In this work we study the problem of MAPFC, a post-optimization step for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) plans where we are given a feasible plan produced by a modern MAPF solver and are tasked with removing avoidable moves while preserving feasibility. This NP-hard problem naturally arises when using learning-based st...
Contact-rich manipulation requires adapting to contact states that can evolve substantially within an action horizon. However, chunk-based vision-language-action models predict complete action chunks from observations collected before execution, leaving tactile conditioning stale during execution. Existing tactile-reac...
Jianbo Zhou, Boyuan Zhao, Yuzheng Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when const...
Aristotelis Papatheodorou, Jose Rojas, Ioannis Havoutis et al.· 0 citations
The Intelligent Robot Simulator is developed, a lightweight declarative simulator implemented as a Python library to support navigation learning and benchmarking through rapid construction of reusable and diverse scenarios and efficient execution on accessible platforms.
Rui-Hua Han, Shuai Wang, Cheng-Yang Li et al.· 6 citations
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Robotic foundation models offer a promising path toward general-purpose humanoid robot control, often through hierarchical architectures. However, their effectiveness depends on the command interface between the planner and the controller, which must support accurate execution while remaining easy to predict, and ideal...
Fei-Yang Wu, Chen-Xiao Gao, Chen Yang et al.· 0 citations
Results show that blended shared control leads to higher autonomous performance compared to typical methods for fine-tuning robot policies from fully teleoperated interventions.
Cailyn Smith, Ge Sun, Henny Admoni et al.· 0 citations
Training robust social-navigation policies requires simulators with diverse scene layouts, terrain, and human motion, but constructing such environments and specifying pedestrian behavior is costly. We propose an efficient pipeline that converts ordinary monocular walking videos directly into closed-loop social-navigat...
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle under visual distribution shifts, often relying on spurious correlations tied to domain-specific factors rather than task-relevant structure. We propose Domain-Invariant Latent Lookahead (DILL), a representation-learning framework that mitigates shortcut learning in VL...
Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim, Chung-Woo Lee et al.· 0 citations
Generalist robot policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) have achieved remarkable generalization, but their inference delays can conflict with the demands of real-time control. Asynchronous execution avoids pauses between action chunks by predicting the next sequence of actions while the robot carries out...
Moritz Zoellner, Reece O'Mahoney, Ioannis Havoutis et al.· 0 citations
A detector pretrained on a broad corpus is fine-tuned on a narrow domain, its in-domain accuracy improves, and it ships. We ask what happens meanwhile to its coverage of objects the vocabulary never names, which in obstacle detection and inspection carry the risk. No in-domain test set holds an example of one. We give...
Trung Minh Bui, Jongsul Moon, YoungOuk Kim et al.· 0 citations
Vision-language-action (VLA) models perform well on shorter-horizon manipulation tasks but still struggle with long-horizon tasks that require multiple dependent manipulations from a single command. Online reinforcement learning (RL) can improve these policies through environment interaction, yet many existing methods...
Zi-Yi Yin, Sang-Min Woo, Kang Zhou et al.· 0 citations
A literature review around the interfaces connecting contextual evidence to execution, distinguishing four families: context-conditioned policies, geometric demonstration transfer, world-model-based control, and skill- and agent-based execution.
Hao-Jian Huang, Ze-Xi Li, Ju-Hao Guo et al.· 1 citation
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.
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.