Skip to content

Category

robotics

1,156 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Towards VLA-Dreamer: Refining VLA Behavior Using World Models

A novel architecture is proposed that addresses sample efficiency in VLAs by training a predictive world model on the embedding space of the VLA's vision encoder, and it is hypothesized that these embeddings are action-relevant and usable for future prediction.

Parsa Mastouri Kashani, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Stefan Wermter · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Evaluation Is All You Need for Multi-Modal Autonomous Driving

Multi-modal planning is promising for autonomous driving by representing multiple plausible behaviors in ambiguous and long-tail scenarios. Existing methods mainly focus on improving trajectory multi-modality, enhancing trajectory representations, or reshaping the candidate distribution. Nevertheless, we identify a pro...

Ze-Yu He, Shi-Qi Liu, Ke Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

NavGen: Visual Generative Models as a Scalable Data Engine for Embodied 3D Navigation

NavGen is introduced, a text-to-video data generation pipeline that produces diverse vision-language navigation episodes across indoor and outdoor scenes and a style-diversification method that scales up long-tail data that is difficult and costly to collect.

Xi-Jie Huang, Yong-Yang Wan, Cheng-Bin Dong et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Anatomy-Aware Dexterity-Driven Design Optimization of Surgical Continuum Robots

This work presents a design optimization method that considers both dexterity and anatomy in the design of a bimanual dexterous sheaths robot for performing procedures on cancerous polyps in colon anatomies, achieving a 78% higher RVDSA on average than optimizing for 3D voxel coverage alone.

Tony Qin, Peter Connor, Khoa T. Dang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Auditing Latent-Space Monitors for Autonomous Driving

An evaluation protocol is proposed for testing the incremental value of latent access and releasing per-frame failure endpoint labels across two autonomous-driving tasks: online vectorized map generation with LaneSegNet and end-to-end planning with VAD.

N. Advani, Vishwajeet Shivaji Hogale, Saurav Kumar · 0 citations
#robotics Preprint Sep 2026

A Procedure for Classifying Attachments and Affective Social Bonds in Human-Robot Dyads

This paper gives HRI practitioners a standardised basis for evaluating, classifying, and comparing human-robot relationships, and sets out the experimental rigour that each classification demands, and calls on researchers of human-robot relationships to adopt such rigour.

Imran Khan, Elisabeth Blagrove · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Aug 2026

Free the Language Model From the Vision Encoder: Semantic Serialization as a Perception Interface for Small Language Models

An embodied scene question-answering (QA) interface in which vision never enters the language model is studied, showing the gain survives paraphrase, attributing it to decision-aligned computation rather than answer-string leakage, while novel judgment vocabularies bound its scope.

Cong Xu, Ravi Sankar · 1 citation
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Albireo: Adaptive, Energy-Efficient Inference Framework for Video Object Detection on the Edge

Albireo is presented, a detector-agnostic, codec-free adaptive inference framework that wraps off-the-shelf detectors and decides when detector invocation can be safely skipped based on scene content and per-object temporal state, requiring no detector modification or retraining.

Amir Taherin, José Cano, Bin Ren et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Decoupled Early Exits for Task-Dependent Compute Allocation in Flow-Matching VLAs

This work proposes a framework that exposes backbone depth V, action expert depth A, and denoising steps $D$ as three jointly configurable compute axes in a VLA, and introduces a KV Cache synthesis mechanism that manages the missing keys and values of the skipped backbone layers, allowing the action expert to exit deep...

Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Uncertainty-Gated Exploration Noise Suppresses Task Collapse in Online RL Fine-Tuning of a Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Policy

Online reinforcement learning fine-tuning of pretrained flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) policies promises robots that keep learning after deployment, but continued updates often destroy competence on individual tasks while the aggregate still looks healthy. We study this failure mode, which we call task coll...

Mehmet Yardimci, Y. Cogurcu · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →
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.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.