Fudan University
Abstract:Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are now widely used for continuous robotic manipulation, and online reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a key technique for adapting them to new tasks. Existing RL methods typically inject stochasticity inside the denoising chain, often through isotropic or temporally independent noise. However, effective robot exploration calls for structured noise: temporally smooth and scaled differently across action groups. We show that simply switching the in-chain noise to a structured form does not suffice: noise added at an intermediate flow time can be weakened by the remaining denoising steps before execution, a phenomenon we call \emph{Structured Noise Dilution}. We propose \textbf{StructRL}, which avoids dilution by relocating policy stochasticity to the action space via three coupled choices: (i) a deterministic ODE decoder, (ii) structured noise injected directly in the action space, and (iii) last-step replay, where policy-gradient updates avoid assigning likelihoods to intermediate denoising states. This keeps structured exploration tied to the executed action while providing a tractable training signal for the flow decoder. Across three flow-based VLA models on multiple simulated manipulation benchmarks and two real-world tasks, StructRL improves exploration efficiency and OOD performance over prior in-chain baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured action-space exploration for adapting flow-based VLA with RL. \textbf{Project page:} https://flyfaerss.github.io/structrl/
Abstract:Robotic manipulation with dexterous hands is a cornerstone of Embodied AI, yet its progress is stifled by the high cost of collecting embodiment-aware teleoperation data. While abundant egocentric videos of human hands offer a scalable alternative, the profound discrepancies in appearance, articulation, and camera viewpoints between human and robotic data raise significant challenges for co-training. Though existing general image-editing models demonstrate strong capabilities, they lack necessary embodiment-specific priors to fully bridge this gap. In this work, we present HandEdit, a unified large-scale embodiment-aware image-editing dataset and benchmark specifically designed to transform human hands and arms into various dexterous robotic embodiments within egocentric frames. HandEdit comprises over 200M editing instances derived from five diverse source datasets, covering 26 distinct URDFs, including 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm configurations. Alongside the dataset, we establish a unified benchmark protocol with two tracks: Hand-only and Hand-Arm, supporting URDF-conditioned evaluation. We conduct extensive evaluations of 11 representative image-editing baselines using a multi-dimensional metric suite, including generic similarity metrics, VLM-based judgment, and embodiment-aware metrics. HandEdit serves as a critical resource at the intersection of image editing and robotics: it advances embodiment-aware editing models while enabling scalable dexterous robotic learning from abundant human video data, paving the way for more generalizable Embodied AI.
Abstract:Vision Language Models (VLMs) face significant challenges with ultra-long, interleaved image-text sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Current solutions either resort to aggressive token pruning, risking irreversible information loss, or adopt efficient but less precise architectures, while largely ignoring the equally vital textual component. We introduce VLZip, a framework that unifies visual and textual compression for high-fidelity reasoning within a pure Transformer. At its core, VLZip hierarchically distills visual and textual segments into compact, layer-specific "soft prefixes" and injects them into each decoder layer's hidden states, drastically shortening the attention sequence while preserving fine-grained global context. To address deficient evaluations in the field, we also introduce LongVLBench, a new benchmark derived from video narratives that demands holistic, narrative-level reasoning. Extensive experiments show VLZip achieves leading performance on long-context multimodal reasoning, enabling training up to 120K tokens, a 6x increase over the baseline, and inference beyond 280K tokens with significantly reduced memory, while demonstrating the memory scalability to handle up to 2M tokens. By excelling at extreme context lengths where existing methods collapse, VLZip establishes an efficient and powerful new standard for long-context multimodal AI. Code is available at https://github.com/ShareLab-SII/VLZip.
Abstract:Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive performance in recipe generation from food images.However, cooking is a structured transformation process in which ingredients undergo state changes through ordered actions,while free-form recipe language leaves the corresponding entities, intermediate states, and dependencies largely implicit and entangled.A graph representation makes this procedural knowledge explicit and compositional, providing a structured basis for assessing whether model outputs encode process-level knowledge rather than merely presenting plausible textual descriptions. To address this limitation, we present ReGraph, a large-scale recipe graph dataset that represents ingredients, cooking actions, and tools as entities, uses entity attributes to describe ingredient state changes, and employs typed relations to encode manipulation targets, destinations, and procedural ordering. ReGraph further incorporates explicit Recipe Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (RR-CoT) traces, providing auxiliary supervision for procedural decomposition and structured graph generation. Building on ReGraph, we propose Recipe Graph Learning (RGL), a two-stage framework that enables LMMs to generate a plausible fine-grained cooking workflow from a food image in the form of a structured recipe graph. Under a deterministic, schema-aware matching protocol, our experiments reveal a substantial gap between text-generation quality and recoverable procedural structure: recipes produced by existing approaches achieve competitive text-generation scores yet yield limited reference-aligned entity and relation structure under the ReGraph schema. In contrast, across two representative LMM backbones, RGL consistently improves the generation of cooking entities and procedural relations, while our analysis further shows that fine-grained ingredient-state capture remains the most challenging dimension.
Abstract:When will robots have their ChatGPT moment? Such a breakthrough requires a general-purpose robot that can handle unfamiliar tasks in unfamiliar environments, remain controllable over long interactions, and learn from experience. Today's embodied systems largely follow an end-to-end observation-to-action path. Despite rapid progress, they remain far from this goal: their generalization depends heavily on the coverage of robot training data, while long task execution remains difficult to control and inspect. To realize this goal, we introduce the Embodied Task Agent (ETA), a new paradigm for extending digital agents into the physical world, and release OpenETA as its open-source implementation. ETA centers the robot around a Planner that chooses one Tool call at a time, an Interface that controls execution, and a World that returns the result and a fresh observation. This loop allows the agent to verify outcomes, adapt its plan, and turn successful and failed interactions into reusable experience. OpenETA provides replaceable Planners, composable Tools and Skills, auditable memory, replayable trajectories, and common interfaces for simulation and real robots. For Codex, OpenETA can operate as a lightweight plugin that exposes only observe, mark_point, and move_to.
Abstract:AI-generated video (AIGV) detection aims to distinguish real videos from AI-generated ones. In practice, detectors trained on existing data often fail to generalize to newly emerging generative models, making this task challenging. Therefore, continual learning (CL) is essential for improving the adaptability. However, CL frameworks for this task remain underexplored. To this end, we propose SphereVideo, a novel CL framework for AIGV detection built on two key observations. First, real videos exhibit a compact feature distribution. Based on this, we encourage real video features to cluster around a real prototype on a hypersphere while repelling AI-generated samples, thereby establishing a decision boundary. This prototype serves as a stable anchor for CL, regulating boundary evolution and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Second, existing methods tend to rely solely on spatial artifacts as shortcuts. To enhance temporal modeling, we introduce a strategy that models the temporal dynamics of real data at both frame and clip levels. By strengthening real data modeling, this strategy further facilitates learning a real prototype and forming a stable decision boundary. Moreover, we construct a comprehensive and challenging benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SphereVideo achieves an improved plasticity-stability trade-off, outperforming prior methods by 3.08% on seen data and 4.00% on unseen AI-generated data.
Abstract:AI agents operate in persistent environments where early state changes can influence decisions far into the future. Unlike conventional language-model interactions, agent behavior is mediated through a shared state that is repeatedly modified and reused across long-horizon workflows. Current safety benchmarks often fail to capture these cumulative risks because they focus on short, static tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART provides over 10,000 validated stateful scenarios across 50 domains, drawing from a pool of more than 500,000 tools and skills. These tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and enable unified evaluation across 75 different agent-model configurations. To systematically explore these evolving attack surfaces, we propose the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA). EMHA is a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates. Throughout the evaluation, task objectives remain fixed while only the environment state changes. Across all configurations, EMHA achieves a pooled Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 85.0%. Its advantage over instruction-only evolution increases from approximately 2% on simple environments to over 17% on the most complex ones, demonstrating that environment evolution increasingly exposes safety failures as task complexity grows. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the specific runtime implementation of an agent explains a significant portion of safety variation beyond the underlying model's capabilities. These results establish OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.
Abstract:Robust embodied robots should be able to recover from failures and retry tasks in order to operate reliably in unstructured and noisy real-world environments. Achieving this capability requires training policies on data that captures recovery behaviors. However, collecting such data through robot teleoperation is difficult to scale, as it is time-consuming to induce diverse failure states, perform corrective actions, and reset the environment. This challenge is further exacerbated by the high diversity of failure modes, which demands substantially more recovery data than success demonstrations. In this work, we show that egocentric human data capturing failure recovery processes provides a scalable alternative. By efficiently arranging task-level failure configurations and recording short recovery segments, human operators can generate more than 10x as much valid recovery data per hour compared to robot teleoperation under our protocol. To address the embodiment gap between human and robot, we propose EgoRecovery, a co-training framework for learning recovery behavior, where human recovery demonstrations are aligned to a compact corrective-intent space shared with robot data, which captures the timing and magnitude of correction. Only a small number of robot recovery demonstrations are required to connect this intent to executable robot actions. At deployment, a learned recovery gate predicts when correction is needed from robot observations and activates the corrective intent only in recovery states. Experiments on real-world recovery tasks show that EgoRecovery improves success from failure starts over robot-only recovery, direct co-training with human recovery data, and direct intent-transfer baselines.
Abstract:Imitation learning enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from demonstrations by mapping observations to actions. Existing approaches predict either short-horizon continuous action sequences or discrete keyposes. However, continuous prediction methods suffer from compounding errors due to short prediction horizons and struggle with multi-modal action distributions, whereas keypose-based methods necessitate an external planner, constraining real-time applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce SegDiff, a closed-loop visuomotor policy that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. SegDiff decomposes demonstrations into motion segments between keyposes and learns to predict the continuous trajectory from the current state to the next keypose, enabling long-horizon prediction with real-time refinement. Furthermore, we leverage the capability of diffusion models and DDIM inversion to propose a Dynamic Temporal Ensembling mechanism, which allows the policy to efficiently respond to dynamic environments and mitigate discontinuities caused by inconsistent multi-modal sampling. SegDiff demonstrates significant performance gains over existing approaches across various simulated and real-world scenarios, indicating its strong ability to reason over extended temporal dependencies while maintaining real-time adaptability and control stability.
Abstract:Existing referring segmentation models passively process static images captured from fixed perspectives, limiting their applicability in Embodied AI, where agents must perform active perception in the continuous 360$^\circ$ environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: Active Panoramic Referring Segmentation (APRS). In this setting, an agent is required to adjust its viewing direction ($Δθ, Δφ$) to explore the 360$^\circ$ environment, seeking the object specified by a user instruction for segmentation. To tackle this challenging task, we propose PanoSeeker, a memory-augmented agent for efficient APRS. Rather than relying on heuristic scanning, PanoSeeker integrates a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with EgoSphere, an explicit spatial visual memory. By progressively integrating sequential local observations into a unified 360$^\circ$ representation, EgoSphere enables the agent to plan efficient and non-redundant search trajectories. Once the target is found, the agent performs active viewpoint alignment and outputs the segmentation mask. Furthermore, we curate an expert-annotated search trajectory dataset with memory timelines for Supervised Fine-Tuning, followed by Reinforcement Learning post-training to explicitly optimize PanoSeeker's exploration efficiency. Extensive experiments on our newly established APRS benchmark demonstrate that PanoSeeker achieves superior search efficiency and segmentation accuracy, significantly outperforming adapted state-of-the-art baselines.