arXiv_RO
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On Representational Alignment among Embodied Agents
Abstract
Embodied agents interacting with the same physical process may maintain heterogeneous, asynchronous, and observer-relative representations. Rather than assuming that such representations should always be globally aligned, we investigate which distinctions among them must actually be resolved for coherent interaction. We formalize this question through relational sufficiency: an interaction-specific relational-evidence map defines the representational ambiguity left unresolved by comparison, and sufficiency holds when each residual ambiguity fiber lies within an interaction-equivalence class. When this condition fails, additional sensorimotor anchors must separate precisely the ambiguities that can change the interaction-relevant outcome. For smooth systems, we derive a local first-order lower bound on the number of inde- pendent scalar anchors required, given by the dimension of directions that are invisible to relational evidence but visible to the interaction-relevant map. We instantiate the theory in two variants of an asynchronous hand-off scenario that share the same observer agents, representations, transports, and relational evidence. Relative synchronization requires no additional anchor, whereas hand-off at an absolute time requires exactly one. The analysis there- fore provides a task-relative stopping condition for representational alignment: residual disagreement need not be eliminated when it is invariant with respect to the interaction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02985
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MixVLA: Adaptive Mixing of Non-Invariant Information for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-02 06:44:43Pingrui Zhang, Yu Zhang, Pengyuan Wu, Bin Wang, Haoming Song, Xianqiang Gao, ZhaxiZhuoma, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Bin Zhao, Xuelong LiAbstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable advances in robotic manipulation, yet their zero-shot generalization under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains limited. These models often entangle task-relevant invariant structure with environment-specific non-invariant factors, causing policies to rely on spurious appearance cues during action prediction. In this work, we propose \textbf{MixVLA}, a model-agnostic training framework that improves the generalization of VLA models without requiring additional OOD data or architectural modifications. The key component of MixVLA is \textbf{Adaptive Mixing of Non-Invariant Information (AMI)}. AMI stochastically mixes non-invariant representations to regularize distribution-specific variability while preserving complementary predictive cues. The mixed non-invariant features are then fused with invariant representations for final action prediction, resulting in improved robustness without sacrificing policy expressiveness. Extensive experiments across challenging manipulation settings, including LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, the RoboTwin perturbation suite, and real-world tasks, demonstrate that MixVLA improves overall zero-shot robustness while retaining strong in-domain performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02898
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SceneFactory-3D: Lifting 2D Traffic Scenes into 3D Physical Counterfactuals for Scalable Physically Grounded Safety Evaluation
2026-10-02 06:12:12Yicheng Zhu, Linfeng Tian, Tianmu Zhao, Yang Chen, Fan Zuo, Tao Li, Zilin BianAbstract
Scalable driving simulators typically execute vehicle commands using prescribed behavioral or kinematic rules, overlooking the physics of tire-road interfaces, thereby limiting their ability to capture how adverse road and environmental conditions alter vehicle execution and propagate through traffic. To address this limitation, we present SceneFactory-3D, a GPU-batched, physics-grounded multi-agent driving simulator. Vehicles execute acceleration and steering commands via suspension- and friction-limited forces evaluated at each wheel-contact point. Spatially varying friction, per-world 3D heightfields, gravity, and rigid contact consistently govern wheel motion and chassis collisions. Per-world terrain isolation and GPU batching enable SceneFactory-3D to run matched physical counterfactuals in parallel: traffic scenario setup and vehicle controllers remain fixed while only the road condition changes, enabling the resulting closed-loop effects to be evaluated across parallel worlds. To demonstrate the advantage of the SceneFactory-3D-enabled counterfactual evaluation, we conduct an empirical study on vehicle controllers' sensitivity to road conditions. We study three learned-policy families on 1,024 matched 12-vehicle worlds per condition, and two classical planners on a shared 32-world subset, across 21 friction and grade conditions. When friction drops from 1.0 to 0.18, the share of vehicles that clear the work zone safely falls by 6 to 90 percentage points across learned policies (18-19 for classical planners), and near-collision situations become more frequent for every learned policy. Code: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02874
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Permutation Robustness Is Not Enough: Action Collapse in Multi-Agent Transformer Policies
2026-10-02 05:35:53Amit Thakur, Mukesh SinghalAbstract
Transformer policies are attractive for multi-agent robot learning because self-attention can model interactions among agents. However, multi-agent teams are unordered, while transformers typically process agents as ordered token sequences. We study how this mismatch affects cooperative navigation policies under agent-order permutations. Our results show that low permutation error alone can be misleading: policies may appear robust simply because all agents choose the same action. We therefore evaluate policies using both permutation-consistency metrics and action-collapse diagnostics, including action diversity, same-action fraction, and maximum action frequency. A PPO-ID baseline yields non-collapsed behavior but remains order-sensitive, while strong equivariance regularization can still induce homogeneous behavior. A weak equivariance penalty improves the robustness while preserving more diverse actions for teams with \(N=3\) agents, whereas teams with \(N=4\) agents require substantially smaller regularization weights. These findings suggest that multi-agent transformer policies should be evaluated not only by return and permutation robustness, but also by whether they maintain non-collapsed, differentiated multi-agent behavior.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02848
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Register-Routed Delayed Fusion: Rewiring Shortcut-Prone Observation Fusion in Visuomotor Imitation
Abstract
Visuomotor imitation policies combine high-dimensional visual observations with compact signals such as proprioception, and their fusion topology determines when and through which tokens these streams interact. In dense token fusion, visual tokens may attend directly to compact tokens from the first encoder layer, allowing action-predictive compact cues to influence spatial visual representations early in their formation. We ask whether controlling this route improves visual responsiveness and policy behavior. We introduce Register-Routed Delayed Fusion (RRDF), which masks direct compact-visual attention and stages cross-modal interaction through a learned register workspace. Its isolate-collect-route schedule protects an early stream-separated prefix and later permits only register-mediated exchange, while compact conditioning remains available to the native action generator. Across five simulation tasks and three real-robot tasks, RRDF matches or improves dense ACT under nominal conditions. Appearance-shift evaluations on four simulation tasks and held-out-position evaluations on three real-robot tasks also favor RRDF. Phase-matched input probes show lower measured state-to-image sensitivity, while ablations indicate that adding registers alone does not reproduce the full performance gain. These results support controlling cross-modal propagation while retaining compact action conditioning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02813
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Learning Reflexive Behavior for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Abstract
During contact-rich manipulation, interactions between a robot and its environment carry information about local geometry: a surface prevents penetration, a bore guides a peg. A controller that exploits these interactions can comply with environmental constraints while preserving task intent. Robot-earning systems commonly use position, hybrid force-position, or Cartesian impedance control. Their prescribed tracking objectives, stiffness, or force-control directions may not match local constraints and may degrade performance. We learn a proprioceptive reflex policy in simulation on three simple interaction primitives: a spring, a plane, and a rail. The policy maps task-space commands to joint-position targets using state history, without direct force or geometrical measurements. Once trained, it serves as a frozen execution layer beneath higher-level controllers. We evaluate it in dual-arm box lifting, peg insertion, and surface following. In box lifting, the reflex kept the force below the threshold while the baseline failed. In rough-surface following it stayed below the 10 N reference, on par with tuned hybrid force-position control. In 0.02 mm peg insertion It reduced mean estimated contact force to less than half that of the baseline while increasing hardware success rates from at most 22 % to 36-58 %. By separating contact response from command generation, the reflex policy provides motion planners, learned policies, and teleoperators with robust contact-rich execution.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02811
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SARI: Phase-Split Sim-Real Co-Training for Contact-Rich Manipulation
2026-10-02 04:50:08Xingxin He, Yuxuan Jiang, Haonan Zhang, Chuhan Cui, Kaile Li, Zhongxing Zheng, Caihao Xu, Ziqi WangAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models often require costly real-world demonstrations to adapt to contact-rich manipulation tasks, particularly when generalization across object placements is needed. We propose SARI (Simulated Approach, Real Interaction), a phase-split sim-and-real co-training framework built on a simple insight: spatial coverage and contact physics should be acquired from the domains best suited to them. Specifically, free-space approaches require spatial diversity but tolerate modest simulation gaps, making them ideal for synthetic generation; conversely, contact interactions demand accurate physics but vary little across object placements, allowing a few real demonstrations to generalize across the workspace. SARI generates diverse simulated approaches in a photorealistic digital twin while collecting real contact interactions at only a few placements. Post-trained on these phase-segmented demonstrations, a single policy seamlessly stitches simulated approaches with real contact interactions using visual appearance alignment and a shared camera-relative action representation--without explicit phase labels or hand-coded switches. Across five real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, SARI reduces real-data collection time by 34.3% and achieves 27.5% success at unseen placements, where all full-task sim-real baselines fail completely (0%).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02804
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LOCUS: Landmark-Oriented Container Discrimination Using Spatial Graphs
2026-10-02 04:50:07Taylor Bergeron, Shibani Senthilbabu, Kevin LeahyAbstract
As robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured, real-world environments, the ability to reason about complex spatial and semantic relationships among objects remains a fundamental challenge in enabling robust and generalizable manipulation and navigation. For example, deciding where to search for an object that is not in plain sight depends on where it is physically plausible as well as semantically likely. Popular methods such as cosine similarity with CLIP struggle to disambiguate between spatially and semantically similar objects that could contain a target object. We propose Landmark-Oriented Container Discrimination Using Spatial Graphs (LOCUS). To jointly reason about spatial information and semantics, we train a GNN to update CLIP embeddings on a full environment scene graph by passing embedding information between nodes based on proximity. CLIP embeddings, augmented by semantic knowledge from a fusion of household ontologies provide a robust semantic signal. We evaluate in simulation on a noiseless scene graph from simulator metadata, making the approach detection-agnostic. Our approach outperforms random, CLIP, Tidybot, and an LLM planner in the majority of room classes and configurations in simulation. To show our approach is robust to scene graph node placement and label noise, we demonstrate a physical mobile manipulator running in an exploration pipeline start-to-finish including scene graph labels from Detic.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02803
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ManiPhysicsBench: Physics-Based Assessment of Object Preservation in VLA Manipulation
2026-10-02 04:49:46Sangwu Park, Yeonjun In, Wonjoong Kim, Sungwon Kim, Sein Kim, Chanyoung ParkAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to perform diverse manipulation tasks, but task success in existing rigid-body benchmarks does not indicate whether they preserve objects. We introduce ManiPhysicsZoo, which consolidates literature-supported material properties, 3D meshes, and supporting references into reusable object assets. Using these assets, a solver-based assessment computes grasp-specific damage thresholds from object geometry, material properties, and recorded grasp conditions and compares them with recorded contact forces to assess potential deformation and fracture. Building on these components, ManiPhysicsBench evaluates object preservation in LIBERO and SimplerEnv across three physics axes and three difficulty levels. Public VLA checkpoints show a substantial gap between task success and safe success, defined as task completion while preserving the object. Their gripper commands concentrate near full opening and closure, with largely similar aggregate distributions across objects, consistent with binary gripper supervision. We examine how object-specific continuous gripper labels change model behavior by retraining a VLA model. The retrained model shows more object-dependent gripping and higher safe success, but lower task success and limited generalization of object-preserving behavior.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02802
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Skill2Real: Agentic Skill Learning for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Robot Manipulation
2026-10-02 04:25:12Xincheng He, Siyu Ma, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Yanjia Huang, Ying Nian Wu, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu JiangAbstract
Transferring robotic skills from simulation to reality requires task knowledge that remains usable across differences in perception, dynamics, and embodiment. We introduce Skill2Real, an agentic policy framework that learns executable skills through a shared application programming interface (API). A Proposer-Verifier-Governor (PVG) loop uses privileged simulation evidence to diagnose outcomes and validate updates, while keeping learned skills grounded in public observations and API semantics. The Cerebellum first acquires local manipulation skills; the Brain then learns task-level composition with the Cerebellum frozen. Both memories transfer to the real robot without task-policy fine-tuning or skill-memory updates. As GPT-5.6 Sol learns skills on LIBERO-90, evaluating each frozen checkpoint with GPT-6 Astra raises LIBERO-Pro Long success from 2.0% to 56.3%, without training on Pro Long. Independent Robosuite training reaches 85.1% and 89.4% mean success with Sol and Opus 5 across seven tasks, respectively. Frozen Sol-trained LIBERO-90 skills achieve 78.75% mean completion across four real-world manipulation tasks with Astra. Removing the Verifier or Governor during LIBERO-90 training lowers final Pro Long success by 17.3 and 13.3 percentage points, respectively. These results support learning and transferring a hierarchy of executable skills through a common robot interface.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02788
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SimpleTouch: Can Vision-Language-Action Models Master Contact-Rich Manipulation Without Tactile Policy Pretraining?
2026-10-02 04:19:13Chen Yang, Linzhe Shi, Changjie Wu, Hang Zhang, Ronghan Chen, Lingjun Zhang, Xu Hu, Mu Xu, Jiansheng Fan, Chen WangAbstract
Tactile sensing provides essential contact information for robotic manipulation, yet incorporating it into pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging. A common concern is that simply introducing touch during task-specific fine-tuning may fail to bridge the cross-modal gap, yielding limited gains or even reduced success. Consequently, existing methods often rely on large-scale tactile policy pretraining or separate visuotactile alignment, adding data requirements and training stages. We introduce SimpleTouch, a simple VLA extension that augments $\pi_{0.5}$ with a tactile expert, to test whether these additional stages are necessary. Leveraging all tokens from a frozen pretrained tactile encoder, the expert learns from action supervision and multi-horizon prediction of future tactile latents. This single-stage training uses only task demonstrations, without additional tactile policy pretraining or separate alignment. With 50 demonstrations per task, SimpleTouch achieves the highest success rate among evaluated methods on all six UniVTAC tasks. Its average success rate reaches 77.5%, compared with 45.2% for FTP-$\pi_{0.5}$ and 66.7% for FTP-1, corresponding to gains of 32.3 and 10.8 percentage points, respectively. Across four real-world tasks, it averages 71.3%, exceeding FTP-1 by 8.8 percentage points. These results demonstrate that, given pretrained VLA and tactile representations, additional tactile policy pretraining is not a prerequisite for strong performance on these tasks, offering a simpler route to contact-rich manipulation. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02784
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Localized Conformal Safety Monitoring with Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving
2026-10-02 03:46:07Lu\'is Marques, Rong Fang, Disha Kamale, Dmitry BerensonAbstract
Monitoring planned driving trajectories requires accurately estimating the collision likelihood with actors whose motion is itself impacted by the ego motion. Existing classical approaches are often limited by the quality of their forecasting model. Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in reasoning about the consequences of high-level actions, yet their approximate predictions are unsuitable for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Conformal prediction (CP) has emerged as a data-driven framework for quantifying the uncertainty of black-box model predictions. We propose Split Label-Localized Conformal Prediction (SLLCP), a post-hoc calibration layer over frozen VLMs that transforms their unreliable predictions into probabilistically calibrated safety prediction sets. We consider how the ability to estimate safety can depend on the observed driving scene and introduce a localized procedure that upweights relevant past experience when calculating uncertainty thresholds. We provide label-conditional finite-sample distribution-free coverage under exchangeability. Evaluated over 15k CARLA trajectories from unseen scenarios, SLLCP correctly flags 89.6% of collision-causing trajectories with a Qwen backbone and 88.4% with a Cosmos backbone, while the base VLMs only flagged 4.6% and 39.1% of the collision-causing trajectories, respectively. These results indicate that local, label-conditional calibration can reduce missed unsafe trajectories.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02765
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Proprioceptive Sketches as Long-Horizon Intent for Generative Action Policies
2026-10-02 03:40:32Fangyuan Wang, Songhao Huang, Haoxiang Sun, Shipeng Lyu, Chengyang He, Anqing Duan, Peng Zhou, David Navarro-AlarconAbstract
Generative robot policies predict short action chunks but lack explicit long-horizon intent. Recent methods expose longer-horizon structure through language plans, subgoal images, or video forecasts, which are costly to generate and still need to be translated into robot motion. Predicting future robot motions avoids this translation, but a dense, time-indexed trajectory requires numerous parameters to cover the full remaining task, and over a short horizon it largely repeats the action chunk and adds little guidance for action generation. We propose Proprioceptive Action Models (PAM), which jointly generate a compact, timing-free sketch of the robot's remaining joint-space path and a dense executable action chunk within a single transformer denoiser. The sketch parameterizes the path by arc length rather than time, capturing geometric intent invariant to execution timing. Block-causal attention and a staggered denoising schedule maintain directed sketch-to-action dependence, ensuring the action tokens condition on a progressively cleaner sketch throughout sampling. In simulation, PAM improves over its action-only counterparts on Push-T and LIBERO-Long; on four real-world bimanual tasks, it raises success from 47.5% to 75.0%. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02759
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GlowTact: Simple and Compact Vision-Based Tactile Sensing with High Sensitivity and Spatial Resolution
2026-10-02 03:31:47Yuxiang Ma, Megha Tippur, Pengfei Ye, Sandra Q. Liu, Haonan Chen, Francis Richard Cottrell, Edward AdelsonAbstract
Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTS) provide rich contact information for robotic manipulation, but existing designs can be hard to simplify and adapt to the size and constraints of humanoid fingertips. We introduce \textbf{GlowTact}, a pressure-responsive vision-based tactile sensing mechanism that directly visualizes contact pressure. \textbf{GlowTact} requires only single-color, non-directional illumination, and the raw tactile image directly represents the pressure distribution without explicit geometry reconstruction. This simple sensing principle enables compact, customizable tactile sensors while preserving high sensitivity and rich spatial detail. We demonstrate gram-scale contact detection, accurate normal-force estimation, and reconstruction of fine contact geometry, including M1 screw threads. These results establish \textbf{GlowTact} as a practical new sensing technology for compact humanoid fingertips, combining a durable nitrile membrane and simple optical design with sensitive and information-rich tactile perception.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32471
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CSIR: Contextually and Socially Informed Robots for Efficient Person Goal Navigation
2026-10-02 03:23:15Tyler Chung, Nahl Farhan, Hao Zhang, Mingfeng Yuan, Jinjun Shan, Amy Wu, Yue HuAbstract
We address the Person Goal Navigation (PersonNav) problem, enabling robots to search for people under realistic constraints on information accessibility and language uncertainty. This tackles the current solutions revolving around rigid person finding systems requiring exact knowledge of the individual for item-delivery in indoor settings. While the focus in literature is on learned methods using unavailable public or sparse data due to human privacy. We propose a planning framework that combines distance and semantic information about the recipient (habits and intent) weighted by the trust of the user-provided information. A synthetic benchmark of scenarios is also developed including actors, items, and requests to evaluate performance before real-world deployment aiming to simulate natural language human-robot interactions. Results show our informed search outperforms classical distance-based graph baselines, while semantics alone lead to ungrounded, sporadic search. Our method achieves strong gains over baselines, with an LLM-based variant performing comparably, and its explicit belief representation naturally supports future Bayesian filtering. Hardware tests demonstrate our method supports real-world embodiment able to leverage between semantic and distance information in a real setting. This work moves toward more intelligent mobile service agents capable of human-like, informed search in realistic environments to be leveraged in day-to-day use. this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02750
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Around the World: Unified Learned Locomotion on a 270 g Continuous-Rotation Quadruped
Abstract
Closed-loop learned locomotion is established on commercial quadrupeds but remains uncommon at the sub-kilogram scale. Continuous-rotation legs give MiNI-Q, a 270 g quadruped, access to supporting configurations on either side of the body. We exploit this range with a single posture-conditioned reinforcement-learning policy that runs entirely onboard. A continuous joint-space reference on the torus $T^8$ and its gravity-conditioned transformation connect upright walking, inverted walking, and landing recovery without state machines or phase switching. Coordinated posture and release curricula train this behavior family; identified actuation, cross-engine validation, and embedded execution support hardware transfer. The same sub-100k-parameter network tracks forward velocity with RMSE of 0.037 m/s upright and 0.050 m/s inverted, resumes walking in 24 of 30 release trials, and operates with four interchangeable foot geometries across four indoor surfaces. Hardware experiments and simulation ablations connect these capabilities to the representation, conditioning, and training choices that exploit the platform's motion range. Demonstration videos and supplementary material are available on the project website: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02728
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RoboBridge: A Self-Evolving Embodied Agent Framework for Sim-to-Real Transfer
2026-10-02 02:53:57Chenxi Li, Zhangrui Zhao, Rui Li, Yuan Gao, Kehui Liu, Jiarui Li, Dong Wang, Tong Si, Minting Pan, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan ZhouAbstract
A key challenge in bringing embodied intelligence into the real world is transferring capabilities from simulation to reality and enabling agents to continually adapt after deployment. End-to-end vision-language-action policies provide strong manipulation capabilities, but their transfer to physical environments typically relies on calibrating simulated visual and dynamical conditions, collecting additional target-domain demonstrations, and optimizing the policy through further training. Tool-using embodied agents offer flexible task orchestration, yet existing systems primarily emphasize task execution and experience reuse within a given environment, with limited support for transferring procedural knowledge and continuously adapting it across simulation and reality. We propose RoboBridge, a framework that treats sim-to-real transfer as the continued adaptation of executable task skills. The agent represents task knowledge as procedures connecting task intent, observations, tool operations, and outcome verification. Interaction feedback is used to generate candidate skill revisions, which are evaluated before being persisted or rejected. A pretrained vision-language-action policy is exposed as a reusable action tool and enhanced with inference-time guidance, enabling fine-grained execution without retraining the underlying policy. RoboBridge grounds transferable skills in task semantics and interaction interfaces shared across simulation and reality. This representation preserves reusable task structure while allowing environment-dependent operations to be selectively revised through real-world execution feedback. We evaluate the framework on LIBERO-PRO and corresponding physical tasks, studying both skill evolution and post-transfer adaptation. Our framework provides a route from one-shot policy deployment to continual procedural learning across environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02717
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RoboChemGym: A Protocol-Driven Generative Simulation Framework for Long-Horizon Chemical Manipulation
2026-10-02 02:43:15Chenxi Li, Haiyuan Wan, Rui Li, Jingyuan Li, Sha Zhang, Bohan Feng, Jianbao Cao, Zhangrui Zhao, Di Hu, Wangmeng Zuo, Shixiang Tang, Minting Pan, Dongzhan ZhouAbstract
Wet-lab experimentation serves as the gold standard for hypothesis verification in scientific discovery; yet it is inherently labor-intensive, costly, and safety-critical. Embodied agents hold the promise of automating these tedious workflows, but their development is hindered by the scarcity of real-world training data. While simulation offers a scalable alternative for producing demonstrations, current methods primarily target relatively short-horizon tasks with loosely structured interactions, failing to meet the strict procedural constraints and fine-grained manipulation demands of chemical experiments. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{RoboChemGym}, a framework that autonomously generates high-fidelity manipulation demonstrations aligned with real-world experiment protocols, featuring a \textit{self-improving task synthesis} mechanism to iteratively refine task execution and scene configurations, enabling the reliable generation of expert trajectories for complex, multi-object protocols exceeding 10 interaction steps. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical benchmark that systematically assesses performance across varying granularities, spanning from atomic operations to full-cycle experimental workflows. RoboChemGym sets a scalable paradigm for the automated data synthesis and capability evaluation of embodied agents in intricate chemical tasks, serving as a critical stepping stone toward fully intelligent laboratories.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02708
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AdaTempo: Learning Shared Relative Tempo from Demonstrations for Faster Robot Manipulation
2026-10-02 02:42:15Jiale Cao, Yike Niu, Zhengrong Xue, Huazhe XuAbstract
Visuomotor policies trained via imitation learning often inherit the unnecessarily slow timing of teleoperated demonstrations. Yet uniform speedup is unreliable because different phases of a manipulation task tolerate acceleration differently. In this work, we introduce AdaTempo, a self-supervised method that accelerates visuomotor policies by exploiting shared relative-tempo structure in demonstrations. AdaTempo establishes phase correspondence, aggregates the aligned relative tempo into a consensus, and maps it to a continuous speedup profile used to resample demonstrations into accelerated training trajectories. Training standard policies such as ACT or Diffusion Policy on these resampled trajectories directly embeds the desired tempo in the learned behavior, without runtime tempo selection or online retiming. Extensive evaluations show that AdaTempo achieves up to a $3.57\times$ speedup and yields a stronger success--speed trade-off than the original policies and representative acceleration baselines.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02706
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Who Went Where When on the Lunar Surface: Forensic Trajectory Analysis to Identify Byzantine Rovers
2026-10-02 02:16:23Lachlan Holden, Feras Dayoub, Melissa de Zwart, David Harvey, Tat-Jun ChinAbstract
Future planetary surface missions are likely to involve multiple independently operated rovers sharing the same deployment region, raising the need to verify compliance with operational constraints such as Lunar Safety Zones. Because continuous in-situ observability is rarely available, such verification requires post-hoc reconstruction of rover trajectories from sparse telemetry, including odometry, pose priors, and relative inter-rover detections. We introduce the problem of forensic trajectory analysis for non-cooperative planetary rovers in the presence of Byzantine agents: rovers that provide miscalibrated or deliberately falsified measurements to support an incorrect trajectory. We show that standard outlier-robust pose graph optimisation methods are vulnerable in this setting, because Byzantine rovers can generate measurements that are internally consistent and numerous enough to make truthful incriminating measurements appear as outliers. To address this, we propose an attribution-aware trajectory estimation method that reasons over rover credibility rather than individual measurement validity. The method evaluates candidate credible rover subsets by comparing the statistical consistency of their internal and boundary relative detections against provided priors, and then estimates trajectories using only measurements attributed to credible agents. Across synthetic simulations and real planetary-analogue trajectory data, the proposed method identifies Byzantine rovers and produces significantly more accurate trajectory estimates than existing robust pose graph optimisation baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02694
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