Evolving the Complete Muscle: Efficient Morphology-Control Co-design for Musculoskeletal Locomotion

Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static physical setting fails to accommodate the diverse dynamic demands of complex tasks, inherently limiting the robot's performance upper bound. In this work, we focus on the morphology and control co-design of musculoskeletal systems. Unlike previous studies that optimize single physiological attributes such as stiffness, we introduce a Complete Musculoskeletal Morphological Evolution Space that simultaneously evolves muscle strength, velocity, and stiffness. To overcome the exponential expansion of the exploration space caused by this comprehensive evolution, we propose Spectral Design Evolution (SDE), a high-efficiency co-optimization framework. By integrating a bilateral symmetry prior with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), SDE projects complex muscle parameters onto a low-dimensional spectral manifold, enabling efficient morphological exploration. Evaluated on the MyoSuite framework across four tasks (Walk, Stair, Hilly, and Rough terrains), our method demonstrates superior learning efficiency and locomotion stability compared to fixed-morphology and standard evolutionary baselines.

EvoGymCM: Harnessing Continuous Material Stiffness for Soft Robot Co-Design

In the automated co-design of soft robots, precisely adapting the material stiffness field to task environments is crucial for unlocking their full physical potential. However, mainstream platforms (e.g., EvoGym) strictly discretize the material dimension, artificially restricting the design space and performance of soft robots. To address this, we propose EvoGymCM (EvoGym with Continuous Materials), a benchmark suite formally establishing continuous material stiffness as a first-class design variable alongside morphology and control. Aligning with real-world material mechanisms, EvoGymCM introduces two settings: (i) EvoGymCM-R (Reactive), motivated by programmable materials with dynamically tunable stiffness; and (ii) EvoGymCM-I (Invariant), motivated by traditional materials with invariant stiffness fields. To tackle the resulting high-dimensional coupling, we formulate two Morphology-Material-Control co-design paradigms: (i) Reactive-Material Co-Design, which learns real-time stiffness tuning policies to guide programmable materials; and (ii) Invariant-Material Co-Design, which jointly optimizes morphology and fixed material fields to guide traditional material fabrication. Systematic experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that continuous material optimization boosts performance and unlocks synergy across morphology, material, and control.

Diff-Muscle: Efficient Learning for Musculoskeletal Robotic Table Tennis

Musculoskeletal robots provide superior advantages in flexibility and dexterity, positioning them as a promising frontier towards embodied intelligence. However, current research is largely confined to relative simple tasks, restricting the exploration of their full potential in multi-segment coordination. Furthermore, efficient learning remains a challenge, primarily due to the high-dimensional action space and inherent overactuated structures. To address these challenges, we propose Diff-Muscle, a musculoskeletal robot control algorithm that leverages differential flatness to reformulate policy learning from the redundant muscle-activation space into a significantly lower-dimensional joint space. Furthermore, we utilize the highly dynamic robotic table tennis task to evaluate our algorithm. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that integrates a Kinematics-based Muscle Actuation Controller (K-MAC) with high-level trajectory planning, enabling a musculoskeletal robot to perform dexterous and precise rallies. Experimental results demonstrate that Diff-Muscle significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in success rates while maintaining minimal muscle activation. Notably, the proposed framework successfully enables the musculoskeletal robots to achieve continuous rallies in a challenging dual-robot setting.

Scaling World Model for Hierarchical Manipulation Policies

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising for generalist robot manipulation but remain brittle in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, especially with limited real-robot data. To resolve the generalization bottleneck, we introduce a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action framework \our{} that leverages the generalization of large-scale pre-trained world model for robust and generalizable VIsual Subgoal TAsk decomposition VISTA. Our hierarchical framework \our{} consists of a world model as the high-level planner and a VLA as the low-level executor. The high-level world model first divides manipulation tasks into subtask sequences with goal images, and the low-level policy follows the textual and visual guidance to generate action sequences. Compared to raw textual goal specification, these synthesized goal images provide visually and physically grounded details for low-level policies, making it feasible to generalize across unseen objects and novel scenarios. We validate both visual goal synthesis and our hierarchical VLA policies in massive out-of-distribution scenarios, and the performance of the same-structured VLA in novel scenarios could boost from 14% to 69% with the guidance generated by the world model. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous baselines with a clear margin, particularly in out-of-distribution scenarios. Project page: \href{https://vista-wm.github.io/}{https://vista-wm.github.io}

Towards Next-Generation SLAM: A Survey on 3DGS-SLAM Focusing on Performance, Robustness, and Future Directions

Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems often face limitations including coarse rendering quality, insufficient recovery of scene details, and poor robustness in dynamic environments. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), with its efficient explicit representation and high-quality rendering capabilities, offers a new reconstruction paradigm for SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews key technical approaches for integrating 3DGS with SLAM. We analyze performance optimization of representative methods across four critical dimensions: rendering quality, tracking accuracy, reconstruction speed, and memory consumption, delving into their design principles and breakthroughs. Furthermore, we examine methods for enhancing the robustness of 3DGS-SLAM in complex environments such as motion blur and dynamic environments. Finally, we discuss future challenges and development trends in this area. This survey aims to provide a technical reference for researchers and foster the development of next-generation SLAM systems characterized by high fidelity, efficiency, and robustness.

UV-M3TL: A Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning Framework for Assistive Driving Perception

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) need to understand human driver behavior while perceiving their navigation context, but jointly learning these heterogeneous tasks would cause inter-task negative transfer and impair system performance. Here, we propose a Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning (UV-M3TL) framework to simultaneously recognize driver behavior, driver emotion, vehicle behavior, and traffic context, while mitigating inter-task negative transfer. Our framework incorporates two core components: dual-branch spatial channel multimodal embedding (DB-SCME) and adaptive feature-decoupled multi-task loss (AFD-Loss). DB-SCME enhances cross-task knowledge transfer while mitigating task conflicts by employing a dual-branch structure to explicitly model salient task-shared and task-specific features. AFD-Loss improves the stability of joint optimization while guiding the model to learn diverse multi-task representations by introducing an adaptive weighting mechanism based on learning dynamics and feature decoupling constraints. We evaluate our method on the AIDE dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that UV-M3TL achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four tasks. To further prove the versatility, we evaluate UV-M3TL on additional public multi-task perception benchmarks (BDD100K, CityScapes, NYUD-v2, and PASCAL-Context), where it consistently delivers strong performance across diverse task combinations, attaining state-of-the-art results on most tasks.

Towards Efficient 3D Object Detection for Vehicle-Infrastructure Collaboration via Risk-Intent Selection

Vehicle-Infrastructure Collaborative Perception (VICP) is pivotal for resolving occlusion in autonomous driving, yet the trade-off between communication bandwidth and feature redundancy remains a critical bottleneck. While intermediate fusion mitigates data volume compared to raw sharing, existing frameworks typically rely on spatial compression or static confidence maps, which inefficiently transmit spatially redundant features from non-critical background regions. To address this, we propose Risk-intent Selective detection (RiSe), an interaction-aware framework that shifts the paradigm from identifying visible regions to prioritizing risk-critical ones. Specifically, we introduce a Potential Field-Trajectory Correlation Model (PTCM) grounded in potential field theory to quantitatively assess kinematic risks. Complementing this, an Intention-Driven Area Prediction Module (IDAPM) leverages ego-motion priors to proactively predict and filter key Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) areas essential for decision-making. By integrating these components, RiSe implements a semantic-selective fusion scheme that transmits high-fidelity features only from high-interaction regions, effectively acting as a feature denoiser. Extensive experiments on the DeepAccident dataset demonstrate that our method reduces communication volume to 0.71\% of full feature sharing while maintaining state-of-the-art detection accuracy, establishing a competitive Pareto frontier between bandwidth efficiency and perception performance.

CollabVLA: Self-Reflective Vision-Language-Action Model Dreaming Together with Human

In this work, we present CollabVLA, a self-reflective vision-language-action framework that transforms a standard visuomotor policy into a collaborative assistant. CollabVLA tackles key limitations of prior VLAs, including domain overfitting, non-interpretable reasoning, and the high latency of auxiliary generative models, by integrating VLM-based reflective reasoning with diffusion-based action generation under a mixture-of-experts design. Through a two-stage training recipe of action grounding and reflection tuning, it supports explicit self-reflection and proactively solicits human guidance when confronted with uncertainty or repeated failure. It cuts normalized Time by ~2x and Dream counts by ~4x vs. generative agents, achieving higher success rates, improved interpretability, and balanced low latency compared with existing methods. This work takes a pioneering step toward shifting VLAs from opaque controllers to genuinely assistive agents capable of reasoning, acting, and collaborating with humans.

Track Any Motions under Any Disturbances

A foundational humanoid motion tracker is expected to be able to track diverse, highly dynamic, and contact-rich motions. More importantly, it needs to operate stably in real-world scenarios against various dynamics disturbances, including terrains, external forces, and physical property changes for general practical use. To achieve this goal, we propose Any2Track (Track Any motions under Any disturbances), a two-stage RL framework to track various motions under multiple disturbances in the real world. Any2Track reformulates dynamics adaptability as an additional capability on top of basic action execution and consists of two key components: AnyTracker and AnyAdapter. AnyTracker is a general motion tracker with a series of careful designs to track various motions within a single policy. AnyAdapter is a history-informed adaptation module that endows the tracker with online dynamics adaptability to overcome the sim2real gap and multiple real-world disturbances. We deploy Any2Track on Unitree G1 hardware and achieve a successful sim2real transfer in a zero-shot manner. Any2Track performs exceptionally well in tracking various motions under multiple real-world disturbances.

S2R-Bench: A Sim-to-Real Evaluation Benchmark for Autonomous Driving

Safety is a long-standing and the final pursuit in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a significant portion of safety challenge arising from perception. How to effectively evaluate the safety as well as the reliability of perception algorithms is becoming an emerging issue. Despite its critical importance, existing perception methods exhibit a limitation in their robustness, primarily due to the use of benchmarks are entierly simulated, which fail to align predicted results with actual outcomes, particularly under extreme weather conditions and sensor anomalies that are prevalent in real-world scenarios. To fill this gap, in this study, we propose a Sim-to-Real Evaluation Benchmark for Autonomous Driving (S2R-Bench). We collect diverse sensor anomaly data under various road conditions to evaluate the robustness of autonomous driving perception methods in a comprehensive and realistic manner. This is the first corruption robustness benchmark based on real-world scenarios, encompassing various road conditions, weather conditions, lighting intensities, and time periods. By comparing real-world data with simulated data, we demonstrate the reliability and practical significance of the collected data for real-world applications. We hope that this dataset will advance future research and contribute to the development of more robust perception models for autonomous driving. This dataset is released on https://github.com/adept-thu/S2R-Bench.