Abstract:Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.
Abstract:Imitation learning is a prominent paradigm for robotic manipulation. However, existing visual imitation methods map 2D image observations directly to 3D action outputs, imposing a 2D-3D mismatch that hinders spatial reasoning and degrades robustness. We present VolumeDP, a policy architecture that restores spatial alignment by explicitly reasoning in 3D. VolumeDP first lifts image features into a Volumetric Representation via cross-attention. It then selects task-relevant voxels with a learnable module and converts them into a compact set of spatial tokens, markedly reducing computation while preserving action-critical geometry. Finally, a multi-token decoder conditions on the entire token set to predict actions, thereby avoiding lossy aggregation that collapses multiple spatial tokens into a single descriptor. VolumeDP achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 88.8% on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, outperforming the strongest baseline by a substantial 14.8% improvement. It also delivers large performance gains over prior methods on the ManiSkill and LIBERO-Plus benchmarks. Real-world experiments further demonstrate higher success rates and robust generalization to novel spatial layouts, camera viewpoints, and environment backgrounds. Code will be released.
Abstract:Diffusion models and flow matching have become a cornerstone of robotic imitation learning, yet they suffer from a structural inefficiency where inference is often bound to a fixed integration schedule that is agnostic to state complexity. This paradigm forces the policy to expend the same computational budget on trivial motions as it does on complex tasks. We introduce Generative Control as Optimization (GeCO), a time-unconditional framework that transforms action synthesis from trajectory integration into iterative optimization. GeCO learns a stationary velocity field in the action-sequence space where expert behaviors form stable attractors. Consequently, test-time inference becomes an adaptive process that allocates computation based on convergence--exiting early for simple states while refining longer for difficult ones. Furthermore, this stationary geometry yields an intrinsic, training-free safety signal, as the field norm at the optimized action serves as a robust out-of-distribution (OOD) detector, remaining low for in-distribution states while significantly increasing for anomalies. We validate GeCO on standard simulation benchmarks and demonstrate seamless scaling to pi0-series Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. As a plug-and-play replacement for standard flow-matching heads, GeCO improves success rates and efficiency with an optimization-native mechanism for safe deployment. Video and code can be found at https://hrh6666.github.io/GeCO/
Abstract:World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for embodied control because they explicitly model how visual observations may evolve under action. Most existing WAMs follow an imagine-then-execute paradigm, incurring substantial test-time latency from iterative video denoising, yet it remains unclear whether explicit future imagination is actually necessary for strong action performance. In this paper, we ask whether WAMs need explicit future imagination at test time, or whether their benefit comes primarily from video modeling during training. We disentangle the role of video modeling during training from explicit future generation during inference by proposing \textbf{Fast-WAM}, a WAM architecture that retains video co-training during training but skips future prediction at test time. We further instantiate several Fast-WAM variants to enable a controlled comparison of these two factors. Across these variants, we find that Fast-WAM remains competitive with imagine-then-execute variants, while removing video co-training causes a much larger performance drop. Empirically, Fast-WAM achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods both on simulation benchmarks (LIBERO and RoboTwin) and real-world tasks, without embodied pretraining. It runs in real time with 190ms latency, over 4$\times$ faster than existing imagine-then-execute WAMs. These results suggest that the main value of video prediction in WAMs may lie in improving world representations during training rather than generating future observations at test time. Project page: https://yuantianyuan01.github.io/FastWAM/
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leveraging the native autoregressive paradigm of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated superior instruction-following and training efficiency. Central to this paradigm is action tokenization, yet its design has primarily focused on reconstruction fidelity, failing to address its direct impact on VLA optimization. Consequently, the fundamental question of \textit{what makes for good action tokenizers} remains unanswered. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing design principles specifically from the perspective of VLA optimization. We identify a set of best practices based on information-theoretic insights, including maximized temporal token overlap, minimized vocabulary redundancy, enhanced multimodal mutual information, and token independence. Guided by these principles, we introduce \textbf{ActionCodec}, a high-performance action tokenizer that significantly enhances both training efficiency and VLA performance across diverse simulation and real-world benchmarks. Notably, on LIBERO, a SmolVLM2-2.2B fine-tuned with ActionCodec achieves a 95.5\% success rate without any robotics pre-training. With advanced architectural enhancements, this reaches 97.4\%, representing a new SOTA for VLA models without robotics pre-training. We believe our established design principles, alongside the released model, will provide a clear roadmap for the community to develop more effective action tokenizers.
Abstract:Achieving highly dynamic humanoid parkour on unseen, complex terrains remains a challenge in robotics. Although general locomotion policies demonstrate capabilities across broad terrain distributions, they often struggle with arbitrary and highly challenging environments. To overcome this limitation, we propose a real-to-sim-to-real framework that leverages rapid test-time training (TTT) on novel terrains, significantly enhancing the robot's capability to traverse extremely difficult geometries. We adopt a two-stage end-to-end learning paradigm: a policy is first pre-trained on diverse procedurally generated terrains, followed by rapid fine-tuning on high-fidelity meshes reconstructed from real-world captures. Specifically, we develop a feed-forward, efficient, and high-fidelity geometry reconstruction pipeline using RGB-D inputs, ensuring both speed and quality during test-time training. We demonstrate that TTT-Parkour empowers humanoid robots to master complex obstacles, including wedges, stakes, boxes, trapezoids, and narrow beams. The whole pipeline of capturing, reconstructing, and test-time training requires less than 10 minutes on most tested terrains. Extensive experiments show that the policy after test-time training exhibits robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability.
Abstract:Semantic communication is emerging as a key enabler for distributed edge intelligence due to its capability to convey task-relevant meaning. However, achieving communication-efficient training and robust inference over wireless links remains challenging. This challenge is further exacerbated for multi-modal edge inference (MMEI) by two factors: 1) prohibitive communication overhead for distributed learning over bandwidth-limited wireless links, due to the \emph{multi-modal} nature of the system; and 2) limited robustness under varying channels and noisy multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose a three-stage communication-aware distributed learning framework to improve training and inference efficiency while maintaining robustness over wireless channels. In Stage~I, devices perform local multi-modal self-supervised learning to obtain shared and modality-specific encoders without device--server exchange, thereby reducing the communication cost. In Stage~II, distributed fine-tuning with centralized evidential fusion calibrates per-modality uncertainty and reliably aggregates features distorted by noise or channel fading. In Stage~III, an uncertainty-guided feedback mechanism selectively requests additional features for uncertain samples, optimizing the communication--accuracy tradeoff in the distributed setting. Experiments on RGB--depth indoor scene classification show that the proposed framework attains higher accuracy with far fewer training communication rounds and remains robust to modality degradation or channel variation, outperforming existing self-supervised and fully supervised baselines.
Abstract:Achieving robust humanoid hiking in complex, unstructured environments requires transitioning from reactive proprioception to proactive perception. However, integrating exteroception remains a significant challenge: mapping-based methods suffer from state estimation drift; for instance, LiDAR-based methods do not handle torso jitter well. Existing end-to-end approaches often struggle with scalability and training complexity; specifically, some previous works using virtual obstacles are implemented case-by-case. In this work, we present \textit{Hiking in the Wild}, a scalable, end-to-end parkour perceptive framework designed for robust humanoid hiking. To ensure safety and training stability, we introduce two key mechanisms: a foothold safety mechanism combining scalable \textit{Terrain Edge Detection} with \textit{Foot Volume Points} to prevent catastrophic slippage on edges, and a \textit{Flat Patch Sampling} strategy that mitigates reward hacking by generating feasible navigation targets. Our approach utilizes a single-stage reinforcement learning scheme, mapping raw depth inputs and proprioception directly to joint actions, without relying on external state estimation. Extensive field experiments on a full-size humanoid demonstrate that our policy enables robust traversal of complex terrains at speeds up to 2.5 m/s. The training and deployment code is open-sourced to facilitate reproducible research and deployment on real robots with minimal hardware modifications.
Abstract:Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores environmental capabilities. This work unites these paradigms to achieve perceptive general motion control. We present a framework where exteroceptive sensing is integrated into whole-body motion tracking, permitting a humanoid to perform highly dynamic, non-locomotion tasks on uneven terrain. By training a single policy to perform multiple distinct motions across varied terrestrial features, we demonstrate the non-trivial benefit of integrating perception into the control loop. Our results show that this framework enables robust, highly dynamic multi-contact motions, such as vaulting and dive-rolling, on unstructured terrain, significantly expanding the robot's traversability beyond simple walking or running. https://project-instinct.github.io/deep-whole-body-parkour
Abstract:Gaining sustainable performance improvement with scaling data and model budget remains a pivotal yet unresolved challenge in autonomous driving. While autoregressive models exhibited promising data-scaling efficiency in planning tasks, predicting ego trajectories alone suffers sparse supervision and weakly constrains how scene evolution should shape ego motion. Therefore, we introduce DAP, a discrete-token autoregressive planner that jointly forecasts BEV semantics and ego trajectories, thereby enforcing comprehensive representation learning and allowing predicted dynamics to directly condition ego motion. In addition, we incorporate a reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning, which preserves supervised behavior cloning priors while injecting reward-guided improvements. Despite a compact 160M parameter budget, DAP achieves state-of-the-art performance on open-loop metrics and delivers competitive closed-loop results on the NAVSIM benchmark. Overall, the fully discrete-token autoregressive formulation operating on both rasterized BEV and ego actions provides a compact yet scalable planning paradigm for autonomous driving.