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robotics

1,156 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Generalist Robot Policies

Generalist robot policies, such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs), combine powerful pretrained backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, these polic...

Ralf R\"omer, Maximilian Seeliger, Saida Liu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are oft...

Wei Xiao, Weiliang Tang, Yuying Ge et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Closing the Train-Test Gap in World Models for Gradient-Based Planning

World models paired with model predictive control (MPC) can be trained offline on large-scale datasets of expert trajectories and enable generalization to a wide range of planning tasks at inference time. Compared to traditional MPC procedures, which rely on slow search algorithms or on iteratively solving optimization...

Rohun Agrawal, Nimit Kalra, Arjun Parthasarathy et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Autonomous Robotic Navigation for Endovascular Brain-Computer Interface Access

Endovascular brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) avoid craniotomy but require precise device delivery through anatomically variable cerebral veins. This work presents the first demonstration of in vitro autonomous robotic navigation for endovascular BCI access in the cerebral venous system. Soft Actor-Critic controllers w...

Harry Robertshaw, Weijie Qi, Nikola Fischer et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generation

World action models (WAMs) have advanced robot control by predicting how observations and actions evolve over time. Despite this progress, RGB and action based future prediction does not explicitly address the spatial understanding needed for robot manipulation. Existing efforts often add a limited set of spatial predi...

Ting-Ting Du, Zi-Yao Wang, Guoheng Sun et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Safe Streaming Flow Planning by Aligning Sampling Dynamics with Execution Dynamics

Generative planners based on diffusion/flow matching can learn to synthesize long-horizon trajectories from demonstrations. However, real-world deployment requires (i) enforcing safety constraints during execution and (ii) tight online replanning at fast execution rates. Prior safe diffusion/flow planners generate the...

Seunghwan Jang, Jeongyong Yang, Siddharth Ancha et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Permutation Robustness Is Not Enough: Action Collapse in Multi-Agent Transformer Policies

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-...

Amit Thakur, Mukesh Singhal · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Localized Conformal Safety Monitoring with Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving

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 th...

Lu\'is Marques, Rong Fang, Disha Kamale et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

NEEDLEWORK: Offline Rewriting of Robot Data with Verified Local Stitches

Robot demonstrations may contain useful behavior even when individual episodes are inefficient or unsuccessful. Trajectory stitching offers a way to compose these behaviors into improved training data, but identifying useful connections and verifying their feasibility is difficult in high-dimensional robot data, where...

Juntao Ren, Yifan Hou, Shuran Song · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

SoTa: Soft Tactile Skins for Dexterous Manipulation

A growing body of work suggests that tactile sensing gives robot policies contact information that complements vision in dexterous manipulation. However, visuo-tactile robot data remains scarce: dexterous demonstrations require teleoperating robots, which limits dataset scale. Human demonstrations are far cheaper to co...

Jing-Yun Yang, Bai-Yu Shi, Timothy Yu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

UniIntervene++: An Adaptive Intervention Agent for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Online reinforcement learning (RL) enables robot policies to improve through physical interaction, but the assistance they require changes as their competence evolves. Existing intervention strategies based on offline estimates or fixed decision rules can therefore become mismatched to the current policy. To address th...

Yu-Dong Lin, Hao-Yuan Deng, Zhuo-Xuan Yuan et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Bidirectional Voronoi-biased Exploration Curriculum for Reinforcement Learning

Long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards pose an exploration bottleneck for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning: a policy started from the initial state rarely reaches the goal and receives no learning signal. Reference motions, hand-designed curricula, and shaped rewards supply this signal but require demonstrations...

J. Pfammatter, Kai-Xian Qu, Clemens Schwarke et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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Microsoft Research Blog Sep 23, 2026

Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics

Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads. The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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