World-Task Factorization for Robot Learning

Robot learning must produce policies that generalize to new combinations of constraints, teammates, and environments. To achieve this, we must structurally factor the policy, which is a choice that dictates what generalizes, what requires retraining, and what remains entangled. Existing methods span a wide spectrum, from expecting structure to emerge from data scaling, to hand-designing it via hierarchies, skill libraries or learned specializations. In this paper, we study what we argue is the most fundamental factorization in robotics: separating the world from the task. We investigate the conditions under which this factorization is principled. World factors are properties of the embodied system and the environment; they exist independently of intent. Task factors are defined by the task's logic over what the world admits. We formalize this asymmetry through Bayesian model evidence: it aligns with the data-generating process, maintains high likelihood through an analytical world model, and reduces the Occam razor's penalty on task parameters. We instantiate this factorization by pairing AICON, a differentiable graph of recursive estimators and interconnections that is compositional, operates without task-specific data, and propagates cost gradients to actuators, with a compact, learned policy that modulates gradient paths. Gradients serve as the interface between the two factors: they carry world structure through the graph and task structure through costs, enabling low-dimensional learning while preserving structural generalization. We test the world/task factorization across three problems that encompass heterogeneous robots, environments, task logic and sensorimotor modalities. Our framework outperforms end-to-end baselines and analytical heuristics in all settings, generalizes zero-shot to out-of-distribution configurations, and transfers to real hardware without retraining.

A Helping (Human) Hand in Kinematic Structure Estimation

Visual uncertainties such as occlusions, lack of texture, and noise present significant challenges in obtaining accurate kinematic models for safe robotic manipulation. We introduce a probabilistic real-time approach that leverages the human hand as a prior to mitigate these uncertainties. By tracking the constrained motion of the human hand during manipulation and explicitly modeling uncertainties in visual observations, our method reliably estimates an object's kinematic model online. We validate our approach on a novel dataset featuring challenging objects that are occluded during manipulation and offer limited articulations for perception. The results demonstrate that by incorporating an appropriate prior and explicitly accounting for uncertainties, our method produces accurate estimates, outperforming two recent baselines by 195% and 140%, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach's estimates are precise enough to allow a robot to manipulate even small objects safely.

A Biologically Inspired Design Principle for Building Robust Robotic Systems

Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no comprehensive understanding of how to achieve similar robustness in robotic systems. In this work, we draw inspirations from biological systems and propose a design principle that advocates active interconnections among system components to enhance robustness to environmental variations. We evaluate this design principle in a challenging long-horizon manipulation task: solving lockboxes. Our extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that we could enhance robustness against environmental changes by establishing active interconnections among system components without substantial changes in individual components. Our findings suggest that a systematic investigation of design principles in system building is necessary. It also advocates for interdisciplinary collaborations to explore and evaluate additional principles of biological robustness to advance the development of intelligent and adaptable robotic systems.