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robotics

1,589 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Learning Robust Visuomotor Policies via Dynamics Alignment

Generative BC policies model expert action distributions well, but they do not explicitly reason about what scene a candidate action would produce, so they cannot tell whether it reaches a task-relevant state. We address this by coupling action generation with an action-conditioned dynamics model that predicts the futu...

Dohyeok Lee, Jung Min Lee, Munkyung Kim et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Active Exploration in Bayesian Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Robot Manipulation

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environments, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions such as reinforcement learning (RL). The high cost of data gathering in robotics encourages data-efficient approaches such as...

Carlos Plou, Ana C. Murillo, Ruben Martinez-Cantin · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Horizon Adaptive Offline Policy Learning via Value Stitching

Learning accurate value functions plays a decisive role for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to solve long-horizon, complex tasks. Conventional temporal-difference (TD) learning objectives suffer from value-estimation bias that accumulates over the horizon, while extended-horizon modeling methods, such as n-step TD b...

Kexin Zheng, Xianyuan Zhan, Xintao Yan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Grid or Nodes? Probing Object Memory in World Models Under Partial Observability

A robot's world model must remember objects that leave the camera's view. FloWM, a learned world model, keeps them in a spatial grid of features that it moves with five built-in velocities. A node memory instead keeps each object's position and velocity as numbers. We compare them in FloWM's own block world, with an or...

Justin McMillen, Yasin Yilmaz · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

LADDER: A Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Benchmark

General-purpose robot manipulation policies learn short-horizon skills effectively, but degrade rapidly on long-horizon tasks. Existing benchmarks cannot isolate failures because task horizon is either too short or entangled with scene and object variations. We propose LADDER, a long-horizon robot manipulation benchmar...

Petko Petkov, Giuliano Albanese, Nikolay Nikolov et al. · 1 citation
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Beyond the End-Effector: Learning Whole-Arm Contact Manipulation from Human Demonstrations

WACL is proposed, a hierarchical framework that describes each whole-arm contact task with three robot-agnostic representations and hands them to a quasi-static surface-contact optimizer: semantic keypoints that summarize the scene, a reference contact trajectory that specifies where and how the arm presses on the obje...

Bo-Hao Huang, Daniel Seita, Erdem Biyik · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Training Generalist Navigation Policies via Action Self-Distillation

Language provides a natural interface for humans to specify and reason about goals, but training language-conditioned robotic policies and reasoning typically requires expensive manual annotations. We propose Action Self-Distillation (ASD), a method for learning language-conditioned reasoning for robotic navigation wit...

Bowen Feng, Keqin Wang, Yulong Yang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

From Orbit Matching to Docking: A Hierarchical Reinforcement-Learning Approach to Multiphase Rendezvous Trajectory Design

As the complexity of space missions increases, autonomous spacecraft guidance must accommodate transitions between mission phases with distinct dynamics, objectives, and constraints. Rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) are particularly challenging because they span multiple operating regimes, from orbital-scale m...

Mariko Storey-Matsutani, Anatoly Zlotnik, Lee Holguin et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Value-Preserving Action Quantization

Search-based policy learning, such as Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), offers the flexibility to trade runtime computation for data efficiency and adaptation to novel environments. For robot learning, however, applying search requires discretizing the continuous action space and associated dynamics, typically through ac...

Max Muchen Sun, Jueun Kwon, Benjamin Riviere et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Multi-Agent Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization with Anytime-Valid Target Retention for Moving Candidates

We study multi-agent terminal interception when one of several moving candidates is the unknown target and both target identity and candidate terminal locations are uncertain. We develop a receding-horizon deferred-decision trajectory optimization (DDTO) controller that combines conformal terminal-location prediction,...

Farbod Siahkali, Mengxue Hou, Vijay Gupta · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

DiTSG: Context-Aware Air Traffic Scene Generation with Multi-Agent Diffusion Transformers

Understanding how many aircraft, and which traffic configurations, can be safely and efficiently managed by air traffic controllers within a given airspace is fundamental to air traffic management. Air traffic controllers continuously modify aircraft trajectories through interventions such as speed advisories and radar...

Seokbin Yoon, Kyungmin Kim, Taejung Kwon et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

CopyQuad: Quadrupedal Skill Transfer from a Single Side-View Video Without a Depth Model

Video-to-robot pipelines for quadrupedal imitation insert a learned lifting stage, either a monocular depth model or a per-clip 3D reconstruction, to recover the one axis a side-view camera cannot see. We present CopyQuad, which omits that stage and pins the missing axis to the robot's own stance width instead. The set...

Mohamad H. Danesh, Raina Hu, Mengxue Xu et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Nov 5, 2026

Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory

A new system identifies and corrects unreliable object descriptions stored in a robot’s memory, improving the robot’s ability to interact with its environment.

Google DeepMind Blog Oct 13, 2026

Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics

Discover Gemini 4 Argon for robotics: leading the ERQA benchmark with physical reasoning, zero-shot control, Real2Sim, and agentic workflows.

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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