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Jul 29

Stroke of Surprise: Progressive Semantic Illusions in Vector Sketching

Visual illusions traditionally rely on spatial manipulations such as multi-view consistency. In this work, we introduce Progressive Semantic Illusions, a novel vector sketching task where a single sketch undergoes a dramatic semantic transformation through the sequential addition of strokes. We present Stroke of Surprise, a generative framework that optimizes vector strokes to satisfy distinct semantic interpretations at different drawing stages. The core challenge lies in the "dual-constraint": initial prefix strokes must form a coherent object (e.g., a duck) while simultaneously serving as the structural foundation for a second concept (e.g., a sheep) upon adding delta strokes. To address this, we propose a sequence-aware joint optimization framework driven by a dual-branch Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) mechanism. Unlike sequential approaches that freeze the initial state, our method dynamically adjusts prefix strokes to discover a "common structural subspace" valid for both targets. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Overlay Loss that enforces spatial complementarity, ensuring structural integration rather than occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recognizability and illusion strength, successfully expanding visual anagrams from the spatial to the temporal dimension. Project page: https://stroke-of-surprise.github.io/

VFX Creator: Animated Visual Effect Generation with Controllable Diffusion Transformer

Crafting magic and illusions is one of the most thrilling aspects of filmmaking, with visual effects (VFX) serving as the powerhouse behind unforgettable cinematic experiences. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have driven progress in generic image and video synthesis, the domain of controllable VFX generation remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for animated VFX generation as image animation, where dynamic effects are generated from user-friendly textual descriptions and static reference images. Our work makes two primary contributions: (i) Open-VFX, the first high-quality VFX video dataset spanning 15 diverse effect categories, annotated with textual descriptions, instance segmentation masks for spatial conditioning, and start-end timestamps for temporal control. (ii) VFX Creator, a simple yet effective controllable VFX generation framework based on a Video Diffusion Transformer. The model incorporates a spatial and temporal controllable LoRA adapter, requiring minimal training videos. Specifically, a plug-and-play mask control module enables instance-level spatial manipulation, while tokenized start-end motion timestamps embedded in the diffusion process, alongside the text encoder, allow precise temporal control over effect timing and pace. Extensive experiments on the Open-VFX test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system in generating realistic and dynamic effects, achieving state-of-the-art performance and generalization ability in both spatial and temporal controllability. Furthermore, we introduce a specialized metric to evaluate the precision of temporal control. By bridging traditional VFX techniques with generative approaches, VFX Creator unlocks new possibilities for efficient and high-quality video effect generation, making advanced VFX accessible to a broader audience.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025 2

Error-Driven Scene Editing for 3D Grounding in Large Language Models

Despite recent progress in 3D-LLMs, they remain limited in accurately grounding language to visual and spatial elements in 3D environments. This limitation stems in part from training data that focuses on language reasoning rather than spatial understanding due to scarce 3D resources, leaving inherent grounding biases unresolved. To address this, we propose 3D scene editing as a key mechanism to generate precise visual counterfactuals that mitigate these biases through fine-grained spatial manipulation, without requiring costly scene reconstruction or large-scale 3D data collection. Furthermore, to make these edits targeted and directly address the specific weaknesses of the model, we introduce DEER-3D, an error-driven framework following a structured "Decompose, Diagnostic Evaluation, Edit, and Re-train" workflow, rather than broadly or randomly augmenting data as in conventional approaches. Specifically, upon identifying a grounding failure of the 3D-LLM, our framework first diagnoses the exact predicate-level error (e.g., attribute or spatial relation). It then executes minimal, predicate-aligned 3D scene edits, such as recoloring or repositioning, to produce targeted counterfactual supervision for iterative model fine-tuning, significantly enhancing grounding accuracy. We evaluate our editing pipeline across multiple benchmarks for 3D grounding and scene understanding tasks, consistently demonstrating improvements across all evaluated datasets through iterative refinement. DEER-3D underscores the effectiveness of targeted, error-driven scene editing in bridging linguistic reasoning capabilities with spatial grounding in 3D LLMs.

AlphaBlock: Embodied Finetuning for Vision-Language Reasoning in Robot Manipulation

We propose a novel framework for learning high-level cognitive capabilities in robot manipulation tasks, such as making a smiley face using building blocks. These tasks often involve complex multi-step reasoning, presenting significant challenges due to the limited paired data connecting human instructions (e.g., making a smiley face) and robot actions (e.g., end-effector movement). Existing approaches relieve this challenge by adopting an open-loop paradigm decomposing high-level instructions into simple sub-task plans, and executing them step-by-step using low-level control models. However, these approaches are short of instant observations in multi-step reasoning, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose to automatically collect a cognitive robot dataset by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting dataset AlphaBlock consists of 35 comprehensive high-level tasks of multi-step text plans and paired observation sequences. To enable efficient data acquisition, we employ elaborated multi-round prompt designs that effectively reduce the burden of extensive human involvement. We further propose a closed-loop multi-modal embodied planning model that autoregressively generates plans by taking image observations as input. To facilitate effective learning, we leverage MiniGPT-4 with a frozen visual encoder and LLM, and finetune additional vision adapter and Q-former to enable fine-grained spatial perception for manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments to verify the superiority over existing open and closed-loop methods, and achieve a significant increase in success rate by 21.4% and 14.5% over ChatGPT and GPT-4 based robot tasks. Real-world demos are shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAzID1_qQk .

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2023

DimensionX: Create Any 3D and 4D Scenes from a Single Image with Controllable Video Diffusion

In this paper, we introduce DimensionX, a framework designed to generate photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from just a single image with video diffusion. Our approach begins with the insight that both the spatial structure of a 3D scene and the temporal evolution of a 4D scene can be effectively represented through sequences of video frames. While recent video diffusion models have shown remarkable success in producing vivid visuals, they face limitations in directly recovering 3D/4D scenes due to limited spatial and temporal controllability during generation. To overcome this, we propose ST-Director, which decouples spatial and temporal factors in video diffusion by learning dimension-aware LoRAs from dimension-variant data. This controllable video diffusion approach enables precise manipulation of spatial structure and temporal dynamics, allowing us to reconstruct both 3D and 4D representations from sequential frames with the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions. Additionally, to bridge the gap between generated videos and real-world scenes, we introduce a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising strategy for 4D generation. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that DimensionX achieves superior results in controllable video generation, as well as in 3D and 4D scene generation, compared with previous methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 4

Real2Edit2Real: Generating Robotic Demonstrations via a 3D Control Interface

Recent progress in robot learning has been driven by large-scale datasets and powerful visuomotor policy architectures, yet policy robustness remains limited by the substantial cost of collecting diverse demonstrations, particularly for spatial generalization in manipulation tasks. To reduce repetitive data collection, we present Real2Edit2Real, a framework that generates new demonstrations by bridging 3D editability with 2D visual data through a 3D control interface. Our approach first reconstructs scene geometry from multi-view RGB observations with a metric-scale 3D reconstruction model. Based on the reconstructed geometry, we perform depth-reliable 3D editing on point clouds to generate new manipulation trajectories while geometrically correcting the robot poses to recover physically consistent depth, which serves as a reliable condition for synthesizing new demonstrations. Finally, we propose a multi-conditional video generation model guided by depth as the primary control signal, together with action, edge, and ray maps, to synthesize spatially augmented multi-view manipulation videos. Experiments on four real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that policies trained on data generated from only 1-5 source demonstrations can match or outperform those trained on 50 real-world demonstrations, improving data efficiency by up to 10-50x. Moreover, experimental results on height and texture editing demonstrate the framework's flexibility and extensibility, indicating its potential to serve as a unified data generation framework.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025 2

SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation

Spatial intelligence is a critical component of embodied AI, promoting robots to understand and interact with their environments. While recent advances have enhanced the ability of VLMs to perceive object locations and positional relationships, they still lack the capability to precisely understand object orientations-a key requirement for tasks involving fine-grained manipulations. Addressing this limitation not only requires geometric reasoning but also an expressive and intuitive way to represent orientation. In this context, we propose that natural language offers a more flexible representation space than canonical frames, making it particularly suitable for instruction-following robotic systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the ''plug-in'' direction of a USB or the ''handle'' direction of a knife). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D models annotated with semantic orientations that link geometric understanding to functional semantics. By integrating semantic orientation into a VLM system, we enable robots to generate manipulation actions with both positional and orientational constraints. Extensive experiments in simulation and real world demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances robotic manipulation capabilities, e.g., 48.7% accuracy on Open6DOR and 74.9% accuracy on SIMPLER.

  • 18 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025 2

OmniManip: Towards General Robotic Manipulation via Object-Centric Interaction Primitives as Spatial Constraints

The development of general robotic systems capable of manipulating in unstructured environments is a significant challenge. While Vision-Language Models(VLM) excel in high-level commonsense reasoning, they lack the fine-grained 3D spatial understanding required for precise manipulation tasks. Fine-tuning VLM on robotic datasets to create Vision-Language-Action Models(VLA) is a potential solution, but it is hindered by high data collection costs and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object-centric representation that bridges the gap between VLM's high-level reasoning and the low-level precision required for manipulation. Our key insight is that an object's canonical space, defined by its functional affordances, provides a structured and semantically meaningful way to describe interaction primitives, such as points and directions. These primitives act as a bridge, translating VLM's commonsense reasoning into actionable 3D spatial constraints. In this context, we introduce a dual closed-loop, open-vocabulary robotic manipulation system: one loop for high-level planning through primitive resampling, interaction rendering and VLM checking, and another for low-level execution via 6D pose tracking. This design ensures robust, real-time control without requiring VLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, highlighting the potential of this approach for automating large-scale simulation data generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 7, 2025 3

GravMAD: Grounded Spatial Value Maps Guided Action Diffusion for Generalized 3D Manipulation

Robots' ability to follow language instructions and execute diverse 3D tasks is vital in robot learning. Traditional imitation learning-based methods perform well on seen tasks but struggle with novel, unseen ones due to variability. Recent approaches leverage large foundation models to assist in understanding novel tasks, thereby mitigating this issue. However, these methods lack a task-specific learning process, which is essential for an accurate understanding of 3D environments, often leading to execution failures. In this paper, we introduce GravMAD, a sub-goal-driven, language-conditioned action diffusion framework that combines the strengths of imitation learning and foundation models. Our approach breaks tasks into sub-goals based on language instructions, allowing auxiliary guidance during both training and inference. During training, we introduce Sub-goal Keypose Discovery to identify key sub-goals from demonstrations. Inference differs from training, as there are no demonstrations available, so we use pre-trained foundation models to bridge the gap and identify sub-goals for the current task. In both phases, GravMaps are generated from sub-goals, providing flexible 3D spatial guidance compared to fixed 3D positions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench show that GravMAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with a 28.63% improvement on novel tasks and a 13.36% gain on tasks encountered during training. These results demonstrate GravMAD's strong multi-task learning and generalization in 3D manipulation. Video demonstrations are available at: https://gravmad.github.io.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024

GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

MOVE: A Simple Motion-Based Data Collection Paradigm for Spatial Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

Imitation learning method has shown immense promise for robotic manipulation, yet its practical deployment is fundamentally constrained by the data scarcity. Despite prior work on collecting large-scale datasets, there still remains a significant gap to robust spatial generalization. We identify a key limitation: individual trajectories, regardless of their length, are typically collected from a single, static spatial configuration of the environment. This includes fixed object and target spatial positions as well as unchanging camera viewpoints, which significantly restricts the diversity of spatial information available for learning. To address this critical bottleneck in data efficiency, we propose MOtion-Based Variability Enhancement (MOVE), a simple yet effective data collection paradigm that enables the acquisition of richer spatial information from dynamic demonstrations. Our core contribution is an augmentation strategy that injects motion into any movable objects within the environment for each demonstration. This process implicitly generates a dense and diverse set of spatial configurations within a single trajectory. We conduct extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments to validate our approach. For example, in simulation tasks requiring strong spatial generalization, MOVE achieves an average success rate of 39.1\%, a 76.1\% relative improvement over the static data collection paradigm (22.2\%), and yields up to 2--5times gains in data efficiency on certain tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucywang720/MOVE.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

Trustworthy Visual Predicates for Robust Manipulation Understanding under Degradation

Manipulation understanding requires reliable relational evidence, such as contact, support, containment, motion coupling, grasp, release, and active-hand involvement. Although these visual predicates are widely used in event-chain, graph-based, and neuro-symbolic models, their reliability under visual degradation is rarely analyzed directly. This paper introduces a predicate-level reliability framework for robust manipulation understanding under blur, occlusion, illumination change, low resolution, frame dropping, and detection noise. The framework defines a structured predicate vocabulary, confidence-aware predicate estimation, and reliability metrics for predicate preservation, degradation sensitivity, temporal consistency, confidence-weighted stability, and downstream impact. Experiments on controlled manipulation videos and public egocentric or bimanual datasets, including VISOR/EPIC-KITCHENS, H2O, and ARCTIC, show that predicate failures are structured rather than uniform. Static spatial predicates remain comparatively robust, whereas contact-sensitive, dynamic, and derived predicates such as grasp and release are more fragile. Under severe degradation, detection noise, occlusion, and frame dropping cause the strongest reliability losses. Downstream analysis shows that degraded predicates reduce manipulation-understanding accuracy from 0.89 to 0.58, while removing confidence weighting under moderate degradation reduces accuracy from 0.74 to 0.64. These results show that predicate reliability provides a diagnostic layer between visual perception and structured manipulation reasoning.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 5

R3DP: Real-Time 3D-Aware Policy for Embodied Manipulation

Embodied manipulation requires accurate 3D understanding of objects and their spatial relations to plan and execute contact-rich actions. While large-scale 3D vision models provide strong priors, their computational cost incurs prohibitive latency for real-time control. We propose Real-time 3D-aware Policy (R3DP), which integrates powerful 3D priors into manipulation policies without sacrificing real-time performance. A core innovation of R3DP is the asynchronous fast-slow collaboration module, which seamlessly integrates large-scale 3D priors into the policy without compromising real-time performance. The system maintains real-time efficiency by querying the pre-trained slow system (VGGT) only on sparse key frames, while simultaneously employing a lightweight Temporal Feature Prediction Network (TFPNet) to predict features for all intermediate frames. By leveraging historical data to exploit temporal correlations, TFPNet explicitly improves task success rates through consistent feature estimation. Additionally, to enable more effective multi-view fusion, we introduce a Multi-View Feature Fuser (MVFF) that aggregates features across views by explicitly incorporating camera intrinsics and extrinsics. R3DP offers a plug-and-play solution for integrating large models into real-time inference systems. We evaluate R3DP against multiple baselines across different visual configurations. R3DP effectively harnesses large-scale 3D priors to achieve superior results, outperforming single-view and multi-view DP by 32.9% and 51.4% in average success rate, respectively. Furthermore, by decoupling heavy 3D reasoning from policy execution, R3DP achieves a 44.8% reduction in inference time compared to a naive DP+VGGT integration.

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 27

Hierarchical Spatial Algorithms for High-Resolution Image Quantization and Feature Extraction

This study introduces a modular framework for spatial image processing, integrating grayscale quantization, color and brightness enhancement, image sharpening, bidirectional transformation pipelines, and geometric feature extraction. A stepwise intensity transformation quantizes grayscale images into eight discrete levels, producing a posterization effect that simplifies representation while preserving structural detail. Color enhancement is achieved via histogram equalization in both RGB and YCrCb color spaces, with the latter improving contrast while maintaining chrominance fidelity. Brightness adjustment is implemented through HSV value-channel manipulation, and image sharpening is performed using a 3 * 3 convolution kernel to enhance high-frequency details. A bidirectional transformation pipeline that integrates unsharp masking, gamma correction, and noise amplification achieved accuracy levels of 76.10% and 74.80% for the forward and reverse processes, respectively. Geometric feature extraction employed Canny edge detection, Hough-based line estimation (e.g., 51.50{\deg} for billiard cue alignment), Harris corner detection, and morphological window localization. Cue isolation further yielded 81.87\% similarity against ground truth images. Experimental evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates robust and deterministic performance, highlighting its potential for real-time image analysis and computer vision.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

Spatially Prompted Visual Trajectory Prediction for Egocentric Manipulation

Robotic manipulation is often specified through language instructions or task identifiers, yet cluttered environments with similar objects are better handled by spatially indicating what to move and where to place it. Addressing the vision-centric challenge of object and goal specification, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first formalization of Spatially Prompted Visual Trajectory Prediction (SP-VTP). This novel setting utilizes initial spatial prompts (like bounding boxes or points) to define task objectives, tasking the model with forecasting future end-effector trajectories from egocentric streams. To study this problem, we collect and annotate EgoSPT, a dataset of egocentric spatially prompted manipulation trajectories with first-frame object and target grounding annotations and recovered 3D end-effector motion. SP-VTP is challenging because the task specification is static, while the scene configuration evolves over time. To solve this problem, we propose SPOT(Spatially Prompted Object-Target Policy), which combines a task encoder for first-frame visual and coordinate spatial prompts, an observation encoder for current visual and history context, and a trajectory generator for future end-effector motion. Experiments under strict scene-level splits show that SPOT improves cross-scene trajectory prediction over non-prompted or single-source prompted baselines. Together, EgoSPT and SPOT establish a new spatial prompting problem SP-VTP, as a simple and scalable task condition for egocentric manipulation.

  • 4 authors
·
May 18

Single-Reference Text-to-Image Manipulation with Dual Contrastive Denoising Score

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown remarkable ability to synthesize diverse and high-quality images. However, it is still challenging to directly apply these models for editing real images for two reasons. First, it is difficult for users to come up with a perfect text prompt that accurately describes every visual detail in the input image. Second, while existing models can introduce desirable changes in certain regions, they often dramatically alter the input content and introduce unexpected changes in unwanted regions. To address these challenges, we present Dual Contrastive Denoising Score, a simple yet powerful framework that leverages the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models. Inspired by contrastive learning approaches for unpaired image-to-image translation, we introduce a straightforward dual contrastive loss within the proposed framework. Our approach utilizes the extensive spatial information from the intermediate representations of the self-attention layers in latent diffusion models without depending on auxiliary networks. Our method achieves both flexible content modification and structure preservation between input and output images, as well as zero-shot image-to-image translation. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach outperforms existing methods in real image editing while maintaining the capability to directly utilize pretrained text-to-image diffusion models without further training.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025

CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects

Synthesizing whole-body manipulation of articulated objects, including body motion, hand motion, and object motion, is a critical yet challenging task with broad applications in virtual humans and robotics. The core challenges are twofold. First, achieving realistic whole-body motion requires tight coordination between the hands and the rest of the body, as their movements are interdependent during manipulation. Second, articulated object manipulation typically involves high degrees of freedom and demands higher precision, often requiring the fingers to be placed at specific regions to actuate movable parts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel coordinated diffusion noise optimization framework. Specifically, we perform noise-space optimization over three specialized diffusion models for the body, left hand, and right hand, each trained on its own motion dataset to improve generalization. Coordination naturally emerges through gradient flow along the human kinematic chain, allowing the global body posture to adapt in response to hand motion objectives with high fidelity. To further enhance precision in hand-object interaction, we adopt a unified representation based on basis point sets (BPS), where end-effector positions are encoded as distances to the same BPS used for object geometry. This unified representation captures fine-grained spatial relationships between the hand and articulated object parts, and the resulting trajectories serve as targets to guide the optimization of diffusion noise, producing highly accurate interaction motion. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that our method outperforms existing approaches in motion quality and physical plausibility, and enables various capabilities such as object pose control, simultaneous walking and manipulation, and whole-body generation from hand-only data.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

VLA-4D: Embedding 4D Awareness into Vision-Language-Action Models for SpatioTemporally Coherent Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show potential for general robotic tasks, but remain challenging in spatiotemporally coherent manipulation, which requires fine-grained representations. Typically, existing methods embed 3D positions into visual representations to enhance the spatial precision of actions. However, these methods struggle to achieve temporally coherent control over action execution. In this work, we propose VLA-4D, a general VLA model with 4D awareness for spatiotemporally coherent robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) 4D-aware visual representation. We extract visual features, embed 1D time into 3D positions for 4D embeddings, and fuse them into a unified visual representation via a cross-attention mechanism. 2) Spatiotemporal action representation. We extend conventional spatial action representations with temporal information to enable the spatiotemporal planning, and align the multimodal representations into the LLM for spatiotemporal action prediction. Within this unified framework, the designed visual and action representations jointly make robotic manipulation spatially-smooth and temporally-coherent. In addition, we extend the VLA dataset with temporal action annotations for fine-tuning our model. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the superiority of our method across different tasks of robotic manipulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025 2

Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D

Reconstructing and understanding 3D structures from a limited number of images is a well-established problem in computer vision. Traditional methods usually break this task into multiple subtasks, each requiring complex transformations between different data representations. For instance, dense reconstruction through Structure-from-Motion (SfM) involves converting images into key points, optimizing camera parameters, and estimating structures. Afterward, accurate sparse reconstructions are required for further dense modeling, which is subsequently fed into task-specific neural networks. This multi-step process results in considerable processing time and increased engineering complexity. In this work, we present the Large Spatial Model (LSM), which processes unposed RGB images directly into semantic radiance fields. LSM simultaneously estimates geometry, appearance, and semantics in a single feed-forward operation, and it can generate versatile label maps by interacting with language at novel viewpoints. Leveraging a Transformer-based architecture, LSM integrates global geometry through pixel-aligned point maps. To enhance spatial attribute regression, we incorporate local context aggregation with multi-scale fusion, improving the accuracy of fine local details. To tackle the scarcity of labeled 3D semantic data and enable natural language-driven scene manipulation, we incorporate a pre-trained 2D language-based segmentation model into a 3D-consistent semantic feature field. An efficient decoder then parameterizes a set of semantic anisotropic Gaussians, facilitating supervised end-to-end learning. Extensive experiments across various tasks show that LSM unifies multiple 3D vision tasks directly from unposed images, achieving real-time semantic 3D reconstruction for the first time.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

Worlds in One Demo: A Synthetic Data Engine for Learning Open-World Mobile Manipulation

Learning open-world mobile manipulation policies requires vast data to achieve spatial generalization, long-horizon robustness, and scene generalization. Current prevailing data collection paradigms, teleoperation and UMI, demand prohibitive human effort and cost at scale. To scale beyond the limits of manual data collection, we seek to maximize the value of each human demonstration by scalable data generation. To this end, we introduce WANDA: learning open-World mobile mANipulation from one demonstration via a synthetic DAta engine. WANDA first reconstructs background Gaussian splats and robot-object interaction trajectories from source RGBD observations, as a world substrate for later planning and rendering. It then rearranges contact-rich robot-object interaction segments into extensive spatial configurations, utilizing whole-body motion planning to chain them into new trajectories. To enhance long-horizon robustness, it applies Corrective State Expansion to increase the robot and object state diversity at different stages of mobile manipulation. To unlock cross-environment generalization, trajectories are synthesized on diverse generated 3D worlds from everyday photos. Furthermore, we synthesize photo-realistic observations by compositing rendered robot and object meshes with Gaussian splatting backgrounds. We evaluate our approach on extensive simulation and real-world tasks in various scenes. Experiments show that policies trained with WANDA achieve long-horizon robustness, broad spatial generalization and cross-environment generalization from one real demonstration. Moreover, WANDA naturally supports cross-embodiment data generation, validated by zero-shot deployment on another mobile manipulator with a distinct morphology.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 16

Edit2Interp: Adapting Image Foundation Models from Spatial Editing to Video Frame Interpolation with Few-Shot Learning

Pre-trained image editing models exhibit strong spatial reasoning and object-aware transformation capabilities acquired from billions of image-text pairs, yet they possess no explicit temporal modeling. This paper demonstrates that these spatial priors can be repurposed to unlock temporal synthesis capabilities through minimal adaptation - without introducing any video-specific architecture or motion estimation modules. We show that a large image editing model (Qwen-Image-Edit), originally designed solely for static instruction-based edits, can be adapted for Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) using only 64-256 training samples via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our core contribution is revealing that the model's inherent understanding of "how objects transform" in static scenes contains latent temporal reasoning that can be activated through few-shot fine-tuning. While the baseline model completely fails at producing coherent intermediate frames, our parameter-efficient adaptation successfully unlocks its interpolation capability. Rather than competing with task-specific VFI methods trained from scratch on massive datasets, our work establishes that foundation image editing models possess untapped potential for temporal tasks, offering a data-efficient pathway for video synthesis in resource-constrained scenarios. This bridges the gap between image manipulation and video understanding, suggesting that spatial and temporal reasoning may be more intertwined in foundation models than previously recognized

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 15

Learning Geometrically-Grounded 3D Visual Representations for View-Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Real-world robotic manipulation demands visuomotor policies capable of robust spatial scene understanding and strong generalization across diverse camera viewpoints. While recent advances in 3D-aware visual representations have shown promise, they still suffer from several key limitations, including reliance on multi-view observations during inference which is impractical in single-view restricted scenarios, incomplete scene modeling that fails to capture holistic and fine-grained geometric structures essential for precise manipulation, and lack of effective policy training strategies to retain and exploit the acquired 3D knowledge. To address these challenges, we present MethodName, a unified representation-policy learning framework for view-generalizable robotic manipulation. MethodName introduces a single-view 3D pretraining paradigm that leverages point cloud reconstruction and feed-forward gaussian splatting under multi-view supervision to learn holistic geometric representations. During policy learning, MethodName performs multi-step distillation to preserve the pretrained geometric understanding and effectively transfer it to manipulation skills. We conduct experiments on 12 RLBench tasks, where our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 12.7% in average success rate. Further evaluation on six representative tasks demonstrates strong zero-shot view generalization, with success rate drops of only 22.0% and 29.7% under moderate and large viewpoint shifts respectively, whereas the state-of-the-art method suffers larger decreases of 41.6% and 51.5%.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 30

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025 2

Neural feels with neural fields: Visuo-tactile perception for in-hand manipulation

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023 1

LOME: Learning Human-Object Manipulation with Action-Conditioned Egocentric World Model

Learning human-object manipulation presents significant challenges due to its fine-grained and contact-rich nature of the motions involved. Traditional physics-based animation requires extensive modeling and manual setup, and more importantly, it neither generalizes well across diverse object morphologies nor scales effectively to real-world environment. To address these limitations, we introduce LOME, an egocentric world model that can generate realistic human-object interactions as videos conditioned on an input image, a text prompt, and per-frame human actions, including both body poses and hand gestures. LOME injects strong and precise action guidance into object manipulation by jointly estimating spatial human actions and the environment contexts during training. After finetuning a pretrained video generative model on videos of diverse egocentric human-object interactions, LOME demonstrates not only high action-following accuracy and strong generalization to unseen scenarios, but also realistic physical consequences of hand-object interactions, e.g., liquid flowing from a bottle into a mug after executing a ``pouring'' action. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our video-based framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image based and video-based action-conditioned methods and Image/Text-to-Video (I/T2V) generative model in terms of both temporal consistency and motion control. LOME paves the way for photorealistic AR/VR experiences and scalable robotic training, without being limited to simulated environments or relying on explicit 3D/4D modeling.

SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation systems operating in diverse, dynamic environments must exhibit three critical abilities: multitask interaction, generalization to unseen scenarios, and spatial memory. While significant progress has been made in robotic manipulation, existing approaches often fall short in generalization to complex environmental variations and addressing memory-dependent tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM2Act, a multi-view robotic transformer-based policy that leverages multi-resolution upsampling with visual representations from large-scale foundation model. SAM2Act achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 86.8% across 18 tasks in the RLBench benchmark, and demonstrates robust generalization on The Colosseum benchmark, with only a 4.3% performance gap under diverse environmental perturbations. Building on this foundation, we propose SAM2Act+, a memory-based architecture inspired by SAM2, which incorporates a memory bank, an encoder, and an attention mechanism to enhance spatial memory. To address the need for evaluating memory-dependent tasks, we introduce MemoryBench, a novel benchmark designed to assess spatial memory and action recall in robotic manipulation. SAM2Act+ achieves competitive performance on MemoryBench, significantly outperforming existing approaches and pushing the boundaries of memory-enabled robotic systems. Project page: https://sam2act.github.io/

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 30, 2025

GAP: Geometric Anchor Pre-training for Data-Efficient Visuomotor Learning of Manipulation Tasks

Learning visuomotor policies from scarce expert demonstrations remains a core challenge in robotic manipulation. A primary hurdle lies in distilling high-dimensional RGB representations into control-relevant geometry without overfitting. While using frozen pre-trained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) improves data efficiency, it also shifts most task adaptation onto a small spatial pooling module, which can latch onto task-irrelevant shortcuts and lose geometric grounding when finetuned with few data samples. More broadly, pre-trained visual representations used for policy learning have been observed to struggle under even minor scene perturbations, highlighting the need for robustness-oriented inductive biases. We propose Geometric Anchor Pre-training (GAP), a simple, action-free warm-up stage that regularizes the spatial adapter before downstream imitation learning. GAP pre-trains the pooling layer on a lightweight simulated proxy task where object masks are available at no cost, encouraging the adapter to produce keypoints that lie on the object, cover its spatial extent, and remain sharp and repeatable over time. This yields stable geometric anchors that provide a reliable coordinate interface for few-shot policy learning, while keeping the VFM frozen. We evaluate GAP on RoboMimic and ManiSkill under severe data scarcity (15-50 demonstrations) and domain shift. A simple adapter regularized with GAP consistently outperforms stronger attention-based poolers and end-to-end fine-tuning, achieving 62% success on RoboMimic Can with 15 demonstrations (+16% over AFA), 63% on the long-horizon high-precision Tool Hang task with 50 demonstrations, and 61% on ManiSkill StackCube with 30 demonstrations (+11% over full fine-tuning). The proxy stage is lightweight and fully decoupled from downstream tasks, making it practical to reuse across environments and manipulation skills.

  • 5 authors
·
May 14

Seeing Across Views: Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning of Vision-Language Models in Robotic Scenes

Vision-language models (VLMs) are essential to Embodied AI, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act in complex environments. They also serve as the foundation for the recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Yet most evaluations of VLMs focus on single-view settings, leaving their ability to integrate multi-view information underexplored. At the same time, multi-camera setups are increasingly standard in robotic platforms, as they provide complementary perspectives to mitigate occlusion and depth ambiguity. Whether VLMs can effectively leverage such multi-view inputs for robotic reasoning therefore remains an open question. To bridge this gap, we introduce MV-RoboBench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the multi-view spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs in robotic manipulation. MV-RoboBench consists of 1.7k manually curated QA items across eight subtasks, divided into two primary categories: spatial understanding and robotic execution. We evaluate a diverse set of existing VLMs, including both open-source and closed-source models, along with enhanced versions incorporating CoT-inspired techniques. The results show that state-of-the-art models remain far below human performance, underscoring the substantial challenges VLMs face in multi-view robotic perception. Additionally, our analysis uncovers two key findings: (i) spatial intelligence and robotic task execution are positively correlated in multi-view robotic scenarios; and (ii) strong performance on existing general-purpose single-view spatial understanding benchmarks does not reliably translate to success in the robotic spatial tasks assessed by our benchmark. We release MV-RoboBench as an open resource to foster progress in spatially grounded VLMs and VLAs, providing not only data but also a standardized evaluation protocol for multi-view embodied reasoning.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025 1

The Moving Eye: Enhancing VLA Spatial Generalization via Hybrid Dynamic Data Collection

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable promise in generalized robotic manipulation. However, their spatial generalization remains fragile. We argue that simply increasing the number of viewpoints is insufficient. Models often fall into the trap of Shortcut Learning, latching onto spurious correlations (e.g., fixed relative poses between objects or between the camera and robot base) rather than learning true spatial relationships. In this work, we propose a data-centric solution to enhance VLA spatial generalization. We utilize a dual-arm setup where one arm performs manipulation while the other serves as a mobile environmental camera. We systematically evaluate three data distribution patterns: Fixed, Multi-Fixed, and Moving Views. Our findings reveal that a hybrid strategy, combining continuous camera motion with diverse static viewpoints, yields the best performance by substantially reducing spurious correlations while maintaining training stability. Our experiments demonstrate that this strategy mitigates spurious correlations, enabling VLAs to generalize to unseen camera poses and object configurations where simply adding more static viewpoints fails. Crucially, we reveal that the susceptibility to shortcut learning and the struggle with spatial generalization are universal characteristics shared across diverse architectures. Consequently, all evaluated models (ACT, Diffusion, and VLA models including Pi0 and Gr00t) benefit significantly from our mixed data strategy.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1

3DVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models via 3D Spatial and Instance Understanding

Vision-Language-Action models have achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, yet they suffer from a critical limitation: a lack of 3D scene understanding. This deficiency manifests as three intertwined challenges: weak extraction of 3D spatial positions without enforcing multi-view consistency, inadequate 3D instance understanding, and fragile reasoning under occlusion. Although mature 3D perception methods exist, their direct integration into VLA pipelines is hindered by architectural incompatibility and by heavy reliance on costly instance-level annotations. To address the above challenges, we propose 3DVLA, a plug-and-play framework that injects robust 3D reasoning into pretrained VLAs without requiring extra manual labels or discarding VLM priors. Specifically, 3DVLA tackles the three challenges through: (1) pervasive 3D feature encoding with explicit multi-view consistency constraints across all modalities and a Spatially-Conditioned Geometry Aggregation method, (2) an instance estimation module with high-level instance tokens for 3D instance awareness, and (3) a masked self-supervised 3D encoding branch that retains its predictor for visual token completion to handle occlusions. We integrate 3DVLA with multiple VLA baselines and evaluate on LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0. Results show consistent and significant gains in manipulation performance, validating both the effectiveness and plug-and-play compatibility of our approach.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27

Cortical Policy: A Dual-Stream View Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

View transformers process multi-view observations to predict actions and have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically extract static visual representations in a view-specific manner, leading to inadequate 3D spatial reasoning ability and a lack of dynamic adaptation. Taking inspiration from how the human brain integrates static and dynamic views to address these challenges, we propose Cortical Policy, a novel dual-stream view transformer for robotic manipulation that jointly reasons from static-view and dynamic-view streams. The static-view stream enhances spatial understanding by aligning features of geometrically consistent keypoints extracted from a pretrained 3D foundation model. The dynamic-view stream achieves adaptive adjustment through position-aware pretraining of an egocentric gaze estimation model, computationally replicating the human cortical dorsal pathway. Subsequently, the complementary view representations of both streams are integrated to determine the final actions, enabling the model to handle spatially-complex and dynamically-changing tasks under language conditions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench, the challenging COLOSSEUM benchmark, and real-world tasks demonstrate that Cortical Policy outperforms state-of-the-art baselines substantially, validating the superiority of dual-stream design for visuomotor control. Our cortex-inspired framework offers a fresh perspective for robotic manipulation and holds potential for broader application in vision-based robot control.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21

You Only Teach Once: Learn One-Shot Bimanual Robotic Manipulation from Video Demonstrations

Bimanual robotic manipulation is a long-standing challenge of embodied intelligence due to its characteristics of dual-arm spatial-temporal coordination and high-dimensional action spaces. Previous studies rely on pre-defined action taxonomies or direct teleoperation to alleviate or circumvent these issues, often making them lack simplicity, versatility and scalability. Differently, we believe that the most effective and efficient way for teaching bimanual manipulation is learning from human demonstrated videos, where rich features such as spatial-temporal positions, dynamic postures, interaction states and dexterous transitions are available almost for free. In this work, we propose the YOTO (You Only Teach Once), which can extract and then inject patterns of bimanual actions from as few as a single binocular observation of hand movements, and teach dual robot arms various complex tasks. Furthermore, based on keyframes-based motion trajectories, we devise a subtle solution for rapidly generating training demonstrations with diverse variations of manipulated objects and their locations. These data can then be used to learn a customized bimanual diffusion policy (BiDP) across diverse scenes. In experiments, YOTO achieves impressive performance in mimicking 5 intricate long-horizon bimanual tasks, possesses strong generalization under different visual and spatial conditions, and outperforms existing visuomotor imitation learning methods in accuracy and efficiency. Our project link is https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/YOTO.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation

How can we imbue robots with the ability to manipulate objects precisely but also to reason about them in terms of abstract concepts? Recent works in manipulation have shown that end-to-end networks can learn dexterous skills that require precise spatial reasoning, but these methods often fail to generalize to new goals or quickly learn transferable concepts across tasks. In parallel, there has been great progress in learning generalizable semantic representations for vision and language by training on large-scale internet data, however these representations lack the spatial understanding necessary for fine-grained manipulation. To this end, we propose a framework that combines the best of both worlds: a two-stream architecture with semantic and spatial pathways for vision-based manipulation. Specifically, we present CLIPort, a language-conditioned imitation-learning agent that combines the broad semantic understanding (what) of CLIP [1] with the spatial precision (where) of Transporter [2]. Our end-to-end framework is capable of solving a variety of language-specified tabletop tasks from packing unseen objects to folding cloths, all without any explicit representations of object poses, instance segmentations, memory, symbolic states, or syntactic structures. Experiments in simulated and real-world settings show that our approach is data efficient in few-shot settings and generalizes effectively to seen and unseen semantic concepts. We even learn one multi-task policy for 10 simulated and 9 real-world tasks that is better or comparable to single-task policies.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 24, 2021

EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3, 2025 3

ODYSSEY: Open-World Quadrupeds Exploration and Manipulation for Long-Horizon Tasks

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025 3

MesaTask: Towards Task-Driven Tabletop Scene Generation via 3D Spatial Reasoning

The ability of robots to interpret human instructions and execute manipulation tasks necessitates the availability of task-relevant tabletop scenes for training. However, traditional methods for creating these scenes rely on time-consuming manual layout design or purely randomized layouts, which are limited in terms of plausibility or alignment with the tasks. In this paper, we formulate a novel task, namely task-oriented tabletop scene generation, which poses significant challenges due to the substantial gap between high-level task instructions and the tabletop scenes. To support research on such a challenging task, we introduce MesaTask-10K, a large-scale dataset comprising approximately 10,700 synthetic tabletop scenes with manually crafted layouts that ensure realistic layouts and intricate inter-object relations. To bridge the gap between tasks and scenes, we propose a Spatial Reasoning Chain that decomposes the generation process into object inference, spatial interrelation reasoning, and scene graph construction for the final 3D layout. We present MesaTask, an LLM-based framework that utilizes this reasoning chain and is further enhanced with DPO algorithms to generate physically plausible tabletop scenes that align well with given task descriptions. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of MesaTask compared to baselines in generating task-conforming tabletop scenes with realistic layouts. Project page is at https://mesatask.github.io/

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025 3

SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025 1

R2RGEN: Real-to-Real 3D Data Generation for Spatially Generalized Manipulation

Towards the aim of generalized robotic manipulation, spatial generalization is the most fundamental capability that requires the policy to work robustly under different spatial distribution of objects, environment and agent itself. To achieve this, substantial human demonstrations need to be collected to cover different spatial configurations for training a generalized visuomotor policy via imitation learning. Prior works explore a promising direction that leverages data generation to acquire abundant spatially diverse data from minimal source demonstrations. However, most approaches face significant sim-to-real gap and are often limited to constrained settings, such as fixed-base scenarios and predefined camera viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a real-to-real 3D data generation framework (R2RGen) that directly augments the pointcloud observation-action pairs to generate real-world data. R2RGen is simulator- and rendering-free, thus being efficient and plug-and-play. Specifically, given a single source demonstration, we introduce an annotation mechanism for fine-grained parsing of scene and trajectory. A group-wise augmentation strategy is proposed to handle complex multi-object compositions and diverse task constraints. We further present camera-aware processing to align the distribution of generated data with real-world 3D sensor. Empirically, R2RGen substantially enhances data efficiency on extensive experiments and demonstrates strong potential for scaling and application on mobile manipulation.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025 2

Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing

As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods primarily approach multimodal reasoning in a straightforward, text-centric manner, where both reasoning and answer derivation are conducted purely through text, with the only difference being the presence of multimodal input. As a result, these methods often encounter fundamental limitations in spatial reasoning tasks that demand precise geometric understanding and continuous spatial tracking-capabilities that humans achieve through mental visualization and manipulation. To address the limitations, we propose drawing to reason in space, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to reason through elementary drawing operations in the visual space. By equipping models with basic drawing operations, including annotating bounding boxes and drawing auxiliary lines, we empower them to express and analyze spatial relationships through direct visual manipulation, meanwhile avoiding the performance ceiling imposed by specialized perception tools in previous tool-integrated reasoning approaches. To cultivate this capability, we develop a three-stage training framework: cold-start training with synthetic data to establish basic drawing abilities, reflective rejection sampling to enhance self-reflection behaviors, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize for target rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, named VILASR, consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, involving maze navigation, static spatial reasoning, video-based reasoning, and multi-view-based reasoning tasks, with an average improvement of 18.4%.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

SPARC: Reliable Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations at Scale

This work introduces Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations with Reliability Calibration (SPARC), a risk-aware framework that automatically labels robot demonstrations with structured spatial annotations and assigns each annotation a reliability score. Structured spatial annotations, such as bounding boxes, object trajectories, and manipulation phase labels, benefit a broad range of robotics applications from training grounded robot policies and embodied foundation models to motion planning and hierarchical task composition. Existing automated pipelines generate such annotations at scale but provide no reliable quality signal: detector confidence is poorly calibrated for annotation correctness, forcing a choice between accepting noisy labels or discarding useful samples. In contrast to existing automated pipelines, SPARC leverages the spatio-temporal structure inherent to robot tasks to generate a reliability signal, reducing noisy labels and retaining more useful samples. We further introduce Interaction-Aware Bench (IA-Bench), a benchmark that measures model accuracy in grounding the locations of interacted objects in robot demonstrations. On 1.7k human-annotated demonstrations spanning diverse embodiments and scenarios, SPARC significantly outperforms detection-only baselines in localization accuracy while retaining three times more samples at high-precision operating points. Our experiments demonstrate that models finetuned on our annotations achieve state-of-the-art results on object-grounding and pointing benchmarks among similarly sized models, while remaining competitive on broader spatial-reasoning suites without manually verified or annotated training data. Furthermore, policies trained on SPARC-generated annotations outperform baselines in cluttered, visually ambiguous real-world scenes. Code, data, and models are available at intuitive-robots.github.io/sparc-labeling.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10

ActiveVLA: Injecting Active Perception into Vision-Language-Action Models for Precise 3D Robotic Manipulation

Recent advances in robot manipulation have leveraged pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) and explored integrating 3D spatial signals into these models for effective action prediction, giving rise to the promising vision-language-action (VLA) paradigm. However, most existing approaches overlook the importance of active perception: they typically rely on static, wrist-mounted cameras that provide an end-effector-centric viewpoint. As a result, these models are unable to adaptively select optimal viewpoints or resolutions during task execution, which significantly limits their performance in long-horizon tasks and fine-grained manipulation scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose ActiveVLA, a novel vision-language-action framework that empowers robots with active perception capabilities for high-precision, fine-grained manipulation. ActiveVLA adopts a coarse-to-fine paradigm, dividing the process into two stages: (1) Critical region localization. ActiveVLA projects 3D inputs onto multi-view 2D projections, identifies critical 3D regions, and supports dynamic spatial awareness. (2) Active perception optimization. Drawing on the localized critical regions, ActiveVLA uses an active view selection strategy to choose optimal viewpoints. These viewpoints aim to maximize amodal relevance and diversity while minimizing occlusions. Additionally, ActiveVLA applies a 3D zoom-in to improve resolution in key areas. Together, these steps enable finer-grained active perception for precise manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ActiveVLA achieves precise 3D manipulation and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three simulation benchmarks. Moreover, ActiveVLA transfers seamlessly to real-world scenarios, enabling robots to learn high-precision tasks in complex environments.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 13

S$^2$Edit: Text-Guided Image Editing with Precise Semantic and Spatial Control

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality generation and manipulation of images guided by texts, as well as concept learning from images. However, naive applications of existing methods to editing tasks that require fine-grained control, e.g., face editing, often lead to suboptimal solutions with identity information and high-frequency details lost during the editing process, or irrelevant image regions altered due to entangled concepts. In this work, we propose S^2Edit, a novel method based on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model that enables personalized editing with precise semantic and spatial control. We first fine-tune our model to embed the identity information into a learnable text token. During fine-tuning, we disentangle the learned identity token from attributes to be edited by enforcing an orthogonality constraint in the textual feature space. To ensure that the identity token only affects regions of interest, we apply object masks to guide the cross-attention maps. At inference time, our method performs localized editing while faithfully preserving the original identity with semantically disentangled and spatially focused identity token learned. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of S^2Edit over state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Additionally, we showcase several compositional image editing applications of S^2Edit such as makeup transfer.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 6, 2025

RoboInter: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite Towards Robotic Manipulation

Advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have stimulated growing interest in vision-language-action (VLA) systems for robot manipulation. However, existing manipulation datasets remain costly to curate, highly embodiment-specific, and insufficient in coverage and diversity, thereby hindering the generalization of VLA models. Recent approaches attempt to mitigate these limitations via a plan-then-execute paradigm, where high-level plans (e.g., subtasks, trace) are first generated and subsequently translated into low-level actions, but they critically rely on extra intermediate supervision, which is largely absent from existing datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RoboInter Manipulation Suite, a unified resource including data, benchmarks, and models of intermediate representations for manipulation. It comprises RoboInter-Tool, a lightweight GUI that enables semi-automatic annotation of diverse representations, and RoboInter-Data, a large-scale dataset containing over 230k episodes across 571 diverse scenes, which provides dense per-frame annotations over more than 10 categories of intermediate representations, substantially exceeding prior work in scale and annotation quality. Building upon this foundation, RoboInter-VQA introduces 9 spatial and 20 temporal embodied VQA categories to systematically benchmark and enhance the embodied reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Meanwhile, RoboInter-VLA offers an integrated plan-then-execute framework, supporting modular and end-to-end VLA variants that bridge high-level planning with low-level execution via intermediate supervision. In total, RoboInter establishes a practical foundation for advancing robust and generalizable robotic learning via fine-grained and diverse intermediate representations.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 10

Dexplore: Scalable Neural Control for Dexterous Manipulation from Reference-Scoped Exploration

Hand-object motion-capture (MoCap) repositories offer large-scale, contact-rich demonstrations and hold promise for scaling dexterous robotic manipulation. Yet demonstration inaccuracies and embodiment gaps between human and robot hands limit the straightforward use of these data. Existing methods adopt a three-stage workflow, including retargeting, tracking, and residual correction, which often leaves demonstrations underused and compound errors across stages. We introduce Dexplore, a unified single-loop optimization that jointly performs retargeting and tracking to learn robot control policies directly from MoCap at scale. Rather than treating demonstrations as ground truth, we use them as soft guidance. From raw trajectories, we derive adaptive spatial scopes, and train with reinforcement learning to keep the policy in-scope while minimizing control effort and accomplishing the task. This unified formulation preserves demonstration intent, enables robot-specific strategies to emerge, improves robustness to noise, and scales to large demonstration corpora. We distill the scaled tracking policy into a vision-based, skill-conditioned generative controller that encodes diverse manipulation skills in a rich latent representation, supporting generalization across objects and real-world deployment. Taken together, these contributions position Dexplore as a principled bridge that transforms imperfect demonstrations into effective training signals for dexterous manipulation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025

MLM: Learning Multi-task Loco-Manipulation Whole-Body Control for Quadruped Robot with Arm

Whole-body loco-manipulation for quadruped robots with arms remains a challenging problem, particularly in achieving multi-task control. To address this, we propose MLM, a reinforcement learning framework driven by both real-world and simulation data. It enables a six-DoF robotic arm-equipped quadruped robot to perform whole-body loco-manipulation for multiple tasks autonomously or under human teleoperation. To address the problem of balancing multiple tasks during the learning of loco-manipulation, we introduce a trajectory library with an adaptive, curriculum-based sampling mechanism. This approach allows the policy to efficiently leverage real-world collected trajectories for learning multi-task loco-manipulation. To address deployment scenarios with only historical observations and to enhance the performance of policy execution across tasks with different spatial ranges, we propose a Trajectory-Velocity Prediction policy network. It predicts unobservable future trajectories and velocities. By leveraging extensive simulation data and curriculum-based rewards, our controller achieves whole-body behaviors in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world deployment. Ablation studies in simulation verify the necessity and effectiveness of our approach, while real-world experiments on a Go2 robot with an Airbot robotic arm demonstrate the policy's good performance in multi-task execution.

  • 17 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

LEGO-Puzzles: How Good Are MLLMs at Multi-Step Spatial Reasoning?

Multi-step spatial reasoning entails understanding and reasoning about spatial relationships across multiple sequential steps, which is crucial for tackling complex real-world applications, such as robotic manipulation, autonomous navigation, and automated assembly. To assess how well current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have acquired this fundamental capability, we introduce LEGO-Puzzles, a scalable benchmark designed to evaluate both spatial understanding and sequential reasoning in MLLMs through LEGO-based tasks. LEGO-Puzzles consists of 1,100 carefully curated visual question-answering (VQA) samples spanning 11 distinct tasks, ranging from basic spatial understanding to complex multi-step reasoning. Based on LEGO-Puzzles, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs and uncover significant limitations in their spatial reasoning capabilities: even the most powerful MLLMs can answer only about half of the test cases, whereas human participants achieve over 90\% accuracy. In addition to VQA tasks, we evaluate MLLMs' abilities to generate LEGO images following assembly illustrations. Our experiments show that only Gemini-2.0-Flash and GPT-4o exhibit a limited ability to follow these instructions, while other MLLMs either replicate the input image or generate completely irrelevant outputs. Overall, LEGO-Puzzles exposes critical deficiencies in existing MLLMs' spatial understanding and sequential reasoning capabilities, and underscores the need for further advancements in multimodal spatial reasoning.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025 2

SpaceTools: Tool-Augmented Spatial Reasoning via Double Interactive RL

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong qualitative visual understanding, but struggle with metrically precise spatial reasoning required for embodied applications. The agentic paradigm promises that VLMs can use a wide variety of tools that could augment these capabilities, such as depth estimators, segmentation models, and pose estimators. Yet it remains an open challenge how to realize this vision without solely relying on handcrafted prompting strategies or enforcing fixed, predefined tool pipelines that limit VLMs' ability to discover optimal tool-use patterns. Reinforcement Learning could overcome this gap, but has so far been limited to reasoning with a single visual tool due to the large search space in multi-tool reasoning. We introduce Double Interactive Reinforcement Learning (DIRL), a two-phase training framework where VLMs learn to coordinate multiple tools through interactive exploration and feedback. In the teaching phase, we combine demonstrations from a single tool specialist trained via interactive RL with traces from a frontier model using all tools. In the exploration phase, the model further refines multi-tool coordination through continued RL. Our model, SpaceTools, with tool-augmented spatial reasoning ability, achieves state-of-the-art performance on spatial understanding benchmarks (RoboSpatial-Home, BLINK, BOP-ASK) and demonstrates reliable real-world manipulation using a 7-DOF robot as a tool. DIRL provides substantial improvements over the vanilla SFT (+12% on RoboSpatial) and RL (+16% on RoboSpatial) baselines. Project page: https://spacetools.github.io/.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Dec 3, 2025 2

Robo2VLM: Visual Question Answering from Large-Scale In-the-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasets

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm - using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot trajectory, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries - images with textural multiple-choice questions - based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We curate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions covering 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning.

  • 4 authors
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May 21, 2025 2

ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loop

Spatial intelligence unfolds through a perception-action loop: agents act to acquire observations, and reason about how observations vary as a function of action. Rather than passively processing what is seen, they actively uncover what is unseen - occluded structure, dynamics, containment, and functionality that cannot be resolved from passive sensing alone. We move beyond prior formulations of spatial intelligence that assume oracle observations by recasting the observer as an actor. We introduce ESI-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for embodied spatial intelligence spanning 10 task categories and 29 subcategories built on OmniGibson, grounded in Spelke's core knowledge systems. Agents must decide what abilities to deploy - perception, locomotion, and manipulation - and how to sequence them to actively accumulate task-relevant evidence. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that active exploration substantially outperforms passive counterparts, with agents spontaneously discovering emergent spatial strategies without explicit instructions, while random multi-view often adds noise rather than signal despite consuming far more images. Most failures stem not from weak perception but from action blindness: poor action choices lead to poor observations, which in turn drive cascading errors. While explicit 3D grounding stabilizes reasoning on depth-sensitive tasks, imperfect 3D representation proves more harmful than 2D baselines by distorting spatial relations. Human studies further reveal that unlike humans who seek falsifying viewpoints and revise beliefs under contradiction, models commit prematurely with high confidence regardless of evidence quality, exposing a metacognitive gap that neither better perception nor more embodied interaction alone can close.

  • 8 authors
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May 17 1

ACE-Brain-0: Spatial Intelligence as a Shared Scaffold for Universal Embodiments

Universal embodied intelligence demands robust generalization across heterogeneous embodiments, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing embodied brain in training a unified model over diverse embodiments frequently triggers long-tail data, gradient interference, and catastrophic forgetting, making it notoriously difficult to balance universal generalization with domain-specific proficiency. In this report, we introduce ACE-Brain-0, a generalist foundation brain that unifies spatial reasoning, autonomous driving, and embodied manipulation within a single multimodal large language model~(MLLM). Our key insight is that spatial intelligence serves as a universal scaffold across diverse physical embodiments: although vehicles, robots, and UAVs differ drastically in morphology, they share a common need for modeling 3D mental space, making spatial cognition a natural, domain-agnostic foundation for cross-embodiment transfer. Building on this insight, we propose the Scaffold-Specialize-Reconcile~(SSR) paradigm, which first establishes a shared spatial foundation, then cultivates domain-specialized experts, and finally harmonizes them through data-free model merging. Furthermore, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization~(GRPO) to strengthen the model's comprehensive capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACE-Brain-0 achieves competitive and even state-of-the-art performance across 24 spatial and embodiment-related benchmarks.

  • 24 authors
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Mar 3

Uni-Skill: Building Self-Evolving Skill Repository for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

While skill-centric approaches leverage foundation models to enhance generalization in compositional tasks, they often rely on fixed skill libraries, limiting adaptability to new tasks without manual intervention. To address this, we propose Uni-Skill, a Unified Skill-centric framework that supports skill-aware planning and facilitates automatic skill evolution. Unlike prior methods that restrict planning to predefined skills, Uni-Skill requests for new skill implementations when existing ones are insufficient, ensuring adaptable planning with self-augmented skill library. To support automatic implementation of diverse skills requested by the planning module, we construct SkillFolder, a VerbNet-inspired repository derived from large-scale unstructured robotic videos. SkillFolder introduces a hierarchical skill taxonomy that captures diverse skill descriptions at multiple levels of abstraction. By populating this taxonomy with large-scale, automatically annotated demonstrations, Uni-Skill shifts the paradigm of skill acquisition from inefficient manual annotation to efficient offline structural retrieval. Retrieved examples provide semantic supervision over behavior patterns and fine-grained references for spatial trajectories, enabling few-shot skill inference without deployment-time demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings verify the state-of-the-art performance of Uni-Skill over existing VLM-based skill-centric approaches, highlighting its advanced reasoning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization across a wide range of novel tasks.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 3

GST-VLA: Structured Gaussian Spatial Tokens for 3D Depth-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models

VLA models encode visual observations as 2D patch tokens with no intrinsic geometric structure. We introduce GST-VLA with two contributions. First, the Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer (GST) converts frozen dense depth and frozen semantic patch features into N_g{=}128 anisotropic 3D Gaussian primitives, each parameterized by a metric residual mean μin R^3, log-scale covariance log σin R^3, and learned opacity αin (0,1). The covariance eigenstructure encodes local surface orientation, and opacity provides per-primitive geometric confidence, both inaccessible from scalar depth. Spatial attention pooling with learned queries concentrates the fixed token budget on geometrically salient regions rather than distributing uniformly. Second, 3D Depth-Aware Chain-of-Thought (DA-CoT) reasoning supervises four structured intermediate spatial thoughts, covering 3D object grounding, grasp affordance contact geometry, pairwise metric distances, and coarse SE(3) waypoints, as explicit generation targets in the training loss. A cross-attention sublayer at every VLM transformer block provides direct access to the raw 256-primitive Gaussian field during DA-CoT generation. A 300M-parameter flow-matching action expert with mixture-of-experts feedforward sublayers decodes 7-DoF delta action chunks via conditional ODE integration, conditioned on both VLM hidden states and DA-CoT outputs through dual cross-attention. Trained with composite L_flow + L_CoT + L_depth across three progressive stages, GST-VLA achieves 96.4% on LIBERO (+2.0%), and 80.2% on SimplerEnv (+5.4%). Ablations isolate the contribution of each GST component, each DA-CoT thought, and each training stage, confirming independent and synergistic gains concentrated on precision demanding tasks.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 9

EmboAlign: Aligning Video Generation with Compositional Constraints for Zero-Shot Manipulation

Video generative models (VGMs) pretrained on large-scale internet data can produce temporally coherent rollout videos that capture rich object dynamics, offering a compelling foundation for zero-shot robotic manipulation. However, VGMs often produce physically implausible rollouts, and converting their pixel-space motion into robot actions through geometric retargeting further introduces cumulative errors from imperfect depth estimation and keypoint tracking. To address these challenges, we present , a data-free framework that aligns VGM outputs with compositional constraints generated by vision-language models (VLMs) at inference time. The key insight is that VLMs offer a capability complementary to VGMs: structured spatial reasoning that can identify the physical constraints critical to the success and safety of manipulation execution. Given a language instruction, uses a VLM to automatically extract a set of compositional constraints capturing task-specific requirements, which are then applied at two stages: (1) constraint-guided rollout selection, which scores and filters a batch of VGM rollouts to retain the most physically plausible candidate, and (2) constraint-based trajectory optimization, which uses the selected rollout as initialization and refines the robot trajectory under the same constraint set to correct retargeting errors. We evaluate on six real-robot manipulation tasks requiring precise, constraint-sensitive execution, improving the overall success rate by 43.3\% points over the strongest baseline without any task-specific training data.

Lift3D-VLA: Lifting VLA Models to 3D Geometry and Dynamics-Aware Manipulation

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding and spatial reasoning. While some VLA approaches attempt to incorporate 3D information, they are constrained by limited data availability and geometric information loss in current 3D encoding pipelines, and fail to jointly capture 3D geometry and temporally structured actions in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we introduce Lift3D-VLA, a unified VLA framework that equips models with explicit 3D point cloud reasoning and enables temporally coherent action generation. First, building upon our previous work Lift3D, an enhanced 2D model-lifting strategy is proposed to geometrically align 3D points with pretrained 2D positional embeddings. This design enables direct point-cloud encoding within the VLA vision encoder while minimizing spatial information loss. Based on explicit 3D inputs, we propose Geometry-Centric Masked Autoencoding (GC-MAE), a dual-objective self-supervised framework that reconstructs the current point cloud while predicting its future geometric evolution. This formulation allows the 2D vision encoder to internalize both 3D structure and physical dynamics. To fully exploit 3D representations, we further design layer-wise temporal action modeling, which leverages multiple layers of the LLM to collaboratively predict action chunks, enabling temporally consistent predictions. Across 22 simulated tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks, Lift3D-VLA achieves 10.8% and 11.1% higher mean success rates on MetaWorld and RLBench than the best-performing prior VLA methods, and outperforms the strongest real-world baseline by 4 percentage points, while exhibiting stronger generalization to out-of-distribution perturbations.

  • 11 authors
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Jul 6

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

  • 14 authors
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Jun 9

Mobile UMI: Cross-View Diffusion Policy with Decoupled Kinematics for Mobile Manipulation

Mobile imitation learning on portable demonstration interfaces faces two coupled bottlenecks: locomotion-contaminated action labels and inference-induced execution latency on a continuously moving base. Recent wrist-mounted interfaces lower the cost of tabletop data collection, yet a single wrist view does not capture the global context required for base navigation. Adding a body-mounted camera entangles human walking with hand motion. Meanwhile, generative policies introduce hundreds of milliseconds of inference latency, during which the base advances past predicted waypoints, forcing backward corrections at action splices. This paper presents Mobile UMI, a hardware-free demonstration framework that addresses both gaps through three components. First, a dual-camera capture system records chest-centric global context and wrist-centric local interaction without any robot present. Second, a one-shot ChArUco-based spatial anchor unifies the chest and hand visual-inertial frames; the hand pose is then re-expressed relative to the chest to extract decoupled SE(3) manipulation and SE(2) base trajectories. Third, an asynchronous receding-horizon executor performs online state matching: each generated action chunk is realigned with the current physical pose so that expired waypoints are discarded before execution. The full system is evaluated on four long-horizon household tasks, achieving an average success rate of 83.8% over 100 trials per task. Controlled comparisons against ACT and Diffusion Policy show that the chest-relative label alone closes much of the gap; online state matching closes the remainder. These results indicate that, for mobile imitation learning under the tested conditions, explicit kinematic factorization combined with state-level latency alignment provides an effective solution without requiring architectural changes to the underlying policy class.

  • 3 authors
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May 19

Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation

Reliable simulation evaluation of robot manipulation policies serves as a high-fidelity proxy for real-world performance. Although existing benchmarks cover a wide range of task categories, they lack visual realism, creating a large domain gap between simulation and reality. This undermines the reliability of simulation-based evaluation in predicting real-world performance. To mitigate the sim-to-real visual gap, we conduct a systematic analysis to isolate the effects of lighting and material. Our results show that these factors play a critical role in geometric reasoning and spatial grounding, yet are largely overlooked in existing benchmarks. Motivated by the analysis, we propose VISER, a visually realistic benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in simulation. VISER features a high-fidelity dataset of over 1,000 3D assets with physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, along with 3D scenes created from these assets through curated layouts or generation. To this end, we propose an automated pipeline leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for material-aware part segmentation and material retrieval, enabling scalable generation of physically plausible assets. Building on the high-fidelity 3D asset dataset, we construct diverse evaluation tasks, such as grasping, placing, and long-horizon tasks, enabling scalable and reproducible assessment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Our benchmark shows a strong correlation between simulation and real-world performance, achieving an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92 across different policies.

  • 7 authors
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May 7

RoboAfford++: A Generative AI-Enhanced Dataset for Multimodal Affordance Learning in Robotic Manipulation and Navigation

Robotic manipulation and navigation are fundamental capabilities of embodied intelligence, enabling effective robot interactions with the physical world. Achieving these capabilities requires a cohesive understanding of the environment, including object recognition to localize target objects, object affordances to identify potential interaction areas and spatial affordances to discern optimal areas for both object placement and robot movement. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level task planning and scene understanding, they often struggle to infer actionable positions for physical interaction, such as functional grasping points and permissible placement regions. This limitation stems from the lack of fine-grained annotations for object and spatial affordances in their training datasets. To tackle this challenge, we introduce RoboAfford++, a generative AI-enhanced dataset for multimodal affordance learning for both robotic manipulation and navigation. Our dataset comprises 869,987 images paired with 2.0 million question answering (QA) annotations, covering three critical tasks: object affordance recognition to identify target objects based on attributes and spatial relationships, object affordance prediction to pinpoint functional parts for manipulation, and spatial affordance localization to identify free space for object placement and robot navigation. Complementing this dataset, we propose RoboAfford-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing affordance-aware prediction in real-world scenarios, featuring 338 meticulously annotated samples across the same three tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal the deficiencies of existing VLMs in affordance learning, while fine-tuning on the RoboAfford++ dataset significantly enhances their ability to reason about object and spatial affordances, validating the dataset's effectiveness.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 15, 2025

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 23, 2025

Detecting Recolored Image by Spatial Correlation

Image forensics, aiming to ensure the authenticity of the image, has made great progress in dealing with common image manipulation such as copy-move, splicing, and inpainting in the past decades. However, only a few researchers pay attention to an emerging editing technique called image recoloring, which can manipulate the color values of an image to give it a new style. To prevent it from being used maliciously, the previous approaches address the conventional recoloring from the perspective of inter-channel correlation and illumination consistency. In this paper, we try to explore a solution from the perspective of the spatial correlation, which exhibits the generic detection capability for both conventional and deep learning-based recoloring. Through theoretical and numerical analysis, we find that the recoloring operation will inevitably destroy the spatial correlation between pixels, implying a new prior of statistical discriminability. Based on such fact, we generate a set of spatial correlation features and learn the informative representation from the set via a convolutional neural network. To train our network, we use three recoloring methods to generate a large-scale and high-quality data set. Extensive experimental results in two recoloring scenes demonstrate that the spatial correlation features are highly discriminative. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art detection accuracy on multiple benchmark datasets and exhibits well generalization for unknown types of recoloring methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 22, 2022

RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Robotics

Spatial understanding is a crucial capability for robots to make grounded decisions based on their environment. This foundational skill enables robots not only to perceive their surroundings but also to reason about and interact meaningfully within the world. In modern robotics, these capabilities are taken on by visual language models, and they face significant challenges when applied to spatial reasoning context due to their training data sources. These sources utilize general-purpose image datasets, and they often lack sophisticated spatial scene understanding capabilities. For example, the datasets do not address reference frame comprehension - spatial relationships require clear contextual understanding, whether from an ego-centric, object-centric, or world-centric perspective, which allow for effective real-world interaction. To address this issue, we introduce RoboSpatial, a large-scale spatial understanding dataset consisting of real indoor and tabletop scenes captured as 3D scans and egocentric images, annotated with rich spatial information relevant to robotics. The dataset includes 1M images, 5K 3D scans, and 3M annotated spatial relationships, with paired 2D egocentric images and 3D scans to make it both 2D and 3D ready. Our experiments show that models trained with RoboSpatial outperform baselines on downstream tasks such as spatial affordance prediction, spatial relationship prediction, and robotics manipulation.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Nov 25, 2024

BridgeVLA: Input-Output Alignment for Efficient 3D Manipulation Learning with Vision-Language Models

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BridgeVLA, a novel 3D VLA model that (1) projects 3D inputs to multiple 2D images, ensuring input alignment with the VLM backbone, and (2) utilizes 2D heatmaps for action prediction, unifying the input and output spaces within a consistent 2D image space. In addition, we propose a scalable pre-training method that equips the VLM backbone with the capability to predict 2D heatmaps before downstream policy learning. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is able to learn 3D manipulation efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81.4% to 88.2%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56.7% to 64.0%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 96.8% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, highlighting its extraordinary sample efficiency. Project Website:https://bridgevla.github.io/

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025 2

VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks

General-purposed embodied agents are designed to understand the users' natural instructions or intentions and act precisely to complete universal tasks. Recently, methods based on foundation models especially Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have shown a substantial potential to solve language-conditioned manipulation (LCM) tasks well. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately meet the needs of VLAs and relative algorithms. To better define such general-purpose tasks in the context of LLMs and advance the research in VLAs, we present VLABench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating universal LCM task learning. VLABench provides 100 carefully designed categories of tasks, with strong randomization in each category of task and a total of 2000+ objects. VLABench stands out from previous benchmarks in four key aspects: 1) tasks requiring world knowledge and common sense transfer, 2) natural language instructions with implicit human intentions rather than templates, 3) long-horizon tasks demanding multi-step reasoning, and 4) evaluation of both action policies and language model capabilities. The benchmark assesses multiple competencies including understanding of mesh\&texture, spatial relationship, semantic instruction, physical laws, knowledge transfer and reasoning, etc. To support the downstream finetuning, we provide high-quality training data collected via an automated framework incorporating heuristic skills and prior information. The experimental results indicate that both the current state-of-the-art pretrained VLAs and the workflow based on VLMs face challenges in our tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024 2

Lift3D Foundation Policy: Lifting 2D Large-Scale Pretrained Models for Robust 3D Robotic Manipulation

3D geometric information is essential for manipulation tasks, as robots need to perceive the 3D environment, reason about spatial relationships, and interact with intricate spatial configurations. Recent research has increasingly focused on the explicit extraction of 3D features, while still facing challenges such as the lack of large-scale robotic 3D data and the potential loss of spatial geometry. To address these limitations, we propose the Lift3D framework, which progressively enhances 2D foundation models with implicit and explicit 3D robotic representations to construct a robust 3D manipulation policy. Specifically, we first design a task-aware masked autoencoder that masks task-relevant affordance patches and reconstructs depth information, enhancing the 2D foundation model's implicit 3D robotic representation. After self-supervised fine-tuning, we introduce a 2D model-lifting strategy that establishes a positional mapping between the input 3D points and the positional embeddings of the 2D model. Based on the mapping, Lift3D utilizes the 2D foundation model to directly encode point cloud data, leveraging large-scale pretrained knowledge to construct explicit 3D robotic representations while minimizing spatial information loss. In experiments, Lift3D consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across several simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

DiffCloth: Diffusion Based Garment Synthesis and Manipulation via Structural Cross-modal Semantic Alignment

Cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation will significantly benefit the way fashion designers generate garments and modify their designs via flexible linguistic interfaces.Current approaches follow the general text-to-image paradigm and mine cross-modal relations via simple cross-attention modules, neglecting the structural correspondence between visual and textual representations in the fashion design domain. In this work, we instead introduce DiffCloth, a diffusion-based pipeline for cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation, which empowers diffusion models with flexible compositionality in the fashion domain by structurally aligning the cross-modal semantics. Specifically, we formulate the part-level cross-modal alignment as a bipartite matching problem between the linguistic Attribute-Phrases (AP) and the visual garment parts which are obtained via constituency parsing and semantic segmentation, respectively. To mitigate the issue of attribute confusion, we further propose a semantic-bundled cross-attention to preserve the spatial structure similarities between the attention maps of attribute adjectives and part nouns in each AP. Moreover, DiffCloth allows for manipulation of the generated results by simply replacing APs in the text prompts. The manipulation-irrelevant regions are recognized by blended masks obtained from the bundled attention maps of the APs and kept unchanged. Extensive experiments on the CM-Fashion benchmark demonstrate that DiffCloth both yields state-of-the-art garment synthesis results by leveraging the inherent structural information and supports flexible manipulation with region consistency.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulation

Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.

  • 10 authors
·
May 13, 2025 1

CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots is a key objective in the field of robotic manipulation. Recent advancements in 3D-based imitation learning have shown promising results, providing an effective pathway to achieve this goal. However, obtaining high-quality 3D representations presents two key problems: (1) the quality of point clouds captured by a single-view camera is significantly affected by factors such as camera resolution, positioning, and occlusions caused by the dexterous hand; (2) the global point clouds lack crucial contact information and spatial correspondences, which are necessary for fine-grained dexterous manipulation tasks. To eliminate these limitations, we propose CordViP, a novel framework that constructs and learns correspondences by leveraging the robust 6D pose estimation of objects and robot proprioception. Specifically, we first introduce the interaction-aware point clouds, which establish correspondences between the object and the hand. These point clouds are then used for our pre-training policy, where we also incorporate object-centric contact maps and hand-arm coordination information, effectively capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities with an average success rate of 90\% in four real-world tasks, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness of CordViP to different objects, viewpoints, and scenarios. Code and videos are available on https://aureleopku.github.io/CordViP.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 12, 2025

Out-of-domain GAN inversion via Invertibility Decomposition for Photo-Realistic Human Face Manipulation

The fidelity of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) inversion is impeded by Out-Of-Domain (OOD) areas (e.g., background, accessories) in the image. Detecting the OOD areas beyond the generation ability of the pre-trained model and blending these regions with the input image can enhance fidelity. The "invertibility mask" figures out these OOD areas, and existing methods predict the mask with the reconstruction error. However, the estimated mask is usually inaccurate due to the influence of the reconstruction error in the In-Domain (ID) area. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that enhances the fidelity of human face inversion by designing a new module to decompose the input images to ID and OOD partitions with invertibility masks. Unlike previous works, our invertibility detector is simultaneously learned with a spatial alignment module. We iteratively align the generated features to the input geometry and reduce the reconstruction error in the ID regions. Thus, the OOD areas are more distinguishable and can be precisely predicted. Then, we improve the fidelity of our results by blending the OOD areas from the input image with the ID GAN inversion results. Our method produces photo-realistic results for real-world human face image inversion and manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority over existing methods in the quality of GAN inversion and attribute manipulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 19, 2022