Robot
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From Prediction to Action: Learning Physical Context for Deformable Linear Object Manipulation
2026-11-10 16:17:48Chengxiao Dong, Alessio Caporali, Hongyu Lan, Gianluca PalliAbstract
A representation that accurately predicts a deformable object's response is not necessarily the one most useful for choosing manipulation actions. We study this distinction between predictive utility and decision utility in planar single-grasp shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs). As a common decision backbone, we introduce Geometry-Pointer-Flow (GPF), a geometry-grounded policy that separates grasp-location selection from grasp-conditioned motion generation. Its geometry-only variant reduces one-step executed shape error by 32.8% relative to a DLO-specific diffusion policy, while using 18.7 times fewer parameters and achieving approximately 193 times faster inference. On this backbone, we compare physical context represented by ground-truth parameters, estimated parameters, and learned interaction-history representations, for both forward prediction and executed control. For prediction, ground-truth physical parameters reduce next-shape error by 15.8% over geometry alone, and estimated parameters are slightly more predictive than interaction history. This ordering does not carry over to control: estimated parameters provide no detectable one-step control gain, whereas history-conditioned GPF reduces executed error by 9.9% relative to geometry-only GPF across 470 paired simulation trials. In closed loop, interaction history improves strict-threshold attainment in simulation and yields the strongest zero-shot performance on hardware. All policies are trained exclusively in simulation and transferred to the physical robot without real-world training or fine-tuning. These results show that physical context should be evaluated by the decisions it supports rather than by predictive accuracy alone. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14274
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Recurrent Modular Structure in Spiking Neural Network Reinforcement Learning
2026-11-10 16:09:19Vikram Ramavarapu, Himanshu Udupi, Ashish GautamAbstract
Biological neural circuits are both modular and recurrent, with dense communities sparsely linked to one another. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) for reinforcement learning are usually feed-forward, and it is unclear how to obtain functional modules in a recurrent SNN or what they buy. In this work, we introduce a class of spiking networks, called Community Recurrent SNNs (CoRe SNNs): recurrent networks partitioned into communities with fixed roles. A controller community receives the stimulus, each action has its own community, and latent communities carry internal state. Spiking activity is then a walk between communities, and the action is the community the walk reaches. All learning is local and three-factor, and the recurrent communities are closer to cortical microcircuits than a feed-forward actor. We compare three regimes for obtaining the communities: dynamic modularity, in which a new learning rule we introduce, Map-STDP, encourages modular structure during learning; partial modularity, in which a stochastic block model (SBM) initialization enforces it partly; and full modularity, in which sealing enforces it fully. On CartPole, across three spiking neuron models, Map-STDP improves learning over the same network without it matches full modularity (sealed communities) on two of the three models, and makes the observed spike walk more compressible. Replacing the feed-forward actor of a TD-STDP actor-critic with recurrent action communities improves on the feed-forward network on CartPole and LunarLander, and matches it on Acrobot. How strongly to enforce modularity depends on the task: full modularity helps most on Acrobot, while on LunarLander the dynamic, partial and full regimes perform alike. Overall, these recurrent modular networks can match or even improve upon feed-forward approaches, with improvements in bio-plausibility and energy efficiency.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14262
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Elastic-WAM: Adaptive Spatiotemporal Imagination for Efficient Robot Control
2026-11-10 16:04:16Haitian Li, Tianfu Li, Xuxi Zhao, Zizheng Liu, Yangcheng Yu, Yiwen Hou, Zeyu Xiao, Mutian Xu, Ziqian Yang, Haonan Chen, Lin ShaoAbstract
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14257
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Personalized Affective Perception via Continual Learning in Human-Agent Negotiation
2026-11-10 15:57:45Mehmet Onur Keskin, Berk Buzcu, Nikhil Churamani, Reyhan Aydogan, Hatice Gunes, Catholijn JonkerAbstract
Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An asynchronous architecture updates CLIFER in the background during live interaction. In a counterbalanced within-subject study in which 66 participants negotiated with a humanoid robot, the CL-enabled agent achieved significantly higher individual utility and elicited higher participant concession rates than the FaceChannel baseline. The CL condition yielded significantly higher mean arousal estimates, alongside a broader output range. Participant utility and Nash distance did not change significantly between conditions. These outcomes support the practical value of coupling continual affective personalization with differential feedback for real-time negotiation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14247
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PA-SaR: Perception-Aware Learning, Control, and Coordination for Multi-Robot Search and Rescue
2026-11-10 15:43:37Jok\=ubas Dim\v{s}a, Maria Grouev, Filip Keerberg, Nicolas Laplagne, Tigo Schutgens, Sven Schoonebeek, Anahita JamshidnejadAbstract
Autonomous SaR requires robots to explore unknown or partially known environments, avoid hazards, coordinate team activities, and guide discovered victims to safety. Improving individual capabilities of robots does not necessarily improve mission outcomes: safer motion can restrict the exploration behavior, faster discovery can increase the rescue demand, and effective guidance depends on victim responses. We introduce PA-SaR, a mathematical and architectural framework for coordinating heterogeneous local control, learning-based exploration, supervisory task allocation, and adaptive approach-lead victim guidance around mission-level objectives. PA- SaR distinguishes environmental ground-truth, robot-specific perceptions, and simulated victim behavior. This provides a common basis for integrating complementary mechanisms and analyzing their interactions across mission stages. We demonstrate the framework through single- and multi-robot simulation studies incorporating model-predictive and learning-based exploration, perception-based safety shielding, event-driven task allocation, and adaptive victim guidance. The results show trade-offs between collision avoidance and search completion, indicate that supervisory allocation improves search completion beyond information sharing alone, and demonstrate that increased exploration does not necessarily yield more rescues. Adaptive guidance increases rescues relative to continuous leading, without a detected improvement in mean or final victim trust or a reduction in mortality. These findings support evaluating local control, team coordination, and evacuation as related but distinct aspects of autonomous SaR within the considered simulation environments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11648
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Koopman Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
2026-11-10 15:08:33Wenjian Hao, Paulo C. Heredia, Shaoshuai MouAbstract
We propose a Koopman model-based reinforcement learning (K-MBRL) algorithm for controlling nonlinear robotic systems with unknown dynamics. The K-MBRL learns a control policy by minimizing an approximate policy objective that combines the analytical immediate cost with an estimate of the future cost evaluated at the one-step predicted state. To this end, we develop a stochastic Koopman operator-based learning method to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics in a linear representation, while a critic function estimates the remaining future cost. This formulation offers two key advantages. First, the linear Koopman dynamics simplify the model-dependent policy gradient computation to a constant matrix product, enabling computationally efficient policy improvement. Second, one-step model propagation mitigates the accumulation of prediction errors associated with long-horizon rollouts while retaining long-term cost information through the critic. The learned policy enables real-time control through feedforward evaluation without online optimization. We establish policy learning convergence guarantees under standard stochastic approximation assumptions. Simulations on HalfCheetah and quadruped four-legged locomotion tasks demonstrate strong sample efficiency and improved performance compared with classical model-free and model-based reinforcement learning baselines. A pendulum swing-up task is used to assess policy gradient approximation accuracy and conduct ablation studies on the learning mechanism and key hyperparameters. The proposed K-MBRL is further validated on a physical quadruped robot performing a challenging sequence of maneuvers: rising to an upright posture supported by two rounded rear feet, maintaining balance during bipedal walking, and safely returning to the ground, as shown in Fig.1.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14186
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LEASH: Stay Safe in Agentic Robotics
2026-11-10 14:06:20Qinfeng Zhu, Weiguang Zhao, Ke Sun, Xihao Guo, Yunxi Jiang, Rui Zhang, Lei Fan, Kaizhu HuangAbstract
Foundation models such as GPT and Claude have shown strong capabilities in spatial understanding and embodied intelligence. These advances make agentic robotics a promising path toward artificial general intelligence in robotics. However, we find that using foundation models to control robots poses serious safety risks, and comprehensive safety evaluation is still lacking. We introduce RoboRisk, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating safety in agentic robotics. Its 92 simulated tasks and 13 physical-robot tasks fall into five categories: Task-level Refusal (T), Plan Repair (P), Execution-time Hazard (E), Injection (I), and Sequential Memory (S). Prior benchmarks cover at most two of these categories, and several evaluate only text outputs. In contrast, RoboRisk covers all five and executes every task in closed loop. We evaluate six state-of-the-art foundation models on RoboRisk: GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon, and Grok 4.7. These models generally show high harm rates. We also evaluate two robot-specific APIs: the Dream API and PokeBot's RoboAPI. We further propose the Lease-Enforced Agentic Safety Harness (LEASH), which offers essential safety infrastructure for agentic robotics and can be integrated into nearly any agentic architecture. LEASH leverages a decision model (Jev or OpenAI's Decisions API) to implement task, action, and commit gates, which review the task, each action, and each irreversible operation in their visual context. The planner and all three gates share a common safety policy. Experiments on RoboRisk in simulation and on physical robots show that LEASH effectively reduces harm across all six foundation models. It largely preserves their task completion performance and adds little time and token overhead.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14115
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Model-Free Runtime Measurement of Task-Relevant Information
2026-11-10 14:02:31Dimitris Panagopoulos, Adolfo Perrusqu\'ia, Yang Xing, Weisi GuoAbstract
Autonomous systems increasingly monitor physical kinematics, environmental states and task completion outcomes. While existing work provides methods to plan information seeking actions and interpret acquired observations, current approaches do not monitor whether the live process of information gathering is functioning properly. Consequently, such systems can remain operationally active without resolving outstanding mission requirements. To address this limitation, we introduce Acquisition-State Telemetry (AST), a model free architecture that evaluates ongoing information acquisition from observable evidence relative to declared task requirements. Specifically, a domain interface maps raw observations into task resolution coordinates and normalized comparative representations, which are processed by a fixed causal monitor. This monitor emits two continuous real time signals that quantify (i) prospective progress across unresolved requirements and (ii) informational friction generated when recurrent evidence yields negligible informational gain. We evaluated a single, unadjusted monitor configuration across eight diverse domains including search and rescue dialogue, spatial grid exploration, hierarchical capability acquisition, continuous robotic manipulation, and probabilistic intent estimation. We show that across these domains the friction channel distinguished unproductive stagnation from purposeful exploration prior to task completion, while remaining muted during post completion activity. Furthermore, in closed loop reinforcement learning experiments under early termination constraints, we demonstrate that penalizing informational friction allowed agents to sustain high mission success, whereas unpenalized policies and baselines with matched operational costs failed to complete required tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14111
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DexSeed: Expanding Human Hand-Object Interactions into Robot Demonstrations for Dexterous Policy Learning
2026-11-10 13:52:18Huaijin Pi, Zehong Shen, Yong Wang, Kechun Xu, Changpeng Wang, Dingkun Wei, Xueyang Wang, Wenjia Wang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Taku KomuraAbstract
We study how to generate diverse, physically executable robot demonstrations for dexterous vision-language-action (VLA) learning. Existing demonstration-generation methods typically rely on costly teleoperated examples. Meanwhile, human hand--object datasets provide a reusable source, but existing transfer methods mainly reproduce given interactions. Turning these interactions into VLA training data further requires coverage of different objects and manipulation locations, together with executable arm and finger actions, and visual observations. To achieve this, we present DexSeed, a framework for low-cost generation of dexterous robot data from human hand--object interactions. Our key idea is to expand human sequences while preserving their grasps and realizing the resulting motions under arm-tracking dynamics in physics simulation. Specifically, we organize source sequences by grasp mode with shared language descriptions. InteractionMesh-based retargeting and arm trajectory augmentation adapt these sequences to the robot hand, different object geometries, and pick-and-place locations while preserving local hand--object relationships. An RL finger-control policy produces executable rollouts, while the arm tracks precomputed trajectories. Rendered observations and recorded actions from successful rollouts are paired with grasp descriptions to fine-tune a VLA. Experiments show improved contact fidelity in retargeting and more reliable whole-arm execution than the evaluated baselines. Simulation evaluation and real-world deployment further demonstrate that a VLA fine-tuned solely on the generated demonstrations can execute language-specified grasps. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14092
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A human-in-the-loop Control Paradigm for Construction Robotics: From VR-Guided Teleoperation to Semi-Autonomous Dual-Arm Operation
2026-11-10 13:27:23Jinhua Chen, Xiaoji Xu, Zhongyuan Liao, Huang Zhenmin, Zhang Ye, Changying XiangAbstract
Construction tasks in hazardous and unstructured environments require both human adaptability and robotic precision, yet existing approaches often treat teleoperation and autonomy as separate control modes. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop control paradigm that enables structured transitions among VR-guided teleoperation, semi-autonomous shared control, and rule-based autonomous execution for contact-rich dual-arm construction tasks. The proposed system combines immersive VR guidance, a manually defined library of reusable skill primitives, and a shared-autonomy framework with explicit human-robot role allocation and command-priority rules. This integration allows operators to retain supervisory and corrective authority while delegating repetitive and precision-critical actions to the robot. The paradigm is validated on a dual-arm platform through representative facade-installation tasks. Results show that autonomous execution provides the best performance under well-calibrated nominal conditions, whereas semi-autonomous control improves resilience when environmental disturbances exceed the predefined autonomous pipeline's correction capability. Semi-autonomous control also substantially reduces subjective operator workload compared with full teleoperation. These findings demonstrate that effective construction-robot control should adapt human involvement to task and environmental uncertainty, using autonomy for repeatable operations and shared control for disturbance recovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14062
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LaST0.5: A Generalist World Action Model with Interaction-Centric Latent Reasoning
2026-11-10 13:15:11Xuheng Zhang, Yiming Zhang, Jialin Gao, Hao Chen, Jiaming Liu, Ji Li, Runzhong Huang, Yinxi Wang, Chenyang Gu, Zihan Yang, Yaowei Liu, Zhonghao Yan, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Peng Jia, Pheng-Ann Heng, Shanghang ZhangAbstract
World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, endowing policies with strong capabilities for modeling temporal and physical dynamics. Existing WAMs, encompassing both video-first action prediction and joint video-action modeling, directly transfer global physical representations from world models to action generation. However, global scene representations may underemphasize local robot-object interactions, creating a mismatch between representations optimized for world evolution and those required for manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose LaST0.5, a novel WAM that introduces an interaction-centric physical representation between world modeling and action generation. Specifically, LaST0.5 learns a compact interaction-centric latent space under the supervision of visual interaction cues between the robot and the environment. This reasoning space is instantiated as a latent expert that bridges the world expert and the action expert within a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Furthermore, LaST0.5 performs adaptive world-to-action transfer by jointly predicting future representations and progress values, using progress consistency to adjust action execution and trigger future resampling. Finally, we pretrain LaST0.5 on a large-scale robotic data corpus comprising over 14k hours of data, establishing interaction-centric physical reasoning as a scalable and effective paradigm. LaST0.5 achieves 99.5% on LIBERO, surpasses the previous state of the art on ten evaluated RLBench tasks, and demonstrates robust long-horizon execution and precise dexterous manipulation in real-world experiments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14048
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HiPFuse: Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Robotic Perception on Edge Devices
2026-11-10 12:57:21Haiyang Wu, George Vosselman, Ville LehtolaAbstract
Real-time robotic perception requires accurate LiDAR semantics under limited resources. Bird's-eye-view (BEV) aggregation is efficient but can mix differently labeled surfaces in columns. We present HiPFuse, a point-BEV fusion framework that exchanges point and height-partitioned BEV features across horizontal scales, combining point-wise detail with 2D spatial context from one LiDAR scan. Fixed height assignments preserve separate vertical aggregation groups, with auxiliary supervision of initial BEV features using targets from the same 3D cells. A dual-scale BEV context module adds broader context from a coarser grid. On SemanticKITTI and MCD, HiPFuse achieves 63.7% and 62.5% mIoU at 14.2 and 22.4 FPS on Jetson AGX Orin, respectively, exceeding the 10 Hz scan rate. Separate training and evaluation show indoor applicability. Replacing only the baseline semantic front end with HiPFuse in fixed robotic systems reduces odometry absolute trajectory error RMSE by 10.6% on average across two outdoor sequences and increases accepted-loop recall by 8.7 percentage points on SemanticKITTI. Qualitative semantic maps show more continuous road labeling. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14025
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Optimization-Based Path Planning for Industrial Manipulators: Experimental Validation in Additive Manufacturing
2026-11-10 12:25:31Shiva Ganesh Murali, Valentin Bhend, Deepak Ingole, Gabriele Fadini, Alisa RupenyanAbstract
Robotic additive manufacturing requires joint paths that reconcile robot feasibility with process-specific geometry. We develop an offline optimization-based path planner that combines joint-path regularity and self-collision penalties with process costs and constraints, so that a new process enters through its own reference, residuals, and tolerances. Full-path and boundary-coupled chunked optimization handle references of different lengths. Iterative Weight Tuning (IWT) determines the cost weights from the gaps between Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their targets. In carbon-fiber winding and robotic 3D printing, the planned paths meet the geometric tolerances and all KPI targets, and both paths are executed on a UR10e, without extrusion for printing, with joint-level tracking recorded during execution.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13983
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TransGHOST: Real-Time, Synthesis-Free Reconstruction of Instrument-Occluded Regions in Ophthalmic Microsurgery
2026-11-10 12:08:36Niran Nataraj, Maina Sogabe, Masamichi Yamashita, Norihiko Ito, Kenji KawashimaAbstract
Intraoperative scene perception in ophthalmic microsurgery is limited by instrument occlusion: when a tool enters the high-magnification field, it conceals tissue from both the surgeon and the perception components of robot-assisted systems that process the video. Generative inpainting can remove the occluder but replaces the missing image content with synthesis, which is unsuitable when visual provenance matters. Many video inpainters also depend on future frames and cannot operate online. We present TransGHOST, a causal reference-guided reconstruction pipeline whose non-generative safe mode operates in real time. Every restored value is obtained by resampling a recorded frame using geometric transforms fitted only to visible regions. The system provides per-pixel confidence and provenance and marks unsupported pixels as abstentions. We evaluate TransGHOST on a new veterinary clinical corpus of canine cataract surgery with pixel-level instrument and anatomy labels. Only the occluded region is scored, and each scoring target is verified to differ from the reference supplied to the system. Safe mode reaches 31.89 dB masked PSNR and 0.915 masked SSIM at 51.7 ms median and 85.5 ms 95th-percentile latency. On a pre-declared held-out cohort using instrument cutouts excluded from segmentation training, it reaches 29.83 dB masked PSNR, while matched-mask evaluation on validation shows a 3.45 dB advantage over LaMa. Region-aware reference selection improves masked PSNR by 3.60 dB over recency when candidate references can themselves be occluded. Reference-age analysis further defines the operating interval for the brief, repeated occlusions targeted by TransGHOST.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13971
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AVCC: Audio-Visual Conversation Corpus for Turn-Taking Prediction with a Human Benchmark
Abstract
} Predicting who will speak next, and when, is a prerequisite for conversational agents and social robots that take turns without waiting for silence. Multiparty next-speaker prediction (NSP) has been studied on corpora with per-speaker sensors, each with its own event definitions. No public benchmark covers the single camera and microphone a robot has, and no model has been compared against how well people perform the same prediction. We turn AVCC, a 31-hour audio-visual corpus of two- and three-speaker online conversation recorded with a single static camera and microphone, into a public NSP benchmark. We add a speaker-disjoint seven-video test partition with 865 hold and 865 shift events at mutual-silence gaps, word-level forced-aligned transcripts for the whole corpus, and a human reference benchmark collected at the same events. We score an audio-only Role-Relative VAP model (RoleVAP) and the multimodal MuVAP model. Labels, transcripts, per-response human data, and the scripts that reproduce every number are released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13957
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ReACT: Reflection-Consistent Modulation and Cross-Load Consistency for Humanoid Velocity Tracking Under Asymmetric Loads
2026-11-10 11:18:34Xianghui Wang, Aoran Fu, Liyou Luo, Shanze Wang, Xiaoyu Shen, Dan Zhang, Wei ZhangAbstract
In recent years, humanoid loco-manipulation has progressed to whole-body grasping, lifting, and transport. A basic requirement underlying these tasks is carrying the object to its destination, which depends on the locomotion controller accurately executing velocity commands from the navigation policy. However, carrying an object in one hand introduces a persistent asymmetric upper-body load that can degrade velocity tracking. Persistent tracking biases can accumulate into position and heading deviations, increasing the risk of collisions and navigation failure. To address this problem, we present ReACT, a framework for accurate velocity tracking under asymmetric upper-body loads. Reflection-consistent disturbance modulation uses the estimated wrench to modulate actor features for load compensation while preserving action correspondence under reflected observations. Cross-load tracking consistency training compares loaded and unloaded conditions under the same velocity commands to promote consistent velocity tracking across loading conditions. Simulation experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot show improved velocity tracking and reduced directional bias under varying asymmetric loads. Real-world experiments demonstrate collision-free goal reaching in all 40 tested navigation trials under unilateral hand loads with a fixed mapless navigation policy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13929
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Persistent Metric-Semantic Maritime Scene Memory from Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs
2026-11-10 10:59:07Kim Alexander Christensen, Dina Zimmermann, Martin Steinert, Eleni KelasidiAbstract
Three-dimensional scene graphs (3DSGs) can provide robots with persistent metric-semantic representations for spatial reasoning, but the existing methods have primarily been developed for indoor and terrestrial environments. In this paper we investigate how a representative outdoor open-vocabulary method transfers to maritime environments and which adaptations are needed. Our experiments show that zero-shot representative outdoor 3DSG descriptions agree with our labeled ground truth for a majority of geometry-supported objects on our data, but the resulting map exhibits considerable physical-entity fragmentation, and its terrestrial higher-level assumptions don't capture maritime spatial organization needs. We therefore keep the underlying mapping method and post-process its accumulated evidence. We show a metric-semantic consolidation method followed by geometry-grounded multi-view vision-language model (VLM) reasoning that reconciles remaining fragments into physical entities and groups entities through observations into local places. In parallel, we construct maritime macro regions using map priors and onboard water and structure observations, and associate them with the local places. The resulting representation reduces physical-entity fragmentation beyond both the baseline and our geometry-semantic consolidation component alone, supports correspondence of fixed local places across repeated maritime traversals, and improves contextual retrieval on our reviewed queries over tested baselines. These results show how an outdoor open-vocabulary map can be adapted into persistent maritime scene memory with our methods for object/place identity and spatial abstractions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13903
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Learn-To-Propagate: Distributionally Robust Motion Planning for Nonlinear Uncertain Systems
2026-11-10 10:23:12Eduardo Figueiredo, Adrien Banse, Qi Heng Ho, Raphael Jungers, Morteza Lahijanian, Luca LaurentiAbstract
Motion planning for stochastic systems aims to find a sequence of control inputs that drives a system to a goal set while avoiding unsafe states with high probability. Existing approaches, however, are either restricted to linear dynamics with perfect knowledge of the underlying distributions or lack formal correctness guarantees. To address these limitations, we propose \emph{Learn-To-Propagate Distributionally-Robust Forest (L2P-DR-Forest)}, a distributionally-robust sampling-based planning algorithm for \emph{nonlinear} stochastic systems with \emph{unknown} initial state and process noise distributions. Our approach leverages recent advances in optimal transport to learn ambiguity sets that contain the true system distributions with high confidence. We develop an efficient method for propagating these sets through the system dynamics and for verifying their safety. We then integrate these techniques into a novel sampling-based planning algorithm to grow a forest of search trees in the system's state space while accounting for and mitigating the growth of ambiguity-sets radii. We prove that the algorithm is correct, i.e., every returned plan satisfies the specifications with the prescribed confidence, and, under some feasibility and distributional assumptions, is probabilistically complete. Evaluations on several robotic benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing methods while providing formal guarantees with high confidence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13863
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Taxonomy-Agnostic Neurosymbolic Grounding of Robot Kinematics
2026-11-10 10:11:30Bastien Dussard (LAAS-RIS, LAAS), Aur{\'e}lie Clodic (LAAS-IDEA, LAAS-RIS, LAAS), Guillaume Sarthou (LAAS-RIS, EPE UT, LAAS)Abstract
While symbolic reasoning for task allocation requires grounding a robot's physical capabilities, standard Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) files provide only low-level kinematics without the formal semantic context needed for reasoning. We present URDF2Ontology, an automated, taxonomy-agnostic neurosymbolic framework that transforms raw URDF files into populated, grounded OWL ontologies. It leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) for targeted semantic reasoning, coupled with an iterative sequential graph-purging mechanism to prevent context window saturation. To process complex kinematic structures, it employs a morphology-aware dual-track architecture featuring a bottom-up Tree Track for branching assemblies and a top-down Chain Track for serial limbs. Guided by neurosymbolic guardrails, the framework extracts functional sub-graphs and asserts populated ontologies aligned with arbitrary user-provided taxonomies. Empirical evaluation across a diverse fleet of heterogeneous robots demonstrates strong schema alignment, valid structural extraction, and a significant reduction in manual domain authoring overhead.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13850
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Game-Enhanced Embodied Learning with Event and Foresight Pretraining
2026-11-10 09:46:21Lianlei Shan, Han Jin, Yaunchao Ma, Xinpeng Chen, Linhao Zhou, Xin BinAbstract
Human gameplay supplies paired observations, actions, and visual consequences that can supplement robot-policy training. We study event-and-foresight pretraining for InternVLA-A1.5, combining recorded keyboard/mouse event prediction with history-conditioned visual supervision through a frozen video model. Coverage-preserving anchor selection constructs one-second targets, and an attention mask prevents teacher-forced future actions from entering foresight queries. The selected corpus contains 394 recordings across 20 games, with 223.36 hours of recorded timestamp span and 2,072,084 training anchors. After 12,400 game-pretraining updates, we compare the resulting initialization with the public base under the same suite-specific robot fine-tuning protocol. Across four LIBERO suites, aggregate success increases from 1,718/2,000 (85.90%) to 1,811/2,000 (90.55%), a gain of 4.65 percentage points. Suite gains are 9.2, 6.8, 0.2, and 2.4 points on Spatial, Object, Goal, and Long. The 40-task breakdown shows 24 improvements, 10 declines, and six ties. These results support the practical value of the complete game-pretraining stage in this evaluated setting, while revealing heterogeneous task outcomes. The comparison includes additional optimization and does not isolate the effects of game data, the two objectives, or training variability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13819
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