Author

Dongbin Zhao

View on Semantic Scholar

2 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Preprint Sep 2026

GIFT: Guided Intermediate Feature Training via Action-Oriented Structural Supervision for Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language pre-training and predictive world modeling provide robot policies with rich semantic and dynamic visual features, but their native action and visual-prediction objectives may omit critical physical and task structure while retaining control-irrelevant visual redundancy. We call this mismatch between visual richness and control utility the action-sufficiency gap. We investigate whether this gap can be bridged by guiding intermediate features to preserve three control-relevant structure in robotic manipulation: geometry governing motion feasibility, affordance encoding instruction-relevant entities, and goals grounding instructions in task-relevant regions. To this end, we present GIFT (Guided Intermediate Feature Training), an architecture-flexible framework for learning intermediate features that translates these structures into training-time constraints through geometry alignment, affordance prediction, and goal-region reconstruction. We instantiate GIFT in a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy, a direct-action World-Action Model (WAM), and an inverse-dynamics WAM while retaining each model's action formulation. Under zero-shot transfer to LIBERO-Plus, GIFT-VLA, GIFT-WAM-Fast, and GIFT-WAM-IDM outperform StarVLA-OFT, Fast-WAM, and Fast-WAM-IDM by 4.6, 12.6, and 5.2 points, reaching 79.6%, 72.6%, and 87.8%, respectively. On RoboCasa, the three GIFT variants reach 61.4%, 83.6%, and 82.3%, outperforming their counterparts by 12.6, 9.0, and 8.4 points, respectively. Together, these results establish learning functionally structured intermediate features as a reusable principle across model-specific action formulations, with especially large gains on articulated-object tasks and high-precision real-world manipulation under unseen visual and spatial perturbations. Project page: https://openphoenix-team.github.io/GIFT-pages.

Yupeng Zheng, Xiang Li, Song-En Gu et al. · 0 citations

Preprint Jul 2026

WALA Learning Executable Latent Actions from Action-Labeled Demonstrations and Action-Free Videos

Generalizable robot policies typically rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations, which are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, large-scale human and robot videos contain rich physical interactions but often lack executable robot action labels. We present WALA, a framework for learning executable latent actions from both action-labeled demonstrations and action-free videos. WALA first pretrains a semantic-geometric latent action model from videos by modeling the evolution between current observations and sparsely sampled future observations. Instead of reconstructing raw pixels, WALA predicts future deltas in the DINOv3 feature space and dense depth space, preserving task-relevant semantic and geometric structure while reducing sensitivity to appearance details. During policy training, the pretrained encoder provides stable latent action targets, and the decoder serves as a trainable latent world model. The latent actions generated by the vision-language backbone are jointly supervised by robot action prediction, latent action target matching, and future dynamics prediction. This enables action-labeled demonstrations to provide executable control supervision, while action-free videos contribute dynamics supervision without requiring robot action annotations. Experiments show that WALA achieves strong performance on RoboTwin, sets a new state-of-the-art result on RoboCasa with 75.2% average success, and improves both policy performance and generalization in real-world manipulation tasks.

Jiahao Liu, Zhongpu Xia, Shuai Tian et al. · 0 citations