Safe robot navigation in unknown, dynamic environments requires more than geometric collision checking: a robot still far from an obstacle may be unable to avoid it because of its speed, orientation, or the obstacle's motion. Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis captures this in a value function whose sign separ...
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often pretrained via imitation learning, making reinforcement learning (RL) post-training important when deployment moves beyond demonstration coverage. Existing refinement paradigms expose a reliability--efficiency tension: model-free refinement avoids simulator bias but is inte...
Wen-Zhan Li, Yi-Ran Qin, Heng Zhou et al.· 0 citations
Freely swiveling casters are widely adopted in industrial AMRs/SDVs for their mechanical simplicity and load capacity. However, caster misalignment during low-speed or high-curvature maneuvers induces strong contact nonlinearities, widening the planning-execution gap between commanded $(v, \omega)$ and realized motion....
Jinho Park, Jeongtae Lee, Jeonghyeok Lim et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models commonly generate robot actions token by token through Large Language Model (LLM) decoders, causing inference latency to grow with action sequence length and limiting closed-loop control frequency. We present Goal-Conditioned Vision-Predictor-Action (VPA), which replaces autoregressi...
Yeonseok Lee· 0 citations
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Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to hardware-dependent 3D sensing modalities, yet predicting precise metric depth remains a persistent challenge due to intrinsic scale ambiguity, edge bleeding, and limited zero-shot generalization in unseen environments. Recent multi-modal ap...
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically deployed as isolated single-agent policies. When several such agents share a workspace, they can coordinate implicitly, by observing one another, or explicitly, by exchanging messages, but it remains unclear when explicit communication becomes necessary. We introduce Co...
Ahaskar Kashyap, Jia-Wen Zong, Bo-Yu Ma et al.· 0 citations
Diffusion policies are increasingly used in robotic control and manipulation, vision-language-action models, and world-model-based agents. Their ability to represent multimodal action distributions offers rich opportunities for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). However, optimizing diffusion policies with RL c...
Shu-Tong Ding, Zhao-Yang Liu, Yi-Miao Zhou et al.· 0 citations
Model-based reinforcement learning has shown superior sample efficiency by leveraging the learned latent dynamics either in the form of derivative-free planning/imagined rollout training or dynamics gradient-based policy updates. While these approaches achieve comparatively fast learning, they all suffer, to varying de...
Robotic platforms combine multi-modal sensors to operate across diverse conditions, but most dense correspondence methods are limited to RGB-RGB or a small set of modality pairs. Training a model for each modality pair scales poorly with the number of sensors and forgoes potential positive transfer across modality pair...
Hyeokjoon Kwon, Ji-Ting Cai, Ruo-Gu Li et al.· 0 citations
Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) in unknown multi-floor environments presents a significant challenge. Recent methods, mostly based on semantic value greedy waypoint selection, spatial topology-enhanced memory, and Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a decision-making framework, have led to improvements. Howeve...
Jingzhi Huang, Junkai Huang, Haoyang Yang et al.· 0 citations
Policy representations in reinforcement learning have expanded beyond Gaussian policies to diffusion and flow-matching based generative policies. However, existing RL methods remain representation-specific, lacking a unified optimization interface for emerging generative policies. In particular, extending likelihood-ba...
Expressive flow policies can represent multiple high-value actions, but sampling them with few integration steps while retaining tractable action densities remains challenging. We introduce DEFlow, a deep equilibrium flow policy that replaces explicit Euler sampling with implicit Euler integration and solves all interm...
Ruslan Ageev, Huaze Tang, Runqing Miao 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.