Daily Papers

Imitation-learning policies for robot manipulation inherit the quality of the success labels attached to their training episodes, and those labels are usually produced by the robot's own success check. A particularly damaging error is the false success: an episode the robot logs as a success when the task outcome was actually wrong. We ask a narrow but practical question about these episodes. Once an episode has already been flagged as a success, how much of the information needed to overturn that label is present in proprioception, and how much requires vision? We build a simulated testbed on two bimanual ALOHA tasks, induce failures through environment perturbations rather than label edits, label every episode by privileged simulator state that the detector never sees, and keep only episodes the robot flagged as successful. We then compare detectors restricted to proprioception against a vision-based detector. We find that recoverability spans a wide range: in cube transfer the false successes are almost fully recoverable from joint data alone, while in peg insertion proprioception recovers only part of them and a vision detector closes most of the gap. We also show that the proprioceptive separability we measure rests on velocity differences far below any realistic sensor noise floor, so it is best read as an optimistic upper bound that a noiseless simulator inflates. We release the generation and evaluation pipeline.

Proprioception is the "sixth sense" that detects limb postures with motor neurons. It requires a natural integration between the musculoskeletal systems and sensory receptors, which is challenging among modern robots that aim for lightweight, adaptive, and sensitive designs at a low cost. Here, we present the Soft Polyhedral Network with an embedded vision for physical interactions, capable of adaptive kinesthesia and viscoelastic proprioception by learning kinetic features. This design enables passive adaptations to omni-directional interactions, visually captured by a miniature high-speed motion tracking system embedded inside for proprioceptive learning. The results show that the soft network can infer real-time 6D forces and torques with accuracies of 0.25/0.24/0.35 N and 0.025/0.034/0.006 Nm in dynamic interactions. We also incorporate viscoelasticity in proprioception during static adaptation by adding a creep and relaxation modifier to refine the predicted results. The proposed soft network combines simplicity in design, omni-adaptation, and proprioceptive sensing with high accuracy, making it a versatile solution for robotics at a low cost with more than 1 million use cycles for tasks such as sensitive and competitive grasping, and touch-based geometry reconstruction. This study offers new insights into vision-based proprioception for soft robots in adaptive grasping, soft manipulation, and human-robot interaction.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by combining vision, language, and proprioception to predict actions. However, previous methods fuse proprioceptive signals directly with VLM-encoded vision-language features, resulting in state-dominant bias and false completions despite visible execution failures. We attribute this to modality imbalance, where policies over-rely on internal state while underusing visual evidence. To address this, we present ReViP, a novel VLA framework with Vision-Proprioception Rebalance to enhance visual grounding and robustness under perturbations. The key insight is to introduce auxiliary task-aware environment priors to adaptively modulate the coupling between semantic perception and proprioceptive dynamics. Specifically, we use an external VLM as a task-stage observer to extract real-time task-centric visual cues from visual observations, which drive a Vision-Proprioception Feature-wise Linear Modulation to enhance environmental awareness and reduce state-driven errors. Moreover, to evaluate false completion, we propose the first False-Completion Benchmark Suite built on LIBERO with controlled settings such as Object-Drop. Extensive experiments show that ReViP effectively reduces false-completion rates and improves success rates over strong VLA baselines on our suite, with gains extending to LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world evaluations.

We propose to address quadrupedal locomotion tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a Transformer-based model that learns to combine proprioceptive information and high-dimensional depth sensor inputs. While learning-based locomotion has made great advances using RL, most methods still rely on domain randomization for training blind agents that generalize to challenging terrains. Our key insight is that proprioceptive states only offer contact measurements for immediate reaction, whereas an agent equipped with visual sensory observations can learn to proactively maneuver environments with obstacles and uneven terrain by anticipating changes in the environment many steps ahead. In this paper, we introduce LocoTransformer, an end-to-end RL method that leverages both proprioceptive states and visual observations for locomotion control. We evaluate our method in challenging simulated environments with different obstacles and uneven terrain. We transfer our learned policy from simulation to a real robot by running it indoors and in the wild with unseen obstacles and terrain. Our method not only significantly improves over baselines, but also achieves far better generalization performance, especially when transferred to the real robot. Our project page with videos is at https://rchalyang.github.io/LocoTransformer/ .

Intelligent systems across physics, language and perception often exhibit factorisable structure, yet are typically modelled by monolithic neural architectures that do not explicitly exploit this structure. The separable neural architecture (SNA) addresses this by formalising a representational class that unifies additive, quadratic and tensor-decomposed neural models. By constraining interaction order and tensor rank, SNAs impose a structural inductive bias that factorises high-dimensional mappings into low-arity components. Separability need not be a property of the system itself: it often emerges in the coordinates or representations through which the system is expressed. Crucially, this coordinate-aware formulation reveals a structural analogy between chaotic spatiotemporal dynamics and linguistic autoregression. By treating continuous physical states as smooth, separable embeddings, SNAs enable distributional modelling of chaotic systems. This approach mitigates the nonphysical drift characteristics of deterministic operators whilst remaining applicable to discrete sequences. The compositional versatility of this approach is demonstrated across four domains: autonomous waypoint navigation via reinforcement learning, inverse generation of multifunctional microstructures, distributional modelling of turbulent flow and neural language modelling. These results establish the separable neural architecture as a domain-agnostic primitive for predictive and generative intelligence, capable of unifying both deterministic and distributional representations.

This paper presents a novel vision-based proprioception approach for a soft robotic finger that can estimate and reconstruct tactile interactions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The key to this system lies in the finger's unique metamaterial structure, which facilitates omni-directional passive adaptation during grasping, protecting delicate objects across diverse scenarios. A compact in-finger camera captures high-framerate images of the finger's deformation during contact, extracting crucial tactile data in real-time. We present a volumetric discretized model of the soft finger and use the geometry constraints captured by the camera to find the optimal estimation of the deformed shape. The approach is benchmarked using a motion capture system with sparse markers and a haptic device with dense measurements. Both results show state-of-the-art accuracies, with a median error of 1.96 mm for overall body deformation, corresponding to 2.1% of the finger's length. More importantly, the state estimation is robust in both on-land and underwater environments as we demonstrate its usage for underwater object shape sensing. This combination of passive adaptation and real-time tactile sensing paves the way for amphibious robotic grasping applications.

Hand motion plays a central role in human interaction, yet modeling realistic 4D hand motion (i.e., 3D hand pose sequences over time) remains challenging. Research in this area is typically divided into two tasks: (1) Estimation approaches reconstruct precise motion from visual observations, but often fail under hand occlusion or absence; (2) Generation approaches focus on synthesizing hand poses by exploiting generative priors under multi-modal structured inputs and infilling motion from incomplete sequences. However, this separation not only limits the effective use of heterogeneous condition signals that frequently arise in practice, but also prevents knowledge transfer between the two tasks. We present UniHand, a unified diffusion-based framework that formulates both estimation and generation as conditional motion synthesis. UniHand integrates heterogeneous inputs by embedding structured signals into a shared latent space through a joint variational autoencoder, which aligns conditions such as MANO parameters and 2D skeletons. Visual observations are encoded with a frozen vision backbone, while a dedicated hand perceptron extracts hand-specific cues directly from image features, removing the need for complex detection and cropping pipelines. A latent diffusion model then synthesizes consistent motion sequences from these diverse conditions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniHand delivers robust and accurate hand motion modeling, maintaining performance under severe occlusions and temporally incomplete inputs.

Reliable odometry for legged robots without cameras or LiDAR remains challenging due to IMU drift and noisy joint velocity sensing. This paper presents a purely proprioceptive state estimator that uses only IMU and motor measurements to jointly estimate body pose and velocity, with a unified formulation applicable to biped, quadruped, and wheel-legged robots. The key idea is to treat each contacting leg as a kinematic anchor: joint-torque--based foot wrench estimation selects reliable contacts, and the corresponding footfall positions provide intermittent world-frame constraints that suppress long-term drift. To prevent elevation drift during extended traversal, we introduce a lightweight height clustering and time-decay correction that snaps newly recorded footfall heights to previously observed support planes. To improve foot velocity observations under encoder quantization, we apply an inverse-kinematics cubature Kalman filter that directly filters foot-end velocities from joint angles and velocities. The implementation further mitigates yaw drift through multi-contact geometric consistency and degrades gracefully to a kinematics-derived heading reference when IMU yaw constraints are unavailable or unreliable. We evaluate the method on four quadruped platforms (three Astrall robots and a Unitree Go2 EDU) using closed-loop trajectories. On Astrall point-foot robot~A, a sim200\,m horizontal loop and a sim15\,m vertical loop return with 0.1638\,m and 0.219\,m error, respectively; on wheel-legged robot~B, the corresponding errors are 0.2264\,m and 0.199\,m. On wheel-legged robot~C, a sim700\,m horizontal loop yields 7.68\,m error and a sim20\,m vertical loop yields 0.540\,m error. Unitree Go2 EDU closes a sim120\,m horizontal loop with 2.2138\,m error and a sim8\,m vertical loop with less than 0.1\,m vertical error. github.com/ShineMinxing/Ros2Go2Estimator.git

Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex.

Lightweight, controllable, and physically plausible human motion synthesis is crucial for animation, virtual reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction applications. Existing methods often compromise between computational efficiency, physical realism, or spatial controllability. We propose FlexMotion, a novel framework that leverages a computationally lightweight diffusion model operating in the latent space, eliminating the need for physics simulators and enabling fast and efficient training. FlexMotion employs a multimodal pre-trained Transformer encoder-decoder, integrating joint locations, contact forces, joint actuations and muscle activations to ensure the physical plausibility of the generated motions. FlexMotion also introduces a plug-and-play module, which adds spatial controllability over a range of motion parameters (e.g., joint locations, joint actuations, contact forces, and muscle activations). Our framework achieves realistic motion generation with improved efficiency and control, setting a new benchmark for human motion synthesis. We evaluate FlexMotion on extended datasets and demonstrate its superior performance in terms of realism, physical plausibility, and controllability.

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

How does the brain predict physical outcomes while acting in the world? Machine learning world models compress visual input into latent spaces, discarding the spatial structure that characterizes sensory cortex. We propose isomorphic world models: architectures preserving sensory topology so that physics prediction becomes geometric propagation rather than abstract state transition. We implement this using neural fields with motor-gated channels, where activity evolves through local lateral connectivity and motor commands multiplicatively modulate specific populations. Three experiments support this approach: (1) local connectivity is sufficient to learn ballistic physics, with predictions traversing intermediate locations rather than "teleporting"; (2) policies trained entirely in imagination transfer to real physics at nearly twice the rate of latent-space alternatives; and (3) motor-gated channels spontaneously develop body-selective encoding through visuomotor prediction alone. These findings suggest intuitive physics and body schema may share a common origin in spatially structured neural dynamics.

Diffusion models have been extensively leveraged for learning robot skills from demonstrations. These policies are conditioned on several observational modalities such as proprioception, vision and tactile. However, observational modalities have varying levels of influence for different tasks that diffusion polices fail to capture. In this work, we propose 'Factorized Diffusion Policies' abbreviated as FDP, a novel policy formulation that enables observational modalities to have differing influence on the action diffusion process by design. This results in learning policies where certain observations modalities can be prioritized over the others such as vision>tactile or proprioception>vision. FDP achieves modality prioritization by factorizing the observational conditioning for diffusion process, resulting in more performant and robust policies. Our factored approach shows strong performance improvements in low-data regimes with 15% absolute improvement in success rate on several simulated benchmarks when compared to a standard diffusion policy that jointly conditions on all input modalities. Moreover, our benchmark and real-world experiments show that factored policies are naturally more robust with 40% higher absolute success rate across several visuomotor tasks under distribution shifts such as visual distractors or camera occlusions, where existing diffusion policies fail catastrophically. FDP thus offers a safer and more robust alternative to standard diffusion policies for real-world deployment. Videos are available at https://fdp-policy.github.io/fdp-policy/ .

We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with physical grounding that is used to assess intrinsic terrain properties such as deformability and slipperiness. We use proprioceptive-based sensing, which provides direct measurements of these physical properties, and enhances the overall semantic understanding of the terrains. Our formulation uses in-context learning to ground the VLM's semantic understanding with proprioceptive data to allow dynamic updates of traversability estimates based on the robot's real-time physical interactions with the environment. We use the updated traversability estimations to inform both the local and global planners for real-time trajectory replanning. We validate our method on a legged robot (Ghost Vision 60) and a wheeled robot (Clearpath Husky), in diverse real-world outdoor environments with different deformable and slippery terrains. In practice, we observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods by up to 50% increase in navigation success rate.

Imitation-learning-based visuomotor policies have been widely used in robot manipulation, where both visual observations and proprioceptive states are typically adopted together for precise control. However, in this study, we find that this common practice makes the policy overly reliant on the proprioceptive state input, which causes overfitting to the training trajectories and results in poor spatial generalization. On the contrary, we propose the State-free Policy, removing the proprioceptive state input and predicting actions only conditioned on visual observations. The State-free Policy is built in the relative end-effector action space, and should ensure the full task-relevant visual observations, here provided by dual wide-angle wrist cameras. Empirical results demonstrate that the State-free policy achieves significantly stronger spatial generalization than the state-based policy: in real-world tasks such as pick-and-place, challenging shirt-folding, and complex whole-body manipulation, spanning multiple robot embodiments, the average success rate improves from 0\% to 85\% in height generalization and from 6\% to 64\% in horizontal generalization. Furthermore, they also show advantages in data efficiency and cross-embodiment adaptation, enhancing their practicality for real-world deployment.

The transfer of manipulation skills from human demonstration to robotic execution is often hindered by a "domain gap" in sensing and morphology. This paper introduces MagiClaw, a versatile two-finger end-effector designed to bridge this gap. MagiClaw functions interchangeably as both a handheld tool for intuitive data collection and a robotic end-effector for policy deployment, ensuring hardware consistency and reliability. Each finger incorporates a Soft Polyhedral Network (SPN) with an embedded camera, enabling vision-based estimation of 6-DoF forces and contact deformation. This proprioceptive data is fused with exteroceptive environmental sensing from an integrated iPhone, which provides 6D pose, RGB video, and LiDAR-based depth maps. Through a custom iOS application, MagiClaw streams synchronized, multi-modal data for real-time teleoperation, offline policy learning, and immersive control via mixed-reality interfaces. We demonstrate how this unified system architecture lowers the barrier to collecting high-fidelity, contact-rich datasets and accelerates the development of generalizable manipulation policies. Please refer to the iOS app at https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/magiclaw/id6661033548 for further details.

Egocentric manipulation videos are highly challenging due to severe occlusions during interactions and frequent object entries and exits from the camera view as the person moves. Current methods typically focus on recovering either hand or object pose in isolation, but both struggle during interactions and fail to handle out-of-sight cases. Moreover, their independent predictions often lead to inconsistent hand-object relations. We introduce WHOLE, a method that holistically reconstructs hand and object motion in world space from egocentric videos given object templates. Our key insight is to learn a generative prior over hand-object motion to jointly reason about their interactions. At test time, the pretrained prior is guided to generate trajectories that conform to the video observations. This joint generative reconstruction substantially outperforms approaches that process hands and objects separately followed by post-processing. WHOLE achieves state-of-the-art performance on hand motion estimation, 6D object pose estimation, and their relative interaction reconstruction. Project website: https://judyye.github.io/whole-www

Synthesizing diverse and physically plausible Human-Scene Interactions (HSI) is pivotal for both computer animation and embodied AI. Despite encouraging progress, current methods mainly focus on developing separate controllers, each specialized for a specific interaction task. This significantly hinders the ability to tackle a wide variety of challenging HSI tasks that require the integration of multiple skills, e.g., sitting down while carrying an object. To address this issue, we present TokenHSI, a single, unified transformer-based policy capable of multi-skill unification and flexible adaptation. The key insight is to model the humanoid proprioception as a separate shared token and combine it with distinct task tokens via a masking mechanism. Such a unified policy enables effective knowledge sharing across skills, thereby facilitating the multi-task training. Moreover, our policy architecture supports variable length inputs, enabling flexible adaptation of learned skills to new scenarios. By training additional task tokenizers, we can not only modify the geometries of interaction targets but also coordinate multiple skills to address complex tasks. The experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve versatility, adaptability, and extensibility in various HSI tasks. Website: https://liangpan99.github.io/TokenHSI/

Embodied AI research is undergoing a shift toward vision-centric perceptual paradigms. While massively parallel simulators have catalyzed breakthroughs in proprioception-based locomotion, their potential remains largely untapped for vision-informed tasks due to the prohibitive computational overhead of large-scale photorealistic rendering. Furthermore, the creation of simulation-ready 3D assets heavily relies on labor-intensive manual modeling, while the significant sim-to-real physical gap hinders the transfer of contact-rich manipulation policies. To address these bottlenecks, we propose GS-Playground, a multi-modal simulation framework designed to accelerate end-to-end perceptual learning. We develop a novel high-performance parallel physics engine, specifically designed to integrate with a batch 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering pipeline to ensure high-fidelity synchronization. Our system achieves a breakthrough throughput of 10^4 FPS at 640x480 resolution, significantly lowering the barrier for large-scale visual RL. Additionally, we introduce an automated Real2Sim workflow that reconstructs photorealistic, physically consistent, and memory-efficient environments, streamlining the generation of complex simulation-ready scenes. Extensive experiments on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation demonstrate that GS-Playground effectively bridges the perceptual and physical gaps across diverse embodied tasks. Project homepage: https://gsplayground.github.io.

Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores environmental capabilities. This work unites these paradigms to achieve perceptive general motion control. We present a framework where exteroceptive sensing is integrated into whole-body motion tracking, permitting a humanoid to perform highly dynamic, non-locomotion tasks on uneven terrain. By training a single policy to perform multiple distinct motions across varied terrestrial features, we demonstrate the non-trivial benefit of integrating perception into the control loop. Our results show that this framework enables robust, highly dynamic multi-contact motions, such as vaulting and dive-rolling, on unstructured terrain, significantly expanding the robot's traversability beyond simple walking or running. https://project-instinct.github.io/deep-whole-body-parkour

Visual imitation learning frameworks allow robots to learn manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. While existing approaches mainly focus on policy design, they often neglect the structure and capacity of visual encoders, limiting spatial understanding and generalization. Inspired by biological vision systems, which rely on both visual and proprioceptive cues for robust control, we propose VGGT-DP, a visuomotor policy framework that integrates geometric priors from a pretrained 3D perception model with proprioceptive feedback. We adopt the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) as the visual encoder and introduce a proprioception-guided visual learning strategy to align perception with internal robot states, improving spatial grounding and closed-loop control. To reduce inference latency, we design a frame-wise token reuse mechanism that compacts multi-view tokens into an efficient spatial representation. We further apply random token pruning to enhance policy robustness and reduce overfitting. Experiments on challenging MetaWorld tasks show that VGGT-DP significantly outperforms strong baselines such as DP and DP3, particularly in precision-critical and long-horizon scenarios.

Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by independently engineering perception, actuation, and control systems to very low tolerances. This restricts them to tightly controlled settings such as a predetermined obstacle course in labs. In contrast, humans are able to learn parkour through practice without significantly changing their underlying biology. In this paper, we take a similar approach to developing robot parkour on a small low-cost robot with imprecise actuation and a single front-facing depth camera for perception which is low-frequency, jittery, and prone to artifacts. We show how a single neural net policy operating directly from a camera image, trained in simulation with large-scale RL, can overcome imprecise sensing and actuation to output highly precise control behavior end-to-end. We show our robot can perform a high jump on obstacles 2x its height, long jump across gaps 2x its length, do a handstand and run across tilted ramps, and generalize to novel obstacle courses with different physical properties. Parkour videos at https://extreme-parkour.github.io/

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.

The pre-training of visual representations has enhanced the efficiency of robot learning. Due to the lack of large-scale in-domain robotic datasets, prior works utilize in-the-wild human videos to pre-train robotic visual representation. Despite their promising results, representations from human videos are inevitably subject to distribution shifts and lack the dynamics information crucial for task completion. We first evaluate various pre-trained representations in terms of their correlation to the downstream robotic manipulation tasks (i.e., manipulation centricity). Interestingly, we find that the "manipulation centricity" is a strong indicator of success rates when applied to downstream tasks. Drawing from these findings, we propose Manipulation Centric Representation (MCR), a foundation representation learning framework capturing both visual features and the dynamics information such as actions and proprioceptions of manipulation tasks to improve manipulation centricity. Specifically, we pre-train a visual encoder on the DROID robotic dataset and leverage motion-relevant data such as robot proprioceptive states and actions. We introduce a novel contrastive loss that aligns visual observations with the robot's proprioceptive state-action dynamics, combined with a behavior cloning (BC)-like actor loss to predict actions during pre-training, along with a time contrastive loss. Empirical results across 4 simulation domains with 20 tasks verify that MCR outperforms the strongest baseline method by 14.8%. Moreover, MCR boosts the performance of data-efficient learning with a UR5e arm on 3 real-world tasks by 76.9%. Project website: https://robots-pretrain-robots.github.io/.

We present a novel approach named OmniControl for incorporating flexible spatial control signals into a text-conditioned human motion generation model based on the diffusion process. Unlike previous methods that can only control the pelvis trajectory, OmniControl can incorporate flexible spatial control signals over different joints at different times with only one model. Specifically, we propose analytic spatial guidance that ensures the generated motion can tightly conform to the input control signals. At the same time, realism guidance is introduced to refine all the joints to generate more coherent motion. Both the spatial and realism guidance are essential and they are highly complementary for balancing control accuracy and motion realism. By combining them, OmniControl generates motions that are realistic, coherent, and consistent with the spatial constraints. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets show that OmniControl not only achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on pelvis control but also shows promising results when incorporating the constraints over other joints.

Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is substantially hindered by hardware adaptability and data efficacy. Prior hardware designs remain gripper-specific and often face a trade-off between tracking precision and portability. Furthermore, the lack of online feasibility checking during demonstration leads to poor replayability. More importantly, existing handheld setups struggle to collect interactive recovery data during robot execution, lacking the authentic tactile information necessary for robust policy refinement. To bridge these gaps, we present TAMEn, a tactile-aware manipulation engine for closed-loop data collection in contact-rich tasks. Our system features a cross-morphology wearable interface that enables rapid adaptation across heterogeneous grippers. To balance data quality and environmental diversity, we implement a dual-modal acquisition pipeline: a precision mode leveraging motion capture for high-fidelity demonstrations, and a portable mode utilizing VR-based tracking for in-the-wild acquisition and tactile-visualized recovery teleoperation. Building on this hardware, we unify large-scale tactile pretraining, task-specific bimanual demonstrations, and human-in-the-loop recovery data into a pyramid-structured data regime, enabling closed-loop policy refinement. Experiments show that our feasibility-aware pipeline significantly improves demonstration replayability, and that the proposed visuo-tactile learning framework increases task success rates from 34% to 75% across diverse bimanual manipulation tasks. We further open-source the hardware and dataset to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.

Despite the advent in 3D hand pose estimation, current methods predominantly focus on single-image 3D hand reconstruction in the camera frame, overlooking the world-space motion of the hands. Such limitation prohibits their direct use in egocentric video settings, where hands and camera are continuously in motion. In this work, we propose HaWoR, a high-fidelity method for hand motion reconstruction in world coordinates from egocentric videos. We propose to decouple the task by reconstructing the hand motion in the camera space and estimating the camera trajectory in the world coordinate system. To achieve precise camera trajectory estimation, we propose an adaptive egocentric SLAM framework that addresses the shortcomings of traditional SLAM methods, providing robust performance under challenging camera dynamics. To ensure robust hand motion trajectories, even when the hands move out of view frustum, we devise a novel motion infiller network that effectively completes the missing frames of the sequence. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that HaWoR achieves state-of-the-art performance on both hand motion reconstruction and world-frame camera trajectory estimation under different egocentric benchmark datasets. Code and models are available on https://hawor-project.github.io/ .

Controlling human motion based on text presents an important challenge in computer vision. Traditional approaches often rely on holistic action descriptions for motion synthesis, which struggle to capture subtle movements of local body parts. This limitation restricts the ability to isolate and manipulate specific movements. To address this, we propose a novel motion representation that decomposes motion into distinct body joint group movements and interactions from a kinematic perspective. We design an automatic dataset collection pipeline that enhances the existing text-motion benchmark by incorporating fine-grained local joint-group motion and interaction descriptions. To bridge the gap between text and motion domains, we introduce a hierarchical motion semantics approach that progressively fuses joint-level interaction information into the global action-level semantics for modality alignment. With this hierarchy, we introduce a coarse-to-fine motion synthesis procedure for various generation and editing downstream applications. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation enhances text-motion retrieval by improving joint-spatial understanding, and enables more precise joint-motion generation and control. Project Page: {\smallhttps://andypinxinliu.github.io/KinMo/}

A fundamental challenge in robot navigation lies in learning policies that generalize across diverse environments while conforming to the unique physical constraints and capabilities of a specific embodiment (e.g., quadrupeds can walk up stairs, but rovers cannot). We propose VAMOS, a hierarchical VLA that decouples semantic planning from embodiment grounding: a generalist planner learns from diverse, open-world data, while a specialist affordance model learns the robot's physical constraints and capabilities in safe, low-cost simulation. We enabled this separation by carefully designing an interface that lets a high-level planner propose candidate paths directly in image space that the affordance model then evaluates and re-ranks. Our real-world experiments show that VAMOS achieves higher success rates in both indoor and complex outdoor navigation than state-of-the-art model-based and end-to-end learning methods. We also show that our hierarchical design enables cross-embodied navigation across legged and wheeled robots and is easily steerable using natural language. Real-world ablations confirm that the specialist model is key to embodiment grounding, enabling a single high-level planner to be deployed across physically distinct wheeled and legged robots. Finally, this model significantly enhances single-robot reliability, achieving 3X higher success rates by rejecting physically infeasible plans. Website: https://vamos-vla.github.io/

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

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.

Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/

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.

Reconstructing the absolute 3D pose and shape of the hands from the user's viewpoint using a single head-mounted camera is crucial for practical egocentric interaction in AR/VR, telepresence, and hand-centric manipulation tasks, where sensing must remain compact and unobtrusive. While monocular RGB methods have made progress, they remain constrained by depth-scale ambiguity and struggle to generalize across the diverse optical configurations of head-mounted devices. As a result, models typically require extensive training on device-specific datasets, which are costly and laborious to acquire. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing EgoForce, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction framework that recovers robust, absolute 3D hand pose and its position from the user's (camera-space) viewpoint. EgoForce operates across fisheye, perspective, and distorted wide-FOV camera models using a single unified network. Our approach combines a differentiable forearm representation that stabilizes hand pose, a unified arm-hand transformer that predicts both hand and forearm geometry from a single egocentric view, mitigating depth-scale ambiguity, and a ray space closed-form solver that enables absolute 3D pose recovery across diverse head-mounted camera models. Experiments on three egocentric benchmarks show that EgoForce achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, reducing camera-space MPJPE by up to 28% on the HOT3D dataset compared to prior methods and maintaining consistent performance across camera configurations. For more details, visit the project page at https://dfki-av.github.io/EgoForce.

Human-humanoid collaboration shows significant promise for applications in healthcare, domestic assistance, and manufacturing. While compliant robot-human collaboration has been extensively developed for robotic arms, enabling compliant human-humanoid collaboration remains largely unexplored due to humanoids' complex whole-body dynamics. In this paper, we propose a proprioception-only reinforcement learning approach, COLA, that combines leader and follower behaviors within a single policy. The model is trained in a closed-loop environment with dynamic object interactions to predict object motion patterns and human intentions implicitly, enabling compliant collaboration to maintain load balance through coordinated trajectory planning. We evaluate our approach through comprehensive simulator and real-world experiments on collaborative carrying tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness, generalization, and robustness of our model across various terrains and objects. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our model reduces human effort by 24.7%. compared to baseline approaches while maintaining object stability. Real-world experiments validate robust collaborative carrying across different object types (boxes, desks, stretchers, etc.) and movement patterns (straight-line, turning, slope climbing). Human user studies with 23 participants confirm an average improvement of 27.4% compared to baseline models. Our method enables compliant human-humanoid collaborative carrying without requiring external sensors or complex interaction models, offering a practical solution for real-world deployment.

Collecting demonstrations enriched with fine-grained tactile information is critical for dexterous manipulation, particularly in contact-rich tasks that require precise force control and physical interaction. While prior works primarily focus on teleoperation or video-based retargeting, they often suffer from kinematic mismatches and the absence of real-time tactile feedback, hindering the acquisition of high-fidelity tactile data. To mitigate this issue, we propose KineDex, a hand-over-hand kinesthetic teaching paradigm in which the operator's motion is directly transferred to the dexterous hand, enabling the collection of physically grounded demonstrations enriched with accurate tactile feedback. To resolve occlusions from human hand, we apply inpainting technique to preprocess the visual observations. Based on these demonstrations, we then train a visuomotor policy using tactile-augmented inputs and implement force control during deployment for precise contact-rich manipulation. We evaluate KineDex on a suite of challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks, including particularly difficult scenarios such as squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, which require precise multi-finger coordination and stable force regulation. Across these tasks, KineDex achieves an average success rate of 74.4%, representing a 57.7% improvement over the variant without force control. Comparative experiments with teleoperation and user studies further validate the advantages of KineDex in data collection efficiency and operability. Specifically, KineDex collects data over twice as fast as teleoperation across two tasks of varying difficulty, while maintaining a near-100% success rate, compared to under 50% for teleoperation.

Recent advancements in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, yet they continue to struggle with long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Existing methods lack internal reasoning mechanisms that can identify task-relevant interaction cues or track progress within a subtask, leading to critical execution errors such as repeated actions, missed steps, and premature termination. To address these challenges, we introduce PALM, a VLA framework that structures policy learning around interaction-centric affordance reasoning and subtask progress cues. PALM distills complementary affordance representations that capture object relevance, contact geometry, spatial placements, and motion dynamics, and serve as task-relevant anchors for visuomotor control. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, PALM predicts continuous within-subtask progress, enabling seamless subtask transitions. Across extensive simulation and real-world experiments, PALM consistently outperforms baselines, achieving a 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-LONG, a 12.5% improvement in average length on CALVIN ABC->D, and a 2x improvement over real-world baselines across three long-horizon generalization settings.

Hand-object motion-capture (MoCap) repositories offer large-scale, contact-rich demonstrations and hold promise for scaling dexterous robotic manipulation. Yet demonstration inaccuracies and embodiment gaps between human and robot hands limit the straightforward use of these data. Existing methods adopt a three-stage workflow, including retargeting, tracking, and residual correction, which often leaves demonstrations underused and compound errors across stages. We introduce Dexplore, a unified single-loop optimization that jointly performs retargeting and tracking to learn robot control policies directly from MoCap at scale. Rather than treating demonstrations as ground truth, we use them as soft guidance. From raw trajectories, we derive adaptive spatial scopes, and train with reinforcement learning to keep the policy in-scope while minimizing control effort and accomplishing the task. This unified formulation preserves demonstration intent, enables robot-specific strategies to emerge, improves robustness to noise, and scales to large demonstration corpora. We distill the scaled tracking policy into a vision-based, skill-conditioned generative controller that encodes diverse manipulation skills in a rich latent representation, supporting generalization across objects and real-world deployment. Taken together, these contributions position Dexplore as a principled bridge that transforms imperfect demonstrations into effective training signals for dexterous manipulation.

Bimanual robotic manipulation is a long-standing challenge of embodied intelligence due to its characteristics of dual-arm spatial-temporal coordination and high-dimensional action spaces. Previous studies rely on pre-defined action taxonomies or direct teleoperation to alleviate or circumvent these issues, often making them lack simplicity, versatility and scalability. Differently, we believe that the most effective and efficient way for teaching bimanual manipulation is learning from human demonstrated videos, where rich features such as spatial-temporal positions, dynamic postures, interaction states and dexterous transitions are available almost for free. In this work, we propose the YOTO (You Only Teach Once), which can extract and then inject patterns of bimanual actions from as few as a single binocular observation of hand movements, and teach dual robot arms various complex tasks. Furthermore, based on keyframes-based motion trajectories, we devise a subtle solution for rapidly generating training demonstrations with diverse variations of manipulated objects and their locations. These data can then be used to learn a customized bimanual diffusion policy (BiDP) across diverse scenes. In experiments, YOTO achieves impressive performance in mimicking 5 intricate long-horizon bimanual tasks, possesses strong generalization under different visual and spatial conditions, and outperforms existing visuomotor imitation learning methods in accuracy and efficiency. Our project link is https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/YOTO.

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high-dimensionality of humanoid control as well as the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a narrow range of movement styles (e.g. locomotion, game characters) from specialized motion datasets. This limited scope hampers its applicability in complex tasks. Our work closes this gap, significantly increasing the coverage of motion representation space. To achieve this, we first learn a motion imitator that can imitate all of human motion from a large, unstructured motion dataset. We then create our motion representation by distilling skills directly from the imitator. This is achieved using an encoder-decoder structure with a variational information bottleneck. Additionally, we jointly learn a prior conditioned on proprioception (humanoid's own pose and velocities) to improve model expressiveness and sampling efficiency for downstream tasks. Sampling from the prior, we can generate long, stable, and diverse human motions. Using this latent space for hierarchical RL, we show that our policies solve tasks using natural and realistic human behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion representation by solving generative tasks (e.g. strike, terrain traversal) and motion tracking using VR controllers.

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still portrays robots as single, autonomous decision-makers, performing tasks like manipulation and navigation, with limited human involvement. However, a large class of real-world robotic systems, including wearable robotics (e.g., prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons), teleoperation, and neural interfaces, are semiautonomous, and require ongoing interactive coordination with human partners, challenging single-agent assumptions. In this position paper, we argue that robot foundation models must evolve to an interactive multi-agent perspective in order to handle the complexities of real-time human-robot co-adaptation. We propose a generalizable, neuroscience-inspired architecture encompassing four modules: (1) a multimodal sensing module informed by sensorimotor integration principles, (2) an ad-hoc teamwork model reminiscent of joint-action frameworks in cognitive science, (3) a predictive world belief model grounded in internal model theories of motor control, and (4) a memory/feedback mechanism that echoes concepts of Hebbian and reinforcement-based plasticity. Although illustrated through the lens of cyborg systems, where wearable devices and human physiology are inseparably intertwined, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to robots operating in semi-autonomous or interactive contexts. By moving beyond single-agent designs, our position emphasizes how foundation models in robotics can achieve a more robust, personalized, and anticipatory level of performance.

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.

We consider the problem of learning a common representation for dexterous manipulation across manipulators of different morphologies. To this end, we propose PCHands, a novel approach for extracting hand postural synergies from a large set of manipulators. We define a simplified and unified description format based on anchor positions for manipulators ranging from 2-finger grippers to 5-finger anthropomorphic hands. This enables learning a variable-length latent representation of the manipulator configuration and the alignment of the end-effector frame of all manipulators. We show that it is possible to extract principal components from this latent representation that is universal across manipulators of different structures and degrees of freedom. To evaluate PCHands, we use this compact representation to encode observation and action spaces of control policies for dexterous manipulation tasks learned with RL. In terms of learning efficiency and consistency, the proposed representation outperforms a baseline that learns the same tasks in joint space. We additionally show that PCHands performs robustly in RL from demonstration, when demonstrations are provided from a different manipulator. We further support our results with real-world experiments that involve a 2-finger gripper and a 4-finger anthropomorphic hand. Code and additional material are available at https://hsp-iit.github.io/PCHands/.

Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding environment (Johansson and Flanagan, 2009; Li et al., 2020; Calandra et al., 2017). However, no existing systems provide rich, multi-modal digital touch-sensing capabilities through a hemispherical compliant embodiment. Here, we describe several conceptual and technological innovations to improve the digitization of touch. These advances are embodied in an artificial finger-shaped sensor with advanced sensing capabilities. Significantly, this fingertip contains high-resolution sensors (~8.3 million taxels) that respond to omnidirectional touch, capture multi-modal signals, and use on-device artificial intelligence to process the data in real time. Evaluations show that the artificial fingertip can resolve spatial features as small as 7 um, sense normal and shear forces with a resolution of 1.01 mN and 1.27 mN, respectively, perceive vibrations up to 10 kHz, sense heat, and even sense odor. Furthermore, it embeds an on-device AI neural network accelerator that acts as a peripheral nervous system on a robot and mimics the reflex arc found in humans. These results demonstrate the possibility of digitizing touch with superhuman performance. The implications are profound, and we anticipate potential applications in robotics (industrial, medical, agricultural, and consumer-level), virtual reality and telepresence, prosthetics, and e-commerce. Toward digitizing touch at scale, we open-source a modular platform to facilitate future research on the nature of touch.

We study how the choice of visual perspective affects learning and generalization in the context of physical manipulation from raw sensor observations. Compared with the more commonly used global third-person perspective, a hand-centric (eye-in-hand) perspective affords reduced observability, but we find that it consistently improves training efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization. These benefits hold across a variety of learning algorithms, experimental settings, and distribution shifts, and for both simulated and real robot apparatuses. However, this is only the case when hand-centric observability is sufficient; otherwise, including a third-person perspective is necessary for learning, but also harms out-of-distribution generalization. To mitigate this, we propose to regularize the third-person information stream via a variational information bottleneck. On six representative manipulation tasks with varying hand-centric observability adapted from the Meta-World benchmark, this results in a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agent operating from both perspectives improving its out-of-distribution generalization on every task. While some practitioners have long put cameras in the hands of robots, our work systematically analyzes the benefits of doing so and provides simple and broadly applicable insights for improving end-to-end learned vision-based robotic manipulation.

High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.

Driven by the demand for spatial intelligence and holistic scene perception, omnidirectional images (ODIs), which provide a complete 360 field of view, are receiving growing attention across diverse applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and embodied robotics. Despite their unique characteristics, ODIs exhibit remarkable differences from perspective images in geometric projection, spatial distribution, and boundary continuity, making it challenging for direct domain adaption from perspective methods. This survey reviews recent panoramic vision techniques with a particular emphasis on the perspective-to-panorama adaptation. We first revisit the panoramic imaging pipeline and projection methods to build the prior knowledge required for analyzing the structural disparities. Then, we summarize three challenges of domain adaptation: severe geometric distortions near the poles, non-uniform sampling in Equirectangular Projection (ERP), and periodic boundary continuity. Building on this, we cover 20+ representative tasks drawn from more than 300 research papers in two dimensions. On one hand, we present a cross-method analysis of representative strategies for addressing panoramic specific challenges across different tasks. On the other hand, we conduct a cross-task comparison and classify panoramic vision into four major categories: visual quality enhancement and assessment, visual understanding, multimodal understanding, and visual generation. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in data, models, and applications that will drive the advancement of panoramic vision research. We hope that our work can provide new insight and forward looking perspectives to advance the development of panoramic vision technologies. Our project page is https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Survey-of-Panorama

Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-effector reachability. Achieving these capabilities requires careful hardware design, but the resulting system complexity further complicates visuomotor policy learning. To address these challenges, we introduce the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a comprehensive framework for whole-body manipulation in diverse household tasks. Built on a bimanual, wheeled robot with a 4-DoF torso, BRS integrates a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies. We evaluate BRS on five challenging household tasks that not only emphasize the three core capabilities but also introduce additional complexities, such as long-range navigation, interaction with articulated and deformable objects, and manipulation in confined spaces. We believe that BRS's integrated robotic embodiment, data collection interface, and learning framework mark a significant step toward enabling real-world whole-body manipulation for everyday household tasks. BRS is open-sourced at https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/

Humanoid whole-body control requires adapting to diverse tasks such as navigation, loco-manipulation, and tabletop manipulation, each demanding a different mode of control. For example, navigation relies on root velocity tracking, while tabletop manipulation prioritizes upper-body joint angle tracking. Existing approaches typically train individual policies tailored to a specific command space, limiting their transferability across modes. We present the key insight that full-body kinematic motion imitation can serve as a common abstraction for all these tasks and provide general-purpose motor skills for learning multiple modes of whole-body control. Building on this, we propose HOVER (Humanoid Versatile Controller), a multi-mode policy distillation framework that consolidates diverse control modes into a unified policy. HOVER enables seamless transitions between control modes while preserving the distinct advantages of each, offering a robust and scalable solution for humanoid control across a wide range of modes. By eliminating the need for policy retraining for each control mode, our approach improves efficiency and flexibility for future humanoid applications.

Recent advances in imitation learning have shown significant promise for robotic control and embodied intelligence. However, achieving robust generalization across diverse mounted camera observations remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a video-based spatial perception framework that leverages 3D spatial representations to address environmental variability, with a focus on handling lighting changes. Our approach integrates a novel image augmentation technique, AugBlender, with a state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation model trained on internet-scale data. Together, these components form a cohesive system designed to enhance robustness and adaptability in dynamic scenarios. Our results demonstrate that our approach significantly boosts the success rate across diverse camera exposures, where previous models experience performance collapse. Our findings highlight the potential of video-based spatial perception models in advancing robustness for end-to-end robotic learning, paving the way for scalable, low-cost solutions in embodied intelligence.

We introduce perioperation, a paradigm for robotic data collection that sensorizes and records human manipulation while maximizing the transferability of the data to real robots. We implement this paradigm in DEXOP, a passive hand exoskeleton designed to maximize human ability to collect rich sensory (vision + tactile) data for diverse dexterous manipulation tasks in natural environments. DEXOP mechanically connects human fingers to robot fingers, providing users with direct contact feedback (via proprioception) and mirrors the human hand pose to the passive robot hand to maximize the transfer of demonstrated skills to the robot. The force feedback and pose mirroring make task demonstrations more natural for humans compared to teleoperation, increasing both speed and accuracy. We evaluate DEXOP across a range of dexterous, contact-rich tasks, demonstrating its ability to collect high-quality demonstration data at scale. Policies learned with DEXOP data significantly improve task performance per unit time of data collection compared to teleoperation, making DEXOP a powerful tool for advancing robot dexterity. Our project page is at https://dex-op.github.io.

Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires adaptation to various terrains. Recently, deep reinforcement learning, inspired by how legged animals learn to walk from their experiences, has been utilized to synthesize natural quadrupedal locomotion. However, state-of-the-art methods strongly depend on a complex and reliable sensing framework. Furthermore, prior works that rely only on proprioception have shown a limited demonstration for overcoming challenging terrains, especially for a long distance. This work proposes a novel quadrupedal locomotion learning framework that allows quadrupedal robots to walk through challenging terrains, even with limited sensing modalities. The proposed framework was validated in real-world outdoor environments with varying conditions within a single run for a long distance.

While generalist foundation models like Gemini and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive multi-modal competence, existing evaluations fail to test their intelligence in dynamic, interactive worlds. Static benchmarks lack agency, while interactive benchmarks suffer from a severe modal bottleneck, typically ignoring crucial auditory and temporal cues. To bridge this evaluation chasm, we introduce OmniPlay, a diagnostic benchmark designed not just to evaluate, but to probe the fusion and reasoning capabilities of agentic models across the full sensory spectrum. Built on a core philosophy of modality interdependence, OmniPlay comprises a suite of five game environments that systematically create scenarios of both synergy and conflict, forcing agents to perform genuine cross-modal reasoning. Our comprehensive evaluation of six leading omni-modal models reveals a critical dichotomy: they exhibit superhuman performance on high-fidelity memory tasks but suffer from systemic failures in challenges requiring robust reasoning and strategic planning. We demonstrate that this fragility stems from brittle fusion mechanisms, which lead to catastrophic performance degradation under modality conflict and uncover a counter-intuitive "less is more" paradox, where removing sensory information can paradoxically improve performance. Our findings suggest that the path toward robust AGI requires a research focus beyond scaling to explicitly address synergistic fusion. Our platform is available for anonymous review at https://github.com/fuqingbie/omni-game-benchmark.

Can multi-agent communication pressure extract discrete, compositional representations of invisible physical properties from frozen video features? We show that agents communicating through a Gumbel-Softmax bottleneck with iterated learning develop positionally disentangled protocols for latent properties (elasticity, friction, mass ratio) without property labels or supervision on message structure. With 4 agents, 100% of 80 seeds converge to near-perfect compositionality (PosDis=0.999, holdout 98.3%). Controls confirm multi-agent structure -- not bandwidth or temporal coverage -- drives this effect. Causal intervention shows surgical property disruption (~15% drop on targeted property, <3% on others). A controlled backbone comparison reveals that the perceptual prior determines what is communicable: DINOv2 dominates on spatially-visible ramp physics (98.3% vs 95.1%), while V-JEPA 2 dominates on dynamics-only collision physics (87.4% vs 77.7%, d=2.74). Scale-matched (d=3.37) and frame-matched (d=6.53) controls attribute this gap entirely to video-native pretraining. The frozen protocol supports action-conditioned planning (91.5%) with counterfactual velocity reasoning (r=0.780). Validation on Physics 101 real camera footage confirms 85.6% mass-comparison accuracy on unseen objects, temporal dynamics contributing +11.2% beyond static appearance, agent-scaling compositionality replicating at 90% for 4 agents, and causal intervention extending to real video (d=1.87, p=0.022).

Universal sound separation faces a fundamental misalignment: models optimized for low-level signal metrics often produce semantically contaminated outputs, failing to suppress perceptually salient interference from acoustically similar sources. We introduce a preference alignment perspective, analogous to aligning LLMs with human intent. To address this, we introduce MARS-Sep, a reinforcement learning framework that reformulates separation as decision making. Instead of simply regressing ground-truth masks, MARS-Sep learns a factorized Beta mask policy that is steered by a preference reward model and optimized by a stable, clipped trust-region surrogate. The reward, derived from a progressively-aligned audio-text-vision encoder, directly incentivizes semantic consistency with query prompts. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in Text-, Audio-, and Image-Queried separation, with notable improvements in signal metrics and semantic quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/mars-sep/MARS-Sep. Sound separation samples are available at https://mars-sep.github.io/.

While large-scale diffusion models have revolutionized video synthesis, achieving precise control over both multi-subject identity and multi-granularity motion remains a significant challenge. Recent attempts to bridge this gap often suffer from limited motion granularity, control ambiguity, and identity degradation, leading to suboptimal performance on identity preservation and motion control. In this work, we present DreamVideo-Omni, a unified framework enabling harmonious multi-subject customization with omni-motion control via a progressive two-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we integrate comprehensive control signals for joint training, encompassing subject appearances, global motion, local dynamics, and camera movements. To ensure robust and precise controllability, we introduce a condition-aware 3D rotary positional embedding to coordinate heterogeneous inputs and a hierarchical motion injection strategy to enhance global motion guidance. Furthermore, to resolve multi-subject ambiguity, we introduce group and role embeddings to explicitly anchor motion signals to specific identities, effectively disentangling complex scenes into independent controllable instances. In the second stage, to mitigate identity degradation, we design a latent identity reward feedback learning paradigm by training a latent identity reward model upon a pretrained video diffusion backbone. This provides motion-aware identity rewards in the latent space, prioritizing identity preservation aligned with human preferences. Supported by our curated large-scale dataset and the comprehensive DreamOmni Bench for multi-subject and omni-motion control evaluation, DreamVideo-Omni demonstrates superior performance in generating high-quality videos with precise controllability.

Synthesizing whole-body manipulation of articulated objects, including body motion, hand motion, and object motion, is a critical yet challenging task with broad applications in virtual humans and robotics. The core challenges are twofold. First, achieving realistic whole-body motion requires tight coordination between the hands and the rest of the body, as their movements are interdependent during manipulation. Second, articulated object manipulation typically involves high degrees of freedom and demands higher precision, often requiring the fingers to be placed at specific regions to actuate movable parts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel coordinated diffusion noise optimization framework. Specifically, we perform noise-space optimization over three specialized diffusion models for the body, left hand, and right hand, each trained on its own motion dataset to improve generalization. Coordination naturally emerges through gradient flow along the human kinematic chain, allowing the global body posture to adapt in response to hand motion objectives with high fidelity. To further enhance precision in hand-object interaction, we adopt a unified representation based on basis point sets (BPS), where end-effector positions are encoded as distances to the same BPS used for object geometry. This unified representation captures fine-grained spatial relationships between the hand and articulated object parts, and the resulting trajectories serve as targets to guide the optimization of diffusion noise, producing highly accurate interaction motion. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that our method outperforms existing approaches in motion quality and physical plausibility, and enables various capabilities such as object pose control, simultaneous walking and manipulation, and whole-body generation from hand-only data.

Multimodal learning enhances the perceptual capabilities of cognitive systems by integrating information from different sensory modalities. However, existing multimodal fusion research typically assumes static integration, not fully incorporating key dynamic mechanisms found in the brain. Specifically, the brain exhibits an inverse effectiveness phenomenon, wherein weaker unimodal cues yield stronger multisensory integration benefits; conversely, when individual modal cues are stronger, the effect of fusion is diminished. This mechanism enables biological systems to achieve robust cognition even with scarce or noisy perceptual cues. Inspired by this biological mechanism, we explore the relationship between multimodal output and information from individual modalities, proposing an inverse effectiveness driven multimodal fusion (IEMF) strategy. By incorporating this strategy into neural networks, we achieve more efficient integration with improved model performance and computational efficiency, demonstrating up to 50% reduction in computational cost across diverse fusion methods. We conduct experiments on audio-visual classification, continual learning, and question answering tasks to validate our method. Results consistently demonstrate that our method performs excellently in these tasks. To verify universality and generalization, we also conduct experiments on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), with results showing good adaptability to both network types. Our research emphasizes the potential of incorporating biologically inspired mechanisms into multimodal networks and provides promising directions for the future development of multimodal artificial intelligence. The code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/IEMF.

Video synthesis techniques are undergoing rapid progress, with controllability being a significant aspect of practical usability for end-users. Although text condition is an effective way to guide video synthesis, capturing the correct joint distribution between text descriptions and video motion remains a substantial challenge. In this paper, we present a disentangled and unified framework, namely I2VControl, that unifies multiple motion control tasks in image-to-video synthesis. Our approach partitions the video into individual motion units and represents each unit with disentangled control signals, which allows for various control types to be flexibly combined within our single system. Furthermore, our methodology seamlessly integrates as a plug-in for pre-trained models and remains agnostic to specific model architectures. We conduct extensive experiments, achieving excellent performance on various control tasks, and our method further facilitates user-driven creative combinations, enhancing innovation and creativity. The project page is: https://wanquanf.github.io/I2VControl .

Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e., kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-\dof robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics over time, both of which are computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops AkinoPDF, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning technique for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP and dynamics integration can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our method is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.

The capability of performing long-horizon, language-guided robotic manipulation tasks critically relies on leveraging historical information and generating coherent action sequences. However, such capabilities are often overlooked by existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. To solve this challenge, we propose LoLA (Long Horizon Latent Action Learning), a framework designed for robot manipulation that integrates long-term multi-view observations and robot proprioception to enable multi-step reasoning and action generation. We first employ Vision-Language Models to encode rich contextual features from historical sequences and multi-view observations. We further introduces a key module, State-Aware Latent Re-representation, which transforms visual inputs and language commands into actionable robot motion space. Unlike existing VLA approaches that merely concatenate robot proprioception (e.g., joint angles) with VL embeddings, this module leverages such robot states to explicitly ground VL representations in physical scale through a learnable "embodiment-anchored" latent space. We trained LoLA on diverse robotic pre-training datasets and conducted extensive evaluations on simulation benchmarks (SIMPLER and LIBERO), as well as two real-world tasks on Franka and Bi-Manual Aloha robots. Results show that LoLA significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods (e.g., pi0), particularly in long-horizon manipulation tasks.

Injury to the cervical spinal cord can cause quadriplegia, impairing muscle function in all four limbs. People with impaired hand function and mobility encounter significant difficulties in carrying out essential self-care and household tasks. Despite the impairment of their neural drive, their volitional myoelectric activity is often partially preserved. High-density electromyography (HDEMG) can detect this myoelectric activity, which can serve as control inputs to assistive devices. Previous HDEMG-controlled robotic interfaces have primarily been limited to controlling table-mounted robot arms. These have constrained reach capabilities. Instead, the ability to control mobile manipulators, which have no such workspace constraints, could allow individuals with quadriplegia to perform a greater variety of assistive tasks, thus restoring independence and reducing caregiver workload. In this study, we introduce a non-invasive wearable HDEMG interface with real-time myoelectric hand gesture recognition, enabling both coarse and fine control over the intricate mobility and manipulation functionalities of an 8 degree-of-freedom mobile manipulator. Our evaluation, involving 13 participants engaging in challenging self-care and household activities, demonstrates the potential of our wearable HDEMG system to profoundly enhance user independence by enabling non-invasive control of a mobile manipulator.

We present Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation Interface (HoMMI), a data collection and policy learning framework that learns whole-body mobile manipulation directly from robot-free human demonstrations. We augment UMI interfaces with egocentric sensing to capture the global context required for mobile manipulation, enabling portable, robot-free, and scalable data collection. However, naively incorporating egocentric sensing introduces a larger human-to-robot embodiment gap in both observation and action spaces, making policy transfer difficult. We explicitly bridge this gap with a cross-embodiment hand-eye policy design, including an embodiment agnostic visual representation; a relaxed head action representation; and a whole-body controller that realizes hand-eye trajectories through coordinated whole-body motion under robot-specific physical constraints. Together, these enable long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks requiring bimanual and whole-body coordination, navigation, and active perception. Results are best viewed on: https://hommi-robot.github.io

If human experience is any guide, operating effectively in unstructured environments -- like homes and offices -- requires robots to sense the forces during physical interaction. Yet, the lack of a versatile, accessible, and easily customizable tactile sensor has led to fragmented, sensor-specific solutions in robotic manipulation -- and in many cases, to force-unaware, sensorless approaches. With eFlesh, we bridge this gap by introducing a magnetic tactile sensor that is low-cost, easy to fabricate, and highly customizable. Building an eFlesh sensor requires only four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (<$5), a CAD model of the desired shape, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is constructed from tiled, parameterized microstructures, which allow for tuning the sensor's geometry and its mechanical response. We provide an open-source design tool that converts convex OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs for fabrication. This modular design framework enables users to create application-specific sensors, and to adjust sensitivity depending on the task. Our sensor characterization experiments demonstrate the capabilities of eFlesh: contact localization RMSE of 0.5 mm, and force prediction RMSE of 0.27 N for normal force and 0.12 N for shear force. We also present a learned slip detection model that generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy, and visuotactile control policies that improve manipulation performance by 40% over vision-only baselines -- achieving 91% average success rate for four precise tasks that require sub-mm accuracy for successful completion. All design files, code and the CAD-to-eFlesh STL conversion tool are open-sourced and available on https://e-flesh.com.

Standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically fine-tune a monolithic Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone explicitly for robotic control. However, this approach creates a critical tension between maintaining high-level general semantic understanding and learning low-level, fine-grained sensorimotor skills, often leading to "catastrophic forgetting" of the model's open-world capabilities. To resolve this conflict, we introduce TwinBrainVLA, a novel architecture that coordinates a generalist VLM retaining universal semantic understanding and a specialist VLM dedicated to embodied proprioception for joint robotic control. TwinBrainVLA synergizes a frozen "Left Brain", which retains robust general visual reasoning, with a trainable "Right Brain", specialized for embodied perception, via a novel Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (AsyMoT) mechanism. This design allows the Right Brain to dynamically query semantic knowledge from the frozen Left Brain and fuse it with proprioceptive states, providing rich conditioning for a Flow-Matching Action Expert to generate precise continuous controls. Extensive experiments on SimplerEnv and RoboCasa benchmarks demonstrate that TwinBrainVLA achieves superior manipulation performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines while explicitly preserving the comprehensive visual understanding capabilities of the pre-trained VLM, offering a promising direction for building general-purpose robots that simultaneously achieve high-level semantic understanding and low-level physical dexterity.

Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/

Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean differences across ICL demonstrations, are the canonical test case; the prediction: steering and decoding succeed or fail together. Across 12 tasks, 6 models from 3 families, and 4,032 directed cross-template pairs, we find the opposite. FV steering routinely succeeds where the logit lens cannot decode the correct answer at any intermediate layer, while the converse -- decodable without steerable -- is nearly empty (3 of 72). The gap is not representational dialect. A diagonal tuned lens closes 1 of 14 steerable-not-decodable cases; a 2-layer MLP probe with a Hewitt \& Liang control closes 5 of 10 via nonlinearly encoded structure but leaves 5 invisible to every decoder tested. Even at > 0.90 steering accuracy, projecting the FV through the unembedding yields incoherent token distributions: FVs encode computational instructions, not answer directions. A model-family asymmetry sharpens the picture. Mistral FVs rewrite intermediate representations, while Llama and Gemma FVs steer the final output without leaving a logit-lens-visible trace, corroborated by three signals (post-steering deltas, activation-patching recovery, FV norm-transfer correlations). A previously reported negative cosine-transfer correlation dissolves at scale, adding at most ΔR^2 = 0.011 beyond task identity. These results decompose the linear representation hypothesis into linear decodability and linear steerability and show they come apart opposite to intuition, with implications for safety monitoring: vocabulary-projection tools are blind to FV-style interventions on widely deployed model families.

Achieving generalized in-hand object rotation remains a significant challenge in robotics, largely due to the difficulty of transferring policies from simulation to the real world. The complex, contact-rich dynamics of dexterous manipulation create a "reality gap" that has limited prior work to constrained scenarios involving simple geometries, limited object sizes and aspect ratios, constrained wrist poses, or customized hands. We address this sim-to-real challenge with a novel framework that enables a single policy, trained in simulation, to generalize to a wide variety of objects and conditions in the real world. The core of our method is a joint-wise dynamics model that learns to bridge the reality gap by effectively fitting limited amount of real-world collected data and then adapting the sim policy's actions accordingly. The model is highly data-efficient and generalizable across different whole-hand interaction distributions by factorizing dynamics across joints, compressing system-wide influences into low-dimensional variables, and learning each joint's evolution from its own dynamic profile, implicitly capturing these net effects. We pair this with a fully autonomous data collection strategy that gathers diverse, real-world interaction data with minimal human intervention. Our complete pipeline demonstrates unprecedented generality: a single policy successfully rotates challenging objects with complex shapes (e.g., animals), high aspect ratios (up to 5.33), and small sizes, all while handling diverse wrist orientations and rotation axes. Comprehensive real-world evaluations and a teleoperation application for complex tasks validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Website: https://meowuu7.github.io/DexNDM/

Tactile perception has the potential to significantly enhance dexterous robotic manipulation by providing rich local information that can complement or substitute for other sensory modalities such as vision. However, because tactile sensing is inherently local, it is not well-suited for tasks that require broad spatial awareness or global scene understanding on its own. A human-inspired strategy to address this issue is to consider active perception techniques instead. That is, to actively guide sensors toward regions with more informative or significant features and integrate such information over time in order to understand a scene or complete a task. Both active perception and different methods for tactile sensing have received significant attention recently. Yet, despite advancements, both fields lack standardized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Tactile MNIST Benchmark Suite, an open-source, Gymnasium-compatible benchmark specifically designed for active tactile perception tasks, including localization, classification, and volume estimation. Our benchmark suite offers diverse simulation scenarios, from simple toy environments all the way to complex tactile perception tasks using vision-based tactile sensors. Furthermore, we also offer a comprehensive dataset comprising 13,500 synthetic 3D MNIST digit models and 153,600 real-world tactile samples collected from 600 3D printed digits. Using this dataset, we train a CycleGAN for realistic tactile simulation rendering. By providing standardized protocols and reproducible evaluation frameworks, our benchmark suite facilitates systematic progress in the fields of tactile sensing and active perception.

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

Reinforcement learning has shown strong promise for quadrupedal agile locomotion, even with proprioception-only sensing. In practice, however, sim-to-real gap and reward overfitting in complex terrains can produce policies that fail to transfer, while physical validation remains risky and inefficient. To address these challenges, we introduce a unified framework encompassing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) locomotion policy for robust multi-terrain representation with RoboGauge, a predictive assessment suite that quantifies sim-to-real transferability. The MoE policy employs a gated set of specialist experts to decompose latent terrain and command modeling, achieving superior deployment robustness and generalization via proprioception alone. RoboGauge further provides multi-dimensional proprioception-based metrics via sim-to-sim tests over terrains, difficulty levels, and domain randomizations, enabling reliable MoE policy selection without extensive physical trials. Experiments on a Unitree Go2 demonstrate robust locomotion on unseen challenging terrains, including snow, sand, stairs, slopes, and 30 cm obstacles. In dedicated high-speed tests, the robot reaches 4 m/s and exhibits an emergent narrow-width gait associated with improved stability at high velocity.

Recent large reconstruction models have made notable progress in generating high-quality 3D objects from single images. However, these methods often struggle with controllability, as they lack information from multiple views, leading to incomplete or inconsistent 3D reconstructions. To address this limitation, we introduce LucidFusion, a flexible end-to-end feed-forward framework that leverages the Relative Coordinate Map (RCM). Unlike traditional methods linking images to 3D world thorough pose, LucidFusion utilizes RCM to align geometric features coherently across different views, making it highly adaptable for 3D generation from arbitrary, unposed images. Furthermore, LucidFusion seamlessly integrates with the original single-image-to-3D pipeline, producing detailed 3D Gaussians at a resolution of 512 times 512, making it well-suited for a wide range of applications.

Understanding the physical world requires perceptual models grounded in physical laws rather than mere statistical correlations. However, existing multimodal learning frameworks, focused on vision and language, lack physical consistency and overlook the intrinsic causal relationships among an object's geometry, material, vibration modes, and the sounds it produces. We introduce VibraVerse, a large-scale geometry-acoustics alignment dataset that explicitly bridges the causal chain from 3D geometry -> physical attributes -> modal parameters -> acoustic signals. Each 3D model has explicit physical properties (density, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio) and volumetric geometry, from which modal eigenfrequencies and eigenvectors are computed for impact sound synthesis under controlled excitations. To establish this coherence, we introduce CLASP, a contrastive learning framework for cross-modal alignment that preserves the causal correspondence between an object's physical structure and its acoustic response. This framework enforces physically consistent alignment across modalities, ensuring that every sample is coherent, traceable to the governing equations, and embedded within a unified representation space spanning shape, image, and sound. Built upon VibraVerse, we define a suite of benchmark tasks for geometry-to-sound prediction, sound-guided shape reconstruction, and cross-modal representation learning. Extensive validations on these tasks demonstrate that models trained on VibraVerse exhibit superior accuracy, interpretability, and generalization across modalities. These results establish VibraVerse as a benchmark for physically consistent and causally interpretable multimodal learning, providing a foundation for sound-guided embodied perception and a deeper understanding of the physical world. The dataset will be open-sourced.

We present Vision in Action (ViA), an active perception system for bimanual robot manipulation. ViA learns task-relevant active perceptual strategies (e.g., searching, tracking, and focusing) directly from human demonstrations. On the hardware side, ViA employs a simple yet effective 6-DoF robotic neck to enable flexible, human-like head movements. To capture human active perception strategies, we design a VR-based teleoperation interface that creates a shared observation space between the robot and the human operator. To mitigate VR motion sickness caused by latency in the robot's physical movements, the interface uses an intermediate 3D scene representation, enabling real-time view rendering on the operator side while asynchronously updating the scene with the robot's latest observations. Together, these design elements enable the learning of robust visuomotor policies for three complex, multi-stage bimanual manipulation tasks involving visual occlusions, significantly outperforming baseline systems.

Video-Action Models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising framework for embodied intelligence, learning implicit world dynamics from raw video streams to produce temporally consistent action predictions. Although such models demonstrate strong performance on long-horizon tasks through visual reasoning, they remain limited in contact-rich scenarios where critical interaction states are only partially observable from vision alone. In particular, fine-grained force modulation and contact transitions are not reliably encoded in visual tokens, leading to unstable or imprecise behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Video-Tactile Action Model (VTAM), a multimodal world modeling framework that incorporates tactile perception as a complementary grounding signal. VTAM augments a pretrained video transformer with tactile streams via a lightweight modality transfer finetuning, enabling efficient cross-modal representation learning without tactile-language paired data or independent tactile pretraining. To stabilize multimodal fusion, we introduce a tactile regularization loss that enforces balanced cross-modal attention, preventing visual latent dominance in the action model. VTAM demonstrates superior performance in contact-rich manipulation, maintaining a robust success rate of 90 percent on average. In challenging scenarios such as potato chip pick-and-place requiring high-fidelity force awareness, VTAM outperforms the pi 0.5 baseline by 80 percent. Our findings demonstrate that integrating tactile feedback is essential for correcting visual estimation errors in world action models, providing a scalable approach to physically grounded embodied foundation models.

An embodied system must not only model the patterns of the external world but also understand its own motion dynamics. A motion dynamic model is essential for efficient skill acquisition and effective planning. In this work, we introduce the neural motion simulator (MoSim), a world model that predicts the future physical state of an embodied system based on current observations and actions. MoSim achieves state-of-the-art performance in physical state prediction and provides competitive performance across a range of downstream tasks. This works shows that when a world model is accurate enough and performs precise long-horizon predictions, it can facilitate efficient skill acquisition in imagined worlds and even enable zero-shot reinforcement learning. Furthermore, MoSim can transform any model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm into a model-based approach, effectively decoupling physical environment modeling from RL algorithm development. This separation allows for independent advancements in RL algorithms and world modeling, significantly improving sample efficiency and enhancing generalization capabilities. Our findings highlight that world models for motion dynamics is a promising direction for developing more versatile and capable embodied systems.

Humanoid robots have demonstrated robust locomotion capabilities using Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approaches. Further, to obtain human-like behaviors, existing methods integrate human motion-tracking or motion prior in the RL framework. However, these methods are limited in flat terrains with proprioception only, restricting their abilities to traverse challenging terrains with human-like gaits. In this work, we propose a novel framework using a mixture of latent residual experts with multi-discriminators to train an RL policy, which is capable of traversing complex terrains in controllable lifelike gaits with exteroception. Our two-stage training pipeline first teaches the policy to traverse complex terrains using a depth camera, and then enables gait-commanded switching between human-like gait patterns. We also design gait rewards to adjust human-like behaviors like robot base height. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that our framework exhibits exceptional performance in traversing complex terrains, and achieves seamless transitions between multiple human-like gait patterns.

Synthesizing human motion has advanced rapidly, yet realistic hand motion and bimanual interaction remain underexplored. Whole-body models often miss the fine-grained cues that drive dexterous behavior, finger articulation, contact timing, and inter-hand coordination, and existing resources lack high-fidelity bimanual sequences that capture nuanced finger dynamics and collaboration. To fill this gap, we present HandX, a unified foundation spanning data, annotation, and evaluation. We consolidate and filter existing datasets for quality, and collect a new motion-capture dataset targeting underrepresented bimanual interactions with detailed finger dynamics. For scalable annotation, we introduce a decoupled strategy that extracts representative motion features, e.g., contact events and finger flexion, and then leverages reasoning from large language models to produce fine-grained, semantically rich descriptions aligned with these features. Building on the resulting data and annotations, we benchmark diffusion and autoregressive models with versatile conditioning modes. Experiments demonstrate high-quality dexterous motion generation, supported by our newly proposed hand-focused metrics. We further observe clear scaling trends: larger models trained on larger, higher-quality datasets produce more semantically coherent bimanual motion. Our dataset is released to support future research.

Accurately perceiving an object's pose and shape is essential for precise grasping and manipulation. Compared to common vision-based methods, tactile sensing offers advantages in precision and immunity to occlusion when tracking and reconstructing objects in contact. This makes it particularly valuable for in-hand and other high-precision manipulation tasks. In this work, we present GelSLAM, a real-time 3D SLAM system that relies solely on tactile sensing to estimate object pose over long periods and reconstruct object shapes with high fidelity. Unlike traditional point cloud-based approaches, GelSLAM uses tactile-derived surface normals and curvatures for robust tracking and loop closure. It can track object motion in real time with low error and minimal drift, and reconstruct shapes with submillimeter accuracy, even for low-texture objects such as wooden tools. GelSLAM extends tactile sensing beyond local contact to enable global, long-horizon spatial perception, and we believe it will serve as a foundation for many precise manipulation tasks involving interaction with objects in hand. The video demo is available on our website: https://joehjhuang.github.io/gelslam.

Recent progress in video generation has led to substantial improvements in visual fidelity, yet ensuring physically consistent motion remains a fundamental challenge. Intuitively, this limitation can be attributed to the fact that real-world object motion unfolds in three-dimensional space, while video observations provide only partial, view-dependent projections of such dynamics. To address these issues, we propose OrthoPhys, a two-stage framework that leverages orthogonal-view geometry guidance to enforce physical plausibility. Instead of directly generating unstructured 2D videos, our first stage generates synchronized, four-view orthogonal videos of the foreground dynamics. By incorporating a geometry-enhanced attention mechanism across these orthogonal views, this stage effectively enforces 3D spatial coherence and implicitly grounds the motion in physical attributes. In the second stage, these physically consistent orthogonal foregrounds serve as rigid guidance to synthesize the final complete video, seamlessly learning the interaction between foreground dynamics and the background context. To support this orthogonal-view training paradigm, we construct PhysMV, a dataset containing 40K scenes, each consisting of four orthogonal viewpoints, resulting in a total of 160K video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoPhys significantly improves physical realism and spatial-temporal coherence over existing video generation methods. Project page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/Phys4D/.

Reconstructing biomechanically realistic 3D human motion - recovering both kinematics (motion) and kinetics (forces) - is a critical challenge. While marker-based systems are lab-bound and slow, popular monocular methods use oversimplified, anatomically inaccurate models (e.g., SMPL) and ignore physics, fundamentally limiting their biomechanical fidelity. In this work, we introduce MonoMSK, a hybrid framework that bridges data-driven learning and physics-based simulation for biomechanically realistic 3D human motion estimation from monocular video. MonoMSK jointly recovers both kinematics (motions) and kinetics (forces and torques) through an anatomically accurate musculoskeletal model. By integrating transformer-based inverse dynamics with differentiable forward kinematics and dynamics layers governed by ODE-based simulation, MonoMSK establishes a physics-regulated inverse-forward loop that enforces biomechanical causality and physical plausibility. A novel forward-inverse consistency loss further aligns motion reconstruction with the underlying kinetic reasoning. Experiments on BML-MoVi, BEDLAM, and OpenCap show that MonoMSK significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in kinematic accuracy, while for the first time enabling precise monocular kinetics estimation.

This paper presents a novel haptic device DeltaFinger designed to deliver the force of interaction with virtual objects by guiding user's finger with wearable delta mechanism. The developed interface is capable to deliver 3D force vector to the fingertip of the index finger of the user, allowing complex rendering of virtual reality (VR) environment. The developed device is able to produce the kinesthetic feedback up to 1.8 N in vertical projection and 0.9 N in horizontal projection without restricting the motion freedom of of the remaining fingers. The experimental results showed a sufficient precision in perception of force vector with DeltaFinger (mean force vector error of 0.6 rad). The proposed device potentially can be applied to VR communications, medicine, and navigation of the people with vision problems.

Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects remains a fundamental challenge for robots in human environments. Vision-based methods can infer hidden kinematics but can yield imprecise estimates on unfamiliar objects. Tactile approaches achieve robust control through contact feedback but require accurate initialization. This suggests a natural synergy: vision for global guidance, touch for local precision. Yet no framework systematically exploits this complementarity for generalized articulated manipulation. Here we present Vi-TacMan, which uses vision to propose grasps and coarse directions that seed a tactile controller for precise execution. By incorporating surface normals as geometric priors and modeling directions via von Mises-Fisher distributions, our approach achieves significant gains over baselines (all p<0.0001). Critically, manipulation succeeds without explicit kinematic models -- the tactile controller refines coarse visual estimates through real-time contact regulation. Tests on more than 50,000 simulated and diverse real-world objects confirm robust cross-category generalization. This work establishes that coarse visual cues suffice for reliable manipulation when coupled with tactile feedback, offering a scalable paradigm for autonomous systems in unstructured environments.

Machine learning has facilitated significant advancements across various robotics domains, including navigation, locomotion, and manipulation. Many such achievements have been driven by the extensive use of simulation as a critical tool for training and testing robotic systems prior to their deployment in real-world environments. However, simulations consist of abstractions and approximations that inevitably introduce discrepancies between simulated and real environments, known as the reality gap. These discrepancies significantly hinder the successful transfer of systems from simulation to the real world. Closing this gap remains one of the most pressing challenges in robotics. Recent advances in sim-to-real transfer have demonstrated promising results across various platforms, including locomotion, navigation, and manipulation. By leveraging techniques such as domain randomization, real-to-sim transfer, state and action abstractions, and sim-real co-training, many works have overcome the reality gap. However, challenges persist, and a deeper understanding of the reality gap's root causes and solutions is necessary. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the sim-to-real landscape, highlighting the causes, solutions, and evaluation metrics for the reality gap and sim-to-real transfer.

Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However, traditional motor-driven systems often fall short in this balancing act. Due to their rigid and often heavy design exacerbated by positioning the motors into the joints, faster motions of such robots transfer high forces at impact. To enable precise and safe dynamic motions, we introduce a four degree-of-freedom~(DoF) tendon-driven robot arm. Tendons allow placing the actuation at the base to reduce the robot's inertia, which we show significantly reduces peak collision forces compared to conventional robots with motors placed near the joints. Pairing our robot with pneumatic muscles allows generating high forces and highly accelerated motions, while benefiting from impact resilience through passive compliance. Since tendons are subject to additional friction and hence prone to wear and tear, we validate the reliability of our robotic arm on various experiments, including long-term dynamic motions. We also demonstrate its ease of control by quantifying the nonlinearities of the system and the performance on a challenging dynamic table tennis task learned from scratch using reinforcement learning. We open-source the entire hardware design, which can be largely 3D printed, the control software, and a proprioceptive dataset of 25 days of diverse robot motions at webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/pamy2.

Effective and generalizable control in video generation remains a significant challenge. While many methods rely on ambiguous or task-specific signals, we argue that a fundamental disentanglement of "appearance" and "motion" provides a more robust and scalable pathway. We propose FlexAM, a unified framework built upon a novel 3D control signal. This signal represents video dynamics as a point cloud, introducing three key enhancements: multi-frequency positional encoding to distinguish fine-grained motion, depth-aware positional encoding, and a flexible control signal for balancing precision and generative quality. This representation allows FlexAM to effectively disentangle appearance and motion, enabling a wide range of tasks including I2V/V2V editing, camera control, and spatial object editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexAM achieves superior performance across all evaluated tasks.

Motion capture from a limited number of body-worn sensors, such as inertial measurement units (IMUs) and pressure insoles, has important applications in health, human performance, and entertainment. Recent work has focused on accurately reconstructing whole-body motion from a specific sensor configuration using six IMUs. While a common goal across applications is to use the minimal number of sensors to achieve required accuracy, the optimal arrangement of the sensors might differ from application to application. We propose a single diffusion model, DiffusionPoser, which reconstructs human motion in real-time from an arbitrary combination of sensors, including IMUs placed at specified locations, and, pressure insoles. Unlike existing methods, our model grants users the flexibility to determine the number and arrangement of sensors tailored to the specific activity of interest, without the need for retraining. A novel autoregressive inferencing scheme ensures real-time motion reconstruction that closely aligns with measured sensor signals. The generative nature of DiffusionPoser ensures realistic behavior, even for degrees-of-freedom not directly measured. Qualitative results can be found on our website: https://diffusionposer.github.io/.

Diffusion-based policies have recently achieved remarkable success in robotics by formulating action prediction as a conditional denoising process. However, the standard practice of sampling from random Gaussian noise often requires multiple iterative steps to produce clean actions, leading to high inference latency that incurs a major bottleneck for real-time control. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of uninformed noise sampling and propose Action-to-Action flow matching (A2A), a novel policy paradigm that shifts from random sampling to initialization informed by the previous proprioceptive action. Unlike existing methods that treat proprioceptive action feedback as static conditions, A2A leverages historical proprioceptive sequences, embedding them into a high-dimensional latent space as the starting point for action generation. This design bypasses costly iterative denoising while effectively capturing the robot's physical dynamics and temporal continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A2A exhibits high training efficiency, fast inference speed, and improved generalization. Notably, A2A enables high-quality action generation in as few as a single inference step, and exhibits superior robustness to visual perturbations and enhanced generalization to unseen configurations. Lastly, we also extend A2A to video generation, demonstrating its broader versatility in temporal modeling. Project site: https://lorenzo-0-0.github.io/A2A_Flow_Matching.

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly pivotal for generalist robot manipulation, enabling tasks such as physical reasoning, policy generation, and failure detection. However, their proficiency in these high-level applications often assumes a deep understanding of low-level physical prerequisites, a capability that remains largely unverified. For robots to perform actions reliably, they must comprehend intrinsic object properties (e.g., material, weight), action affordances (e.g., graspable, stackable), and physical constraints (e.g., stability, reachability, or an object's state, such as being closed). Despite the widespread use of VLMs in manipulation tasks, we argue that off-the-shelf models may lack this granular, physically grounded understanding, as such prerequisites are often overlooked during training. To address this critical gap, we introduce PAC Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate VLMs on their understanding of core Properties, Affordances, and Constraints (PAC) from a task executability perspective. PAC Bench features a diverse dataset with over 30,000 annotations, comprising 673 real-world images (115 object classes, 15 property types, and 1 to 3 affordances defined per class), 100 real-world humanoid-view scenarios, and 120 unique simulated constraint scenarios across four tasks. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the ability of current VLMs to grasp fundamental physical concepts, highlighting limitations in their suitability for reliable robot manipulation and pointing to key areas for targeted research. PAC Bench also serves as a standardized benchmark for rigorously evaluating physical reasoning in VLMs and guiding the development of more robust, physically grounded models for robotic applications. Project Page: https://pacbench.github.io/

Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods estimate the 3D positions of joints from individual images. Existing 3D HPE approaches often use the cropped image alone as input for their models. However, the relative depths of joints cannot be accurately estimated from cropped images without the corresponding camera intrinsics, which determine the perspective relationship between 3D objects and the cropped images. In this work, we introduce Perspective Encoding (PE) to encode the camera intrinsics of the cropped images. Moreover, since the human subject can appear anywhere within the original image, the perspective relationship between the 3D scene and the cropped image differs significantly, which complicates model fitting. Additionally, the further the human subject deviates from the image center, the greater the perspective distortions in the cropped image. To address these issues, we propose Perspective Rotation (PR), a transformation applied to the original image that centers the human subject, thereby reducing perspective distortions and alleviating the difficulty of model fitting. By incorporating PE and PR, we propose a novel 3D HPE framework, PersPose. Experimental results demonstrate that PersPose achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M datasets. For example, on the in-the-wild dataset 3DPW, PersPose achieves an MPJPE of 60.1 mm, 7.54% lower than the previous SOTA approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/KenAdamsJoseph/PersPose.

Imitation learning provides a promising approach to dexterous hand manipulation, but its effectiveness is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-fidelity data. Existing data-collection pipelines suffer from inaccurate motion retargeting, low data-collection efficiency, and missing high-resolution fingertip tactile sensing. We address this gap with MILE, a mechanically isomorphic teleoperation and data-collection system co-designed from human hand to exoskeleton to robotic hand. The exoskeleton is anthropometrically derived from the human hand, and the robotic hand preserves one-to-one joint-position isomorphism, eliminating nonlinear retargeting and enabling precise, natural control. The exoskeleton achieves a multi-joint mean absolute angular error below one degree, while the robotic hand integrates compact fingertip visuotactile modules that provide high-resolution tactile observations. Built on this retargeting-free interface, we teleoperate complex, contact-rich in-hand manipulation and efficiently collect a multimodal dataset comprising high-resolution fingertip visuotactile signals, RGB-D images, and joint positions. The teleoperation pipeline achieves a mean success rate improvement of 64%. Incorporating fingertip tactile observations further increases the success rate by an average of 25% over the vision-only baseline, validating the fidelity and utility of the dataset. Further details are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/mile-system.

The current dominant paradigm in sensorimotor control, whether imitation or reinforcement learning, is to train policies directly in raw action spaces such as torque, joint angle, or end-effector position. This forces the agent to make decisions individually at each timestep in training, and hence, limits the scalability to continuous, high-dimensional, and long-horizon tasks. In contrast, research in classical robotics has, for a long time, exploited dynamical systems as a policy representation to learn robot behaviors via demonstrations. These techniques, however, lack the flexibility and generalizability provided by deep learning or reinforcement learning and have remained under-explored in such settings. In this work, we begin to close this gap and embed the structure of a dynamical system into deep neural network-based policies by reparameterizing action spaces via second-order differential equations. We propose Neural Dynamic Policies (NDPs) that make predictions in trajectory distribution space as opposed to prior policy learning methods where actions represent the raw control space. The embedded structure allows end-to-end policy learning for both reinforcement and imitation learning setups. We show that NDPs outperform the prior state-of-the-art in terms of either efficiency or performance across several robotic control tasks for both imitation and reinforcement learning setups. Project video and code are available at https://shikharbahl.github.io/neural-dynamic-policies/

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.

Teleoperation of robotic systems for precise and delicate object grasping requires high-fidelity haptic feedback to obtain comprehensive real-time information about the grasp. In such cases, the most common approach is to use kinesthetic feedback. However, a single contact point information is insufficient to detect the dynamically changing shape of soft objects. This paper proposes a novel telemanipulation system that provides kinesthetic and cutaneous stimuli to the user's hand to achieve accurate liquid dispensing by dexterously manipulating the deformable object (i.e., pipette). The experimental results revealed that the proposed approach to provide the user with multimodal haptic feedback considerably improves the quality of dosing with a remote pipette. Compared with pure visual feedback, the relative dosing error decreased by 66\% and task execution time decreased by 18\% when users manipulated the deformable pipette with a multimodal haptic interface in combination with visual feedback. The proposed technology can be potentially implemented in delicate dosing procedures during the antibody tests for COVID-19, chemical experiments, operation with organic materials, and telesurgery.

While large language models have become the prevailing approach for agentic reasoning and planning, their success in symbolic domains does not readily translate to the physical world. Spatial intelligence, the ability to perceive 3D structure, reason about object relationships, and act under physical constraints, is an orthogonal capability that proves important for embodied agents. Existing surveys address either agentic architectures or spatial domains in isolation. None provide a unified framework connecting these complementary capabilities. This paper bridges that gap. Through a thorough review of over 2,000 papers, citing 742 works from top-tier venues, we introduce a unified three-axis taxonomy connecting agentic capabilities with spatial tasks across scales. Crucially, we distinguish spatial grounding (metric understanding of geometry and physics) from symbolic grounding (associating images with text), arguing that perception alone does not confer agency. Our analysis reveals three key findings mapped to these axes: (1) hierarchical memory systems (Capability axis) are important for long-horizon spatial tasks. (2) GNN-LLM integration (Task axis) is a promising approach for structured spatial reasoning. (3) World models (Scale axis) are essential for safe deployment across micro-to-macro spatial scales. We conclude by identifying six grand challenges and outlining directions for future research, including the need for unified evaluation frameworks to standardize cross-domain assessment. This taxonomy provides a foundation for unifying fragmented research efforts and enabling the next generation of spatially-aware autonomous systems in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and geospatial intelligence.

We study the problem of functional retargeting: learning dexterous manipulation policies to track object states from human hand-object demonstrations. We focus on long-horizon, bimanual tasks with articulated objects, which is challenging due to large action space, spatiotemporal discontinuities, and embodiment gap between human and robot hands. We propose DexMachina, a novel curriculum-based algorithm: the key idea is to use virtual object controllers with decaying strength: an object is first driven automatically towards its target states, such that the policy can gradually learn to take over under motion and contact guidance. We release a simulation benchmark with a diverse set of tasks and dexterous hands, and show that DexMachina significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our algorithm and benchmark enable a functional comparison for hardware designs, and we present key findings informed by quantitative and qualitative results. With the recent surge in dexterous hand development, we hope this work will provide a useful platform for identifying desirable hardware capabilities and lower the barrier for contributing to future research. Videos and more at https://project-dexmachina.github.io/

Humanoid robots capable of autonomous operation in diverse environments have long been a goal for roboticists. However, autonomous manipulation by humanoid robots has largely been restricted to one specific scene, primarily due to the difficulty of acquiring generalizable skills. Recent advances in 3D visuomotor policies, such as the 3D Diffusion Policy (DP3), have shown promise in extending these capabilities to wilder environments. However, 3D visuomotor policies often rely on camera calibration and point-cloud segmentation, which present challenges for deployment on mobile robots like humanoids. In this work, we introduce the Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3), a novel 3D visuomotor policy that eliminates these constraints by leveraging egocentric 3D visual representations. We demonstrate that iDP3 enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously perform skills in diverse real-world scenarios, using only data collected in the lab. Videos are available at: https://humanoid-manipulation.github.io

Rich contact perception is crucial for robotic manipulation, yet traditional tactile skins remain expensive and complex to integrate. This paper presents a scalable alternative: high-accuracy whole-body touch localization via vibro-acoustic sensing. By equipping a robotic hand with seven low-cost piezoelectric microphones and leveraging an Audio Spectrogram Transformer, we decode the vibrational signatures generated during physical interaction. Extensive evaluation across stationary and dynamic tasks reveals a localization error of under 5 mm in static conditions. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the distinct influence of material properties: stiff materials (e.g., metal) excel in impulse response localization due to sharp, high-bandwidth responses, whereas textured materials (e.g., wood) provide superior friction-based features for trajectory tracking. The system demonstrates robustness to the robot's own motion, maintaining effective tracking even during active operation. Our primary contribution is demonstrating that complex physical contact dynamics can be effectively decoded from simple vibrational signals, offering a viable pathway to widespread, affordable contact perception in robotics. To accelerate research, we provide our full datasets, models, and experimental setups as open-source resources.

High-quality, long-horizon demonstrations are essential for embodied AI, yet acquiring such data for tightly coupled wheeled mobile manipulators remains a fundamental bottleneck. Unlike fixed-base systems, mobile manipulators require continuous coordination between SE(2) locomotion and precise manipulation, exposing limitations in existing teleoperation and wearable interfaces. We present SuperSuit, a bimodal data acquisition framework that supports both robot-in-the-loop teleoperation and active demonstration under a shared kinematic interface. Both modalities produce structurally identical joint-space trajectories, enabling direct data mixing without modifying downstream policies. For locomotion, SuperSuit maps natural human stepping to continuous planar base velocities, eliminating discrete command switches. For manipulation, it employs a strictly isomorphic wearable arm in both modes, while policy training is formulated in a shift-invariant delta-joint representation to mitigate calibration offsets and structural compliance without inverse kinematics. Real-world experiments on long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks show 2.6times higher demonstration throughput in active mode compared to a teleoperation baseline, comparable policy performance when substituting teleoperation data with active demonstrations at fixed dataset size, and monotonic performance improvement as active data volume increases. These results indicate that consistent kinematic representations across collection modalities enable scalable data acquisition for long-horizon mobile manipulation.

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots is a key objective in the field of robotic manipulation. Recent advancements in 3D-based imitation learning have shown promising results, providing an effective pathway to achieve this goal. However, obtaining high-quality 3D representations presents two key problems: (1) the quality of point clouds captured by a single-view camera is significantly affected by factors such as camera resolution, positioning, and occlusions caused by the dexterous hand; (2) the global point clouds lack crucial contact information and spatial correspondences, which are necessary for fine-grained dexterous manipulation tasks. To eliminate these limitations, we propose CordViP, a novel framework that constructs and learns correspondences by leveraging the robust 6D pose estimation of objects and robot proprioception. Specifically, we first introduce the interaction-aware point clouds, which establish correspondences between the object and the hand. These point clouds are then used for our pre-training policy, where we also incorporate object-centric contact maps and hand-arm coordination information, effectively capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities with an average success rate of 90\% in four real-world tasks, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness of CordViP to different objects, viewpoints, and scenarios. Code and videos are available on https://aureleopku.github.io/CordViP.

In recent decades, several assistive technologies have been developed for visually impaired and blind (VIB) individuals to improve their ability to navigate independently and safely. At the same time, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have become sufficiently robust and efficient to be adopted in the development of these assistive technologies. In this paper, we first report the results of an anonymous worldwide survey conducted with VIB people to understand their experiences, needs, and challenges in navigation, differentiating our approach from prior work that often has a limited geographic scope and focuses on specific challenges. We then present a systematic literature review of recent studies on SLAM-based solutions for VIB people. This review explores various SLAM techniques employed in this context. We discuss the advantages and limitations of these techniques for VIB navigation. Moreover, we examined a range of challenging situations addressed in the studies included in this review. We explain how SLAM-based solutions offer potential to improve the ability of visually impaired individuals to navigate effectively. Finally, we present future opportunities and challenges in this domain.

The increasing demand for immersive AR/VR applications and spatial intelligence has heightened the need to generate high-quality scene-level and 360{\deg} panoramic video. However, most video diffusion models are constrained by limited resolution and aspect ratio, which restricts their applicability to scene-level dynamic content synthesis. In this work, we propose the DynamicScaler, addressing these challenges by enabling spatially scalable and panoramic dynamic scene synthesis that preserves coherence across panoramic scenes of arbitrary size. Specifically, we introduce a Offset Shifting Denoiser, facilitating efficient, synchronous, and coherent denoising panoramic dynamic scenes via a diffusion model with fixed resolution through a seamless rotating Window, which ensures seamless boundary transitions and consistency across the entire panoramic space, accommodating varying resolutions and aspect ratios. Additionally, we employ a Global Motion Guidance mechanism to ensure both local detail fidelity and global motion continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior content and motion quality in panoramic scene-level video generation, offering a training-free, efficient, and scalable solution for immersive dynamic scene creation with constant VRAM consumption regardless of the output video resolution. Our project page is available at https://dynamic-scaler.pages.dev/.

For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) generating sensor signals in novel scenarios, and 3) learning sensor-based policies. For visuotactile sensors, interpretation has been facilitated by their close relationship with vision sensors (e.g., RGB cameras). However, generation is still difficult, as visuotactile sensors typically involve contact, deformation, illumination, and imaging, all of which are expensive to simulate; in turn, policy learning has been challenging, as simulation cannot be leveraged for large-scale data collection. We present TacSL (taxel), a library for GPU-based visuotactile sensor simulation and learning. TacSL can be used to simulate visuotactile images and extract contact-force distributions over 200times faster than the prior state-of-the-art, all within the widely-used Isaac Gym simulator. Furthermore, TacSL provides a learning toolkit containing multiple sensor models, contact-intensive training environments, and online/offline algorithms that can facilitate policy learning for sim-to-real applications. On the algorithmic side, we introduce a novel online reinforcement-learning algorithm called asymmetric actor-critic distillation (\sysName), designed to effectively and efficiently learn tactile-based policies in simulation that can transfer to the real world. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our library and algorithms by evaluating the benefits of distillation and multimodal sensing for contact-rich manip ulation tasks, and most critically, performing sim-to-real transfer. Supplementary videos and results are at https://iakinola23.github.io/tacsl/.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced robot manipulation through large-scale pretraining, but real-world deployment remains challenging due to partial observability and delayed feedback. Reinforcement learning addresses this via value functions, which assess task progress and guide policy improvement. However, existing value models built on vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture temporal dynamics, undermining reliable value estimation in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose ViVa, a video-generative value model that repurposes a pretrained video generator for value estimation. Taking the current observation and robot proprioception as input, ViVa jointly predicts future proprioception and a scalar value for the current state. By leveraging the spatiotemporal priors of a pretrained video generator, our approach grounds value estimation in anticipated embodiment dynamics, moving beyond static snapshots to intrinsically couple value with foresight. Integrated into RECAP, ViVa delivers substantial improvements on real-world box assembly. Qualitative analysis across all three tasks confirms that ViVa produces more reliable value signals, accurately reflecting task progress. By leveraging spatiotemporal priors from video corpora, ViVa also generalizes to novel objects, highlighting the promise of video-generative models for value estimation.

Mobile manipulation in dynamic environments is challenging due to movable obstacles blocking the robot's path. Traditional methods, which treat navigation and manipulation as separate tasks, often fail in such 'manipulate-to-navigate' scenarios, as obstacles must be removed before navigation. In these cases, active interaction with the environment is required to clear obstacles while ensuring sufficient space for movement. To address the manipulate-to-navigate problem, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach for learning manipulation actions that facilitate subsequent navigation. Our method combines manipulability priors to focus the robot on high manipulability body positions with affordance maps for selecting high-quality manipulation actions. By focusing on feasible and meaningful actions, our approach reduces unnecessary exploration and allows the robot to learn manipulation strategies more effectively. We present two new manipulate-to-navigate simulation tasks called Reach and Door with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. The first task tests whether the robot can select a good hand position in the target area such that the robot base can move effectively forward while keeping the end effector position fixed. The second task requires the robot to move a door aside in order to clear the navigation path. Both of these tasks need first manipulation and then navigating the base forward. Results show that our method allows a robot to effectively interact with and traverse dynamic environments. Finally, we transfer the learned policy to a real Boston Dynamics Spot robot, which successfully performs the Reach task.

Three-dimensional (3D) applications have come to every corner of life. We present 3DTouch, a novel 3D wearable input device worn on the fingertip for interacting with 3D applications. 3DTouch is self-contained, and designed to universally work on various 3D platforms. The device employs touch input for the benefits of passive haptic feedback, and movement stability. Moreover, with touch interaction, 3DTouch is conceptually less fatiguing to use over many hours than 3D spatial input devices such as Kinect. Our approach relies on relative positioning technique using an optical laser sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit. We implemented a set of 3D interaction techniques including selection, translation, and rotation using 3DTouch. An evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space. With 3DTouch project, we would like to provide an input device that reduces the gap between 3D applications and users.

The integrated inertial system, typically integrating an IMU and an exteroceptive sensor such as radar, LiDAR, and camera, has been widely accepted and applied in modern robotic applications for ego-motion estimation, motion control, or autonomous exploration. To improve system accuracy, robustness, and further usability, both multiple and various sensors are generally resiliently integrated, which benefits the system performance regarding failure tolerance, perception capability, and environment compatibility. For such systems, accurate and consistent spatiotemporal calibration is required to maintain a unique spatiotemporal framework for multi-sensor fusion. Considering most existing calibration methods (i) are generally oriented to specific integrated inertial systems, (ii) often only focus on spatial determination, (iii) usually require artificial targets, lacking convenience and usability, we propose iKalibr: a unified targetless spatiotemporal calibration framework for resilient integrated inertial systems, which overcomes the above issues, and enables both accurate and consistent calibration. Altogether four commonly employed sensors are supported in iKalibr currently, namely IMU, radar, LiDAR, and camera. The proposed method starts with a rigorous and efficient dynamic initialization, where all parameters in the estimator would be accurately recovered. Subsequently, several continuous-time batch optimizations are conducted to refine the initialized parameters toward better states. Sufficient real-world experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility and evaluate the calibration performance of iKalibr. The results demonstrate that iKalibr can achieve accurate resilient spatiotemporal calibration. We open-source our implementations at (https://github.com/Unsigned-Long/iKalibr) to benefit the research community.

Controlling both camera motion and object dynamics is essential for coherent and expressive video generation, yet current methods typically handle only one motion type or rely on ambiguous 2D cues that entangle camera-induced parallax with true object movement. We present SymphoMotion, a unified motion-control framework that jointly governs camera trajectories and object dynamics within a single model. SymphoMotion features a Camera Trajectory Control mechanism that integrates explicit camera paths with geometry-aware cues to ensure stable, structurally consistent viewpoint transitions, and an Object Dynamics Control mechanism that combines 2D visual guidance with 3D trajectory embeddings to enable depth-aware, spatially coherent object manipulation. To support large-scale training and evaluation, we further construct RealCOD-25K, a comprehensive real-world dataset containing paired camera poses and object-level 3D trajectories across diverse indoor and outdoor scenes, addressing a key data gap in unified motion control. Extensive experiments and user studies show that SymphoMotion significantly outperforms existing methods in visual fidelity, camera controllability, and object-motion accuracy, establishing a new benchmark for unified motion control in video generation.Codes and data are publicly available at https://grenoble-zhang.github.io/SymphoMotion/.

Real-world contact-rich manipulation demands robots to perceive temporal tactile feedback, capture subtle surface deformations, and reason about object properties as well as force dynamics. Although optical tactile sensors are uniquely capable of providing such rich information, existing tactile datasets and models remain limited. These resources primarily focus on object-level attributes (e.g., material) while largely overlooking fine-grained tactile temporal dynamics during physical interactions. We consider that advancing dynamic tactile perception requires a systematic hierarchy of dynamic perception capabilities to guide both data collection and model design. To address the lack of tactile data with rich dynamic information, we present ToucHD, a large-scale hierarchical tactile dataset spanning tactile atomic actions, real-world manipulations, and touch-force paired data. Beyond scale, ToucHD establishes a comprehensive tactile dynamic data ecosystem that explicitly supports hierarchical perception capabilities from the data perspective. Building on it, we propose AnyTouch 2, a general tactile representation learning framework for diverse optical tactile sensors that unifies object-level understanding with fine-grained, force-aware dynamic perception. The framework captures both pixel-level and action-specific deformations across frames, while explicitly modeling physical force dynamics, thereby learning multi-level dynamic perception capabilities from the model perspective. We evaluate our model on benchmarks that covers static object properties and dynamic physical attributes, as well as real-world manipulation tasks spanning multiple tiers of dynamic perception capabilities-from basic object-level understanding to force-aware dexterous manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate consistent and strong performance across sensors and tasks.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential for generating robotic decision-making data, with trajectory conditions further enabling fine-grained control. However, existing trajectory-based methods primarily focus on individual object motion and struggle to capture multi-object interaction crucial in complex robotic manipulation. This limitation arises from multi-feature entanglement in overlapping regions, which leads to degraded visual fidelity. To address this, we present RoboMaster, a novel framework that models inter-object dynamics through a collaborative trajectory formulation. Unlike prior methods that decompose objects, our core is to decompose the interaction process into three sub-stages: pre-interaction, interaction, and post-interaction. Each stage is modeled using the feature of the dominant object, specifically the robotic arm in the pre- and post-interaction phases and the manipulated object during interaction, thereby mitigating the drawback of multi-object feature fusion present during interaction in prior work. To further ensure subject semantic consistency throughout the video, we incorporate appearance- and shape-aware latent representations for objects. Extensive experiments on the challenging Bridge V2 dataset, as well as in-the-wild evaluation, demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in trajectory-controlled video generation for robotic manipulation.

One of the roadblocks for training generalist robotic models today is heterogeneity. Previous robot learning methods often collect data to train with one specific embodiment for one task, which is expensive and prone to overfitting. This work studies the problem of learning policy representations through heterogeneous pre-training on robot data across different embodiments and tasks at scale. We propose Heterogeneous Pre-trained Transformers (HPT), which pre-train a large, shareable trunk of a policy neural network to learn a task and embodiment agnostic shared representation. This general architecture aligns the specific proprioception and vision inputs from distinct embodiments to a short sequence of tokens and then processes such tokens to map to control robots for different tasks. Leveraging the recent large-scale multi-embodiment real-world robotic datasets as well as simulation, deployed robots, and human video datasets, we investigate pre-training policies across heterogeneity. We conduct experiments to investigate the scaling behaviors of training objectives, to the extent of 52 datasets. HPTs outperform several baselines and enhance the fine-tuned policy performance by over 20% on unseen tasks in multiple simulator benchmarks and real-world settings. See the project website (https://liruiw.github.io/hpt/) for code and videos.

Recent diffusion-based video generation models can synthesize visually plausible videos, yet they often struggle to satisfy physical constraints. A key reason is that most existing approaches remain single-stage: they entangle high-level physical understanding with low-level visual synthesis, making it hard to generate content that require explicit physical reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free three-stage pipeline,PhyRPR:Phy\uline{Reason}--Phy\uline{Plan}--Phy\uline{Refine}, which decouples physical understanding from visual synthesis. Specifically, PhyReason uses a large multimodal model for physical state reasoning and an image generator for keyframe synthesis; PhyPlan deterministically synthesizes a controllable coarse motion scaffold; and PhyRefine injects this scaffold into diffusion sampling via a latent fusion strategy to refine appearance while preserving the planned dynamics. This staged design enables explicit physical control during generation. Extensive experiments under physics constraints show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and motion controllability.

Coordinating the motion between lower and upper limbs and aligning limb control with perception are substantial challenges in robotics, particularly in dynamic environments. To this end, we introduce an approach for enabling legged mobile manipulators to play badminton, a task that requires precise coordination of perception, locomotion, and arm swinging. We propose a unified reinforcement learning-based control policy for whole-body visuomotor skills involving all degrees of freedom to achieve effective shuttlecock tracking and striking. This policy is informed by a perception noise model that utilizes real-world camera data, allowing for consistent perception error levels between simulation and deployment and encouraging learned active perception behaviors. Our method includes a shuttlecock prediction model, constrained reinforcement learning for robust motion control, and integrated system identification techniques to enhance deployment readiness. Extensive experimental results in a variety of environments validate the robot's capability to predict shuttlecock trajectories, navigate the service area effectively, and execute precise strikes against human players, demonstrating the feasibility of using legged mobile manipulators in complex and dynamic sports scenarios.

Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-through-skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing capabilities, while modern imitation learning provides powerful tools for policy acquisition. However, existing STS designs lack simultaneous multimodal perception and suffer from unreliable tactile tracking. Furthermore, integrating these rich multimodal signals into learning-based manipulation pipelines remains an open challenge. We introduce TacThru, an STS sensor enabling simultaneous visual perception and robust tactile signal extraction, and TacThru-UMI, an imitation learning framework that leverages these multimodal signals for manipulation. Our sensor features a fully transparent elastomer, persistent illumination, novel keyline markers, and efficient tracking, while our learning system integrates these signals through a Transformer-based Diffusion Policy. Experiments on five challenging real-world tasks show that TacThru-UMI achieves an average success rate of 85.5%, significantly outperforming the baselines of alternating tactile-visual (66.3%) and vision-only (55.4%). The system excels in critical scenarios, including contact detection with thin and soft objects and precision manipulation requiring multimodal coordination. This work demonstrates that combining simultaneous multimodal perception with modern learning frameworks enables more precise, adaptable robotic manipulation.

Dynamic and static components in scenes often exhibit distinct properties, yet most 4D reconstruction methods treat them indiscriminately, leading to suboptimal performance in both cases. This work introduces SDD-4DGS, the first framework for static-dynamic decoupled 4D scene reconstruction based on Gaussian Splatting. Our approach is built upon a novel probabilistic dynamic perception coefficient that is naturally integrated into the Gaussian reconstruction pipeline, enabling adaptive separation of static and dynamic components. With carefully designed implementation strategies to realize this theoretical framework, our method effectively facilitates explicit learning of motion patterns for dynamic elements while maintaining geometric stability for static structures. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that SDD-4DGS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction fidelity, with enhanced detail restoration for static structures and precise modeling of dynamic motions. The code will be released.

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.

Ensuring vertical separation is a key means of maintaining safe separation between aircraft in congested airspace. Aircraft trajectories are modelled in the presence of significant epistemic uncertainty, leading to discrepancies between observed trajectories and the predictions of deterministic models, hampering the task of planning to ensure safe separation. In this paper a probabilistic model is presented, for the purpose of emulating the trajectories of aircraft in climb and bounding the uncertainty of the predicted trajectory. A monotonic, functional representation exploits the spatio-temporal correlations in the radar observations. Through the use of Gaussian Process Emulators, features that parameterise the climb are mapped directly to functional outputs, providing a fast approximation, while ensuring that the resulting trajectory is monotonic. The model was applied as a probabilistic digital twin for aircraft in climb and baselined against BADA, a deterministic model widely used in industry. When applied to an unseen test dataset, the probabilistic model was found to provide a mean prediction that was 21% more accurate, with a 34% sharper forecast.

Handheld grippers are increasingly used to collect human demonstrations due to their ease of deployment and versatility. However, most existing designs lack tactile sensing, despite the critical role of tactile feedback in precise manipulation. We present a portable, lightweight gripper with integrated tactile sensors that enables synchronized collection of visual and tactile data in diverse, real-world, and in-the-wild settings. Building on this hardware, we propose a cross-modal representation learning framework that integrates visual and tactile signals while preserving their distinct characteristics. The learning procedure allows the emergence of interpretable representations that consistently focus on contacting regions relevant for physical interactions. When used for downstream manipulation tasks, these representations enable more efficient and effective policy learning, supporting precise robotic manipulation based on multimodal feedback. We validate our approach on fine-grained tasks such as test tube insertion and pipette-based fluid transfer, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness under external disturbances. Our project page is available at https://binghao-huang.github.io/touch_in_the_wild/ .

The ability to accurately recognize, localize and separate sound sources is fundamental to any audio-visual perception task. Historically, these abilities were tackled separately, with several methods developed independently for each task. However, given the interconnected nature of source localization, separation, and recognition, independent models are likely to yield suboptimal performance as they fail to capture the interdependence between these tasks. To address this problem, we propose a unified audio-visual learning framework (dubbed OneAVM) that integrates audio and visual cues for joint localization, separation, and recognition. OneAVM comprises a shared audio-visual encoder and task-specific decoders trained with three objectives. The first objective aligns audio and visual representations through a localized audio-visual correspondence loss. The second tackles visual source separation using a traditional mix-and-separate framework. Finally, the third objective reinforces visual feature separation and localization by mixing images in pixel space and aligning their representations with those of all corresponding sound sources. Extensive experiments on MUSIC, VGG-Instruments, VGG-Music, and VGGSound datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of OneAVM for all three tasks, audio-visual source localization, separation, and nearest neighbor recognition, and empirically demonstrate a strong positive transfer between them.