Online reinforcement learning (RL) enables robot policies to improve through physical interaction, but the assistance they require changes as their competence evolves. Existing intervention strategies based on offline estimates or fixed decision rules can therefore become mismatched to the current policy. To address th...
Yu-Dong Lin, Hao-Yuan Deng, Zhuo-Xuan Yuan et al.· 0 citations
Long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards pose an exploration bottleneck for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning: a policy started from the initial state rarely reaches the goal and receives no learning signal. Reference motions, hand-designed curricula, and shaped rewards supply this signal but require demonstrations...
J. Pfammatter, Kai-Xian Qu, Clemens Schwarke et al.· 0 citations
Language-enabled robot systems increasingly combine semantic-graph planning with temporal-logic safety monitors. We investigate a trace-completeness assumption in these systems: whether the high-level action sequence checked by a monitor represents the navigation and implicit action effects induced during execution. We...
Stabak Das, Priyesh Ranjan, Xiang-Fang Li et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes scalable coordination via optimal unified transport (SCOUT), the first offline MARL framework to combine a generative foundation model with a learned value function through test-time action refinement, and proves a single-term KL bound on the joint soft-value gap that vanishes as transport converges.
Dong-Su Lee, Hao-Ran Xu, Amy Zhang· 0 citations
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Finding an optimal behaviour policy within a given environment is a widely studied problem in domains as diverse as games, robotics, energy infrastructure, communication networks, and multi-agent systems. Numerous benchmarks have been developed to support such research, but the vast majority assume that the agent's emb...
Aviraj Newatia, Yordan Tsvetkov, Leonard Pleiss et al.· 0 citations
Synthesizing safe and robust neural controllers in simulation for reliable sim-to-real deployment remains a critical challenge in robotics. Existing learning-based methods typically lack safety and performance guarantees over an explicitly defined operating region, while post-training verification techniques provide no...
Riccardo Curcio, Hongpeng Cao, Marco Caccamo· 0 citations
Forward-backward (FB) representations provide a powerful framework for learning the successor representation (SR) in continuous spaces by enforcing a low-rank factorization. However, a fundamental spectral mismatch often exists between the high-rank transition dynamics of continuous environments and the low-rank bottle...
Seyed Mahdi B. Azad, Jasper Hoffmann, Iman Nematollahi et al.· 0 citations
Robotic locomotion is often approached with the goal of maximizing robustness and reactivity by increasing motion control frequency. We challenge this intuitive notion by demonstrating robust and dynamic locomotion with a learned motion controller executing at as low as 8 Hz on a real ANYmal C quadruped. The robot is a...
Siddhant Gangapurwala, Luigi Campanaro, Ioannis Havoutis· 0 citations
This paper examines the role of Novel View Synthesis (NVS) in geometric representation learning. In principle, NVS should reason about 3D scene structure, thereby enabling transferable multi-view geometric representations. Yet, existing encoder-based NVS methods yield poor representations. This is not because of a lack...
Keerthi Kaashyap, D. Anthony, Akshay Krishnan et al.· 0 citations
Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally...
Kush J. Hari, Justin Kerr, Nidhya Shivakumar et al.· 0 citations
Adversarial patches can disrupt Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models by manipulating visual observations, leading to failures in robot control. However, it remains poorly understood which internal mechanisms underlie these failures and how targeted interventions can mitigate them. In this work, we mechanistically analyz...
Yukiya Horiba, Koshiro Aoki, Shunsuke Yasuki et al.· 0 citations
Long-horizon mobile manipulation presents significant challenges due to compounding execution errors and capacity interference between locomotion and arm control. While recent Vision-Language-Action models excel at short-horizon tasks, they lack the hierarchical reasoning required for multi-stage objectives. Furthermor...
Chen-Zhi Liu, Yue Zhang, Jie-Hong Lin 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.