A Flow Matching Framework for Soft-Robot Inverse Dynamics

Learning the inverse dynamics of soft continuum robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional nonlinearities and complex actuation coupling. Conventional feedback-based controllers often suffer from control chattering due to corrective oscillations, while deterministic regression-based learners struggle to capture the complex nonlinear mappings required for accurate dynamic tracking. Motivated by these limitations, we propose an inverse-dynamics framework for open-loop feedforward control that learns the system's differential dynamics as a generative transport map. Specifically, inverse dynamics is reformulated as a conditional flow-matching problem, and Rectified Flow (RF) is adopted as a lightweight instance to generate physically consistent control inputs rather than conditional averages. Two variants are introduced to further enhance physical consistency: RF-Physical, utilizing a physics-based prior for residual modeling; and RF-FWD, integrating a forward-dynamics consistency loss during flow matching. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework reduces trajectory tracking RMSE by over 50% compared to standard regression baselines (MLP, LSTM, Transformer). The system sustains stable open-loop execution at a peak end-effector velocity of 1.14 m/s with sub-millisecond inference latency (0.995 ms). This work demonstrates flow matching as a robust, high-performance paradigm for learning differential inverse dynamics in soft robotic systems.

POPDG: Popular 3D Dance Generation with PopDanceSet

Generating dances that are both lifelike and well-aligned with music continues to be a challenging task in the cross-modal domain. This paper introduces PopDanceSet, the first dataset tailored to the preferences of young audiences, enabling the generation of aesthetically oriented dances. And it surpasses the AIST++ dataset in music genre diversity and the intricacy and depth of dance movements. Moreover, the proposed POPDG model within the iDDPM framework enhances dance diversity and, through the Space Augmentation Algorithm, strengthens spatial physical connections between human body joints, ensuring that increased diversity does not compromise generation quality. A streamlined Alignment Module is also designed to improve the temporal alignment between dance and music. Extensive experiments show that POPDG achieves SOTA results on two datasets. Furthermore, the paper also expands on current evaluation metrics. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Luke-Luo1/POPDG.