Four of today's papers converge on the same question from different angles: what should a world model's latent or visual representation actually encode for planning? Temporal-Distance JEPA and VisualPatchWorld (same author pair) both argue that representation-learning byproducts — Euclidean latent distance, or an unstructured neural predictor — make poor planning costs, and instead mine a directed temporal cost from trajectories or fit an inspectable, code-form dynamical model. INTACT pushes further, folding planning and representation into a single isomorphic architecture so that no test-time search is needed at all (one-epoch models already hit up to 100% success on LeWM tasks, with optional CEM refinement using 23× fewer samples). DC-WAM applies the same underlying insight to video-based World-Action Models, showing that de-emphasizing photorealistic reconstruction in favor of contact- and motion-centric supervision improves robustness to exactly the appearance shifts that photorealism was supposed to help with. Read together, these four papers make a specific, falsifiable claim: the field has been over-investing in representation fidelity (visual or geometric) and under-investing in representations shaped directly by the planning or control objective.
A second cluster targets the reactivity and data-efficiency of manipulation policies. πR² attacks the latency problem in flow/diffusion policies directly, splitting fast proprioceptive and slow visual-language conditioning so a large pretrained backbone can replan four times faster without retraining from scratch. SAM3D-Guided VLA and the causality-aware IDR framework both refine how a VLA fuses modalities — one by distilling 3D object priors into training only, the other by diagnosing vision's causal effect on actions at test time — while S2A2 extends the modality question to acoustic cues. Underneath all of this sits a data question: HiFi-UMI shows that sufficiently high-fidelity robot-free data can remove the need for real-robot fine-tuning entirely, while "When Does Legacy Data Start to Help?" gives the clearest empirical account yet of exactly when cross-hardware-generation data transfer flips from useless to essential (a grokking-like threshold effect). Together they suggest the community is shifting from "collect more data" toward "collect the right fidelity/configuration of data, at the right moment in training."
A third theme is realism as a first-class simulation concern rather than an afterthought. Pictura shows that privileged vectorized self-play for driving creates a representation gap that only closes by rendering each agent's actual egocentric view during training itself — and the resulting policy then beats privileged agents zero-shot on Waymo data. SONG makes the analogous argument for social navigation, using 3D Gaussian splatting and LLM-driven pedestrian trajectories to combine visual fidelity with behavioral plausibility, and its benchmark results (safety deficits precede etiquette failures; real data beats scale) are a useful corrective for anyone assuming bigger models alone will fix vision-based social navigation. Meanwhile a distinct swarm of multi-agent papers — nano-UAV Lévy walks, shared voxel-map MASAC guidance, and curriculum-based multi-UAV RL — all push toward decentralized coordination under minimal communication and explicit safety constraints, echoed even outside physical robotics in Untangling Co-Drift's treatment of self-driving networks as coupled macro-intents.
Making generalist manipulation policies react faster, fuse modalities better, and rely on less costly real-robot data.
Rethinking what latent/video representations should encode so planning is fast, interpretable, and search-free.
Zero-shot and training-free approaches to object search, social navigation, localization, and low-level state estimation.
Decentralized swarms, shared-map cooperation, and trust-aware planning under repeated human or agent interaction.
Control and forecasting for quadrotors, racing, and driving policies trained directly from realistic perception.
Novel mechanisms and generative co-design of physical robot embodiments.
Generalist manipulation policies increasingly take the form of action-chunking flow policies built on large pretrained backbones. Such chunks run open-loop, so the policy cannot react to sensory input arriving mid-execution, sacrificing reactivity. Replanning more often would restore it, but the perception-to-action pipeline (a large backbone plus multiple denoising steps) is too slow: this latency forbids frequent replanning and leaves committed actions stale, making such policies ill-suited for dynamic, closed-loop control. We present $πmathbf{R}^2, which makes these policies reactive and real-time while retaining large backbones, expressive multi-modal policies, and multi-action prediction. Built on the per-position noise schedule of diffusion forcing, πmathbf{R}^2 contributes two ideas. First, it splits conditioning into a fast channel (proprioception, fresh every tick) and an asynchronously updated slow channel (vision-language features), so the policy reacts to proprioception within a chunk while tolerating stale vision. Second, a latency-adaptive flow schedule treats in-flight actions as inpainting conditioning and emits actions in one denoising step per call, letting one trained model adapt to varying hardware latency. Requiring minimal modification to existing architectures, πmathbf{R}^2 can be finetuned from a pretrained policy: applied to GR00T-N1.7 on a real xArm6+XHand platform, it replans closed-loop roughly 4× faster than the base policy (~25Hz on an A5000 GPU), acting on a fresh observation every 40ms. Across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, πmathbf{R}^2 improves the success rate by up to 23% in simulation and 30%$ in the real world over the strongest baseline. Project page: https://pi-r2-flow.github.io/
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general robot manipulation, but most existing models rely on 2D visual-language backbones and lack fine-grained 3D understanding of target objects, especially under occlusion, pose variation, scale changes, and precise spatial interaction. We propose an object-centric 3D representation alignment framework built upon π_0, using SAM3D as a frozen 3D teacher to provide target-object 3D priors during training. Specifically, we localize task-relevant objects with object recognition models, generate corresponding object masks, and use SAM3D to extract dense object-level 3D representations, which are aligned with intermediate visual features of π_0. This enables the policy to internalize target-object 3D information while preserving the original RGB-language-to-action inference pipeline without requiring depth, point clouds, masks, SAM3D, or additional 3D modules at test time. Simulation experiments show consistent improvements, achieving 99.1% on LIBERO and an average length of 4.11 on CALVIN. Real-world experiments further demonstrate that our method is particularly effective in long-horizon manipulation scenarios where the robot must focus on different target objects across multiple subtasks.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict sequential actions to execute tasks specified by language instructions, conditioned on visual observations and proprioceptive states. However, how to fuse modalities in VLA models remains an open problem, since robot manipulation involves dynamic phases, such as long-distance movements and close-range interactions, in which the importance of visual observations may vary over time. In this paper, we propose an infer-diagnose-refine (IDR) framework, a model-agnostic framework that can be integrated with diverse VLA architectures for refining action predictions at test time. IDR first infers actions under factual and counterfactual scenarios of visual observations, and then diagnoses the causal effects of visual observations as the estimated dynamic importance, which is finally used to refine the action predictions in a training-free manner. We further design a causality-aware action refiner to realize the IDR framework, including zero-padding interventions for inferring counterfactual actions, norm-based quantification for diagnosing causal effects, and gated residual fusion for refining actions. Extensive experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks show improvements in overall performance across multiple VLA backbones, demonstrating the efficacy of dynamically adjusting visual importance at test time.
Robotic hardware evolves over time, but demonstration data is often tied to a specific sensor and actuator configuration. This raises a practical and underexplored question: when does legacy data begin to benefit an upgraded robot? We study this question on a wheeled humanoid platform across two hardware generations, where both the camera and gripper are changed while the overall morphology remains fixed. Contrary to the common assumption that more cross-configuration data is always helpful, we observe a grokking-like transition: legacy data remains ineffective until the upgraded configuration acquires a minimum level of task competence, after which co-training gains rise sharply before diminishing near saturation. We hypothesize that this task-dependent transition is governed by a transfer threshold and characterize the resulting three-phase pattern. Across real-robot manipulation tasks, we observe all three phases: no measurable benefit at low competence (10.0% → 10.0%), a sharp gain after crossing the threshold (23.3% → 86.7% on flower insertion), and diminishing returns at high competence (85.0% → 93.3% on pen insertion). We provide a theoretical account based on gradient alignment and residual policy uncertainty, and derive a phase-aware rule for deciding when to collect more new-hardware data and when to reuse legacy demonstrations. We further validate this three-phase pattern on a mobile dual-arm watering task, with results consistent with our predictions.
Acoustic information provides rich cues about object location, material properties, and changes caused by contact or motion. This paper introduces a new set of acoustic-aware manipulation tasks for imitation learning, in which robots must use auditory cues to determine manipulation targets. These tasks require sound source localization and identification for active exploration in robotic manipulation. Also, we propose a multimodal imitation learning framework, Spatial-Spectral Audio Action (S2A2), that integrates visual features with acoustic spatial and acoustic signal information for the acoustic-aware manipulation tasks. We implemented S2A2 models that integrates policies such as ACT, Diffusion Policy, VQ-BeT, and π_0, into our framework. Simulation experiments showed that the proposed method is the most effective for tasks requiring both position and timbre. Furthermore, real-robot experiments confirm the applicability of the proposed tasks and framework to real-world manipulation.
Bimanual teleoperation provides an effective way to collect robot demonstrations, but it assumes that the operator and robot have matching numbers of simultaneous control channels. This assumption breaks for tri-manual systems: the robot can coordinate three arms concurrently, whereas a single operator can continuously control only two. Pairwise mode switching may therefore record otherwise independent motions sequentially, causing behaviour cloning to reproduce delays imposed by the interface rather than required by the task. We present TriManPolicy, a tri-manual imitation learning system that allows one operator to demonstrate behaviours for three arms. Its central component is Dependency-Aware Tri-Arm Scheduling (DATS). The key idea is to preserve the demonstrated arm motions while reconsidering when they occur. DATS retimes demonstrations offline by preserving local sensorimotor segments of fixed duration and repositioning them according to constraints on task order and arm usage that are reviewed by a human. The resulting data train a single synchronous policy for all three arms, while deployment requires neither the dependency graph nor the scheduler. Across six challenging tasks performed in the real world, policies trained on demonstrations retimed by DATS exhibit more efficient coordination while maintaining comparable observed task success. Offline analysis further shows that DATS changes the supervision across arms rather than merely removing idle periods.
Successfully automating dexterous, long-horizon robotic manipulation requires frameworks capable of both high-level reasoning and fine-grained execution. Traditional task and motion planning (TAMP), while excellent at symbolic planning, is often brittle in contact-rich operations. Simultaneously, imitation learning (IL), while effective in manipulation tasks with visual feedback, is limited by its low capability in spatial generalization and multi-stage operation. To reconcile their complementary strengths and limitations, we propose DR-LfD (Decomposed and Reorganized Skills Learned from Demonstrations), a framework that seamlessly integrates visuomotor policies into a TAMP-gated decision-making system. Based on contact relationships, DR-LfD decomposes human demonstrations into atomic skills, which are reproduced as visuomotor policies or object-centric primitives. The initiation, termination, and constraints of the visuomotor policies are carefully modeled and implemented in a TAMP-compatible form, enabling reorganization of skills learned from different sources. DR-LfD transforms the learning problem from one requiring exponential demonstration data over possible skill sequences to one whose demonstration burden scales with the number of distinct skill types, with limited data for each skill. Through comprehensive real-world and simulation benchmarking across diverse scenarios, we demonstrate the strong performance of DR-LfD on tasks involving multiple steps, unseen setups, and physical constraints. Project website: https://dr-lfd.github.io/DR-LfD-website.
Learning deployable manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of data that is both high-fidelity and scalable. Real-robot teleoperation is accurate but costly to scale; robot-free UMI capture scales readily, and current practice uses the resulting data mainly for pre-training, adding a small real-robot "anchor" at post-training. We ask whether raising the fidelity of robot-free UMI data, rather than shrinking the real-robot fraction, can remove that anchor. We present HiFi-UMI, a portable UMI data-production system co-designed for trajectory accuracy, inter-gripper relative pose, synchronization, and field of view: head-mounted offline stereo-inertial SLAM, native rather than reconstructed relative pose, a shared microsecond GPIO trigger, and two wide-angle cameras per hand covering ~200 degrees. It reaches 3 mm workspace-local end-effector accuracy without external tracking infrastructure. Using this corpus, we demonstrate zero-robot post-training: a policy post-trained solely on HiFi-UMI demonstrations deploys directly on a real robot and matches in-domain teleoperation across three backbones spanning the vision-language-action and world-action-model families, with success-rate differences of -2.5, +3.1, and -0.6 percentage points on StarVLA-QwenPI, OpenPI-pi_0.5, and LingBot-VA; the strongest policy reaches 85% on a precision insertion task, even though the teleoperation baseline is collected in the evaluation scene and no HiFi-UMI trajectory is. Pre-training on 4,000 hours from the same corpus lowers action error on ten unseen tasks by 41% and, on StarVLA-QwenPI, raises real-robot success by a further 18.1 percentage points. We open-source HiFi-UMI-2K, 2,000 hours of microsecond-synchronized, ultra-wide-FoV demonstrations, each automatically reconstructed and validated through simulation replay, as a large-scale, high-fidelity resource for the robot-learning community.
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn world models by predicting in representation space rather than reconstructing pixels, making them a natural backbone for latent model predictive control from offline demonstration logs. JEPA-style training optimizes short-horizon latent prediction, whereas planning requires a multi-step ranking of imagined futures by goal progress. Prior JEPA planners often inherit that ranking from embedding geometry, typically latent Euclidean distance, which arises as a byproduct of representation learning rather than as a progress cost mined from the logs. We propose temporal-distance JEPA (TD-JEPA), which retains the LeWM encoder--predictor backbone and mines a directed temporal cost from reward-free trajectories: same-trajectory step order supplies positive targets, cross-trajectory pairs act as heuristic negatives, and a rollout-consistency term matches the planner horizon. The mined supervision serves two roles: as the deployed planning cost when progress is topological, and as a representation signal that improves Euclidean planning when contact geometry dominates. Under locked evaluation, deploying the mined cost raises Two-Room success to 100.0% versus LeWM's 97.4%, while shared Euclidean planning on the same temporally trained checkpoint raises OGB-Cube by 14.2 points over LeWM and improves Push-T. Against LeWM and the concurrent RC-aux baseline under locked evaluation, TD-JEPA matches or exceeds both methods on every environment. Ablations show that the directed head, cross-trajectory negatives, and rollout consistency each contribute. TD-JEPA narrows the train--plan gap for JEPA world-model planners by discovering temporal progress structure in offline logs and co-designing cost form with plan-time deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/TD-JEPA.
Different research lines use the term world model in different ways, yet they share a common aim: to capture how the world evolves under action in a form that supports perception, simulation, and planning. Two prominent realizations are neural predictors that learn dynamics in continuous vector spaces, and hand-built physics engines that expose explicit state and physical laws. Neural predictors scale from data but leave the form of the dynamics implicit; physics engines are inspectable and editable but difficult to construct at scale. We introduce VisualPatchWorld (VPW), which represents world dynamics as code. VPW first selects a qualitative dynamical form with short active probes, then fits that form's free parameters from recorded state-action traces by minimizing multi-step prediction error. The resulting programs can be rolled forward like a simulator, inspected in source form, and used inside model-predictive control; image-derived scene graphs can supply the live state at replan time. Across comparisons with prior code-based world models, VPW attains 69.0% mean planning success and exceeds the strongest code baseline by 23.5 points. The largest gains arise when choosing the correct qualitative dynamics is essential. Under the same planner, the induced models approach ground-truth engine success on navigation and grasp-rich control; a residual gap remains for contact-rich pushing, and checking a shortlist of promising plans in the engine closes most of that gap. These results establish a practical route toward automatically constructed code world models that are useful for planning. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/VisualPatchWorld/.
Variational Autoencoders are widely used to encode high-dimensional and noisy observations in robotics. However, their stochastic latent creates a mismatch with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO): an effective policy marginalizes over the latent distribution, whereas former implementations estimate its probability ratio and KL divergence using only one latent sample. We identify a fundamental but overlooked theoretical cause: naive single-sample approximations in stochastic latent space induce significant variance and bias in the surrogate loss. To address this, we introduce P^3 (Probabilistic Policy Propagation), a distribution-aware optimization framework for VAE-based policies. P^3 couples moment-based probabilistic method for stable and efficient learning with sampling-based calibration for robust policy behavior under latent uncertainty. In our experiments, P^3 boosts data efficiency from 64.6% to >96%, reduces convergence steps by >20%. Furthermore, P^3 is evaluated on challenging humanoid parkour tasks and shows an effective foundation for VAE-based PPO. Code is available at https://github.com/ylyem9x/P3_Open.
World-Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with future visual prediction, but it remains unclear what the visual modality should learn for control. While photorealistic future prediction provides dense supervision, it also incurs substantial computation and can allocate capacity to texture, illumination, and background variations that are only weakly related to action selection. Recent efficient WAM variants suggest that the main benefit of the video branch may not lie in the rendered future itself, but in the control-relevant visual representations induced during training. In this work, we revisit future video prediction from a dynamic-centric perspective and ask whether an existing RGB-based WAM can be redirected from appearance-dominated reconstruction toward interaction-induced visual dynamics without introducing additional modality-specific predictions or online inputs at deployment. We propose DC-WAM, a dynamic-centric WAM framework that redistributes supervision and computation in the RGB video branch. At the supervision level, DC-WAM combines temporal-difference flow matching with trajectory-guided weighting, emphasizing dense temporal changes and localized regions where the gripper, manipulated objects, and contact areas move. At the reasoning level, DynaRoute predicts token-wise dynamic relevance and converts it into an attention bias, guiding the model toward control-relevant future tokens. Experiments in simulation and on real-world manipulation tasks show that DC-WAM consistently improves policy performance, especially under out-of-distribution perturbations in lighting, object appearance, and background texture.
Forward latent world models predict how actions change a scene, but recover actions for a desired change only through expensive test-time search. We introduce INTACT (INtent-To-ACTion), an end-to-end JEPA that turns action-labeled, reward-free trajectories into a deployable intent-to-action interface. Each transition supplies physical intent $z_{t+1}-z_t, while a future goal supplies deployment intent sg(z_g)-z_t. The architecture is isomorphic between the local and goal motion-intent backbone-input graphs through an identical four-slot grammar and shared parameters, and between supported local and goal motion-intent families through action-law semantics induced by the same predictor rather than pointwise latent equality. INTACT also provides intact transfer from RGB evidence to action-effective latent intent coordinates and from intent families to their corresponding action-law families. Asymmetric endpoint gradients ground physical successors and fix future goals as anchors, joining representation learning and control without pointwise latent matching or globally linear dynamics. The resulting coordinates support a robust distributional action law: its conditional mean serves directly as a search-free policy, while sampling remains available for diversity or optional verification. On the four official LeWM tasks, one-epoch, zero-search models reach 85.78%, 100.00%, 97.67%, and 97.89% success. Optional local CEM centered on the Direct plan reaches 96.86% macro success using 384 instead of 9,000 candidate sequences, reducing sampling by 23.44× while improving pure CEM by 16.00 points. One shared four-task encoder reaches 89.39% E5 Direct macro and improves every task over jointly trained LeWM, while predicted--expert action-family kNN tracks Direct success at r=0.954$. Direct inference takes 2.9--5.5 ms.
Zero-shot ObjectNav methods increasingly use vision-language priors, but direct object-object similarity in the latent space is often a weak proxy for spatial co-occurrence. We present an analytical, training-free semantic navigation pipeline that mediates object relationships through a compact room lexicon. Each object label is mapped to a CLIP-derived Room Probability Vector (RPV), and object-target co-occurrence is computed from RPV distribution overlap. These scores are projected onto a value map using geodesic flood-fill propagation (Fast Marching Method), with adaptive signal decay, and are used to rank frontiers by semantic score for navigation. Together, these components form an integrated, training-free, object-centric pipeline for open-vocabulary zero-shot navigation. Results show that our object-centric approach improves Success Rate (SR) and Success by weighted inverse Path Length (SPL) by a relative 3% and 1.3%, respectively, compared to image-holistic baselines on the HM3D dataset validation split, while preserving interpretability and open-vocabulary flexibility. Code is available at: uts-ri.github.io/RPV-SemNav.
Social navigation has progressed from simplified 2D environments toward a more general vision-based setting, in which a robot needs to achieve socially compliant behavior purely from onboard visual observations. Yet supporting simulation platforms have not kept pace: existing options either lack visual observations, lack moving human avatars, or fall short of real-world fidelity in appearance and pedestrian behavior, offering limited support for advancing vision-based social navigation. We introduce SONG, a SOcial Navigation platform powered by 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). It leverages 3DGS for both scene and avatar representations, drives pedestrians using semantically grounded trajectories generated by a large language model, and synthesizes their full-body motion with a trajectory-conditioned generator to produce continuous, natural movement. On top of the platform, we curate SONG-Bench, a set of evaluation episodes stratified by difficulty, and propose a multi-dimensional metric suite covering effectiveness, safety, and social compliance. A systematic evaluation of representative navigation baselines reveals three findings: (a) vision-based social navigation is far from solved; (b) a critical safety deficit precedes social etiquette; (c) real-world data matters more than model scale. Crucially, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on our curated data effectively improves the success rate in real-world environments. We hope our platform provides a faithful and rigorous testbed for the next generation of vision-based social navigation research.
Efficient autonomous exploration with palm-sized nano-UAVs remains challenging due to severe limitations in sensing, computation, and flight endurance. We present a lightweight sensor-driven Lévy walk (SDLW) controller for aerial robots weighing under 50 grams and equipped with sparse local sensing. The method combines discrete Lévy step-length sampling with a sensor-reactive heading policy using directional range measurements. Each robot independently samples its Lévy exponent from a uniform prior to diversify exploration without inter-robot communication for exploration control. Each robot then selects headings using a von Mises distribution that biases motion toward open directions while preserving superdiffusive exploration properties. The controller operates at constant computational cost, enabling scalable multi-UAV exploration. Simulation results show coverage improvements of 79.6% in open arenas, 43.1% in rooms-and-corridors layouts, and 13.6% in cluttered environments, with collision reductions of 13.0%, 7.1%, and 1.4%, respectively, relative to a uniform-heading Lévy walk baseline. This work provides a practical framework for scalable multi-robot exploration on minimal-sensing, resource-constrained nano-UAVs.
Attitude estimation based on inertial sensing requires measurements of local angular velocities and local gravity via gyroscopes and accelerometers. However, during the motion of a mobile system the inertial measurement unit (IMU) will be subject to additional accelerations which skews the measurement of local gravity. This effect gets amplified the further away the IMU is from the base of the system. Many attitude estimation filters, such as "Madgwick" or "Mahony", account for this by relying more on gyroscope integration for periods of high angular velocity. However, this approach is prone to accumulate long term error especially around the gravity vector. In this work we utilize the gyroscope measurements to compensate the additional accelerations induced by the motion of the system, i.e., centripetal- and tangential-accelerations. Additionally, we introduce a calibration method that estimates intrinsic IMU parameters such as axes misalignment, bias, scale, as well as the extrinsic base-to-IMU vector without the necessity for additional external equipment. Our evaluation in simulation as well as in the real-world shows that this method improves any attitude filter that relies on the direction of gravity. Furthermore we demonstrate the effectivenes on highly dynamic systems, and systems that are unable to put the IMU at the center of rotation, using our real-world spherical mobile mapping system.
Visual front-ends for robotic localization typically rely on point-based features such as Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB), which frequently fail in structured environments dominated by strong linear structures or textureless surfaces. While line-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems mitigate this by utilizing line segments, conventional line extraction and description algorithms are computationally prohibitive for real-time edge robotics. To address this fundamental bottleneck, we propose HOME (Hough-space One-dimensional Matching of Extrema), an ultra-lightweight, training-free feature matching framework. HOME transforms images into Hough space, mapping global linear structures to stable local extrema, which serve as keypoints, thereby reformulating complex line matching into highly efficient one-dimensional point matching. The proposed 1D radial descriptor mathematically guarantees rotational and translational invariance without the overhead of explicit orientation estimation. As a proof of concept to validate the matching accuracy and efficiency of HOME, this paper focuses on homography estimation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that HOME achieves robust registration in challenging scenarios where point-based methods fail, operating at a much faster speed than existing line-based methods. Extending this robust matching engine to full 3D pose estimation remains a highly promising future direction.
We want robots to localize in previously untraversed environments against commonly available prior data. Rich semantic data available from OpenStreetMap can be useful in this task. However, existing methods either ignore this semantic information, directly matching panoramas and overhead imagery, or dramatically compress the semantic information, working with a small set of fixed classes. To leverage this rich semantic information, two challenges need to be overcome. First, useful semantic information needs to be extracted from the robot's egocentric observations. Second, the observed information must be quickly associated with the large prior semantic map (e.g., up to 628 km^2). We show that VLMs are effective at both extracting relevant landmarks from panoramas, and identifying feasible correspondences between these landmarks and prior overhead landmarks. However, using VLMs to propose all correspondences scales poorly as the number of mapped landmarks increases. Instead, we propose distilling a lightweight matcher from a VLM which computes correspondences for all entities in a map. We use this output to form an observation likelihood which is fused over time with a Bayes filter to create a time series of pose estimates. To support further investigation into generalizable cross-view methods that leverage semantic information, we release a dataset of extracted semantics and evaluation trajectories spanning eleven environments, including panoramas we collected in a snowstorm and at night in Boston. We demonstrate our method, trained on a single city's fair-weather data, generalizes across location, lighting, weather, and other challenges. Code and datasets are available at https://efahnestock.github.io/loci/.
Repeated human-robot interaction (HRI) requires proactively accounting for humans who continually adapt to evolving beliefs about the robot. Prior frameworks often treat encounters as isolated events, suffering cumulative task performance decay as human perception drifts, or maintain long-term influence through erratic, unpredictable behavior that erodes perceived human trust and relies on computationally unscalable formulations. To address these gaps, we introduce the Belief- Aware Influence and Trust (BAIT) controller. BAIT integrates a hierarchical particle filter, which infers both fast human strategic shifts and slow perceptual belief updates, with a belief-aware Model Predictive Path Integral planner. BAIT explicitly optimizes the trade-off between long-horizon influence and human trust, while enforcing immediate task performance as a strict constraint. Across simulations, a human-subject study, and a real-world GEM vehicle deployments in repeated lane-merging scenarios, BAIT achieves task performance comparable to baselines that optimize long-term influence through unpredictability while yielding significantly higher user trust. The video demonstrating our experiments is available at https://youtu.be/GsPfHRujzVs.
The vision of self-driving networks that monitor, reason, and act upon themselves with minimal human intervention relies on tightly coupled monitoring, analytics, and actuation functions. In this work, we treat these functions as three operational macro-intents: continuous telemetry, real-time analytics, and programmatic actuation, and formalize the health of each function as an intent that the network must continuously satisfy. A critical, yet underexplored, challenge stems from the causal coupling among these intents, where a singular fault within one macro-intent propagates as a co-drift and subsequently triggers cascading, symptomatic anomalies across the remaining intents. This ambiguity makes it exceedingly difficult for existing, reactive approaches to distinguish the true root-cause intent from symptomatic victim intents, and their reliance on threshold-crossing detection leaves insufficient time for proactive remediation. We introduce MILD, a novel framework that reformulates intent assurance from reactive drift detection to proactive failure prediction. Grounded in our three-macro-intent formulation of the self-driving control loop, MILD employs a teacher-augmented Mixture-of-Experts architecture with a hybrid objective that jointly optimizes intent failure prediction and root-cause attribution. MILD enables KPI-level diagnostics via SHAP explainability and dynamic intent failure urgency estimation via multi-horizon modeling. Our extensive evaluation of MILD across three environments of increasing realism, from a controlled statistical benchmark, to a microservices application, to an SDN-based edge-to-cloud testbed, demonstrates that MILD achieves high failure detection rates, strong remediation lead times, and accurate intent-level root-cause disambiguation. This positions MILD as a practical enabler of closed-loop assurance in next-generation autonomous networks.
Cooperative navigation of multi-agent UAVs in complex environments faces key challenges including local optima traps, sparse rewards, learning imbalance among agents, and insufficient cross-scenario generalisation. This paper proposes a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework that addresses these issues through coordinated exploration, demonstration exploitation, safe curriculum scheduling, and structure-aware generalisation. First, a perception mechanism combining memory of visited states, directional novelty estimates, and penalty backpropagation enables agents to proactively detect and escape local optima. Second, a hierarchical collaborative demonstration buffer with tiered behaviour cloning manages trajectories by degree of team collaboration and applies differential supervision to the actor network, improving demonstration utilisation under sparse collaborative signals. Third, a safety-aware dual-condition curriculum scheduling mechanism reviews mastered scenarios through back-testing and experience pre-filling during training, suppressing catastrophic forgetting while ensuring both task performance and flight safety. For generalisation, local geometric features computed from sensor readings are abstracted into a domain parameter, through which a structure-aware gating network and mixture-of-experts mechanism condition the policy on local structural patterns rather than scenario-specific coordinates, enabling cross-scenario transfer without exposure to the target environment. The framework is further validated under mixed static-dynamic obstacle settings, showing robust adaptability to dynamic disturbances. Simulation results confirm strong performance in collaboration success rate, navigation robustness, zero-shot cross-scenario generalisation, and dynamic environment adaptability.
This paper presents a cooperative indoor UAV guidance framework that combines a shared voxel-map world model with a multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) controller. Multiple drones fuse 360 LiDAR observations into a common world-frame occupancy map, which is converted into a compact bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and provided to each agent as an ego-aligned local crop. This integrate-in-world, act-in- ego design enables consistent multi-UAV spatial fusion whilst retaining decentralised continuous control. The policy combines BEV map features, near-field obstacle observations, and compact goal and peer-state information within a centralised-training, decentralised-execution framework. In simulation, the learned controller achieves a 90.3% success rate in corridor navigation, outperforming Astar planning, an artificial potential field controller, and a prior guidance method. To address residual sim-to-real mismatch, the simulation-trained policy is further adapted using offline imitation fine-tuning from real-world data. Real-world experiments in GNSS-denied indoor environments demonstrate stable two-UAV cooperative operation across increasingly chal- lenging obstacle layouts. The results show that shared voxel-map representations provide an effective and scalable spatial substrate for learned cooperative indoor UAV guidance.
Self-play in simulation produces robust driving policies at scale. Demonstrations of such behavior have been made using privileged vectorized observations such as exact poses and velocities, even for occluded agents. This assumes that perception is solved and introduces a representation gap with the partial observation of a deployed agent driving from the perspective view of egocentric cameras. A common fix, distilling the privileged policy into a camera-input student, leaves the student imitating decisions its own view cannot justify. Instead, we establish perspective-view self-play as a practical training regime. We introduce Pictura, a GPU-accelerated multi-agent driving simulator that renders each agent's egocentric view at every step, mitigating the representation gap at its source. Pictura sustains up to 500K agent-steps/s (2M images/s) on a single H100. Using Pictura, we train Alberti by self-play with plain PPO. It is the first large-scale driving self-play policy trained directly from perspective images, without privileged observations. Training spans 50B agent steps for ~35M km of driving. It approaches the driving performance of its privileged vectorized counterpart, and transfers zero-shot to Waymo Open Motion Dataset layouts re-rendered in Pictura, where it outperforms privileged vectorized agents. Project page: https://valeoai.github.io/Pictura/
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly quadcopters, present unique challenges for autonomous control due to their underactuated dynamics: only four available control inputs must govern six degrees of freedom. This paper investigates a physics-aware, end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that acts directly on low-level body inputs, total thrust and body torques (T, τ_x, τ_y, τ_z), and closes the loop through a high-fidelity Simulink environment. Our simulator integrates a 12-state rigid-body model (MATLAB Level-2 S-Function) with (i) an Action2RPM allocation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of a coefficient matrix derived from thrust and drag terms, and (ii) first-order actuator dynamics for each motor (time constant T_m = 0.076 s), including rotor gyroscopic coupling. A shaped reward balances goal-reaching and stability using an exponential position well, attitude penalties, and quadratic velocity costs. Four DRL algorithms, DDPG, TD3, PPO, and SAC, are evaluated in two stages: (S1) thrust-only hover and (S2) hover with pitch torque and a translated goal. Results show that SAC and TD3 achieve superior stability and exploration efficiency, while PPO is less sample-efficient. The study highlights the significance of modeling actuator lags and aerodynamic moments for stable low-level control and provides a reproducible benchmark for quadcopter DRL.
Autonomous multi-vehicle racing requires real-time planning of diverse competitive behaviors in intense interactions. Existing planners often struggle to balance strategic diversity and computational efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose Sampling-based Game-Theoretic Planning (SGTP), a real-time framework that combines game-theoretic reasoning with GPU-accelerated sampling of control sequences and dynamics rollouts. Sampled trajectories are ranked using a game-aware cost to capture competitive interactions and generate diverse racing behaviors. Our planner then performs feasibility selection by explicitly enforcing track-boundary and dynamic collision-avoidance constraints, ensuring safe and reliable transitions between racing strategies. Extensive simulations on challenging tracks show that SGTP achieves a 95.24% win rate and a 99.35% task-completion ratio in highly interactive races, with a mean computational time of 0.095 s over multiple iterative solving steps. We also demonstrate the successful application of SGTP in large-scale scenarios with up to 10 agents. We release our code and provide an open-source benchmark of multi-agent autonomous racing algorithms to facilitate future research. Project page: https://sgtp-racing.github.io/.
We develop a novel forecasting scheme to anticipate controller induced loss of control (LOC) in quadrotors and evaluate it on real LOC flight data from four different quadrotors. For this, early warning signals of LOC are derived using critical slowing down (CSD), a generic phenomenon shown to precede critical transitions across various complex ecological and biological systems. As such, our early warning indicators are generic in the sense that no system models are needed to facilitate forecasts of LOC. The approach is evaluated on real quadrotor flight data wherein LOC occurs due to unstable controller behavior arising from input-output delays. Our approach achieves a time-to-LOC forecast of up to 0.9 seconds before LOC occurs, outperforming state-of-the-art recurrent neural network quadrotor LOC forecasters in terms of detection accuracy and LOC data reliance. In particular, we leverage insights from CSD to accurately predict LOC without using data of the LOC event itself. Going further, we apply our forecasters without any re-parameterization to anticipate a different LOC scenario, quadrotor flyways, that occur on other quadrotors flying both indoors and outdoors. Despite these differences, our approach successfully detects LOC, demonstrating that it can generalize across controller architectures, quadrotors, and LOC scenarios.
Fenestrated/Branched endovascular aneurysm repair (FEVAR/BEVAR) require surgeons to navigate catheters and guidewires into various branches of the abdominal aorta, before deploying stent grafts to alleviate pressure on the aneurysm. Previous clinical studies suggests that surgeons continue to struggle with vessel access using standard commercial instruments, prolonging the procedural time and inducing further complications. In this work, we present two contributions to solving this problem: 1) A bespoke 2-segment steerable catheter, consisting of 4 degrees of freedom to enhance dexterity. 2) An expandable, modular tendon-driven actuation platform that can accommodate for the redundancies introduced in our system. To fabricate the catheter, we capitalized on thermal fiber drawing, a technique that creates high-aspect ratio devices at scale, and processed the catheter with laser micro-machining to soften its tip. We evaluated the system using simulations, where we investigated the catheter's bending stiffness, then its steerability with in-vitro experiments in vascular phantoms. This handheld, robotic steerable catheter system has the potential to shorten the length of future endovascular surgeries, and give clinicians the tools to resolve challenging clinical cases.
Many ceiling construction tasks still rely on heavy serial manipulators that are difficult to deploy in cluttered interiors, motivating lightweight, field-ready alternatives that reach ceiling height while maintaining millimeter-level accuracy and the stiffness demanded by overhead tool loads. We introduce Tripody, a wheeled 3-DoF parallel robot for high-reach tasks that replaces the base spherical joints of a classical 3-SPR (3 legs; S: base spherical joint; P: actuated prismatic joint; R: end-effector revolute joint) morphology with universal joints, intentionally overconstraining the mechanism; small, distributed elastic deflections absorb the resulting incompatibilities, preserving predominantly translational motion. The 33kg system extends from 1.7m to 3.4m in height, supports a continuous 32kg payload, and offers a modular end-effector interface for ceiling operations. We detail the mechanical design - including custom linear actuators and a kinematic-compatibility analysis - and a control stack for accurate positioning that combines SE(3) state estimation, forward kinematics, and task-space control. In experiments, Tripody exhibits similar in-plane stiffness to a spherical-base variant but substantially higher torsional stiffness - an increase of 67% at 1.7m, 196% at 2.6m, and 454% at 3.4m - while maintaining negligible cross-axis coupling. Closed-loop positioning with a total station converges below 0.6mm across the entire workspace; pure model extrapolation achieves a 95th-percentile error of 2.7mm (max 3.6mm). Finally, we demonstrate task-level ceiling-drilling feasibility in an open-loop study by drilling a 15-hole pattern with 4.5mm maximum relative hole-position error after rigid alignment. These results support overconstrained, compliance-absorbing 3-SPR-like architectures as a practical path to lightweight, high- reach, millimeter-accurate construction robots.
An often overlooked factor of robot manipulation performance is the embodiment of the robot itself. Motivated by this problem, we study motion-conditioned robot co-design, where the goal is to generate complete robot designs that track target end-effector trajectories (from human demonstrations) while optimizing user-defined rewards. We introduce Transformer Transformer, a diffusion transformer trained on RoboTokens, a unified tokenization of robot embodiments, states, and actions. The same architecture can be used across embodiment spaces (e.g., wheeled bimanual, quadrupeds, humanoids) and use cases (embodiment generation, cross embodiment controller). Rather than overfitting to one reward function, Transformer Transformer is a dynamics model, whose reward-agnostic state and action predictions can be converted into reward-specific value predictions. These value predictions are used to steer embodiment diffusion towards high value robot designs, through a procedure we call Dynamics Self-Guidance. Experiments across multiple design spaces show zero-shot optimization of unseen rewards and trajectories, improving performance and runtime over the evolutionary baseline. Finally, we fabricated an optimized ALOHA design, which reduced tracking error by over 70% compared to the original design.