Gradient Regularized Natural Gradients

Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how the training dynamics of second-order optimizers can benefit from GR. In this work, we propose Gradient-Regularized Natural Gradients (GRNG), a family of scalable second-order optimizers that integrate explicit gradient regularization with natural gradient updates. Our framework provides two complementary algorithms: a frequentist variant that avoids explicit inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) via structured approximations, and a Bayesian variant based on a Regularized-Kalman formulation that eliminates the need for FIM inversion entirely. We establish convergence guarantees for GRNG, showing that gradient regularization improves stability and enables convergence to global minima. Empirically, we demonstrate that GRNG consistently enhances both optimization speed and generalization compared to first-order methods (SGD, AdamW) and second-order baselines (K-FAC, Sophia), with strong results on vision and language benchmarks. Our findings highlight gradient regularization as a principled and practical tool to unlock the robustness of natural gradient methods for large-scale deep learning.

M2I2HA: Multi-modal Object Detection Based on Intra- and Inter-Modal Hypergraph Attention

Recent advances in multi-modal detection have significantly improved detection accuracy in challenging environments (e.g., low light, overexposure). By integrating RGB with modalities such as thermal and depth, multi-modal fusion increases data redundancy and system robustness. However, significant challenges remain in effectively extracting task-relevant information both within and across modalities, as well as in achieving precise cross-modal alignment. While CNNs excel at feature extraction, they are limited by constrained receptive fields, strong inductive biases, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based models offer global context but suffer from quadratic computational complexity and are confined to pairwise correlation modeling. Mamba and other State Space Models (SSMs), on the other hand, are hindered by their sequential scanning mechanism, which flattens 2D spatial structures into 1D sequences, disrupting topological relationships and limiting the modeling of complex higher-order dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a multi-modal perception network based on hypergraph theory called M2I2HA. Our architecture includes an Intra-Hypergraph Enhancement module to capture global many-to-many high-order relationships within each modality, and an Inter-Hypergraph Fusion module to align, enhance, and fuse cross-modal features by bridging configuration and spatial gaps between data sources. We further introduce a M2-FullPAD module to enable adaptive multi-level fusion of multi-modal enhanced features within the network, meanwhile enhancing data distribution and flow across the architecture. Extensive object detection experiments on multiple public datasets against baselines demonstrate that M2I2HA achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection tasks.

M2I2HA: A Multi-modal Object Detection Method Based on Intra- and Inter-Modal Hypergraph Attention

Recent advances in multi-modal detection have significantly improved detection accuracy in challenging environments (e.g., low light, overexposure). By integrating RGB with modalities such as thermal and depth, multi-modal fusion increases data redundancy and system robustness. However, significant challenges remain in effectively extracting task-relevant information both within and across modalities, as well as in achieving precise cross-modal alignment. While CNNs excel at feature extraction, they are limited by constrained receptive fields, strong inductive biases, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based models offer global context but suffer from quadratic computational complexity and are confined to pairwise correlation modeling. Mamba and other State Space Models (SSMs), on the other hand, are hindered by their sequential scanning mechanism, which flattens 2D spatial structures into 1D sequences, disrupting topological relationships and limiting the modeling of complex higher-order dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a multi-modal perception network based on hypergraph theory called M2I2HA. Our architecture includes an Intra-Hypergraph Enhancement module to capture global many-to-many high-order relationships within each modality, and an Inter-Hypergraph Fusion module to align, enhance, and fuse cross-modal features by bridging configuration and spatial gaps between data sources. We further introduce a M2-FullPAD module to enable adaptive multi-level fusion of multi-modal enhanced features within the network, meanwhile enhancing data distribution and flow across the architecture. Extensive object detection experiments on multiple public datasets against baselines demonstrate that M2I2HA achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection tasks.

Skill-Aware Diffusion for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Robust generalization in robotic manipulation is crucial for robots to adapt flexibly to diverse environments. Existing methods usually improve generalization by scaling data and networks, but model tasks independently and overlook skill-level information. Observing that tasks within the same skill share similar motion patterns, we propose Skill-Aware Diffusion (SADiff), which explicitly incorporates skill-level information to improve generalization. SADiff learns skill-specific representations through a skill-aware encoding module with learnable skill tokens, and conditions a skill-constrained diffusion model to generate object-centric motion flow. A skill-retrieval transformation strategy further exploits skill-specific trajectory priors to refine the mapping from 2D motion flow to executable 3D actions. Furthermore, we introduce IsaacSkill, a high-fidelity dataset containing fundamental robotic skills for comprehensive evaluation and sim-to-real transfer. Experiments in simulation and real-world settings show that SADiff achieves good performance and generalization across various manipulation tasks. Code, data, and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/sa-diff.

CoINS: Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-Aware VLM

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in robotic planning. However, they typically function as semantic reasoners, lacking an intrinsic understanding of the specific robot's physical capabilities. This limitation is particularly critical in interactive navigation, where robots must actively modify cluttered environments to create traversable paths. Existing VLM-based navigators are predominantly confined to passive obstacle avoidance, failing to reason about when and how to interact with objects to clear blocked paths. To bridge this gap, we propose Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-aware VLM (CoINS), a hierarchical framework that integrates skill-aware reasoning and robust low-level execution. Specifically, we fine-tune a VLM, named InterNav-VLM, which incorporates skill affordance and concrete constraint parameters into the input context and grounds them into a metric-scale environmental representation. By internalizing the logic of counterfactual reasoning through fine-tuning on the proposed InterNav dataset, the model learns to implicitly evaluate the causal effects of object removal on navigation connectivity, thereby determining interaction necessity and target selection. To execute the generated high-level plans, we develop a comprehensive skill library through reinforcement learning, specifically introducing traversability-oriented strategies to manipulate diverse objects for path clearance. A systematic benchmark in Isaac Sim is proposed to evaluate both the reasoning and execution aspects of interactive navigation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoINS significantly outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 17\% higher overall success rate and over 80\% improvement in complex long-horizon scenarios compared to the best-performing baseline

Local Path Optimization in The Latent Space Using Learned Distance Gradient

Constrained motion planning is a common but challenging problem in robotic manipulation. In recent years, data-driven constrained motion planning algorithms have shown impressive planning speed and success rate. Among them, the latent motion method based on manifold approximation is the most efficient planning algorithm. Due to errors in manifold approximation and the difficulty in accurately identifying collision conflicts within the latent space, time-consuming path validity checks and path replanning are required. In this paper, we propose a method that trains a neural network to predict the minimum distance between the robot and obstacles using latent vectors as inputs. The learned distance gradient is then used to calculate the direction of movement in the latent space to move the robot away from obstacles. Based on this, a local path optimization algorithm in the latent space is proposed, and it is integrated with the path validity checking process to reduce the time of replanning. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms in multiple planning scenarios, demonstrating the fastest planning speed

ARCADE: Adaptive Robot Control with Online Changepoint-Aware Bayesian Dynamics Learning

Real-world robots must operate under evolving dynamics caused by changing operating conditions, external disturbances, and unmodeled effects. These may appear as gradual drifts, transient fluctuations, or abrupt shifts, demanding real-time adaptation that is robust to short-term variation yet responsive to lasting change. We propose a framework for modeling the nonlinear dynamics of robotic systems that can be updated in real time from streaming data. The method decouples representation learning from online adaptation, using latent representations learned offline to support online closed-form Bayesian updates. To handle evolving conditions, we introduce a changepoint-aware mechanism with a latent variable inferred from data likelihoods that indicates continuity or shift. When continuity is likely, evidence accumulates to refine predictions; when a shift is detected, past information is tempered to enable rapid re-learning. This maintains calibrated uncertainty and supports probabilistic reasoning about transient, gradual, or structural change. We prove that the adaptive regret of the framework grows only logarithmically in time and linearly with the number of shifts, competitive with an oracle that knows timings of shift. We validate on cartpole simulations and real quadrotor flights with swinging payloads and mid-flight drops, showing improved predictive accuracy, faster recovery, and more accurate closed-loop tracking than relevant baselines.

AERMANI-Diffusion: Regime-Conditioned Diffusion for Dynamics Learning in Aerial Manipulators

Aerial manipulators undergo rapid, configuration-dependent changes in inertial coupling forces and aerodynamic forces, making accurate dynamics modeling a core challenge for reliable control. Analytical models lose fidelity under these nonlinear and nonstationary effects, while standard data-driven methods such as deep neural networks and Gaussian processes cannot represent the diverse residual behaviors that arise across different operating conditions. We propose a regime-conditioned diffusion framework that models the full distribution of residual forces using a conditional diffusion process and a lightweight temporal encoder. The encoder extracts a compact summary of recent motion and configuration, enabling consistent residual predictions even through abrupt transitions or unseen payloads. When combined with an adaptive controller, the framework enables dynamics uncertainty compensation and yields markedly improved tracking accuracy in real-world tests.

Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive, Unified, and Evolving Evaluation Platform for Embodied AI

Embodied AI development significantly lags behind large foundation models due to three critical challenges: (1) lack of systematic understanding of core capabilities needed for Embodied AI, making research lack clear objectives; (2) absence of unified and standardized evaluation systems, rendering cross-benchmark evaluation infeasible; and (3) underdeveloped automated and scalable acquisition methods for embodied data, creating critical bottlenecks for model scaling. To address these obstacles, we present Embodied Arena, a comprehensive, unified, and evolving evaluation platform for Embodied AI. Our platform establishes a systematic embodied capability taxonomy spanning three levels (perception, reasoning, task execution), seven core capabilities, and 25 fine-grained dimensions, enabling unified evaluation with systematic research objectives. We introduce a standardized evaluation system built upon unified infrastructure supporting flexible integration of 22 diverse benchmarks across three domains (2D/3D Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) and 30+ advanced models from 20+ worldwide institutes. Additionally, we develop a novel LLM-driven automated generation pipeline ensuring scalable embodied evaluation data with continuous evolution for diversity and comprehensiveness. Embodied Arena publishes three real-time leaderboards (Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) with dual perspectives (benchmark view and capability view), providing comprehensive overviews of advanced model capabilities. Especially, we present nine findings summarized from the evaluation results on the leaderboards of Embodied Arena. This helps to establish clear research veins and pinpoint critical research problems, thereby driving forward progress in the field of Embodied AI.

Object-Reconstruction-Aware Whole-body Control of Mobile Manipulators

Object reconstruction and inspection tasks play a crucial role in various robotics applications. Identifying paths that reveal the most unknown areas of the object becomes paramount in this context, as it directly affects efficiency, and this problem is known as the view path planning problem. Current methods often use sampling-based path planning techniques, evaluating potential views along the path to enhance reconstruction performance. However, these methods are computationally expensive as they require evaluating several candidate views on the path. To this end, we propose a computationally efficient solution that relies on calculating a focus point in the most informative (unknown) region and having the robot maintain this point in the camera field of view along the path. We incorporated this strategy into the whole-body control of a mobile manipulator employing a visibility constraint without the need for an additional path planner. We conducted comprehensive and realistic simulations using a large dataset of 114 diverse objects of varying sizes from 57 categories to compare our method with a sampling-based planning strategy using Bayesian data analysis. Furthermore, we performed real-world experiments with an 8-DoF mobile manipulator to demonstrate the proposed method's performance in practice. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in object coverage and entropy. In contrast, our method is approximately nine times faster than the baseline sampling-based method in terms of the average time the robot spends between views.