Papers

See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for Vision-Language-Action Models

This paper addresses the frame mismatch in VLA models between camera-frame observation and robot-frame action by introducing robot-centric pointmaps—images whose pixels store 3D coordinates in the robot frame. Pointmaps provide robot-frame 3D geometry while preserving image structure, enabling cross-viewpoint generalization across diverse camera setups.

VLAPointmapcross-viewpointByungkun Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Dongjin Kim·Jul 13, 2026

SLAMFormer-∞: Infinite SLAM Transformer for Unbounded Frontend and Backend Processing

We introduce the Infinite SLAM Transformer (SLAMFormer-∞), the first geometric transformer capable of supporting both long-range frontend and backend processing without an explicit distance bound. Instead of relying on a first-frame-anchored formulation, SLAMFormer-∞ employs memory conditions to define flexible coordinate systems and scales for input frames, enabling more expressive structural conditioning. Built upon this formulation, the frontend preserves efficient local computation, while the backend jointly optimizes long-range trajectories and scene geometry in a globally consistent manner. Experimental results demonstrate that SLAMFormer-∞ achieves superior or highly competitive performance in both trajectory estimation and scene reconstruction across large-scale datasets. Notably, SLAMFormer-∞ generalizes to extremely long trajectories, successfully operating on sequences exceeding 17km.

SLAM3D reconstructionTransformerZhijian Fang, Weicheng Zheng, Yijun Yuan·Aug 4, 2026

PhiZero: A World Model Built Around Physical Language

We introduce PhiZero, a physical world model built around physical language, a compact discrete representation of world-state transitions. Existing physical world models typically predict future videos directly in pixel space, leaving the underlying world dynamics implicit within high-dimensional visual predictors. Motivated by humans' ability to abstract predictive structure from visual experience and organize it in natural language for explicit reasoning, we learn physical language from in-the-wild videos through self-supervision and use it to explicitly reason about how the physical world evolves. Accordingly, PhiZero adopts a reason-then-render paradigm: it first infers future world evolution as a physical-language sequence and then renders the inferred transitions into videos. Extensive experiments across generation and understanding benchmarks validate the ability of PhiZero to model physically coherent world evolution. We further show its potential for realistic and interactive world modeling, fine-grained action-conditioned simulation, and zero-shot motion transfer.

World ModelsPhysical LanguageVideo GenerationShuyao Shang, Yuqi Wang, Ruopeng Gao·Jul 30, 2026

X-NavDP: Generalizing Navigation Diffusion Policy to Novel Behavior and Embodiments with Group Q-score Reweighted Matching

Proposes GQRM, a data-efficient diffusion RL post-training framework with self-bootstrapped exploration and group Q-score normalization for cross-embodiment visual navigation. Improves success rate from 61.20% to 84.28% in simulation and 10% to 65% in real-world hard cases.

NavDPVLANavigationTianyu Yang, Yiming Zeng, Wenzhe Cai·Jul 30, 2026

AwareVLN: Reasoning with Self-awareness for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to ground language instructions to its own movement within a visual environment. While state-of-the-art methods leverage the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for end-to-end action prediction, they often lack an explicit and explainable understanding of the relationships between the agent, the instruction, and the scene. Conversely, explicitly building a scene map for heuristic planning is intuitively appealing but relies on additional 3D sensors and hinders large-scale vision-language pre-training. To bridge this gap, we propose AwareVLN, a novel framework that equips the navigation model with a self-aware reasoning mechanism, enabling it to understand the agent's state and task progress in a fully end-to-end and data-driven manner. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) a structural reasoning module that fosters spatial and task-oriented self-awareness, and (2) an automatic data engine with progress division for effective training. Extensive experiments on various datasets in Habitat simulator show our AwareVLN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art vision-language navigation methods. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/AwareVLN/.

VLMVLNVision-language navigationWenxuan Guo, Xiuwei Xu, Yichen Liu·May 21, 2026

Towards Capability-Aware Traversability Navigation for Unstructured Environments

Estimating traversability in unstructured environments requires conditioning on robot embodiment, as the same terrain can be traversable for one platform and unsafe for another. Existing methods often transfer predictions across morphologies through late-stage trajectory filtering rather than encoding platform constraints in the learned representation. We propose Capability-Aware Traversability (CAT), a framework that embeds physical limits directly into the spatial feature space. CAT grounds dense supervision masks in physical trajectories through an interactive annotation pipeline and modulates semantic terrain maps with robot-specific traversability vectors through Spatially-Adaptive Denormalization (SPADE) blocks. Across human-annotated and trajectory-aligned datasets, CAT leads all ranking-based metrics, improving AUROC by 11.0% on physically executed trajectories and AUPRC by 15.8% on human traces over the strongest baseline. Ablations show that spatial conditioning and per-robot prototypes produce capability sensitivity beyond generic path prediction. Deployments on a legged quadruped and a wheeled skid-steer demonstrate embodiment-aware obstacle avoidance on embedded hardware at 4.8 Hz.

Embodied AIGianluca Capezzuto, Felipe Tommaselli, Matheus P. Angarola·Jul 22, 2026

Embodying Multi-Hand Manipulation Policies by Searching the Assignment and Null Spaces

Learned manipulation policies increasingly predict motions for abstract "hands" and are attractive in practice because they rely on easily collected demonstrations and transfer across robot platforms. Executing these trajectories on multi-arm robots, however, is not trivial. Multi-hand policy outputs must be assigned to physical arms, each arm must realize a configuration-space motion that tracks its prescribed end-effector trajectory, and all arms must respect kinematic limits and avoid collisions. In the absence of algorithms that directly address this problem, practitioners typically extend single-arm inverse-kinematics (IK) pipelines in an ad hoc way, with no guarantees of feasibility or safety. In this work, we close this execution gap with a search-based framework that is theoretically complete for grounding policy-generated multi-hand trajectories onto physical multi-arm systems. Building on Conflict-Based Search, our method explicitly searches over both the discrete assignment of trajectories to arms and the continuous Jacobian null spaces of redundant manipulators, using redundancy to avoid inter-arm collisions while tracking the prescribed motions. This unified treatment of assignment and null-space motion yields a practically efficient planner that safely realizes coordinated manipulation-policy outputs on multi-arm robots. See omcbsa.github.io for more.

Embodied AIYorai Shaoul, Jiaoyang Li, Maxim Likhachev·Jul 24, 2026

Design and Human Evaluation of Tactile Withdrawal Reflexes for a Skin-Covered Robot Arm

Nociception is a protective biological mechanism that links harmful stimulation to a reaction. This paper investigates artificial nociception for a robotic arm with whole-body tactile sensing. We present a complete pipeline that maps pressure changes from sensitive skin on a robot manipulator to bio-inspired withdrawal motions. The system first converts skin pressure into a scalar pain gain using a nonlinear continuous model. We compare three reflexes: (i) uniform reflex moves four robot joints by a fixed amount, whereby the withdrawal is approximated by a movement of the arm "toward the base", independent of where the robot was touched; (ii) biologically motivated location-dependent joint-space withdrawal derived from human withdrawal reflex characteristics; (iii) Cartesian space withdrawal along the surface normal of the contacted skin pad. All behaviors are integrated in a reflex controller that interrupts the task, executes the withdrawal, and returns to a pre-contact pose. A user study with 15 participants compared the strategies using Godspeed questionnaire subscales, custom perceived-naturalness and safety items, forced-choice comparisons, and qualitative feedback. Interestingly, participants rated more highly the uniform reflex behavior over one or both competitors on the anthropomorphism, animacy, and likeability Godspeed subscales and on the Naturalness and Realism custom scale. When asked to compare the conditions, the uniform reflex was scored best in "felt safest", "most human-like", and "most natural". This suggests that predictability of the robot behavior is key for user acceptance. The Cartesian reflex was judged the most appropriate reaction to touch. The bio-inspired reflex did not lead any evaluated measure. This may be partly attributed to the embodiment gap between the robot arm and human arm and participants having different expectations from a robot manipulator.

Embodied AILaura Babayeva, Lukas Rustler, Matej Hoffmann·Jul 24, 2026

MEMENTO: Memory-Guided Memetic Code-as-Policy Evolution

Long-horizon embodied tasks require policies that execute many dependent actions before task success can be observed. Representing policies as executable control pro- grams (code-as-policy) enables their decision logic to be inspected and revised after rollout evaluation. Revised programs can then be executed and compared by rollout performance, framing policy improvement as execution-guided program search. Evo- lutionary methods driven by large language models (LLMs) provide a natural mecha- nism for this search by generating variants and selecting high-performing candidates. However, existing approaches primarily select among independently generated vari- ants and lack a sequential local improvement phase. We introduce MEMENTO, a memory-guided single-elite memetic framework for code-as-policy evolution. ME- MENTO first evolves a rollout evaluator that maps policy rollouts to scalar fitness and structured feedback metrics. Fitness selects accepted candidates and the next elite, while feedback metrics condition policy proposals generated by memory-guided hill-climbing, macro-mutation, and crossover. We evaluate MEMENTO on two long- horizon embodied domains: Robosuite Franka Tower-of-Hanoi manipulation and AI2- THOR household interaction. MEMENTO outperforms Eureka and REvolve, adapted as code-as-policy evolutionary baselines, in task success and generalization to held- out Robosuite object configurations and unseen AI2-THOR scenes. Ablations show that zero-shot generation and unevolved evaluators fail to solve either domain, and that removing policy-search branches reduces performance. Finally, we deploy the best-evolved Robosuite policy on a physical Franka robot, demonstrating the feasibil- ity of sim-to-real transfer of the evolved code-as-policy. Code, prompts, and videos are available at: https://github.com/sygkounas/MEMENTO.

Embodied AIAlkis Sygkounas, Victor Aregbede, Amy Loutfi·Jul 24, 2026

Physical AI Governance: From Theory to Practice Across Life Cycle

With the emergence of Physical AI, artificial intelligence is extending beyond screen-based applications to embodied systems that perceive, interact with, and act in the physical world. Unlike traditional AI, Physical AI operates under real-time safety constraints, continuously interacts with dynamic environments, and coexists with humans, introducing governance challenges that existing AI governance frameworks do not explicitly address. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Physical AI governance from both scientific and operational perspectives. We synthesize existing governance principles and organize them into a unified governance framework tailored to physical AI systems. Building on this foundation, we propose a five-stage Physical AI lifecycle comprising research, design, data, model development, and deployment, and demonstrate how governance can be operationalized across each stage through concrete implementation practices. By connecting governance principles with engineering workflows, this survey provides a structured reference for researchers, developers, and policymakers to build Physical AI systems that are safe, trustworthy, and aligned with societal values.

Embodied AIWang Yang, Shaobo Wang, Hongxuan Liu·Jul 24, 2026

Real2Sim2Real for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation: An AMD ROCm-Based Pipeline

Physical AI – the integration of large vision-language-action (VLA) models with embodied agents that act in the real world – has emerged as the next major frontier for AI, echoed by industry leaders such as Jensen Huang (``the next big thing is Physical AI, AI with a body,'' GTC Paris, June 2025) and Dr. Lisa Su (`we're entering the world of Physical AI... this is where AI enters the real world,' CES 2026). This paper presents an end-to-end, fully AMD-accelerated technology stack for embodied manipulation, spanning data-center training silicon, Radeon PRO simulation/rendering GPUs, and Ryzen AI edge compute, unified by the open ROCm software stack. We demonstrate that training and deploying VLA-based manipulation policies does not require a CUDA-locked ecosystem. Four progressive demonstrations are presented: (1) a Sim-to-Real manipulation pipeline trained with SmolVLA and deployed on a physical Franka arm; (2) a semantic, language-grounded object-selection task (`one-of-three'); (3) a Real2Sim synthetic-data generation pipeline that fuses 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions of real scenes with the Genesis physics engine; and (4) large-scale reinforcement learning for quadruped and humanoid locomotion benchmarked across multiple hardware platforms. All pipelines run natively on ROCm + PyTorch on RDNA4 (Radeon AI PRO R9700) and RDNA3.5 (Radeon PRO W7900) hardware and are reproducible on the free Radeon Cloud Platform.

Embodied AIQing Yang, Xun Wang, Ziguan Wang·Jul 25, 2026

WCM: World-Cognition Model for Generalizable Human-Robot Interaction

Language agents can now interact fluently with users in software, but robots still struggle to bring comparable interaction to physical tasks. Current robot-control paradigms, including vision-language-action policies and world-model-based planners, are mainly optimized for instruction execution, leaving users with little visibility into why an action is chosen and few mechanisms to redirect, correct, or teach the robot through interaction. To solve this problem, we present the World-Cognition Model (WCM), a human-centered embodied agent built on the SLAK architecture (Sensing, Logic, Action, and Knowledge) and an asynchronous runtime. SLAK separates perception, reasoning, control, and memory, while the runtime allows reasoning, dialogue, and execution to proceed concurrently. WCM further introduces a human-in-the-loop teaching mode that enables users to interactively teach the robot difficult or long-horizon tasks. Teaching episodes and autonomous task rollouts are refined into chain-of-thought supervision to continually improve the model. WCM achieves a 73.8% average success rate across nine real-world human-robot interaction tasks, including tasks held out from CoT fine-tuning and a long-horizon task learned through teaching.

Embodied AIYuzhen Chen, KC Zhou·Jul 25, 2026