3D-aware representations can improve robotic manipulation by providing geometric information that is robust to changes in viewpoint, object position, and occlusion. However, using 3D inputs at deployment requires additional sensing and processing, making image-based policies more practical. We ask whether an image-base...
Madelon Bernardy, Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani, David M Knigge et al.· 0 citations
Knowledge of the hidden interior structure of an object, including the presence and location of cavities, is essential for predictive simulation, robotic manipulation, and nondestructive inspection. However, such cavities leave no direct signature on the static visible surface, making collision-induced deformation one...
Selecting a next motion in a populated scene is not just a matter of avoiding what is currently in the way: an action can be locally feasible yet drift onto the road instead of the crosswalk, cut into a stream of crossing pedestrians, or bottleneck a narrow passage. These failure modes are invisible from the current st...
Seong-Eun Hong, JuYeong Hwang, Jinhyun Kim et al.· 0 citations
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Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) lets robots search for run-time object queries, but fixed-rate inference spends embedded compute on low-value frames during idle motion, map revisits, or stable viewpoints. This paper presents an energy-aware OVD scheduler for low-power mobile robots. The scheduler uses odometry,...
Modern 6-DoF grasp generators are often evaluated using grasp scores, dataset-level metrics, or single-robot demonstrations, yet proposal quality alone does not determine whether a grasp is executable by a particular robot. We present GraspBench, a controlled MuJoCo protocol for evaluating complete grasp-generation pip...
Abdul Basit, Bibek Poudel, Muhammad Shafique· 0 citations
Most vision-language-action (VLA) policies decouple manipulation from cognition by bolting an external action mechanism onto a vision-language model (VLM)--either quantizing actions into discrete tokens whose errors bear no stable correspondence to physical displacements, or delegating continuous trajectory generation...
Chengcheng Wang, Wei He, Wenhao Li et al.· 0 citations
Pre-trained diffusion and flow policies have emerged as powerful backbones for robotics, yet adapting them to novel data via reinforcement learning (RL) remains computationally expensive, sample inefficient and lacks theoretical guarantees. Prior approaches that fine-tune the initial noise bypass costly backpropagation...
Yuanchu Liang, Yue Yang, An-Chi He et al.· 0 citations
Self-improving embodied agents are increasingly being developed and compared on robot simulation benchmarks. Several recent works expose the benchmark's success criteria to the learning agent, a practice we call Criteria Exposure (CE). These criteria, originally written to verify policies trained by imitation learning,...
Wenbo Huang, Jianxin Bi, Shunyu Yang et al.· 0 citations
World action models (WAMs) for autonomous driving couple the driving policy and the visual world model in a single generative network whose objectives are fixed post-training. Conditioning on a new driving objective requires retraining. We study energy guidance as a general mechanism and present GuidedWAM, a model-agno...
Xiyan Su, Finn Rasmus Sch\"afer, Hojun Lim et al.· 0 citations
Goal interpretation is to translate a natural language instruction into a formal symbolic goal that a planner can execute. It is critical for embodied agents because any error here propagates to every downstream planning and action step. Doing it well requires both generating suitable candidates and reliably selecting...
Multi-agent systems offer significant advantages in terms of flexibility and redundancy, enabling the efficient distribution of complex tasks among multiple robots. However, their deployment requires advanced control strategies to ensure optimal cooperation between autonomous agents and human operators. We propose a mo...
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.