Embodied agents have successfully leveraged large language models (LLMs) to better transform human instructions and images into executable task plans. Furthermore, memories of agents can be leveraged to achieve continual self-learning and optimization. However, vector data quality problems emerge in memories when they are projected into vector space, especially in discerning contextually similar but semantically conflicting sentences and highly similar images. This is particularly detrimental to embodied AI as it potentially distorts the robot’s actions. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict Detection Rules (CDRs) to identify and manage data quality issues in vector knowledge bases, which assist in correcting the index structure and further improving the answer quality. Experimental results show that planners with CDRs exceed the basic LLM planner by 15.25% and 14.25% in grammatical accuracy (GA) and interpretation accuracy (IA) on average, respectively. Moreover, the entire workflow has been successfully integrated into various scenarios, demonstrating its practical applicability and robustness in the real world.
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Conventional Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks assume instructions are feasible and the referenced target exists, leaving agents ill-equipped to handle false-premise goals. We introduce VLN-NF, a benchmark with false-premise instructions where the target is absent from the specified area and agents must navigate, gather evidence through in-room exploration, and explicitly output NOT-FOUND. VLN-NF is constructed via a scalable pipeline that rewrites VLN instructions using an LLM and verifies target absence with a VLM, producing plausible yet factually incorrect goals. We further propose REV-SPL to jointly evaluate room reaching, exploration coverage, and decision correctness. To address this challenge, we present ROAM, a two-stage hybrid that combines supervised room-level navigation with LLM/VLM-driven in-room exploration guided by a free-space clearance prior. ROAM achieves the best REV-SPL among compared methods, while baselines often under-explore and terminate prematurely under unreliable instructions. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.
Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT (Affordance-Driven Adaptive Planning and Task execution), a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.
VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wise prediction to maximize control throughput. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO simulation benchmark and a real-world LeRobot platform demonstrate that MIRTH achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. We will release our code and collected datasets to facilitate reproducible research in embodied AI upon publication.
Effective real-world human–agent interactions, such as household robotic services, are often long-term and repeated. Beyond executing tasks, agents are expected to quickly become familiar with individual users. In everyday use, people do not want to repeatedly specify precise instructions. Instead, they prefer agents that adapt to their habits and preferences over interaction while minimizing communication effort. This poses a key challenge: enabling agents to rapidly align with user needs and provide proactive assistance within limited communication. To study this problem in a realistic embodied setting, we first introduce HA-Desire, a home assistance simulation environment. HA-Desire features an LLM-driven proxy user with value-driven preferences and natural language behavior, enabling systematic evaluation of how agents adapt to users across interactions and satisfy their desires. We further propose FAMER, a framework that integrates goal-relevant memory, desire-centered mental reasoning, and efficient communication to infer user preferences from interaction while reducing unnecessary dialogue. Experiments across embodied household tasks and different LLMs show that FAMER improves both task success and interaction efficiency compared to existing baselines, highlighting the importance of communication-efficient desire alignment for proactive embodied agents that support users without requiring frequent instructions.
RoboFailRing: Retrieval-Augmented and Language Grounding Failure Detection for VLM-enabled Robotic Manipulation
PDF ↗Reliable failure detection and causal reasoning are critical in robotic manipulation, as their absence risks robot damage and endangers human safety.Although recent Vision–Language Models (VLMs) are employed to attempt failure detection and causality reasoning, they typically make retrospective assessment only after task completion, and their reasoning accuracy is often limited.To address these issues, we introduce RoboFailRing, which enables timely failure detection during task execution and enhances the reasoning accuracy of VLMs.It achieves rapid failure detection by retrieving a pre-constructed failure memory and returning a similarity-based decision.In addition, by providing grounded failure report to VLMs, it improves the accuracy of their reasoning about the failure causes and repair strategies.We evaluate RoboFailRing on two large-scale simulated datasets comprising over 6,000 failure trajectories and covering 81 distinct manipulation tasks.The results show that the average success rate of out-of-distribution failure detection reaches 80%, while the mean detection time is cut to roughly 50% of the baseline.Moreover, evaluations on real-world systems show an average 35% gain in VLM failure-reasoning accuracy.We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/DynamicPoet/RoboFailRing.
GuideDog: A Real-World Egocentric Multimodal Dataset for Blind and Low-Vision Accessibility-Aware Guidance
PDF ↗For people affected by blindness and low vision (BLV), safe and independent navigation remains a major challenge, impacting over 2.2 billion individuals worldwide. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for assistive navigation, progress has been limited by the scarcity of accessibility-aware datasets, requiring labor-intensive, expert annotation. To this end, we introduce GuideDog, a novel dataset containing 22K image-description pairs (2K human-verified) capturing real-world pedestrian scenes across 46 countries. Our human-AI pipeline shifts annotation from generation to verification, grounded in established BLV guidance standards from experts and research, improving scalability while maintaining quality. We also present GuideDogQA, an 818-sample benchmark evaluating object recognition and depth perception. Experiments reveal that depth perception and adherence to these standards remain challenging for current MLLMs. Code and dataset will be publicly available.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical "modality collapse” phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose Residual Semantic Steering (RSS), a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) Residual Affordance Steering, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations.
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage
PDF ↗Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models (ORMs) that judge only final answers. Process Reward Models(PRMs) address this gap by evaluating and guiding reasoning at the step or trajectory level. This survey provides a systematic overview of PRMs through the full loop: how to generate process data, build PRMs, and use PRMs for test-time scaling and reinforcement learning. We summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents, and review emerging benchmarks. Our goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment.
Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose NavA^3, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NavA^3 achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete long-horizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available.
Theory · Optimization
Synchronization over the special Euclidean group $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ aims to recover absolute poses from noisy pairwise relative transformations and is a core primitive in robotics and 3D vision. Standard approaches often require multi-step heuristic procedures to recover valid poses, which are difficult to analyze and typically lack theoretical guarantees. This paper adopts a dual quaternion representation and formulates $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ synchronization directly over the unit dual quaternion. A two-stage algorithm is developed: A spectral initializer computed via the power method on a Hermitian dual quaternion measurement matrix, followed by a dual quaternion generalized power method (DQGPM) that enforces feasibility through per-iteration projection. The estimation error bounds are established for spectral estimators, and DQGPM is shown to admits a finite-iteration error bound and achieves linear error contraction up to an explicit noise-dependent threshold. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world multi-scan point-set registration demonstrate that the proposed pipeline improves both accuracy and efficiency over representative matrix-based methods.
Applications · Computer Vision
Detecting what has changed in an environment is essential for long-term autonomy, yet most change detection settings assume fixed viewpoints, mild misalignment, or only a few changed objects. We introduce Video-based Scene Change Detection (VSCD), which predicts a pixel-wise change mask for each query frame, given a reference and a query RGB video of the same indoor space recorded at different times under unconstrained camera motion. The two videos are not temporally synchronized, and many object instances may appear or disappear. To study this setting, we build a large-scale benchmark with over 1.1 million frames annotated with pixel-accurate change masks, together with a real-world test set for evaluating transfer beyond simulation. We propose a query-centric multi-reference model that learns temporal matching implicitly from change-mask supervision, aligns candidate reference features to the query via local patch correspondence, and fuses per-candidate change features using frame-level and patch-level confidence before decoding a high-resolution mask once per frame. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance against strong image- and video-based baselines, and we validate its real-world impact by deploying it on a mobile robot for two downstream applications—visual surveillance and object incremental learning.
Applications · Robotics
Modern robotic policies increasingly rely on action chunking to execute complex tasks in the physical world. While action chunking improves temporal consistency at moderate action frequencies, it becomes insufficient when the action frequency is further increased (e.g., to 60~Hz). At such high frequencies, policies often fail to generate actions that are both temporally smooth and spatially consistent. We address this challenge by shifting high-frequency action learning from the action space to a latent space with variational autoencoder (VAE). This formulation significantly improves both temporal and spatial consistency of high-frequency control. To enable smooth real-time execution, we further introduce Reuse-then-Refine, a chunk-level refine strategy that improves continuity between adjacent action chunks under asynchronous inference. As a result, robots controlled by our policy can execute complex contact-rich tasks continuously, with less pauses and jerky motions. Experiments on three real-world contact-rich robotic tasks show that our approach consistently completes tasks with smooth motions.
Applications · Robotics
Flow matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise precise continuous control, but their iterative denoising nature introduces fundamental incompatibilities with real-time robotics: global timestep injection invalidates KV-caching, forcing a choice between slow $O(N^2)$ re-computation or mathematically incorrect cache reuse. We present \textbf{Reflex}, a framework that enables \textit{real-time streaming inference} for flow matching policies by exploiting the \textit{Timestep-Invariance Property}---that perception encoders are functionally independent of the denoising loop. Reflex partitions the attention context into static, sliding, and dynamic regions, enabling $O(1)$ incremental cache updates that guarantee outputs identical to full-batch inference. To ensure stability under continuous high-frequency inference, we introduce \textit{AdaRMSNorm}, an adaptive normalization layer that prevents BFloat16 numerical collapse by gating on flow phase. We further maximize throughput through an \textit{async pipeline} that decouples visual encoding from action generation, combined with \textit{operator fusion} that reduces kernel overhead. On LIBERO and Kinetix benchmarks, Reflex achieves a 2.58$\times$ inference speedup and 50Hz stable streaming, reducing reaction latency by up to 54\% and enabling efficient deployment without performance degradation.
Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL
A promising recipe towards intelligent robotic decision-making is the finetuning of pretrained generative control policies, which can summarize offline experience effectively through behavior cloning, with reinforcement learning techniques to adapt them to online experience. In this work we present Diffusion Filtered Exploration via Ensembles (DF-ExpEnse), an exploration technique that meaningfully improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing the sample efficiency of the finetuning procedure. DF-ExpEnse first leverages the multimodal modeling capability of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. Then, it utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify an action with high exploration interest that best balances quality with uncertainty. When instantiated in a parallelized fleet, DF-ExpEnse further utilizes cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. As it is only used for online experience collection, DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated on top of existing techniques that seek to finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits when using DF-ExpEnse for exploration over both manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes.
Applications · Robotics
While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in ground-based embodied intelligence, their application to Aerial Manipulation Systems (AMS) remains a largely unexplored frontier. The inherent characteristics of AMS, including floating-base dynamics, strong coupling between the UAV and the manipulator, and the multi-step, long-horizon nature of operational tasks, pose severe challenges to existing VLA paradigms designed for static or 2D mobile bases. To bridge this gap, we propose AIR-VLA, the first VLA benchmark specifically tailored for aerial manipulation. We construct a physics-based simulation environment and release a high-quality multimodal dataset comprising 3000 manually teleoperated demonstrations, covering base manipulation, object & spatial understanding, semantic reasoning, and long-horizon planning. Leveraging this platform, we systematically evaluate mainstream VLA models and state-of-the-art VLM models. Our experiments not only validate the feasibility of transferring VLA paradigms to aerial systems but also, through multi-dimensional metrics tailored to aerial tasks, reveal the capabilities and boundaries of current models regarding UAV mobility, manipulator control, and high-level planning. AIR-VLA establishes a standardized testbed and data foundation for future research in general-purpose aerial robotics. The resource of AIR-VLA will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AIR-VLA-dataset-B5CC/.
Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly constraining the *policy ratio **variance*** provides a principled local approximation to trust-region constraints, eliminating the need for binary hard clipping. By acting as a distributional ''soft brake'', this approach preserves critical gradient signals from novel discoveries while naturally down-weighting and enabling the reuse of stale, off-policy data. We introduce **R$^2$VPO** (Ratio-Variance Regularized Policy Optimization), which implements this constraint via a primal–dual optimization framework. Extensive evaluations across $7$ LLM scales, spanning both fast and slow reasoning paradigms, and $10$ robotic control tasks demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach. R$^2$VPO achieves substantial performance gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with particularly pronounced improvements on smaller models, while significantly improving sample efficiency. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms PPO baselines in continuous control domains, particularly in sparse-reward and dynamic environments. Together, these findings establish ratio-variance regularization as a principled foundation for stable and data-efficient policy optimization.
Optimization · Non-Convex
In this paper, we study a class of non-convex optimization problems known as multi-affine quadratic equality constrained problems, which appear in various applications--from generating feasible force trajectories in robotic locomotion and manipulation to training neural networks. Although these problems are generally non-convex, they exhibit convexity or related properties when all variables except one are fixed. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) converges when applied to this class of problems. Furthermore, when the "degree" of non-convexity in the constraints remains within certain bounds, we show that ADMM achieves a linear convergence rate. We validate our theoretical results through practical examples in robotic locomotion.
World models derived from large-scale video generative pre-training have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robot policy learning. However, standard approaches often focus on high-fidelity RGB video prediction, but this can result in overfitting to irrelevant factors, such as dynamic backgrounds and illumination changes. These distractions reduce the model's ability to generalize, ultimately leading to unreliable and fragile control policies. To address this, we introduce the Mask World Model (MWM), that leverages video diffusion architectures to predict the evolution of semantic masks instead of pixels. This shift imposes a geometric information bottleneck, forcing the model to capture essential physical dynamics and contact relations while filtering out visual noise. We seamlessly integrate this mask dynamics backbone with a diffusion-based policy head to enable robust end-to-end control. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MWM on the LIBERO and RLBench simulation benchmarks, which significantly outperforming the state-of-the-arts RGB-based world models. Furthermore, real-world experiments and robustness evaluation (via random token pruning) reveal that MWM exhibits superior generalization capabilities with robust resilience to texture information loss.
Theory · Reinforcement Learning and Planning
Behavior cloning is a fundamental paradigm in machine learning, enabling policy learning from expert demonstrations across robotics, autonomous driving, and generative models. Autoregressive models like transformer have proven remarkably effective, from large language models (LLMs) to vision-language-action systems (VLAs). However, applying autoregressive models to continuous control requires discretizing actions through quantization, a practice widely adopted yet poorly understood theoretically. This paper provides theoretical foundations for this practice. We analyze how quantization error propagates along the horizon and interacts with statistical sample complexity. We show that behavior cloning with quantized actions and log-loss achieves optimal sample complexity—matching existing lower bounds—and incurs only polynomial horizon dependence on quantization error, provided the dynamics are stable and the policy satisfies a probabilistic smoothness condition. We further characterize when different quantization schemes satisfy or violate these requirements, and propose a model-based augmentation that provably improves the error bound without requiring policy smoothness. Finally, we establish fundamental limits that jointly capture the effects of quantization error and statistical complexity.