VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs

Video-Action Models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising framework for embodied intelligence, learning implicit world dynamics from raw video streams to produce temporally consistent action predictions. Although such models demonstrate strong performance on long-horizon tasks through visual reasoning, they remain limited in contact-rich scenarios where critical interaction states are only partially observable from vision alone. In particular, fine-grained force modulation and contact transitions are not reliably encoded in visual tokens, leading to unstable or imprecise behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Video-Tactile Action Model (VTAM), a multimodal world modeling framework that incorporates tactile perception as a complementary grounding signal. VTAM augments a pretrained video transformer with tactile streams via a lightweight modality transfer finetuning, enabling efficient cross-modal representation learning without tactile-language paired data or independent tactile pretraining. To stabilize multimodal fusion, we introduce a tactile regularization loss that enforces balanced cross-modal attention, preventing visual latent dominance in the action model. VTAM demonstrates superior performance in contact-rich manipulation, maintaining a robust success rate of 90 percent on average. In challenging scenarios such as potato chip pick-and-place requiring high-fidelity force awareness, VTAM outperforms the pi 0.5 baseline by 80 percent. Our findings demonstrate that integrating tactile feedback is essential for correcting visual estimation errors in world action models, providing a scalable approach to physically grounded embodied foundation models.

ForceVLA2: Unleashing Hybrid Force-Position Control with Force Awareness for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Embodied intelligence for contact-rich manipulation has predominantly relied on position control, while explicit awareness and regulation of interaction forces remain under-explored, limiting stability, precision, and robustness in real-world tasks. We propose ForceVLA2, an end-to-end vision-language-action framework that equips robots with hybrid force-position control and explicit force awareness. ForceVLA2 introduces force-based prompts into the VLM expert to construct force-aware task concepts across stages, and employs a Cross-Scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in the action expert to adaptively fuse these concepts with real-time interaction forces for closed-loop hybrid force-position regulation. To support learning and evaluation, we construct ForceVLA2-Dataset, containing 1,000 trajectories over 5 contact-rich tasks, including wiping, pressing, and assembling, with multi-view images, task prompts, proprioceptive state, and force signals. Extensive experiments show that ForceVLA2 substantially improves success rates and reliability in contact-rich manipulation, outperforming pi0 and pi0.5 by 48.0% and 35.0%, respectively, across the 5 tasks, and mitigating common failure modes such as arm overload and unstable contact, thereby actively advancing force-aware interactive physical intelligence in VLAs. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/force-vla2/home.

VFM-Recon: Unlocking Cross-Domain Scene-Level Neural Reconstruction with Scale-Aligned Foundation Priors

Scene-level neural volumetric reconstruction from monocular videos remains challenging, especially under severe domain shifts. Although recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) provide transferable generalized priors learned from large-scale data, their scaleambiguous predictions are incompatible with the scale consistency required by volumetric fusion. To address this gap, we present VFMRecon, the first attempt to bridge transferable VFM priors with scaleconsistent requirements in scene-level neural reconstruction. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight scale alignment stage that restores multiview scale coherence. We then integrate pretrained VFM features into the neural volumetric reconstruction pipeline via lightweight task-specific adapters, which are trained for reconstruction while preserving the crossdomain robustness of pretrained representations. We train our model on ScanNet train split and evaluate on both in-distribution ScanNet test split and out-of-distribution TUM RGB-D and Tanks and Temples datasets. The results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-theart performance across all datasets domains. In particular, on the challenging outdoor Tanks and Temples dataset, our model achieves an F1 score of 70.1 in reconstructed mesh evaluation, substantially outperforming the closest competitor, VGGT, which only attains 51.8.

Towards Human-Like Manipulation through RL-Augmented Teleoperation and Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable success in robotic manipulation, their application has largely been confined to low-degree-of-freedom end-effectors performing simple, vision-guided pick-and-place tasks. Extending these models to human-like, bimanual dexterous manipulation-specifically contact-rich in-hand operations-introduces critical challenges in high-fidelity data acquisition, multi-skill learning, and multimodal sensory fusion. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to address these bottlenecks, built upon two components. First, we introduce IMCopilot (In-hand Manipulation Copilot), a suite of reinforcement learning-trained atomic skills that plays a dual role: it acts as a shared-autonomy assistant to simplify teleoperation data collection, and it serves as a callable low-level execution primitive for the VLA. Second, we present MoDE-VLA (Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA), an architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous force and tactile modalities into a pretrained VLA backbone. By utilizing a residual injection mechanism, MoDE-VLA enables contact-aware refinement without degrading the model's pretrained knowledge. We validate our approach on four tasks of escalating complexity, demonstrating doubled success rate improvement over the baseline in dexterous contact-rich tasks.

RoboPocket: Improve Robot Policies Instantly with Your Phone

Scaling imitation learning is fundamentally constrained by the efficiency of data collection. While handheld interfaces have emerged as a scalable solution for in-the-wild data acquisition, they predominantly operate in an open-loop manner: operators blindly collect demonstrations without knowing the underlying policy's weaknesses, leading to inefficient coverage of critical state distributions. Conversely, interactive methods like DAgger effectively address covariate shift but rely on physical robot execution, which is costly and difficult to scale. To reconcile this trade-off, we introduce RoboPocket, a portable system that enables Robot-Free Instant Policy Iteration using single consumer smartphones. Its core innovation is a Remote Inference framework that visualizes the policy's predicted trajectory via Augmented Reality (AR) Visual Foresight. This immersive feedback allows collectors to proactively identify potential failures and focus data collection on the policy's weak regions without requiring a physical robot. Furthermore, we implement an asynchronous Online Finetuning pipeline that continuously updates the policy with incoming data, effectively closing the learning loop in minutes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboPocket adheres to data scaling laws and doubles the data efficiency compared to offline scaling strategies, overcoming their long-standing efficiency bottleneck. Moreover, our instant iteration loop also boosts sample efficiency by up to 2$\times$ in distributed environments a small number of interactive corrections per person. Project page and videos: https://robo-pocket.github.io.

Rethinking Camera Choice: An Empirical Study on Fisheye Camera Properties in Robotic Manipulation

The adoption of fisheye cameras in robotic manipulation, driven by their exceptionally wide Field of View (FoV), is rapidly outpacing a systematic understanding of their downstream effects on policy learning. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study to bridge this gap, rigorously analyzing the properties of wrist-mounted fisheye cameras for imitation learning. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world, we investigate three critical research questions: spatial localization, scene generalization, and hardware generalization. Our investigation reveals that: (1) The wide FoV significantly enhances spatial localization, but this benefit is critically contingent on the visual complexity of the environment. (2) Fisheye-trained policies, while prone to overfitting in simple scenes, unlock superior scene generalization when trained with sufficient environmental diversity. (3) While naive cross-camera transfer leads to failures, we identify the root cause as scale overfitting and demonstrate that hardware generalization performance can be improved with a simple Random Scale Augmentation (RSA) strategy. Collectively, our findings provide concrete, actionable guidance for the large-scale collection and effective use of fisheye datasets in robotic learning. More results and videos are available on https://robo-fisheye.github.io/

Stereo-Inertial Poser: Towards Metric-Accurate Shape-Aware Motion Capture Using Sparse IMUs and a Single Stereo Camera

Recent advancements in visual-inertial motion capture systems have demonstrated the potential of combining monocular cameras with sparse inertial measurement units (IMUs) as cost-effective solutions, which effectively mitigate occlusion and drift issues inherent in single-modality systems. However, they are still limited by metric inaccuracies in global translations stemming from monocular depth ambiguity, and shape-agnostic local motion estimations that ignore anthropometric variations. We present Stereo-Inertial Poser, a real-time motion capture system that leverages a single stereo camera and six IMUs to estimate metric-accurate and shape-aware 3D human motion. By replacing the monocular RGB with stereo vision, our system resolves depth ambiguity through calibrated baseline geometry, enabling direct 3D keypoint extraction and body shape parameter estimation. IMU data and visual cues are fused for predicting drift-compensated joint positions and root movements, while a novel shape-aware fusion module dynamically harmonizes anthropometry variations with global translations. Our end-to-end pipeline achieves over 200 FPS without optimization-based post-processing, enabling real-time deployment. Quantitative evaluations across various datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Qualitative results show our method produces drift-free global translation under a long recording time and reduces foot-skating effects.

I-Perceive: A Foundation Model for Active Perception with Language Instructions

Active perception, the ability of a robot to proactively adjust its viewpoint to acquire task-relevant information, is essential for robust operation in unstructured real-world environments. While critical for downstream tasks such as manipulation, existing approaches have largely been confined to local settings (e.g., table-top scenes) with fixed perception objectives (e.g., occlusion reduction). Addressing active perception with open-ended intents in large-scale environments remains an open challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose I-Perceive, a foundation model for active perception conditioned on natural language instructions, designed for mobile manipulators and indoor environments. I-Perceive predicts camera views that follows open-ended language instructions, based on image-based scene contexts. By fusing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone with a geometric foundation model, I-Perceive bridges semantic and geometric understanding, thus enabling effective reasoning for active perception. We train I-Perceive on a diverse dataset comprising real-world scene-scanning data and simulation data, both processed via an automated and scalable data generation pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that I-Perceive significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs in both prediction accuracy and instruction following of generated camera views, and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to novel scenes and tasks.

DICArt: Advancing Category-level Articulated Object Pose Estimation in Discrete State-Spaces

Articulated object pose estimation is a core task in embodied AI. Existing methods typically regress poses in a continuous space, but often struggle with 1) navigating a large, complex search space and 2) failing to incorporate intrinsic kinematic constraints. In this work, we introduce DICArt (DIsCrete Diffusion for Articulation Pose Estimation), a novel framework that formulates pose estimation as a conditional discrete diffusion process. Instead of operating in a continuous domain, DICArt progressively denoises a noisy pose representation through a learned reverse diffusion procedure to recover the GT pose. To improve modeling fidelity, we propose a flexible flow decider that dynamically determines whether each token should be denoised or reset, effectively balancing the real and noise distributions during diffusion. Additionally, we incorporate a hierarchical kinematic coupling strategy, estimating the pose of each rigid part hierarchically to respect the object's kinematic structure. We validate DICArt on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance and robustness. By integrating discrete generative modeling with structural priors, DICArt offers a new paradigm for reliable category-level 6D pose estimation in complex environments.

Force Policy: Learning Hybrid Force-Position Control Policy under Interaction Frame for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based policies often entangle these roles in a monolithic network, trading off global generalization against stable local refinement, while control-centric approaches typically assume a known task structure or learn only controller parameters rather than the structure itself. In this paper, we formalize a physically grounded interaction frame, an instantaneous local basis that decouples force regulation from motion execution, and propose a method to recover it from demonstrations. Based on this, we address both issues by proposing Force Policy, a global-local vision-force policy in which a global policy guides free-space actions using vision, and upon contact, a high-frequency local policy with force feedback estimates the interaction frame and executes hybrid force-position control for stable interaction. Real-world experiments across diverse contact-rich tasks show consistent gains over strong baselines, with more robust contact establishment, more accurate force regulation, and reliable generalization to novel objects with varied geometries and physical properties, ultimately improving both contact stability and execution quality. Project page: https://force-policy.github.io/