论文检索

Applications · Robotics

Chenqi Yan, Zhaoyu Zeng, Yifeng Yang, Jundong Zhou, Zhuoyuan Ni, Junqi Wu, Qinying Gu, Xinbing Wang, Nanyang Ye

Robust aerial target detection for autonomous UAV-on-UAV pursuit is severely hindered by continuous scale drift, long-tailed scale imbalance, and flight-induced visual noise, rendering standard empirical risk minimization strategies poorly aligned with real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose a scale-aware robust optimization framework that performs group-wise minimax optimization over scale-partitioned data, ensuring balanced robustness across long-, mid-, and close-range engagement regimes. We further introduce an uncertainty-rectified regression loss to suppress noise-driven errors without discarding informative hard examples, complemented by a control-aligned center accuracy penalty that prioritizes the localization precision required for stable flight control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields substantially improved robustness under visual degradation, with significantly slower decay in detection mAP and center-point accuracy compared to baselines. Validated through both photorealistic simulations and real-world flight tests, our system achieves **real-time performance of 120 FPS** on an embedded NVIDIA Orin NX platform, confirming its practical efficacy for high-speed interception.

Applications · Robotics

Leiyu Wang, Zhaofengnian Wang, Xueqi Li, Luoyi Fan, Cewu Lu, Nanyang Ye

Vision-Language-Action models face significant challenges in real-world deployment due to the entanglement of high-level reasoning with low-level control, and the instability of policy optimization. In this paper, we introduce SyVLA, a robust VLA model trained with diversified experiences. We propose an Intention Decoupling algorithm to isolate control-relevant features from reasoning contexts and a similar-sample guided RL pipeline to stabilize policy updates and mitigate distribution shift. Extensive experiments on real-world robotic tasks and multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate that SyVLA achieves superior task success rates and stronger out-of-distribution generalization compared to existing methods, while effectively preserving core vision-language capabilities.

Applications · Computer Vision

Yujia Zhang, Xiaoyang Wu, Yunhan Yang, Xianzhe Fan, Han Li, Yuechen Zhang, Zehao Huang, Naiyan Wang, Hengshuang Zhao

We dream of a future where point clouds from all domains can come together to shape a single model that benefits them all. Toward this goal, we present Utonia, a first step toward training a single self-supervised point transformer encoder across heterogeneous domains, spanning remote sensing, outdoor LiDAR, indoor RGB-D sequences, object-centric CAD models, and point clouds lifted from RGB-only videos. Despite their distinct sensing geometries, densities, and priors, Utonia learns a consistent representation space that transfers across domains. This unification improves perception capability while revealing intriguing emergent behaviors that arise only when domains are trained jointly. Beyond perception, we observe that Utonia representations can also benefit embodied and multimodal reasoning: conditioning vision-language-action policies on Utonia features improves robotic manipulation, and integrating them into vision-language models yields gains on spatial reasoning. We hope Utonia can serve as a step toward foundation models for sparse 3D data, and support downstream applications in AR/VR, robotics, and autonomous driving.

Applications · Robotics

Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring *my* cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose **Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP)**, a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

Deep Learning · Other Representation Learning

Shicheng Yin, Kaixuan Yin, Weixing Chen, Yang Liu, Guanbin Li, Liang Lin

World models are essential for autonomous robotic planning. However, the substantial computational overhead of existing dense Transformer-based models significantly hinders real-time deployment. To address this efficiency-performance bottleneck, we introduce DDP-WM, a novel world model centered on the principle of Disentangled Dynamics Prediction (DDP). We hypothesize that latent state evolution in observed scenes is heterogeneous and can be decomposed into sparse primary dynamics driven by physical interactions and secondary context-driven background updates. DDP-WM realizes this decomposition through an architecture that integrates efficient historical processing with dynamic localization to isolate primary dynamics. By employing a cross-attention mechanism for background updates, the framework optimizes resource allocation and provides a smooth optimization landscape for planners. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDP-WM achieves superior efficiency and performance across diverse tasks, including navigation, precise tabletop manipulation, and complex deformable or multi-body interactions. Specifically, on the challenging Push-T task, DDP-WM achieves an approximately 9 times inference speedup and improves the MPC success rate from 90% to 98% compared to state-of-the-art dense models.

Applications · Robotics

Zhiyi Li, Peilin Wu, Xiaoshen Han, Ruojin Cai, Yilun Du

Learned world models are emerging as a powerful paradigm in robotics, offering a promising path toward task generalization, long-horizon planning, and flexible decision-making. However, prevailing approaches often operate on 2D video sequences, inherently lacking the 3D geometric understanding necessary for precise spatial reasoning and physical consistency. We introduce a **Structured 4D Latent World Model**, which predicts the evolution of a scene’s 3D structure in a structured latent space conditioned on observations and textual instructions. Our representation encodes the scene holistically and can be decoded into diverse 3D formats, enabling a more complete and physically consistent scene understanding. This structured 4D latent world model serves as a planner, generating future scenes that are translated into executable actions by a goal-conditioned inverse dynamics module. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates futures with superior visual quality, physical consistency, and multi-view coherence compared to state-of-the-art video-based planners. Consequently, our full planning pipeline achieves superior performance on complex manipulation tasks, exhibits robust generalization to novel visual conditions, and proves effective on real-world robotic platforms. Our website is available at https://icml2026-18617.github.io/.

Renhao Zhang, Haotian Fu, Mingxi Jia, George Konidaris, Yilun Du, Bruno C. da Silva

We propose Parameterized Diffusion Policy (PDP), a framework that learns a diffusion policy parameterized in a smooth continuous space. By structuring a latent manifold such that distances between latents' values reflect the semantic similarity of physical trajectories, we transform diffusion from a mechanism of stochastic diversity into a precise tool for behavior steering. Our approach also enables smooth interpolation between known strategies and efficient generalization to novel constraints without the need to update policy weights. We demonstrate that PDP significantly improves adaptation performance on complex multimodal benchmarks in both simulation and real-robot hardware compared to regular diffusion policy, particularly in scenarios requiring the discovery of novel behaviors.

Applications · Robotics

Shuxin Cao, Liquan Wang, Walker Byrnes, Yiye Chen, Yilun Du, Animesh Garg

In this paper, we identify a semantic decomposition in robot action sequences, separating task-level motion intent from execution-level refinements. By analyzing actions in the spectral domain using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), we observe that low-frequency components capture global motion trajectories, while high-frequency components encode precise timing, alignment, and contact behaviors. Motivated by this structure, we propose Causal Spectral Policy (CSP), which models action generation as a causal coarse-to-fine process: coarse motion is predicted from observation and language, and fine corrections are generated conditionally on the realized trajectory. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, CSP consistently outperforms strong baselines on precision-sensitive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we propose human-inspired teleoperation noise injection as a data augmentation method under which our approach demonstrates strong robustness to noisy demonstrations.

Applications · Robotics

Xiaoji Zheng, Ziyuan Yang, Yuhang PENG, Yanhao Chen, Yuanrong Tang, Gengyuan Liu, Bokui Chen, Jiangtao Gong

End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide complementary reward signals, but applying RL in real-world autonomous driving is challenging in offline settings without simulators, where datasets consist almost exclusively of expert actions and lack behavioral diversity. We propose CoIRL-AD, a competitive dual-policy framework that integrates IL and RL under a unified offline training regime. CoIRL-AD decouples IL and RL into separate actors to alleviate objective conflicts between imitation and reward maximization, and introduces a competition-based mechanism that stabilizes learning and enables effective exploration while remaining anchored to expert behavior. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show a 27\% relative reduction in collision rate weighted by L2 error compared to strong baselines, with substantially larger gains on cross-city generalization (up to 77\%) and long-tail scenarios (up to 85\%), demonstrating that competitive integration of IL and RL significantly improves robustness in offline end-to-end autonomous driving. Code is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/drive-with-two-minds}.

Minh-Tung Luu, Hwanhee Kim, Younghwan Lee, Chang D. Yoo

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL (PbRL) offers a promising alternative by learning reward functions from human feedback, but its scalability is hindered by high labeling costs. Inspired by advances in Video Foundation Models (ViFMs), we present Video-based Optimal Transport Preference (VOTP), a semi-supervised framework that learns effective reward functions from only a handful of labels. By leveraging optimal transport to align visual trajectories within the rich representation space of ViFMs, VOTP effectively generates high-fidelity pseudo-labels for large amounts of unlabeled data, substantially reducing human supervision. Extensive experiments across locomotion and manipulation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of VOTP, which outperforms state-of-the-art offline PbRL methods under limited feedback budgets. We also showcase the robustness of VOTP in the presence of visual distractors and validate its utility on real robotic tasks, where it learns meaningful rewards with minimal human input.

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Huaihai Lyu, Chaofan Chen, Yuheng Ji, Xiansheng Chen, Pengwei Wang, Shanghang Zhang, Changsheng Xu

We formulate the learning of generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as a Gromov-Wasserstein alignment problem, aiming to map semantically similar VL embeddings to physically similar motion primitives. However, solving this is challenging due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, while the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. As a result, direct regression approaches fail due to the disjoint metric structures of these domains, making standard distance minimization ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer). LAST reconstructs the action space to establish a more consistent metric alignment between the VL and Action modalities. Specifically, LAST bridges the heterogeneity via two stages: (1) *Global Topological Linearization*, which linearizes the action manifold through Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation; and (2) *Local Metric Discretization*, where the representation is discretized hierarchically into schemas and whitened residuals, establishing a mathematical isomorphism with the isotropic Euclidean metric. By addressing the structural mismatch globally and locally, LAST enables VLA models with enhanced convergence and generalizability.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch/Offline

Minh-Tung Luu, Hwanhee Kim, Younghwan Lee, Chang D. Yoo

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL (PbRL) offers a promising alternative by learning reward functions from human feedback, but its scalability is hindered by high labeling costs. Inspired by advances in Video Foundation Models (ViFMs), we present Video-based Optimal Transport Preference (VOTP), a semi-supervised framework that learns effective reward functions from only a handful of labels. By leveraging optimal transport to align visual trajectories within the rich representation space of ViFMs, VOTP effectively generates high-fidelity pseudo-labels for large amounts of unlabeled data, substantially reducing human supervision. Extensive experiments across locomotion and manipulation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of VOTP, which outperforms state-of-the-art offline PbRL methods under limited feedback budgets. We also showcase the robustness of VOTP in the presence of visual distractors and validate its utility on real robotic tasks, where it learns meaningful rewards with minimal human input.

Social Aspects · Security

Zhengxian Huang, Wenjun Zhu, Haoxuan Qiu, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu

By integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, particularly by improving generalization and interpretability. However, the security of CoT-based reasoning mechanisms remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning introduces a novel attack vector for targeted control hijacking—for example, causing a robot to mistakenly deliver a knife to a person instead of an apple—without modifying the user’s instruction. We first provide empirical evidence that CoT strongly governs action generation, even when it is semantically misaligned with the input instructions. Building on this observation, we propose **TRAP**, the first targeted adversarial attack framework for CoT-reasoning VLA models. **TRAP** uses an adversarial patch (e.g., a coaster placed on the table) to corrupt intermediate CoT reasoning and hijack the VLA’s output. By optimizing the CoT adversarial loss, **TRAP** induces specific and adversary-defined behaviors. Extensive evaluations across 3 mainstreaming VLA architectures and 3 CoT reasoning paradigms validate the effectiveness of **TRAP**. Notably, we implemented the patch by printing it on paper in a real-world setting. Our findings highlight the urgent need to secure CoT reasoning in VLA systems.

Theory · Reinforcement Learning and Planning

Abdullah Akgül, Gulcin Baykal, Manuel Haussmann, Mustafa Mert Çelikok, Melih Kandemir

Optimal control of complex environments with robotic systems faces two complementary and intertwined challenges: efficient organization of sensory state information and far-sighted action planning. Because the reinforcement learning framework addresses only the latter, it tends to deliver sample-inefficient solutions. Active inference is the state-of-the-art process theory that explains how biological brains handle this dual problem. However, its applications to artificial intelligence have thus far been limited to extensions of existing model-based approaches. We present a formal abstraction of reinforcement learning algorithms that spans model-based, distributional, and model-free approaches. This abstraction seamlessly integrates active inference into the distributional reinforcement learning framework, making its performance advantages accessible without transition dynamics modeling.

Applications · Robotics

Zhiyu Huang, Yun Zhang, Johnson Liu, Rui Song, Chen Tang, Jiaqi Ma

Robots in dynamic, human-centric environments must follow language instructions while maintaining real-time reactive control. Vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising framework, but they assume temporally aligned reasoning and control, despite semantic inference being inherently delayed relative to real-time action. We introduce Think-in-Control (TIC)-VLA, a latency-aware framework that explicitly models delayed semantic reasoning during action generation. TIC-VLA defines a delayed semantic-control interface that conditions action generation on delayed vision-language semantic states and explicit latency metadata, in addition to current observations. We further propose a latency-consistent training pipeline that injects reasoning inference delays during imitation learning and online reinforcement learning, aligning training with asynchronous deployment. To support realistic evaluation, we present DynaNav, a physics-accurate, photo-realistic simulation suite for language-guided navigation in dynamic environments. Extensive experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that TIC-VLA consistently outperforms prior VLA models while maintaining robust real-time control under multi-second reasoning latency. Code, data, and benchmarks will be released for reproducibility.

Applications · Robotics

Rufeng Chen, Yue Chang, Xiaqiang Tang, Hechang Chen, Sihong Xie

Open-vocabulary navigation requires embodied agents to manage significant perception uncertainty stemming from semantic ambiguity and model errors. However, most existing works settle for local optimal deterministic approaches, depriving complex navigation decision-making over multiple composite possibilities that are critical for globally better solutions. In this paper, we propose Probabilistic Scene Graph Navigation (PSG-Nav), which constructs a 3D Probabilistic Scene Graph that uses full semantic categorical distributions to account for perception uncertainty. To efficiently use the local distributions to compose and reason about the optimal navigation landmarks, we propose Multiverse Decision to sample multiple most likely world settings from the joint distribution, and evaluate navigation landmarks based on the compatibility between landmarks and multiverses. To mitigate false positives due to epistemic uncertainty in open-vocabulary navigation, we introduce the Evidential Experience Calibrator, which enables online lifelong adaptation by cross-validating detections against memories of past successes and failures. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks MP3D, HD3D, and HSSD demonstrate that PSG-Nav establishes new state-of-the-art results, achieving a Success Rate of 66.1%, 44.8%, and 67.9%, respectively.

Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL

Haowen Sun, Liqi Huang, Mingyang Li, Sihua Ren, Xinzhe Chen, Chengzhong Ma, Zeyang Liu, Xingyu Chen, Xuguang Lan

Reinforcement learning from demonstrations (RLfD) offers a promising method for robotic manipulation with sparse rewards. However, limited demonstrations often cause agents to encounter out-of-distribution states where world models produce poor predictions. In multi-stage tasks, jointly optimizing a learned reward function and policy introduces a moving target problem, and the resulting non-stationarity intensifies the impact of uncertainty on policy learning. In this work, we propose QUEST, a model-based RL framework that adaptively switches between exploration and exploitation guided by uncertainty to achieve stable and efficient learning. Specifically, our approach employs intrinsic rewards to capture environmental stochasticity, leverages ensemble dynamics for uncertainty-guided planning, and introduces a hybrid sampling strategy to prioritize rare successful stage transitions. We evaluate QUEST on challenging sparse-reward manipulation tasks with limited expert demonstrations. Results show that QUEST outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 17\% on average, with gains increasing to 60\% on difficult tasks. We further demonstrate successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on three real-world tasks.

Applications · Robotics

Fengshuo Bai, Yufeng Li, Ruihai Wu, Peishuo Wang, Yuhan Wang, Bernie Zhu, Yuanfei Wang, Tawei Chou, Gao, Runchuan Zhu 等

Laboratory automation driven by scientific embodied agents represents a critical frontier in modern laboratories. Unlike conventional robotic domains, laboratory environments impose zero-tolerance constraints on manipulation precision and collision, as minor deviations can lead to irreversible chemical hazards or equipment damage. This naturally makes the automated laboratory an ideal testbed for advancing embodied safety. However, existing benchmarks predominantly feature high-tolerance manipulation tasks where intermediate failures are largely reversible. More critically, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models trained via static imitation learning cannot satisfy these strict constraints. Because they merely mimic successful demonstrations, they lack the ability to recover from execution drift, leading to catastrophic compounding errors in precision-critical domains. Overcoming this limitation requires transitioning from static datasets to interactive environments that support Reinforcement Learning (RL) for dynamic error recovery. To this end, we introduce SafeLab, a generative simulation benchmark designed for the full lifecycle of safe robot learning. Grounded in a high-fidelity chemistry lab, our framework integrates an {LLM engine} for procedural task synthesis, an {automated expert} for scalable demonstration collection, and an {interactive environment} for continuous RL refinement. Leveraging this infrastructure, we release a dataset of 6,000+ {complex trajectories} to evaluate state-of-the-art VLA models. Experiments reveal that current embodied agents fail significantly under these safety constraints. In contrast, our RL post-training pipeline enables agents to learn active error correction, mitigating hazardous failures and improving success rates by 37\%, thereby establishing SafeLab as a critical platform for developing reliable and safe generalist agents.

Pengyi Li, Hongyao Tang, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Xin Xu, Jianye Hao

Deploying robots in open‑ended real‑world environments demands continual learning capabilities to adapt to an ever-expanding range of tasks. This requires retaining previously acquired skills without forgetting while effectively leveraging prior knowledge to learn new ones. Inspired by neuroscience, we propose Neuro-evolutionary Continual Reinforcement Learning (Nevo-CRL). Nevo-CRL maintains a fixed-capacity monolithic policy network, solving tasks by optimizing inter-layer connectivity and neuron parameter. For each new task, Nevo-CRL constructs a mask population to selectively activate the outputs of each hidden layer, thereby forming a task-specific policy population. Upon completing each task, the best-performing mask is stored, and its activated neurons are frozen to prevent catastrophic forgetting. To facilitate knowledge transfer, Nevo-CRL reuses neurons from acquired skills based on semantic similarity between tasks, while dynamically allocating additional neurons for task-specific adaptation. In the learning process, Nevo-CRL iteratively adjusts masks via importance-based crossover to optimize the policy network connectivity. To improve neuron utilization, we prune low-activity connections to recycle neurons. The experiments demonstrate that Nevo-CRL significantly outperforms existing continual RL methods and multi-task learning methods in terms of overall performance, forgetting reduction, generalization ability.

Applications · Robotics

Tao Sun, Utkarsh Mishra, Jiaxin Lu, Danfei Xu, Iro Armeni

Compositional diffusion planners enable robotic decision-making beyond the horizon of training trajectories. Yet, current approaches often rely on the heuristic stitching of local predictions. We demonstrate that this induces a non-conservative vector field that does not mathematically correspond to any valid global trajectory log-density function. We propose Energy-based Compositional Diffuser (ECD), a framework that formulates the global trajectory as the minimizer of the sum of local bridge potentials. This energy-based perspective guarantees a conservative update field by construction and reveals a critical endpoint reaction term that is missing in heuristic stitching methods. To enable efficient inference, we further introduce a Markov-based score approximation that computes the reaction term though a single block-tridiagonal solve, maintaining time complexity linear in the planning horizon. Empirically, ECD achieves state-of-the-art success rates on a range of OGBench stitching tasks, while nearly matching the inference speed of heuristic stitching methods.