ForceVLA2: Unleashing Hybrid Force-Position Control with Force Awareness for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Embodied intelligence for contact-rich manipulation has predominantly relied on position control, while explicit awareness and regulation of interaction forces remain under-explored, limiting stability, precision, and robustness in real-world tasks. We propose ForceVLA2, an end-to-end vision-language-action framework that equips robots with hybrid force-position control and explicit force awareness. ForceVLA2 introduces force-based prompts into the VLM expert to construct force-aware task concepts across stages, and employs a Cross-Scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in the action expert to adaptively fuse these concepts with real-time interaction forces for closed-loop hybrid force-position regulation. To support learning and evaluation, we construct ForceVLA2-Dataset, containing 1,000 trajectories over 5 contact-rich tasks, including wiping, pressing, and assembling, with multi-view images, task prompts, proprioceptive state, and force signals. Extensive experiments show that ForceVLA2 substantially improves success rates and reliability in contact-rich manipulation, outperforming pi0 and pi0.5 by 48.0% and 35.0%, respectively, across the 5 tasks, and mitigating common failure modes such as arm overload and unstable contact, thereby actively advancing force-aware interactive physical intelligence in VLAs. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/force-vla2/home.

SkillVLA: Tackling Combinatorial Diversity in Dual-Arm Manipulation via Skill Reuse

Recent progress in vision-language-action (VLA) models has demonstrated strong potential for dual-arm manipulation, enabling complex behaviors and generalization to unseen environments. However, mainstream bimanual VLA formulations largely overlook the critical challenge of combinatorial diversity. Different pairings of single-arm behaviors can induce qualitatively distinct task behaviors, yet existing models do not explicitly account for this structure. We argue that effective bimanual VLAs should support skill reuse - the ability to recombine previously learned single-arm skills across novel left-right pairings - thereby avoiding the need to separately learn every possible combination. Current VLA designs entangle skills across arms, preventing such recomposition and limiting scalability. To address this limitation, we propose SkillVLA, a framework explicitly designed to enable skill reuse in dual-arm manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkillVLA substantially improves skill composition, increasing overall success rate from 0% to 51%, and achieves strong performance on cooperative and long-horizon tasks.

EvalMVX: A Unified Benchmarking for Neural 3D Reconstruction under Diverse Multiview Setups

Recent advancements in neural surface reconstruction have significantly enhanced 3D reconstruction. However, current real world datasets mainly focus on benchmarking multiview stereo (MVS) based on RGB inputs. Multiview photometric stereo (MVPS) and multiview shape from polarization (MVSfP), though indispensable on high-fidelity surface reconstruction and sparse inputs, have not been quantitatively assessed together with MVS. To determine the working range of different MVX (MVS, MVSfP, and MVPS) techniques, we propose EvalMVX, a real-world dataset containing $25$ objects, each captured with a polarized camera under $20$ varying views and $17$ light conditions including OLAT and natural illumination, leading to $8,500$ images. Each object includes aligned ground-truth 3D mesh, facilitating quantitative benchmarking of MVX methods simultaneously. Based on our EvalMVX, we evaluate $13$ MVX methods published in recent years, record the best-performing methods, and identify open problems under diverse geometric details and reflectance types. We hope EvalMVX and the benchmarking results can inspire future research on multiview 3D reconstruction.

ExoGS: A 4D Real-to-Sim-to-Real Framework for Scalable Manipulation Data Collection

Real-to-Sim-to-Real technique is gaining increasing interest for robotic manipulation, as it can generate scalable data in simulation while having narrower sim-to-real gap. However, previous methods mainly focused on environment-level visual real-to-sim transfer, ignoring the transfer of interactions, which could be challenging and inefficient to obtain purely in simulation especially for contact-rich tasks. We propose ExoGS, a robot-free 4D Real-to-Sim-to-Real framework that captures both static environments and dynamic interactions in the real world and transfers them seamlessly to a simulated environment. It provides a new solution for scalable manipulation data collection and policy learning. ExoGS employs a self-designed robot-isomorphic passive exoskeleton AirExo-3 to capture kinematically consistent trajectories with millimeter-level accuracy and synchronized RGB observations during direct human demonstrations. The robot, objects, and environment are reconstructed as editable 3D Gaussian Splatting assets, enabling geometry-consistent replay and large-scale data augmentation. Additionally, a lightweight Mask Adapter injects instance-level semantics into the policy to enhance robustness under visual domain shifts. Real-world experiments demonstrate that ExoGS significantly improves data efficiency and policy generalization compared to teleoperation-based baselines. Code and hardware files have been released on https://github.com/zaixiabalala/ExoGS.

Near-Light Color Photometric Stereo for mono-Chromaticity non-lambertian surface

Color photometric stereo enables single-shot surface reconstruction, extending conventional photometric stereo that requires multiple images of a static scene under varying illumination to dynamic scenarios. However, most existing approaches assume ideal distant lighting and Lambertian reflectance, leaving more practical near-light conditions and non-Lambertian surfaces underexplored. To overcome this limitation, we propose a framework that leverages neural implicit representations for depth and BRDF modeling under the assumption of mono-chromaticity (uniform chromaticity and homogeneous material), which alleviates the inherent ill-posedness of color photometric stereo and allows for detailed surface recovery from just one image. Furthermore, we design a compact optical tactile sensor to validate our approach. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves accurate and robust surface reconstruction.

Adaptive Attention Distillation for Robust Few-Shot Segmentation under Environmental Perturbations

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to rapidly learn novel class concepts from limited examples to segment specific targets in unseen images, and has been widely applied in areas such as medical diagnosis and industrial inspection. However, existing studies largely overlook the complex environmental factors encountered in real world scenarios-such as illumination, background, and camera viewpoint-which can substantially increase the difficulty of test images. As a result, models trained under laboratory conditions often fall short of practical deployment requirements. To bridge this gap, in this paper, an environment-robust FSS setting is introduced that explicitly incorporates challenging test cases arising from complex environments-such as motion blur, small objects, and camouflaged targets-to enhance model's robustness under realistic, dynamic conditions. An environment robust FSS benchmark (ER-FSS) is established, covering eight datasets across multiple real world scenarios. In addition, an Adaptive Attention Distillation (AAD) method is proposed, which repeatedly contrasts and distills key shared semantics between known (support) and unknown (query) images to derive class-specific attention for novel categories. This strengthens the model's ability to focus on the correct targets in complex environments, thereby improving environmental robustness. Comparative experiments show that AAD improves mIoU by 3.3% - 8.5% across all datasets and settings, demonstrating superior performance and strong generalization. The source code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/Adaptive-Attention-Distillation-for-FSS.

ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{ForceVLA}, a novel end-to-end manipulation framework that treats external force sensing as a first-class modality within VLA systems. ForceVLA introduces \textbf{FVLMoE}, a force-aware Mixture-of-Experts fusion module that dynamically integrates pretrained visual-language embeddings with real-time 6-axis force feedback during action decoding. This enables context-aware routing across modality-specific experts, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to subtle contact dynamics. We also introduce \textbf{ForceVLA-Data}, a new dataset comprising synchronized vision, proprioception, and force-torque signals across five contact-rich manipulation tasks. ForceVLA improves average task success by 23.2\% over strong $\pi_0$-based baselines, achieving up to 80\% success in tasks such as plug insertion. Our approach highlights the importance of multimodal integration for dexterous manipulation and sets a new benchmark for physically intelligent robotic control. Code and data will be released at https://sites.google.com/view/forcevla2025.

Look-to-Touch: A Vision-Enhanced Proximity and Tactile Sensor for Distance and Geometry Perception in Robotic Manipulation

Camera-based tactile sensors provide robots with a high-performance tactile sensing approach for environment perception and dexterous manipulation. However, achieving comprehensive environmental perception still requires cooperation with additional sensors, which makes the system bulky and limits its adaptability to unstructured environments. In this work, we present a vision-enhanced camera-based dual-modality sensor, which realizes full-scale distance sensing from 50 cm to -3 mm while simultaneously keeping ultra-high-resolution texture sensing and reconstruction capabilities. Unlike conventional designs with fixed opaque gel layers, our sensor features a partially transparent sliding window, enabling mechanical switching between tactile and visual modes. For each sensing mode, a dynamic distance sensing model and a contact geometry reconstruction model are proposed. Through integration with soft robotic fingers, we systematically evaluate the performance of each mode, as well as in their synergistic operation. Experimental results show robust distance tracking across various speeds, nanometer-scale roughness detection, and sub-millimeter 3D texture reconstruction. The combination of both modalities improves the robot's efficiency in executing grasping tasks. Furthermore, the embedded mechanical transmission in the sensor allows for fine-grained intra-hand adjustments and precise manipulation, unlocking new capabilities for soft robotic hands.

Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Humans can accomplish complex contact-rich tasks using vision and touch, with highly reactive capabilities such as quick adjustments to environmental changes and adaptive control of contact forces; however, this remains challenging for robots. Existing visual imitation learning (IL) approaches rely on action chunking to model complex behaviors, which lacks the ability to respond instantly to real-time tactile feedback during the chunk execution. Furthermore, most teleoperation systems struggle to provide fine-grained tactile / force feedback, which limits the range of tasks that can be performed. To address these challenges, we introduce TactAR, a low-cost teleoperation system that provides real-time tactile feedback through Augmented Reality (AR), along with Reactive Diffusion Policy (RDP), a novel slow-fast visual-tactile imitation learning algorithm for learning contact-rich manipulation skills. RDP employs a two-level hierarchy: (1) a slow latent diffusion policy for predicting high-level action chunks in latent space at low frequency, (2) a fast asymmetric tokenizer for closed-loop tactile feedback control at high frequency. This design enables both complex trajectory modeling and quick reactive behavior within a unified framework. Through extensive evaluation across three challenging contact-rich tasks, RDP significantly improves performance compared to state-of-the-art visual IL baselines through rapid response to tactile / force feedback. Furthermore, experiments show that RDP is applicable across different tactile / force sensors. Code and videos are available on https://reactive-diffusion-policy.github.io/.

SymmeTac: Symmetric Color LED Driven Efficient Photometric Stereo Reconstruction Methods for Camera-based Tactile Sensors

Camera-based tactile sensors can provide high-density surface geometry and force information for robots in the interaction process with the target. However, most existing methods cannot achieve accurate reconstruction with high efficiency, impeding the applications in robots. To address these problems, we propose an efficient two-shot photometric stereo method based on symmetric color LED distribution. Specifically, based on the sensing response curve of CMOS channels, we design orthogonal red and blue LEDs as illumination to acquire four observation maps using channel-splitting in a two-shot manner. Subsequently, we develop a two-shot photometric stereo theory, which can estimate accurate surface normal and greatly reduce the computing overhead in magnitude. Finally, leveraging the characteristics of the camera-based tactile sensor, we optimize the algorithm to be a highly efficient, pure addition operation. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the advantages of our approach. Further details are available on: https://github.com/Tacxels/SymmeTac.