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robotics

1,589 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

A Geometric Perspective on Reward Function Updates in Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is classically solved using Lagrangian optimisation, by jointly optimising a primal-dual problem with gradient descent to obtain the optimal reward function parameters and corresponding optimal policy. While this algorithmic view of IRL has been highly influential, gradient-based re...

Anish Diwan, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

LabInstruct: Benchmarking Situated Instructional Video Generation for Lab Procedures

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) aim to automate the full experimental loop, from scientific decision-making to physical execution. Ideally, AI-generated plans could be carried out directly by robotic systems, but reliable automation remains difficult in complex, open-world laboratory environments, where experiments of...

Yuming Fu, Weijia Wu, Jing Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

RoboHarness: A Simple Harness Outperforms VLA and World Actions Models

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has opened a path toward generalist embodied AI, raising the question of how LLMs can act in the physical world. One straightforward approach is training the model to generate actions: collect robot-action data and video demonstration, refine LLM architecture with an action head...

Bin Qu, Wei Chen, Bo Zhang · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Review Oct 2026

Who Improves the Robot? Toward Physical Recursive Self-Improvement

This study investigates Physical Recursive Self-Improvement (Physical RSI), in which physical experience guides lasting updates to both a robot's capabilities and its improvement procedure, making subsequent improvement more effective across tasks.

Hai Zhou, Fan Yang, Ze-Yi Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Thinker-WM: A Unified World Model with Shared Multimodal Representations for Embodied Intelligence

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied AI, yet existing systems often remain fragmented in the modalities they model and the functions they support. In particular, visual dynamics, geometric structure, and executable action are commonly coupled through separate interfaces or downstream modules r...

Thinker Team Ubtech, Peng Gao, Ji-Chao Jiao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Autonomous 3D Visual-Thermal Inspection for Utility-Scale Solar Farms

Utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) inspection is dominated by aerial surveys, which are effective for identifying module-level hot cells but provide limited visibility of critical components located under the array, including connectors, cabling, fasteners and structural elements. These assets are difficult to inspect con...

Lachlan Tychsen-Smith, Mark Cox, Brett Wood et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Reference Wording Shapes Retrieval of Robot Task Instructions

Identifying a robot task from a short instruction is sensitive to which descriptions are available for retrieval. We investigate this effect in the natural-language instructions included with the RLBench manipulation benchmark. We extract 296 fixed descriptions from 62 publicly available task files and compare five tra...

Jahnavi Yelamanchi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

TacitVLA: Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Models Without Reasoning Latency

Textual reasoning before acting has improved vision-language-action (VLA) models, but at the cost of latency: every action conditioned on the reasoning text must wait for autoregressive decoding. We show that actions do not need to wait for or condition on the generated reasoning to benefit from it, because the reasoni...

Jack Lu, Yurong You, Boyi Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Observe, Share, or Predict? Disentangling Partner Information in Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration

LLMs are used as high-level controllers for embodied agents, but it remains unclear whether they support collaborative reasoning, such as anticipating a collaborator's actions in real-time teamwork without dialogue. We ask if observing the partner's state, exchanging object knowledge, and predicting the partner's next...

Adrián Szlatincsán, Filippo Ziliotto, Bruno Lepri et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Acceptable Misalignment

There is a specific challenge designers face in developing autonomous robots capable of open-ended learning. This challenge is how one can develop such systems in an ethically sound way when there are many unknowns during design time about their manner of deployment, what they can and will learn, and how these systems...

Maud van Lier, Ludovica Marinucci, Vieri Giuliano Santucci et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

G$^2$WAM: World Action Models for Efficient and Geometry Grounded Image-Goal Navigation

World models capture environment dynamics and support counterfactual reasoning for planning. In image-goal navigation, where the target often lies beyond the current field of view, the agent must not only model environmental dynamics but also maintain a persistent spatial memory of the scene. Existing approaches either...

Ke Gui, Chenghao Shi, Ziyue Wang et al. · 0 citations
#robotics Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Development of a Low-Cost Prosthetic Hand Using Electromyography and Machine Learning

Electromyography (EMG) is a measure of muscular electrical activity and is used in many clinical/biomedical disciplines and modern human computer interaction. Myo-electric prosthetics analyze and classify the electrical signals recorded from the residual limb. The classified output is then used to control the position...

Mosab Diab, Ashraf Mohammed, Yinlai Jiang · 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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