Daily Papers

Contact-rich manipulation requires adapting to contact states that can evolve substantially within an action horizon. However, chunk-based vision-language-action models predict complete action chunks from observations collected before execution, leaving tactile conditioning stale during execution. Existing tactile-reactive approaches typically rely on separate high-frequency controllers, which increase both architectural and training complexity. In this paper, we introduce TacForcing, a streaming action-generation framework that effectively incorporates execution-time tactile feedback. Instead of employing a separate reactive controller, TacForcing replaces the standard action expert with a streaming action expert to generate actions conditioned on the evolving tactile observations acquired during execution. TacForcing also introduces Execution-Aware Tactile Attention (EATA), which restricts tactile conditioning to actions nearing execution, thereby reducing the temporal mismatch between tactile acquisition and action execution. Across six simulated UniVTAC tasks and three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, TacForcing achieves average success rates of 65% and 69%, respectively, outperforming strong baselines in both settings.

World Action Models (WAMs) generate actions together with predicted futures, offering a powerful interface for robot decision making. In contact-rich manipulation, however, visually plausible futures can be physically incomplete: insertion, assembly, search, and reorientation often depend on slip, jamming, contact normals, or small alignment errors that are weakly visible or hidden in RGB. A natural solution is to predict future tactile states, however, we identify tactile pollution, a failure mode where unconstrained tactile-token injection degrades video and action prediction by forcing a visual dynamics model to absorb sparse, local, event-driven contact signals. To address this, we propose Tactile-WAM, a touch-aware WAM with a Tactile Asymmetric Attention Mechanism (TAAM). TAAM combines a VideoClean mask, which blocks video-query access to tactile key/value tokens while preserving action-query access, with a touch-aware bias for action attention. The VideoClean mask protects visual prediction while keeping contact information available for action generation; the touch-aware bias is derived from predicted touch changes and modulates action attention to tactile tokens during denoising. On ManiFeel, Tactile-WAM improves the mean success rate by 38.9% overall and by 86% on contact-rich tasks.

World action models inherit the predictive capability of world models, enabling action generation to be guided by anticipated future observations. However, they rely primarily on vision and often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where critical cues arise from physical interaction. In this paper, we propose Dream-Tac, a unified Tactile-World Action Model that jointly models actions, future visual observations, and tactile dynamics. Specifically, Dream-Tac introduces (i) contact-gated visuotactile fusion to selectively integrate tactile signals and (ii) a contact-aware attention bias to better regulate cross-modal interactions during manipulation. To support real-time deployment, we further design a dual-level acceleration strategy, reformulating the contact-aware bias to preserve the fused attention path during training and introducing cache-based diffusion acceleration at inference, achieving up to 2.9times faster training and 1.8times faster inference. Across six contact-rich manipulation tasks, Dream-Tac improves action accuracy by 31.7\% on average, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified visuotactile world modeling.Code is available at https://github.com/LYFCLOUDFAN/Dream-Tac.

Tactile feedback is generally recognized to be crucial for effective interaction with the physical world. However, state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models lack the ability to interpret and use tactile signals, limiting their effectiveness in contact-rich tasks. Incorporating tactile feedback into these systems is challenging due to the absence of large multi-modal datasets. We present VLA-Touch, an approach that enhances generalist robot policies with tactile sensing without fine-tuning the base VLA. Our method introduces two key innovations: (1) a pipeline that leverages a pretrained tactile-language model that provides semantic tactile feedback for high-level task planning, and (2) a diffusion-based controller that refines VLA-generated actions with tactile signals for contact-rich manipulation. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our dual-level integration of tactile feedback improves task planning efficiency while enhancing execution precision. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/jxbi1010/VLA-Touch{this URL}.

Tactile sensing is a crucial capability for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures, as it enables dexterous and safe manipulation in contact-rich tasks. However, reliance on dedicated tactile hardware increases cost and reduces reproducibility across robotic platforms. We argue that tactile-aware manipulation can be learned offline and deployed without direct haptic feedback at inference. To this end, we present HapticVLA, which proceeds in two tightly coupled stages: Safety-Aware Reward-Weighted Flow Matching (SA-RWFM) and Tactile Distillation (TD). SA-RWFM trains a flow-matching action expert that incorporates precomputed, safety-aware tactile rewards penalizing excessive grasping force and suboptimal grasping trajectories. TD further transfers this tactile-aware capability into a conventional VLA: we distill a compact tactile token from the SA-RWFM teacher and train a student VLA to predict that token from vision and state modalities, enabling tactile-aware action generation at inference without requiring on-board tactile sensors. This design preserves contact-rich tactile-aware reasoning within VLA while removing the need for on-board tactile sensors during deployment. On real-world experiments, HapticVLA achieves a mean success rate of 86.7%, consistently outperforming baseline VLAs - including versions provided with direct tactile feedback during inference.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as powerful generalists for robotic manipulation. However, due to their predominant reliance on visual modalities, they fundamentally lack the physical intuition required for contact-rich tasks that require precise force regulation and physical reasoning. Existing attempts to incorporate vision-based tactile sensing into VLA models typically treat tactile inputs as auxiliary visual textures, thereby overlooking the underlying correlation between surface deformation and interaction dynamics. To bridge this gap, we propose a paradigm shift from tactile-vision alignment to tactile-force alignment. Here, we introduce TaF-VLA, a framework that explicitly grounds high-dimensional tactile observations in physical interaction forces. To facilitate this, we develop an automated tactile-force data acquisition device and curate the TaF-Dataset, comprising over 10 million synchronized tactile observations, 6-axis force/torque, and matrix force map. To align sequential tactile observations with interaction forces, the central component of our approach is the Tactile-Force Adapter (TaF-Adapter), a tactile sensor encoder that extracts discretized latent information for encoding tactile observations. This mechanism ensures that the learned representations capture history-dependent, noise-insensitive physical dynamics rather than static visual textures. Finally, we integrate this force-aligned encoder into a VLA backbone. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that TaF-VLA policy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tactile-vision-aligned and vision-only baselines on contact-rich tasks, verifying its ability to achieve robust, force-aware manipulation through cross-modal physical reasoning.

Touch supplies the physical grounding needed to perceive intrinsic material properties, such as friction and compliance, that vision alone often cannot resolve. Recent efforts for equipping multimodal LLMs with this tactile sense, however, expose a zero-sum trade-off: the limited parameter budget of compact models forces a choice between acquiring the new sensory modality and preserving the established vision-language reasoning. We present Splash, a mask-isolated tactile alignment learning framework for MLLMs. Splash quantifies the significance of each pretrained parameter, and partitions the parameter space into a dormant and critical subspace. While the frozen critical subspace acts as a stable anchor to safeguard general visual knowledge, Splash updates the isolated dormant subspace to internalize tactile alignment towards LLMs. This selective, non-destructive expansion effectively prevents catastrophic forgetting and ensures non-destructive modality expansion. Extensive experiments show that Splash effectively achieves tactile reasoning without additional inference overhead in the LLM part, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on visuo-tactile benchmarks, including SSVTP, TVL, and TacQuad, while preserving its original general-purpose capabilities.

Effectively utilizing multi-sensory data is important for robots to generalize across diverse tasks. However, the heterogeneous nature of these modalities makes fusion challenging. Existing methods propose strategies to obtain comprehensively fused features but often ignore the fact that each modality requires different levels of attention at different manipulation stages. To address this, we propose a force-guided attention fusion module that adaptively adjusts the weights of visual and tactile features without human labeling. We also introduce a self-supervised future force prediction auxiliary task to reinforce the tactile modality, improve data imbalance, and encourage proper adjustment. Our method achieves an average success rate of 93% across three fine-grained, contactrich tasks in real-world experiments. Further analysis shows that our policy appropriately adjusts attention to each modality at different manipulation stages. The videos can be viewed at https://adaptac-dex.github.io/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable achievements, driven by the rich implicit knowledge of their vision-language components. However, achieving generalist robotic agents demands precise grounding into physical interactions, especially in contact-rich scenarios where fine-grained force control is essential. We advance VLAs' implicit knowledge beyond identifying what to do, towards guiding how to physically interact with real world. This paper introduces Tactile-VLA, a novel framework that deeply fuses vision, language, action, and tactile sensing. This framework incorporates a hybrid position-force controller to translate the model's intentions into precise physical actions and a reasoning module that allows the robot to adapt its strategy based on tactile feedback. Experiments demonstrate Tactile-VLA's effectiveness and generalizability in three key aspects: (1) enabling tactile-aware instruction following, (2) utilizing tactile-relevant commonsense, and (3) facilitating adaptive tactile-involved reasoning. A key finding is that the VLM's prior knowledge already contains semantic understanding of physical interaction; by connecting it to the robot's tactile sensors with only a few demonstrations, we can activate this prior knowledge to achieve zero-shot generalization in contact-rich tasks.

Overview of the Proposed DECO Framework.} DECO is a DiT-based policy that decouples multimodal conditioning. Image and action tokens interact via joint self attention, while proprioceptive states and optional conditions are injected through adaptive layer normalization. Tactile signals are injected via cross attention, while a lightweight LoRA-based adapter is used to efficiently fine-tune the pretrained policy. DECO is also accompanied by DECO-50, a bimanual dexterous manipulation dataset with tactile sensing, consisting of 4 scenarios and 28 sub-tasks, covering more than 50 hours of data, approximately 5 million frames, and 8,000 successful trajectories.

Recent generative models have achieved remarkable progress in image editing. However, existing systems and benchmarks remain largely text-guided. In contrast, human communication is inherently multimodal, where visual instructions such as sketches efficiently convey spatial and structural intent. To address this gap, we introduce VIBE, the Visual Instruction Benchmark for Image Editing with a three-level interaction hierarchy that captures deictic grounding, morphological manipulation, and causal reasoning. Across these levels, we curate high-quality and diverse test cases that reflect progressively increasing complexity in visual instruction following. We further propose a robust LMM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with task-specific metrics to enable scalable and fine-grained assessment. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 17 representative open-source and proprietary image editing models, we find that proprietary models exhibit early-stage visual instruction-following capabilities and consistently outperform open-source models. However, performance degrades markedly with increasing task difficulty even for the strongest systems, highlighting promising directions for future research.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.

Significant progress has been made in vision-language models. However, language-conditioned robotic manipulation for contact-rich tasks remains underexplored, particularly in terms of tactile sensing. To address this gap, we introduce the Tactile-Language-Action (TLA) model, which effectively processes sequential tactile feedback via cross-modal language grounding to enable robust policy generation in contact-intensive scenarios. In addition, we construct a comprehensive dataset that contains 24k pairs of tactile action instruction data, customized for fingertip peg-in-hole assembly, providing essential resources for TLA training and evaluation. Our results show that TLA significantly outperforms traditional imitation learning methods (e.g., diffusion policy) in terms of effective action generation and action accuracy, while demonstrating strong generalization capabilities by achieving over 85\% success rate on previously unseen assembly clearances and peg shapes. We publicly release all data and code in the hope of advancing research in language-conditioned tactile manipulation skill learning. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/tactile-language-action/

The ability to react dynamically to tactile signals has long been considered crucial to agile human-level dexterity. Yet contemporary learning-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation generally either overlook the tactile modality or are limited to encoders with static cues, due in part to the scarcity of diverse training data and standardized evaluation, architectural constraints in current VLA models, and limitations of static tactile encoders. In this paper, we push the frontier of tactile-reactive manipulation by addressing all of these limitations. We propose a large-scale, 100-hour tactile-rich dataset collected via a novel, data-efficient recipe that prioritizes elementary motor primitives. To effectively exploit naturally high-frequency touch signals without sacrificing the existing capabilities of existing VLAs, we introduce a variable-rate Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture equipped with a novel temporal tactile VQ-VAE encoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of tactile-reactive policies on 12 manipulation tasks requiring delicate force control and deformable object manipulation, achieving over 30% higher average success rate than the strongest baseline.

Tactile-enhanced vision-language-action (VLA) policies have been introduced for contact-rich manipulation, where critical interaction states are often hidden from vision. Future tactile prediction is a promising way to use touch because it turns tactile outcomes into supervision for action-induced contact dynamics. Yet VLA policies contain representations with different roles, from perceptual encoding to motor prediction, making it unclear where this supervision should be applied. We study this as a representation-alignment problem. Through a linear probe analysis, we find that future tactile states are most predictable from intermediate action-expert features, rather than from vision-language features or final action states. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a lightweight Latent Tactile Predictor (LTP), which predicts compact future tactile embeddings from the identified intermediate representation. By avoiding direct prediction of noisy raw tactile signals, LTP provides an action-outcome grounding signal that aligns intermediate action representations with future contact consequences. Experiments on real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks show that representation-aligned tactile grounding outperforms less aligned or multi-interface tactile prediction, highlighting the importance of where tactile supervision is applied.

Data-driven approaches struggle with precise manipulation; imitation learning requires many hard-to-obtain demonstrations, while reinforcement learning yields brittle, non-generalizable policies. We introduce VisuoTactile Local (ViTaL) policy learning, a framework that solves fine-grained manipulation tasks by decomposing them into two phases: a reaching phase, where a vision-language model (VLM) enables scene-level reasoning to localize the object of interest, and a local interaction phase, where a reusable, scene-agnostic ViTaL policy performs contact-rich manipulation using egocentric vision and tactile sensing. This approach is motivated by the observation that while scene context varies, the low-level interaction remains consistent across task instances. By training local policies once in a canonical setting, they can generalize via a localize-then-execute strategy. ViTaL achieves around 90% success on contact-rich tasks in unseen environments and is robust to distractors. ViTaL's effectiveness stems from three key insights: (1) foundation models for segmentation enable training robust visual encoders via behavior cloning; (2) these encoders improve the generalizability of policies learned using residual RL; and (3) tactile sensing significantly boosts performance in contact-rich tasks. Ablation studies validate each of these insights, and we demonstrate that ViTaL integrates well with high-level VLMs, enabling robust, reusable low-level skills. Results and videos are available at https://vitalprecise.github.io.

With the widespread adoption of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents for automating GUI interaction tasks, substantial research focused on improving GUI perception to ground task instructions into concrete action steps. However, the step execution capability of these agents has gradually emerged as a new bottleneck for task completion. In particular, existing GUI agents often adopt overly simplified strategies for handling swipe interactions, preventing them from accurately replicating human-like behavior. To address this limitation, we decompose human swipe gestures into multiple quantifiable dimensions and propose an automated pipeline SwipeGen to synthesize human-like swipe interactions through GUI exploration. Based on this pipeline, we construct and release the first benchmark for evaluating the swipe execution capability of GUI agents. Furthermore, leveraging the synthesized data, we propose GUISwiper, a GUI agent with enhanced interaction execution capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that GUISwiper achieves a swipe execution accuracy of 69.07%, representing a 214% improvement over existing VLM baselines.

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, π_{0.5}, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

Tactile perception has the potential to significantly enhance dexterous robotic manipulation by providing rich local information that can complement or substitute for other sensory modalities such as vision. However, because tactile sensing is inherently local, it is not well-suited for tasks that require broad spatial awareness or global scene understanding on its own. A human-inspired strategy to address this issue is to consider active perception techniques instead. That is, to actively guide sensors toward regions with more informative or significant features and integrate such information over time in order to understand a scene or complete a task. Both active perception and different methods for tactile sensing have received significant attention recently. Yet, despite advancements, both fields lack standardized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Tactile MNIST Benchmark Suite, an open-source, Gymnasium-compatible benchmark specifically designed for active tactile perception tasks, including localization, classification, and volume estimation. Our benchmark suite offers diverse simulation scenarios, from simple toy environments all the way to complex tactile perception tasks using vision-based tactile sensors. Furthermore, we also offer a comprehensive dataset comprising 13,500 synthetic 3D MNIST digit models and 153,600 real-world tactile samples collected from 600 3D printed digits. Using this dataset, we train a CycleGAN for realistic tactile simulation rendering. By providing standardized protocols and reproducible evaluation frameworks, our benchmark suite facilitates systematic progress in the fields of tactile sensing and active perception.

Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to react to local deformation, pressure, slip, and friction, yet these cues are temporally sparse and often invisible in visual observations. Existing visual-tactile policies usually feed tactile observations directly into action prediction, but rarely model tactile deformation dynamics during action generation. In this paper, we introduce VT-WAM, a Visual-Tactile World Action Model that jointly learns future visual prediction, tactile deformation prediction, and action prediction within a unified flow matching framework. In particular, VT-WAM introduces (1) Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention to bridge a first-frame visual anchor with temporal tactile dynamics, and (2) contact-gated Action-Visual-Tactile Attention Guidance (AVTAG) to encourage action queries to rely on tactile evidence during contact phases. Across six real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, VT-WAM achieves a 71.67% average success rate, outperforming Fast-WAM by 26.67% and OmniVTLA by 35.84%. Ablations demonstrate that modeling tactile deformation dynamics and guiding contact-phase tactile attention are both important for contact-rich tasks. Project website: https://vt-wam.github.io/.

We present N_0-TWAM, a tactile-native world-action model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts both future vision and future contact. To our knowledge, it is the first tactile world-action model trained at large scale, and it shows strong capability on contact-rich tasks. We pre-train N_0-TWAM at large scale with visuo-tactile joint training over tactile-rich demonstrations spanning six embodiments and 450 tasks. We use NeoForce, a unified force-based tactile representation, to form a physically grounded contact signal that conditions action generation. To improve long-horizon and multi-stage manipulation, we introduce tactile contact events for task staging and advance through them during execution. For real-time efficiency, we adopt an asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that pairs a full-width expert for video prediction with slim experts for downstream action and tactile prediction. Evaluations on both real and simulated benchmarks justify the capabilities of N_0-TWAM across a range of contact-rich tasks, and demonstrate the benefit of data scaling for precise tactile and action prediction. In summary, N_0-TWAM endows a world-action model with predictive capabilities to foresee vision, touch and action, building a solid foundation for fine-grained manipulation on open contact-rich tasks. The codebase and model checkpoints will be made publicly available to foster further research and development in tactile-enabled robotic manipulation.

Deformable object manipulation poses challenges beyond task completion: successful execution must also maintain safe physical interaction, holding the object stably without slip or drop while avoiding excessive deformation. However, existing manipulation benchmarks are predominantly success-oriented and rarely evaluate whether a policy remains physically safe throughout execution. We present SoftVTBench, a safety-aware visuo-tactile benchmark for physically constrained deformable object manipulation. Built in Isaac Sim with finite-element-simulated deformable objects, SoftVTBench provides multi-view RGB observations, RGB tactile sensing with marker motion, proprioception, and language instructions, and defines four matched task suites over object type (deformable vs. rigid) and variation axis (object vs. spatial). It separately reports Goal Success and Safety Success; the latter additionally requires no drop and peak deformation below a calibrated object-specific threshold, measured from policy-hidden privileged Finite Element Method (FEM) states. We implement pi0.5-based baselines under this protocol. Experiments show that success-only evaluation substantially overstates policy performance, as a large fraction of goal-completing rollouts still violate physical safety. Furthermore, incorporating tactile sensing improves Safety Success (e.g., from 21.4% to 35.6% on object-centric deformable tasks) and reduces object deformation during execution, while maintaining comparable Goal Success. SoftVTBench provides a reproducible benchmark for studying visuo-tactile deformable manipulation under physical interaction constraints.

Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that visually distinct objects can exhibit similar surface textures or material properties. For example, a leather sofa and a leather jacket have different appearances but share similar tactile properties. This implies that tactile understanding can be guided by material cues in visual data, even without direct tactile supervision. In this paper, we introduce RA-Touch, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves visuo-tactile perception by leveraging visual data enriched with tactile semantics. We carefully recaption a large-scale visual dataset with tactile-focused descriptions, enabling the model to access tactile semantics typically absent from conventional visual datasets. A key challenge remains in effectively utilizing these tactile-aware external descriptions. RA-Touch addresses this by retrieving visual-textual representations aligned with tactile inputs and integrating them to focus on relevant textural and material properties. By outperforming prior methods on the TVL benchmark, our method demonstrates the potential of retrieval-based visual reuse for tactile understanding. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/RA-Touch

Tactile graphics are essential for providing access to visual information for the 43 million people globally living with vision loss. Traditional methods for creating these graphics are labor-intensive and cannot meet growing demand. We introduce TactileNet, the first comprehensive dataset and AI-driven framework for generating embossing-ready 2D tactile templates using text-to-image Stable Diffusion (SD) models. By integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and DreamBooth, our method fine-tunes SD models to produce high-fidelity, guideline-compliant graphics while reducing computational costs. Quantitative evaluations with tactile experts show 92.86% adherence to accessibility standards. Structural fidelity analysis revealed near-human design similarity, with an SSIM of 0.538 between generated graphics and expert-designed tactile images. Notably, our method preserves object silhouettes better than human designs (SSIM = 0.259 vs. 0.215 for binary masks), addressing a key limitation of manual tactile abstraction. The framework scales to 32,000 images (7,050 high-quality) across 66 classes, with prompt editing enabling customizable outputs (e.g., adding or removing details). By automating the 2D template generation step-compatible with standard embossing workflows-TactileNet accelerates production while preserving design flexibility. This work demonstrates how AI can augment (not replace) human expertise to bridge the accessibility gap in education and beyond. Code, data, and models will be publicly released to foster further research.

Humans can accomplish complex contact-rich tasks using vision and touch, with highly reactive capabilities such as quick adjustments to environmental changes and adaptive control of contact forces; however, this remains challenging for robots. Existing visual imitation learning (IL) approaches rely on action chunking to model complex behaviors, which lacks the ability to respond instantly to real-time tactile feedback during the chunk execution. Furthermore, most teleoperation systems struggle to provide fine-grained tactile / force feedback, which limits the range of tasks that can be performed. To address these challenges, we introduce TactAR, a low-cost teleoperation system that provides real-time tactile feedback through Augmented Reality (AR), along with Reactive Diffusion Policy (RDP), a novel slow-fast visual-tactile imitation learning algorithm for learning contact-rich manipulation skills. RDP employs a two-level hierarchy: (1) a slow latent diffusion policy for predicting high-level action chunks in latent space at low frequency, (2) a fast asymmetric tokenizer for closed-loop tactile feedback control at high frequency. This design enables both complex trajectory modeling and quick reactive behavior within a unified framework. Through extensive evaluation across three challenging contact-rich tasks, RDP significantly improves performance compared to state-of-the-art visual IL baselines through rapid response to tactile / force feedback. Furthermore, experiments show that RDP is applicable across different tactile / force sensors. Code and videos are available on https://reactive-diffusion-policy.github.io.

Whole-body humanoid manipulation of bulky, deformable, and shared-load objects requires distributed contact sensing and explicit force regulation, yet most imitation policies treat contact force only implicitly. On the other hand, different demonstration sources provide complementary modalities with inherent trade-offs: human demonstrations capture natural contact forces but not robot-executable actions, while teleoperation directly records robot actions but with less natural force regulation. This paper presents WT-UMI, a wearable whole-body tactile interface worn by human operators or mounted on humanoids, providing accurate observations of tactile images, contact forces, and end-effector poses across both human demonstration and humanoid teleoperation modes. We introduce a force-conditioned target-pose correction module that converts measured human poses into contact-aware robot targets by learning corrections from teleoperation data. To leverage the natural force interaction in human data, we propose a force-supervised planner that predicts end-effector pose chunks and contact-force trajectories. The predicted contact force serves as the reference for a tactile-based admittance controller. Across five contact-rich tasks spanning deformable objects, bulky rigid objects, and human--humanoid collaboration, WT-UMI improves success rate and reduces contact-position tracking error over four policy baselines. Our project page is available at https://wt-umi.github.io/WTUMI/.

Tactile sensing is essential for robots to achieve human-like gentle manipulation. However, existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models struggle to exploit tactile feedback for gentle manipulation due to scarce aligned vision-tactile-language data and the lack of effective closed-loop force feedback mechanisms. To address these challenges, we introduce Tabero, a benchmark and model suite for gentle, language-conditioned robotic manipulation that demands fine-grained contact force perception. First, the Tabero benchmark addresses the scarcity of tactile data by presenting a data-efficient pipeline that repurposes open-source robot manipulation trajectories to generate diverse vision-tactile-language tasks, and establishes a multidimensional evaluation protocol that measures task success alongside physical interaction quality. Second, we propose Tabero-VTLA, an architecture with a decoupled force-position command interface; the resulting force-position commands are executed by a fixed hybrid controller to enable real-time, force-aware manipulation. Evaluated on Tabero, our model maintains high task success while reducing average grip force by over 70\% under gentle instructions, demonstrating its ability to modulate interaction forces based on multimodal experience. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NathanWu7/Tabero.

Short-Term object-interaction Anticipation consists of detecting the location of the next-active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, and the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. This ability is fundamental for wearable assistants or human robot interaction to understand the user goals, but there is still room for improvement to perform STA in a precise and reliable way. In this work, we improve the performance of STA predictions with two contributions: 1. We propose STAformer, a novel attention-based architecture integrating frame guided temporal pooling, dual image-video attention, and multiscale feature fusion to support STA predictions from an image-input video pair. 2. We introduce two novel modules to ground STA predictions on human behavior by modeling affordances.First, we integrate an environment affordance model which acts as a persistent memory of interactions that can take place in a given physical scene. Second, we predict interaction hotspots from the observation of hands and object trajectories, increasing confidence in STA predictions localized around the hotspot. Our results show significant relative Overall Top-5 mAP improvements of up to +45% on Ego4D and +42% on a novel set of curated EPIC-Kitchens STA labels. We will release the code, annotations, and pre extracted affordances on Ego4D and EPIC- Kitchens to encourage future research in this area.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models build upon vision-language foundations, and have achieved promising results and exhibit the possibility of task generalization in robot manipulation. However, due to the heterogeneity of tactile sensors and the difficulty of acquiring tactile data, current VLA models significantly overlook the importance of tactile perception and fail in contact-rich tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes OmniVTLA, a novel architecture involving tactile sensing. Specifically, our contributions are threefold. First, our OmniVTLA features a dual-path tactile encoder framework. This framework enhances tactile perception across diverse vision-based and force-based tactile sensors by using a pretrained vision transformer (ViT) and a semantically-aligned tactile ViT (SA-ViT). Second, we introduce ObjTac, a comprehensive force-based tactile dataset capturing textual, visual, and tactile information for 56 objects across 10 categories. With 135K tri-modal samples, ObjTac supplements existing visuo-tactile datasets. Third, leveraging this dataset, we train a semantically-aligned tactile encoder to learn a unified tactile representation, serving as a better initialization for OmniVTLA. Real-world experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving 96.9% success rates with grippers, (21.9% higher over baseline) and 100% success rates with dexterous hands (6.2% higher over baseline) in pick-and-place tasks. Besides, OmniVTLA significantly reduces task completion time and generates smoother trajectories through tactile sensing compared to existing VLA. Our ObjTac dataset can be found at https://readerek.github.io/Objtac.github.io

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framework-centric approach to enhance performance in embodied learning tasks, including EIF. Despite these efforts, there exists a lack of a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components-ranging from visual perception to action execution-on task performance. To address this gap, we introduce OPEx, a comprehensive framework that delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks: Observer, Planner, and Executor. Through extensive evaluations, we provide a deep analysis of how each component influences EIF task performance. Furthermore, we innovate within this space by deploying a multi-agent dialogue strategy on a TextWorld counterpart, further enhancing task performance. Our findings reveal that LLM-centric design markedly improves EIF outcomes, identify visual perception and low-level action execution as critical bottlenecks, and demonstrate that augmenting LLMs with a multi-agent framework further elevates performance.

Dexterous manipulation in everyday environments requires both anticipation and reaction: a robot must predict how contact should evolve while rapidly correcting local errors caused by slip, misalignment, unstable grasping, or force mismatch. Vision and language provide semantic and geometric guidance, but they cannot reliably reveal hidden contact states such as force, slip, and contact stability. Although tactile sensing exposes these physical cues, most existing policies treat touch as a low-frequency observation stream within a monolithic action model, coupling slow task reasoning, action generation, and fast contact feedback in a single loop. We introduce TouchWorld, a predictive-and-reactive tactile foundation model for dexterous manipulation. TouchWorld uses a hierarchical policy that separates vision-language subtask planning, tactile world-model prediction, visuo-tactile goal-conditioned action generation, and high-frequency tactile residual refinement. A High-Level Planning Layer produces executable subtasks and predicts tactile subgoals; a Visuo-Tactile Goal-Conditioned Policy generates nominal action chunks; and a Tactile-Conditioned Refinement Policy performs online residual correction using recent tactile and proprioceptive feedback. By using touch as both a predictive contact reference and a fast feedback signal, TouchWorld preserves the semantic generalization of vision-language-action policies while improving local contact adaptation. Across six long-horizon and contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks, TouchWorld achieves 65.0% success in the clean setting and 53.7% success under human perturbations, outperforming the strongest baseline by 15.7 and 18.5 percentage points, respectively.

Real-world contact-rich manipulation demands robots to perceive temporal tactile feedback, capture subtle surface deformations, and reason about object properties as well as force dynamics. Although optical tactile sensors are uniquely capable of providing such rich information, existing tactile datasets and models remain limited. These resources primarily focus on object-level attributes (e.g., material) while largely overlooking fine-grained tactile temporal dynamics during physical interactions. We consider that advancing dynamic tactile perception requires a systematic hierarchy of dynamic perception capabilities to guide both data collection and model design. To address the lack of tactile data with rich dynamic information, we present ToucHD, a large-scale hierarchical tactile dataset spanning tactile atomic actions, real-world manipulations, and touch-force paired data. Beyond scale, ToucHD establishes a comprehensive tactile dynamic data ecosystem that explicitly supports hierarchical perception capabilities from the data perspective. Building on it, we propose AnyTouch 2, a general tactile representation learning framework for diverse optical tactile sensors that unifies object-level understanding with fine-grained, force-aware dynamic perception. The framework captures both pixel-level and action-specific deformations across frames, while explicitly modeling physical force dynamics, thereby learning multi-level dynamic perception capabilities from the model perspective. We evaluate our model on benchmarks that covers static object properties and dynamic physical attributes, as well as real-world manipulation tasks spanning multiple tiers of dynamic perception capabilities-from basic object-level understanding to force-aware dexterous manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate consistent and strong performance across sensors and tasks.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language-driven perception and control. However, the high computational cost of VLA models poses significant efficiency challenges, particularly for resource-constrained edge platforms in real-world deployments. However, since different stages of VLA (observation, action generation and execution) must proceed sequentially, and wait for the completion of the preceding stage, the system suffers from frequent halting and high latency. To address this, We conduct a systematic analysis to identify the challenges for fast and fluent generation, and propose enabling VLAs with the ability to asynchronously parallelize across VLA stages in a "streaming" manner. First, we eliminate the reliance on action chunking and adopt action flow matching, which learns the trajectory of action flows rather than denoising chunk-wise actions. It overlaps the latency of action generation and execution. Second, we design an action saliency-aware adaptive observation mechanism, thereby overlapping the latency of execution and observation. Without sacrificing performance, StreamingVLA achieves substantial speedup and improves the fluency of execution. It achieves a 2.4 times latency speedup and reduces execution halting by 6.5 times.

Resistive pressure arrays are the cheapest and most widely shipped tactile sensors, yet tactile representation learning has concentrated on optical sensors that image a deforming gel. We present Tactus, an open model that answers text queries from pressure data alone: on the STAG benchmark (27 objects, held-out recordings), it reaches 0.771 +/- 0.062 top-1 over four runs (top-3 0.935), matching, and at best exceeding, the dataset's supervised closed-set CNN at 0.76, with no trained classifier head. The recipe is small-data: 187 training recordings, masked-autoencoder pretraining on 144k unlabeled same-sensor frames, and the sensor's own calibration affine, which recovered more accuracy than every architecture change combined. The released model's errors concentrate in a few contact-ambiguous classes, are uncorrelated with text-target geometry (Spearman rho <= 0.05 over 702 class pairs), and survive paraphrased and even bare-name queries within one point; two diverse frames recover 89% of eight-frame accuracy. Failures are reported with equal precision: cross-sensor pretraining pooling gave no gain, vision co-training degraded touch, and a mis-normalized input pipeline silently discarded 97% of the sensor's dynamic range while producing plausible intermediate results. Weights, code, and the memory layer the model plugs into are released openly.

Zero-Input AI (ZIA) introduces a novel framework for human-computer interaction by enabling proactive intent prediction without explicit user commands. It integrates gaze tracking, bio-signals (EEG, heart rate), and contextual data (time, location, usage history) into a multi-modal model for real-time inference, targeting <100 ms latency. The proposed architecture employs a transformer-based model with cross-modal attention, variational Bayesian inference for uncertainty estimation, and reinforcement learning for adaptive optimization. To support deployment on edge devices (CPUs, TPUs, NPUs), ZIA utilizes quantization, weight pruning, and linear attention to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear with sequence length. Theoretical analysis establishes an information-theoretic bound on prediction error and demonstrates how multi-modal fusion improves accuracy over single-modal approaches. Expected performance suggests 85-90% accuracy with EEG integration and 60-100 ms inference latency. ZIA provides a scalable, privacy-preserving framework for accessibility, healthcare, and consumer applications, advancing AI toward anticipatory intelligence.

Tactile perception is a critical component of solving real-world manipulation tasks, but tactile sensors for manipulation have barriers to use such as fragility and cost. In this work, we engage a robust, low-cost tactile sensor, BeadSight, as an alternative to precise pre-calibrated sensors for a pretraining approach to manipulation. We show that tactile pretraining, even with a low-fidelity sensor as BeadSight, can improve an imitation learning agent's performance on complex manipulation tasks. We demonstrate this method against a baseline USB cable plugging task, previously achieved with a much higher precision GelSight sensor as the tactile input to pretraining. Our best BeadSight pretrained visuo-tactile agent completed the task with 70\% accuracy compared to 85\% for the best GelSight pretrained visuo-tactile agent, with vision-only inference for both.

Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

Tactile sensing remains far less understood in neuroscience and less effective in artificial systems compared to more mature modalities such as vision and language. We bridge these gaps by introducing a novel Encoder-Attender-Decoder (EAD) framework to systematically explore the space of task-optimized temporal neural networks trained on realistic tactile input sequences from a customized rodent whisker-array simulator. We identify convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNNs) as superior encoders to purely feedforward and state-space architectures for tactile categorization. Crucially, these ConvRNN-encoder-based EAD models achieve neural representations closely matching rodent somatosensory cortex, saturating the explainable neural variability and revealing a clear linear relationship between supervised categorization performance and neural alignment. Furthermore, contrastive self-supervised ConvRNN-encoder-based EADs, trained with tactile-specific augmentations, match supervised neural fits, serving as an ethologically-relevant, label-free proxy. For neuroscience, our findings highlight nonlinear recurrent processing as important for general-purpose tactile representations in somatosensory cortex, providing the first quantitative characterization of the underlying inductive biases in this system. For embodied AI, our results emphasize the importance of recurrent EAD architectures to handle realistic tactile inputs, along with tailored self-supervised learning methods for achieving robust tactile perception with the same type of sensors animals use to sense in unstructured environments.

We present VisionClaw, an always-on wearable AI agent that integrates live egocentric perception with agentic task execution. Running on Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, VisionClaw continuously perceives real-world context and enables in-situ, speech-driven action initiation and delegation via OpenClaw AI agents. Therefore, users can directly execute tasks through the smart glasses, such as adding real-world objects to an Amazon cart, generating notes from physical documents, receiving meeting briefings on the go, creating events from posters, or controlling IoT devices. We evaluate VisionClaw through a controlled laboratory study (N=12) and a longitudinal deployment study (N=5). Results show that integrating perception and execution enables faster task completion and reduces interaction overhead compared to non-always-on and non-agent baselines. Beyond performance gains, deployment findings reveal a shift in interaction: tasks are initiated opportunistically during ongoing activities, and execution is increasingly delegated rather than manually controlled. These results suggest a new paradigm for wearable AI agents, where perception and action are continuously coupled to support situated, hands-free interaction.

For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) generating sensor signals in novel scenarios, and 3) learning sensor-based policies. For visuotactile sensors, interpretation has been facilitated by their close relationship with vision sensors (e.g., RGB cameras). However, generation is still difficult, as visuotactile sensors typically involve contact, deformation, illumination, and imaging, all of which are expensive to simulate; in turn, policy learning has been challenging, as simulation cannot be leveraged for large-scale data collection. We present TacSL (taxel), a library for GPU-based visuotactile sensor simulation and learning. TacSL can be used to simulate visuotactile images and extract contact-force distributions over 200times faster than the prior state-of-the-art, all within the widely-used Isaac Gym simulator. Furthermore, TacSL provides a learning toolkit containing multiple sensor models, contact-intensive training environments, and online/offline algorithms that can facilitate policy learning for sim-to-real applications. On the algorithmic side, we introduce a novel online reinforcement-learning algorithm called asymmetric actor-critic distillation (\sysName), designed to effectively and efficiently learn tactile-based policies in simulation that can transfer to the real world. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our library and algorithms by evaluating the benefits of distillation and multimodal sensing for contact-rich manip ulation tasks, and most critically, performing sim-to-real transfer. Supplementary videos and results are at https://iakinola23.github.io/tacsl/.

Tactile information plays a crucial role for humans and robots to interact effectively with their environment, particularly for tasks requiring the understanding of contact properties. Solving such dexterous manipulation tasks often relies on imitation learning from demonstration datasets, which are typically collected via teleoperation systems and often demand substantial time and effort. To address these challenges, we present ViTaMIn, an embodiment-free manipulation interface that seamlessly integrates visual and tactile sensing into a hand-held gripper, enabling data collection without the need for teleoperation. Our design employs a compliant Fin Ray gripper with tactile sensing, allowing operators to perceive force feedback during manipulation for more intuitive operation. Additionally, we propose a multimodal representation learning strategy to obtain pre-trained tactile representations, improving data efficiency and policy robustness. Experiments on seven contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrate that ViTaMIn significantly outperforms baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness for complex manipulation tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong potential for robot learning by following language instructions. However, in practice, language alone is often insufficient to precisely convey human intent. It is difficult to describe which exact object to interact with among similar candidates, where to act on the object, or how the target may change during execution. To address this limitation, we propose Gaze2Act, a novel VLA framework that leverages human gaze as a dynamic and intuitive intent signal for complex interactive manipulation. Gaze2Act first bridges the ego-exo view gap by mapping first-person gaze into the robot's perspective through cross-view semantic matching, producing both an object mask and a gaze point for coarse-to-fine target specification. These cues are then integrated into the policy through perception-level prompting and action-level conditioning, allowing the robot to attend to relevant regions and execute precise interactions under dynamic intent. In a systematic evaluation across seven task categories and 16 real-robot tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, Gaze2Act achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intent accuracy and task success rate. It notably outperforms baselines in object disambiguation, fine-grained interaction, and dynamic intent steering. These results demonstrate that human gaze provides a natural, low-burden, and highly expressive modality for human-in-the-loop VLA control.

Video-Action Models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising framework for embodied intelligence, learning implicit world dynamics from raw video streams to produce temporally consistent action predictions. Although such models demonstrate strong performance on long-horizon tasks through visual reasoning, they remain limited in contact-rich scenarios where critical interaction states are only partially observable from vision alone. In particular, fine-grained force modulation and contact transitions are not reliably encoded in visual tokens, leading to unstable or imprecise behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Video-Tactile Action Model (VTAM), a multimodal world modeling framework that incorporates tactile perception as a complementary grounding signal. VTAM augments a pretrained video transformer with tactile streams via a lightweight modality transfer finetuning, enabling efficient cross-modal representation learning without tactile-language paired data or independent tactile pretraining. To stabilize multimodal fusion, we introduce a tactile regularization loss that enforces balanced cross-modal attention, preventing visual latent dominance in the action model. VTAM demonstrates superior performance in contact-rich manipulation, maintaining a robust success rate of 90 percent on average. In challenging scenarios such as potato chip pick-and-place requiring high-fidelity force awareness, VTAM outperforms the pi 0.5 baseline by 80 percent. Our findings demonstrate that integrating tactile feedback is essential for correcting visual estimation errors in world action models, providing a scalable approach to physically grounded embodied foundation models.

Contact-rich manipulation depends on applying the correct grasp forces throughout the manipulation task, especially when handling fragile or deformable objects. Most existing imitation learning approaches often treat visuotactile feedback only as an additional observation, leaving applied forces as an uncontrolled consequence of gripper commands. In this work, we present Force-Aware Robotic Manipulation (FARM), an imitation learning framework that integrates high-dimensional tactile data to infer tactile-conditioned force signals, which in turn define a matching force-based action space. We collect human demonstrations using a modified version of the handheld Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) gripper that integrates a GelSight Mini visual tactile sensor. For deploying the learned policies, we developed an actuated variant of the UMI gripper with geometry matching our handheld version. During policy rollouts, the proposed FARM diffusion policy jointly predicts robot pose, grip width, and grip force. FARM outperforms several baselines across three tasks with distinct force requirements -- high-force, low-force, and dynamic force adaptation -- demonstrating the advantages of its two key components: leveraging force-grounded, high-dimensional tactile observations and a force-based control space. The codebase and design files are open-sourced and available at https://tactile-farm.github.io .

We address the challenging task of detecting the precise moment when hands make contact with objects in egocentric videos. This frame-level detection is crucial for augmented reality, human-computer interaction, assistive technologies, and robot learning applications, where contact onset signals action initiation or completion. Temporally precise detection is particularly challenging due to subtle hand motion variations near contact, frequent occlusions, fine-grained manipulation patterns, and the inherent motion dynamics of first-person perspectives. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Hand-informed Context Enhanced module (HiCE; pronounced `high-see') that leverages spatiotemporal features from hand regions and their surrounding context through cross-attention mechanisms, learning to identify potential contact patterns. Our approach is further refined with a grasp-aware loss and soft label that emphasizes hand pose patterns and movement dynamics characteristic of touch events, enabling the model to distinguish between near-contact and actual contact frames. We also introduce TouchMoment, an egocentric dataset containing 4,021 videos and 8,456 annotated contact moments spanning over one million frames. Experiments on TouchMoment show that, under a strict evaluation criterion that counts a prediction as correct only if it falls within a two-frame tolerance of the ground-truth moment, our method achieves substantial gains and outperforms state-of-the-art event-spotting baselines by 16.91% average precision.

Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems integrate a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for semantic reasoning with an action expert generating continuous action signals, yet both typically run at a single unified frequency. As a result, policy performance is constrained by the low inference speed of large VLMs. This mandatory synchronous execution severely limits control stability and real-time performance in whole-body robotic manipulation, which involves more joints, larger motion spaces, and dynamically changing views. We introduce a truly asynchronous Fast-Slow VLA framework (DuoCore-FS), organizing the system into a fast pathway for high-frequency action generation and a slow pathway for rich VLM reasoning. The system is characterized by two key features. First, a latent representation buffer bridges the slow and fast systems. It stores instruction semantics and action-reasoning representation aligned with the scene-instruction context, providing high-level guidance to the fast pathway. Second, a whole-body action tokenizer provides a compact, unified representation of whole-body actions. Importantly, the VLM and action expert are still jointly trained end-to-end, preserving unified policy learning while enabling asynchronous execution. DuoCore-FS supports a 3B-parameter VLM while achieving 30 Hz whole-body action-chunk generation, approximately three times as fast as prior VLA models with comparable model sizes. Real-world whole-body manipulation experiments demonstrate improved task success rates and significantly enhanced responsiveness compared to synchronous Fast-Slow VLA baselines. The implementation of DuoCore-FS, including training, inference, and deployment, is provided to commercial users by Astribot as part of the Astribot robotic platform.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated effectiveness in robot manipulation, yet state-of-the-art models such as pi0.5 operate under a single-frame paradigm, limiting their ability to retain past observations and develop precise spatial perception. In this paper, we propose StreamPI, a streaming multimodal temporal modeling framework that equips single-frame VLA with temporal reasoning capability without introducing any additional parameters. One core design is instruction-anchored temporal modeling. It treats each (visual observation, language instruction) pair as an atomic temporal unit: bidirectional attention within each pair enables cross-modal fusion, while causal attention across pairs preserves autoregressive streaming inference. This ensures the language instruction serves as a persistent semantic anchor throughout task execution. To bridge the gap between synchronous training and asynchronous real-robot deployment, we introduce a andom-interval streaming training strategy: a proper inter-frame interval (e.g., every 3 frames) enables faster and smoother action execution. Beyond this, randomizing the interval further improves robustness to frame-timing perturbations, supporting asynchronous deployment in practice. Furthermore, by leveraging the length extrapolation capability of the LLM backbone, StreamPI seamlessly inherits pretrained single-frame weights and supports flexible single-frame and multi-frame inference. Experiments on real-robot tasks spanning memory-dependent and precise perception scenarios, as well as the simulation benchmark LIBERO, demonstrate that StreamPI outperforms pi0.5 across diverse tasks.

While long-horizon mobile GUI agents typically rely on thought-action-observation loops, they struggle to separate persistent task states from transient screen observations. As execution histories grow, this entanglement imposes a severe context burden, causing agents to forget initial requirements, hallucinate progress, or repeatedly interact with stale interfaces. To address this, we introduce Task-State Representation (TSR), a training-free framework that explicitly decouples task state from sensory input. Acting as a lightweight external wrapper, TSR maintains three structured components: a global instruction summary, a dynamic progress tracker for subgoals, and a transition-aware action verifier. By continuously updating through pre- and post-action visual comparisons, TSR effectively guides the agent's reasoning without requiring architectural modifications. Experiments across four mobile GUI benchmarks validate TSR's effectiveness, yielding up to a 12 absolute point increase in success rate on complex cross-application and memory-intensive tasks.

Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is substantially hindered by hardware adaptability and data efficacy. Prior hardware designs remain gripper-specific and often face a trade-off between tracking precision and portability. Furthermore, the lack of online feasibility checking during demonstration leads to poor replayability. More importantly, existing handheld setups struggle to collect interactive recovery data during robot execution, lacking the authentic tactile information necessary for robust policy refinement. To bridge these gaps, we present TAMEn, a tactile-aware manipulation engine for closed-loop data collection in contact-rich tasks. Our system features a cross-morphology wearable interface that enables rapid adaptation across heterogeneous grippers. To balance data quality and environmental diversity, we implement a dual-modal acquisition pipeline: a precision mode leveraging motion capture for high-fidelity demonstrations, and a portable mode utilizing VR-based tracking for in-the-wild acquisition and tactile-visualized recovery teleoperation. Building on this hardware, we unify large-scale tactile pretraining, task-specific bimanual demonstrations, and human-in-the-loop recovery data into a pyramid-structured data regime, enabling closed-loop policy refinement. Experiments show that our feasibility-aware pipeline significantly improves demonstration replayability, and that the proposed visuo-tactile learning framework increases task success rates from 34% to 75% across diverse bimanual manipulation tasks. We further open-source the hardware and dataset to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.

Human attention provides valuable yet underexploited signals for code LLM training, offering a perspective beyond purely machine-driven attention. Despite the complexity and cost of collecting eye-tracking data, there has also been limited progress in systematically using these signals for code LLM training. To address both issues, we propose a cohesive pipeline spanning augmentation and reward-based fine-tuning. Specifically, we introduce (1) an eye-tracking path augmentation method to expand programmer attention datasets, (2) a pattern abstraction step that refines raw fixations into learnable attention motifs, and (3) a reward-guided strategy for integrating these insights directly into a CodeT5 supervised fine-tuning process. Our experiments yield +7.16 in CodeBLEU on the CodeXGlue benchmark for code summarization, underscoring how uniting human and machine attention can boost code intelligence. We hope this work encourages broader exploration of human-centric methods in next-generation AI4SE.

Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-through-skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing capabilities, while modern imitation learning provides powerful tools for policy acquisition. However, existing STS designs lack simultaneous multimodal perception and suffer from unreliable tactile tracking. Furthermore, integrating these rich multimodal signals into learning-based manipulation pipelines remains an open challenge. We introduce TacThru, an STS sensor enabling simultaneous visual perception and robust tactile signal extraction, and TacThru-UMI, an imitation learning framework that leverages these multimodal signals for manipulation. Our sensor features a fully transparent elastomer, persistent illumination, novel keyline markers, and efficient tracking, while our learning system integrates these signals through a Transformer-based Diffusion Policy. Experiments on five challenging real-world tasks show that TacThru-UMI achieves an average success rate of 85.5%, significantly outperforming the baselines of alternating tactile-visual (66.3%) and vision-only (55.4%). The system excels in critical scenarios, including contact detection with thin and soft objects and precision manipulation requiring multimodal coordination. This work demonstrates that combining simultaneous multimodal perception with modern learning frameworks enables more precise, adaptable robotic manipulation.

Currently, instruction-based image editing methods have made significant progress by leveraging the powerful cross-modal understanding capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). However, they still face challenges in three key areas: 1) complex scenarios; 2) semantic consistency; and 3) fine-grained editing. To address these issues, we propose FireEdit, an innovative Fine-grained Instruction-based image editing framework that exploits a REgion-aware VLM. FireEdit is designed to accurately comprehend user instructions and ensure effective control over the editing process. Specifically, we enhance the fine-grained visual perception capabilities of the VLM by introducing additional region tokens. Relying solely on the output of the LLM to guide the diffusion model may lead to suboptimal editing results. Therefore, we propose a Time-Aware Target Injection module and a Hybrid Visual Cross Attention module. The former dynamically adjusts the guidance strength at various denoising stages by integrating timestep embeddings with the text embeddings. The latter enhances visual details for image editing, thereby preserving semantic consistency between the edited result and the source image. By combining the VLM enhanced with fine-grained region tokens and the time-dependent diffusion model, FireEdit demonstrates significant advantages in comprehending editing instructions and maintaining high semantic consistency. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art instruction-based image editing methods. Our project is available at https://zjgans.github.io/fireedit.github.io.

Tactile graphics require careful expert validation before reaching blind and visually impaired (BVI) learners, yet existing datasets provide only coarse holistic quality ratings that offer no actionable repair signal. We present TactileEval, a three-stage pipeline that takes a first step toward automating this process. Drawing on expert free-text comments from the TactileNet dataset, we establish a five-category quality taxonomy; encompassing view angle, part completeness, background clutter, texture separation, and line quality aligned with BANA standards. We subsequently gathered 14,095 structured annotations via Amazon Mechanical Turk, spanning 66 object classes organized into six distinct families. A reproducible ViT-L/14 feature probe trained on this data achieves 85.70% overall test accuracy across 30 different tasks, with consistent difficulty ordering suggesting the taxonomy suggesting the taxonomy captures meaningful perceptual structure. Building on these evaluations, we present a ViT-guided automated editing pipeline that routes classifier scores through family-specific prompt templates to produce targeted corrections via gpt-image-1 image editing. Code, data, and models are available at https://TactileEval.github.io/

Real-time execution is essential for cyber-physical systems such as robots. These systems operate in dynamic real-world environments where even small delays can undermine responsiveness and compromise performance. Asynchronous inference has recently emerged as a system-level paradigm for real-time robot manipulation, enabling the next action chunk to be predicted while the current one is being executed. While this approach achieves real-time responsiveness, naive integration often results in execution failure. Previous methods attributed this failure to inter-chunk discontinuity and developed test-time algorithms to smooth chunk boundaries. In contrast, we identify another critical yet overlooked factor: intra-chunk inconsistency, where the robot's executed action chunk partially misaligns with its current perception. To address this, we propose REMAC, which learns corrective adjustments on the pretrained policy through masked action chunking, enabling the policy to remain resilient under mismatches between intended actions and actual execution during asynchronous inference. In addition, we introduce a prefix-preserved sampling procedure to reinforce inter-chunk continuity. Overall, our method delivers more reliable policies without incurring additional latency. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our method enables faster task execution, maintains robustness across varying delays, and consistently achieves higher completion rates.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control, enabling end-to-end policies that ground natural language instructions into visuomotor actions. However, current VLAs often struggle to satisfy precise task constraints, such as stopping based on numeric thresholds, since their observation-to-action mappings are implicitly shaped by training data and lack explicit mechanisms for condition monitoring. In this work, we propose CLAW (CLIP-Language-Action for Weight), a framework that decouples condition evaluation from action generation. CLAW leverages a fine-tuned CLIP model as a lightweight prompt generator, which continuously monitors the digital readout of a scale and produces discrete directives based on task-specific weight thresholds. These prompts are then consumed by π_0, a flow-based VLA policy, which integrates the prompts with multi-view camera observations to produce continuous robot actions. This design enables CLAW to combine symbolic weight reasoning with high-frequency visuomotor control. We validate CLAW on three experimental setups: single-object grasping and mixed-object tasks requiring dual-arm manipulation. Across all conditions, CLAW reliably executes weight-aware behaviors and outperforms both raw-π_0 and fine-tuned π_0 models. We have uploaded the videos as supplementary materials.

Computer-using agents (CUAs) are becoming increasingly capable; however, it remains difficult to scale evaluation of whether a trajectory truly fulfills a user instruction. In this work, we study reward modeling from execution video: a sequence of keyframes from an agent trajectory that is independent of the agent's internal reasoning or actions. Although video-execution modeling is method-agnostic, it presents key challenges, including highly redundant layouts and subtle, localized cues that determine success. We introduce Execution Video Reward 53k (ExeVR-53k), a dataset of 53k high-quality video--task--reward triplets. We further propose adversarial instruction translation to synthesize negative samples with step-level annotations. To enable learning from long, high-resolution execution videos, we design spatiotemporal token pruning, which removes homogeneous regions and persistent tokens while preserving decisive UI changes. Building on these components, we fine-tune an Execution Video Reward Model (ExeVRM) that takes only a user instruction and a video-execution sequence to predict task success. Our ExeVRM 8B achieves 84.7% accuracy and 87.7% recall on video-execution assessment, outperforming strong proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro across Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, and Android, while providing more precise temporal attribution. These results show that video-execution reward modeling can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic evaluator for CUAs.

While tactile sensing is widely accepted as an important and useful sensing modality, its use pales in comparison to other sensory modalities like vision and proprioception. AnySkin addresses the critical challenges that impede the use of tactile sensing -- versatility, replaceability, and data reusability. Building on the simplistic design of ReSkin, and decoupling the sensing electronics from the sensing interface, AnySkin simplifies integration making it as straightforward as putting on a phone case and connecting a charger. Furthermore, AnySkin is the first uncalibrated tactile-sensor with cross-instance generalizability of learned manipulation policies. To summarize, this work makes three key contributions: first, we introduce a streamlined fabrication process and a design tool for creating an adhesive-free, durable and easily replaceable magnetic tactile sensor; second, we characterize slip detection and policy learning with the AnySkin sensor; and third, we demonstrate zero-shot generalization of models trained on one instance of AnySkin to new instances, and compare it with popular existing tactile solutions like DIGIT and ReSkin. Videos of experiments, fabrication details and design files can be found on https://any-skin.github.io/

Despite widespread deployment of Large Language Models, systematic evaluation of instruction-following capabilities remains challenging. While comprehensive benchmarks exist, focused assessments that quickly diagnose specific instruction adherence patterns are valuable. As newer models may be trained on existing benchmarks, novel evaluation approaches are needed to assess genuine capabilities rather than memorized performance. This paper presents a streamlined evaluation framework using twenty carefully designed prompts to assess LLM instruction-following across diverse task categories. We demonstrate this framework through a large-scale empirical study conducted on October 14, 2025, testing 256 verified working models from 331 available via OpenRouter. To ensure methodological rigor and prevent selection bias, we first verified each model's basic functionality before inclusion. Unlike large-scale benchmarks requiring extensive computational resources, our approach offers a practical diagnostic tool researchers and practitioners can readily apply. Our methodology builds upon verifiable instructions while introducing a compact test suite balancing comprehensiveness with efficiency. Each prompt targets distinct aspects of instruction following, including format compliance, content constraints, logical sequencing, and multi-step task execution. We evaluate models from major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral) and emerging implementations (Qwen, DeepSeek, community models), providing comparative performance analysis. Our findings reveal consistent failure modes and identify specific instruction types posing particular challenges. This work contributes both a practical evaluation tool and one of the most comprehensive empirical analyses of instruction-following capabilities across the contemporary LLM landscape.

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd.edu/AcTExplore

Tactile-based reinforcement learning (RL) is currently hindered by fragmented research and a focus on over-saturated orientation tasks. We introduce v2 of the Robot Tactile Olympiad (roto 2.0), a GPU-parallelised benchmark designed to standardise tactile-based RL across four distinct robotic morphologies (16-DOF to 24-DOF). Unlike prior benchmarks, roto focuses on end-to-end "blind" manipulation, utilising only proprioception and tactile sensing without state information or distillation. We demonstrate a significant performance leap, with our blind agents achieving 13 Baoding ball rotations in 10 seconds, an order of magnitude faster than current state-of-the-art speeds. By open-sourcing our environments and robustly tuned baselines, we reduce the barrier to entry and enable researchers to prioritise fundamental algorithmic challenges over tedious RL tuning. Website: https://elle-miller.github.io/roto/

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task learning and instruction following, they typically assume static task intent, failing to respond when new instructions arrive during ongoing execution. This limitation hinders natural and robust interaction in dynamic settings, such as retail or household environments, where real-time intent changes are common. We propose SwitchVLA, a unified, execution-aware framework that enables smooth and reactive task switching without external planners or additional switch-specific data. We model task switching as a behavior modulation problem conditioned on execution state and instruction context. Expert demonstrations are segmented into temporally grounded contact phases, allowing the policy to infer task progress and adjust its behavior accordingly. A multi-behavior conditional policy is then trained to generate flexible action chunks under varying behavior modes through conditioned trajectory modeling. Experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that SwitchVLA enables robust instruction adherence, fluid task switching, and strong generalization-outperforming prior VLA baselines in both task success rate and interaction naturalness.

AI agents need to plan to achieve complex goals that involve orchestrating perception, sub-goal decomposition, and execution. These plans consist of ordered steps structured according to a Temporal Execution Order (TEO, a directed acyclic graph that ensures each step executes only after its preconditions are satisfied. Existing research on foundational models' understanding of temporal execution is limited to automatically derived annotations, approximations of the TEO as a linear chain, or text-only inputs. To address this gap, we introduce MATEO (MultimodAl Temporal Execution Order), a benchmark designed to assess and improve the temporal reasoning abilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) required for real-world planning. We acquire a high-quality professional multimodal recipe corpus, authored through a standardized editorial process that decomposes instructions into discrete steps, each paired with corresponding images. We collect TEO annotations as graphs by designing and using a scalable crowdsourcing pipeline. Using MATEO, we evaluate six state-of-the-art LVLMs across model scales, varying language context, multimodal input structure, and fine-tuning strategies.

Information workers' productivity is significantly influenced by their cognitive states and physiological responses. AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and others have become integral components of knowledge-intensive workplaces. These AI assistants utilize pre-defined user preferences and chat interaction histories, thus confining themselves to reactive exchanges, lacking sufficient adaptability. Consequently, they fail to cater to individual user preferences and are unable to adapt to their psychophysiological states, diminishing potential productivity gains. To bridge this gap, we introduce AwareLLM, a novel multimodal framework that integrates egocentric vision, pupillometry, eye-gaze tracking, posture detection, heart activity, and the inferencing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to create a proactive and context-aware ecosystem. AwareLLM dynamically adapts to users' psychophysiological states while analyzing temporal patterns and behavioral tendencies to provide personalized and timely interventions. We evaluated AwareLLM through a user study with 20 participants, comparing it to a standard LLM assistant across multiple tasks. Our results show statistically significant improvements in task performance, along with reductions in cognitive fatigue and mental demand. Participants described AwareLLM's personalized interventions as timely and relevant, helping them boost their confidence and deepen engagement with their work. AwareLLM opens new avenues for Human-AI collaboration where technology adapts to our needs rather than us adhering to technological constraints.

Establishing a universal benchmark for tactile representation learning in robotic manipulation remains challenging due to the diversity of tactile sensor designs, data formats, and robot embodiments. Rather than seeking to establish such, we explore a scalable and promising direction for future development: egocentric vision paired with full-hand tactile data. To this end, we introduce HT-Bench, a large-scale multi-task benchmark for dexterous full-hand tactile sensing, comprising 10M RGB frames and 7.8M tactile frames collected across 226 tasks. HT-Bench evaluates tactile representations from three key perspectives: whether they encode meaningful contact geometry, whether they can align tactile observations with visual information, and whether they generalize to unseen tasks. To assess these capabilities, HT-Bench includes four tasks: fine-grained tactile similarity retrieval, masked tactile inpainting, vision-to-tactile synthesis, and multimodal tactile frame prediction. We further propose HandTouch, a vector-quantized vision--tactile encoder that learns tactile representations through progressive spatial, cross-modal, and temporal training. Across HT-Bench, HandTouch consistently outperforms representative tactile encoder baselines, improving Recall@5 on fine-grained tactile similarity retrieval from 74.65\% to 85.23\%, reducing RMSE on masked tactile inpainting from 0.022 to 0.010, and increasing OOD cIoU on vision-to-tactile synthesis from 0.628 to 0.705. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of HandTouch and suggest that large-scale egocentric full-hand tactile data provides a scalable basis for evaluating and advancing tactile representation learning in dexterous manipulation.

As an essential modality for dexterous and contact-rich tasks, tactile sensing provides precise force feedback that cannot be reliably inferred from vision. However, limited by hardware and data collection systems, existing datasets with tactility remain small in scale and narrow in contact coverage. Meanwhile, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with tactile modality are constrained on dynamics-agnostic post-training, which limits the performance ceiling on downstream tasks. In this paper, we present H-Tac, a large-scale tactile-action dataset with 160-hour egocentric human videos containing more than 300 tasks and 135k episodes. Building upon this, we propose Transferable Tactile Pre-Training (TTP), a system of tactile-based pre-training on human data for fine-grained robotic tasks. To bridge the gap between humans and robots, we use unified tactile and action spaces throughout the pre-training and post-training phases, preserving prior knowledge during human-to-robot transfer. By leveraging a tactile expert for future tactile prediction, our framework explicitly models the contact dynamics and precise physical interactions. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance, exhibiting robust generalization and fine-grained manipulation capabilities. TTP paves the way for scalable tactile pre-training via human-to-robot transfer.

Human beings possess the capability to multiply a melange of multisensory cues while actively exploring and interacting with the 3D world. Current multi-modal large language models, however, passively absorb sensory data as inputs, lacking the capacity to actively interact with the objects in the 3D environment and dynamically collect their multisensory information. To usher in the study of this area, we propose MultiPLY, a multisensory embodied large language model that could incorporate multisensory interactive data, including visual, audio, tactile, and thermal information into large language models, thereby establishing the correlation among words, actions, and percepts. To this end, we first collect Multisensory Universe, a large-scale multisensory interaction dataset comprising 500k data by deploying an LLM-powered embodied agent to engage with the 3D environment. To perform instruction tuning with pre-trained LLM on such generated data, we first encode the 3D scene as abstracted object-centric representations and then introduce action tokens denoting that the embodied agent takes certain actions within the environment, as well as state tokens that represent the multisensory state observations of the agent at each time step. In the inference time, MultiPLY could generate action tokens, instructing the agent to take the action in the environment and obtain the next multisensory state observation. The observation is then appended back to the LLM via state tokens to generate subsequent text or action tokens. We demonstrate that MultiPLY outperforms baselines by a large margin through a diverse set of embodied tasks involving object retrieval, tool use, multisensory captioning, and task decomposition.

We present CIFLEX (Contextual Instruction Flow for Sub-task Execution), which is a novel execution system for efficient sub-task handling in multi-turn interactions with a single on-device large language model (LLM). As LLMs become increasingly capable, a single model is expected to handle diverse sub-tasks that more effectively and comprehensively support answering user requests. Naive approach reprocesses the entire conversation context when switching between main and sub-tasks (e.g., query rewriting, summarization), incurring significant computational overhead. CIFLEX mitigates this overhead by reusing the key-value (KV) cache from the main task and injecting only task-specific instructions into isolated side paths. After sub-task execution, the model rolls back to the main path via cached context, thereby avoiding redundant prefill computation. To support sub-task selection, we also develop a hierarchical classification strategy tailored for small-scale models, decomposing multi-choice decisions into binary ones. Experiments show that CIFLEX significantly reduces computational costs without degrading task performance, enabling scalable and efficient multi-task dialogue on-device.

Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding environment (Johansson and Flanagan, 2009; Li et al., 2020; Calandra et al., 2017). However, no existing systems provide rich, multi-modal digital touch-sensing capabilities through a hemispherical compliant embodiment. Here, we describe several conceptual and technological innovations to improve the digitization of touch. These advances are embodied in an artificial finger-shaped sensor with advanced sensing capabilities. Significantly, this fingertip contains high-resolution sensors (~8.3 million taxels) that respond to omnidirectional touch, capture multi-modal signals, and use on-device artificial intelligence to process the data in real time. Evaluations show that the artificial fingertip can resolve spatial features as small as 7 um, sense normal and shear forces with a resolution of 1.01 mN and 1.27 mN, respectively, perceive vibrations up to 10 kHz, sense heat, and even sense odor. Furthermore, it embeds an on-device AI neural network accelerator that acts as a peripheral nervous system on a robot and mimics the reflex arc found in humans. These results demonstrate the possibility of digitizing touch with superhuman performance. The implications are profound, and we anticipate potential applications in robotics (industrial, medical, agricultural, and consumer-level), virtual reality and telepresence, prosthetics, and e-commerce. Toward digitizing touch at scale, we open-source a modular platform to facilitate future research on the nature of touch.

Human interaction is inherently multimodal and full-duplex: we listen while watching, speak while acting, and fluidly adapt to turn-taking and interruptions. Realizing these capabilities is essential for building models simulating humans. We present ELLSA (End-to-end Listen, Look, Speak and Act), which, to our knowledge, is the first full-duplex, end-to-end model that simultaneously perceives and generates across vision, text, speech, and action within a single architecture, enabling interaction patterns previously out of reach, yielding more natural, human-like behaviors. At its core is a novel SA-MoE architecture (Self-Attention Mixture-of-Experts) that routes each modality to specialized experts and fuses them through a unified attention backbone. This provides a generalizable solution for joint multimodal perception and concurrent generation, leveraging strong pre-trained components while enabling efficient modality integration and mitigating modality interference. On speech-interaction and robot-manipulation benchmarks, ELLSA matches modality-specific baselines, while uniquely supporting advanced multimodal and full-duplex behaviors such as dialogue and action turn-taking, defective instruction rejection, speaking-while-acting, context-grounded visual question answering, and action barge-ins. We contend that ELLSA represents a step toward more natural and general interactive intelligence, contributing to the broader pursuit of artificial general intelligence. All data, code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in perceiving and reasoning over multimodal inquiries, ushering in a new research era for foundation models. However, vision-language misalignment in MLLMs has emerged as a critical challenge, where the textual responses generated by these models are not factually aligned with the given text-image inputs. Existing efforts to address vision-language misalignment have focused on developing specialized vision-language connectors or leveraging visual instruction tuning from diverse domains. In this paper, we tackle this issue from a fundamental yet unexplored perspective by revisiting the core architecture of MLLMs. Most MLLMs are typically built on decoder-only LLMs consisting of a causal attention mechanism, which limits the ability of earlier modalities (e.g., images) to incorporate information from later modalities (e.g., text). To address this problem, we propose AKI, a novel MLLM that unlocks causal attention into modality-mutual attention (MMA) to enable image tokens to attend to text tokens. This simple yet effective design allows AKI to achieve superior performance in 12 multimodal understanding benchmarks (+7.2% on average) without introducing additional parameters and increasing training time. Our MMA design is intended to be generic, allowing for application across various modalities, and scalable to accommodate diverse multimodal scenarios. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sony/aki, and we will release our AKI-4B model to encourage further advancements in MLLMs across various directions.

We introduce IMPACT, a synchronized five-view RGB-D dataset for deployment-oriented industrial procedural understanding, built around real assembly and disassembly of a commercial angle grinder with professional-grade tools. To our knowledge, IMPACT is the first real industrial assembly benchmark that jointly provides synchronized ego-exo RGB-D capture, decoupled bimanual annotation, compliance-aware state tracking, and explicit anomaly--recovery supervision within a single real industrial workflow. It comprises 112 trials from 13 participants totaling 39.5 hours, with multi-route execution governed by a partial-order prerequisite graph, a six-category anomaly taxonomy, and operator cognitive load measured via NASA-TLX. The annotation hierarchy links hand-specific atomic actions to coarse procedural steps, component assembly states, and per-hand compliance phases, with synchronized null spans across views to decouple perceptual limitations from algorithmic failure. Systematic baselines reveal fundamental limitations that remain invisible to single-task benchmarks, particularly under realistic deployment conditions that involve incomplete observations, flexible execution paths, and corrective behavior. The full dataset, annotations, and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/IMPACT.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly deployed to interact with online web services, yet their exposure to open-world content renders them vulnerable to Environmental Injection Attacks (EIAs). In these attacks, an attacker can inject crafted triggers into website to manipulate the behavior of GUI agents used by other users. In this paper, we find that most existing EIA studies fall short of realism. In particular, they fail to capture the dynamic nature of real-world web content, often assuming that a trigger's on-screen position and surrounding visual context remain largely consistent between training and testing. To better reflect practice, we introduce a realistic dynamic-environment threat model in which the attacker is a regular user and the trigger is embedded within a dynamically changing environment. Under this threat model, existing approaches largely fail, suggesting that their effectiveness in exposing GUI agent vulnerabilities has been substantially overestimated. To expose the hidden vulnerabilities of existing GUI agents effectively, we propose Chameleon, an attack framework with two key novelties designed for dynamic environments. (1) To synthesize more realistic training data, we introduce LLM-Driven Environment Simulation, which automatically generates diverse, high-fidelity webpage simulations that mimic the variability of real-world dynamic environments. (2) To optimize the trigger more effectively, we introduce Attention Black Hole, which converts attention weights into explicit supervisory signals. This mechanism encourages the agent to remain insensitive to irrelevant surrounding content, thereby improving robustness in dynamic environments. We evaluate Chameleon on six realistic websites and four representative LVLM-powered GUI agents, where it significantly outperforms existing methods.

Touch is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet most egocentric human data increasingly used for robot learning lacks tactile information. Directly collecting large-scale tactile data is challenging due to sensor limitations, while human video data is abundant, contact-rich, and easily scalable. This motivates a natural question: can tactile signals be inferred purely from vision? To address this, we introduce EgoTac, a generalizable model that predicts rich tactile information directly from egocentric human videos. EgoTac is trained on a unified corpus of over 5.7M image-tactile pairs, covering both continuous force measurements and binary contacts. By learning from this diverse dataset, EgoTac captures nuanced touch dynamics across varied interactions. Experiments demonstrate strong performance: in-domain prediction achieves an average force error below 0.06N. On out-of-domain contact prediction benchmarks, EgoTac consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art contact estimator. It also captures the rise and fall patterns of real tactile data and enables zero-shot predictions on unconstrained real-world videos. Scaling analyses further reveal that both data diversity and volume improve performance steadily. Overall, EgoTac provides a scalable pathway to extract tactile priors from egocentric human videos, enabling broadly applicable tactile-aware robot learning.

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies such as π_{0.5} and OpenVLA perform well on many manipulation tasks, but they are often reactive: the next action is predicted from the current observation, instruction, and proprioceptive state. This assumption breaks down in stage-dependent manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on latent task progress and previous interaction outcomes. We argue that such tasks require not only memory, but dynamics-aware belief updates: the policy should preserve task progress during stable or occluded phases and revise its belief near contact, release, or subgoal transitions. We introduce Temporally Conditioned Memory-Fusion Policies (TFP), a lightweight memory-action framework for VLA backbones. TFP maintains an episode-local task-progress belief with Liquid Time-Constant dynamics and injects the updated belief directly into the flow-matching action decoder through adaptive modulation. This lets temporally accumulated context shape the generated action chunk, rather than serving only as passive history context. With a 3.3B-parameter model, TFP improves the average success rate from \(96.9\%\) to \(98.75\%\) on LIBERO and from \(91.4\%\) to \(93.77\%\) on LIBERO-plus. On the memory-focused MIKASA ShellGameTouch diagnostic, TFP achieves success up to \(75.0\%\). Mechanistic analyses show that write-gain changes near manipulation events are about \(6\times\) larger than far non-event phases, and hidden-state interventions show that the belief causally modulates generated action chunks. These results suggest that compact, event-sensitive memory dynamics can improve VLA policies under occlusion, visual perturbation, and stage-dependent task structure.

Recent advances in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) are primarily focused on offline video understanding. Instead, streaming video understanding poses great challenges to recent models due to its time-sensitive, omni-modal and interactive characteristics. In this work, we aim to extend the streaming video understanding from a new perspective and propose a novel task named Visual Instruction Feedback in which models should be aware of visual contents and learn to extract instructions from them. For example, when users wave their hands to agents, agents should recognize the gesture and start conversations with welcome information. Thus, following instructions in visual modality greatly enhances user-agent interactions. To facilitate research, we define seven key subtasks highly relevant to visual modality and collect the ViSpeak-Instruct dataset for training and the ViSpeak-Bench for evaluation. Further, we propose the ViSpeak model, which is a SOTA streaming video understanding LMM with GPT-4o-level performance on various streaming video understanding benchmarks. After finetuning on our ViSpeak-Instruct dataset, ViSpeak is equipped with basic visual instruction feedback ability, serving as a solid baseline for future research.

We present N_0-VTLA, a vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) foundation model capable of (1) fine-grained contact-rich manipulation with tactile perception and tactile-feedback control, and (2) offline policy improvement from stored deployment data. Building on current vision-based backbones, we propose a training recipe for tactile integration consisting of visuo-tactile pre-training, staged tactile-pathway integration, and advantage-conditioned offline policy improvement. During pre-training, the policy learns broad contact priors from NeoData, our large-scale visuo-tactile robot dataset; to our knowledge, N_0-VTLA is the first VTLA model pretrained on tactile data at scale. During post-training, we augment the policy with a predictive tactile pathway that distills the contact patterns learned at scale into the fine motion adjustments required by downstream tactile-centric manipulation. For offline policy improvement, we introduce ALTER, an advantage-conditioned offline reinforcement learning method that converts relative progress and trajectory-event comparisons into binary advantage labels for policy training on a fixed deployment corpus, further improving task-specific learning on contact-rich skills such as deformable object manipulation. Across contact-rich benchmarks, N_0-VTLA outperforms strong baselines by wide margins: it wins all nine real-robot NeoReal tasks and reaches 63.8% mean success on a twenty-task simulation suite, against 44.0% for the strongest baseline. N_0-VTLA policies trained with ALTER reach 75-95% success on three long-horizon real-robot tasks. These results lay a foundation for versatile tactile-driven manipulation policies.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for enhancing human productivity by assisting with computer tasks. Existing task formulations primarily focus on simple tasks that can be specified by a single, language-only instruction, such as "Insert a new slide." In this work, we introduce VideoGUI, a novel multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate GUI assistants on visual-centric GUI tasks. Sourced from high-quality web instructional videos, our benchmark focuses on tasks involving professional and novel software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop or Stable Diffusion WebUI) and complex activities (e.g., video editing). VideoGUI evaluates GUI assistants through a hierarchical process, allowing for identification of the specific levels at which they may fail: (i) high-level planning: reconstruct procedural subtasks from visual conditions without language descriptions; (ii) middle-level planning: generate sequences of precise action narrations based on visual state (i.e., screenshot) and goals; (iii) atomic action execution: perform specific actions such as accurately clicking designated elements. For each level, we design evaluation metrics across individual dimensions to provide clear signals, such as individual performance in clicking, dragging, typing, and scrolling for atomic action execution. Our evaluation on VideoGUI reveals that even the SoTA large multimodal model GPT4o performs poorly on visual-centric GUI tasks, especially for high-level planning.

Performing simple household tasks based on language directives is very natural to humans, yet it remains an open challenge for AI agents. The 'interactive instruction following' task attempts to make progress towards building agents that jointly navigate, interact, and reason in the environment at every step. To address the multifaceted problem, we propose a model that factorizes the task into interactive perception and action policy streams with enhanced components and name it as MOCA, a Modular Object-Centric Approach. We empirically validate that MOCA outperforms prior arts by significant margins on the ALFRED benchmark with improved generalization.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

The advancement of visual language models (VLMs) has enhanced mobile device operations, allowing simulated human-like actions to address user requirements. Current VLM-based mobile operating assistants can be structured into three levels: task, subtask, and action. The subtask level, linking high-level goals with low-level executable actions, is crucial for task completion but faces two challenges: ineffective subtasks that lower-level agent cannot execute and inefficient subtasks that fail to contribute to the completion of the higher-level task. These challenges stem from VLM's lack of experience in decomposing subtasks within GUI scenarios in multi-agent architecture. To address these, we propose a new mobile assistant architecture with constrained high-frequency o}ptimized planning (CHOP). Our approach overcomes the VLM's deficiency in GUI scenarios planning by using human-planned subtasks as the basis vector. We evaluate our architecture in both English and Chinese contexts across 20 Apps, demonstrating significant improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency. Our dataset and code is available at https://github.com/Yuqi-Zhou/CHOP

Human demonstrations collected by wearable devices (e.g., tactile gloves) provide fast and dexterous supervision for policy learning, and are guided by rich, natural tactile feedback. However, a key challenge is how to transfer human-collected tactile signals to robots despite the differences in sensing modalities and embodiment. Existing human-to-robot (H2R) approaches that incorporate touch often assume identical tactile sensors, require paired data, and involve little to no embodiment gap between human demonstrator and the robots, limiting scalability and generality. We propose TactAlign, a cross-embodiment tactile alignment method that transfers human-collected tactile signals to a robot with different embodiment. TactAlign transforms human and robot tactile observations into a shared latent representation using a rectified flow, without paired datasets, manual labels, or privileged information. Our method enables low-cost latent transport guided by hand-object interaction-derived pseudo-pairs. We demonstrate that TactAlign improves H2R policy transfer across multiple contact-rich tasks (pivoting, insertion, lid closing), generalizes to unseen objects and tasks with human data (less than 5 minutes), and enables zero-shot H2R transfer on a highly dexterous tasks (light bulb screwing).

Robots in many real-world settings have access to force/torque sensors in their gripper and tactile sensing is often necessary in tasks that involve contact-rich motion. In this work, we leverage surprise from mismatches in touch feedback to guide exploration in hard sparse-reward reinforcement learning tasks. Our approach, Touch-based Curiosity (ToC), learns what visible objects interactions are supposed to "feel" like. We encourage exploration by rewarding interactions where the expectation and the experience don't match. In our proposed method, an initial task-independent exploration phase is followed by an on-task learning phase, in which the original interactions are relabeled with on-task rewards. We test our approach on a range of touch-intensive robot arm tasks (e.g. pushing objects, opening doors), which we also release as part of this work. Across multiple experiments in a simulated setting, we demonstrate that our method is able to learn these difficult tasks through sparse reward and curiosity alone. We compare our cross-modal approach to single-modality (touch- or vision-only) approaches as well as other curiosity-based methods and find that our method performs better and is more sample-efficient.

In this paper, we introduce Haptic-Informed ACT, an advanced robotic system for pseudo oocyte manipulation, integrating multimodal information and Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT). Traditional automation methods for oocyte transfer rely heavily on visual perception, often requiring human supervision due to biological variability and environmental disturbances. Haptic-Informed ACT enhances ACT by incorporating haptic feedback, enabling real-time grasp failure detection and adaptive correction. Additionally, we introduce a 3D-printed TPU soft gripper to facilitate delicate manipulations. Experimental results demonstrate that Haptic-Informed ACT improves the task success rate, robustness, and adaptability compared to conventional ACT, particularly in dynamic environments. These findings highlight the potential of multimodal learning in robotics for biomedical automation.

Vision language models (VLMs) often generate hallucination, i.e., content that cannot be substantiated by either textual or visual inputs. Prior work primarily attributes this to over-reliance on linguistic prior knowledge rather than visual inputs. Some methods attempt to mitigate hallucination by amplifying visual token attention proportionally to their attention scores. However, these methods overlook the visual attention sink problem, where attention is frequently misallocated to task-irrelevant visual regions, and neglect cross-modal fusion balance by enhancing only visual attention without adjusting attention to the user query. This can result in amplifying incorrect areas while failing to properly interpret the user query. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective method called Gaze Shift-Guided Cross-modal Fusion Enhancement (GIFT). GIFT pre-computes a holistic visual saliency map by tracking positive changes in visual attention, or "gaze shifts", during user query comprehension, and leverages this map to amplify attention to both salient visual information and the user query at each decoding step. This reduces the impact of visual attention sink, as irrelevant tokens exhibit minimal shifts, while ensuring balanced cross-modal fusion for well-integrated representation. Extensive experiments show that GIFT effectively mitigates hallucination in VLMs across both generative and classification tasks, achieving up to 20.7% improvement over greedy decoding, while maintaining general vision-language performance with low computational overhead.

Many robotic manipulation tasks require sensing and responding to force signals such as torque to assess whether the task has been successfully completed and to enable closed-loop control. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models lack the ability to integrate such subtle physical feedback. In this work, we explore Torque-aware VLA models, aiming to bridge this gap by systematically studying the design space for incorporating torque signals into existing VLA architectures. We identify and evaluate several strategies, leading to three key findings. First, introducing torque adapters into the decoder consistently outperforms inserting them into the encoder.Third, inspired by joint prediction and planning paradigms in autonomous driving, we propose predicting torque as an auxiliary output, which further improves performance. This strategy encourages the model to build a physically grounded internal representation of interaction dynamics. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments across contact-rich manipulation benchmarks validate our findings.

Evaluating user interface (UI) design effectiveness extends beyond aesthetics to influencing user behavior, a principle central to Design Persuasiveness. A/B testing is the predominant method for determining which UI variations drive higher user engagement, but it is costly and time-consuming. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can process automated UI analysis, current approaches focus on isolated design attributes rather than comparative persuasiveness-the key factor in optimizing user interactions. To address this, we introduce WiserUI-Bench, a benchmark designed for Pairwise UI Design Persuasiveness Assessment task, featuring 300 real-world UI image pairs labeled with A/B test results and expert rationales. Additionally, we propose G-FOCUS, a novel inference-time reasoning strategy that enhances VLM-based persuasiveness assessment by reducing position bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Experimental results show that G-FOCUS surpasses existing inference strategies in consistency and accuracy for pairwise UI evaluation. Through promoting VLM-driven evaluation of UI persuasiveness, our work offers an approach to complement A/B testing, propelling progress in scalable UI preference modeling and design optimization. Code and data will be released publicly.

Human skin provides a rich tactile sensing stream, localizing intentional and unintentional contact events over a large and contoured region. Replicating these tactile sensing capabilities for dexterous robotic manipulation systems remains a longstanding challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by introducing DexSkin. DexSkin is a soft, conformable capacitive electronic skin that enables sensitive, localized, and calibratable tactile sensing, and can be tailored to varying geometries. We demonstrate its efficacy for learning downstream robotic manipulation by sensorizing a pair of parallel jaw gripper fingers, providing tactile coverage across almost the entire finger surfaces. We empirically evaluate DexSkin's capabilities in learning challenging manipulation tasks that require sensing coverage across the entire surface of the fingers, such as reorienting objects in hand and wrapping elastic bands around boxes, in a learning-from-demonstration framework. We then show that, critically for data-driven approaches, DexSkin can be calibrated to enable model transfer across sensor instances, and demonstrate its applicability to online reinforcement learning on real robots. Our results highlight DexSkin's suitability and practicality for learning real-world, contact-rich manipulation. Please see our project webpage for videos and visualizations: https://dex-skin.github.io/.

We present PCA-Bench, a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating the integrated capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Departing from previous benchmarks focusing on simplistic tasks and individual model capability, PCA-Bench introduces three complex scenarios: autonomous driving, domestic robotics, and open-world games. Given task instructions and diverse contexts, the model is required to seamlessly integrate multiple capabilities of Perception, Cognition, and Action in a reasoning chain to make accurate decisions. Moreover, PCA-Bench features error localization capabilities, scrutinizing model inaccuracies in areas such as perception, knowledge, or reasoning. This enhances the reliability of deploying MLLMs. To balance accuracy and efficiency in evaluation, we propose PCA-Eval, an automatic evaluation protocol, and assess 10 prevalent MLLMs. The results reveal significant performance disparities between open-source models and powerful proprietary models like GPT-4 Vision. To address this, we introduce Embodied-Instruction-Evolution (EIE), an automatic framework for synthesizing instruction tuning examples in multimodal embodied environments. EIE generates 7,510 training examples in PCA-Bench and enhances the performance of open-source MLLMs, occasionally surpassing GPT-4 Vision (+3\% in decision accuracy), thereby validating the effectiveness of EIE. Our findings suggest that robust MLLMs like GPT4-Vision show promise for decision-making in embodied agents, opening new avenues for MLLM research.

Modern AI systems, especially those interacting with the physical world, increasingly require real-time performance. However, the high latency of state-of-the-art generalist models, including recent vision-language action models (VLAs), poses a significant challenge. While action chunking has enabled temporal consistency in high-frequency control tasks, it does not fully address the latency problem, leading to pauses or out-of-distribution jerky movements at chunk boundaries. This paper presents a novel inference-time algorithm that enables smooth asynchronous execution of action chunking policies. Our method, real-time chunking (RTC), is applicable to any diffusion- or flow-based VLA out of the box with no re-training. It generates the next action chunk while executing the current one, "freezing" actions guaranteed to execute and "inpainting" the rest. To test RTC, we introduce a new benchmark of 12 highly dynamic tasks in the Kinetix simulator, as well as evaluate 6 challenging real-world bimanual manipulation tasks. Results demonstrate that RTC is fast, performant, and uniquely robust to inference delay, significantly improving task throughput and enabling high success rates in precise tasks x2013 such as lighting a match x2013 even in the presence of significant latency. See https://pi.website/research/real_time_chunking for videos.

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching billions of parameters. These huge models are memory hungry and incur significant inference latency even on cutting edge AI-accelerators, such as GPUs. Specifically, the time and memory complexity of the attention operation is quadratic in terms of the total context length, i.e., prompt and output tokens. Thus, several optimizations such as key-value tensor caching and FlashAttention computation have been proposed to deliver the low latency demands of applications relying on such large models. However, these techniques do not cater to the computationally distinct nature of different phases during inference. To that end, we propose LeanAttention, a scalable technique of computing self-attention for the token-generation phase (decode-phase) of decoder-only transformer models. LeanAttention enables scaling the attention mechanism implementation for the challenging case of long context lengths by re-designing the execution flow for the decode-phase. We identify that the associative property of online softmax can be treated as a reduction operation thus allowing us to parallelize the attention computation over these large context lengths. We extend the "stream-K" style reduction of tiled calculation to self-attention to enable parallel computation resulting in an average of 2.6x attention execution speedup over FlashAttention-2 and up to 8.33x speedup for 512k context lengths.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. Despite rapid advancements, current approaches are hindered by several critical challenges: data bottleneck in end-to-end training, high cost of delayed error detection, and risk of contradictory guidance. Inspired by the human cognitive loop of Thinking, Alignment, and Reflection, we present D-Artemis -- a novel deliberative framework in this paper. D-Artemis leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. It also employs a proactive Pre-execution Alignment stage, where Thought-Action Consistency (TAC) Check module and Action Correction Agent (ACA) work in concert to mitigate the risk of execution failures. A post-execution Status Reflection Agent (SRA) completes the cognitive loop, enabling strategic learning from experience. Crucially, D-Artemis enhances the capabilities of general-purpose Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for GUI tasks without the need for training on complex trajectory datasets, demonstrating strong generalization. D-Artemis establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across both major benchmarks, achieving a 75.8% success rate on AndroidWorld and 96.8% on ScreenSpot-V2. Extensive ablation studies further demonstrate the significant contribution of each component to the framework.

User instructions are often underspecified because humans rely on implicit assumptions about the surrounding environment. For large language model (LLM) agents operating in information-rich digital and physical environments, these assumptions cannot be inferred from the instruction alone; they must be recovered from the current state of tools, data, interfaces, and observations. Effective execution therefore requires agents to identify missing context, ground it in observed evidence, and carry it forward into subsequent actions. We show that current agents often fail to do so. They act from assumed rather than observed specifics, overlook information they could have gathered, and fail to incorporate evidence that has already been returned. Building on this insight, we propose ACCORD (Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding), a simple and effective agent framework for adaptive grounding. Before each action, ACCORD actively probes the environment for missing information and integrates relevant context from the agent's trajectory that would otherwise be overlooked. Requiring no additional training or task-success signals, ACCORD improves task-goal completion on AppWorld by up to +20.6 points with GPT-5-mini, from 42.0% to 62.6%, compared to strong baselines. These gains persist with a substantially stronger base model (+10.8 with Claude-4.5-sonnet), an open-weight model (+10.1 with Qwen3.5-27B-FP8), and on the embodied AlfWorld benchmark (+7.4 success rate with GPT-5-mini).

Despite significant advances in talking avatar generation, existing methods face critical challenges: insufficient text-following capability for diverse actions, lack of temporal alignment between actions and audio content, and dependency on additional control signals such as pose skeletons. We present ActAvatar, a framework that achieves phase-level precision in action control through textual guidance by capturing both action semantics and temporal context. Our approach introduces three core innovations: (1) Phase-Aware Cross-Attention (PACA), which decomposes prompts into a global base block and temporally-anchored phase blocks, enabling the model to concentrate on phase-relevant tokens for precise temporal-semantic alignment; (2) Progressive Audio-Visual Alignment, which aligns modality influence with the hierarchical feature learning process-early layers prioritize text for establishing action structure while deeper layers emphasize audio for refining lip movements, preventing modality interference; (3) A two-stage training strategy that first establishes robust audio-visual correspondence on diverse data, then injects action control through fine-tuning on structured annotations, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and the model's text-following capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ActAvatar significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both action control and visual quality.

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light fine-tuning, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains significantly lower perplexity on long-context than RoPE families.

Despite the significant success of Large Vision-Language models(LVLMs), these models still suffer hallucinations when describing images, generating answers that include non-existent objects. It is reported that these models tend to over-focus on certain irrelevant image tokens that do not contain critical information for answering the question and distort the output. To address this, we propose an Instruction-Aligned Visual Attention(IAVA) approach, which identifies irrelevant tokens by comparing changes in attention weights under two different instructions. By applying contrastive decoding, we dynamically adjust the logits generated from original image tokens and irrelevant image tokens, reducing the model's over-attention to irrelevant information. The experimental results demonstrate that IAVA consistently outperforms existing decoding techniques on benchmarks such as MME, POPE, and TextVQA in mitigating object hallucinations. Our IAVA approach is available online at https://github.com/Lee-lab558/IAVA.

Contact often occurs without macroscopic surface deformation, such as during interaction with liquids, semi-liquids, or ultra-soft materials. However, most existing tactile sensors rely on deformation to infer contact, making such light-contact interactions difficult to perceive robustly. To address this, we present LightTact, a visual-tactile fingertip sensor that makes contact directly visible via a deformation-independent principle. LightTact features an ambient-blocking optical configuration that suppresses both external light and internal illumination at non-contact regions, while transmitting only the scattered light generated at true contacts. As a result, LightTact produces high-contrast raw images in which non-contact pixels remain near-black (mean gray value < 3) and contact pixels preserve the natural appearance of the contacting surface. Built on this, LightTact achieves accurate pixel-level contact segmentation that is robust to material properties, contact force, surface appearance, and environmental lighting. We further demonstrate that LightTact unlocks new robotic manipulation behaviors that require detection of extremely light contact, including water spreading, facial-cream dipping, and soft thin-film interaction. In addition, we show that LightTact's spatially aligned visual-tactile images can be directly interpreted by vision-language models.

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have shown remarkable progress. However, existing methods remain limited to relatively simple editing operations, hindering real-world applications that require complex and compositional instructions. In this work, we address these limitations from the perspectives of architectural design, data, and evaluation protocols. Specifically, we identify two key challenges in current models: insufficient instruction compliance and background inconsistency. To this end, we propose MCIE-E1, a Multimodal Large Language Model-Driven Complex Instruction Image Editing method that integrates two key modules: a spatial-aware cross-attention module and a background-consistent cross-attention module. The former enhances instruction-following capability by explicitly aligning semantic instructions with spatial regions through spatial guidance during the denoising process, while the latter preserves features in unedited regions to maintain background consistency. To enable effective training, we construct a dedicated data pipeline to mitigate the scarcity of complex instruction-based image editing datasets, combining fine-grained automatic filtering via a powerful MLLM with rigorous human validation. Finally, to comprehensively evaluate complex instruction-based image editing, we introduce CIE-Bench, a new benchmark with two new evaluation metrics. Experimental results on CIE-Bench demonstrate that MCIE-E1 consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, achieving a 23.96% improvement in instruction compliance.

Deploying language-driven agents in robotics requires evaluations that reflect real-world task demands: natural-language instructions with reproducible outcomes. Such agents must connect language models to callable perception and control tools, and be assessed using deployment-critical metrics including latency, accuracy, and error modes. We present SCOPE (Simulation and Camera Operations for Perception and Evaluation), a modular agent for natural-language, open-vocabulary pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera control and visual scene understanding, designed explicitly for edge deployment. SCOPE operates both in a Blender-based simulation environment and on a physical PTZ camera, executing all perception, planning, and control locally at the deployment site using edge-accessible compute. We release a 536-task benchmark spanning QA, single- and multi-step commands, counting, spatial reasoning, descriptions, and optical character recognition in a Blender-based simulation environment that exposes realistic PTZ control affordances. Execution traces are combined with an LM-as-Judge to evaluate latency, accuracy, and error modes. We evaluate 19 planner-perception model combinations pairing Qwen3 small language models (SLMs) with Moondream and Qwen vision-language models (VLMs). Stronger SLMs substantially reduce hallucinations and improve tool routing, leading to more reliable closed-loop behavior. Once a sufficiently capable SLM is used, perception becomes the dominant performance bottleneck. Mixture-of-Experts models on both the planning and perception side consistently match or exceed dense alternatives at latencies and memory footprints comparable to much smaller networks. Quantization provides additional efficiency gains with minimal accuracy degradation, identifying a practical, sim-to-real validated design point for real-time, edge-feasible language-driven PTZ control.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often exhibit text inertia, where attention drifts from visual evidence toward linguistic priors, resulting in object hallucinations. Existing decoding strategies intervene only at the output logits and thus cannot correct internal reasoning drift, while recent internal-control methods based on heuristic head suppression or global steering vectors lack principled grounding. We introduce Conscious Gaze (CG-VLM), a training-free, inference-time framework that converts game-theoretic interpretability into actionable decoding control. A Cognitive Demand Sensor built on Harsanyi interactions estimates instantaneous vision-text synergy and identifies moments when visual grounding is necessary. Conditioned on this signal, a Focused Consensus Induction module selectively reorients mid-layer attention toward visual tokens before collapse into text priors. CG-VLM achieves state-of-the-art results on POPE and CHAIR across InstructBLIP, LLaVA, Qwen-VL, and mPLUG, while preserving general capabilities, demonstrating that token-level sensing enables precise, context-aware intervention without compromising foundational knowledge.

Compliance is a useful parametrization of tactile information that humans often utilize in manipulation tasks. It can be used to inform low-level contact-rich actions or characterize objects at a high-level. In robotic manipulation, existing approaches to estimate compliance have struggled to generalize across object shape and material. Using camera-based tactile sensors, we present a novel approach to parametrize compliance through Young's modulus E. We evaluate our method over a novel dataset of 285 common objects, including a wide array of shapes and materials with Young's moduli ranging from 5.0 kPa to 250 GPa. Data is collected over automated parallel grasps of each object. Combining analytical and data-driven approaches, we develop a hybrid system using a multi-tower neural network to analyze a sequence of tactile images from grasping. This system is shown to estimate the Young's modulus of unseen objects within an order of magnitude at 74.2% accuracy across our dataset. This is a drastic improvement over a purely analytical baseline, which exhibits only 28.9% accuracy. Importantly, this estimation system performs irrespective of object geometry and demonstrates robustness across object materials. Thus, it could be applied in a general robotic manipulation setting to characterize unknown objects and inform decision-making, for instance to sort produce by ripeness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed vibe coding, where users leverage LLMs to generate and iteratively refine code through natural language interactions until it passes their vibe check. Vibe check is tied to real-world human preference and goes beyond functionality: the solution should feel right, read cleanly, preserve intent, and remain correct. However, current code evaluation remains anchored to pass@k and captures only functional correctness, overlooking the non-functional instructions that users routinely apply. In this paper, we hypothesize that instruction following is the missing piece underlying vibe check that represents human preference in coding besides functional correctness. To quantify models' code instruction following capabilities with measurable signals, we present VeriCode, a taxonomy of 30 verifiable code instructions together with corresponding deterministic verifiers. We use the taxonomy to augment established evaluation suites, resulting in Vibe Checker, a testbed to assess both code instruction following and functional correctness. Upon evaluating 31 leading LLMs, we show that even the strongest models struggle to comply with multiple instructions and exhibit clear functional regression. Most importantly, a composite score of functional correctness and instruction following correlates the best with human preference, with the latter emerging as the primary differentiator on real-world programming tasks. Our work identifies core factors of the vibe check, providing a concrete path for benchmarking and developing models that better align with user preferences in coding.

Affective Computing (AC), integrating computer science, psychology, and cognitive science knowledge, aims to enable machines to recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions.To create more value, AC can be applied to diverse scenarios, including social media, finance, healthcare, education, etc. Affective Computing (AC) includes two mainstream tasks, i.e., Affective Understanding (AU) and Affective Generation (AG). Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for AU tasks has succeeded considerably. However, these models lack generalization ability, requiring specialized models for specific tasks. Additionally, traditional PLMs face challenges in AG, particularly in generating diverse and emotionally rich responses. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the ChatGPT series and LLaMA models, brings new opportunities and challenges, catalyzing a paradigm shift in AC. LLMs possess capabilities of in-context learning, common sense reasoning, and advanced sequence generation, which present unprecedented opportunities for AU. To provide a comprehensive overview of AC in the LLMs era from an NLP perspective, we summarize the development of LLMs research in this field, aiming to offer new insights. Specifically, we first summarize the traditional tasks related to AC and introduce the preliminary study based on LLMs. Subsequently, we outline the relevant techniques of popular LLMs to improve AC tasks, including Instruction Tuning and Prompt Engineering. For Instruction Tuning, we discuss full parameter fine-tuning and parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA, P-Tuning, and Prompt Tuning. In Prompt Engineering, we examine Zero-shot, Few-shot, Chain of Thought (CoT), and Agent-based methods for AU and AG. To clearly understand the performance of LLMs on different Affective Computing tasks, we further summarize the existing benchmarks and evaluation methods.

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation via LMs. We investigate how MLLMs facilitate edit instructions and present MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE). MGIE learns to derive expressive instructions and provides explicit guidance. The editing model jointly captures this visual imagination and performs manipulation through end-to-end training. We evaluate various aspects of Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that expressive instructions are crucial to instruction-based image editing, and our MGIE can lead to a notable improvement in automatic metrics and human evaluation while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.

Modality following serves as the capacity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to selectively utilize multimodal contexts based on user instructions. It is fundamental to ensuring safety and reliability in real-world deployments. However, the underlying mechanisms governing this decision-making process remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate its working mechanism through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that instruction tokens function as structural anchors for modality arbitration: Shallow attention layers perform non-selective information transfer, routing multimodal cues to these anchors as a latent buffer; Modality competition is resolved within deep attention layers guided by the instruction intent, while MLP layers exhibit semantic inertia, acting as an adversarial force. Furthermore, we identify a sparse set of specialized attention heads that drive this arbitration. Causal interventions demonstrate that manipulating a mere 5% of these critical heads can decrease the modality-following ratio by 60% through blocking, or increase it by 60% through targeted amplification of failed samples. Our work provides a substantial step toward model transparency and offers a principled framework for the orchestration of multimodal information in MLLMs.

This paper proposes joint attention estimation in a single image. Different from related work in which only the gaze-related attributes of people are independently employed, (I) their locations and actions are also employed as contextual cues for weighting their attributes, and (ii) interactions among all of these attributes are explicitly modeled in our method. For the interaction modeling, we propose a novel Transformer-based attention network to encode joint attention as low-dimensional features. We introduce a specialized MLP head with positional embedding to the Transformer so that it predicts pixelwise confidence of joint attention for generating the confidence heatmap. This pixelwise prediction improves the heatmap accuracy by avoiding the ill-posed problem in which the high-dimensional heatmap is predicted from the low-dimensional features. The estimated joint attention is further improved by being integrated with general image-based attention estimation. Our method outperforms SOTA methods quantitatively in comparative experiments. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymized_codes-ECA4.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents to navigate mobile graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Operating in dynamic on-device ecosystems, which include notifications, pop-ups, and inter-app interactions, exposes them to a unique and underexplored threat vector: environmental injection. Unlike prompt-based attacks that manipulate textual instructions, environmental injection corrupts an agent's visual perception by inserting adversarial UI elements (for example, deceptive overlays or spoofed notifications) directly into the GUI. This bypasses textual safeguards and can derail execution, causing privacy leakage, financial loss, or irreversible device compromise. To systematically evaluate this threat, we introduce GhostEI-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing mobile agents under environmental injection attacks within dynamic, executable environments. Moving beyond static image-based assessments, GhostEI-Bench injects adversarial events into realistic application workflows inside fully operational Android emulators and evaluates performance across critical risk scenarios. We further propose a judge-LLM protocol that conducts fine-grained failure analysis by reviewing the agent's action trajectory alongside the corresponding screenshot sequence, pinpointing failure in perception, recognition, or reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on state-of-the-art agents reveal pronounced vulnerability to deceptive environmental cues: current models systematically fail to perceive and reason about manipulated UIs. GhostEI-Bench provides a framework for quantifying and mitigating this emerging threat, paving the way toward more robust and secure embodied agents.

Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires bridging the gap between high-level planning (System 2) and low-level control (System 1). Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often entangle these processes, performing redundant multimodal reasoning at every timestep, which leads to high latency and goal instability. To address this, we present StreamVLA, a dual-system architecture that unifies textual task decomposition, visual goal imagination, and continuous action generation within a single parameter-efficient backbone. We introduce a "Lock-and-Gated" mechanism to intelligently modulate computation: only when a sub-task transition is detected, the model triggers slow thinking to generate a textual instruction and imagines the specific visual completion state, rather than generic future frames. Crucially, this completion state serves as a time-invariant goal anchor, making the policy robust to execution speed variations. During steady execution, these high-level intents are locked to condition a Flow Matching action head, allowing the model to bypass expensive autoregressive decoding for 72% of timesteps. This hierarchical abstraction ensures sub-goal focus while significantly reducing inference latency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that StreamVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 98.5% success rate on the LIBERO benchmark and robust recovery in real-world interference scenarios, achieving a 48% reduction in latency compared to full-reasoning baselines.

Reliable insertion of industrial connectors remains a central challenge in robotics, requiring sub-millimeter precision under uncertainty and often without full visual access. Vision-based approaches struggle with occlusion and limited generalization, while learning-based policies frequently fail to transfer to unseen geometries. To address these limitations, we leverage tactile sensing, which captures local surface geometry at the point of contact and thus provides reliable information even under occlusion and across novel connector shapes. Building on this capability, we present Touch2Insert, a tactile-based framework for arbitrary peg insertion. Our method reconstructs cross-sectional geometry from high-resolution tactile images and estimates the relative pose of the hole with respect to the peg in a zero-shot manner. By aligning reconstructed shapes through registration, the framework enables insertion from a single contact without task-specific training. To evaluate its performance, we conducted experiments with three diverse connectors in both simulation and real-robot settings. The results indicate that Touch2Insert achieved sub-millimeter pose estimation accuracy for all connectors in simulation, and attained an average success rate of 86.7\% on the real robot, thereby confirming the robustness and generalizability of tactile sensing for real-world robotic connector insertion.

Understanding human visual attention on a scene over time has applications in domains such as interface design and inferring cognitive states. Modeling visual scanpaths has historically relied on specialized architectures with hand-crafted priors. While these architectures can model fixation sequences, their rigid structural biases restrict easy extendability and flexible conditioning. For instance, integrating task-specific instructions or adapting to distinct viewer identities requires custom, disjoint architectural additions. We frame scanpath prediction purely as a discrete sequence modeling task. By mapping coordinates into a text vocabulary, we leverage the pretrained representations of Vision-Language Models. This framing absorbs diverse factors of variation: simple prompting allows for global conditioning, such as providing viewer identities to capture personalized biases, or task-specific objectives like visual search. The framework can also integrate per-fixation attributes, such as individual fixation durations, alongside spatial locations. The autoregressive alignment enables the scalable, exact computation of per-fixation log-likelihoods, directly equivalent to the commonly used Information Gain (IG) metric. Our model, DeepGaze3.5-VL, establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, achieving 2.18 bits of IG on MIT1003, a 46% improvement over DeepGaze III. This advantage persists even when baselines use identical high-capacity vision encoders. Beyond predictive performance, our generative framework serves as a powerful computational tool for direct behavioral interventions, allowing for controlled in-silico simulations that would be experimentally difficult or impossible to conduct in vivo. We demonstrate this ability by performing controlled interventions on the durations of pre-saccadic fixations, recovering known oculomotor phenomena purely from data.

For the past decade, the trajectory of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominated by a model-centric paradigm driven by scaling laws. Despite significant leaps in visual fidelity, this approach has encountered a ``usability ceiling'' manifested as the Intent-Execution Gap (i.e., the fundamental disparity between a creator's high-level intent and the stochastic, black-box nature of current single-shot models). In this paper, inspired by the Vibe Coding, we introduce the Vibe AIGC, a new paradigm for content generation via agentic orchestration, which represents the autonomous synthesis of hierarchical multi-agent workflows. Under this paradigm, the user's role transcends traditional prompt engineering, evolving into a Commander who provides a Vibe, a high-level representation encompassing aesthetic preferences, functional logic, and etc. A centralized Meta-Planner then functions as a system architect, deconstructing this ``Vibe'' into executable, verifiable, and adaptive agentic pipelines. By transitioning from stochastic inference to logical orchestration, Vibe AIGC bridges the gap between human imagination and machine execution. We contend that this shift will redefine the human-AI collaborative economy, transforming AI from a fragile inference engine into a robust system-level engineering partner that democratizes the creation of complex, long-horizon digital assets.

Traditional vision-based material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer. Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation. The code and datasets will be open-source, and the videos are available in the supplementary materials.

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often constrained by a rigid, static interaction paradigm, which lacks the ability to see, hear, speak, and act concurrently as well as handle real-time user interruptions dynamically. This hinders seamless embodied collaboration, resulting in an inflexible and unresponsive user experience. To address these limitations, we introduce VITA-E, a novel embodied interaction framework designed for both behavioral concurrency and nearly real-time interruption. The core of our approach is a dual-model architecture where two parallel VLA instances operate as an ``Active Model'' and a ``Standby Model'', allowing the embodied agent to observe its environment, listen to user speech, provide verbal responses, and execute actions, all concurrently and interruptibly, mimicking human-like multitasking capabilities. We further propose a ``model-as-controller'' paradigm, where we fine-tune the VLM to generate special tokens that serve as direct system-level commands, coupling the model's reasoning with the system's behavior. Experiments conducted on a physical humanoid platform demonstrate that VITA-E can reliably handle complex interactive scenarios. Our framework is compatible with various dual-system VLA models, achieving an extremely high success rate on emergency stops and speech interruptions while also successfully performing concurrent speech and action. This represents a significant step towards more natural and capable embodied assistants.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models acquire broad embodied capabilities through large-scale pretraining, yet their generalization remains far more fragile than that of LLMs and VLMs. The prevailing remedy, post-training via supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, improves task-specific performance but narrows the generalist capability that makes pretraining valuable. We identify a key bottleneck: VLA failures stem not only from action generation but also from action evaluation. A diagnostic pass@k study confirms that frozen VLAs already contain competent behaviors in their output distribution, with overall success rates rising from 33% at pass@1 to 92% at pass@32. Inspired by this, we propose SVA (Search, Value, and Act), a simple framework that equips frozen VLA policies with long-term consequence awareness. SVA first uses Monte-Carlo tree search in simulation to fully explore the VLA's output distribution and collect diverse trajectories annotated with empirical returns; this knowledge is then distilled into a lightweight Q-value model that predicts the expected consequence of candidate actions; at deployment, the frozen VLA proposes multiple candidates and the evaluator selects the one with the highest uncertainty-regularized Q-value, requiring no simulator access. By decoupling action proposal from consequence evaluation, SVA preserves the generalization capacity of the VLA backbone while substantially improving task success rates. Experiments across embodied benchmarks show that SVA consistently improves generalization on unseen tasks and exhibits strong test-time scaling behavior. Strikingly, SVA enables a 9B VLA to outperform a 27B VLA by 7 points at 27% lower inference latency, suggesting that scaling test-time evaluation is more cost-effective than scaling model size.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal perception and language instructions to executable robot actions, making them particularly vulnerable to behavioral backdoor manipulation: a hidden trigger introduced during training can induce unintended physical actions while nominal task performance remains intact. Prior work on VLA backdoors primarily studies untargeted attacks or task-level hijacking, leaving fine-grained control over individual actions largely unexplored. In this work, we present DropVLA, an action-level backdoor attack that forces a reusable action primitive (e.g., open_gripper) to execute at attacker-chosen decision points under a realistic pipeline-black-box setting with limited data-poisoning access, using a window-consistent relabeling scheme for chunked fine-tuning. On OpenVLA-7B evaluated with LIBERO, vision-only poisoning achieves 98.67%-99.83% attack success rate (ASR) with only 0.31% poisoned episodes while preserving 98.50%-99.17% clean-task retention, and successfully triggers the targeted action within 25 control steps at 500 Hz (0.05 s). Text-only triggers are unstable at low poisoning budgets, and combining text with vision provides no consistent ASR improvement over vision-only attacks. The backdoor remains robust to moderate trigger variations and transfers across evaluation suites (96.27%, 99.09%), whereas text-only largely fails (0.72%). We further validate physical-world feasibility on a 7-DoF Franka arm with pi0-fast, demonstrating non-trivial attack efficacy under camera-relative motion that induces image-plane trigger drift. These results reveal that VLA models can be covertly steered at the granularity of safety-critical actions with minimal poisoning and without observable degradation of nominal performance.

UMI-style interfaces enable scalable robot learning, but existing systems remain largely visuomotor, relying primarily on RGB observations and trajectory while providing only limited access to physical interaction signals. This becomes a fundamental limitation in contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on contact dynamics such as tactile interaction, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench that are difficult to infer from vision alone. We present OmniUMI, a unified framework for physically grounded robot learning via human-aligned multimodal interaction. OmniUMI synchronously captures RGB, depth, trajectory, tactile sensing, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench within a compact handheld system, while maintaining collection--deployment consistency through a shared embodiment design. To support human-aligned demonstration, OmniUMI enables natural perception and modulation of internal grasping force, external interaction wrench, and tactile interaction through bilateral gripper feedback and the handheld embodiment. Built on this interface, we extend diffusion policy with visual, tactile, and force-related observations, and deploy the learned policy through impedance-based execution for unified regulation of motion and contact behavior. Experiments demonstrate reliable sensing and strong downstream performance on force-sensitive pick-and-place, interactive surface erasing, and tactile-informed selective release. Overall, OmniUMI combines physically grounded multimodal data acquisition with human-aligned interaction, providing a scalable foundation for learning contact-rich manipulation.

Tactile sensing is critical to fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as insertion and assembly. Prior research has shown the possibility of learning tactile-guided policy from teleoperated demonstration data. However, to provide the demonstration, human users often rely on visual feedback to control the robot. This creates a gap between the sensing modality used for controlling the robot (visual) and the modality of interest (tactile). To bridge this gap, we introduce "MimicTouch", a novel framework for learning policies directly from demonstrations provided by human users with their hands. The key innovations are i) a human tactile data collection system which collects multi-modal tactile dataset for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy, ii) an imitation learning-based framework for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy through such data, and iii) an online residual RL framework to bridge the embodiment gap between the human hand and the robot gripper. Through comprehensive experiments, we highlight the efficacy of utilizing human's tactile-guided control strategy to resolve contact-rich manipulation tasks. The project website is at https://sites.google.com/view/MimicTouch.

Deploying autonomous multimodal agents in continuous, real-world environments requires them to ingest unbounded audio-visual streams and maintain hour-scale memory. However, current evaluations predominantly rely on brief clips and multiple-choice formats. This design allows minimal baselines that process only the last four frames to match or surpass complex streaming models, while answer options also expose language shortcuts. We introduce StreamArena, a benchmark for hour-scale, interactive streaming video understanding. StreamArena contains 243 full-length videos averaging 88.8 minutes and 3,646 rigorously annotated, open-ended question-answer pairs that evaluate real-time perception, historical retrospection, proactive interaction, and multimodal tool utilization. Evaluation across diverse systems exposes a tension between continuous interaction and long-horizon multimodal comprehension. Methods that retain only recent frames cannot recover distant events, methods that convert past observations into text lose visual evidence, and methods that repeatedly compress visual memory struggle to preserve fine-grained details over time. We address this tension with StreamMind, a two-tier architecture that assigns latency-critical interaction and proactive monitoring to independently scheduled frontend workers, while backend workers asynchronously construct persistent multimodal memory and perform historical recall and external search. StreamMind outperforms existing streaming baselines across all four capabilities and reduces query-to-answer latency by reusing persistent state.