Zero-Shot
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LeapBot-JAC: Joint Action Chains for World Action Models
2026-10-09 02:21:19Chenhao Zhu, Baibing Liu, Pei Liu, Rui Yang, Lang Zhang, Mingyue Feng, Yaonong Wang, Jun MaAbstract
Action-chunking policies predict future controls but execute only a prefix before replanning. How should a fixed action-token budget be organized to support execution? We propose LeapBot-JAC, which allocates sparse future-control references and dense execution targets within one shared action expert. Both chains are supervised by demonstrated controls and jointly denoised at aligned physical-time positions. Directed attention allows execution tokens to read reference tokens subject to the host's visibility constraints. JAC adds neither action tokens nor parameters and retains the host's world-modeling process; both chains participate in inference, while only the execution chain drives the robot. On LIBERO, JAC reaches 98.3% success with FastWAM and LeapBot-WA, up from 97.0% and 97.3%. On zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, their success rates improve from 53.5% to 70.4% and from 73.1% to 77.3%, respectively. RoboTwin and two real-world tasks provide additional deployment evaluations. Single-training-seed comparisons and FastWAM ablations support action-role organization as a practical design choice under a fixed action-token budget.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12886
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VLMs are Native Action Models: Unleashing the Manipulation Capabilities of VLMs with Explicit Action-Space Grounding
2026-10-09 00:33:13Jingkun Yi, Shujie Zhang, Zirui Zhou, Haoxiao Wang, Haiyang Sun, Yuhang Dong, Xudong Xu, Xing Shen, Tao Zhang, Yong Liu, Jiangning ZhangAbstract
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) already exhibit strong visual, spatial and reasoning capabilities relevant to robotic manipulation. The key challenge in turning pretrained VLMs into generalist manipulation policies is to expose these capabilities through an appropriate action interface. Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a unified trainable policy, but typically introduce learned action tokens, action heads, or action experts whose semantics must be learned from robot data pretraining. In contrast, modular foundation-model-based manipulation methods can exploit pretrained VLM capabilities for zero-shot manipulation, but rely on external planning and control scaffolds that are not end-to-end trainable as a unified continuous-action policy. In this work, we introduce EASG, an Explicit Action-Space Grounding framework that bridges these two paradigms. By projecting a tool center point (TCP)-centered action frame into the wrist camera observation and expressing actions in the form of VLM's native textual generation interface, EASG makes the semantics of a continuous robot action space directly observable in the VLM's perceptual context. This allows pretrained VLMs to directly generate executable robot actions using their existing visual-spatial reasoning capabilities, without robot-action pretraining or additional action modules. Besides, the same action interface supports direct fine-tuning with robot trajectories, allowing the models to continuously improve beyond their manipulation capabilities unleashed by EASG. Overall, EASG enables zero-shot manipulation and generalization across object positions, categories, and robot embodiments, while supporting effective fine-tuning in the same continuous action space. These results demonstrate that, given an appropriate action interface, pretrained VLMs can themselves serve as native action models for robotic manipulation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12832
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Embodied Zero-Shot Task Planning via Hardware-Aware LLM-VLM Integration for Grounded Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-08 22:59:11Lonnie Tankersley, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Soroush KorivandAbstract
Large language models can translate natural-language instructions into plausible manipulation plans, but robotic execution requires physically grounded decisions that respect robot embodiment, workspace geometry, reachability, collision constraints, and grasp feasibility. This paper presents a hardware-aware large language model-vision-language model (LLM-VLM) manipulation framework for a simulated Franka Research 3 robot in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The framework separates symbolic reasoning from metric execution: an API-hosted LLM planner receives a structured scene summary and generates only symbolic task information, including the object to manipulate, target relation, approach preference, and objects to avoid. A local Qwen3-VL 8B VLM verifier supports semantic confirmation of ambiguous objects and open-container surrogates. Both the LLM planner and the VLM verifier are prohibited from generating robot coordinates, grasp poses, keepout dimensions, gripper commands, trajectory waypoints, or success labels. Instead, these decisions are handled by deterministic grounding and execution modules that use the robot model, scene geometry, MoveIt 2 collision checking, inverse kinematics, grasp validation, release verification, and final visual assessment. Execution feedback is returned only as symbolic context for replanning. The framework is evaluated through simulated digital-twin trials involving pickup, occluded-source access, keepout reasoning, relation placement, and sequential manipulation tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14106
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Reference-Free Food Volume Estimation from Egocentric Stereo Video
2026-10-08 21:30:38Vivan Kumar, Gautham Vinod, Fengqing ZhuAbstract
Current stereo vision-based approaches for food portion estimation are hindered by the user burden of using a mobile phone to capture multiple images or placing a reference object in the scene for scale calibration. As a step towards passive dietary intake monitoring, we introduce a method that uses stereo video from a wearable egocentric device to reconstruct food items in true physical scale to accurately estimate volume. By utilizing FoundationStereo for zero-shot stereo matching, SAM 2 for food segmentation, and TSDF fusion over a set of keyframes, our method yields a visually and metrically accurate 3D mesh of any plated food item from a single stereo recording. We leverage the unique offerings of wearables, such as a factory-calibrated stereo baseline and camera poses estimated on-device via visual-inertial odometry (VIO), to perform fully automatic reconstruction without a scale reference object in the scene. We show strong initial volume estimation results across five recorded food items, achieving a mean absolute percentage error of 9.1%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12735
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Visual-Wi-Fi Navigation to Signal-Emitting Devices
2026-10-08 21:28:25Lihao Wang, Tianjian Xu, Tianmin Shu, Renjie ZhaoAbstract
Indoor navigation to task-relevant targets remains difficult when the target is small, occluded, or visually indistinct. Meanwhile, smart appliances, mobile devices, and IoT tags emit Wi-Fi signals during everyday communication, providing a pervasive but underused spatial cue. We study visual-Wi-Fi navigation, where a robot reaches a signal-emitting device in an unmapped environment using onboard visual observations and Wi-Fi packets overheard from the device, without connecting to the device or modifying infrastructure. Realizing this requires pose-dependent Wi-Fi observations during closed-loop policy learning and reliable spatial cues from bearing measurements corrupted by indoor multipath propagation on a moving robot. We present WiFiSpaces, which extends the Habitat embodied simulator with online ray-traced Wi-Fi sensing, rendering Wi-Fi observations for a robot-mounted antenna array at continuous poses during policy rollouts. On top of it, we build ViFiNav, a localization-aware navigation framework: an online source-localization algorithm exploits robot motion to disambiguate and robustly aggregate bearings from multiple viewpoints into a confidence-aware source estimate, and a learned policy fuses this evolving estimate with depth observations and learns to act on it as it is refined. Experiments show that exploiting robot motion is key to accurate source estimates, and that fine-tuning on ray-traced Wi-Fi observations in WiFiSpaces improves the success rate of ViFiNav. The policy transfers zero-shot to unseen scene datasets, and we deploy it on a real robot with a Wi-Fi sensor built from a commodity router, without any real-world training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12733
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Mesh-Native Tokenisation: Retrofitting Foundation Models to Unstructured Data
2026-10-08 18:37:52Georg Maierhofer, Miles Cranmer, Payel MukhopadhyayAbstract
Physics foundation models are an increasingly popular approach for building versatile emulators for spatiotemporal systems. They require tokenisation layers that lift physical field data into a latent representation suitable for dynamic processing. A typical choice for this layer is a convolutional encoder, which lifts field information in a locality-aware way and can be trained very efficiently. However, this choice cannot be applied to a large class of scientific computing problems where data are represented on unstructured meshes, for example simulations on domains with curved boundaries. Such data typically require graph neural network architectures, which are more expensive to train and, in the form currently used, encode information differently from their CNN counterparts, thus limiting the portability of physics emulators between these data regimes. In this work we introduce Mesh-Native Convolution (MNC), a locality-aware tokenisation layer that encodes unstructured mesh-based data in a way that is analogous to CNNs. This approach leads to models that can be trained once on mesh data and then deployed to arbitrary unstructured meshes, even if these are irregular, with minimal retraining. We show that this tokenisation approach can be used to retrofit grid-pretrained foundation models efficiently on unstructured meshes and provide theoretical results to confirm the consistency of this approach with classical CNN encoders. We demonstrate the favourable performance of this retrofitting approach, which in many cases reaches acceptable accuracy even in zero-shot deployment, and outperforms existing baselines after only a few epochs of fine-tuning, thus providing an efficient bridge between the two data regimes.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12618
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CASTER: Formalizing Zero-Shot Manipulation from Synthetic Videos as Constrained Optimization
2026-10-08 18:00:55Yinlong Dai, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Dylan P. LoseyAbstract
Prior research on learning from humans often requires real human demonstrations. But advances in video generation models offer a new paradigm: we can now prompt these generators to make synthetic videos of the task. On the plus side, these synthetic videos take place in the robot's current environment, and do not require actual human teaching. However, while the generated videos appear to show plausible motions, they lack both physical consistency and robot grounding, and thus the robot cannot directly roll out the trajectory shown by the video. In this paper we seek to formalize the process of going from synthetic video generation to real-world robot trajectories for zero-shot manipulation tasks. We recognize that this problem is an instance of constrained optimization. The object trajectories extracted from the synthetic video provide an initial guess at the correct motion, and the robot must refine these trajectories (for instance, within a digital twin) while enforcing physical feasibility and semantic consistency. Our optimization-based formalism provides insights into the video generation properties necessary for success. Specifically, we show that the video generation must probabilistically seed the search within a semantic basin of attraction where the trajectory can be locally modified without losing its task alignment. Our analysis further reveals that state-of-the-art approaches can be viewed as instances of our unified formalism with key simplifications. In our experiments we remove these simplifications to more closely match the underlying optimization, leading to more robust zero-shot trajectories from synthetic videos and improving average task success by 34.1% compared to the best-performing baseline. See videos at our project website: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12567
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Dex-One2Many: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Human Demonstration
2026-10-08 17:59:58Jusuk Lee, Sungha Kim, Yeonsoo Park, Jonguk Cheon, Yoonkyo Jung, Yongjun You, H. Jin Kim, Jia-Bin Huang, Furong Huang, Youngseok Jang, Seungjae LeeAbstract
While learning dexterous manipulation from a single human video offers a promising alternative to costly robot demonstrations, many recent methods predominantly imitate demonstrated motions. Such strict motion matching often limits generalization to initial object poses, goal poses, and grasps not shown in the video. Alternatively, discovering a policy via reinforcement learning (RL) allows for broad generalization, but without prior guidance, it struggles with high-dimensional exploration in complex, multi-stage tasks. To address these coupled generalization and exploration challenges, we present Dex-One2Many, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that learns a generalizable dexterous manipulation policy from a single human video. Our key insight is to abstract the video into sequential scene graphs that guide RL, enabling efficient exploration while preserving broad generalizability. The graphs serve as generative constraints for sampling diverse reset states and provide dense rewards for each stage. Because the graphs constrain relations rather than exact poses, these reset states cover object poses and grasps beyond the video, while initializing each stage from them with dense rewards keeps exploration short and guided. Trained entirely in simulation, Dex-One2Many transfers zero-shot to a real multi-fingered hand. Across five tool-use and manipulation tasks, Dex-One2Many exceeds baselines by 6.5% in seen configurations, while its robust generalization widens this gap to 71% in unseen scenarios.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12470
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A Balanced Data Diet: Addressing the Exploration Bottleneck in Mega-Scale RL for Robot Control
2026-10-08 17:59:50Octi Zhang, Mateo Guaman Castro, Patrick Yin, Ignacio Dagnino, Abhishek Gupta, Rosario Scalise, Byron BootsAbstract
General-purpose robots must perform a wide range of tasks from agile locomotion to dexterous manipulation. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a useful tool for this goal, current RL pipelines depend on engineering-heavy, per-task structural priors such as shaped rewards and demonstrations. Recent work has shown that diverse simulator resets, combined with massively parallel simulation, can alleviate much of this engineering burden on several manipulation problems. However, we find that naively scaling this paradigm to more precise or dynamic problems remains non-trivial. While simulator resets can help with exploration, uniformly sampling over this distribution wastes a growing fraction of learning experience on task configurations the policy has already mastered or cannot yet attempt. This makes it challenging to see the expected benefits of scaling parallel environments for RL, since much of the learning signal in a batch is wasted during learning. To mitigate this, we introduce Success Guided Sampling (SGS), a simple adaptive sampler that concentrates RL training on task configurations around the frontier of the policy's capabilities. Doing so allows large-scale simulated RL to make the most out of the experience in a batch, enabling much more effective scaling to large-scale parallel simulation. Across experiments using up to $2^{20}$ (over one million) parallel environments, SGS enables RL to solve challenging multi-terrain quadruped locomotion and contact-rich assembly tasks that prior methods fail to solve. Finally, we distill the learned manipulation policies into RGB-based policies and demonstrate zero-shot transfer to several challenging assembly tasks on real hardware. Project website: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12465
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VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data
2026-10-08 17:57:27Mert Albaba, Jens Bei{\ss}wenger, Anna Manasyan, Daniel Marta, Michael J. Black, Wieland Brendel, Andreas Krause, Georg Martius, Martin RiedmillerAbstract
Teaching a humanoid to follow instructions with its whole body runs into two obstacles. Its action space is large and tightly coupled: legs, arms, and fingers must move together while the robot keeps its balance, which makes joint-level actions hard to learn. And humanoid demonstrations are scarce, so current humanoid generalist policies do not follow new instructions out of the box and are fine-tuned on teleoperated demonstrations of each task before deployment. Human demonstrations exist in far larger numbers, but a person's motion is not a robot command. We remove both obstacles by changing what the generalist policy predicts. We introduce VioLA, a generalist humanoid policy that predicts body and hand motion latents instead of joint commands. A pretrained body- and hand-controller execute these latents on the robot. Their corresponding motion encoders map human and robot motion into the same latent spaces. A human recording is therefore labeled in the policy's action space, and the training demonstration pool contains 140.6 million frames, 93.2% of them human. As a result, VioLA follows locomotion instructions on the real robot zero-shot, without task-specific fine-tuning, reaching 100% success where GR00T N1.7 and $\Psi_0$ reach 16.7% and 0%, respectively. It also reaches 88.6% manipulation success without task-specific fine-tuning. The same approach works across two VLA and one world-action model backbones. A generalist policy trained on human demonstrations alone performs locomotion tasks on the real robot zero-shot. Code and checkpoints will be released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12435
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Humanity's Sixth Sense: Benchmarking Intuitive Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Models
2026-10-08 17:39:44Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Daniel Quigley, Steven Li, David Yan, Daniel Yue Zhang, Darvin Yi, Forrest Huang, HiJae Kim, Tianyi Zhang, Jared Lichtarge, Jihua Huang, Le Xue, Manan Tomar, Qiuyi Richard Zhang, Ruofei Yu, Seth Neel, Yaning Hu, Marcella Valentine, Xinzhe Jiang, Daniel Evans, Chenguang Wang, Dustin Tran, Tong Zhao, Yinfei Yang, Yunzhong HeAbstract
Humans perceive far more in a scene than what is explicitly depicted: a single glance captures past causes and future trajectories; a quick peek determines if a vehicle can fit between two parked cars; a few seconds of video reveals who holds authority in a room; and a fleeting clip highlights subtle abstract patterns like unwritten rules or hidden labels. This capacity reflects a form of humanity's sixth sense: an intuitive reasoning mechanism that recovers implicit information beyond raw sensory perception. Crucially, this rapid, zero-shot visual intuition underpins everyday navigation and social interaction, making it a vital capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deployed alongside people. Existing visual benchmarks, however, target either deliberate expert-level analysis in academic and mathematical domains or low-level perception, leaving the intuitive reasoning that people perform largely untested. To bridge this gap, we introduce Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark for intuitive visual reasoning. HSS spans diverse image and video inputs, organizes items under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human-written prompts probing the implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract structure that people infer at a glance. Frontier MLLMs fall short of human performance: participants reach 93.1% accuracy, while the strongest model, GPT-6-astra, reaches only 53.6% even at maximum reasoning effort. Despite excelling in many complex tasks that require advanced perception and knowledge, current models still struggle significantly on these visual tasks that are intuitive for humans. We further explore agentic setup that apply dynamic visual manipulation to HSS, which narrows but does not close the gap. HSS establishes intuitive visual reasoning as a measurable axis and directs attention to a capability that scaling on current benchmarks has so far left behind.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08966
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ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models
2026-10-08 17:38:04Gokul Puthumanaillam, Tao Sun, Elie Aljalbout, Moritz Reuss, Zhaoshuo Li, Fabio Ramos, Ankit Goyal, Jenai Xuning YangAbstract
The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale. We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC. It consists of three key ingredients: a reasoning trace, a scalable automatic labeling pipeline, and a strategy for adapting pretrained RFMs to use these traces for control. First, we find that effective reasoning traces should be grounded in the robot's next action and explain its causal structure: why the action is appropriate and what effect it should produce. Second, we show that these traces can be generated automatically from existing demonstrations, enabling us to construct ARC-Trace-DROID from DROID without collecting new robot data. Third, we show how state-of-the-art VLAs such as $\pi_{0.5}$ and WAMs such as Cosmos3-Nano-Policy can learn to use these traces for control, with fine-tuning and inference tailored to each model's architecture and capabilities. Using ARC, we obtain gains in zero-shot RFM performance that, to our knowledge, are unprecedented without additional robot demonstrations or foundation-scale training. The adapted models establish a new state of the art on RoboLab-120 and MolmoSpaces, with gains of up to 50 percentage points on RoboLab-Reasoning-50. On real robots, ARC improves $\pi_{0.5}$'s task success by 82.2 percentage points. Project website: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12386
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RiCo: Neural Simulation of Rigid-Body Interactions via Local Contact Reasoning
2026-10-08 17:11:54Ruixiang Ouyang, Guanren Qiao, Fansen Meng, Yueci Deng, Ruixing Jin, Kui Jia, Guiliang LiuAbstract
Accurate simulation of rigid-body interactions is essential for predictive physical world models. Despite recent progress in modeling object dynamics, capturing how local contacts between surfaces shape object motion remains challenging. While end-to-end world models predict interactions across entire scenes or objects, in practice, rigid-body contact is inherently local, and only nearby surfaces can directly exchange contact forces. Motivated by this observation, we introduce Rigid-body Contact Reasoning (RiCo), which represents interactions between objects through sparse neighborhoods of contact surface points. RiCo combines each point's state with the relative geometry, motion, and physical properties of nearby surfaces, then reasons across the object's points to determine how these local contacts jointly affect its motion. By confining cross-object reasoning to nearby surfaces while propagating contact information within each rigid body, RiCo retains fine-grained interaction details without the cost of modeling every pair of scene points. Such properties enable RiCo a higher accuracy and contact fidelity. Experiments on MOVi-benchmark demonstrate that RiCo reduces 100-frame position and orientation errors by 31-35% and approximately 38%, respectively, compared with baselines. Moreover, RiCo achieves high contact fidelity, with ground-truth-relative penetration-time and mean-depth differences of 11.0% and 2.22 mm, respectively. RiCo further generalizes zero-shot from small-scale training scenarios to scenes containing 270 objects. Our real-world multi-ball collision experiments further provide preliminary evidence of sim-to-real transfer.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12333
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PLaW-VLA: Predictive Latent World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Policies
2026-10-08 16:41:11Yu Liu, Hetian Guo, Tianlv Huang, Ziyi Cai, Wudi Chen, Hantang Wang, Qiutong Liu, Yingzhi Peng, Wei Han, Peijun Tang, Jianan Wang, Zipei Fan, Zhiyuan Zha, Xuan SongAbstract
Learning to predict how the world evolves can provide vision-language-action (VLA) policies with predictive context for long-horizon control, but its effectiveness depends on what future representation is modeled and how it conditions action generation. We introduce PLaW-VLA, which models task-relevant future states in a pretrained prediction-oriented representation space, reducing the need to predict control-irrelevant visual details. Built on a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PLaW-VLA conditions action generation on observation history, current task semantics, and predicted future states through structured causal attention. Experiments show a +11.8 percentage-point (pp) gain over reactive policies on RoboTwin Hard Horizon III and a +1.77 pp gain over reconstruction-oriented latent prediction on zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, supporting improved long-horizon control and generalization under distribution shift, respectively. By avoiding low-level visual reconstruction, PLaW-VLA lowers the burden of future prediction, enabling a lightweight latent world model with parallel future prediction and about 1/19 the inference latency of generative world-action modeling at comparable policy performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12285
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EgoVoice: Proactive Spoken Assistance from Egocentric Multimodal Streams
2026-10-08 16:24:12Heeseung KimAbstract
Wearable augmented reality (AR) assistants are moving toward continuous real-world interaction, where they perceive the user's activity through first-person video and audio and provide timely spoken guidance without being explicitly asked. While proactive video assistants, spoken dialog systems, and egocentric task understanding have each advanced rapidly, existing systems do not address the joint problem of deciding when to speak and what to say from continuous first-person streams. We introduce EgoVoice, a framework for training and evaluating proactive egocentric spoken assistants. From HoloAssist video recordings of real human instructors, we construct clean audio streams through source separation and speech resynthesis, and convert each video session into a format where the model must decide at each moment whether to remain silent or provide spoken guidance. We fine-tune an omni-modal LLM with our data, and further improve its proactive intervention behavior with direct preference optimization. Experiments across closed and open-source models show that existing systems rarely produce well-timed, meaningful proactive interventions, while EgoVoice yields clear improvements in intervention timing, content relevance, and human preference over the zero-shot backbone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12248
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AdaCast: Conditional Parameter Generation for Adaptive Time Series Forecasting
2026-10-08 16:21:19Darahaas Nallagatla, Darryl Cherian Jacob, Pan HeAbstract
Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) have achieved strong forecasting performance across domains. However, most adaptation methods remain static. Existing all-in-one methods learn a single set of dataset-level parameter updates and apply the same adapted model to every input. As a result, they cannot adapt the model parameters to the temporal patterns, seasonality and dynamics of each input time series. This limits their ability to produce forecasts that are tailored to heterogeneous inputs. To address this limitation, we propose AdaCast, a conditional parameter generation framework for time-series forecasting. AdaCast uses a generator to produce input-specific low-rank parameter updates for a frozen pretrained TSFM. These updates adapt the model to each input during both training and inference. Across six public benchmarks, AdaCast consistently outperforms static adaptation baseline in in-domain forecasting and improves zero-shot generalization to held-out datasets across domains. These results demonstrate that conditional parameter generation provides an effective approach for adaptive forecasting.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12240
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Sim-to-Real RL for ASVs using SysID
2026-10-08 15:56:38Cody Sheltraw, Tsimafei Lazouski, Maani Ghaffari, Alan PapaliaAbstract
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) operating in dynamic marine environments require robust control policies for tasks such as path following and station keeping, making reinforcement learning (RL) a promising alternative to classical controllers. However, existing ASV simulators rarely support parallel environments for RL training. Such existing simulators require accurate hydrodynamic modeling from computational fluid dynamics solvers or towing tank tests for setting hydrodynamic parameters to address the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we present an ASV simulator and accompanying pipeline that enables training policies starting from unknown vehicle dynamics. Our framework uses only a CAD model and brief set of open-water field trajectories for approximating and refining both hydrodynamic and thruster parameters. Real-world deployments on a BlueBoat ASV demonstrate successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in path following and station-keeping tasks without prior hydrodynamic and propeller information.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12202
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From Pixels to Structure: Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Document OCR and Structured JSON Extraction
2026-10-08 12:21:52Uddipan Basu Bir, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Mathias ZinnenAbstract
While massive, closed-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) set strong benchmarks for document understanding, their dependence on commercial APIs limits adoption in institutional archives due to data autonomy concerns, recurring costs, and the environmental footprint of hyperscale computing. This is especially acute in heritage digitization, where documents include historical handwriting, domain-specific terminology (e.g., jewelry, prehistory, architecture), and non-standard layouts requiring high-dimensional structured extraction. We present a comparative study of eight open-source lightweight VLMs (up to 7B parameters) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-to-structure across three university heritage collections. Given a document image, models must extract text and generate schema-compliant JSON, enabling automatic validation and downstream use. We evaluate models under a constraint-aware protocol across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, measuring extraction fidelity and structured-output quality using Character Error Rate (CER), Approximate Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS*), and mean Average Precision F1 (mAP-F1). Against a fine-tuning baseline, we further test the independent impact of (i) hyperparameter optimization, (ii) classical image preprocessing (illumination flattening, denoising, and CLAHE), and (iii) multi-stage training. Finally, we analyze the trade-off between dataset-specific fine-tuning and a single multi-dataset checkpoint, where joint training enables one model to operate across collections but can shift performance between datasets. Overall, we show that carefully adapted VLMs with up to 7B parameters can provide a sustainable, private, high-performing alternative to manual transcription or commercial black-box systems, and we offer actionable guidance for heritage institutions seeking institution-controlled OCR-to-JSON extraction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11818
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Timer-M1: A Multivariate Time Series Foundation Model via Learning Primitives
2026-10-08 11:28:56Haoran Zhang, Haixuan Liu, Xingjian Su, Yong Liu, Zhi Chen, Yuxuan Wang, Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng LongAbstract
We introduce Timer-M1, a pretrained multivariate time series foundation model that learns with primitives for zero-shot forecasting. Across domains, time series share elementary temporal and relational patterns, termed primitives, yet differ in how these primitives manifest and evolve across different contexts. Despite progress in zero-shot and task-general forecasting, existing foundation models may still struggle to generalize to complex real-world scenarios. To this end, we develop a primitive-based data synthesis and pretraining pipeline. The synthesis pipeline generates series with temporal primitives shared across domains and then assembles real and generated series into multivariate samples using relational primitives. Afterwards, samples are organized into episodes by assigning distinct channel roles as target variates, past-only covariates, and known-future covariates, ensuring that the model is optimized on predictable variates using available exogenous information. Technically, Timer-M1 further adapts gated two-dimensional Transformer blocks that dynamically allocate cross-variate attention across layers. Across three large-scale forecasting benchmarks, Timer-M1 ranks first on both FEV and TIME and second on GIFT-Eval among most recent time series foundation models. These results support effective primitive-based pretraining as a route to robust general forecasting technique across domains and task settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11734
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Autoregressive Retriever: Improving Query Understanding from Item Feedback for Universal Multimodal Retrieval
2026-10-08 10:39:17Jianfei Zhao, Yifan Wang, Feng Zhang, Xin Sun, Chong Feng, Zhixing Tan, Yang Luo, Boyuan Pan, Xu Kai, Yao HuAbstract
Universal multimodal retrieval typically encodes a query once and ranks independently indexed items by embedding similarity. This design supports efficient search, but leaves the query representation unchanged even when retrieved items could help clarify the information need. We introduce the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that learns both to select informative items and to use their content to refine subsequent retrieval. ARR alternates between retrieving an item and updating the query embedding, then uses the final embedding to rank the collection. Supervised fine-tuning teaches the encoder to use feedback through stepwise contrastive supervision. Reinforcement learning treats feedback items as actions and optimizes their selection using the final reciprocal rank of a relevant item. A query-side adapter enables this optimization against a fixed item index. ARR demonstrates strong retrieval performance on both in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks, outperforming the compared baselines on average. Further analyses show that feedback improves retrieval at inference time and that training with feedback also improves the initial query embedding, before any item is observed.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11666
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