arXiv subjects

Mohammad Khoshnazar

Publications and source records attributed to Mohammad Khoshnazar.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reliability-Aware Future Conditioning for Temporally Robust Robot Manipulation

A generated video of a task the robot is about to perform is useful guidance only if it depicts the phase the robot is actually in. We show that temporal misalignment can turn a task-consistent generated future into actively harmful guidance. On CALVIN, a five-frame early shift nearly erases the benefit of generated futures, reducing success from 81.3% to 54.8% against 54.0% without futures; imposed timing shifts reduce it even further to 34.2%, 19.8 points below the future-free policy. We introduce Reliability-Aware Future Conditioning (RAFC), which treats this as a control problem rather than a generation problem. At every step, RAFC estimates how far to trust the received clip and which nearby temporal hypothesis to prefer, falling back toward a static branch when neither fits, and it learns both from task reward alone without shift labels or alignment supervision. RAFC sits on top of Future-Experience Conditioning (FEC), which builds the clip once from task grounding, a robot-free digital-twin rollout, and mask-free video diffusion. Under deliberately off-grid phase shifts and rate mismatch, RAFC substantially improves success under temporal mismatch. Candidate ensembling accounts for most of the recovery near alignment, while learned reliability adds a further 7.0 percentage points over uniform averaging of the identical candidate bank under off-grid shifts. The gain holds on the evaluated task sets and survives on a Franka under natural timing mismatch nobody imposed, where aggregate success rises from 26.7% to 56.7%. All resources will be made publicly available. https://future-condition.github.io/.

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arXiv2026

CAPABLE: Capability-Aware Policy Adaptation via Behavioral Latent Encoding

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies assume the embodiment on which they were trained and can fail when a joint fault changes how commanded actions are physically executed. Existing fault-recovery methods often require task-specific retraining, fault labels, explicit diagnosis, or privileged embodiment information. We introduce CAPABLE, a unified capability-aware adaptation framework for frozen VLAs that integrates self-supervised capability inference with residual reinforcement learning. CAPABLE infers capability, how much of the commanded motion each joint actually realizes and how that motion contributes to end-effector behavior, online from command-response history and kinematics using a temporal encoder shared across joints, Jacobian grounding, cross-joint attention, and self-supervised physical prediction. The resulting representation conditions a residual policy that adds bounded corrections to the VLA arm action without fault labels or faulty-joint identifiers. Across 28 LIBERO tasks, CAPABLE raises success on an actuator excluded from fault training from 24.8% to 59.3%, outperforming a parameter-matched global-history baseline by 17.4 points while preserving healthy performance. Leave-one-actuator-out experiments across six joints show that this transfer is not specific to one actuator, and additional evaluations characterize transfer to unseen fault families and demonstrate recovery on a physical Franka Panda. https://capable-vla.github.io/

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arXiv2026

A Survey on Reinforcement Learning Applications in SLAM

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) allows a mobile robot or autonomous vehicle to build a map of an unknown environment while estimating its own pose within that map. Reinforcement learning (RL), in which an agent learns a decision policy from interaction and reward, has been applied to decide how such systems move, explore, and recognize places they have visited before. This survey reviews the applications of RL in SLAM. We first distinguish passive SLAM, in which the robot's motion is not chosen by the SLAM system, from active SLAM, in which it is, and summarize the sensors that provide the input to SLAM. We then introduce the RL methods used in this literature, from value-based and policy-based methods to actor-critic and deep RL. Next, we classify RL applications in SLAM into three categories: path planning, including environment exploration and obstacle avoidance; loop closure detection; and active SLAM. Thirteen representative studies are compared in terms of their simulation environment, deep learning method, SLAM method, and RL algorithm. Most of these studies are evaluated mainly in simulation, and value-based methods from the deep Q-network family are the most common. Finally, we discuss the challenges of applying RL to SLAM, namely computational demands, safety, generalization, high-dimensional state and action spaces, sample efficiency, and sensor and actuator delays, and we outline directions for future research.

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arXiv2026

FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models have demonstrated strong performance across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, VLA models that directly map current 2D observations to actions often lack sufficient spatial and temporal understanding, limiting their performance in precise and long-horizon manipulation. Recent methods enhance VLA models through geometric supervision and future-state prediction across the entire scene. However, these methods can suffer from redundant scene information, distracting the model from learning the geometry and dynamics relevant to the current interaction. To address this issue, we propose FOCAL-VLA, a framework that combines subtask-guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling to learn representations of current spatial structure and future interaction dynamics. To focus geometric learning on the current subtask, we transfer geometric knowledge from VGGT to the VLA model by aligning geometry latents with features from subtask-relevant image regions. To capture the future 3D evolution of the current interaction, we incorporate implicit world modeling using Track4World features from current and future demonstration frames. The two complementary representations jointly guide action generation without running VGGT or Track4World at inference time. Experiments show that FOCAL-VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks. Project website: https://zhiyuan-gao.github.io/FOCAL-VLA/.

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arXiv2026

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

Learning robot manipulation policies typically requires substantial demonstration data, which are costly to collect on real robots. Recent methods generate robot demonstrations from human videos by adapting recovered motion and validating the resulting trajectories in simulation. However, methods centered on motion-reference adaptation can limit behavioral diversity by retaining the demonstrated contact strategies and subtask orders, while insufficient understanding of task requirements and scene relations can reduce demonstration generation efficiency by generating invalid candidates. To address these limitations, we propose KnowDemo, a framework that uses structured manipulation knowledge from human videos to generate diverse robot demonstrations for a target workspace. To distinguish task requirements from demonstration-specific choices, we develop a knowledge extraction and reasoning module based on a vision-language model (VLM) that associates object and action descriptions with inferred task conditions, demonstration references, and permissible execution variations. To translate this knowledge into executable demonstrations, we resolve the descriptions against target-scene entities and geometry to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning and simulation. The resulting demonstrations exhibit multimodal behavior through alternative contact strategies and valid subtask orders, with structured execution labels. Experiments demonstrate additional verified execution modes beyond a reference-only configuration and improved candidate planning success through task-guided grasp sampling. To validate the generated data for policy learning, we fine-tune the pretrained $π_{0.5}$ model on simulation data, achieving sim-to-real transfer across three tasks. Project page: https://zhiyuan-gao.github.io/knowdemo/

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arXiv2026

LLM-Guided Future Hypotheses for Horizon-Aware Exploration in Multi-Step Robot Manipulation

Multi-step robot manipulation requires acting under uncertainty about how the scene will evolve, making exploration and policy adaptation challenging. We study whether short-horizon, task-consistent future videos can provide useful structured priors for control and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning. We formalize this idea through Future-Experience Conditioning (FEC), a simple interface that conditions closed-loop policies on a latent representation of a short future video. In our simulation setup, future clips are generated in three stages, an LLM reasoner operating over a task ontology initialized from the current scene state, a robot-free digital-twin rollout of the intended object motion, and a mask-free video diffusion model that synthesizes a robot-consistent future clip without requiring segmentation at inference. We instantiate this future-conditioning interface primarily with BC and BC+RL, and compare against a future-conditioned Streaming Flow Policy (SFP) baseline on RoboCasa and CALVIN under NoFuture, GTFuture, GenFuture, and WrongFuture. Generated futures improve performance over no-future conditioning, while mismatched futures degrade it, and our BC+RL instantiation achieves the strongest overall results. An average BC+RL learning-curve analysis across 8 CALVIN tasks further shows that GTFuture improves fastest, GenFuture improves earlier and to a higher level than NoFuture, and WrongFuture remains at zero throughout training. These results suggest that short-horizon future videos can serve as useful structured priors for exploration and policy adaptation under imperfect future predictions. https://enact2026.github.io/

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