World models endow perceptual systems with the ability to predict how scenes evolve under interaction. They are most beneficial when trained on diverse volumes of data, to instill a rich prior into downstream applications. Existing methods typically require robot action labels to learn action-conditioned 3D dynamics, which excludes web video data from the training pool. We study 3D point track completion as a pre-training objective for learning transferable 3D dynamics without robot data. Given a single RGB-D observation and sparse partial 3D trajectories (tracks), we predict future 3D tracks of all observed points. We show this objective produces a rich 3D dynamics prior, without requiring robot action labels. We contribute a diverse dataset of 2.9 million synthetic frames spanning deformable, articulated, and rigid objects, and use it to train PointZero. We show that a flexible and expressive transformer, PointZero, outperforms prior methods on the same data. We demonstrate the utility of our pre-training objective by post-training PointZero for two downstream applications: (1) action-conditioned 3D dynamics prediction and (2) imitation learning. When fine-tuned to condition on end-effector pose, PointZero outperforms the baselines on the recent PGND 3D dynamics benchmark. When fine-tuned to predict robot actions and 3D tracks, PointZero outperforms or matches the baselines on 6/7 simulated and real-world robot manipulation tasks. We furthermore evaluate training PointZero from scratch to isolate the benefits of our proposed architecture from those of our proposed pre-training objective and dataset. We release the dataset, checkpoints, and full training recipe.
B. Duisterhof, Kai-Feng Zhang, Adam Hung et al.· 0 citations
In-hand manipulation allows multi-fingered dexterous hands to reconfigure grasped objects without releasing and regrasping them. This improves manipulation efficiency by reducing repeated grasp acquisition and large arm motions. However, most learning-based methods focus on reorientation, continuous rotation, or translation, whereas many tasks require joint control of object position and orientation. We formulate this capability as in-hand 6D object pose reaching: starting from an existing grasp, coordinated finger motions move the object to a palm-relative target pose. We present POISE (Palm-relative Object reaching In SE(3)), a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for this task. POISE combines diverse stable-grasp initialization, goal- and geometry-conditioned control, an adaptive 6D goal curriculum, and a compact reward scheme for pose reaching and grasp preservation. In simulation, diverse initialization raises held-out-grasp success from 40.1% to 51.5% and post-drop recovery from 33.8% to 72.9%; the curriculum raises full-range success from 6.2% to 59.5%. On hardware, the grasp-maintenance reward improves three-target sequence success from 20% to 80%. In real-world experiments, POISE reaches successive 6D targets without manual reset across multiple object geometries and wrist orientations, and recovers from external disturbances. To support further research in dexterous manipulation, we will release our code at https://junxiaolin.github.io/poise-website/.
Jun-Xiao Lin, Tian-Yue Wu, Jie Yin et al.· 0 citations
Evaluating robot manipulation policies is becoming increasingly important as generalist models, particularly vision-language-action (VLA) models, are deployed on physical robots. However, conventional real-world evaluation remains labor-intensive, unstable, and insufficiently informative. It requires repeated hardware trials, manual scene resets, and continuous operator monitoring, may produce different policy rankings across repeated evaluations, and primarily relies on success-rate metrics that provide limited information about execution quality. In contrast, humans assess robot performance by observing and comparing complete behaviors rather than relying solely on binary success outcomes. To this end, we propose R2S-Eval, an evaluation pipeline that combines real-to-sim calibration with vision-language model (VLM) preference evaluation. The real-to-sim component efficiently generates rollout videos in a simulator calibrated to the real-world evaluation setting, thereby reducing the need for repeated hardware trials. The VLM evaluator assesses the execution quality of rollout videos and produces pairwise preferences, which are subsequently aggregated into policy rankings. We further introduce a protocol to assess whether the proposed evaluation pipeline yields validated policy conclusions while mitigating the key challenges of conventional real-world evaluation. Experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that R2S-Eval produces reliable and stable policy conclusions, achieves agreement with human preferences, substantially reduces repeated hardware-operation effort, and reveals behavior-quality differences that are not captured by binary success labels. In general, R2S-Eval advances robot evaluation from manual success counting toward automated, statistically stable, and quality-aware evaluation of robot behavior. Project page: https://r2s-eval.github.io.
Yi-Di Wang, Fei-Xiang Ruan, Ruo-Qu Chen et al.· 1 citation
Agentic Real2Sim is introduced, a framework for generalized physical world modeling with vision-language agents, converting a real-world recording of object-robot interaction into a simulatable episodic twin which preserves observations, geometries, robot interactions, and object states.
