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robotics

1,589 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Equivariant Visual-Tactile Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Imitation learning for contact-rich manipulation requires high-quality expert data that is expensive to obtain. This makes learning a sample-efficient policy a key issue. To address this, we propose VISTA, a workspace-level equivariant visuotactile diffusion policy for data-efficient contact-rich imitation learning. VI...

Lik Hang Kenny Wong, Yiyao Ma, Xiu-Shen Wei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

How to Find and Reuse Policies for Continuous Adaptation in Lifelong Reinforcement Learning

In lifelong reinforcement learning, retaining previously learned policies is not sufficient for effective transfer to a new task. Useful knowledge may be distributed across several prior policies, and its relevance may change as the learner acquires experience. One hypothesis is that task similarity can be effectively...

Saptarshi Nath, Inish M. D'Souza, Antonio Carta et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

OmniAct3D: Leveraging Foundation Geometry and Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for Panoramic 3D Detection

Accurate 3D detection is essential for mobile embodied agents, while Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer transferable visual and geometric priors. Yet existing VFM-based 3D detectors rely on narrow-view monocular images or discrete perspective views, limiting coherent surround perception; equirectangular projection (...

Run-Tong Wu, Fei Teng, Di Wen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

FastOPD: On-Policy Distillation for Lightweight VLA Deployment

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have scaled rapidly to enhance manipulation performance and generalizability, but this scaling incurs high computational costs that render real-world deployment increasingly challenging. Existing approaches typically mitigate this issue by designing smaller architectures o...

Yoojin Oh, Jeongsol Kim, Yeonwoo Seo et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

CriticHack: Evaluating Visual Rewards Under Robot Policy Optimization

Learned visual reward models are increasingly used to optimize robot policies, yet a reward model can score an execution that acts on the wrong object as highly as one that completes the task. We show that optimizing such a reward can amplify these wrong-object failures while reward and task success both rise, so the s...

Jia-Xuan Luo, Xing-Guo Xu, Shan-Shan Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Multi-Fidelity Policy Gradients Stabilize Data-Scarce Reinforcement Learning

Policy gradient methods for on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) can become unstable when expensive, scarce target-domain data yield noisy gradient estimates. We address this challenge by complementing limited high-fidelity (HF) target-domain data with abundant, cheap, but biased low-fidelity (LF) data, e.g., from a s...

Xin-Jie Liu, Rui-Han Zhao, A. Chaudhuri et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Network-in-the-Loop at Scale: GPU-Batched 5G Simulation for Massively Parallel Robot Learning

Massively parallel GPU simulators train multi-robot policies in thousands of environments, and many fleets use private Fifth-Generation (5G) networks, where each robot's delay depends on its teammates' traffic. Network-in-the-loop training places a simulated 5G network inside this loop. However, GPU robot simulators re...

Zifan Zhang, Mingzhe Han, Kannan Athreya et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Toward Controlling Biology with Language:Offline Learning of Prompt-Conditioned Interventions for Cells, Organoids, and Biobots

Artificial intelligence increasingly serves as a natural-language interface to complex technical systems, letting people accomplish sophisticated tasks by describing what they want rather than specifying how to do it. Extending this interface to living systems is harder: unlike code or images, a biological intervention...

Nam H. Le, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

VIGOR: Zero-Shot Visual Generalization via Latent-Space Consistency in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) achieves strong sample efficiency by planning within learned latent dynamics, yet its performance degrades substantially under unseen visual distractions such as background variations, lighting changes, or camera shifts. Unlike model-free RL, where encoder perturbations affect...

Mingyu Park, Samyeul Noh, Hyun Myung et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

World Action Modeling with Progressive Visual Planning

World action models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control by jointly predicting future visual dynamics and actions from an initial observation and instruction. However, existing WAMs struggle with long-horizon prediction, as generating dense video rollouts is highly inefficient. Some recent WA...

Fei Zhang, Zhao-Chong An, D. Frost et al. · 1 citation
#robotics Preprint Sep 2026

Toward Humanoid Robots in Construction: A Teleoperation Feasibility Study

We present a teleoperation system that enables a single operator to perform construction tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, combining extended reality (XR) based upper body control with pedal-based locomotion to enable simultaneous manipulation and locomotion. Motivated by persistent labor shortages, hazardous working con...

Parastoo Ali Pour, David R. Martin, Chang Min Hur 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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