Search — manipulation

Newton’s brick_stacking example generates many contacts that appear to float due to large shape margin+gap settings. They want more reasonable parameters while maintaining the example’s behavior.

TacSL force-field readings in an Isaac Lab demo do not increase smoothly with stepped applied normal force and instead appear irregular. The user reports Isaac Lab main branch with Isaac Sim 5.1.

A dexterous hand imported via URDF fails to grasp and lift a bottle; the object slides and remains unliftable. The same bottle can be lifted using a Franka example, suggesting contact/friction or grasp modeling differences for the hand.

A dexterous hand imported via URDF cannot grasp a bottle reliably; the bottle slides and cannot be lifted. The reporter notes the Franka example can lift the same object, implying a hand-specific contact/friction issue.

In a CloudXR + OpenXR setup, frames stream correctly but inbound messages and hand-tracking poses are silently dropped between client and Isaac Sim’s OpenXR plugin. This blocks teleop commands and hand tracking for interactive workflows.

Kamino examples were added but are missing required README entries and screenshots on the release branch. This reduces discoverability and fails documented contribution requirements.

Mouse dragging in cable examples introduces overly large forces, possibly from large torques applied to segments. This makes interactive manipulation unreliable.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are prone to compounding errors in dexterous manipulation, where high-dimensional action spaces and contact-rich dynamics amplify small policy deviations over long horizons. While Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) can refine policies through human takeover data, applying it to high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic hands remains challenging due to a command mismatch between human teleoperation and policy execution at the takeover moment, which causes abrupt robot-hand configuration changes, or "gesture jumps". We present Hand-in-the-Loop (HandITL), a seamless human-in-the-loop intervention method that blends human corrective intent with autonomous policy execution to avoid gesture jumps during bimanual dexterous manipulation. Compared with direct teleoperation takeover, HandITL reduces takeover jitter by 99.8% and preserves robust post-takeover manipulation, reducing grasp failures by 87.5% and mean completion time by 19.1%. We validate HandITL on tasks requiring bimanual coordination, tool use, and fine-grained long-horizon manipulation. When used to collect intervention data for policy refinement, HandITL yields policies that outperform those trained with standard teleoperation data by 19% on average across three long-horizon dexterous tasks.

Vision-Language-Action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by unifying perception, language grounding, and action generation. However, they often struggle in scenarios requiring precise spatial understanding, as current VLA models primarily rely on 2D visual representations that lack depth information and detailed spatial relationships. While recent approaches incorporate explicit 3D inputs such as depth maps or point clouds to address this issue, they often increase system complexity, require additional sensors, and remain vulnerable to sensing noise and reconstruction errors. Another line of work explores implicit 3D-aware spatial modeling directly from RGB observations without extra sensors, but it often relies on large geometry foundation models, resulting in higher training and deployment costs. To address these challenges, we propose Evo-Depth, a lightweight depth-enhanced VLA framework that enhances spatially grounded manipulation without relying on additional sensing hardware or compromising deployment efficiency. Evo-Depth employs a lightweight Implicit Depth Encoding Module to extract compact depth features from multi-view RGB images. These features are incorporated into vision-language representations through a Spatial Enhancement Module via depth-aware modulation, enabling efficient spatial-semantic enhancement. A Progressive Alignment Training strategy is further introduced to align the resulting depth-enhanced representations with downstream action learning. With only 0.9B parameters, Evo-Depth achieves superior performance across four simulation benchmarks. In real-world experiments, Evo-Depth attains the highest average success rate while also exhibiting the smallest model size, lowest GPU memory usage, and highest inference frequency among compared methods.

Predictive world models enable agents to model scene dynamics and reason about the consequences of their actions. Inspired by human perception, object-centric world models capture scene dynamics using object-level representations, which can be used for downstream applications such as action planning. However, most object-centric world models and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn reactive policies that are fixed at inference time, limiting generalization to novel situations. We propose Slot-MPC, an object-centric world modeling framework that enables planning through Model Predictive Control (MPC). Slot-MPC leverages vision encoders to learn slot-based representations, which encode individual objects in the scene, and uses these structured representations to learn an action-conditioned object-centric dynamics model. At inference time, the learned dynamics model enables action planning via MPC, allowing agents to adapt to previously unseen situations. Since the learned world model is differentiable, we can use gradient-based MPC to directly optimize actions, which is computationally more efficient than relying on gradient-free, sampling-based MPC methods. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that Slot-MPC improves both task performance and planning efficiency compared to non-object-centric world model baselines. In the considered offline setting with limited state-action coverage, we find that gradient-based MPC performs better than gradient-free, sampling-based MPC. Our results demonstrate that explicitly structured, object-centric representations provide a strong inductive bias for controllable and generalizable decision-making. Code and additional results are available at https://slot-mpc.github.io.

Accurate dynamics models are critical for aerial manipulators operating under complex tasks such as payload transport. However, modeling these systems remains fundamentally challenging due to strong quadrotor-manipulator coupling, delayed aerodynamic interactions, and regime-dependent dynamics variations arising from payload changes and manipulator reconfiguration. These effects produce residual dynamics that are simultaneously cross-coupled, history-dependent, and nonstationary, causing both analytical models and purely offline learned models to degrade during deployment. To address these challenges, we propose a structured encoder-decoder framework for adaptive residual dynamics learning in aerial manipulators. The proposed nonlinear latent encoder captures cross-variable coupling and temporal dependencies from state-input histories, while a lightweight linear latent decoder enables online adaptation under regime-dependent nonstationary dynamics. The linear-in-parameter decoder structure permits closed-form Bayesian adaptation together with consistency-driven covariance inflation, enabling rapid and stable adaptation to both transient and slowly varying dynamics changes while remaining compatible with real-time model predictive control (MPC). Experimental results on a real aerial manipulation platform demonstrate improved residual prediction accuracy, faster adaptation under changing operating conditions, and enhanced MPC-based trajectory tracking performance. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling coupled temporal dynamics and deployment-time nonstationarity for reliable aerial manipulation.

Robot imitation data are often multimodal: similar visual-language observations may be followed by different action chunks because human demonstrators act with different short-horizon intents, task phases, or recent context. Existing frame-conditioned VLA policies infer each chunk from the current observation and instruction alone, so under partial observability they may resample different intents across adjacent replanning steps, leading to inter-chunk conflict and unstable execution. We introduce IntentVLA, a history-conditioned VLA framework that encodes recent visual observations into a compact short-horizon intent representation and uses it to condition chunk generation. We further introduce AliasBench, a 12-task ambiguity-aware benchmark on RoboTwin2 with matched training data and evaluation environments that isolate short-horizon observation aliasing. Across AliasBench, SimplerEnv, LIBERO, and RoboCasa, IntentVLA improves rollout stability and outperforms strong VLA baselines

Diffusion-based imitation learning has shown strong promise for robot manipulation. However, most existing policies condition only on the current observation or a short window of recent observations, limiting their ability to resolve history-dependent ambiguities in long-horizon tasks. To address this, we introduce DSSP, a history-conditioned Diffusion State Space Policy that enables efficient, full-history conditioning for robot manipulation. Leveraging the continuous sequence modeling properties of State Space Models (SSMs), our history encoder effectively compresses the entire observation stream into a compact context representation. To ensure this context preserves critical information regarding future state evolution, the encoder is optimized with a dynamics-aware auxiliary training objective. This high-level context representation is then seamlessly fused with recent state observations to form a hierarchical conditioning mechanism for action generation. Furthermore, to maintain architectural consistency and minimize GPU memory overhead, we also instantiate the diffusion backbone itself using an SSM. Extensive experiments across simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks show that DSSP achieves state-of-the-art performance with a significantly smaller model size, demonstrating superior efficiency of the hierarchical conditioning in capturing crucial information as the history length increases.

Differentiable simulation of soft bodies is a foundation for system identification, trajectory optimization, and Real2Sim transfer. Yet, existing methods such as the differentiable Projective Dynamics (DiffPD) struggle when faced with heterogeneous materials with extreme stiffness contrasts, hyperelasticity under large deformations, and contact-rich interactions, which are common scenarios in the real world. We present DiffPhD, a unified GPU-accelerated differentiable Projective Dynamics framework for heterogeneous materials that tackles these intertwined challenges simultaneously. Our key insight is a careful integration of: (i) stiffness-aware projective weights to embed heterogeneity into the global system; (ii) trust-region eigenvalue filtering lifted to the backward pass for stable hyperelastic gradients and a type-II Anderson Acceleration scheme with dual-gate convergence to stabilize forward iteration under large stiffness contrasts; and (iii) a unified GPU pipeline that reuses a single sparse factor across forward, backward, and contact computations, with stiffness-amplified Rayleigh damping folded into the same factor for heterogeneity-aware dissipation at zero recurring cost. DiffPhD achieves strict gradient accuracy while delivering up to an order-of-magnitude speedup over prior differentiable solvers on heterogeneous, hyperelastic, contact-rich benchmarks. Crucially, this speedup does not come at the cost of stability: DiffPhD remains convergent on stiffness contrasts up to 100x where prior PD solvers degrade. This unlocks end-to-end gradient-based optimization on regimes previously bottlenecked by either solver fragility or per-iteration cost -- shell--joint composite creatures, soft characters wielding stiff weapons, and soft-gripper robotic manipulation -- all handled within a single forward--backward pass.

We investigate whether behavior cloning is sufficient to produce active perception in a structured object-finding task. A low-cost robot arm equipped with a wrist-mounted egocentric RGB camera must reposition to center a partially visible plant before triggering a grasp signal, requiring actions that improve future observations. The model predicts joint commands directly from low-resolution RGB images under closed-loop control. We show that low-resolution egocentric vision is sufficient for reliable task completion and that predicting relative joint deltas substantially outperforms absolute joint position prediction in our setting. These results demonstrate that visually grounded active perception can emerge from behavior cloning in a reproducible setting.

Generative policies based on diffusion and flow matching have become a dominant paradigm for visuomotor robotic control. We show that replacing the standard Gaussian source distribution with WarmPrior, a simple temporally grounded prior constructed from readily available recent action history, consistently improves success rates on robotic manipulation tasks. We trace this gain to markedly straighter probability paths, echoing the effect of optimal-transport couplings in Rectified Flow. Beyond standard behavior cloning, WarmPrior also reshapes the exploration distribution in prior-space reinforcement learning, improving both sample efficiency and final performance. Collectively, these results identify the source distribution as an important and underexplored design axis in generative robot control.

The scalability of robotic manipulation is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of task-aligned physical interaction data. While vision-language models (VLMs) and video generation models (VGMs) hold promise for autonomous data synthesis, they suffer from semantic-spatial misalignment and physical hallucinations, respectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboEvolve, a novel framework that couples a VLM planner and a VGM simulator into a mutually reinforcing co-evolutionary loop. Operating purely on unlabeled seed images, RoboEvolve leverages a cognitive-inspired dual-phase mechanism: (i) daytime exploration fosters physically grounded behavioral discovery through a semantic-controlled multi-granular reward, and (ii) nighttime consolidation mines "near-miss" failures to stabilize policy optimization. Guided by an autonomous progressive curriculum, the system naturally scales from simple atomic actions to complex tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboEvolve (I) achieves superior effectiveness, elevating base planners by 30 absolute points and amplifying simulator success by 48% on average; (II) exhibits extreme data efficiency, surpassing fully supervised baselines with merely 500 unlabeled seeds--a 50x reduction; and (III) demonstrates robust continual learning without catastrophic forgetting.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly trained from dense robot demonstration trajectories, often collected through teleoperation, by sampling every recorded frame as if it provided equally useful supervision. We argue that this convention creates a temporal supervision imbalance: long low-change segments dominate the training stream, while manipulation-critical transitions such as alignment, contact, grasping, and release appear only sparsely. We introduce FrameSkip, a data-layer frame selection framework that scores trajectory frames using action variation, visual-action coherence, task-progress priors, and gripper-transition preservation, then remaps training samples toward high-importance frames under a target retention ratio. Because FrameSkip operates only in the dataloader, it leaves the VLA architecture, action head, training objective, and inference procedure unchanged. Across RoboCasa-GR1, SimplerEnv, and LIBERO, FrameSkip improves the success-retention trade-off over full-frame training and simpler frame selection variants, achieving a macro-average success rate of 76.15% across the three benchmarks compared with 66.50% for full-frame training while using a compressed trajectory view that retains 20% of unique frames in the main setting.

In this paper, we study the problem of manipulation skill acquisition for performing construction activities consisting of repetitive tasks (e.g., building a wall or installing ceiling tiles). Our approach involves setting up a simulated construction activity in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment, where the user can provide demonstrations of the object manipulation skills needed to perform the construction activity. We then exploit the screw geometry of motion to approximate the demonstrated motion as a sequence of constant screw motions. For performing the construction activity, we generate the sequence of manipulation task instances and then compute the joint space motion plan corresponding to each instance using Screw Linear Interpolation (ScLERP) and Resolved Motion Rate Control (RMRC). We evaluate our framework by executing two representative construction tasks: constructing brick walls and installing multiple ceiling tiles. Each task is performed using only a single demonstration, a pick-and-place action for the bricks, and a single ceiling tile installation. Our experiments with a 7-DoF robot in both simulation and hardware demonstrate that the approach generalizes robustly to arbitrarily long construction activities that involve repetitive motions and demand precision, even when provided with just one demonstration. For instance, we can construct walls of arbitrary layout and length by leveraging a single demonstration of placing one brick on top of another.

Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization. This "flat" training paradigm, inherited from language modeling, remains indifferent to the underlying physical hierarchy of manipulation. In reality, robot trajectories are fundamentally heterogeneous, where low-velocity segments often dictate task success through precision-demanding interactions, while high-velocity motions serve as error-tolerant transitions. Such a misalignment between uniform loss weighting and physical criticality fundamentally limits the performance of current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World-Action Models (WAM) in complex, long-horizon tasks. To rectify this, we introduce AttenA+, an architecture-agnostic framework that prioritizes kinematically critical segments via velocity-driven action attention. By reweighting the training objective based on the inverse velocity field, AttenA+ naturally aligns the model's learning capacity with the physical demands of manipulation. As a plug-and-play enhancement, AttenA+ can be integrated into existing backbones without structural modifications or additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttenA+ significantly elevates the ceilings of current state-of-the-art models. Specifically, it improves OpenVLA-OFT to 98.6% (+1.5%) on the Libero benchmark and pushes FastWAM to 92.4% (+0.6%) on RoboTwin 2.0. Real-world validation on a Franka manipulator further showcases its robustness and cross-task generalization. Our work suggests that mining the intrinsic structural priors of action sequences offers a highly efficient, physics-aware complement to standard scaling laws, paving a new path for general-purpose robotic control.

Recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have enabled robots to perform control directly from visual inputs. Yet, extending such end-to-end learning from single-arm to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the need for both independent perception and coordinated interaction between arms. Existing methods typically favor one side -- either decoupling the two arms to avoid interference or enforcing strong cross-arm coupling for coordination -- thus lacking a unified treatment. We propose CUBic, a Coordinated and Unified framework for Bimanual perception and control that reformulates bimanual coordination as a unified perceptual modeling problem. CUBic learns a shared tokenized representation bridging perception and control, where independence and coordination emerge intrinsically from structure rather than from hand-crafted coupling. Our approach integrates three components: unidirectional perception aggregation, bidirectional perception coordination through two codebooks with shared mapping, and a unified perception-to-control diffusion policy. Extensive experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark show that CUBic consistently surpasses standard baselines, achieving marked improvements in coordination accuracy and task success rates over state-of-the-art visuomotor baselines.

Generalizing robotic manipulation across object poses, viewpoints, and dynamic disturbances is difficult, especially with only a few demonstrations. End-to-end visuomotor policies are expressive but data-hungry, while planning and optimization satisfy explicit constraints but do not directly capture the interaction strategies demonstrated by humans. We propose Sliding into Distribution (SID), a structured framework that learns an object-centric motion field from canonicalized demonstrations to iteratively slide the system toward the demonstrated manifold and into the reliable operating region of a lightweight egocentric execution policy, mitigating out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. The motion field provides large corrective motions when far from the demonstration manifold and naturally vanishes near convergence, enabling robust reaching under substantial pose and viewpoint shifts. Within the reached regime, an egocentric policy trained with conditioned flow matching performs task-specific manipulation, supported by kinematically consistent point-cloud reprojection augmentation that preserves action-observation consistency. Across six real-world tasks, SID achieves approximately 90% success under OOD initializations with only two demonstrations, with under a 10% drop under distractors and external disturbances. Overall, SID provides a new paradigm for few-shot manipulation: explicitly managing distribution shift via online distribution recovery.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as an effective paradigm for handling heterogeneous datasets during Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pretraining, offering a unified action space across embodiments. However, existing LAMs often rely on discrete quantization encode and decode pipelines, which can lead to trivial frame reconstruction behavior, limited representational capacity, and a lack of physically meaningful structure. We introduce RotVLA, a VLA framework built on a continuous rotational latent action representation. Latent actions are modeled as elements of SO(n), providing continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry aligned with real-world action dynamics. A triplet frame learning framework further enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while avoiding degeneration. RotVLA consists of a VLM backbone and a flow-matching action head, pretrained on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets and human videos with latent-action supervision. For downstream robot control, the flow-matching head is extended into a unified action expert that jointly denoises latent and robot actions. Here, latent actions serve as a latent planner, providing high-level guidance that conditions action generation. With only 1.7B parameters and 1700+ hours of pretraining data, RotVLA achieves 98.2% on LIBERO and 89.6% / 88.5% on RoboTwin2.0 under clean and randomized settings, respectively. It also demonstrates strong real-world performance on manipulation tasks, consistently outperforming existing VLA models.

Achieving reliable robotic manipulation, such as dexterous grasping, requires a synergy between physically stable interactions and semantic task guidance, yet these objectives are often treated as separate, disjoint goals. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate dexterous grasping techniques, i.e., physically stable grasps for object lifting and language-guided grasp generation, to achieve both physical stability and semantic understanding. To this end, we propose SECOND-Grasp (SEmantic CONtact-guided Dexterous Grasping), a unified framework that enables robotic hands to dynamically adjust grasping strategies based on semantic reasoning while ensuring physical feasibility. We begin by obtaining coarse contact proposals through vision-language reasoning to infer where contacts should occur based on object properties, followed by segmentation to localize these regions across views. To further ensure consistency across multiple viewpoints, we introduce Semantic-Geometric Consistency Refinement (SGCR), which refines initial contact predictions by enforcing semantic consistency across views and removing geometrically invalid regions, yielding reliable 3D contact maps. Then, we derive a feasible hand pose for each contact map via inverse kinematics, generating a supervision signal for policy learning. Our approach, trained on DexGraspNet, consistently outperforms baselines in lifting success rate on both seen and unseen categories, achieving 98.2% and 97.7%, respectively, while also improving intent-aware grasping by 12.8% and 26.2%. We further show promising results on additional datasets and robotic hands, including Shadow Hand and Allegro Hand.

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges. A key difficulty is that standard task rewards supervise task success, but offer limited guidance on whether a visual change is task-irrelevant or changes the behavior required for manipulation. We propose PAIR-VLA (Paired Action Invariance & Sensitivity for Visually Robust VLA), an RL fine-tuning framework to address this difficulty by adding two auxiliary objectives over paired visual variants during PPO optimization: an invariance term that reduces the discrepancy between action distributions for a task-preserving pair (e.g., different distractors), and a sensitivity objective that encourages separable action distributions for a task-altering pair (e.g., target object in a different pose). Together, these objectives turn visual variants from mere observation diversity into behavior-level guidance on policy responses during RL fine-tuning. We evaluate on ManiSkill3 across two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$, under diverse out-of-distribution visual shifts including unseen distractors, texture changes, target object pose variation, viewpoint shifts, and lighting changes. Our method consistently improves over standard PPO, achieving average improvements of 16.62% on $π_{0.5}$ and 9.10% on OpenVLA. Notably, ablations further show generalization across visual shifts: invariance guidance learned from distractor and texture variants transfers to target-pose and lighting shifts, while adding sensitivity guidance on target-pose variants further improves robustness to nuisance shifts, highlighting the broader transferability of behavior-level RL guidance.

Robotic manipulation is typically evaluated by task success, but successful completion does not guarantee safe execution. Many safety failures are temporal: a robot may touch a clean surface after contamination or release an object before it is fully inside an enclosure. We introduce SafeManip, a property-driven benchmark to explicitly evaluate temporal safety properties in robotic manipulation, moving beyond prior evaluations that largely focus on task completion or per-state constraint violations. SafeManip defines reusable safety templates over finite executions using Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf). It maps observed rollouts to symbolic predicate traces and evaluates them with LTLf-based monitors. Its property suite covers eight manipulation safety categories: collision and contact safety, grasp stability, release stability, cross-contamination, action onset, mechanism recovery, object containment, and enclosure access. Templates can be instantiated with task-specific objects, fixtures, regions, or skills, allowing the same safety specifications to generalize across tasks and environments. We evaluate SafeManip on six vision-language-action policies, including $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$, GR00T, and their training variants, across 50 RoboCasa365 household tasks. Results show that even strong models often behave unsafely. Task-success gains do not reliably translate into safer execution: many successful rollouts remain unsafe, while longer-horizon or more complex tasks expose more violations. SafeManip provides a reusable evaluation layer for diagnosing temporal safety failures and measuring safe success beyond task completion.

Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for downstream exploration. We present a unified framework that enables the exploration necessary to enable efficient robot policy finetuning by bridging BC pre-training and RL fine-tuning. Our pre-training method, Context-Smoothed Pre-training (CSP), injects forward-diffusion noise into policy inputs, creating a continuum between precise imitation and broad action coverage. We then fine-tune pre-trained policies via Timestep-Modulated Reinforcement Learning (TMRL), which trains the agent to dynamically adjust this conditioning during fine-tuning by modulating the diffusion timestep, granting explicit control over exploration. Integrating seamlessly with arbitrary policy inputs, e.g., states, 3D point clouds, or image-based VLA policies, we show that TMRL improves RL fine-tuning sample efficiency. Notably, TMRL enables successful real-world fine-tuning on complex manipulation tasks in under one hour. Videos and code available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/tmrl/.

Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a $\mathbb{C}_2$-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.

Dexterous teleoperation via Mixed Reality (MR)-based interfaces offers a scalable paradigm for transferring human manipulation skills to dexterous robot hands. However, conventional retargeting approaches that minimize kinematic dissimilarity (e.g., joint angle or fingertip position error) often fail in contact-rich rotational manipulation, such as cap opening, key turning, and bolt screwing. This failure stems from the embodiment gap: mismatched link lengths, joint axes/limits, and fingertip geometry can cause direct pose imitation to induce tangential fingertip sliding rather than stable object rotation, resulting in screw axis drift, contact slip, and grasp instability. To address this, we propose DexTwist, a functional twist-retargeting framework for MR-based dexterous teleoperation. DexTwist detects a tripod pinch, estimates the operator's intended screw axis and twist magnitude, and applies a real-time residual joint-space refinement that tracks turning progress while regularizing the robot tripod geometry. The refinement minimizes a virtual-object objective defined by turning angle, screw axis consistency, fingertip closure, and tripod stability. Simulation and real-world experiments show that DexTwist improves turning angle tracking and screw axis stability compared with a vector-based retargeting baseline.

Video generation models offer a promising imagination mechanism for robot manipulation by predicting long-horizon future observations, but effectively exploiting these imagined futures for action execution remains challenging. Existing approaches either condition policies on predicted frames or directly decode generated videos into actions, both suffering from a mismatch between visual realism and control relevance. As a result, predicted observations emphasize perceptual fidelity rather than action-centric causes of state transitions, leading to indirect and unstable control. To address this gap, we propose MoLA (Mixture of Latent Actions), a control-oriented interface that transforms imagined future videos into executable representations. Instead of passing predicted frames directly to the policy, MoLA leverages a mixture of pretrained inverse dynamics models to infer a mixture of latent actions implied by generated visual transitions. These modality-aware inverse dynamics models capture complementary semantic, depth, and flow cues, providing a structured and physically grounded action representation that bridges video imagination and policy execution. We evaluate our approach on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO, CALVIN, and LIBERO-Plus) and real-world robot manipulation tasks, achieving consistent gains in task success, temporal consistency, and generalization.

Effectively handling the interplay between spatial perception and action generation remains a critical bottleneck in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically treat spatial perception and action execution as decoupled or strictly unidirectional processes, fundamentally restricting a robot's ability to master complex manipulation tasks. To address this, we propose X-Imitator, a versatile dual-path framework that models spatial perception and action execution as a tightly coupled bidirectional loop. By reciprocally conditioning current pose predictions on past actions and vice versa, this framework enables continuous mutual refinement between spatial reasoning and action generation. This joint modeling exactly mimics human internal forward models. Designed as a modular architecture, the system can be seamlessly integrated into various visuomotor policies. Extensive experiments across 24 simulated and 3 real-world tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms both vanilla policies and prior methods utilizing explicit pose guidance. The code will be open sourced.

Designing learnable information-theoretic objectives for robot exploration remains challenging. Such objectives aim to guide exploration toward data that reduces uncertainty in model parameters, yet it is often unclear what information the collected data can actually reveal. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize a given objective, constructing objectives that reflect parametric learnability is difficult in high-dimensional robotic systems. Many parameter directions are weakly observable or unidentifiable, and even when identifiable directions are selected, omitted directions can still influence exploration and distort information measures. To address this challenge, we propose Quasi-Optimal Experimental Design (Q{\footnotesize OED}), an adaptive information objective grounded in optimal experimental design. Q{\footnotesize OED} (i) performs eigenspace analysis of the Fisher information matrix to identify an observable subspace and select identifiable parameter directions, and (ii) modifies the exploration objective to emphasize these directions while suppressing nuisance effects from non-critical parameters. Under bounded nuisance influence and limited coupling between critical and nuisance directions, Q{\footnotesize OED} provides a constant-factor approximation to the ideal information objective that explores all parameters. We evaluate Q{\footnotesize OED} on simulated and real-world navigation and manipulation tasks, where identifiable-direction selection and nuisance suppression yield performance improvements of \SI{35.23}{\percent} and \SI{21.98}{\percent}, respectively. When integrated as an exploration objective in model-based policy optimization, Q{\footnotesize OED} further improves policy performance over established RL baselines.