arXiv subjects

Gavriel State

Publications and source records attributed to Gavriel State.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Interactive World Simulation with Cosmos for Physical AI

We present a shared framework that adapts Cosmos world foundation models for real-time interactive world simulation in Physical AI. By streaming visual observations in response to actions and scene controls, the framework enables users and embodied agents to interact with evolving virtual environments. It supports both predicting the visual consequences of actions and generating observations from physical state maintained by an external simulator. We demonstrate this approach across camera navigation and robot manipulation, controllable video transfer, and multi-view autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation. These examples provide a shared foundation for developing interactive virtual environments for Physical AI training and evaluation. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3-examples. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos-simulation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AlphaNIST: Emergent Assembly Skills from Binary Task Rewards

The NIST Assembly Task Board #1 remains a challenging benchmark for learning-based methods in robotic manipulation. Over short horizons, it demands precise, contact-rich control of small, tight-fitting parts. Over long horizons, it requires recovery and coordination across extended action sequences. Demonstrations, task decomposition, and dense progress rewards have enabled research advances by providing guidance on how to assemble. But how much of the strategy must be specified? The progression from AlphaGo to AlphaGo Zero showed that RL at scale can discover superhuman strategies without prescribing how to win. AlphaNIST asks whether a sparse binary task reward and task diversity admitted by this task-agnostic reward can similarly let a robot discover how to assemble. In simulation, we train a single policy from scratch across all 20 assembly tasks on the NIST Assembly Task Board #1, reaching 98.2% overall training success without demonstrations, progress shaping, scripted primitives, or per-task tuning. The framework also trains policies to complete ten assembly pairs in a single episode without a prescribed order, with task success rewarded only when all ten pairs are simultaneously complete. The learned policies discover dexterous and planning-like behaviors: choosing grasps for later assembly, using surrounding geometry to reorient parts, and preparing one part, assembling another, then returning to finish the first without an explicit planner. For videos, see our website: https://alpha-nist.github.io/

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

FlashNeRD: Performance-First Contact-Rich Neural Robot Dynamics

Compared with analytical physics, learned dynamics models promise robot simulation that is faster, inherently differentiable, and easily adaptable to real data. Neural Robot Dynamics (NeRD) pursues this by keeping collision detection analytical and replacing a simulator's numerical dynamics for the robot with a learned model. Three limitations remain. NeRD offers little speedup over the simulator it learned from, accepts contact only at predefined points, and has no two-way coupling with objects it manipulates. FlashNeRD removes all three with a parallel streaming architecture that makes each prediction faster and more accurate, an encoder that accepts contacts wherever they occur, and two-way coupling with objects simulated by analytical solvers. Experiments across five robots show faster and more accurate dynamics, faster policy learning, and faster inference-time planning. Across three robots, FlashNeRD's dynamics model is up to $55\times$ faster than an optimized NeRD and more accurate over long rollouts. This speedup extends to policy learning, where PPO trains an ANYmal locomotion policy in 34 seconds, $3.8\times$ faster than the analytical simulator and $2.7\times$ faster than an optimized NeRD. With DIAL-MPC, a sampling-based MPC method, the robot climbs all six test platforms where fixed-contact NeRD manages one, at approximately half the analytical simulator's planning time. Cube-reorientation policies trained with FlashNeRD complete within 2% of the simulator-trained policy's target count.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields Invariant to Resolution

Accurate mechanical properties (or materials) Young's modulus ($E$), Poisson's ratio ($ν$) and density ($ρ$) are essential for reliable physics simulation of digital worlds, but most 3D assets lack this information. We propose AdaVoMP, a method for predicting accurate dense spatially-varying ($E$, $ν$, $ρ$) for input 3D objects across representations, improving the resolution, accuracy, and memory efficiency over the state-of-the-art. The foundation of our technique is a sparse and adaptive voxel structure SAV that efficiently represents both the input 3D shape and the material field output. We replace the fixed-voxel model of the most accurate prior method, VoMP, with a novel sparse transformer encoder-decoder model that learns to generate a unique SAV autoregressively for every input shape to represent its materials, achieving a resolution $16^3\times$ higher than prior art. Experiments show that AdaVoMP estimates more accurate volumetric properties, even with lesser test-time compute than all prior art. This allows us to convert high-resolution complex 3D objects into simulation-ready assets, resulting in realistic deformable simulations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PPISP: Physically-Plausible Compensation and Control of Photometric Variations in Radiance Field Reconstruction

Multi-view 3D reconstruction methods remain highly sensitive to photometric inconsistencies arising from camera optical characteristics and variations in image signal processing (ISP). Existing mitigation strategies such as per-frame latent variables or affine color corrections lack physical grounding and generalize poorly to novel views. We propose the Physically-Plausible ISP (PPISP) correction module, which disentangles camera-intrinsic and capture-dependent effects through physically based and interpretable transformations. A dedicated PPISP controller, trained on the input views, predicts ISP parameters for novel viewpoints, analogous to auto exposure and auto white balance in real cameras. This design enables realistic and fair evaluation on novel views without access to ground-truth images. PPISP achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, while providing intuitive control and supporting the integration of metadata when available. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nv-tlabs/ppisp

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VoMP: Predicting Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields

Physical simulation relies on spatially-varying mechanical properties, often laboriously hand-crafted. VoMP is a feed-forward method trained to predict Young's modulus ($E$), Poisson's ratio ($ν$), and density ($ρ$) throughout the volume of 3D objects, in any representation that can be rendered and voxelized. VoMP aggregates per-voxel multi-view features and passes them to our trained Geometry Transformer to predict per-voxel material latent codes. These latents reside on a manifold of physically plausible materials, which we learn from a real-world dataset, guaranteeing the validity of decoded per-voxel materials. To obtain object-level training data, we propose an annotation pipeline combining knowledge from segmented 3D datasets, material databases, and a vision-language model, along with a new benchmark. Experiments show that VoMP estimates accurate volumetric properties, far outperforming prior art in accuracy and speed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes

Particle-based representations of radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have found great success for reconstructing and re-rendering of complex scenes. Most existing methods render particles via rasterization, projecting them to screen space tiles for processing in a sorted order. This work instead considers ray tracing the particles, building a bounding volume hierarchy and casting a ray for each pixel using high-performance GPU ray tracing hardware. To efficiently handle large numbers of semi-transparent particles, we describe a specialized rendering algorithm which encapsulates particles with bounding meshes to leverage fast ray-triangle intersections, and shades batches of intersections in depth-order. The benefits of ray tracing are well-known in computer graphics: processing incoherent rays for secondary lighting effects such as shadows and reflections, rendering from highly-distorted cameras common in robotics, stochastically sampling rays, and more. With our renderer, this flexibility comes at little cost compared to rasterization. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision. We further propose related improvements to the basic Gaussian representation, including a simple use of generalized kernel functions which significantly reduces particle hit counts.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2024

Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments

We present Orbit, a unified and modular framework for robot learning powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It offers a modular design to easily and efficiently create robotic environments with photo-realistic scenes and high-fidelity rigid and deformable body simulation. With Orbit, we provide a suite of benchmark tasks of varying difficulty -- from single-stage cabinet opening and cloth folding to multi-stage tasks such as room reorganization. To support working with diverse observations and action spaces, we include fixed-arm and mobile manipulators with different physically-based sensors and motion generators. Orbit allows training reinforcement learning policies and collecting large demonstration datasets from hand-crafted or expert solutions in a matter of minutes by leveraging GPU-based parallelization. In summary, we offer an open-sourced framework that readily comes with 16 robotic platforms, 4 sensor modalities, 10 motion generators, more than 20 benchmark tasks, and wrappers to 4 learning libraries. With this framework, we aim to support various research areas, including representation learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and task and motion planning. We hope it helps establish interdisciplinary collaborations in these communities, and its modularity makes it easily extensible for more tasks and applications in the future.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality

Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to learn complex robotic behaviours in simulation, including in the domain of multi-fingered manipulation. However, such models can be challenging to transfer to the real world due to the gap between simulation and reality. In this paper, we present our techniques to train a) a policy that can perform robust dexterous manipulation on an anthropomorphic robot hand and b) a robust pose estimator suitable for providing reliable real-time information on the state of the object being manipulated. Our policies are trained to adapt to a wide range of conditions in simulation. Consequently, our vision-based policies significantly outperform the best vision policies in the literature on the same reorientation task and are competitive with policies that are given privileged state information via motion capture systems. Our work reaffirms the possibilities of sim-to-real transfer for dexterous manipulation in diverse kinds of hardware and simulator setups, and in our case, with the Allegro Hand and Isaac Gym GPU-based simulation. Furthermore, it opens up possibilities for researchers to achieve such results with commonly-available, affordable robot hands and cameras. Videos of the resulting policy and supplementary information, including experiments and demos, can be found at https://dextreme.org/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

DexPBT: Scaling up Dexterous Manipulation for Hand-Arm Systems with Population Based Training

In this work, we propose algorithms and methods that enable learning dexterous object manipulation using simulated one- or two-armed robots equipped with multi-fingered hand end-effectors. Using a parallel GPU-accelerated physics simulator (Isaac Gym), we implement challenging tasks for these robots, including regrasping, grasp-and-throw, and object reorientation. To solve these problems we introduce a decentralized Population-Based Training (PBT) algorithm that allows us to massively amplify the exploration capabilities of deep reinforcement learning. We find that this method significantly outperforms regular end-to-end learning and is able to discover robust control policies in challenging tasks. Video demonstrations of learned behaviors and the code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/dexpbt

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly

Robotic assembly is one of the oldest and most challenging applications of robotics. In other areas of robotics, such as perception and grasping, simulation has rapidly accelerated research progress, particularly when combined with modern deep learning. However, accurately, efficiently, and robustly simulating the range of contact-rich interactions in assembly remains a longstanding challenge. In this work, we present Factory, a set of physics simulation methods and robot learning tools for such applications. We achieve real-time or faster simulation of a wide range of contact-rich scenes, including simultaneous simulation of 1000 nut-and-bolt interactions. We provide $60$ carefully-designed part models, 3 robotic assembly environments, and 7 robot controllers for training and testing virtual robots. Finally, we train and evaluate proof-of-concept reinforcement learning policies for nut-and-bolt assembly. We aim for Factory to open the doors to using simulation for robotic assembly, as well as many other contact-rich applications in robotics. Please see https://sites.google.com/nvidia.com/factory for supplementary content, including videos.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning

Isaac Gym offers a high performance learning platform to train policies for wide variety of robotics tasks directly on GPU. Both physics simulation and the neural network policy training reside on GPU and communicate by directly passing data from physics buffers to PyTorch tensors without ever going through any CPU bottlenecks. This leads to blazing fast training times for complex robotics tasks on a single GPU with 2-3 orders of magnitude improvements compared to conventional RL training that uses a CPU based simulator and GPU for neural networks. We host the results and videos at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/isaacgym-nvidia} and isaac gym can be downloaded at \url{https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-gym}.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Self-Supervised Real-to-Sim Scene Generation

Synthetic data is emerging as a promising solution to the scalability issue of supervised deep learning, especially when real data are difficult to acquire or hard to annotate. Synthetic data generation, however, can itself be prohibitively expensive when domain experts have to manually and painstakingly oversee the process. Moreover, neural networks trained on synthetic data often do not perform well on real data because of the domain gap. To solve these challenges, we propose Sim2SG, a self-supervised automatic scene generation technique for matching the distribution of real data. Importantly, Sim2SG does not require supervision from the real-world dataset, thus making it applicable in situations for which such annotations are difficult to obtain. Sim2SG is designed to bridge both the content and appearance gaps, by matching the content of real data, and by matching the features in the source and target domains. We select scene graph (SG) generation as the downstream task, due to the limited availability of labeled datasets. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over leading baselines in reducing the domain gap both qualitatively and quantitatively, on several synthetic datasets as well as the real-world KITTI dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Structured Domain Randomization: Bridging the Reality Gap by Context-Aware Synthetic Data

We present structured domain randomization (SDR), a variant of domain randomization (DR) that takes into account the structure and context of the scene. In contrast to DR, which places objects and distractors randomly according to a uniform probability distribution, SDR places objects and distractors randomly according to probability distributions that arise from the specific problem at hand. In this manner, SDR-generated imagery enables the neural network to take the context around an object into consideration during detection. We demonstrate the power of SDR for the problem of 2D bounding box car detection, achieving competitive results on real data after training only on synthetic data. On the KITTI easy, moderate, and hard tasks, we show that SDR outperforms other approaches to generating synthetic data (VKITTI, Sim 200k, or DR), as well as real data collected in a different domain (BDD100K). Moreover, synthetic SDR data combined with real KITTI data outperforms real KITTI data alone.

cs.CV↗