Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance in embodied manipulation, but still struggle to distinguish between changes that should preserve behavior and those that require different actions. We identify two complementary failure modes. Under task-preserving changes, where task semantics remain...
Shuai-Jun Liu, Fei-Yang You, Cheng-Ju Wu et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes Latent Telepathy, a content-controlled protocol in which bandwidth, latency, topology and receiver are held fixed and only the message content varies, and identifies a requirement for porting MARL communication results to continuous control.
A robot policy is trained with one of two action parameterizations: absolute joint targets, or deltas relative to the current state, and the inheritance is catastrophic: a latent dynamics model trained on one parameterization and handed the identical commanded trajectory written in the other collapses.
A causal anatomy of one naturally occurring case of compressed manipulation policies, and a minimal-pair intervention that restores parity with the teacher, eliminates that signature, and recovers a teacher-like perturbation-response profile.
Feng-Ze Jia· 0 citations
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This work shows that successful grasp sets exhibit heterogeneous and reproducible connectivity structure across objects, and introduces a connectivity-aware sampling strategy that incrementally explores the currently observed grasp space by prioritizing potential bridges between components, structural frontiers, bounda...
This work proposes StateMem, a single-state residual memory framework for VLA policies that uses prediction error to update a persistent memory token through low-rank residuals and to adaptively route cached prefixes.
This tutorial provides a unified view of the emerging area of bilinear learning and control. Using linear systems as a benchmark, it explains what fundamentally changes in the bilinear settings, how recent theory addresses finite-sample learning and control, and how these ideas connect to broader themes in nonlinear co...
Yahya Sattar, Yassir Jedra, Robin Str\"asser et al.· 0 citations
A linear model using only trace increments recovers the correct choice on mechanisms excluded from fitting, showing that the trace is informative but unused, and a chain that holds end to end in controlled environments, however, it breaks at evidence use.
Reinforcement learning in real-life applications requires safety guarantees during exploration. Typical reinforcement learning algorithms do not provide such guarantees, and many modifications that do rely on Gaussian processes (GPs), which have a large computational cost. We propose a computationally lightweight algor...
Shreeram Murali, Shankar A. Deka, Dominik Baumann· 0 citations
The Industrial Kinematic Trajectory Model (IKTM), a coordinate-free trajectory generator that represents industrial vehicle motion through kinematic sequences (speed and heading change) with no absolute spatial reference is introduced.
A two-step strategy for correcting ML-based state estimation, where an offline computation is used to characterize the uncertainties resulting from the ML module's state estimation, using preimages of perception contracts at runtime, using a risk heuristic.
Underwater robot development is often hindered by the complexities of waterproofing and wiring, which significantly delay the rapid prototyping process. This paper presents MarineCraft, a modular toolkit designed to accelerate the development cycle through structural reconfiguration. The system features self-contained,...
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.