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robotics

1,589 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

EpicWorldModel: Exploration-driven Planning with Latent World Models

Latent world models based on Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) are deterministic by design. While successful in fully observable scenarios, this paradigm breaks down when past observations and actions lead to multiple plausible future possibilities, e.g., due to occlusion. We introduce EpicWorldModel, a fr...

Bo-Wen Feng, Julian Ost, May Mei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

OGAM: Connecting Systematic Testing to Runtime Assurance through Object-Grounded Attention Monitoring for VLA Policies

Benchmarks expose vision-language-action (VLA) policies to few canonical instructions, while exhaustive deployment testing is impossible. We introduce Object-Grounded Attention Monitoring (OGAM), connecting systematic testing to runtime assurance: testing reveals attention divergence between successful and failed execu...

Haki Darwish, Xiangyu Yin, Changwen Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Collision-Free Locomotion of an Underactuated Biped

A bipedal robot cannot deviate from its path to avoid an obstacle without disturbing its balance, and this coupling is most severe on underactuated platforms such as the biped considered here, which has four actuated joints per leg and no hip or ankle roll. This paper presents a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL...

J. Sahoo, Saurabh Kumar, Surya Prakash S.K. et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Scenario-Based Compositional Statistical Model Checking for Safety Specifications

In safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving, systems must be evaluated across a large number of environment conditions, often represented as composite scenarios built from primitive scenarios. Existing statistical model checking (SMC) approaches analyze each composite scenario independently, requiring many ex...

Abhinav Pomalapally, Arya Raeesi, K. Chang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

FLEX-WAM: Flexible Block-Causal World-Action Models for Long-Horizon Imagination and Planning

World--action models (WAMs) promise a unified model that predicts action-conditioned futures, generates feasible actions, and supports planning in imagination. However, existing joint video--action models often use computationally heavy, fixed-horizon backbones ill-suited to streaming inference and stable long-horizon...

R. Khorrambakht, Joseph Amigo, Félix Lebel et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Optimal Control with Learned Critics under Unmodeled State Dependencies

A learning-based MPC framework that combines the data efficiency and structure of local model-based planning with learned components that compensate for incomplete dynamics and finite-horizon myopia and is integrated into a robotics simulator, enabling scalable model-based reinforcement learning under incomplete dynami...

P. Schöch, Markus Ryll · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

VAMPS: Visual and Motor Policies from Sampling-Based Planning

This work introduces Visual and Motor Policies from Sampling-Based Planning (VAMPS), a framework that uses Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control to train reusable policies without human demonstrations, and demonstrates visuomotor pick-and-place and force-aware whiteboard erasing.

Mohamed Yassine Kabouri, Pietro Noah Crestaz, Q. Nguyen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

CoDance: Learning Reactive and Compliant Human-Humanoid Interaction from Video

Partnered human-humanoid interaction couples locomotion with continuous physical contact. A humanoid needs to coordinate with a person's motion while responding to interaction forces and maintaining stable and natural movement. We present CoDance, a framework for learning reactive and compliant human-humanoid interacti...

Zhuoqun Chen, Shu-Cheng Jia, Bo-Yuan Chen · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Vela: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with Adaptive Action Curve Parametrization

Most vision-language-action models represent future motion as fixed-rate action chunks, tying temporal resolution and prediction horizon to a fixed output budget. This pointwise representation wastes capacity on highly correlated neighboring actions, leaves temporal continuity and smoothness to be learned implicitly, a...

Yi-Fan Li, Jia-Xu Wang, Dong-Ming Wu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Direction-Conditioned Policies for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) learns representations that estimate goal reachability, yet its policy remains conditioned on raw goals and therefore does not directly exploit the geometry encoded by its critic. We introduce Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a method built around a small modification to CR...

S. Swaminathan, Damiya Gondha, Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

A Unified Dynamics Framework for Reinforcement Learning and Classical Control of a Six-DOF Pipeline-Tracking ROV in NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Reinforcement learning controllers for underwater vehicles are usually trained against one physics representation and deployed against another, so reported performance does not always describe behavior outside training. This paper presents a pipeline-tracking architecture for a six-degree-of-freedom remotely operated v...

Cheng Siong Chin, M. Venkateshkumar, Jian-Hua Zhang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

DiVeR: Decision-Critical Verifier Learning for VLA Test-Time Scaling

DiVeR is proposed, which estimates decision criticality from the dispersion of sampled action representations and uses this signal to reweight verifier learning toward states where action selection is most consequential, without requiring step-level annotations or additional environment interaction.

Seongheon Park, Heecheol Kim, Shu-Lin Tian et al. · 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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