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robotics

1,589 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Interruption-Aware Recurrent Reinforcement Learning for UAS Navigation Under Temporary Overrides

Safe autonomous navigation of UASs requires tactical deconfliction to address conflicts that strategic coordination cannot prevent. This task is challenging under partial observability, when sensor or traffic data are missing, delayed, or degraded. Geometry-based methods can offer separation assurances but face limitat...

Christopher Conrad, Deepak Panda, Weisi Guo et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Give the Model a Finger: Developmentally Aligned Evaluation of Counting in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are exact on small sets and drift into estimation on larger ones, a profile reminiscent of children before they master counting. Children cross the barrier with epistemic actions: pointing at each item while reciting number words, moving counted items aside, partitioning the array. We give...

Ying-Xin Jia, Hui Geng, Wen-Xin Yang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

When Does Experience Memory Help Closed-Loop LLM Driving Agents? A Controlled Evaluation with Resampled Warmup Pools, Token-Matched Fillers, and Audited Baselines

This work treats the warmup pool as a resampled random factor and adds token-matched irrelevant-filler controls, oracle-certified diagnostics, caution-pricing metrics, and quantified audits of the baseline ports to answer the question when does experience memory help a closed-loop LLM driving agent.

Ying-Xin Jia, Xuan-Yi Li · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Oct 2026

Physical AI: Concepts, Techniques, and Challenges

This monograph seeks to define physical AI, present its technical landscape, and examine each key technical subfield in depth, and establishes a unified framework for Physical AI: artificial systems that perceive, model, and act upon the physical world through continuous feedback under real-world constraints.

Wei-Nan Zhang, Chun-Hua Shen, Tian-Fan Xue et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a...

Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

OrbiSim: World Models as Differentiable Physics Engines for Embodied Intelligence

We present OrbiSim, a novel robotic simulation paradigm that redefines world models as a fully differentiable physics engine for embodied intelligence. Unlike prior world models that focus on unconstrained imagination in latent or visual domains, OrbiSim establishes a unified, physically-grounded pathway that bridges s...

Jiajian Li, Jingyuan Huang, Junru Gong et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Confidence Calibration in Vision-Language-Action Models

Trustworthy robot behavior requires not only high levels of task success but also that the robot can reliably quantify how likely it is to succeed. To this end, we present a first-of-its-kind study of confidence calibration in vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models, which map visual observations and natural lan...

Thomas P Zollo, Richard Zemel · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning-Based UAV Pathfinding for Obstacle Avoidance in Stochastic Environment

Traditional methods plan feasible paths for multiple agents in the stochastic environment. However, the methods' iterations with the changes in the environment result in computation complexities, especially for the decentralized agents without a centralized planner. Although reinforcement learning provides a plausible...

Qizhen Wu, Kexin Liu, Lei Chen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Beyond Success Rate: Interventional Evaluation of Memory in Vision-Language-Action Systems

When we say that a robot uses memory, does that memory actually play a role? Success-rate ablations alone cannot establish the use of task-relevant facts: they change information and computation together, while aggregate rates can hide offsetting gains and losses. We propose an Interventional Memory Evaluation Protocol...

Ke-Yuan Luo, Yi Xie, Wan-Yun Ling et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

NestedVLA: Learning to Consolidate and Generate Skills for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn a wide range of robotic skills, but combining separately trained skills remains challenging. The original training data may be unavailable for joint retraining, while directly merging model weights can cause interference. We propose NestedVLA, which consolidates independent...

Guo-Dong Du, Wan-Yu Lin · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Unifying Embodied Foundation Models via a Model-to-Policy Formulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs) have emerged as promising approaches to robot learning and control. These models integrate multimodal perception and action generation, but differ in their architectures, output representations, and learning objectives. In this paper, we present a unifi...

Xinyi Hong, Mingyang Ren · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Shape-Aware Neural Time Fields for Rigid-Body Motion and Manipulation Planning

Rigid-body motion planning is fundamental to robotic transport and manipulation, where both object position and orientation determine whether a body can move through cluttered environments. This coupling makes planning chal- lenging because translation and rotation can be constrained very differently by surrounding geo...

Yanming Zhou, Yuchen Liu, Ahmed H. Qureshi · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Nov 5, 2026

Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory

A new system identifies and corrects unreliable object descriptions stored in a robot’s memory, improving the robot’s ability to interact with its environment.

Google DeepMind Blog Oct 13, 2026

Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics

Discover Gemini 4 Argon for robotics: leading the ERQA benchmark with physical reasoning, zero-shot control, Real2Sim, and agentic workflows.

Microsoft Research Blog Sep 23, 2026

Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics

Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads. The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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