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robotics

1,589 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Divide and Collapse: MAPF-Collapse via Exact Decomposition into Independent Sub-Instances

In this work we study the problem of MAPFC, a post-optimization step for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) plans where we are given a feasible plan produced by a modern MAPF solver and are tasked with removing avoidable moves while preserving feasibility. This NP-hard problem naturally arises when using learning-based st...

Oren Salzman · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

TacForcing: Streaming Action Generation with Execution-Time Tactile Feedback

Contact-rich manipulation requires adapting to contact states that can evolve substantially within an action horizon. However, chunk-based vision-language-action models predict complete action chunks from observations collected before execution, leaving tactile conditioning stale during execution. Existing tactile-reac...

Jianbo Zhou, Boyuan Zhao, Yuzheng Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when const...

Aristotelis Papatheodorou, Jose Rojas, Ioannis Havoutis et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Jun 2026

IR-SIM: A Lightweight Declarative Simulator for Navigation Learning and Benchmarking

The Intelligent Robot Simulator is developed, a lightweight declarative simulator implemented as a Python library to support navigation learning and benchmarking through rapid construction of reusable and diverse scenarios and efficient execution on accessible platforms.

Rui-Hua Han, Shuai Wang, Cheng-Yang Li et al. · 6 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Learning Expressive and Compositional Motion Representation via Spectral Skills

Robotic foundation models offer a promising path toward general-purpose humanoid robot control, often through hierarchical architectures. However, their effectiveness depends on the command interface between the planner and the controller, which must support accurate execution while remaining easy to predict, and ideal...

Fei-Yang Wu, Chen-Xiao Gao, Chen Yang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Learning Social Navigation from Internet Videos in the Policy State Space

Training robust social-navigation policies requires simulators with diverse scene layouts, terrain, and human motion, but constructing such environments and specifying pedestrian behavior is costly. We propose an efficient pipeline that converts ordinary monocular walking videos directly into closed-loop social-navigat...

Jiaming Wang, Duc Thang Nguyen, Ji-Zhuo Chen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Disentangling Spurious Correlations in Vision-Language-Action Models via Predicting Domain-Invariant Latent Lookahead

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle under visual distribution shifts, often relying on spurious correlations tied to domain-specific factors rather than task-relevant structure. We propose Domain-Invariant Latent Lookahead (DILL), a representation-learning framework that mitigates shortcut learning in VL...

Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim, Chung-Woo Lee et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Reactive Real-Time Flow Policies via Asynchronous Distribution Alignment

Generalist robot policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) have achieved remarkable generalization, but their inference delays can conflict with the demands of real-time control. Asynchronous execution avoids pauses between action chunks by predicting the next sequence of actions while the robot carries out...

Moritz Zoellner, Reece O'Mahoney, Ioannis Havoutis et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Losing the name before the box: measuring and repairing what narrow fine-tuning costs a detector outside its deployment vocabulary

A detector pretrained on a broad corpus is fine-tuned on a narrow domain, its in-domain accuracy improves, and it ships. We ask what happens meanwhile to its coverage of objects the vocabulary never names, which in obstacle detection and inspection carry the risk. No in-domain test set holds an example of one. We give...

Trung Minh Bui, Jongsul Moon, YoungOuk Kim et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

StructRL: Online Structured Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Tasks

Vision-language-action (VLA) models perform well on shorter-horizon manipulation tasks but still struggle with long-horizon tasks that require multiple dependent manipulations from a single command. Online reinforcement learning (RL) can improve these policies through environment interaction, yet many existing methods...

Zi-Yi Yin, Sang-Min Woo, Kang Zhou et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Review Sep 2026

In-Context Learning for Robots: Methods and Applications

A literature review around the interfaces connecting contextual evidence to execution, distinguishing four families: context-conditioned policies, geometric demonstration transfer, world-model-based control, and skill- and agent-based execution.

Hao-Jian Huang, Ze-Xi Li, Ju-Hao Guo et al. · 1 citation

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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