MirrorDuo: Reflection-Consistent Visuomotor Learning from Mirrored Demonstration Pairs

Image-based behaviour cloning leverages demonstrations captured from ubiquitous RGB cameras. However, it remains constrained by the cost of collecting diverse demos, especially for generalizing across workspace variations. We propose MirrorDuo, a reflection-based formulation that operates on image, proprioception, and full 6-DoF end-effector action tuples, generating a mirrored counterpart for each original demonstration, effectively achieving "collect one, get one for free". It can be applied as a data augmentation strategy for existing learning pipelines, such as standard behaviour cloning or diffusion policy, or as a structural prior for reflection-equivariant policy networks. By leveraging the overlap between the original and mirrored domains, MirrorDuo achieves significantly improved performance under the same data budget when demonstrations are evenly distributed across both sides of the workspace. When demonstrations are confined to one side, MirrorDuo enables efficient skill transfer to the mirrored workspace with as few as zero or five demos in the target arrangement.

Fibration Trees: A Unified Approach to Multi-Robot Motion Planning

State space projections and decompositions have emerged as powerful tools to tackle the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional, multi-robot motion planning problems. However, existing methods lack a unified framework which seamlessly handles combinations of projections (prioritization or task-space) and decompositions (parallel or decoupled subspaces). To fill this gap, we introduce fibration trees, which are trees consisting of state spaces as nodes and fibrations as edges, whereby a fibration models a projection from a higher-dimensional space to a lower-dimensional (or simplified) space. By modeling projections as fibrations, we unify sequential prioritization, parallel decomposition, and task-space projections under a single, coherent formalism. Building on this, we develop the rapidly-exploring random fibration trees (Fibration-RRT) planner, a sampling-based motion planner that generalizes strategies from quotient-space RRT (for sequential prioritizations) and discrete RRT (for parallel decompositions), while allowing the inclusion of task-space projections. Fibration-RRT operates on user-defined fibration trees and is proven to be probabilistically complete. To test the generality and efficiency of Fibration-RRT, we provide an open-source implementation and conduct experiments on 32 scenarios using multi robot teams with up to 96 degrees of freedom. Our results indicate that Fibration-RRT efficiently solves high-dimensional problems by exploiting user-defined fibration trees, thereby establishing fibration trees as a powerful, unified framework for multi-robot motion planning.

Adversarial Attacks on Learned Policies for Surgical Robotic Tasks

Learning-based policies are being considered to augment the dexterity of human surgeons in robot-assisted surgery. Can the end-to-end mapping from visual observations to robot actions be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, potentially leading to patient injury? In this paper, we present the first study of adversarial threats to learning-based policies in surgical robotics. We investigate two threat modes: (a) disruptive attacks, where imperceptible visual perturbations interrupt policy execution, and (b) steering attacks, where such perturbations steer policy actions toward attacker-specified directions. We formulate three adversarial attack methods, each with increasing access to policy information, and evaluate their impact on two surgical subtasks: debridement and suturing. Our evaluation covers three end-to-end policy architectures: ACT, Diffusion Policy, and Pi0. In addition, we introduce a new class of photometric adversarial attacks that mimic natural visual changes, such as lighting variations, to generate effective yet visually plausible perturbations. Results from 560 physical experiments using phantoms for debridement and suturing suggest that state-of-the-art policies can be significantly disrupted, resulting in an average 61% reduction in surgical subtask success rates. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/adversary-surgery

MoDex: A Diffusion Policy for Sequential Multi-Object Dexterous Grasping

This work addresses sequentially grasping multiple objects with a single dexterous hand without releasing those already held. Most dexterous grasping methods commit all of the hand's degrees of freedom to a single object, underutilizing its dexterity and leaving no redundancy for subsequent grasps. The proposed solution, MoDex, is a diffusion policy that predicts the next gripper pose directly from observations, conditioned on an opposition space and point cloud. The opposition space condition specifies which fingers participate in the current grasp, enabling the gripper to use only a subset of its available degrees of freedom while reserving the remaining degrees of freedom for subsequent grasps. To facilitate sim-to-real transfer, MoDex is trained in two stages: first through imitation learning on expert demonstrations, and subsequently through reinforcement learning fine-tuning, which consistently improves success rates over the pre-trained policy. We evaluate MoDex in simulation on a MuJoCo-based Franka Emika Panda robot equipped with an Allegro Hand and on the corresponding real-world hardware platform. Across both simulation and real-world experiments, MoDex achieves higher success rates than the evaluated learning-based baselines, improving performance by 2.92-17.92% and 6.67-17.78%, respectively. Project page: https://modex2026.github.io/.

Speculative Policy Orchestration: A Latency-Resilient Framework for Cloud-Robotic Manipulation

Cloud robotics enables robots to offload high-dimensional motion planning and reasoning to remote servers. However, for continuous manipulation tasks requiring high-frequency control, network latency and jitter can severely destabilize the system, causing command starvation and unsafe physical execution. To address this, we propose Speculative Policy Orchestration (SPO), a latency-resilient cloud-edge framework. SPO utilizes a cloud-hosted world model to pre-compute and stream future kinematic waypoints to a local edge buffer, decoupling execution frequency from network round-trip time. To mitigate unsafe execution caused by predictive drift, the edge node employs an $ε$-tube verifier that strictly bounds kinematic execution errors. The framework is coupled with an Adaptive Horizon Scaling mechanism that dynamically expands or shrinks the speculative pre-fetch depth based on real-time tracking error. We evaluate SPO on continuous RLBench manipulation tasks under emulated network delays. Results show that even when deployed with learned models of modest accuracy, SPO reduces network-induced idle time by over 60% compared to blocking remote inference. Furthermore, SPO discards approximately 60% fewer cloud predictions than static caching baselines. Ultimately, SPO enables fluid, real-time cloud-robotic control while maintaining bounded physical safety.

RoboLight: A Dataset with Linearly Composable Illumination for Robotic Manipulation

In this paper, we introduce RoboLight, the first real-world robotic manipulation dataset capturing synchronized episodes under systematically varied lighting conditions. RoboLight consists of two components. (a) RoboLight-Real contains 2,800 real-world episodes collected in our custom Light Cube setup, a calibrated system equipped with eight programmable RGB LED lights. It includes structured illumination variation along three independently controlled dimensions: color, direction, and intensity. Each dimension is paired with a dedicated task featuring objects of diverse geometries and materials to induce perceptual challenges. All image data are recorded in high-dynamic-range (HDR) format to preserve radiometric accuracy. Leveraging the linearity of light transport, we introduce (b) RoboLight-Synthetic, comprising 196,000 episodes synthesized through interpolation in the HDR image space of RoboLight-Real. In principle, RoboLight-Synthetic can be arbitrarily expanded by refining the interpolation granularity. We further verify the dataset quality through qualitative analysis and real-world policy roll-outs, analyzing task difficulty, distributional diversity, and the effectiveness of synthesized data. We additionally demonstrate three representative use cases of the proposed dataset. The full dataset, along with the system software and hardware design, will be released as open-source to support continued research.

Where to Attend: A Principled Vision-Centric Position Encoding with Parabolas

We propose Parabolic Position Encoding (PaPE), a parabola-based position encoding for vision modalities in attention-based architectures. Given a set of vision tokens-such as images, point clouds, videos, or event camera streams-our objective is to encode their positions while accounting for the characteristics of vision modalities. Prior works have largely extended position encodings from 1D-sequences in language to nD-structures in vision, but only with partial account of vision characteristics. We address this gap by designing PaPE from principles distilled from prior work: translation invariance, rotation invariance (PaPE-RI), distance decay, directionality, and context awareness. We evaluate PaPE on 8 datasets that span 4 modalities. We find that either PaPE or PaPE-RI achieves the top performance on 7 out of 8 datasets. Extrapolation experiments on ImageNet-1K show that PaPE extrapolates remarkably well, improving in absolute terms by up to 10.5% over the next-best position encoding. Code is available at https://github.com/DTU-PAS/parabolic-position-encoding.

PALM: Enhanced Generalizability for Local Visuomotor Policies via Perception Alignment

Generalizing beyond the training domain in image-based behavior cloning remains challenging. Existing methods address individual axes of generalization, workspace shifts, viewpoint changes, and cross-embodiment transfer, yet they are typically developed in isolation and often rely on complex pipelines. We introduce PALM (Perception Alignment for Local Manipulation), which leverages the invariance of local action distributions between out-of-distribution (OOD) and demonstrated domains to address these OOD shifts concurrently, without additional input modalities, model changes, or data collection. PALM modularizes the manipulation policy into coarse global components and a local policy for fine-grained actions. We reduce the discrepancy between in-domain and OOD inputs at the local policy level by enforcing local visual focus and consistent proprioceptive representation, allowing the policy to retrieve invariant local actions under OOD conditions. Experiments show that PALM limits OOD performance drops to 8% in simulation and 24% in the real world, compared to 45% and 77% for baselines.

ViTA-Seg: Vision Transformer for Amodal Segmentation in Robotics

Occlusions in robotic bin picking compromise accurate and reliable grasp planning. We present ViTA-Seg, a class-agnostic Vision Transformer framework for real-time amodal segmentation that leverages global attention to recover complete object masks, including hidden regions. We proposte two architectures: a) Single-Head for amodal mask prediction; b) Dual-Head for amodal and occluded mask prediction. We also introduce ViTA-SimData, a photo-realistic synthetic dataset tailored to industrial bin-picking scenario. Extensive experiments on two amodal benchmarks, COOCA and KINS, demonstrate that ViTA-Seg Dual Head achieves strong amodal and occlusion segmentation accuracy with computational efficiency, enabling robust, real-time robotic manipulation.

Federated Learning for Large-Scale Cloud Robotic Manipulation: Opportunities and Challenges

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm, where the collaborative training of a model involves dynamic participation of devices to achieve broad objectives. In contrast, classical machine learning (ML) typically requires data to be located on-premises for training, whereas FL leverages numerous user devices to train a shared global model without the need to share private data. Current robotic manipulation tasks are constrained by the individual capabilities and speed of robots due to limited low-latency computing resources. Consequently, the concept of cloud robotics has emerged, allowing robotic applications to harness the flexibility and reliability of computing resources, effectively alleviating their computational demands across the cloud-edge continuum. Undoubtedly, within this distributed computing context, as exemplified in cloud robotic manipulation scenarios, FL offers manifold advantages while also presenting several challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we present fundamental concepts of FL and their connection to cloud robotic manipulation. Additionally, we envision the opportunities and challenges associated with realizing efficient and reliable cloud robotic manipulation at scale through FL, where researchers adopt to design and verify FL models in either centralized or decentralized settings.