UniTac2Pose: A Unified Approach Learned in Simulation for Category-level Visuotactile In-hand Pose Estimation

Accurate estimation of the in-hand pose of an object based on its CAD model is crucial in both industrial applications and everyday tasks, ranging from positioning workpieces and assembling components to seamlessly inserting devices like USB connectors. While existing methods often rely on regression, feature matching, or registration techniques, achieving high precision and generalizability to unseen CAD models remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage framework for in-hand pose estimation. The first stage involves sampling and pre-ranking pose candidates, followed by iterative refinement of these candidates in the second stage. In the final stage, post-ranking is applied to identify the most likely pose candidates. These stages are governed by a unified energy-based diffusion model, which is trained solely on simulated data. This energy model simultaneously generates gradients to refine pose estimates and produces an energy scalar that quantifies the quality of the pose estimates. Additionally, borrowing the idea from the computer vision domain, we incorporate a render-compare architecture within the energy-based score network to significantly enhance sim-to-real performance, as demonstrated by our ablation studies. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that our method outperforms conventional baselines based on regression, matching, and registration techniques, while also exhibiting strong intra-category generalization to previously unseen CAD models. Moreover, our approach integrates tactile object pose estimation, pose tracking, and uncertainty estimation into a unified framework, enabling robust performance across a variety of real-world conditions.

CorrectNav: Self-Correction Flywheel Empowers Vision-Language-Action Navigation Model

Existing vision-and-language navigation models often deviate from the correct trajectory when executing instructions. However, these models lack effective error correction capability, hindering their recovery from errors. To address this challenge, we propose Self-correction Flywheel, a novel post-training paradigm. Instead of considering the model's error trajectories on the training set as a drawback, our paradigm emphasizes their significance as a valuable data source. We have developed a method to identify deviations in these error trajectories and devised innovative techniques to automatically generate self-correction data for perception and action. These self-correction data serve as fuel to power the model's continued training. The brilliance of our paradigm is revealed when we re-evaluate the model on the training set, uncovering new error trajectories. At this time, the self-correction flywheel begins to spin. Through multiple flywheel iterations, we progressively enhance our monocular RGB-based VLA navigation model CorrectNav. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks show CorrectNav achieves new state-of-the-art success rates of 65.1% and 69.3%, surpassing prior best VLA navigation models by 8.2% and 16.4%. Real robot tests in various indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate \method's superior capability of error correction, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and long instruction following.

Adapting Vision-Language Models Without Labels: A Comprehensive Survey

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their performance often remains suboptimal when directly applied to specific downstream scenarios without task-specific adaptation. To enhance their utility while preserving data efficiency, recent research has increasingly focused on unsupervised adaptation methods that do not rely on labeled data. Despite the growing interest in this area, there remains a lack of a unified, task-oriented survey dedicated to unsupervised VLM adaptation. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive and structured overview of the field. We propose a taxonomy based on the availability and nature of unlabeled visual data, categorizing existing approaches into four key paradigms: Data-Free Transfer (no data), Unsupervised Domain Transfer (abundant data), Episodic Test-Time Adaptation (batch data), and Online Test-Time Adaptation (streaming data). Within this framework, we analyze core methodologies and adaptation strategies associated with each paradigm, aiming to establish a systematic understanding of the field. Additionally, we review representative benchmarks across diverse applications and highlight open challenges and promising directions for future research. An actively maintained repository of relevant literature is available at https://github.com/tim-learn/Awesome-LabelFree-VLMs.

ClutterDexGrasp: A Sim-to-Real System for General Dexterous Grasping in Cluttered Scenes

Dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes presents significant challenges due to diverse object geometries, occlusions, and potential collisions. Existing methods primarily focus on single-object grasping or grasp-pose prediction without interaction, which are insufficient for complex, cluttered scenes. Recent vision-language-action models offer a potential solution but require extensive real-world demonstrations, making them costly and difficult to scale. To address these limitations, we revisit the sim-to-real transfer pipeline and develop key techniques that enable zero-shot deployment in reality while maintaining robust generalization. We propose ClutterDexGrasp, a two-stage teacher-student framework for closed-loop target-oriented dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes. The framework features a teacher policy trained in simulation using clutter density curriculum learning, incorporating both a novel geometry and spatially-embedded scene representation and a comprehensive safety curriculum, enabling general, dynamic, and safe grasping behaviors. Through imitation learning, we distill the teacher's knowledge into a student 3D diffusion policy (DP3) that operates on partial point cloud observations. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first zero-shot sim-to-real closed-loop system for target-oriented dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes, demonstrating robust performance across diverse objects and layouts. More details and videos are available at https://clutterdexgrasp.github.io/.

CheckManual: A New Challenge and Benchmark for Manual-based Appliance Manipulation

Correct use of electrical appliances has significantly improved human life quality. Unlike simple tools that can be manipulated with common sense, different parts of electrical appliances have specific functions defined by manufacturers. If we want the robot to heat bread by microwave, we should enable them to review the microwave manual first. From the manual, it can learn about component functions, interaction methods, and representative task steps about appliances. However, previous manual-related works remain limited to question-answering tasks while existing manipulation researchers ignore the manual's important role and fail to comprehend multi-page manuals. In this paper, we propose the first manual-based appliance manipulation benchmark CheckManual. Specifically, we design a large model-assisted human-revised data generation pipeline to create manuals based on CAD appliance models. With these manuals, we establish novel manual-based manipulation challenges, metrics, and simulator environments for model performance evaluation. Furthermore, we propose the first manual-based manipulation planning model ManualPlan to set up a group of baselines for the CheckManual benchmark.

SR3D: Unleashing Single-view 3D Reconstruction for Transparent and Specular Object Grasping

Recent advancements in 3D robotic manipulation have improved grasping of everyday objects, but transparent and specular materials remain challenging due to depth sensing limitations. While several 3D reconstruction and depth completion approaches address these challenges, they suffer from setup complexity or limited observation information utilization. To address this, leveraging the power of single view 3D object reconstruction approaches, we propose a training free framework SR3D that enables robotic grasping of transparent and specular objects from a single view observation. Specifically, given single view RGB and depth images, SR3D first uses the external visual models to generate 3D reconstructed object mesh based on RGB image. Then, the key idea is to determine the 3D object's pose and scale to accurately localize the reconstructed object back into its original depth corrupted 3D scene. Therefore, we propose view matching and keypoint matching mechanisms,which leverage both the 2D and 3D's inherent semantic and geometric information in the observation to determine the object's 3D state within the scene, thereby reconstructing an accurate 3D depth map for effective grasp detection. Experiments in both simulation and real world show the reconstruction effectiveness of SR3D.

To Trust Or Not To Trust Your Vision-Language Model's Prediction

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in aligning visual and textual modalities, enabling a wide range of applications in multimodal understanding and generation. While they excel in zero-shot and transfer learning scenarios, VLMs remain susceptible to misclassification, often yielding confident yet incorrect predictions. This limitation poses a significant risk in safety-critical domains, where erroneous predictions can lead to severe consequences. In this work, we introduce TrustVLM, a training-free framework designed to address the critical challenge of estimating when VLM's predictions can be trusted. Motivated by the observed modality gap in VLMs and the insight that certain concepts are more distinctly represented in the image embedding space, we propose a novel confidence-scoring function that leverages this space to improve misclassification detection. We rigorously evaluate our approach across 17 diverse datasets, employing 4 architectures and 2 VLMs, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of up to 51.87% in AURC, 9.14% in AUROC, and 32.42% in FPR95 compared to existing baselines. By improving the reliability of the model without requiring retraining, TrustVLM paves the way for safer deployment of VLMs in real-world applications. The code will be available at https://github.com/EPFL-IMOS/TrustVLM.

From Strangers to Assistants: Fast Desire Alignment for Embodied Agent-User Adaptation

While embodied agents have made significant progress in performing complex physical tasks, real-world applications demand more than pure task execution. The agents must collaborate with unfamiliar agents and human users, whose goals are often vague and implicit. In such settings, interpreting ambiguous instructions and uncovering underlying desires is essential for effective assistance. Therefore, fast and accurate desire alignment becomes a critical capability for embodied agents. In this work, we first develop a home assistance simulation environment HA-Desire that integrates an LLM-driven human user agent exhibiting realistic value-driven goal selection and communication. The ego agent must interact with this proxy user to infer and adapt to the user's latent desires. To achieve this, we present a novel framework FAMER for fast desire alignment, which introduces a desire-based mental reasoning mechanism to identify user intent and filter desire-irrelevant actions. We further design a reflection-based communication module that reduces redundant inquiries, and incorporate goal-relevant information extraction with memory persistence to improve information reuse and reduce unnecessary exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances both task execution and communication efficiency, enabling embodied agents to quickly adapt to user-specific desires in complex embodied environments.

SpikeStereoNet: A Brain-Inspired Framework for Stereo Depth Estimation from Spike Streams

Conventional frame-based cameras often struggle with stereo depth estimation in rapidly changing scenes. In contrast, bio-inspired spike cameras emit asynchronous events at microsecond-level resolution, providing an alternative sensing modality. However, existing methods lack specialized stereo algorithms and benchmarks tailored to the spike data. To address this gap, we propose SpikeStereoNet, a brain-inspired framework and the first to estimate stereo depth directly from raw spike streams. The model fuses raw spike streams from two viewpoints and iteratively refines depth estimation through a recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) update module. To benchmark our approach, we introduce a large-scale synthetic spike stream dataset and a real-world stereo spike dataset with dense depth annotations. SpikeStereoNet outperforms existing methods on both datasets by leveraging spike streams' ability to capture subtle edges and intensity shifts in challenging regions such as textureless surfaces and extreme lighting conditions. Furthermore, our framework exhibits strong data efficiency, maintaining high accuracy even with substantially reduced training data. The source code and datasets will be publicly available.

Extremely Simple Multimodal Outlier Synthesis for Out-of-Distribution Detection and Segmentation

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and segmentation are crucial for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. While prior research has primarily focused on unimodal image data, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, requiring the integration of multiple modalities for improved OOD detection. A key challenge is the lack of supervision signals from unknown data, leading to overconfident predictions on OOD samples. To address this challenge, we propose Feature Mixing, an extremely simple and fast method for multimodal outlier synthesis with theoretical support, which can be further optimized to help the model better distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data. Feature Mixing is modality-agnostic and applicable to various modality combinations. Additionally, we introduce CARLA-OOD, a novel multimodal dataset for OOD segmentation, featuring synthetic OOD objects across diverse scenes and weather conditions. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, CARLA-OOD datasets, and the MultiOOD benchmark demonstrate that Feature Mixing achieves state-of-the-art performance with a $10 \times$ to $370 \times$ speedup. Our source code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/mona4399/FeatureMixing.