Robot Manipulation and Learning

Latest papers

• FORGE: Towards Functional Tool-Use Generalization via Keypoint Trajectory Reasoning

  Chuhao Zhou, Liquan Wang, Shuxin Cao, Xiangyu Chen, Yuxuan Hu, Boyu Ma, Animesh Garg, Jianfei Yang · 8 July 2026

  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. Such tools share a common functional intent that is visually recognizable, yet this percept…

• Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Models

  Jianjun Zhang, Jian Zhu, Taiyi Su, Chong Ma, Zitai Huang, Yi Xu, Hanli Wang · 8 July 2026

  World Action Models (WAMs) have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual future dynamics and executable action sequences. However, existing video-action co-training methods primarily optimize appearance-oriented video latents, which may insufficiently capture the te…

• Learning to Throw Objects Safely in Multi-Obstacle Environments

  Mohammadreza Kasaei, Klemen Voncina, Hamidreza Kasaei · 8 July 2026

  Robotic throwing enables fast and efficient object placement beyond the robot's immediate workspace, but reliable throwing in cluttered environments remains underexplored. Existing approaches, such as TossingBot, learn throwing strategies from visual input but assume obstacle-free settings. In this …

• HALO-WA: Hybrid-Attention Latent-Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for World-Action Models

  Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang · 7 July 2026

  World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion. We propos…

• Rational Inverse Reasoning: Few-Shot Imitation by Inferring Intent through Planning

  Ben Zandonati, Tom\'as Lozano-P\'erez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling · 7 July 2026

  Humans can learn a new manipulation task from one or two demonstrations and then perform it in a new room, with new objects, under new constraints. Modern robot imitation learning, in contrast, typically needs hundreds to thousands of demonstrations and still degrades under modest shifts in layout, …

• MOSAIC: Skill-Centric Manipulation Planning with Physics Simulation

  Itamar Mishani, Yorai Shaoul, Maxim Likhachev · 7 July 2026

  Planning long-horizon manipulation motions using a set of predefined skills is a central challenge in robotics; solving it efficiently could enable general-purpose robots to tackle novel tasks by flexibly composing generic skills. Solutions to this problem lie in an infinitely vast space of paramete…

• ACE: Agentic Control for Embodied Manipulation via Zero-shot Workflow Reasoning

  Iok Tong Lei, QianZhi Li, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Rui Zhong, Haichao Gui, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng · 7 July 2026

  Open-ended tabletop manipulation requires agents to not only understand natural language but also adapt to dynamic environments and execution failures. We present ACE (Agentic Control for Embodied Manipulation), a zero-shot workflow reasoning framework for tabletop pick-and-place from natural langua…

• Language-Guided Grasping under Partial Observation for Mobile Manipulation in Field Inspection and Maintenance

  Dilermando Almeida, Juliano Negri, Guilherme Lazzarini, Thiago H. Segreto, Ranulfo Bezerra, Gustavo J. G. Lahr, Ricardo V. Godoy, Marcelo Becker · 7 July 2026

  Offshore inspection and maintenance have increasingly been using legged robots for routine sensing, yet many useful interventions still require physical interaction with tools, containers, and task-relevant objects. Employing robots for these tasks can reduce operators' exposure in confined, elevate…

• RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies

  Tianxing Chen, Yue Chen, Zixuan Li, Junyuan Tang, Kailun Su, Weijie Wan, Baijun Chen, Haoran Lu, Haowen Yan, Honghao Su, Zhiyang Dou, Kaixuan Wang, Dandan Zhang, Yunze Liu, Yan Qin, Qiwei Liang, Qiwei Wu, Zijian Lin, Wenwei Lin, Yuran Wang, Minghua He, Tianshu Wu, Ruihai Wu, Jingquan Zhou, Kai-Chong Lei, Haibao Yu, Yuanfeng Ji, Weiyang Jin, Guanyu Lin, Xiaofan Li, Qi Xiong, Renjing Xu, Zhongyu Li, Wenhao Chai, Enze Xie, Ziwei Wang, Yao Mu, Hao Dong, Wojciech Matusik, Mingyu Ding, Wenbo Ding, Ping Luo, Masayoshi Tomizuka · 7 July 2026

  Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities. Many rely on simple, short-horizon, or skill-narrow tasks with limited capability coverage, and are often conducted only in simulation or only in the …

• MemPose: Category-level Object Pose Estimation with Memory

  Xiao Lin, Minghao Zhu, Yun Peng, Liuyi Wang, Qiyi Wang, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen · 7 July 2026

  In the pursuit of robust and generalizable category-level object pose estimation, most existing methods adopt parametric formulations that learn effective representations from data, yet they primarily encode category-level patterns into fixed shape priors or static parameter weights, which limits th…

• Mask2Real-WM: Segmentation Masks as a Sim-to-Real Bridge for Controllable Dexterous World Models

  Riccardo O. Feingold, Davide Liconti, Chenyu Yang, Robert K. Katzschmann · 7 July 2026

  Action-conditioned world models allow robots to predict the future consequences of candidate actions without additional physical interaction, supporting policy evaluation, planning, and data augmentation. We present Mask2Real-WM, a two-stage action-conditioned world model for dexterous manipulation …

• SoftVTBench: A Safety-Aware Visuo-Tactile Benchmark for Physically Constrained Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

  Bowen Jing, Mingxin Wang, Ruiyang Hao, Chenchen Ge, Hanwen Shen, Junjie He, Yang Cui, Yiming Hou, Weitao Zhou, Jiawei Wang, Minglei Li, Dandan Zhang, Ding Zhao, Houde Liu, Xiaofan Li, Si Liu, Ping Luo, Haibao Yu · 7 July 2026

  Deformable object manipulation poses challenges beyond task completion: successful execution must also maintain safe physical interaction, holding the object stably without slip or drop while avoiding excessive deformation. However, existing manipulation benchmarks are predominantly success-oriented…

• High-Fidelity One-Step Generative Visuomotor Policy via Recursive Correction, Frequency Consistency, and Contrastive Flow Matching

  Yuran Chen, Xinye Cai, Zhonglin Gong, Yang Huang · 7 July 2026

  Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have advanced robotic visuomotor policies by modeling multimodal action distributions, but their multi-step sampling or ODE solving introduces inference latency. Existing one-step acceleration methods often compress the whole generation process i…

• Differential Amplifier-Inspired AmpAttention for Multi-View Robotic Manipulation

  Jin Yang, Ping Wei, Nanning Zheng · 7 July 2026

  Multi-view robotic manipulation methods with the attention mechanism have recently achieved significant progress in both training efficiency and task performance. However, the inherent redundancy, occlusion, and viewpoint dependency in robotic view images often lead to severe attention drift. To add…

• Geometry-Aware Motion Latents for Learning Robust Manipulation Policies

  Yunchao Zhang, Yijia Weng, Ruizhe Liu, Ming Hu, Leonidas Guibas, Yanchao Yang · 7 July 2026

  Learning motion latents for robotic manipulation heavily relies on extracting motion patterns from visual sequences, yet effective action abstractions require understanding three-dimensional geometric transformations. Here, we introduce GeoMoLa (Geometry-Aware Motion Latents), which learns discrete …

• LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework

  Jacky Kwok, Shulu Li, Pranav Atreya, Yuejiang Liu, Yixing Jiang, Chelsea Finn, Marco Pavone, Ion Stoica, Azalia Mirhoseini · 7 July 2026

  Scaling pre-training, post-training, and test-time compute have become the central paradigms for improving the capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we identify verification, the ability to determine the correctness of a solution, as a new scaling axis. To unlock this and demonstrate its effectiveness…

• LIME: Learning Intent-aware Camera Motion from Egocentric Video

  Boyang Sun, Jiajie Li, Yung-Hsu Yang, Chenyangguang Zhang, Tim Engelbracht, Sunghwan Hong, Cesar Cadena, Marc Pollefeys, Hermann Blum · 3 July 2026

  Autonomous robots often need to move their camera before they can act: to inspect an object, reveal an occluded region, or obtain a view that responds to a user's intent. While vision-language navigation translates instructions to base motion and vision-language-action policies map instructions to m…

• Guided Action Flow: Q-Guided Inference for Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Policies

  Liuhaichen Yang, Zhuang Jiang, Chenchao Sheng, Zezhi Tang · 3 July 2026

  Flow-matching vision-language-action policies generate robot action chunks through an iterative transport process, creating an opportunity for test-time guidance without retraining the base policy. We study this opportunity in Guided Action Flow, an inference-time framework that keeps a pretrained S…

• PhysMani: Physics-principled 3D World Model for Dynamic Object Manipulation

  Peng Yun, Shouwang Huang, Hao Li, Jinxi Li, Jianan Wang, Bo Yang · 3 July 2026

  Manipulating fast and dynamically moving targets in unstructured 3D environments remains challenging for embodied AI. Existing visual-language-action models and world models struggle with accurate 3D geometry and physically meaningful forecasting. We propose PhysMani, a framework that couples a phys…

• Learning Dexterous Manipulation Using Contact Wrench Guidance From Human Demonstration

  Xinghao Zhu, Zixi Liu, Shalin Jain, Chenran Li, Milad Noori, Huihua Zhao, John Welsh, Michael Andres Lin, Wei Liu, Tingwu Wang, Xingye Da, Zhengyi Luo, Vishal Kulkarni, Naema Bhatti, Yuke Zhu, Linxi Fan, Bowen Wen, Danfei Xu, Soha Pouya, Yan Chang · 2 July 2026

  Dexterous robot manipulation can benefit from the abundance of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to robot policies remains challenging. We present Contact Wrench Guidance from Human Demonstration in Robotic Dexterous Manipulation (CHORD), a framework for long-horizon manipul…

• ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics

  Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang · 2 July 2026

  Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures. We introduce ASPIRE (Agentic Skill Programming through Iterative Robot Exploration), a continual learning sys…

• FurnitureVLA: Learning Long-Horizon Bimanual Furniture Assembly with Vision-Language-Action Model

  Chenyang Ma, Yue Yang, Radu Corcodel, Siddarth Jain, Andrew Wu, Chiori Hori, Diego Romeres · 2 July 2026

  Current work on robot furniture assembly mostly focuses on toy-scale settings or single-arm manipulation. We introduce FurnitureVLA, the first systematic study of real-scale bimanual furniture assembly using Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs). We formalize the task, develop a scalable simulation p…

• Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

  Yang Yang, Bingjie Chen, Zihan Wang, Yizhe Li, Guoping Pan, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu · 1 July 2026

  Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations. This work proposes Stage-Transition Dense Reward (STDR), a visual re…

• Robustness of Robotic Manipulation: Foundations and Frontiers

  Yifei Dong, Zhanyi Sun, Lujie Yang, Manuel Baum, Kei Ikemura, Shuran Song, Florian T. Pokorny, Xianyi Cheng · 1 July 2026

  Humans and animals exhibit remarkable robustness in physical manipulation, yet robots remain far behind. Progress toward human-level manipulation robustness is hindered by the absence of a unified and systematic understanding: different subfields frame robustness in distinct ways, often leaving the …

• Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

  Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn · 1 July 2026

  Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal. We introduce Freeform P…