AnySlot: Goal-Conditioned Vision-Language-Action Policies for Zero-Shot Slot-Level Placement

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have emerged as a versatile paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. However, precise object placement under compositional language instructions remains a major challenge for modern monolithic VLA policies. Slot-level tasks require both reliable slot grounding and sub-centimeter execution accuracy. To this end, we propose AnySlot, a framework that reduces compositional complexity by introducing an explicit spatial visual goal as an intermediate representation between language grounding and control. AnySlot turns language into an explicit visual goal by generating a scene marker, then executes this goal with a goal-conditioned VLA policy. This hierarchical design effectively decouples high-level slot selection from low-level execution, ensuring both semantic accuracy and spatial robustness. Furthermore, recognizing the lack of existing benchmarks for such precision-demanding tasks, we introduce SlotBench, a comprehensive simulation benchmark featuring nine task categories tailored to evaluate structured spatial reasoning in slot-level placement. Extensive experiments show that AnySlot significantly outperforms flat VLA baselines and previous modular grounding methods in zero-shot slot-level placement.

TreeCSS: An Efficient Framework for Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (VFL) considers the case that the features of data samples are partitioned over different participants. VFL consists of two main steps, i.e., identify the common data samples for all participants (alignment) and train model using the aligned data samples (training). However, when there are many participants and data samples, both alignment and training become slow. As such, we propose TreeCSS as an efficient VFL framework that accelerates the two main steps. In particular, for sample alignment, we design an efficient multi-party private set intersection (MPSI) protocol called Tree-MPSI, which adopts a tree-based structure and a data-volume-aware scheduling strategy to parallelize alignment among the participants. As model training time scales with the number of data samples, we conduct coreset selection (CSS) to choose some representative data samples for training. Our CCS method adopts a clustering-based scheme for security and generality, which first clusters the features locally on each participant and then merges the local clustering results to select representative samples. In addition, we weight the samples according to their distances to the centroids to reflect their importance to model training. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our TreeCSS framework on various datasets and models. The results show that compared with vanilla VFL, TreeCSS accelerates training by up to 2.93x and achieves comparable model accuracy.