SoftVTBench: A Deformation-Aware Visuo-Tactile Dataset and Benchmark for Deformable-Object Manipulation

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, $π_{0.5}$, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

A Counterexample to the Tang Zhang Schatten Norm Conjecture and Sharp Positive Results

For $m\geq 2$, let $c_p(m)$ be the all-dimensional best constant in $$ \left\|\sum_{k=1}^m A_k\right\|_p \leq c_p(m)\left\|\sum_{k=1}^m |A_k|\right\|_p. $$ Tang and Zhang conjectured an explicit formula for every finite $p>1$. We disprove the conjecture with two explicit real $2\times 2$ rank-one matrices at $p=3/2$. The comparison is certified by seven strict rational inequalities and, in particular, places the attained ratio above $207/200$, while the conjectured constant lies below $207/200$. On the positive side, we prove the conjectured sharp bound for every family of rank-at-most-one summands when $2\leq p<\infty$, and classify all equality cases. We also prove the corresponding endpoint statement for $p=\infty$. Finally, for arbitrary complex matrices, we establish the conjectured sharp constant in the case $m=2$, $p=4$.

Push-Wiper: Toward General-Purpose Robotic Cleaning across Varied Stains and Surfaces with Segmented Pushing Trajectories

Viscous stains, characterized by high viscosity and complex rheological properties, remain a major challenge for robotic surface cleaning. Conventional wiping often spreads the stain, while scrubbing provides stronger friction but risks damaging the surface. In this paper, we propose Push-Wiper, a framework that reformulates viscous stain cleaning as an aggregation problem. Push-Wiper employs a sponge to progressively gather stains through segmented pushing trajectories, followed by a post-processing phase that detaches the aggregated material and enables sponge self-cleaning. We adopt a stepwise strategy for stain gathering and leverage Diffusion Policy to generate adaptive pushing action sequences. These sequences are executed through our Arbitrary Surface Pose Interpolator (ASPI) and a hybrid force-position controller, allowing the method to generalize to stains with diverse spatial distributions. Push-Wiper achieves a cleaning score (CS), defined as the percentage of stain area removed, up to 130% higher than baseline methods. Without additional training, Push-Wiper also transfers in a zero-shot manner to solid residues, liquid spills, unseen viscous stains, and curved surfaces with varying geometries. Our experiments demonstrate the cleaning effectiveness of Push-Wiper and its strong generalization ability. The project website is available at https://push-wiper.github.io/.

ST-WAM: Semantic-Temporal World Action Model for Robust Manipulation under Visual Distribution Shifts

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm by jointly modeling robot actions and future visual dynamics. However, their reliance on pixel-generative future supervision can entangle action-relevant state transitions with task-irrelevant visual content, limiting robustness under visual distribution shifts. We identify Training-Distribution Hallucination, a recurring phenomenon in which futures conditioned on visually shifted observations hallucinate training-domain content rather than remain faithful to the current scene. A controlled frame-triplet diagnosis further shows that DINOv3 features remain more stable across visual shifts while better preserving task-state distinctions than Wan-VAE latents. Rather than correcting the predicted futures, we propose Semantic-Temporal WAM (ST-WAM) to improve action robustness by using DINOv3 as a shared semantic representation for future prediction and history retrieval while retaining fine-grained VAE dynamics. Its Dual-Space Future Experts (DSFE) jointly predict future VAE latents and DINO features, while Current-Anchored Intent Retrieval (CAIR) retrieves task-relevant evidence from recent DINO history under the current visual-language context. ST-WAM is trained end-to-end without additional embodied pretraining or task-specific annotations, and requires no explicit future generation at inference. It achieves 98.7% on LIBERO and 92.8% on RoboTwin 2.0; more importantly, compared with Fast-WAM, it improves zero-shot LIBERO-Plus performance by 21.3 percentage points and more than doubles real-world success under visual shifts from 25.8% to 61.5%. These results demonstrate that semantic-temporal modeling effectively complements pixel-generative dynamics for robust manipulation.

MSTF-Net: A UAV-Oriented Multi-Spectral Video Segmentation Method via Modality-Robust, Scale-Adaptive, and Consistent Fusion

Multi-spectral video segmentation is essential for robust scene understanding in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications such as city planning, land use monitoring, traffic monitoring, and crowd estimation. While the fusion of RGB and thermal modalities offers complementary information for perception under varying lighting and visibility conditions, two fundamental challenges remain: (1) the modal fusion dilemma, arising from significant discrepancies between RGB and thermal features that obscure complementary cues, and (2) temporal variation, induced by rapid motion and viewpoint changes on UAV platforms, which leads to appearance inconsistency and misalignment across frames. To address these issues, this study proposed MSTF-Net, a modality-robust scale-adaptive fusion framework for multi-spectral video segmentation that effectively models cross-modal fusion and temporal consistency. The Modality Spatial Complementary Suppression and Enhancement (MSCSE) module generates unified instance queries via cross-modal attention and suppresses modality-specific noise using residual-guided discrepancy filtering and consistency constraints. To model temporal dynamics, the Multi-scale Temporal Cross-modality Semantic Consistency (MTCSC) module adaptively adjusts the temporal receptive field based on frame distance, capturing both coarse global context and fine local structure across time. Extensive ablation experiments on public RGB-T datasets demonstrate that MSTF-Net achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance, especially under challenging conditions such as small targets, occlusion, and modality degradation. Specifically, reached 56.42\% mIoU on the MVSeg dataset and 51.80\% mIoU on the CART dataset, respectively.

MASTE: A Multi-Agent Pipeline for Zero-Shot Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) requires jointly identifying (aspect, opinion, sentiment) triples from a given review sentence. While large language models (LLMs) achieve strong zero-shot performance on many NLP benchmarks, their effectiveness on ASTE remains limited, as single-pass generation forces the model to determine span boundaries, opinion grouping, and sentiment polarity in a single decoding step. Common remedies, such as few-shot in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting, offer only marginal improvements and rely heavily on either in-domain demonstrations sampled from labeled training data or carefully engineered reasoning prompts, neither of which is broadly available in zero-shot deployment. Inspired by the classical agent paradigm, we propose MASTE, a multi-agent pipeline for zero-shot Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction. MASTE decomposes ASTE into four sequential stages, where specialized agents handle different compositional subtasks with explicit conditioning on prior outputs. This design enables entirely training-free zero-shot ASTE and generalizes across different backbones and datasets. Extensive experiments on four ASTE benchmarks show that MASTE substantially outperforms zero-shot and chain-of-thought LLM baselines under the same backbone, narrowing the gap to fully supervised methods without using any labeled triplets. Code is available at https://github.com/Hankerlove/MASTE.

SoftVTBench: A Safety-Aware Visuo-Tactile Benchmark for Physically Constrained Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

Deformable object manipulation poses challenges beyond task completion: successful execution must also maintain safe physical interaction, holding the object stably without slip or drop while avoiding excessive deformation. However, existing manipulation benchmarks are predominantly success-oriented and rarely evaluate whether a policy remains physically safe throughout execution. We present SoftVTBench, a safety-aware visuo-tactile benchmark for physically constrained deformable object manipulation. Built in Isaac Sim with finite-element-simulated deformable objects, SoftVTBench provides multi-view RGB observations, RGB tactile sensing with marker motion, proprioception, and language instructions, and defines four matched task suites over object type (deformable vs. rigid) and variation axis (object vs. spatial). It separately reports Goal Success and Safety Success; the latter additionally requires no drop and peak deformation below a calibrated object-specific threshold, measured from policy-hidden privileged Finite Element Method (FEM) states. We implement pi0.5-based baselines under this protocol. Experiments show that success-only evaluation substantially overstates policy performance, as a large fraction of goal-completing rollouts still violate physical safety. Furthermore, incorporating tactile sensing improves Safety Success (e.g., from 21.4% to 35.6% on object-centric deformable tasks) and reduces object deformation during execution, while maintaining comparable Goal Success. SoftVTBench provides a reproducible benchmark for studying visuo-tactile deformable manipulation under physical interaction constraints.

Stage-Transition Dense Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations. This work proposes Stage-Transition Dense Reward (STDR), a visual reward-learning framework that converts unstructured expert videos into logically grounded dense rewards for training RL agents from scratch. STDR leverages semantic understanding to infer a task's stage structure from demonstrations, and delivers two complementary learning signals during online training: (i) stage-transition feedback that provides goal-directed reward, and (ii) within-stage progress feedback that supplies fine-grained guidance toward completing each stage. Furthermore, an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection mechanism and a grasping regulation module are integrated to enhance robustness and prevent reward hacking. Experiments on 14 manipulation tasks across MetaWorld, ManiSkill, and Franka Kitchen show that STDR consistently improves sample efficiency and success rates over multiple baselines, and matches or surpasses handcrafted dense rewards on several challenging tasks. Real-robot evaluations further indicate that STDR assigns stable, progress-aligned rewards on successful executions while producing appropriately low rewards for failures, suggesting robustness to visual noise and better-calibrated reward assignment across settings.

GGD-SLAM: Monocular 3DGS SLAM Powered by Generalizable Motion Model for Dynamic Environments

Visual SLAM algorithms achieve significant improvements through the exploration of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representations, particularly in generating high-fidelity dense maps. However, they depend on a static environment assumption and experience significant performance degradation in dynamic environments. This paper presents GGD-SLAM, a framework that employs a generalizable motion model to address the challenges of localization and dense mapping in dynamic environments - without predefined semantic annotations or depth input. Specifically, the proposed system employs a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) queue to manage incoming frames, facilitating dynamic semantic feature extraction through a sequential attention mechanism. This is integrated with a dynamic feature enhancer to separate static and dynamic components. Additionally, to minimize dynamic distractors' impact on the static components, we devise a method to fill occluded areas via static information sampling and design a distractor-adaptive Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) loss tailored for dynamic environments, significantly enhancing the system's resilience. Experiments conducted on real-world dynamic datasets demonstrate that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance in camera pose estimation and dense reconstruction in dynamic scenes.

OVAL: Open-Vocabulary Augmented Memory Model for Lifelong Object Goal Navigation

Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) refers to an agent navigating to an object in an unseen environment, which is an ability often required in the accomplishment of complex tasks. While existing methods demonstrate proficiency in isolated single object navigation, their limitations emerge in the restricted applicability of lifelong memory representations, which ultimately hinders effective navigation toward continual targets over extended periods. To address this problem, we propose OVAL, a novel lifelong open-vocabulary memory framework, which enables efficient and precise execution of long-term navigation in semantically open tasks. Within this framework, we introduce memory descriptors to facilitate structured management of the memory model. Additionally, we propose a novel probability-based exploration strategy, utilizing a multi-value frontier scoring to enhance lifelong exploration efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed system.