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Zilong Xie, Jingyu Gong, Xin Tan, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie

Existing end-to-end approaches of robotic manipulation often lack generalization to unseen objects or tasks due to limited data and poor interpretability. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong commonsense reasoning, they struggle with geometric and spatial understanding required for pose prediction. In this paper, we propose RobMRAG, a 3D Gaussian Splatting-Enhanced Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation. Specifically, We construct a multi-source manipulation knowledge base containing object contact frames, task completion frames, and pose parameters. During inference, a Hierarchical Multimodal Retrieval module first employs hybrid semantic search to find task-relevant object prototypes, then selects the geometrically closest reference example based on pixel-level similarity and Instance Matching Distance (IMD). We further introduce a 3D-Aware Pose Refinement module based on 3D Gaussian Splatting into the MRAG framework, which aligns the pose of the reference object to the target object in 3D space. The aligned results are reprojected onto the image plane and used as input to the MLLM to enhance the generation of the final pose parameters. Extensive experiments show that on a test set containing 30 categories of household objects, our method improves the success rate by 7.76% compared to the best-performing zero-shot baseline under the same setting, and by 6.54% compared to the state-of-the-art supervised baseline. Our results validate that RobMRAG effectively bridges the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level geometric execution, enabling robotic systems that generalize to unseen objects while remaining inherently interpretable.

Wuyuan Xie, Zhenming Li, Yuwu Lu, Di Lin, Yun Song, Miaohui Wang

Just recognizable distortion (JRD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for machine-centric video coding. However, existing JRD-guided coding methods are limited by coarse annotation granularity and high computational cost, which hinder their deployment. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of different JRD annotation strategies on downstream task performance. By incorporating both instance-level and contextual information, we construct a new JRD dataset with fine-grained annotations compatible with object detection and instance segmentation tasks. To enhance quantization parameter (QP) map prediction while maintaining computational efficiency, we propose a novel spiking neural network (SNN)-based framework that decomposes video frames into spatial structures, channel interactions, and temporal patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a spiking attention mechanism to aggregate task-relevant features and employ adaptive scaling vectors to suppress machine-perceived redundancy, enabling targeted bitrate allocation aligned with task-critical content. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art codec-based and JRD-guided methods in maintaining task performance at ultra-low bitrates, while significantly reducing computational overhead.

Weize Xie, Yi Ding, Ying He, Leilei Wang, Binwen Bai, Zheyi Zhao, Chenyang Wang, F. Richard Yu

Diffusion strategies have advanced visual motor control by progressively denoising high-dimensional action sequences, providing a promising method for robot manipulation. However, as task complexity increases, the success rate of existing baseline models decreases considerably. Analysis indicates that current diffusion strategies are confronted with two limitations. First, these strategies only rely on short-term observations as conditions. Second, the training objective remains limited to a single denoising loss, which leads to error accumulation and causes grasping deviations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion (ForeDiffusion), by injecting the predicted future view representation into the diffusion process. As a result, the policy is guided to be forward-looking, enabling it to correct trajectory deviations. Following this design, ForeDiffusion employs a dual loss mechanism, combining the traditional denoising loss and the consistency loss of future observations, to achieve the unified optimization. Extensive evaluation on the Adroit suite and the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrates that ForeDiffusion achieves an average success rate of 80% for the overall task, significantly outperforming the existing mainstream diffusion methods by approximately 20% in high difficulty tasks, while maintaining more stable performance across the entire tasks.

Yingying Wang, Xuanhua He, Chen Wu, Jialing Huang, Suiyun Zhang, Rui Liu, Xinghao Ding, Haoxuan Che

Pan-sharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with its corresponding low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. To achieve effective fusion, it is crucial to fully exploit the complementary information between the two modalities. Traditional CNN-based methods typically rely on channel-wise concatenation with fixed convolutional operators, which limits their adaptability to diverse spatial and spectral variations. While cross-attention mechanisms enable global interactions, they are computationally inefficient and may dilute fine-grained correspondences, making it difficult to capture complex semantic relationships. Recent advances in the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture have demonstrated impressive success in image generation and editing tasks. Unlike cross-attention, MMDiT employs in-context conditioning to facilitate more direct and efficient cross-modal information exchange. In this paper, we propose MMMamba, a cross-modal in-context fusion framework for pan-sharpening, with the flexibility to support image super-resolution in a zero-shot manner. Built upon the Mamba architecture, our design ensures linear computational complexity while maintaining strong cross-modal interaction capacity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal interleaved (MI) scanning mechanism that facilitates effective information exchange between the PAN and MS modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

Yingying Wang, Rongjin Zhuang, Hui Zheng, Xuanhua He, Ke Cao, Xiaotong Tu, Xinghao Ding

Image fusion integrates complementary information from different modalities to generate high-quality fused images, thereby enhancing downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Unlike task-specific techniques that primarily focus on consolidating inter-modal information, general image fusion needs to address a wide range of tasks while improving performance without increasing complexity. To achieve this, we propose SMC-Mamba, a Self-supervised Multiplex Consensus Mamba framework for general image fusion. Specifically, the Modality-Agnostic Feature Enhancement (MAFE) module preserves fine details through adaptive gating and enhances global representations via spatial-channel and frequency rotational scanning. The Multiplex Consensus Cross-modal Mamba (MCCM) module enables dynamic collaboration among experts, reaching a consensus to efficiently integrate complementary information from multiple modalities. The cross-modal scanning within MCCM further strengthens feature interactions across modalities, facilitating seamless integration of critical information from both sources. Additionally, we introduce a Bi-level Self-supervised Contrastive Learning Loss (BSCL), which preserves high-frequency information without increasing computational overhead while simultaneously boosting performance in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) image fusion algorithms in tasks such as infrared-visible, medical, multi-focus, and multi-exposure fusion, as well as downstream visual tasks.

Yihao Wang, Pengxiang Ding, Lingxiao Li, Can Cui, Zirui Ge, Xinyang Tong, Wenxuan Song, Han Zhao, Wei Zhao, Pengxu Hou 等

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks show that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying VLA model.

Xudong Wang, Zebin Han, Zhiyu Liu, Gan Li, Jiahua Dong, Baichen Liu, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han

Traditional language-conditioned manipulation agent adaptation to new manipulation skills leads to catastrophic forgetting of old skills, limiting dynamic scene practical deployment. In this paper, we propose SkillsCrafter, a novel robotic manipulation framework designed to continually learn multiple skills while reducing catastrophic forgetting of old skills. Specifically, we propose a Manipulation Skills Adaptation to retain the old skills knowledge while inheriting the shared knowledge between new and old skills to facilitate learning of new skills. Meanwhile, we perform the singular value decomposition on the diverse skill instructions to obtain common skill semantic subspace projection matrices, thereby recording the essential semantic space of skills. To achieve forget-less and generalization manipulation, we propose a Skills Specialization Aggregation to compute inter-skills similarity in skill semantic subspaces, achieving aggregation of the previously learned skill knowledge for any new or unknown skill. Extensive simulator and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our SkillsCrafter.

Ningnan Wang, Weihuang Chen, Liming Chen, Haoxuan Ji, Zhongyu Guo, Xuchong Zhang, Hongbin Sun

Embodied visual navigation remains a challenging task, as agents must explore unknown environments with limited knowledge. Existing zero-shot studies have shown that incorporating memory mechanisms to support goal-directed behavior can improve long-horizon planning performance. However, they overlook visual frontier boundaries, which fundamentally dictate future trajectories and observations, and fall short of inferring the relationship between partial visual observations and navigation goals. In this paper, we propose Semantic Cognition Over Potential-based Exploration (SCOPE), a zero-shot framework that explicitly leverages frontier information to drive potential-based exploration, enabling more informed and goal-relevant decisions. SCOPE estimates exploration potential with a Vision-Language Model and organizes it into a spatio-temporal potential graph, capturing boundary dynamics to support long-horizon planning. In addition, SCOPE incorporates a self-reconsideration mechanism that revisits and refines prior decisions, enhancing reliability and reducing overconfident errors. Experimental results on two diverse embodied navigation tasks show that SCOPE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 4.6% in accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates that its core components lead to improved calibration, stronger generalization, and higher decision quality.

Kehan Wang, Huan Zhao, Yong Wei, Xupeng Zha, Guanghui Ye, Cheng Zhu, Yiming Liu, Zixing Zhang

Existing multimodal representation learning approaches often rely on simple feature concatenation or unified transformations, which fail to effectively disentangle and leverage common and private information across different modalities in a progressive manner. Moreover, they typically lack adaptive modeling tailored to specific task requirements. To address these limitations, we propose a Prototype-Induced Label Structuring for Disentangled Multimodal Representation Network (PLUM-Net). It first employs a multilevel semantic alignment module to synchronize global and local semantics across audio, visual and textual streams. On this aligned foundation, a prototype-based single-modal label generation module derives modality-specific hard and soft-labels that subtly steer the network toward a cleaner split between shared and private cues. Guided by these labels, the task-conditioned feature bifurcator module channels information through the most beneficial common or private pathway for the given task, after which a private refinement module polishes and fuses each modality’s idiosyncratic signals. Extensive experiments show that PLUM-Net delivers strong performance on datasets such as CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI and UR-FUNNY, achieving an ACC-2 of 90.3% on CMU-MOSI, representing a 2%–4% improvement over previous SOTA models.

Kaijun Wang, Liqin Lu, Mingyu Liu, Jianuo Jiang, Zeju Li, Bolin Zhang, Wancai Zheng, Xinyi Yu, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have shown promise in enhancing spatial reasoning and task planning through learned semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges characteristic of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied in the literature. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination of locomotion and manipulation across challenging terrains. We further present the first comprehensive benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system’s generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks.

Junming Wang

Current paradigms for robotic imitation learning face a stark trade-off between the motion fidelity of diffusion models and the data scalability of inverse dynamics models. The latter, while scalable, often learns a latent action space disconnected from physical reality. This flaw leads to critical failures: temporal entanglement, where the model cannot distinguish between visually similar states requiring distinct actions, e.g., a gripper approaching versus receding from an object. This ambiguity, compounded by discretization artifacts and sensitivity to task-irrelevant dynamics, renders robust planning infeasible. We introduce LatentVLA, a vision-language-action framework designed to overcome these limitations by learning a continuous and spatiotemporally grounded latent action representation. Its progressive three-stage architecture first employs a Temporal-Attentive Latent Action Model (TA-LAM) to resolve ambiguities using language-guided attention and explicit temporal encoding. Subsequently, a Latent Action Diffusion Transformer (LADT) performs planning via diffusion directly within this continuous latent space, preserving motion fidelity without tokenization. Finally, an expert policy head translates these latent plans into precise robot actions. Experiments show LatentVLA sets a new state-of-the-art across a suite of real-world bimanual tasks, outperforming prior methods and demonstrating superior zero-shot generalization and few-shot efficiency.

Chi Wan, Kangrui Wang, Yuan Si, Pingyue Zhang, Manling Li

How can vision-language-action (VLA) models adapt to new environments where world dynamics shift? While recent research has combined world modeling and action prediction to improve VLA performance, existing methods largely rely on pretraining in static datasets, without mechanisms for active adaptation to new environments. As a result, these models often fail to generalize when deployed in unseen scenarios with novel object configurations or dynamics. We present WorldAgen, a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction while enabling test-time training (TTT) to adapt to new environments. WorldAgen employs a shared Transformer backbone with two heads: (1) a world-model head that predicts future states from past state-action trajectories, and (2) an agent-model head that predicts actions conditioned on task instructions. During test time, WorldAgen samples exploratory actions, collects ground-truth state transitions, and performs lightweight TTT updates to refine its world model. This adaptation improves the model's understanding to the environments and leads to more accurate action predictions. Experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks demonstrate that our baseline model achieves comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to current state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, with TTT on a small number of samples, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art models, highlighting the effectiveness of adapting world models at inference time.

Jing Tan, Shiting Chen, Yangfan Li, Weisheng Xu, Renjing Xu

Unified physics-based humanoid controllers are pivotal for robotics and character animation, yet models that excel on gentle, everyday motions still stumble on explosive actions, hampering real-world deployment. We bridge this gap with FARM (Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts), an end-to-end framework composed of frame-accelerated augmentation, a robust base controller, and a residual mixture-of-experts (MoE). Frame-accelerated augmentation exposes the model to high-velocity pose changes by widening inter-frame gaps. The base controller reliably tracks everyday low-dynamic motions, while the residual MoE adaptively allocates additional network capacity to handle challenging high-dynamic actions, significantly enhancing tracking accuracy. In the absence of a public benchmark, we curate the High-Dynamic Humanoid Motion (HDHM) dataset, comprising 3593 physically plausible clips. On HDHM, FARM reduces the tracking failure rate by 42.8% and lowers global mean per-joint position error by 14.6% relative to the baseline, while preserving near-perfect accuracy on low-dynamic motions. These results establish FARM as a new baseline for high-dynamic humanoid control and introduce the first open benchmark dedicated to this challenge.

Kabir Swain, Sijie Han, Ayush Raina, Jin Zhang, Shuang Li, Michael Stopa, Antonio Torralba

As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve in reasoning and decision-making, there is a growing need for realistic and interactive environments where their abilities can be rigorously evaluated. We present VirtualEnv, a next-generation simulation platform built on Unreal Engine 5 that enables fine-grained benchmarking of LLMs in embodied and interactive scenarios. VirtualEnv supports rich agent–environment interactions, including object manipulation, navigation, and adaptive multi-agent collaboration, as well as game-inspired mechanics like escape rooms and procedurally generated environments. We provide a user-friendly API built on top of Unreal Engine, allowing researchers to deploy and control LLM-driven agents using natural language instructions. We integrate large-scale LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-based models, to generate novel environments and structured tasks from multimodal inputs. Our experiments benchmark the performance of several popular LLMs across tasks of increasing complexity, analyzing differences in adaptability, planning, and multi-agent coordination. We also describe our methodology for procedural task generation, task validation, and real-time environment control. VirtualEnv is released as an open-source platform, we aim to advance research at the intersection of AI and gaming, enable standardized evaluation of LLMs in embodied AI settings, and pave the way for future developments in immersive simulations and interactive entertainment.

Zirui Song, Guangxian Ouyang, Mingzhe Li, Yuheng Ji, Chenxi Wang, Zixiang Xu, Zeyu Zhang, Xiaoqing Zhang, Qian Jiang, Fengxian Ji 等

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging vision for scene perception and language for instruction following. However, existing methods rely heavily on costly human-annotated training datasets, which limits their generalization and causes them to struggle in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, reducing real-world adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose ManipLVM-R1, a novel reinforcement learning framework that replaces traditional supervision with Reinforcement Learning using Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). By directly optimizing for task-aligned outcomes, our method enhances generalization and physical reasoning while removing the dependence on costly annotations. Specifically, we design two rule-based reward functions targeting key robotic manipulation subtasks: an Affordance Perception Reward to enhance localization of interaction regions, and a Trajectory Match Reward to ensure the physical plausibility of action paths. These rewards provide immediate feedback and impose spatial-logical constraints, encouraging the model to go beyond shallow pattern matching and instead learn deeper, more systematic reasoning about physical interactions. Experimental results show that ManipLVM-R1 achieves substantial performance gains across multiple manipulation tasks, using only 50% of the training data while achieving strong generalization to OOD scenarios. We further analyze the benefits of our reward design and its impact on task success and efficiency.

Wenxuan Song, Ziyang Zhou, Han Zhao, Jiayi Chen, Pengxiang Ding, Haodong Yan, Yuxin Huang, Feilong Tang, Donglin Wang, Haoang Li

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robotic agents to integrate multimodal understanding with action execution. However, our empirical analysis reveals that current VLAs struggle to allocate visual attention to target regions. Instead, visual attention is always dispersed. To guide the visual attention grounding on the correct target, we propose ReconVLA, a reconstructive VLA model with an implicit grounding paradigm. Conditioned on the model's visual outputs, a diffusion transformer aims to reconstruct the gaze region of the image, which corresponds to the target manipulated objects. This process prompts the VLA model to learn fine-grained representations and accurately allocate visual attention, thus effectively leveraging task-specific visual information and conducting precise manipulation. Moreover, we curate a large-scale pretraining dataset comprising over 100k trajectories and 2 million data samples from open-source robotic datasets, further boosting the model’s generalization in visual reconstruction. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate the superiority of our implicit grounding method, showcasing its capabilities of precise manipulation and generalization.

Abhudaya Shrivastava, Shelly Gupta, Zoran Obradovic

Autonomous aerial robots must operate in cluttered, wind-disturbed environments where turbulence and gusts generated by wind-object and terrain interactions introduce significant aerodynamic risks, including orientation instability, sensor degradation, control drift, and increased power consumption, often leading to mission failure or crash. We present Graphlets-based Zero-Shot Planning Framework (GZS), a novel, non-parametric, fast computation, memory-efficient, zero-shot training-free onboard inference framework for real-time 3D spatial-aware aerodynamic risk perception that operates without prior scene knowledge. GZS dynamically classifies point clouds to extract local topology, incorporates physics-informed modeling of wind interactions, and applies attention-guided segment matching to generate onboard 3D representations of wind-induced aerodynamic risk. It transforms unstructured scene segments into structured graphlets topologies encoding aerodynamic risk-aware features, enabling UAVs to identify and navigate through regions of minimal aerodynamic hazard in real time and without prior training in any environment. Unlike computational fluid dynamics(CFD)-based, deep learning, or map-dependent approaches, GZS performs zero-shot aerodynamic risk estimation in previously unseen and dynamic conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate 90-95% accurate aerodynamic risk zone identification compared to conventional methods of CFDs and wind tunnels, while substantially reducing computational and memory overhead, and a 100% success rate in creating onboard 3d spatial-aware risk perceptions. Our results establish GZS as a framework for a zero-shot, non-parametric, robust, aerodynamic risk perception for autonomous real-time trajectory planning in wind-affected aerial environments.

Juyi Sheng, Ziyi Wang, Peiming Li, Mengyuan Liu

In robot manipulation, robot learning has become a prevailing approach. However, generative models within this field face a fundamental trade-off between the slow, iterative sampling of diffusion models and the architectural constraints of faster Flow-based methods, which often rely on explicit consistency losses. To address these limitations, we introduce MP1, which pairs 3D point-cloud inputs with the MeanFlow paradigm to generate action trajectories in one network function evaluation (1-NFE). By directly learning the interval-averaged velocity via the "MeanFlow Identity", our policy avoids any additional consistency constraints. This formulation eliminates numerical ODE-solver errors during inference, yielding more precise trajectories. MP1 further incorporates CFG for improved trajectory controllability while retaining 1-NFE inference without reintroducing structural constraints. Because subtle scene-context variations are critical for robot learning, especially in few-shot learning, we introduce a lightweight Dispersive Loss that repels state embeddings during training, boosting generalization without slowing inference. We validate our method on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks, as well as in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show MP1 achieves superior average task success rates, outperforming DP3 by 10.2% and FlowPolicy by 7.3%. Its average inference time is only 6.8 ms—19 times faster than DP3 and nearly 2 times faster than FlowPolicy.

Buqing Nie, Yang Zhang, Rongjun Jin, Zhanxiang Cao, Huangxuan Lin, Xiaokang Yang, Yue Gao

The human nervous system exhibits bilateral symmetry, enabling coordinated and balanced movements. However, existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods for humanoid robots neglect morphological symmetry of the robot, leading to uncoordinated and suboptimal behaviors. Inspired by human motor control, we propose Symmetry Equivariant Policy (SE-Policy), a new DRL framework that embeds strict symmetry equivariance in the actor and symmetry invariance in the critic without additional hyperparameters. SE-Policy enforces consistent behaviors across symmetric observations, producing temporally and spatially coordinated motions with higher task performance. Extensive experiments on velocity tracking tasks, conducted in both simulation and real-world deployment with the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrate that SE-Policy improves tracking accuracy by up to 40% compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while achieving superior spatial-temporal coordination. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SE-Policy and its broad applicability to humanoid robots.

Asen Nachkov, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel, Xi Wang, Luc Van Gool

Planning allows an agent to safely refine its actions before executing them in the real world. In autonomous driving, this is crucial to avoid collisions and navigate in complex, dense traffic scenarios. One way to plan is to search for the best action sequence. However, this is challenging when all necessary components – policy, next-state predictor, and critic – have to be learned. Here we propose Differentiable Simulation for Search (DSS), a framework that leverages the differentiable simulator Waymax as both a next state predictor and a critic. It relies on the simulator’s hardcoded dynamics, making state predictions highly accurate, while utilizing the simulator’s differentiability to effectively search across action sequences. Our DSS agent optimizes its actions using gradient descent over imagined future trajectories. We show experimentally that DSS – the combination of planning gradients and stochastic search – significantly improves tracking and path planning accuracy compared to sequence prediction, imitation learning, model-free RL, and other planning methods.