Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Renjing Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Renjing Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

GRAFT: Geometry-Aware Residual Adaptation for Foundation Trackers

Humanoid behavior foundation models (BFMs) provide reusable whole-body motion priors: given a kinematic reference, they generate coordinated joint commands for motion replay, teleoperation, and VLA control. However, trained primarily on flat-ground motion, BFMs lack an explicit mechanism to adapt foot placement, swing clearance, and contact timing to local terrain. Many terrain-aware BFM approaches address this limitation by retraining or fine-tuning the tracker together with perception, incurring substantial data and computation costs while coupling ordinary tracking to the perception pathway. To bridge this gap, we propose GRAFT, a geometry-aware residual adaptation framework for frozen behavior trackers. GRAFT preserves the BFM parameters and motion-reference interface, while a lightweight adapter adds terrain-conditioned corrections only to lower-body execution targets. The adapter is trained with task and foot-geometry rewards, regularized to suppress unnecessary corrections on flat ground, and distilled from privileged terrain observations to onboard depth. Because the frozen BFM already provides whole-body reference tracking and nominal locomotion, GRAFT reduces terrain learning to a focused execution-adaptation problem. We instantiate the framework on four frozen trackers and evaluate stairs, gaps, and platforms in simulation. We further validate it through real-world deployment on a Unitree G1, where the adapted SONIC tracker traverses terrain with onboard depth and unmodified references.

cs.RO↗

HC2Robot: Hyper-Connection Transformers with Predicted Foresight for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Parkour

Humanoid parkour requires robots to reason about future footholds and whole-body motions over highly discontinuous terrain. We revisit the information asymmetry in asymmetric actor-critic learning for perceptive humanoid locomotion: the critic exploits privileged simulator signals during training, whereas the deployable actor operates solely from onboard perception. We argue that the key is not exposing privileged information to the actor, but learning a deployable approximation of it to narrow the information gap between training and deployment. We present HC2Robot, a deployable perceptive humanoid parkour framework consisting of a Predicted Foresight Module (PFM) and a Hyper-Connection (HC) Transformer. PFM predicts from deployable observations the policy-conditioned timing, location, and support quality of each foot's next touchdown event, converting privileged supervision into a deployable latent representation that provides the actor with predicted touchdown information without privileged runtime sensing. The HC Transformer further enhances temporal reasoning through learnable multi-stream routing, while a future motion prediction head provides short-horizon motion priors for regularization. Across stairs, gaps, high platforms, and slopes, HC2Robot achieves a mean simulated traversal success rate of 97.60% and consistently higher safe foothold rates than strong perceptive locomotion baselines, supporting improved traversal performance and geometric foothold support under deployable sensing.

cs.RO↗

RMBench: Memory-Dependent Robotic Manipulation Benchmark with Insights into Policy Design

Robotic manipulation policies have made rapid progress in recent years, yet most existing approaches give limited consideration to memory capabilities. Consequently, they struggle to solve tasks that require reasoning over historical observations and maintaining task-relevant information over time, which are common requirements in real-world manipulation scenarios. Although several memory-aware policies have been proposed, systematic evaluation of memory-dependent manipulation remains underexplored, and the relationship between architectural design choices and memory performance is still not well understood. To address this gap, we introduce RMBench, a simulation benchmark comprising 9 manipulation tasks that span multiple levels of memory complexity, enabling systematic evaluation of policy memory capabilities. We further propose Mem-0, a modular manipulation policy with explicit memory components designed to support controlled ablation studies. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we identify memory-related limitations in existing policies and provide empirical insights into how architectural design choices influence memory performance. The website is available at https://rmbench.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

TS-WAM: Temporal Latent Actions and World-Action Coupling for Vision-Language Robot Control

Many vision-language-action policies rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations and lack an explicit mechanism for predicting future visual states. These limitations hinder learning from action-free videos and can encourage overfitting to demonstration conditions, weakening generalization and robustness. We present TS-WAM, a lightweight Teacher-Student World-Action Model that addresses these challenges through self-supervised temporal learning and explicit future prediction. Its vlm-jepa framework learns from heterogeneous data, including robot demonstrations and action-free human videos, using an EMA target branch without requiring a separately trained external teacher. By coupling vlm-jepa with delta-lwm, TS-WAM learns to predict latent actions from the current observation and instruction and uses them to predict future visual features that guide action generation at inference. A unified end-to-end training architecture jointly optimizes temporal representation learning, visual dynamics, and robot control without a separate latent-action or world-model pretraining stage. The EMA target branch is removed at inference, keeping the deployed policy lightweight. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, together with real-world manipulation experiments on Franka Research 3 and RevoTron, demonstrate that TS-WAM achieves strong manipulation performance, generalization, and robustness.

cs.RO↗

Spark-0: Scaling Spatially Aligned Tactile Pretraining for Robot Dexterous Manipulation

Generalist robot policies benefit from large-scale visual pretraining but often struggle with contact-rich dexterous manipulation, where force, compliance, and incipient slip are hard to observe from images. We present Spark-0, a spatially aligned vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) model that uses touch in two complementary ways. During pretraining, image-space contact maps derived from tactile gloves, together with features from a frozen 3D geometry teacher, supervise the visual tokens; these objectives are removed at inference. In parallel, a tactile pathway encodes regional force histories and 3D taxel states to condition the action expert. A single checkpoint therefore supports both vision-only and tactile-conditioned deployment. To scale this supervision, we build HumanTouch, a 1,000-hour dataset of full-hand tactile human manipulation, and pretrain Spark-0 on it together with egocentric video, robot data, and simulation. We also release SparkArena, which pairs vision-only simulated tasks with tactile-conditioned real-robot tasks on one dexterous embodiment. Spark-0 achieves the highest mean success rate on both SparkArena tracks and ranks first on all eight aggregate metrics of the Ego Humanoid Manipulation Benchmark. Compared with vision-only pretraining on the same data and compute with touch discarded, retaining the touch of 1,000 hours of HumanTouch raises vision-only success on Ego Humanoid from 52.5% to 71.7%, and success on SparkArena-Real, where touch is also used at deployment, from 44.0% to 52.0%, indicating that touch serves not only as a policy input but also as scalable supervision for dexterous visuomotor pretraining. The Website is available at: https://xsparkai.com/Spark-0.

cs.RO↗

ParkourFormer: Integrating Predictive Supervision and Sequence Modeling into Parkour Locomotion

Humanoid parkour requires locomotion policies to coordinate whole-body dynamics across rapidly changing terrains such as stairs, gaps, slopes, and obstacles. Existing learning-based humanoid locomotion policies typically infer actions from current and historical observations, while the future evolution of the robot state is represented only implicitly. Explicitly anticipating short-horizon state evolution is particularly beneficial for multiple terrains locomotion, where current actions must account for upcoming contact transitions and whole-body dynamics. We present ParkourForme, a Transformer-based sequence modeling framework that reformulates humanoid locomotion as a future-conditioned decision-making problem. The current robot state queries historical sensorimotor trajectories through cross-attention, while a lightweight prediction head forecasts short-horizon future proprioceptive states. The future states are predicted solely from historical observations and actions, with ground-truth future states used only as supervision targets, and are fused with temporal features to generate the current action without future-information leakage. We evaluate ParkourFormer on a diverse multi-terrain humanoid parkour benchmark including stairs, gaps, slopes, rough terrain, and obstacle traversal. ParkourFormer achieves a 93.96% mean traversal success rate, compared with 90.49% for a vanilla Transformer and 87.16% for a MoE-MLP policy, while maintaining a single policy across all terrain types. These results demonstrate that explicit future-state modeling significantly improves robustness and generalization for agile whole-body locomotion.

cs.RO↗

Agentic RSR: Real-to-Sim-to-Real through Scene Reconstruction and Execution-Grounded Robot Policies

A simulation of a real robot workspace must preserve task-relevant interactions, while policies developed in it must operate on observations available to the real robot. Yet scene reconstruction and policy development are often treated separately. We present Agentic Real-to-Sim-to-Real (Agentic RSR), a framework that links scene reconstruction, policy development, and real-robot execution through the same manipulation task. Given a workspace video, a task description, and a known robot model, an agent recovers metric scale, iteratively refines the scene using visual feedback, and checks task-relevant interactions in MuJoCo. A coding agent then develops an executable policy, progressing from privileged object poses to visual observations and randomized simulation. The policy can interleave multiple observations and actions within one invocation, while the agent uses execution feedback to continue, retry, or revise its approach. A shared task-level interface carries the policy and accumulated experience to the real robot, where fresh observations and safety checks guide execution. Using Claude Opus 5.5 through DeepSeek Harness (DSH), all 18 scenes across two robots pass the joint visual check; mean four-view Depth MAE against reference depth estimates is 0.0808 m, mean Lab $ΔE_{76}$ is 8.01, and mean grayscale SSIM is 0.7338. In real-robot experiments, the aggregate task success rate reaches 80% of the simulation task success rate, indicating substantial retention of simulated performance on hardware. Code and reconstructed scene data will be made publicly available.

cs.RO↗

SHARE: Sharing Human Actions across Robot Embodiments through Unified Retargeting and Tracking

The central challenge in reusing human actions across robots is the need to realize shared intent through incompatible kinematics, dynamics, and control interfaces. We present SHARE, which decomposes action sharing into two connected stages---reference generation and feedback execution---and uses native robot references as their interface to achieve shared structure, native realization. In the reference-generation stage, AdaMorph extracts human-motion intent with a shared temporal backbone and generates embodiment-compatible references through robot-conditioned decoding. In the feedback-execution stage, AdaTrack combines these references with proprioception, action history, and morphology, then uses variable-length dynamic representations, morphology-conditioned attention, expert distillation, and closed-loop reinforcement learning to emit native actions from one shared Actor. On G1, HI, AD, and T1, AdaMorph attains seen/unseen root-speed Pearson correlation coefficients (PCCs) of 0.951/0.894; AdaTrack reaches 94.00%/91.96% closed-loop Success Rate with 21.15% of the total parameters in four specialist Actors, while cross-embodiment pretraining improves seen/unseen adaptation by 9.67/13.62 points with only 1% target data.

cs.RO↗

A GPU-Parallel Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

GPU-parallel simulation provides abundant robot interaction, but existing benchmarks rarely combine this scale with heterogeneous manipulation tasks and standardized multi-task RL evaluation. We introduce Hebero (Heterogeneous Benchmark for Robot Learning), a GPU-parallel Isaac Lab benchmark that enables efficient joint training and evaluation of a single policy across all 40 heterogeneous tasks. Scaling experiments show that increasing parallel replicas per task improves success under a fixed wall-clock budget. To support learning with sparse rewards and limited demonstrations, we propose Demonstration-Guided Policy Optimization (DGPO), which reuses demonstrations for dense tracking rewards and asymmetric value learning. Its shared stack supports controlled comparisons of learner-specific demonstration interfaces within PPO. Within DGPO framework, we introduce IW-ABC, which uses a lightweight per-task learning progress signal to coordinate adaptive behavior cloning (ABC), relaxing demonstration guidance with task progress, and importance weighting (IW), emphasizing lagging tasks in PPO updates. With 50 demonstrations per task, IW-ABC achieves 90.1% state-input mean success, outperforming the strongest baseline FAMO-ABC by 7.8 percentage points. Its visual counterpart reaches 93.5% mean success. Real-world experiments further demonstrate that a single multi-task policy trained in simulation can successfully perform four tasks on a physical Piper robot. The project page is available at https://hebero-rl.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

MM-ABC: Towards Generalist Mobile Manipulation via Seeing, Coordinating and Imagining

Mobile manipulation extends robot interaction beyond a fixed kinematic workspace by making the reachable region itself controllable. This flexibility introduces two central challenges: spatially grounded perception under continuous ego-motion and coordinated control of heterogeneous arm and base actions. Existing approaches strengthen geometry through explicit 3D representations or predictive world models, and often decouple mobility and manipulation into separate action streams. We argue that effective mobile manipulation requires not only decoupling, but also representations that support efficient cross-stream collaboration. We present MM-ABC, a foundation model built around Seeing, Coordinating, and Imagining Arm-Base Collaboration. MM-ABC combines sparse multi-level VLM features for spatial perception; a training-only future branch that uses world imagination and geometric intent as extra supervision, strengthening perception and manipulation-intent prediction and improving the overall learning signal; and MM-APT, which coordinates separate manipulation and mobility streams through masked joint attention and clean-action x-prediction. In controlled ablations, replacing clean-action prediction with velocity prediction lowers success on RoboCasa365 composite-seen tasks from 32.8% to 29.2%, and removing future supervision or multilevel conditioning causes larger drops. We pretrain MM-ABC on 5,000+ hours of heterogeneous robot data spanning 400K+ episodes, 12 datasets, and 17 embodiments. Experiments cover EBench, RoboCasa365, ManiSkill-HAB, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world mobile manipulation. MM-ABC achieves 44.71% success on EBench, 61.2% on RoboCasa365, 99.1% on LIBERO, 82.8% on LIBERO-Plus without perturbation training, and 83% mean success on five real-world tasks.

cs.RO↗

AutoPruner: Agentic Depth Pruning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Layer pruning reduces the size and inference cost of vision-language-action (VLA) models, but selecting a deployable configuration requires deciding both which layers to remove and how to recover task performance. These decisions depend on the model and task, and a failed trial can reflect either the deletion set or insufficient recovery. We present AutoPruner, an agent-driven framework that jointly searches pruning structures and recovery recipes through closed-loop experimentation. Offline layer interventions measure changes in action output to provide functional evidence. An LLM agent combines this evidence with evaluation history and retained diagnoses to propose deletion sets and recovery recipes within a search budget. Each proposal is executed and evaluated on the target tasks, and the resulting feedback guides the next experiment. Across OpenVLA-OFT, StarVLA, and FastWAM on four LIBERO suites, AutoPruner removes 16.7--87.5% of backbone layers while maintaining task success above 90%, with measured inference speedups of up to 2.50$\times$. Further analysis shows that functional probes identify action-sensitive layers despite high representation similarity, and that recovery can make previously failing structures viable.

cs.RO↗

What is the Better Curriculum: Controller-Shaped Grasping Behavior for Contact Force-Sensitive Manipulation

How should a robot learn to manipulate objects so fragile that sub-Newton contact forces can cause irreversible damage? Existing visuo-tactile policy learning typically treats tactile sensing as an additional policy input. In direct-contact force-sensitive manipulation, however, the bottleneck can arise earlier, during data collection: manual gripper control is too delayed and coarse-grained to reliably maintain the narrow force range required for stable grasping. We therefore use a deterministic 25 Hz tactile reflex controller as a collection-time teacher, producing demonstrations with controller-shaped grasping behavior for tactile-free policy learning. On Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), policies trained from reflex-shaped demonstrations recover the teacher's grasping profile and achieve 95% stable grasps on the nominal plastic-cup task, substantially outperforming visually screened manual demonstrations. The same intervention improves in-distribution stability on $π_{0.5}$ and shows a favorable exploratory trend on an unseen paper-cup variant. Under randomized external disturbance, however, the reflex-data $π_{0.5}$ policy still fails in 45% of policy-only trials, whereas a deployment-time reflex arbiter retains all grasps. These results reveal a new role for tactile feedback in force-sensitive manipulation: rather than integrating tactile into the policy, we use it as a collection-time teacher that shapes grasping behavior in demonstrations for policy learning, while disturbance rejection remains controller-dependent, revealing the boundary of tactile-free policy.

cs.RO↗

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

Learning predictive models of contact-rich dexterous manipulation requires dense tactile interaction, but such data are costly to scale on real robots and remain tied to embodiment-specific sensors. We introduce DexTouch-WM, an action-conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to jointly predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics. Our insight is that human and robot manipulation share transferable contact dynamics when their tactile observations and action spaces are made compatible. We deploy flexible piezoresistive arrays with a shared sensing layout on both human and dexterous robot hands, and retarget human motion into the robot action space so that human interaction can supervise the same dynamics model used for real-robot prediction. DexTouch-WM couples a pretrained video expert with a lightweight tactile expert using anatomy-aware tactile tokens and aligned action conditioning. In human-to-robot scaling experiments, we keep five hours of real-robot supervision fixed while increasing human interaction from 0 to 100 hours, and observe substantial improvements in held-out robot-domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction despite disjoint human and robot task sets. Beyond prediction, we evaluate the world models as surrogate environments for policy evaluation and as generators of synthetic trajectories for real-robot policy learning, showing that scalable human interaction provides a complementary data axis for learning dexterous robot world models.

cs.RO↗

MoPA: Coordinated Mobile Manipulation via Subsystem-Specific Perception Alignment

Mobile manipulation requires perceptual evidence at different spatial scales for base motion and arm control, while the two action modalities remain kinematically coupled. Existing policies often employ specialized action generation for different subsystems but condition heterogeneous action branches on a shared perceptual representation, leaving subsystem-specific perception-action correspondence implicit. We present MoPA, a framework that aligns perceptual conditioning with mobility and manipulation while preserving coordination at the action level. Dual Perceptual Streams employ two mutually masked query banks to extract separate perceptual representations from a shared vision-language context. Perception2Action Adaptation jointly updates each query bank and its corresponding action stream at every layer of a structured Mixture-of-Transformers decoder, while enabling information exchange between the two action streams. Coupled conditional flow matching learns a joint vector field for coordinated generation of both action chunks. On the ManiSkill-HAB benchmark, MoPA achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three task suites. Across four real-world tasks, MoPA achieves a mean full-task success rate of 76.3%, outperforming the best baseline by 12.5 percentage points. Ablation studies and further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed design. Website is available at: https://mopa-policy.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

Spatiotemporal programming via asymmetric dielectric engineering for nonvolatile 2D optoelectronics

Ambipolar two dimensional (2D) semiconductors integrated with floating-gate architectures offer a promising platform for nonvolatile, reconfigurable electronics. However, the switching between p-n and n-p junction polarities has conventionally required complex multi-gate designs, hindering the scalability and integration density. Here, we demonstrate a spatiotemporal programming strategy using a dual-floating-gate architecture with a symmetry broken tunneling dielectric. An asymmetric dielectric stack creates distinct tunneling thresholds for two floating gates, enabling a single input gate to encode spatial doping profiles in the 2D channel via defined voltage pulse sequences. We achieve on demand, nonvolatile, and reversible switching between p-n and n-p configurations with excellent retention and endurance. The reconfigurable homojunction serves as a multifunctional platform for logic encoding, rectification, photodetection, and in sensor computing. This work establishes a design paradigm that replaces spatial input complexity with spatiotemporal programming, paving the way for high-density, multifunctional intelligent hardware.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation via Shared Bird's-Eye Maps

Air-ground collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) pairs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a global bird's-eye view and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a local first-person view, yet the setting remains largely unexplored: existing training-free methods solve single-agent tasks but offer no collaboration mechanism, and a recent CARLA-Air evaluation found no stable cooperative behavior across five state-of-the-art VLA models; naive semantic communication or bidirectional coupling even degrades performance. We establish AGC-VLN (Air-Ground Collaborative VLN), the first training-free baseline for air-ground collaborative VLN. The key insight is that training-free methods decompose navigation into VLM-based semantic reasoning and deterministic geometric execution, exposing a collaboration interface: the UAV's global view, over which it renders the UGV's reported pose and the VLM-anchored target as CAR/GOAL markers with distance labels, yielding a shared bird's-eye map. From this map, the UGV acquires global spatial context its first-person view cannot provide, plans a road-following path with a frozen VLM, and executes it under closed-loop control; in parallel, the UAV runs 3D-SPF, a spatial-search upgrade of SPF that localizes the target in the downward view and flies toward it. On 100 closed-loop episodes in CARLA-Air's Town10HD scene, AGC-VLN reaches a 77.0% joint success rate, a collaboration gain of +27.0% over the weaker individual agent (the UAV, 50.0%), and exceeds the strongest published single-agent baseline (Travel UAV, 53.0%) by 24.0 points, stemming from the complementarity of the UAV's global view and the UGV's road-following execution. Project page: https://github.com/ZSN2024/AGC-VLN.

cs.RO↗

Unified Motion Retargeting for Humanoids with Learned Point Cloud Correspondence

Humanoid learning increasingly relies on transforming vast and diverse human motion data into high-quality robot reference trajectories. However, retargeting human motion to humanoid robots is challenging due to substantial differences in morphology, degrees of freedom, joint ranges, and kinematic constraints between humans and robots. Existing retargeting methods typically address these differences by defining human-robot correspondence through hand-crafted sparse keypoints or body-part pairs. As a result, retargeting quality depends heavily on manual semantic design, limiting scalability across motion sources and robot morphologies and providing only sparse guidance for reproducing detailed poses and interactions. In this paper, we present Unified Motion Retargeting (UMR), a framework that learns dense point cloud correspondence without requiring manually designed human-robot mappings. By treating exterior point clouds as a unified interface between human motion and humanoid robots, UMR decouples retargeting from source-specific skeletal semantics and robot-specific topology. The learned dense correspondence provides fine-grained geometric anchors for constrained point cloud matching optimization, enabling surface-level pose alignment and direct transfer of interaction contacts. Experiments demonstrate that UMR unifies retargeting across heterogeneous motion sources, robot embodiments, and downstream scenarios ranging from locomotion to interaction, while achieving higher motion fidelity and plausibility than state-of-the-art methods. UMR therefore provides a scalable foundation for transforming large-scale human motion references into robot-ready training data.

cs.RO↗

How to Learn from What a Human Would Avoid? Intervention-Aware World Models with Real-World RL for Dexterous Manipulation

Multi-fingered dexterous manipulation remains a frontier for real-world reinforcement learning (RL) due to the high-dimensional action space and the prohibitive cost of hardware failures. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) RL allows operators to intervene before failures occur, current pipelines often treat these interventions as reactive corrections, discarding the rich safety signal inherent in the operator's decision to take control. In this paper, we ask: How can we learn from what a human would avoid? We present WHIRL, a safety-aware RL framework that transforms binary human interventions into forward-predictive signals for proactive risk avoidance. Our approach centers on an intervention-aware latent world model with four prediction heads: dynamics, reward, termination, and a novel per-state intervention-probability head that learns to predict the likelihood of a human takeover at future states. This head provides an actor-side risk-shaping term that discourages the policy from entering "intervention-prone" regions, modeling the operator's internal safety threshold. We evaluate our framework on a 16-DoF LEAP Hand across tasks spanning convex and irregular object grasping, prismatic manipulation, and long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Our results show that predictive risk-shaping enables the system to achieve a 96.7 percent success rate on complex grasping tasks while reducing the operator intervention burden by up to 84 percent in step-weighted terms. By closing the loop between human intuition and predictive world modeling, this work provides a practical safety-aware recipe for training complex dexterous agents in the real world while reducing operator fatigue and hardware-risk exposure.

cs.RO↗