World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An asynchronous architecture updates CLIFER in the background during live interaction. In a counterbalanced within-subject study in which 66 participants negotiated with a humanoid robot, the CL-enabled agent achieved significantly higher individual utility and elicited higher participant concession rates than the FaceChannel baseline. The CL condition yielded significantly higher mean arousal estimates, alongside a broader output range. Participant utility and Nash distance did not change significantly between conditions. These outcomes support the practical value of coupling continual affective personalization with differential feedback for real-time negotiation.
Preventing human error in physical assembly tasks requires assistance systems that can intervene before mistakes are made. This is especially challenging in settings where users are free to choose the construction order and correctness depends on the evolving assembly rather than a fixed next step. We present TanCRAFT, a four-stage real-time predictive assistance system that tracks the scene state, reasons about the current partial assembly, forecasts the near-future motion of manipulated pieces, and intervenes when the predicted placement is incompatible with the target. We instantiate our framework and confirm its effectiveness in a controlled tangram assembly task through offline benchmarks and a within-subject user study. Our findings show that the predictive feedback significantly reduces mistakes relative to unguided and reactive sessions, while yielding the lowest mean perceived workload and shortest mean completion time. Overall, these results demonstrate the value of predictive feedback for error prevention and provide a step toward cost-aware assistance for automation and human-robot workcells.
Understanding 4D scenes is a core challenge in visual intelligence, requiring models to jointly capture scene geometry, appearance, and dynamics from partial observations. However, existing approaches are subdivided into feedforward models for direct geometric prediction, and generative models for visual synthesis. We introduce UGG, a unified framework for 4D scene understanding that jointly models RGB video and geometric representations such as depth and camera pose. By assigning different noise levels across modalities and time, UGG formulates visual generation and geometric prediction as conditional completion within a single generative model. This flexible formulation enables the model to learn from diverse, heterogeneous datasets with different subsets of geometric and visual annotations. Furthermore, our generative formulation enables inference-time search over multiple plausible scene hypotheses, using geometric evidence extracted from observed RGB frames to improve geometric prediction without ground truth geometry. We demonstrate UGG's effectiveness over non-unified baselines across camera-controlled video generation, depth estimation, and camera pose prediction, including in challenging sparse observation settings. Code and visualizations are available at https://ugg-model.github.io/
We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $π_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the model for longer, optimizing some training parameters, making each training step slightly faster and reducing the gradient noise: a migration from 50 to 100 tasks (semantic stages built from the demonstrations' skill annotations, task and stage embeddings of new tasks warm-started from similar old ones, and a 21-dimensional action space matching the teleoperation controls); variance-reduced multi-sample flow matching with a simple noise-vs-compute model that picks the number of action-expert samples per observation without ablations; and a 200k-step training run, about one pass over the 211M frames of the demonstrations. A cloud evaluation infrastructure keeps a shared record with provenance, episode diagnostics and restorable simulator states, and runs six simulators on one GPU together faster than real time. On top of the learned policy, 14 tasks are routed to a GPT-6 Astra coding agent that controls the robot through observation and motion tools, starting every episode from a frozen copy of its own practice session on training instances. Across these 14 tasks, Astra's mean Q is 0.639, against 0.108 for the learned policy. The public submission included only part of the Astra results and scored 0.446 Q with 27.3% full-task success.
Biological intelligence emerges from neural activity that connects sensation, memory and action. Synaptic plasticity, neuronal assemblies and oscillations provide principles for biomimetic computing, but translating them into reusable operations requires a defined computational unit. We introduce Oscillatory Processing Units (OPUs), groups of synthetic neurons sharing a rhythm. Their directed interactions transform incoming activity and prior receiving state into an Oscillatory Occupancy Space (OOS), which becomes available to subsequent computation. We show that source--receiver conditions and oscillatory organization shape these transformations, including their geometry, persistence and historical accessibility. An Atlas of measured relationships supports prospective composition with predicted response classes. Configured circuits perform logical and numerical operations, express associative recall and generate closed-loop decisions with fixed synaptic weights. OPUs and OOS establish a computing substrate for biomimetic intelligence in which experience remains part of the state through which new input becomes action.
A great gap in adaptivity, flexibility, and dexterity still exists between intelligent robots, whether they are made of rigid or (partially) compliant components, and their naturally evolved animal and vegetal counterparts. One reason could be of `paradigm' nature. On the one hand, most robots (both rigid and soft) are still designed by following a `Cartesian' approach, with top-down control and a clear mind-body separation. Designing artificial agents on the basis of the principles that we observe in biology is not an easy task. The principles of organization of animals and plants rely on morphological computation and emergence of fit behaviors from loosely coupled networks of embodied agents. Modeling and control require radically new approaches. In this paper we briefly recall and explain some seminal mathematical results linking information metrics and dynamics of the agents, already published years ago; we integrate them with some recent methods developed by us and by the community, we highlight some brief remarks about their relevance and we hint to our current and near future work towards finding concrete and efficient ways for the modeling and control of completely or partially compliant artificial agents and for a better understanding of physical intelligence in nature. We present a technical note summarizing phase-space volume calculations for inverted-pendulum and passive-dynamic walking models, following our proposed framework. Starting from the McGeer compass gait, we introduce knee-ankle compliance, foot-rocker effects, and a Ruina-style compass gait with distributed leg inertia. Standard heel-strike maps are derived and used in the estimation of viable phase-space volumes $W(\gamma)$, based on a state-dependent Monte-Carlo and Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces methods. We show how the methods based on RKHS allow deeper and more subtle analysis.
Monocular depth foundation models make it tempting to replace depth sensors on mobile robots with a single RGB camera. We show that, used off the shelf, this is unsafe: in a simulated indoor navigation benchmark, a standard Nav2 stack driven by Depth Anything V2 (metric) collides in 63\% of 120 episodes, because the model systematically over-estimates the distance to nearby obstacles. We propose a lightweight plug-in module that turns predicted depth into \emph{safe depth}. A 0.58\,M-parameter head on top of the \emph{frozen} depth model predicts, per pixel, a log-depth correction $\mu$ and an uncertainty $\sigma$, trained with a $\beta$-weighted Gaussian negative log-likelihood. The navigation stack consumes the one-sided bound $\hat d_{\text{safe}}=d\,e^{\mu-k\sigma}$, where $k$ is set by conformal calibration on a held-out world, and uncertainty also decides which pixels may be treated as floor. The correction halves the depth error (AbsRel $0.262\rightarrow0.134$) and reduces near-range over-estimation from 59.8\% to 12.0\%. In navigation, safe depth raises the success rate from 37\% to 70\% and lowers collisions from 63\% to 3\%, close to the 2\% of ground-truth depth. A constant safety margin calibrated to the same pixel coverage reaches only 30\% success because it freezes the robot; uncertainty-aware safety wins 52 of 56 discordant paired episodes against it. Gains hold on glass, texture-less walls and dark regions.
In this paper, we investigate how human egocentric videos can benefit robot policy learning without action supervision. Building on a pretrained VLM, we propose Shared Prediction on Action and Representation (SPAR), an MoT architecture in which future visual state prediction can provide independent and complementary learning signals alongside action prediction. We find that representations learned from egocentric videos improve downstream performance on out-of-distribution robot tasks, with further gains as video data scales. We also study the effects of objective choices and data curation, providing insights into how to leverage action-free videos for scalable robot learning.
Reasoning about people's plans and goals based on their actions is fundamental to human social interaction and essential for cooperative, embodied artificial intelligence. Formalizing this capacity in naturalistic, embodied settings has been a longstanding challenge. Here, we present GenEA, a novel agent representation capable of reasoning over multi-step, long-horizon embodied plans. At the heart of GenEA lies a multilevel state-space that couples the coarse biomechanics of an articulated body and its interactions with nearby objects by extending the task-and-motion planning framework from robotics with simulation-based intuitive physics. By embedding this state-space in a generative model, GenEA yields a joint probability distribution over goals and embodied plans. Across several experiments spanning the qualitatively distinct domains of object manipulation and navigation, featuring diverse tasks and multiple behavioral measures, we show that GenEA, through simple transformations of this joint distribution, recapitulates how humans reason about embodied plans. Crucially, GenEA consistently outperforms strong alternative models, including plausible heuristics, standard task-and-motion planning, and a state-of-the-art vision-language model. GenEA thereby offers a new perspective on the architecture of human reasoning and social cognition, suggesting that embodied artificial intelligence systems seeking to seamlessly interact with humans should adopt GenEA-like generative models of action planning.
Smart industrial solutions that can address multiple tasks require models that understand the underlying processes. We examine representation learning for modeling the injection moulding process as an example of such solutions. We consider its data efficiency and multi-modal benefit compared to classical machine learning alternatives. To this end, we synthesize a process-informed dataset based on a real reference cycle of an Erlanger Tr\"ager part. We then introduce MouldIt, a temporal convolution and attention based variational autoencoder that reconstructs in-mould signals, while classifying parts as acceptable or as one of our synthetic failure modes. We evaluate MouldIt on two tasks, known-class classification and unknown-class detection, across nine dataset sizes in single-modal and multi-modal settings. We compare it with an accept-all baseline and the classical methods k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, random forests, and principal component analysis, which we adapt to support both tasks. MouldIt outperforms classical methods across both tasks from 4000 cycles in the single-modal setting and from 2000 cycles in the multi-modal setting. It achieves part sorting losses of 6.0 $\pm$ 0.7% and 1.0 $\pm$ 0.3% in the single-modal and multi-modal settings respectively, ranking first across all baselines and a combination of principal component analysis and random forests.
Photorealistic and metrically consistent world representations are a primary requirement for LiDAR--inertial--visual SLAM systems that serve robots over continuous operation. 3D Gaussian splatting makes such representations attainable by supplying an explicit, renderable, and queryable scene model. We present GEMOR-GS (Global Extrinsic-calibration-refined Mapping and Online Relocalization for 3D Gaussian-Splatting SLAM) to make the Gaussian map geometrically accurate, globally refined, and re-enterable, providing a better appearance for robot perception and decision-making. To improve the 3DGS map, the LiDAR--camera extrinsic is first estimated offline by direct-method alignment over dedicated calibration segments and reused by all following online and offline processes. Under the calibrated geometry, keyframe poses and Gaussian parameters are refined alternately under a gated differentiable-rendering and LiDAR--projection objective. The final global reconstruction is then rebuilt from the refined keyframe schema with all online constraints lifted. For the robot SLAM lifecycle, the method recovers the pose from the 3DGS map after tracking loss through an XFeat bypass map, RANSAC-PnP coarse localization, and Gaussian RGB-D warp refinement. Experiments on one self-collected and five public sequences quantify each element: the offline reconstruction wins all paired keyframes against the online map by 14.3--19.9 dB, improves PSNR by approximately 9 dB over Gaussian-LIC2, and achieves 86--100% held-out relocalization success tied to extrinsic quality. The results show that GEMOR-GS improves the geometric accuracy, appearance fidelity, and re-enterability of the 3DGS map, serving as a dependable robot world model for SLAM and downstream tasks.
Accurate inertial odometry is critical for autonomous systems but suffers from unbounded drift caused by the integration of sensor noise and biases. In approaches such as TLIO, neural pseudo-measurements are trained independently of their downstream filter. This paper introduces Differentiable Filtering for Inertial Odometry (DFIO), a learning framework that embeds the update stages of an error-state Kalman filter directly into a computational graph. Following standalone pre-training, DFIO jointly optimizes the displacement and covariance output heads using posterior-position supervision through differentiable measurement updates. The proposed system is validated on public pedestrian motion datasets featuring both calibrated and uncalibrated inertial measurements. Experimental results on a pedestrian dataset demonstrate that DFIO reduces mean absolute and one-second relative translation errors by 13.2% and 39.6% relative to the TLIO baseline, and by 7.7% and 17.4% relative to its pre-trained counterpart. Furthermore, evaluations on uncalibrated smartphone inertial data indicate that the proposed method effectively mitigates translational drift and maintains trajectory alignment under highly noisy sensor conditions. Source code will be made publicly available.
Flow matching robot policies commonly use a fixed Euler step count selected from offline accuracy sweeps. At inference time, however, each policy input (visual observation, robot state, and language instruction) together with a source-noise draw defines a different ODE trajectory and sequence of local Jacobians. We ask whether a step count that accurately follows the nominal noise-to-action trajectory can still be too coarse for strongly contracting directions around it. An exact two-coordinate system and a controlled augmentation of six trained flow models show that trajectory accuracy and local Euler stability can impose different step requirements even when the original learned transport is unchanged. We then study a frozen $\pi_{0.5}$-LIBERO checkpoint without modifying its weights or action dynamics. Across 30 policy inputs from 10 LIBERO-10 tasks, the Jacobian exhibits strong contracting directions near the action endpoint, yet no sampled mode violates the Euler non-expansion condition. On five of those inputs, accuracy sweeps require 4--9 Euler steps at 5% terminal error and 87--112 at 1%. These five paired cases are therefore consistent with accuracy-limited rather than stability-limited sampling under this local criterion, while the controlled experiments show why endpoint accuracy alone cannot rule out a separate stability requirement.
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar provides weather-robust sensing and direct Doppler measurements, yet automotive perception pipelines often reduce its output to sparse point clouds or two-dimensional projections, leaving raw range-azimuth-Doppler (RAD) cubes underutilized. Ego motion induces Doppler responses from world-static structures, while Doppler wrapping aliases radial velocities, complicating moving-object detection and velocity estimation. We present RaMOD (Radar-based Moving-Object Detection), a real-time framework for moving-object detection and velocity estimation from raw RAD cubes acquired by a vehicle-mounted single-chip radar. RaMOD explicitly estimates frame-wise ego motion and uses the estimated radar translational velocity to predict the Doppler region of world-static structures and suppress returns within it. It temporally encodes the suppressed cubes into multi-scale features to predict RAD-space boxes with class labels. For each detected object, it predicts radial and forward velocities under raw-Doppler and Doppler-unwrapped hypotheses, together with Doppler-wrapping probabilities. On our BRIDGE-Liv dataset, RaMOD outperforms all compared raw-radar methods across RAD-cube, RA, and RD detection settings, achieving 80.8% cube mAP at IoU 0.30, 15.7 percentage points above the strongest RAD-cube baseline. Velocity MAE is 1.128 m/s, with 99.87% Doppler-wrapping accuracy.
A person running a bench experiment works from a printed instruction sheet, tells identical containers apart by the labels written on them, and looks at the bench again before each step. Lab automation usually works the other way around: the procedure is written as a script, and containers stand at fixed positions or carry fiducial markers. We present Curie's Jarvis, a system that lets a robot arm carry out a chemistry experiment on a bench set up for people. It reads the steps from a photo of the printed sheet, finds containers on an ordinary bench with no fixed positions or markers, tells identical-looking containers apart by reading their labels in four camera views, locates its target again before every step, and sets how each step is carried out, including its speed, from what is being handled. On a Franka Panda arm, Curie's Jarvis completed 5 of 5 runs of one protocol from a children's chemistry kit and 4 of 5 runs of another, with no human intervention, and in 160 locates on printed and handwritten labels it identified every container correctly. This brings robots a step closer to doing bench chemistry the way people do.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models now exceed 95% success on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, yet it remains unclear how much of this performance requires generalization beyond the training demonstrations. In this work, we show that retrieving nearby demonstrations and reusing their action chunks achieves a success rate of 91.7 % on LIBERO without policy training. Under LIBERO-Plus perturbations, retrieval shows the smallest drop of all evaluated policies. Across nine publicly available VLAs, fine-tuning mostly makes the vision-language backbone a better retrieval key, and the actions of the VLAs remain close to the demonstrations. In addition, we introduce Local Action Consistency (LAC), an offline metric that measures whether nearby observations in representation space are also associated with similar future actions. We show that LAC tracks the success rate of retrieval and can guide the training of a retrieval key. Our evaluation and source code are available at https://github.com/sereact/lerobot_knn.
Learning-based decentralized collision avoidance must remain reliable under state-estimation uncertainty and heterogeneous agent dynamics. Existing methods typically address these factors through training-domain variation or by exposing uncertainty and capability estimates to the policy at runtime. However, both leave the policy to infer how these quantities should alter the physical separation required for safe interaction, which can couple collision-avoidance behavior to relationships learned from the training distribution. We introduce the Dynamic Oriented Bounding Box (DOBB), an online geometric representation that maps the current state estimate, uncertainty, and agent-specific response characteristics into a dynamic, direction-dependent safety margin. We derive geometric features that jointly characterize the relative configuration and severity of interactions between agents' DOBBs, along with a reward function that preserves the physical interpretation of those interactions. Across four evaluation environments, DOBB achieves the lowest mean total failure rate of 2.6%. This performance persists under out-of-distribution shifts in actuation dynamics and state-estimation uncertainty, with collision-based failure remaining at or below 2.3% in every tested condition. We attribute this robustness to the geometric abstraction of the safety margin, which is less coupled to the specific uncertainty and actuation regimes encountered during training.
System identification requires expert decisions on the identification method, incorporation of prior physical knowledge, and model validation. We propose ASPIRE, a framework for nonlinear system identification in which a large language model agent selects and executes the identification method. ASPIRE constructs closed-form, nonlinear static or dynamic models from measured data, optionally supplemented by a system description, the intended use of the model, and physical requirements expressed formally or in natural language. Each model includes its parameters, an estimation record, an interpretation of its terms, and an error evaluated on test data inaccessible to the agent. Formal physical requirements are verified independently. ASPIRE operates autonomously or interactively, allowing the agent to ask questions and the user to request further analyses and identification rounds. We evaluate ASPIRE on three measured systems: a mobile robot, a rotational system with dry friction, and a laboratory fermenter. Each system is tested with and without a description, in five runs per task. All 30 runs delivered valid models, at a cost of 0.96 to 3.38 US dollars per run. An assessment by the authors found that, for the 30 models recommended by the agent, one per run, the interpretation of the model and the documentation of its structure selection and parameter estimation fully satisfied 132 of 150 assessed items and partly satisfied 18. The most frequent discrepancy, found in nine models, concerned inaccurate or unsupported claims about model structure selection.
Embodied Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are backbones for robotic planning and manipulation. However, for coordinate prediction in grounding tasks, existing architectures suffer from two distinct bottlenecks: discrete tokenization disrupts spatial continuity with high decoding latency, while standard point regression fails on multi-contact affordances and irregularly shaped targets. To resolve these challenges, we propose PhysMoE, introducing three core contributions: (1) sharing lower layers for multimodal context while routing upper layers to specialized spatial (pixel) and linguistic (text) experts by physical modality, eliminating gradient interference; (2) encoding each coordinate as a single token by reusing the visual encoder's learned positional embeddings, injecting 2D spatial priors to natively align coordinates with visual features and ease training; and (3) differentiable Signed Distance Field (SDF) supervision on pointing, accommodating affordances and irregular geometries without costly mask decoders. Compared to the base model, PhysMoE achieves a 15.7% average gain and an 8.31x throughput speedup across 9 coordinate-based grounding benchmarks (trajectory, affordance, and localization), while preserving multimodal understanding and reasoning across 11 text-based embodied benchmarks.