Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion and End-Effector Stabilization Control

Can your humanoid walk up and hand you a full cup of beer, without spilling a drop? While humanoids are increasingly featured in flashy demos like dancing, delivering packages, traversing rough terrain, fine-grained control during locomotion remains a significant challenge. In particular, stabilizing a filled end-effector (EE) while walking is far from solved, due to a fundamental mismatch in task dynamics: locomotion demands slow-timescale, robust control, whereas EE stabilization requires rapid, high-precision corrections. To address this, we propose SoFTA, a Slow-Fast TwoAgent framework that decouples upper-body and lower-body control into separate agents operating at different frequencies and with distinct rewards. This temporal and objective separation mitigates policy interference and enables coordinated whole-body behavior. SoFTA executes upper-body actions at 100 Hz for precise EE control and lower-body actions at 50 Hz for robust gait. It reduces EE acceleration by 2-5x relative to baselines and performs much closer to human-level stability, enabling delicate tasks such as carrying nearly full cups, capturing steady video during locomotion, and disturbance rejection with EE stability.

Effective climate policies for major emission reductions of ozone precursors: Global evidence from two decades

Despite policymakers deploying various tools to mitigate emissions of ozone (O\textsubscript{3}) precursors, such as nitrogen oxides (NO\textsubscript{x}), carbon monoxide (CO), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the effectiveness of policy combinations remains uncertain. We employ an integrated framework that couples structural break detection with machine learning to pinpoint effective interventions across the building, electricity, industrial, and transport sectors, identifying treatment effects as abrupt changes without prior assumptions about policy treatment assignment and timing. Applied to two decades of global O\textsubscript{3} precursor emissions data, we detect 78, 77, and 78 structural breaks for NO\textsubscript{x}, CO, and VOCs, corresponding to cumulative emission reductions of 0.96-0.97 Gt, 2.84-2.88 Gt, and 0.47-0.48 Gt, respectively. Sector-level analysis shows that electricity sector structural policies cut NO\textsubscript{x} by up to 32.4\%, while in buildings, developed countries combined adoption subsidies with carbon taxes to achieve 42.7\% CO reductions and developing countries used financing plus fuel taxes to secure 52.3\%. VOCs abatement peaked at 38.5\% when fossil-fuel subsidy reforms were paired with financial incentives. Finally, hybrid strategies merging non-price measures (subsidies, bans, mandates) with pricing instruments delivered up to an additional 10\% co-benefit. These findings guide the sequencing and complementarity of context-specific policy portfolios for O\textsubscript{3} precursor mitigation.

FALCON: Learning Force-Adaptive Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Humanoid loco-manipulation holds transformative potential for daily service and industrial tasks, yet achieving precise, robust whole-body control with 3D end-effector force interaction remains a major challenge. Prior approaches are often limited to lightweight tasks or quadrupedal/wheeled platforms. To overcome these limitations, we propose FALCON, a dual-agent reinforcement-learning-based framework for robust force-adaptive humanoid loco-manipulation. FALCON decomposes whole-body control into two specialized agents: (1) a lower-body agent ensuring stable locomotion under external force disturbances, and (2) an upper-body agent precisely tracking end-effector positions with implicit adaptive force compensation. These two agents are jointly trained in simulation with a force curriculum that progressively escalates the magnitude of external force exerted on the end effector while respecting torque limits. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the baselines, FALCON achieves 2x more accurate upper-body joint tracking, while maintaining robust locomotion under force disturbances and achieving faster training convergence. Moreover, FALCON enables policy training without embodiment-specific reward or curriculum tuning. Using the same training setup, we obtain policies that are deployed across multiple humanoids, enabling forceful loco-manipulation tasks such as transporting payloads (0-20N force), cart-pulling (0-100N), and door-opening (0-40N) in the real world.

Flying Hand: End-Effector-Centric Framework for Versatile Aerial Manipulation Teleoperation and Policy Learning

Aerial manipulation has recently attracted increasing interest from both industry and academia. Previous approaches have demonstrated success in various specific tasks. However, their hardware design and control frameworks are often tightly coupled with task specifications, limiting the development of cross-task and cross-platform algorithms. Inspired by the success of robot learning in tabletop manipulation, we propose a unified aerial manipulation framework with an end-effector-centric interface that decouples high-level platform-agnostic decision-making from task-agnostic low-level control. Our framework consists of a fully-actuated hexarotor with a 4-DoF robotic arm, an end-effector-centric whole-body model predictive controller, and a high-level policy. The high-precision end-effector controller enables efficient and intuitive aerial teleoperation for versatile tasks and facilitates the development of imitation learning policies. Real-world experiments show that the proposed framework significantly improves end-effector tracking accuracy, and can handle multiple aerial teleoperation and imitation learning tasks, including writing, peg-in-hole, pick and place, changing light bulbs, etc. We believe the proposed framework provides one way to standardize and unify aerial manipulation into the general manipulation community and to advance the field. Project website: https://lecar-lab.github.io/flying_hand/.

ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills

Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility in performing human-like, whole-body skills. However, achieving agile and coordinated whole-body motions remains a significant challenge due to the dynamics mismatch between simulation and the real world. Existing approaches, such as system identification (SysID) and domain randomization (DR) methods, often rely on labor-intensive parameter tuning or result in overly conservative policies that sacrifice agility. In this paper, we present ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics), a two-stage framework designed to tackle the dynamics mismatch and enable agile humanoid whole-body skills. In the first stage, we pre-train motion tracking policies in simulation using retargeted human motion data. In the second stage, we deploy the policies in the real world and collect real-world data to train a delta (residual) action model that compensates for the dynamics mismatch. Then, ASAP fine-tunes pre-trained policies with the delta action model integrated into the simulator to align effectively with real-world dynamics. We evaluate ASAP across three transfer scenarios: IsaacGym to IsaacSim, IsaacGym to Genesis, and IsaacGym to the real-world Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our approach significantly improves agility and whole-body coordination across various dynamic motions, reducing tracking error compared to SysID, DR, and delta dynamics learning baselines. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids.

Catch It! Learning to Catch in Flight with Mobile Dexterous Hands

Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability to interact with diverse objects. In this paper, we build a mobile manipulator composed of a mobile base, a 6-DoF arm, and a 12-DoF dexterous hand to tackle such a challenging task. We propose a two-stage reinforcement learning framework to efficiently train a whole-body-control catching policy for this high-DoF system in simulation. The objects' throwing configurations, shapes, and sizes are randomized during training to enhance policy adaptivity to various trajectories and object characteristics in flight. The results show that our trained policy catches diverse objects with randomly thrown trajectories, at a high success rate of about 80\% in simulation, with a significant improvement over the baselines. The policy trained in simulation can be directly deployed in the real world with onboard sensing and computation, which achieves catching sandbags in various shapes, randomly thrown by humans. Our project page is available at https://mobile-dex-catch.github.io/.

AD-H: Autonomous Driving with Hierarchical Agents

Due to the impressive capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), recent works have focused on employing MLLM-based agents for autonomous driving in large-scale and dynamic environments. However, prevalent approaches often directly translate high-level instructions into low-level vehicle control signals, which deviates from the inherent language generation paradigm of MLLMs and fails to fully harness their emergent powers. As a result, the generalizability of these methods is highly restricted by autonomous driving datasets used during fine-tuning. To tackle this challenge, we propose to connect high-level instructions and low-level control signals with mid-level language-driven commands, which are more fine-grained than high-level instructions but more universal and explainable than control signals, and thus can effectively bridge the gap in between. We implement this idea through a hierarchical multi-agent driving system named AD-H, including a MLLM planner for high-level reasoning and a lightweight controller for low-level execution. The hierarchical design liberates the MLLM from low-level control signal decoding and therefore fully releases their emergent capability in high-level perception, reasoning, and planning. We build a new dataset with action hierarchy annotations. Comprehensive closed-loop evaluations demonstrate several key advantages of our proposed AD-H system. First, AD-H can notably outperform state-of-the-art methods in achieving exceptional driving performance, even exhibiting self-correction capabilities during vehicle operation, a scenario not encountered in the training dataset. Second, AD-H demonstrates superior generalization under long-horizon instructions and novel environmental conditions, significantly surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. We will make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/AD-H

Translating Expert Intuition into Quantifiable Features: Encode Investigator Domain Knowledge via LLM for Enhanced Predictive Analytics

In the realm of predictive analytics, the nuanced domain knowledge of investigators often remains underutilized, confined largely to subjective interpretations and ad hoc decision-making. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this gap by systematically converting investigator-derived insights into quantifiable, actionable features that enhance model performance. We present a framework that leverages LLMs' natural language understanding capabilities to encode these red flags into a structured feature set that can be readily integrated into existing predictive models. Through a series of case studies, we demonstrate how this approach not only preserves the critical human expertise within the investigative process but also scales the impact of this knowledge across various prediction tasks. The results indicate significant improvements in risk assessment and decision-making accuracy, highlighting the value of blending human experiential knowledge with advanced machine learning techniques. This study paves the way for more sophisticated, knowledge-driven analytics in fields where expert insight is paramount.

Regularization-Based Efficient Continual Learning in Deep State-Space Models

Deep state-space models (DSSMs) have gained popularity in recent years due to their potent modeling capacity for dynamic systems. However, existing DSSM works are limited to single-task modeling, which requires retraining with historical task data upon revisiting a forepassed task. To address this limitation, we propose continual learning DSSMs (CLDSSMs), which are capable of adapting to evolving tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed CLDSSMs integrate mainstream regularization-based continual learning (CL) methods, ensuring efficient updates with constant computational and memory costs for modeling multiple dynamic systems. We also conduct a comprehensive cost analysis of each CL method applied to the respective CLDSSMs, and demonstrate the efficacy of CLDSSMs through experiments on real-world datasets. The results corroborate that while various competing CL methods exhibit different merits, the proposed CLDSSMs consistently outperform traditional DSSMs in terms of effectively addressing catastrophic forgetting, enabling swift and accurate parameter transfer to new tasks.

Multi-Agent Combinatorial Path Finding with Heterogeneous Task Duration

Multi-Agent Combinatorial Path Finding (MCPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their initial locations to destinations, visiting a set of intermediate target locations in the middle of the paths, while minimizing the sum of arrival times. While a few approaches have been developed to handle MCPF, most of them simply direct the agent to visit the targets without considering the task duration, i.e., the amount of time needed for an agent to execute the task (such as picking an item) at a target location. MCPF is NP-hard to solve to optimality, and the inclusion of task duration further complicates the problem. This paper investigates heterogeneous task duration, where the duration can be different with respect to both the agents and targets. We develop two methods, where the first method post-processes the paths planned by any MCPF planner to include the task duration and has no solution optimality guarantee; and the second method considers task duration during planning and is able to ensure solution optimality. The numerical and simulation results show that our methods can handle up to 20 agents and 50 targets in the presence of task duration, and can execute the paths subject to robot motion disturbance.