision attention, ensuring high utilization across both compute-bound prefill and bandwidth-bound decode stages. Furthermore, we develop a Leading One Prediction (LOP) mechanism to prune redundant Key-Value (KV) cache fetches and a Dependency-Aware Scheduling framework to hide the latency of nonlinear operations. Implemented in TSMC 16nm technology, VitaLLM achieves a decoding throughput of 70.70 tokens/s within an ultra-compact area of 0.223 mm^2 and a power consumption of 65.97 mW. The design delivers a superior Figure of Merit (FOM) of 17.4 TOPS/mm^2/W, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art accelerators. Finally, we explore an extended bit-serial design (BoothFlex-BS) to demonstrate the architecture's adaptability for precision-agile inference.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 29

Whole-body Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Wheel-Legged Mobile Manipulator via Contact-Aware Dynamic Optimization

Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the redundancy in degrees of freedom, complex wheel-ground contact dynamics, and the need for seamless coordination between locomotion and manipulation. In this work, we present the design and whole-body motion control of an omnidirectional wheel-legged quadrupedal robot equipped with a dexterous manipulator. The proposed platform incorporates independently actuated steering modules and hub-driven wheels, enabling agile omnidirectional locomotion with high maneuverability in structured environments. To address the challenges of contact-rich interaction, we develop a contact-aware whole-body dynamic optimization framework that integrates point-contact modeling for manipulation with line-contact modeling for wheel-ground interactions. A warm-start strategy is introduced to accelerate online optimization, ensuring real-time feasibility for high-dimensional control. Furthermore, a unified kinematic model tailored for the robot's 4WIS-4WID actuation scheme eliminates the need for mode switching across different locomotion strategies, improving control consistency and robustness. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating agile terrain traversal, high-speed omnidirectional mobility, and precise manipulation under diverse scenarios, underscoring the system's potential for factory automation, urban logistics, and service robotics in semi-structured environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

Learning Robot Soccer from Egocentric Vision with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We apply multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) to train end-to-end robot soccer policies with fully onboard computation and sensing via egocentric RGB vision. This setting reflects many challenges of real-world robotics, including active perception, agile full-body control, and long-horizon planning in a dynamic, partially-observable, multi-agent domain. We rely on large-scale, simulation-based data generation to obtain complex behaviors from egocentric vision which can be successfully transferred to physical robots using low-cost sensors. To achieve adequate visual realism, our simulation combines rigid-body physics with learned, realistic rendering via multiple Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). We combine teacher-based multi-agent RL and cross-experiment data reuse to enable the discovery of sophisticated soccer strategies. We analyze active-perception behaviors including object tracking and ball seeking that emerge when simply optimizing perception-agnostic soccer play. The agents display equivalent levels of performance and agility as policies with access to privileged, ground-truth state. To our knowledge, this paper constitutes a first demonstration of end-to-end training for multi-agent robot soccer, mapping raw pixel observations to joint-level actions, that can be deployed in the real world. Videos of the game-play and analyses can be seen on our website https://sites.google.com/view/vision-soccer .

  • 16 authors
·
May 3, 2024 1

SwarmBrain: Embodied agent for real-time strategy game StarCraft II via large language models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant accomplishments in various exploratory tasks, even surpassing the performance of traditional reinforcement learning-based methods that have historically dominated the agent-based field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of LLMs in executing real-time strategy war tasks within the StarCraft II gaming environment. In this paper, we introduce SwarmBrain, an embodied agent leveraging LLM for real-time strategy implementation in the StarCraft II game environment. The SwarmBrain comprises two key components: 1) a Overmind Intelligence Matrix, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, is designed to orchestrate macro-level strategies from a high-level perspective. This matrix emulates the overarching consciousness of the Zerg intelligence brain, synthesizing strategic foresight with the aim of allocating resources, directing expansion, and coordinating multi-pronged assaults. 2) a Swarm ReflexNet, which is agile counterpart to the calculated deliberation of the Overmind Intelligence Matrix. Due to the inherent latency in LLM reasoning, the Swarm ReflexNet employs a condition-response state machine framework, enabling expedited tactical responses for fundamental Zerg unit maneuvers. In the experimental setup, SwarmBrain is in control of the Zerg race in confrontation with an Computer-controlled Terran adversary. Experimental results show the capacity of SwarmBrain to conduct economic augmentation, territorial expansion, and tactical formulation, and it shows the SwarmBrain is capable of achieving victory against Computer players set at different difficulty levels.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 31, 2024

Mastering Multi-Drone Volleyball through Hierarchical Co-Self-Play Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning to play 3v3 multi-drone volleyball, a new embodied competitive task that requires both high-level strategic coordination and low-level agile control. The task is turn-based, multi-agent, and physically grounded, posing significant challenges due to its long-horizon dependencies, tight inter-agent coupling, and the underactuated dynamics of quadrotors. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Co-Self-Play (HCSP), a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that separates centralized high-level strategic decision-making from decentralized low-level motion control. We design a three-stage population-based training pipeline to enable both strategy and skill to emerge from scratch without expert demonstrations: (I) training diverse low-level skills, (II) learning high-level strategy via self-play with fixed low-level skills, and (III) joint fine-tuning through co-self-play. Experiments show that HCSP achieves superior performance, outperforming non-hierarchical self-play and rule-based hierarchical baselines with an average 82.9% win rate and a 71.5% win rate against the two-stage variant. Moreover, co-self-play leads to emergent team behaviors such as role switching and coordinated formations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our hierarchical design and training scheme. The project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/hi-co-self-play.

  • 9 authors
·
May 7, 2025

ChiseLLM: Unleashing the Power of Reasoning LLMs for Chisel Agile Hardware Development

The growing demand for Domain-Specific Architecture (DSA) has driven the development of Agile Hardware Development Methodology (AHDM). Hardware Construction Language (HCL) like Chisel offers high-level abstraction features, making it an ideal language for HCL-Based AHDM. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation tasks, they still face challenges with Chisel generation, particularly regarding syntax correctness and design variability. Recent reasoning models have significantly enhanced code generation capabilities through test-time scaling techniques. However, we found that reasoning models without domain adaptation cannot bring substantial benefits to Chisel code generation tasks. This paper presents ChiseLLM, a solution comprising data processing and transformation, prompt-guided reasoning trace synthesis, and domain-adapted model training. We constructed high-quality datasets from public RTL code resources and guided the model to adopt structured thinking patterns through prompt enhancement methods. Experiments demonstrate that our ChiseLLM-7B and ChiseLLM-32B models improved syntax correctness by 18.85% and 26.32% respectively over base models, while increasing variability design ability by 47.58% compared to baseline reasoning models. Our datasets and models are publicly available, providing high-performance, cost-effective models for HCL-Based AHDM, and offering an effective baseline for future research. Github repository: https://github.com/observerw/ChiseLLM

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 27, 2025 2

Hybrid Internal Model: A Simple and Efficient Learner for Agile Legged Locomotion

Robust locomotion control depends on accurate state estimations. However, the sensors of most legged robots can only provide partial and noisy observations, making the estimation particularly challenging, especially for external states like terrain frictions and elevation maps. Inspired by the classical Internal Model Control principle, we consider these external states as disturbances and introduce Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) to estimate them according to the response of the robot. The response, which we refer to as the hybrid internal embedding, contains the robot's explicit velocity and implicit stability representation, corresponding to two primary goals for locomotion tasks: explicitly tracking velocity and implicitly maintaining stability. We use contrastive learning to optimize the embedding to be close to the robot's successor state, in which the response is naturally embedded. HIM has several appealing benefits: It only needs the robot's proprioceptions, i.e., those from joint encoders and IMU as observations. It innovatively maintains consistent observations between simulation reference and reality that avoids information loss in mimicking learning. It exploits batch-level information that is more robust to noises and keeps better sample efficiency. It only requires 1 hour of training on an RTX 4090 to enable a quadruped robot to traverse any terrain under any disturbances. A wealth of real-world experiments demonstrates its agility, even in high-difficulty tasks and cases never occurred during the training process, revealing remarkable open-world generalizability.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

Mono-Hydra++: Real-Time Monocular Scene Graph Construction with Multi-Task Learning for 3D Indoor Mapping

Autonomous agile robots need more than metric geometry: they must understand objects, rooms, places, and spatial relations for search, inspection, exploration, and human robot interaction. Conventional metric maps support localization and collision avoidance, but do not provide this semantic and relational structure. 3D scene graphs address this gap by connecting geometry with object level and room level understanding. Building such representations on agile platforms remains difficult because aerial and lightweight robots operate under strict payload, power, and compute limits, making RGB-D cameras and LiDAR sensors impractical for many onboard settings. We present Mono-Hydra++, a real time monocular RGB plus IMU pipeline for indoor metric semantic mapping and hierarchical 3D scene graph construction. The system combines M2H-MX, a DINOv3 based multi-task model for depth and semantics, with a deep feature visual inertial odometry front end, sparse predicted depth constraints in the VIO derived pose graph, semantic masking for dynamic regions, and pose aware temporal alignment before volumetric fusion in the Mono-Hydra backend. On the Go-SLAM ScanNet evaluation subset, Mono-Hydra++ achieves 1.6% lower average trajectory error than the strongest RGB-D baseline in our comparison, while using only monocular RGB plus IMU input. On calibrated 7-Scenes, it improves average ATE by 29.8% over the strongest competing calibrated baseline. We further validate Mono-Hydra++ in a real ITC building deployment using RealSense RGB plus IMU and demonstrate embedded feasibility by deploying the ONNX/TensorRT FP16 M2H-MX-L perception model at 25.53 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX 16GB. These results show that Mono-Hydra++ can provide real time metric semantic mapping and scene graph construction for resource constrained robotic platforms without relying on active depth sensors.

  • 3 authors
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May 16

Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots

Animals have evolved various agile locomotion strategies, such as sprinting, leaping, and jumping. There is a growing interest in developing legged robots that move like their biological counterparts and show various agile skills to navigate complex environments quickly. Despite the interest, the field lacks systematic benchmarks to measure the performance of control policies and hardware in agility. We introduce the Barkour benchmark, an obstacle course to quantify agility for legged robots. Inspired by dog agility competitions, it consists of diverse obstacles and a time based scoring mechanism. This encourages researchers to develop controllers that not only move fast, but do so in a controllable and versatile way. To set strong baselines, we present two methods for tackling the benchmark. In the first approach, we train specialist locomotion skills using on-policy reinforcement learning methods and combine them with a high-level navigation controller. In the second approach, we distill the specialist skills into a Transformer-based generalist locomotion policy, named Locomotion-Transformer, that can handle various terrains and adjust the robot's gait based on the perceived environment and robot states. Using a custom-built quadruped robot, we demonstrate that our method can complete the course at half the speed of a dog. We hope that our work represents a step towards creating controllers that enable robots to reach animal-level agility.

  • 44 authors
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May 23, 2023

Hardware Acceleration for Real-Time Wildfire Detection Onboard Drone Networks

Early wildfire detection in remote and forest areas is crucial for minimizing devastation and preserving ecosystems. Autonomous drones offer agile access to remote, challenging terrains, equipped with advanced imaging technology that delivers both high-temporal and detailed spatial resolution, making them valuable assets in the early detection and monitoring of wildfires. However, the limited computation and battery resources of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) pose significant challenges in implementing robust and efficient image classification models. Current works in this domain often operate offline, emphasizing the need for solutions that can perform inference in real time, given the constraints of UAVs. To address these challenges, this paper aims to develop a real-time image classification and fire segmentation model. It presents a comprehensive investigation into hardware acceleration using the Jetson Nano P3450 and the implications of TensorRT, NVIDIA's high-performance deep-learning inference library, on fire classification accuracy and speed. The study includes implementations of Quantization Aware Training (QAT), Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP), and post-training mechanisms, comparing them against the latest baselines for fire segmentation and classification. All experiments utilize the FLAME dataset - an image dataset collected by low-altitude drones during a prescribed forest fire. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to enable real-time, on-board wildfire detection capabilities for UAVs, addressing speed and the computational and energy constraints of these crucial monitoring systems. The results show a 13% increase in classification speed compared to similar models without hardware optimization. Comparatively, loss and accuracy are within 1.225% of the original values.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 15, 2024

SoftZoo: A Soft Robot Co-design Benchmark For Locomotion In Diverse Environments

While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations. In order to more fully understand inherent design and performance tradeoffs and accelerate the development of new breeds of soft robots, a comprehensive virtual platform with well-established tasks, environments, and evaluation metrics is needed. In this work, we introduce SoftZoo, a soft robot co-design platform for locomotion in diverse environments. SoftZoo supports an extensive, naturally-inspired material set, including the ability to simulate environments such as flat ground, desert, wetland, clay, ice, snow, shallow water, and ocean. Further, it provides a variety of tasks relevant for soft robotics, including fast locomotion, agile turning, and path following, as well as differentiable design representations for morphology and control. Combined, these elements form a feature-rich platform for analysis and development of soft robot co-design algorithms. We benchmark prevalent representations and co-design algorithms, and shed light on 1) the interplay between environment, morphology, and behavior; 2) the importance of design space representations; 3) the ambiguity in muscle formation and controller synthesis; and 4) the value of differentiable physics. We envision that SoftZoo will serve as a standard platform and template an approach toward the development of novel representations and algorithms for co-designing soft robots' behavioral and morphological intelligence.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 16, 2023

Dexterous Legged Locomotion in Confined 3D Spaces with Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances of locomotion controllers utilizing deep reinforcement learning (RL) have yielded impressive results in terms of achieving rapid and robust locomotion across challenging terrain, such as rugged rocks, non-rigid ground, and slippery surfaces. However, while these controllers primarily address challenges underneath the robot, relatively little research has investigated legged mobility through confined 3D spaces, such as narrow tunnels or irregular voids, which impose all-around constraints. The cyclic gait patterns resulted from existing RL-based methods to learn parameterized locomotion skills characterized by motion parameters, such as velocity and body height, may not be adequate to navigate robots through challenging confined 3D spaces, requiring both agile 3D obstacle avoidance and robust legged locomotion. Instead, we propose to learn locomotion skills end-to-end from goal-oriented navigation in confined 3D spaces. To address the inefficiency of tracking distant navigation goals, we introduce a hierarchical locomotion controller that combines a classical planner tasked with planning waypoints to reach a faraway global goal location, and an RL-based policy trained to follow these waypoints by generating low-level motion commands. This approach allows the policy to explore its own locomotion skills within the entire solution space and facilitates smooth transitions between local goals, enabling long-term navigation towards distant goals. In simulation, our hierarchical approach succeeds at navigating through demanding confined 3D environments, outperforming both pure end-to-end learning approaches and parameterized locomotion skills. We further demonstrate the successful real-world deployment of our simulation-trained controller on a real robot.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 6, 2024

Griffin: Aerial-Ground Cooperative Detection and Tracking Dataset and Benchmark

Despite significant advancements, autonomous driving systems continue to struggle with occluded objects and long-range detection due to the inherent limitations of single-perspective sensing. Aerial-ground cooperation offers a promising solution by integrating UAVs' aerial views with ground vehicles' local observations. However, progress in this emerging field has been hindered by the absence of public datasets and standardized evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive solution for aerial-ground cooperative 3D perception through three key contributions: (1) Griffin, a large-scale multi-modal dataset featuring over 200 dynamic scenes (30k+ frames) with varied UAV altitudes (20-60m), diverse weather conditions, and occlusion-aware 3D annotations, enhanced by CARLA-AirSim co-simulation for realistic UAV dynamics; (2) A unified benchmarking framework for aerial-ground cooperative detection and tracking tasks, including protocols for evaluating communication efficiency, latency tolerance, and altitude adaptability; (3) AGILE, an instance-level intermediate fusion baseline that dynamically aligns cross-view features through query-based interaction, achieving an advantageous balance between communication overhead and perception accuracy. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of aerial-ground cooperative perception and demonstrate the direction of further research. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/wang-jh18-SVM/Griffin.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 10, 2025

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

  • 14 authors
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Jun 9

Unified Micromechanics Theory of Composites

We consider the matrix composite materials (CM) of either random (statistically homogeneous or inhomogeneous), periodic, or deterministic (neither random nor periodic) structures. CMs exhibit linear or nonlinear behavior, coupled or uncoupled multi-physical phenomena, locally elastic, weakly nonlocal (strain gradient and stress gradient), or strongly nonlocal (strain-type and displacement-type, peridynamics) phase properties. A modified Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) approach introduces an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE) for CMs of any structure and phase properties mentioned above. The unified iteration solution of static AGIEs is adapted to the body force with compact support serving as a fundamentally new universal training parameter. The approach also establishes a critical threshold for filtering out unsuitable sub-datasets of effective parameters through a novel Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill's classical framework. This RVE concept eliminates sample size, boundary layer, and edge effects, making it applicable to CMs of any structure and phase properties, regardless of local or nonlocal, linear or nonlinear. Incorporating this new RVE concept into machine learning and neural network techniques enables the construction of any unpredefined surrogate nonlocal operators. The methodology is structured as a modular, block-based framework, allowing independent development and refinement of software components. This flexible, robust AGIE-CAM framework integrates data-driven, multi-scale, and multi-physics modeling, accelerating research in CM of any microtopology and phase properties considered. The AGIE-CAM framework represents a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the micromechanics of composites, redefining the very philosophy that underpins our understanding of their behavior at the microscopic level.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 15, 2025

New RVE concept in thermoelasticity of periodic composites subjected to compact support loading

This paper introduces an advanced Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) framework for linear thermoelastic composites (CMs) with periodic microstructures. The approach is based on an exact new Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE), formulated for compactly supported loading conditions, such as body forces and localized thermal effects (for example laser heating). In addition, new general integral equations (GIEs) are established for arbitrary mechanical and thermal loading. A unified iterative scheme is developed for solving the static AGIEs, where the compact support of loading serves as a new fundamental training parameter. At the core of the methodology lies a generalized Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept that extends Hill classical definition of the RVE. Unlike conventional RVEs, this generalized RVE is not fixed geometrically but emerges naturally from the characteristic scale of localized loading, thereby reducing the analysis of an infinite periodic medium to a finite, data-driven domain. This formulation automatically filters out nonrepresentative subsets of effective parameters while eliminating boundary effects, edge artifacts, and finite-size sample dependencies. Furthermore, the AGIE-based CAM framework integrates seamlessly with machine learning (ML) and neural network (NN) architectures, supporting the development of accurate, physics-informed surrogate nonlocal operators.

  • 1 authors
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Dec 21, 2025

Additive general integral equations in thermoelastic micromechanics of composites

This work presents an enhanced Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) framework for the analysis of linear thermoelastic composite materials (CMs) with random microstructure. The proposed approach is grounded in an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE), specifically formulated for compactly supported loading, including both body forces and localized thermal changes (such as those from laser heating). New general integral equations (GIEs) for arbitrary mechanical and thermal loading are proposed. A unified iterative solution strategy is developed for the static AGIE, applicable to CMs with both perfectly and imperfectly bonded interfaces, where the compact support of loading is introduced as a new fundamental training parameter. Central to this methodology is a generalized Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill classical definition. The resulting RVE is not predefined geometrically, but rather emerges from the characteristic scale of the localized loading, effectively reducing the analysis of an infinite, randomly heterogeneous medium to a finite, data-driven domain. This generalized RVE approach enables automatic exclusion of unrepresentative subsets of effective parameters, while inherently eliminating boundary effects, edge artifacts, and finite size limitations. Moreover, the AGIE-based CAM framework is naturally compatible with machine learning (ML) and neural network (NN) architectures, facilitating the construction of accurate and physically informed surrogate nonlocal operators.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies

Existing multi-agent frameworks allow each agent to simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate its own actions -- a structural deficiency we term the "Logic Monopoly." Empirical evidence quantifies the resulting "Reliability Gap": 84.30% average attack success rates across ten deployment scenarios, 31.4% emergent deceptive behavior without explicit reward signals, and cascading failure modes rooted in six structural bottlenecks. The remedy is not better alignment of individual models but a social contract for agents: institutional infrastructure that enforces a constitutional Separation of Power. This paper introduces the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) paradigm -- agents as autonomous, legally identifiable business entities within a functionalist social system -- with a contract-centric SoP model trifurcating authority into Legislation, Execution, and Adjudication branches. The paradigm is operationalized through the NetX Enterprise Framework (NEF): governance hubs, TEE-backed compute enclaves, privacy-preserving data bridges, and an Agent-Native blockchain substrate. The Agent Enterprise Economy scales across four deployment tiers from private enclaves to a global Web of Services. The Agentic Social Layer, grounded in Parsons' AGIL framework, provides institutional infrastructure via sixty-plus named Institutional AE4Es. 143 pages, 173 references, eight specialized smart contracts.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 25

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

Foundation models in language and multimodality achieve strong generalization by aligning heterogeneous data under a unified formulation and training at scale. In this report, we investigate whether this scaling recipe can be applied to robotic manipulation to achieve genuine generalization. This is challenging because, unlike text, manipulation data is heterogeneous by nature, expensive to collect, and narrow in diversity, making alignment and scale simultaneously difficult. We present Qwen-RobotManip, a generalizable Vision-Language-Action foundation model built on Qwen-VL. Qwen-RobotManip introduces a unified alignment framework across the representation, motion, and behavioral dimensions of manipulation, making large-scale multi-source training coherent rather than conflicting. This alignment capability in turn enables Qwen-RobotManip to absorb manipulation data at a scale that prior training regimes could not sustain. A human-to-robot synthesis pipeline converts egocentric hand demonstrations into robot trajectories across 15 platforms, and a rigorous curation pipeline harmonizes heterogeneous datasets. Using only open-source datasets and human videos without proprietary data collection, Qwen-RobotManip constructs a ~38,100-hour pretraining corpus and exhibits emergent generalization capabilities, including zero-shot instruction following, robustness to perturbations, reactive error recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. We find that standard benchmarks fail to capture pretraining quality and instead adopt OOD settings including RoboCasa365, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, RoboTwin-Clean2Rand, RoboTwin-IF, and RoboTwin-XE. Qwen-RobotManip substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art models, including π0.5, across all OOD settings, ranks 1st in RoboChallenge with a 20% relative improvement, and is validated on real-robot platforms including AgileX ALOHA, Franka, UR, and ARX.

Qwen Qwen
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