VQActFlow: Vector-Quantized Action Mode Steering for Multi-Task Robot Manipulation

Multi-task robot manipulation policies are challenging to learn from demonstration because traditionally a single network must select among qualitatively different action modes from a multimodal demonstration distribution, conditioned on language and visual context. A wrong mode selection means executing the wrong task or an action infeasible in the scene. Tokenizing continuous actions into a learned discrete codebook separates these modes at the representation level, offering structural advantages for multi-task learning. We propose VQActFlow, a multi-task manipulation policy that tokenizes action chunks and generates code sequences via Variational Flow Matching. VQActFlow maintains an explicit preference over action modes throughout generation. Inference-time guidance acts on this preference to steer mode commitment. We instantiate this with classifier-free guidance over language conditioning, which steers the policy toward the instructed action mode, and a learned codebook critic that supplies a complementary feasibility signal. We evaluate VQActFlow on three platforms: the LIBERO simulation benchmarks, a Unitree G1 humanoid performing whole-body pick-and-place, and an ALOHA-style bimanual platform performing contact-rich tasks. Across these benchmarks, VQActFlow outperforms both continuous and discrete baselines.

WT-UMI: Tactile-based Whole-Body Manipulation via Force-Supervised Contact-Aware Planning

Whole-body humanoid manipulation of bulky, deformable, and shared-load objects requires distributed contact sensing and explicit force regulation, yet most imitation policies treat contact force only implicitly. On the other hand, different demonstration sources provide complementary modalities with inherent trade-offs: human demonstrations capture natural contact forces but not robot-executable actions, while teleoperation directly records robot actions but with less natural force regulation. This paper presents \textbf{WT-UMI}, a wearable whole-body tactile interface worn by human operators or mounted on humanoids, providing accurate observations of tactile images, contact forces, and end-effector poses across both human demonstration and humanoid teleoperation modes. We introduce a force-conditioned target-pose correction module that converts measured human poses into contact-aware robot targets by learning corrections from teleoperation data. To leverage the natural force interaction in human data, we propose a force-supervised planner that predicts end-effector pose chunks and contact-force trajectories. The predicted contact force serves as the reference for a tactile-based admittance controller. Across five contact-rich tasks spanning deformable objects, bulky rigid objects, and human--humanoid collaboration, WT-UMI improves success rate and reduces contact-position tracking error over four policy baselines. Our project page is available at https://wt-umi.github.io/WTUMI/.

REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated high-level motion plans with stable, low-level whole-body execution under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks. While diffusion policies (DPs) show promise for learning from demonstrations, deploying them on humanoids poses critical challenges: the motion planner trained offline is decoupled from the low-level controller, leading to poor command tracking, compounding distribution shift, and task failures. The common approach of scaling demonstration data is prohibitively expensive for high-dimensional humanoid systems. To address this challenge, we present REFINE-DP (REinforcement learning FINE-tuning of Diffusion Policy), a hierarchical framework that jointly optimizes a DP high-level planner and an RL-based low-level loco-manipulation controller. The DP is fine-tuned via a PPO-based diffusion policy gradient to improve task success rate, while the controller is simultaneously updated to accurately track the planner's evolving command distribution, reducing the distributional mismatch that degrades motion quality. We validate REFINE-DP on a humanoid robot performing loco-manipulation tasks, including door traversal and long-horizon object transport. REFINE-DP achieves an over $90\%$ success rate in simulation, even in out-of-distribution cases not seen in the pre-trained data, and enables smooth autonomous task execution in real-world dynamic environments. Our proposed method substantially outperforms pre-trained DP baselines and demonstrates that RL fine-tuning is key to reliable humanoid loco-manipulation. https://refine-dp.github.io/REFINE-DP/