Online decision-making faces a tension between efficient inference and long-horizon reasoning. Value-based methods rely on short-horizon bootstrapping that limits the propagation of long-term information, while trajectory optimization methods plan explicitly but must solve a high-dimensional optimization problem at eve...
Recent advances in zero-shot voice cloning systems make it possible to reproduce a recognizable voice from a short recording and attach it to arbitrary virtual characters. Prior work suggests that familiar vocal identity can carry over associated personality impressions to new targets such as robots or virtual characte...
Johanna Magdalena Kuch, Maud van Lier, Daksitha Senel Withanage Don et al.· 0 citations
3D part assembly aims to reconstruct a complete shape from a set of unassembled parts by predicting a rigid SE(3) transformation for each part. Because the placement of a part is rarely determined by its own geometry, the task demands reasoning over the entire part set, and existing methods, which rely on pairwise rela...
Zhouhan Zhong, Qiuhong Shen, Xingyi Yang et al.· 0 citations
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves robot foundation models (RFMs) beyond their demonstrations, but real-world deployment demands more: learning new tasks efficiently while retaining previously acquired behaviors. Existing continual RL methods on top of VLAs mitigate forgetting but rely on on-policy upda...
Changyeon Kim, Kimin Lee, Yashraj Narang et al.· 0 citations
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Task planning for robots in off-site construction prefabrication is primarily manual, leading to planning inefficiencies and reluctance to adopt robotic solutions. Existing approaches provide limited support for scalable, modular automated task planning and localized runtime replanning. This paper proposes APTree, a mo...
Shermin Sherkat, Thomas Wortmann, Andreas Wortmann· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 0 citations
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown strong potential for embodied vision-language navigation (VLN), yet their performance degrades on long-horizon trajectories due to context-length limits, redundant historical observations, and unstable spatial alignment across time. These issues make it difficult to both...
Xu-Ya Wei, Yi-Fei Wang, De-Lun Li et al.· 0 citations
A robot following a multi-step instruction needs to act on the right objects in the right order, even as the scene changes. It must also maintain awareness of task progress and determine when to advance. To address these challenges, we introduce Orchestra, an agent harness that separates task planning and execution man...
You-Peng Wen, Gang Wang, Tian-Yu Huang et al.· 0 citations
Autonomous navigation in real-world environments often requires long-horizon operation under partial observability and evolving goals. Existing mapless navigation approaches predominantly assume fixed goals throughout an episode, limiting applicability to practical scenarios where goals change online during execution....
Yousef Liang, Ryan Ardalan, Yarden Goraly et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and future scene evolution for autonomous driving. However, effectively integrating both capabilities for trajectory generation remains challenging. In this work, we propose DriveWLA, a unified World-Language-...
Shu-Zheng Wang, Hao-Xuan Li, Sheng-Zhen Li et al.· 0 citations
Policies trained offline from teleoperated demonstrations can degrade outside their training distribution. This gap is particularly acute in long-horizon whole-body mobile manipulation, where long horizons amplify compounding errors and coordinated arm, torso, and base motion makes exhaustive demonstration coverage imp...
Wen-Si Ai, Christopher Luey, Karthik Dharmarajan et al.· 0 citations
Imitation learning typically treats every demonstration state as equally important, optimizing a behavior-cloning objective uniformly across the dataset. Yet not all states are created equal: in a small number of critical states, even a slight deviation from the expert action can lead to a failure, while in many other...
Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Joonwon Kang, Ajay Suresha Sathya et al.· 0 citations
We introduce HelpMeOut, an embodied AI benchmark for error-aware monitoring of household task execution. Existing embodied household benchmarks typically assume that humans execute tasks correctly, but this assumption does not hold for cognitively impaired persons or older adults whose everyday activities produce struc...
Haoran Wang, Jingwei Huang, Anqing Duan 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.