New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly place a multi-billion-parameter model inside the feedback loop, repeatedly recomputing task context whenever they predict a new action chunk. Yet task understanding changes far more slowly than the robot state.
Huawei researchers show how to merge several specialist robot-control models into one generalist by letting the generalist practise and having the specialists correct it at every step of its action generation. In three simulation benchmarks the merged model gained 22 to 33 points of success over a standard fine-tune, though it still trails the specialists.
We introduce REKI, a 2.4B vision-language-action model (VLA) pretrained exclusively on public data that sets a new Pareto frontier between performance and model size: on LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin Clean2Rand and RoboCasa365, it is outperformed only by models about twice its size. REKI consists of a vision-language model (VLM) followed by a flow-matching action expert, and is pretrained on a curated mixture of public robot, egocentric human and vision-language data.
Proactive robots should anticipate user needs and provide assistance before being explicitly asked. A straightforward approach is to infer human intentions from commonsense knowledge, but the same observed behavior can imply different needs across users, potentially leading to unwanted assistance.
While generalist vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled diverse open-world manipulation, real-world robotic assistance requires two critical capabilities they currently lack: personalization and reliable execution. First, executing an instruction like "make me a sandwich" requires grounding subtask decomposition in persistent user preferences rather than relying on a single generic solution.
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies are typically trained with action prediction as the primary supervision signal, since robots ultimately execute actions. Auxiliary objectives such as latent-action (LA) and future-vision (FV) prediction are often added to improve policy learning, yet they compete with action prediction for the same training budget.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models are expected to follow instructions like their language backbones, yet prior work has focused on What-level instructions that specify the task rather than How-level instructions that specify how to carry it out. Through our diagnoses, we find that How-level instructions do not help current VLAs and lower task success.
Robotic manipulation often requires remembering interactions that are no longer visible. We introduce Latent Transition Memory (LTM), which stores history as compact latent transitions between consecutive observations.
Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are inherently stochastic: different noise seeds can produce action chunks of varying quality from the same observation. At test time, however, the policy typically commits to a single sample without an explicit estimate of its quality.
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate action sequences that reduce repeated inference, but deciding how much of each sequence to execute is critical to task success. Existing adaptive methods make this decision using generation stability or prediction agreement, yet these signals do not establish whether executing a candidate prefix preserves the ability to complete the task.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models present a promising paradigm for general-purpose robot manipulation, but closed-loop deployment is often limited by inference efficiency: at each timestep, high-resolution, often multi-view images are encoded into hundreds of visual tokens that dominate transformer computation and latency. Token compression via attention is a natural solution but is challenging for VLA control because (1) decision-critical tokens are determined by the task, not generic visual saliency, and (2) the token budget varies substantially across steps, so static metrics and budgets waste computation or discard control-critical tokens.
This preprint turns videos people film with a chest-mounted iPhone into training data a Unitree G1 humanoid can learn from, including what the robot's own camera would have seen. Adding 100 converted human clips per task to 50 robot demonstrations raised success on unseen object setups by about 45 percentage points.
Dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) models pair a high-frequency fast policy with a slow, expensive module, and published trigger mechanisms for invoking it lack a shared objective, measured costs, and any standard separating schedule quality from module quality. We provide the missing account: invocation is formalized as a calibrated decision problem whose fixed-ratio, fixed-budget, and history-gated schedules are degenerate cases of one quantity, the Value of Intervention (VoI); a renewal baseline proves the optimal schedule periodic under state-independent collapse, with adaptive gains governed by the cost ratio ρ and the dispersion of collapse.
Long-horizon precise manipulation produces mixed-quality data for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models: even successful demonstrations and intervention-assisted rollouts may contain detours, hesitations, failed attempts, and imperfect recoveries. The key challenge is to identify which action chunks actually advance the task, rather than uniformly cloning or discarding imperfect trajectories.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation, enabling robots to generate actions from visual observations and language instructions. However, most existing VLA models still operate on image-level visual representations inherited from pretrained vision-language backbones, while lacking fine-grained object understanding for manipulation.
Retrieving useful context for a robot requires matching its task, execution stage, and the continuation that should follow. We introduce Robota-Embed, to our knowledge the first vision-language-action (VLA) embedding model to jointly encode all three modalities in both current-state queries and recorded future continuations.
Pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) often fail midway through unseen long-horizon tasks. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a remedy, but embodied RSI methods either refine the harness around a frozen executor and so cannot add a missing motion, or train the executor on persistent failures without asking whether a failure lies in how the executor is called or in what it can do.
A preprint from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba and FiveAges tests the main ways of teaching robot AI models to predict what happens next, all on the same backbone, and finds that the add-on helps but no single design wins everywhere. Keeping the prediction module separate from the main model worked best for pretrained robot models and raised real-robot success from 45% to as much as 73.8%.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models connect visual perception and language understanding with robot control, providing a foundation for instruction-conditioned manipulation. However, conventional pretrained VLA policies lack a mechanism for gradual adaptation through accumulated interaction experience during deployment.
Executing a vision-language-action (VLA) policy involves deciding when to continue an attempt and when to intervene to improve its chances of success. We introduce ACRO, an Actor--Critic rollout orchestration layer that makes these decisions for a fixed VLA.
Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.