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robotics

1,589 papers

#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation

This paper explores a reward-based policy to achieve zero-shot transfer between source and target environments with completely different observation spaces. While humans can demonstrate impressive adaptation capabilities, deep neural network policies often struggle to adapt to a new environment and require a considerab...

Morgan Byrd, Jacob Blevins, Maks Sorokin et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

FuncBridge: Towards Functional Tool-Use Generalization via Keypoint Trajectory Reasoning

While humans readily repurpose a book, a stone, or a shoe to drive a nail, robots trained on specific tools fail to transfer the same function to novel ones -- a gap we formalize as functional generalization. Functionally equivalent tools share visually recognizable functional intent, such as where contact can occur an...

Chuhao Zhou, Liquan Wang, Shuxin Cao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

BORA: Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Online Residual Adaptation for Real-World Dexterous VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies provide strong behavioral priors for dexterous manipulation, yet adapting them on real robots remains challenging because high-DoF contact failures are difficult for humans to correct and online interaction is expensive. We present BORA, an offline-to-online reinforcement learning...

Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Bin Qiu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Rewind-IL: Online Failure Detection and State Respawning for Imitation Learning

Imitation learning has enabled robots to acquire complex visuomotor manipulation skills from demonstrations, but deployment failures remain a major obstacle, especially for long-horizon action-chunked policies. Once execution drifts off the demonstration manifold, these policies often continue producing locally plausib...

Gehan Zheng, Sanjay Seenivasan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson et al. · 0 citations

Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Models

This paper proposes Large Reward Models (LRMs), a framework that adapts foundation VLMs into frame-level reward generators for robot policy refinement, and shows that LRM progress rewards provide the strongest non-privileged online refinement signal, improving the IL baseline and narrowing the gap to privileged environ...

Yan-Ru Wu, Wei-Duo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon et al. · 16 citations · ⚡1
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with multipanda_ros2: A Real-Time ROS2 Framework for Multimanual Systems

We present $multipanda\_ros2$, a novel open-source ROS2 architecture for multi-robot control of Franka Robotics robots. Leveraging ros2 control, this framework provides native ROS2 interfaces for controlling any number of robots from a single process. Our core contributions address key challenges in real-time torque co...

Jon \v{S}kerlj, Seongjin Bien, Abdeldjallil Naceri et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Constant-Time Planning for Chaining Collision-free Motion to Manipulation Behaviors

Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routines. One of the barriers is the lack of motion planning algorithms that can provide verifiable guarantees for safety, efficiency and reliability. Constant-Time Motion Planning (CTMP...

Nayesha Gandotra, Itamar Mishani, Lai Yuan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

UrbanVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Urban Micromobility

Urban micromobility applications, such as delivery robots, demand reliable navigation across large-scale urban environments while following long-horizon route instructions. This task is particularly challenging due to the dynamic and unstructured nature of real-world city areas, yet most existing navigation methods rem...

Anqi Li, Zhiyong Wang, Jiazhao Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Probing an Embodied LLM: When Higher Observation Fidelity Hurts Problem Solving

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as cognitive components for robotic systems, yet their opaque decision processes make it difficult to explain success or failure in closed-loop embodied tasks. Following an empirical AI methodology, we study an embodied LLM agent behaviorally by varying the availab...

Oussama Zenkri, Oliver Brock · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real: Guided Self-Improvement for Embodied Agents

Building reliable robot capabilities across diverse tasks requires substantial human effort to develop and maintain skills, design rewards, and integrate perception with control. We present Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real (RPG), a framework for autonomous improvement of robot execution systems without updating model wei...

Yen-Jen Wang, Hao-Zhe Jiang, Shu-Ying Deng et al. · 3 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

FERPO: Forward Entropy-Regularized Policy Optimization

Several state-of-the-art methods for online reinforcement learning in continuous control improve policies using action gradients of a learned critic. However, critics are typically trained to predict returns, and accurate value predictions do not necessarily yield accurate action derivatives, potentially leading to unr...

Sebastian Sanokowski, Alireza Sarmadi, Majid Khadiv · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Watch, Infer, Coordinate: Inferring Robot Partner Constraints for Zero-Shot Coordination

Robots operating in the physical world will increasingly need to coordinate with other robots, particularly in manipulation tasks where an object may be too large or heavy for a single robot to carry alone. Physical limitations caused by hardware degradation or actuator faults can restrict the actions a robot can relia...

Suyu Ye, Zheyuan Zhang, Vaishnav Tadiparthi 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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