Rui Cao, Jia-Hui Pan, Yichuan Li et al. · cs.RO, cs.CV
Manipulation 97%
Abstract
Grasping is a foundational capability in robotic manipulation. Scene-level 6-DoF grasp synthesis relies on point clouds for metric geometry, yet real-world point observations are often noisy, incomplete, and over-smoothed. RGB images provide object-region, boundary, and appearance cues, yet two bottlenecks limit their effective use in scene representation and local grasp reasoning. We present MMGNet, a Multi-Modal Grasp Synthesis Network that addresses these bottlenecks through hierarchical image-to-3D feature injection and rotational graspness modeling. Hierarchical injection integrates multi-scale image features throughout 3D representation formation, while the rotational graspness jointly predicts the grasp approach direction and in-plane rotation before organizing local image-informed features through grasp-shaded grouping. Ablation studies show that these two modules provide complementary gains. MMGNet achieves a mean AP of 60.34 on GraspNet-1Billion with RealSense, surpassing all compared methods. In real-world experiments with adversarial grasp objects, MMGNet improves the grasp success rate over AnyGrasp by 8.46 percentage points. \emph{Code, models, and data will be released upon publication.}
Deformable linear objects (DLO) pose a coupled perception and control challenge: their slender geometry makes precise localization difficult, while their deformations depend on object-specific physical properties. To address this challenge, we propose PS-DLO, a property- and spatially aware DLO manipulation policy. First, contrastive image-text learning maps the initial observation to categorical descriptions of DLO properties, providing explicit physical and structural priors for action generation. Second, SAM3 extracts mask-guided features from future observations, which are distilled into the policy's action expert to encode task-relevant DLO regions and their subsequent configurations. We evaluate PS-DLO on nine real-world tasks across single-arm and bimanual platforms, training a shared multi-task policy for each embodiment. PS-DLO achieves an average success rate of 68.9%, exceeding the strongest baseline by 20.0 percentage points. In generalization experiments, PS-DLO achieves higher success rates than the baseline in six of seven visual-shift conditions on butterfly-knot untying. These results demonstrate that combining object-property priors with future spatial supervision improves multi-task DLO manipulation and robustness to visual variation.
Jianibieke Adalibieke, Qianwei Han, Xueyi Liu et al. · cs.RO
Manipulation 93%Vision-language-action 45%
Abstract
Language is a natural way to command robots, but converting a single instruction into a long-horizon, contact-rich hand-object interaction remains challenging: synthesized references are noisy, human-to-robot retargeting introduces embodiment bias, and fixed-reference tracking lets small errors snowball. We address this with AdaDexTrack, a modulator-in-the-loop framework for language-conditioned manipulation tracking. A distilled generalist tracker serves as the skill carrier, while a tightly aligned modulator performs three feedback corrections: reference modulation (continual adjustment of what to track), object-latent modulation (online adaptation of the object representation to recruit suitable skills), and positional-target modulation (small state-dependent refinements for execution). The tracker is learned via large-scale specialist to generalist distillation on a corpus of language-conditioned hand-object trajectories; the modulator is trained with RL under the same task objective, ensuring tight coupling. Across large-scale evaluations, AdaDexTrack consistently outperforms prior SOTA on unseen-trajectory and unseen-object sets in both average tracking error and success rate, demonstrating robustness and generalization. We further show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on real hardware, where adding the modulator yields substantial gains over a tracker-only variant. AdaDexTrack reframes language-conditioned dexterous manipulation as modulated tracking, replacing the open-loop, fixed-reference tracking with in-loop modulation that adjusts the reference, object latent, and positional target, yielding drift-resistant execution from noisy text references.
Yanjinghao Xu, Jiexin Zhang, Huan Zhao et al. · cs.RO
Manipulation 90%Vision-language-action 46%
Abstract
Large-scale vision, language, and video pretraining has substantially improved the perception and generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation models, but action generation for complex dexterous manipulation remains constrained by the scarcity of robot demonstrations. Limited robot demonstrations must be used to learn both action representations and task-conditioned action distributions, making it difficult to adequately learn action representations and, in turn, limiting the ability of downstream generative models to generate complex dexterous actions. To address this limitation, we propose ARPG (Action Representation Pretraining and Generation), which explicitly separates action representation learning from action generation: we first pretrain an action representation encoder on large-scale human manipulation data. We then freeze the encoder and train a compact generative backbone (130M parameters) to learn task-conditioned action distributions in the encoder's representation space. Experimental results show that ARPG achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DexJoCo benchmark and improves the average success rate on bimanual dexterous manipulation from 10.1% for $\pi_{0.5}$ to 44.7%. Scaling experiments further show that broader coverage of human manipulation behaviors effectively improves downstream performance. These results indicate that action representation pretraining provides an independent scaling dimension for improving complex dexterous manipulation capabilities.
A robot policy needs to understand what a task is asking for in a scene, and how to move the robot to accomplish that task. To achieve these two skills, we introduce Zero-real Agent Policy (ZAP), a recipe that teaches a small off-the-shelf vision-language model to control a robot via a simple tool harness. We use a pretrained 27B parameter model to bootstrap world understanding and reasoning, followed by supervised fine-tuning and GRPO on simple simulated tasks to teach it how to move the robot. Without any real-world robot data during training, ZAP reaches 96.7% success on real-world tasks, matching GPT-6 Astra in our harness and outperforming the MolmoAct2 VLA (33.3%), while running 3x faster and 17x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra. We demonstrate that ZAP also generalizes to completely new objects, goals, strategies, and language by seating a test tube in a rack (and choosing a different hole in the rack when prompted), handing a test tube between arms mid-air, drawing an X on a tic-tac-toe board, and playing chess. These goals and types of manipulation don't appear in our training data. Furthermore, ZAP also transfers to an unseen embodiment. On a single-arm Franka, ZAP reaches 55.9% on RoboLab-120, 4.9 percentage points ahead of the leading VLA/WAM baseline.