Navigation world models predict future observations conditioned on navigation actions to support planning, but their generalization across real-world environments remains constrained by the limited coverage of action-labeled data. Action-free navigation videos provide diverse visual experience, yet lack the recorded ac...
Dujun Nie, Ruiqi Song, Zixuan Wang et al.· 0 citations
Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models cascade pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) with diffusion action experts, but typically restrict the VLM to providing static conditioning. This separation limits how much pretrained perception and reasoning can guide action generation, especially in out-of-distr...
Xicheng Gong, Wenxuan Song, Chengze Liu et al.· 0 citations
Perceptive legged locomotion across discontinuous terrain requires shared locomotion knowledge, task-specific maneuvers, and smooth transitions between them. Existing approaches train specialized policies independently and either switch among them with a hierarchical selector or distill them into a monolithic policy. B...
Francisco Affonso, Matheus P. Angarola, Ana Luiza Mineiro et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies translate language and visual inputs into robot actions, where their hidden representations directly shape closed-loop behavior. However, mechanistic interpretability tools from language and vision-language models do not transfer cleanly to VLAs: outputs are robot actions rather th...
Xinchen Jin, Aditya Chatterjee, Pranav Kumar et al.· 0 citations
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Tactile vision-language-action models (VLAs) and tactile world-action models (WAMs) are a promising new paradigm for contact-rich manipulation, but existing models either underutilize touch, rely on large-scale tactile pretraining, or incur high inference latency due to iterative video generation. We present VTAM, an e...
Haoran Yuan, Weigang Yi, Zhenyu Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Synthetic data generated by video generative models has shown promise for robot learning as a scalable pipeline, but it often suffers from noisy action labels due to imperfect video generation or inaccurate action prediction. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have been leveraged to validate video quality, but the...
Seungku Kim, Suhyeok Jang, Byungjun Yoon et al.· 0 citations
Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to unlock capabilities beyond imitation learning for Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models, but its requirement for massive real-world interaction prevents direct deployment on physical robots. Recent work attempts to use learned world models as simulators for policy optimization, y...
Zhennan Jiang, Shangqing Zhou, Yutong Jiang et al.· 0 citations
Heterogeneous multi-robot collaboration over long horizons requires both global task planning and robust coordination during execution. Existing plan- ners using large language models (LLMs) can generate task decompositions or symbolic plans, but often execute them as rigid action sequences, making them fragile to loca...
World action models increasingly rely on pretrained diffusion/flow-based video generators assumed to capture physical dynamics for prediction, planning, and action generation. Existing evaluations assess plausibility, probe representations, or measure predictive surprise, yet physical consistency is history-dependent:...
Taekoan Yoo, Wonkyung Jung, Kyunghun Kim et al.· 0 citations
We introduce the Architecturally Admissible Compressor (AAC), which adapts landmark-based A* heuristics to query demand under a fixed label-memory budget. AAC provides two continuous relaxations of ALT (A*, Landmarks, and Triangle inequality) selection. With exact landmark distances, every parameter value defines a low...
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and in...
Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little et al.· 0 citations
Visuomotor policies trained through imitation learning are highly sensitive to changes in camera viewpoint. This is particularly problematic for mobile manipulation (MoMa), where robots rarely execute manipulation from the exact same base pose used during demonstration collection due to navigation uncertainty, localiza...
Sateesh Kumar, Arnav Balaji, Arpit Bahety et al.· 0 citations
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.
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.