Daily Papers

Recently, equivariant neural networks for policy learning have shown promising improvements in sample efficiency and generalization, however, their wide adoption faces substantial barriers due to implementation complexity. Equivariant architectures typically require specialized mathematical formulations and custom network design, posing significant challenges when integrating with modern policy frameworks like diffusion-based models. In this paper, we explore a number of straightforward and practical approaches to incorporate symmetry benefits into diffusion policies without the overhead of full equivariant designs. Specifically, we investigate (i) invariant representations via relative trajectory actions and eye-in-hand perception, (ii) integrating equivariant vision encoders, and (iii) symmetric feature extraction with pretrained encoders using Frame Averaging. We first prove that combining eye-in-hand perception with relative or delta action parameterization yields inherent SE(3)-invariance, thus improving policy generalization. We then perform a systematic experimental study on those design choices for integrating symmetry in diffusion policies, and conclude that an invariant representation with equivariant feature extraction significantly improves the policy performance. Our method achieves performance on par with or exceeding fully equivariant architectures while greatly simplifying implementation.

Humans do not passively observe the visual world -- we actively look in order to act. Motivated by this principle, we introduce EyeRobot, a robotic system with gaze behavior that emerges from the need to complete real-world tasks. We develop a mechanical eyeball that can freely rotate to observe its surroundings and train a gaze policy to control it using reinforcement learning. We accomplish this by first collecting teleoperated demonstrations paired with a 360 camera. This data is imported into a simulation environment that supports rendering arbitrary eyeball viewpoints, allowing episode rollouts of eye gaze on top of robot demonstrations. We then introduce a BC-RL loop to train the hand and eye jointly: the hand (BC) agent is trained from rendered eye observations, and the eye (RL) agent is rewarded when the hand produces correct action predictions. In this way, hand-eye coordination emerges as the eye looks towards regions which allow the hand to complete the task. EyeRobot implements a foveal-inspired policy architecture allowing high resolution with a small compute budget, which we find also leads to the emergence of more stable fixation as well as improved ability to track objects and ignore distractors. We evaluate EyeRobot on five panoramic workspace manipulation tasks requiring manipulation in an arc surrounding the robot arm. Our experiments suggest EyeRobot exhibits hand-eye coordination behaviors which effectively facilitate manipulation over large workspaces with a single camera. See project site for videos: https://www.eyerobot.net/

Achieving generalizable manipulation in unconstrained environments requires the robot to proactively resolve information uncertainty, i.e., the capability of active perception. However, existing methods are often confined in limited types of sensing behaviors, restricting their applicability to complex environments. In this work, we formalize active perception as a non-Markovian process driven by information gain and decision branching, providing a structured categorization of visual active perception paradigms. Building on this perspective, we introduce CoMe-VLA, a cognitive and memory-aware vision-language-action (VLA) framework that leverages large-scale human egocentric data to learn versatile exploration and manipulation priors. Our framework integrates a cognitive auxiliary head for autonomous sub-task transitions and a dual-track memory system to maintain consistent self and environmental awareness by fusing proprioceptive and visual temporal contexts. By aligning human and robot hand-eye coordination behaviors in a unified egocentric action space, we train the model progressively in three stages. Extensive experiments on a wheel-based humanoid have demonstrated strong robustness and adaptability of our proposed method across diverse long-horizon tasks spanning multiple active perception scenarios.

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

Visual observations from different viewpoints can significantly influence the performance of visuomotor policies in robotic manipulation. Among these, egocentric (in-hand) views often provide crucial information for precise control. However, in some applications, equipping robots with dedicated in-hand cameras may pose challenges due to hardware constraints, system complexity, and cost. In this work, we propose to endow robots with imaginative perception - enabling them to 'imagine' in-hand observations from agent views at inference time. We achieve this via novel view synthesis (NVS), leveraging a fine-tuned diffusion model conditioned on the relative pose between the agent and in-hand views cameras. Specifically, we apply LoRA-based fine-tuning to adapt a pretrained NVS model (ZeroNVS) to the robotic manipulation domain. We evaluate our approach on both simulation benchmarks (RoboMimic and MimicGen) and real-world experiments using a Unitree Z1 robotic arm for a strawberry picking task. Results show that synthesized in-hand views significantly enhance policy inference, effectively recovering the performance drop caused by the absence of real in-hand cameras. Our method offers a scalable and hardware-light solution for deploying robust visuomotor policies, highlighting the potential of imaginative visual reasoning in embodied agents.

We study how the choice of visual perspective affects learning and generalization in the context of physical manipulation from raw sensor observations. Compared with the more commonly used global third-person perspective, a hand-centric (eye-in-hand) perspective affords reduced observability, but we find that it consistently improves training efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization. These benefits hold across a variety of learning algorithms, experimental settings, and distribution shifts, and for both simulated and real robot apparatuses. However, this is only the case when hand-centric observability is sufficient; otherwise, including a third-person perspective is necessary for learning, but also harms out-of-distribution generalization. To mitigate this, we propose to regularize the third-person information stream via a variational information bottleneck. On six representative manipulation tasks with varying hand-centric observability adapted from the Meta-World benchmark, this results in a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agent operating from both perspectives improving its out-of-distribution generalization on every task. While some practitioners have long put cameras in the hands of robots, our work systematically analyzes the benefits of doing so and provides simple and broadly applicable insights for improving end-to-end learned vision-based robotic manipulation.

Eye-in-hand cameras have shown promise in enabling greater sample efficiency and generalization in vision-based robotic manipulation. However, for robotic imitation, it is still expensive to have a human teleoperator collect large amounts of expert demonstrations with a real robot. Videos of humans performing tasks, on the other hand, are much cheaper to collect since they eliminate the need for expertise in robotic teleoperation and can be quickly captured in a wide range of scenarios. Therefore, human video demonstrations are a promising data source for learning generalizable robotic manipulation policies at scale. In this work, we augment narrow robotic imitation datasets with broad unlabeled human video demonstrations to greatly enhance the generalization of eye-in-hand visuomotor policies. Although a clear visual domain gap exists between human and robot data, our framework does not need to employ any explicit domain adaptation method, as we leverage the partial observability of eye-in-hand cameras as well as a simple fixed image masking scheme. On a suite of eight real-world tasks involving both 3-DoF and 6-DoF robot arm control, our method improves the success rates of eye-in-hand manipulation policies by 58% (absolute) on average, enabling robots to generalize to both new environment configurations and new tasks that are unseen in the robot demonstration data. See video results at https://giving-robots-a-hand.github.io/ .

Egocentric vision (a.k.a. first-person vision - FPV) applications have thrived over the past few years, thanks to the availability of affordable wearable cameras and large annotated datasets. The position of the wearable camera (usually mounted on the head) allows recording exactly what the camera wearers have in front of them, in particular hands and manipulated objects. This intrinsic advantage enables the study of the hands from multiple perspectives: localizing hands and their parts within the images; understanding what actions and activities the hands are involved in; and developing human-computer interfaces that rely on hand gestures. In this survey, we review the literature that focuses on the hands using egocentric vision, categorizing the existing approaches into: localization (where are the hands or parts of them?); interpretation (what are the hands doing?); and application (e.g., systems that used egocentric hand cues for solving a specific problem). Moreover, a list of the most prominent datasets with hand-based annotations is provided.

Interactive object understanding, or what we can do to objects and how is a long-standing goal of computer vision. In this paper, we tackle this problem through observation of human hands in in-the-wild egocentric videos. We demonstrate that observation of what human hands interact with and how can provide both the relevant data and the necessary supervision. Attending to hands, readily localizes and stabilizes active objects for learning and reveals places where interactions with objects occur. Analyzing the hands shows what we can do to objects and how. We apply these basic principles on the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset, and successfully learn state-sensitive features, and object affordances (regions of interaction and afforded grasps), purely by observing hands in egocentric videos.

We present Vision in Action (ViA), an active perception system for bimanual robot manipulation. ViA learns task-relevant active perceptual strategies (e.g., searching, tracking, and focusing) directly from human demonstrations. On the hardware side, ViA employs a simple yet effective 6-DoF robotic neck to enable flexible, human-like head movements. To capture human active perception strategies, we design a VR-based teleoperation interface that creates a shared observation space between the robot and the human operator. To mitigate VR motion sickness caused by latency in the robot's physical movements, the interface uses an intermediate 3D scene representation, enabling real-time view rendering on the operator side while asynchronously updating the scene with the robot's latest observations. Together, these design elements enable the learning of robust visuomotor policies for three complex, multi-stage bimanual manipulation tasks involving visual occlusions, significantly outperforming baseline systems.

Tactile sensing provides contact information that can be difficult to infer from vision alone, but tactile hardware for dexterous hands has not converged to a common design. Dexterous hands differ in finger structure, contact surfaces, and sensor layouts, while simulated tactile signals still differ from measurements produced by physical sensors. These factors make it difficult to study visuo-tactile manipulation across diverse dexterous hands within a consistent experimental setting. We present Bench2Dex, a simulation benchmark for visuo-tactile bimanual manipulation across 12 dexterous hands. We adapt existing robot models with a shared simulated tactile interface that converts local contact geometry into image-like tactile observations. The interface provides a consistent observation format across different hand morphologies without attempting to reproduce the output of a specific physical tactile sensor. Bench2Dex includes 26 bimanual manipulation tasks that involve tool use, articulated-object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, together with about 1.3K human-teleoperated demonstrations. The benchmark provides synchronized visual, tactile, proprioceptive, action, and object-state observations, together with executable task metrics. For robustness, we group seven perturbation types into invariance axis, where the correct action does not change, and equivariance axis, where the correct action changes together with the perturbation. We evaluate ACT, Diffusion Policy, pi0.5, and GR00T N1.5 on Bench2Dex and report their performance and failure modes. Bench2Dex is meant as a platform for studying visuo-tactile learning across dexterous hands. It does not assume that simulated tactile observations can replace real tactile sensing; it offers a shared setting for algorithm development while tactile hardware and simulation models are still evolving.

Robotic manipulation integrates vision, touch, and language, whose importance shifts across stages: vision guides reaching, while touch, through its evolution over time, decides grasping, alignment, and contact. Yet existing multi-modal manipulation policies typically use fixed temporal contexts and fusion strategies, despite shifts in what each modality contributes across different skills. We study how vision and touch should be combined at the level of primitive skills, asking what each skill needs from each sensor, and propose a skill-conditioned representation in which the queried skill conditions fusion over modality-specific short-term observation tokens while attending to a sparse event memory that retains terminal observations from the last K executed skills. Evaluated by skill progress estimation on three contact-rich tasks, it reduces slip-detection delay by 87% against fine-tuned SOTA progress models, twist-completion delay by 67.5% against a vision-only ablation, and progress error on a blind search task by 92% through sparse event memory. Gains concentrate exactly where completion is defined by contact or task history. More broadly, our results suggest that observation formation not only policy architecture is a central challenge in multi-modal representation. Project Website: http://what-to-attend-what-to-keep.github.io/

The ability to associate touch with sight is essential for tasks that require physically interacting with objects in the world. We propose a dataset with paired visual and tactile data called Touch and Go, in which human data collectors probe objects in natural environments using tactile sensors, while simultaneously recording egocentric video. In contrast to previous efforts, which have largely been confined to lab settings or simulated environments, our dataset spans a large number of "in the wild" objects and scenes. To demonstrate our dataset's effectiveness, we successfully apply it to a variety of tasks: 1) self-supervised visuo-tactile feature learning, 2) tactile-driven image stylization, i.e., making the visual appearance of an object more consistent with a given tactile signal, and 3) predicting future frames of a tactile signal from visuo-tactile inputs.

Anticipating how users will interact with their surroundings is essential for proactive systems that provide timely assistance in AR, VR, and embodied applications. Prior work typically forecasts hand-object interactions directly from historical observations, leaving intention and contact geometry implicit. However, similar observation histories can precede semantically or geometrically distinct futures. Inspired by behavioral evidence that gaze can provide early cues for underlying intention, we propose Gaze2HOI, a gaze-aware framework that formulates hand-object interaction forecasting as a hierarchical problem comprising intention inference, contact grounding, and coupled hand-object motion generation. Specifically, Gaze2HOI first weights gaze cues by fixation strength and recency, and uses them to modulate the visual representations of a vision-language model (VLM) through Temporal Gaze Saliency Modulation (TGSM), thereby reducing semantic ambiguity in intention inference. Subsequently, an Anticipatory Contact Grounding (ACG) module maps these structured intentions into explicit contact, support, and placement fields, effectively mitigating geometric ambiguity. Driven by these explicit conditions, a diffusion-based model jointly generates the 6-DoF object trajectories and future articulated motion of both hands. To evaluate Gaze2HOI, we further introduce EgoAIM, a phase-aware benchmark that organizes egocentric hand-object interactions into four phases defined by evolving hand-object relations and provides fine-grained intention annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaze2HOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intention inference and motion forecasting, even approaching oracle-level end-to-end performance in specific interaction phases. Project page: https://gaze2hoi.github.io/.

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.

The human hand is our primary interface to the physical world, yet egocentric perception rarely knows when, where, or how forcefully it makes contact. Robust wearable tactile sensors are scarce, and no existing in-the-wild datasets align first-person video with full-hand touch. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical interaction, we present OpenTouch, the first in-the-wild egocentric full-hand tactile dataset, containing 5.1 hours of synchronized video-touch-pose data and 2,900 curated clips with detailed text annotations. Using OpenTouch, we introduce retrieval and classification benchmarks that probe how touch grounds perception and action. We show that tactile signals provide a compact yet powerful cue for grasp understanding, strengthen cross-modal alignment, and can be reliably retrieved from in-the-wild video queries. By releasing this annotated vision-touch-pose dataset and benchmark, we aim to advance multimodal egocentric perception, embodied learning, and contact-rich robotic manipulation.

Recently, there has been a significant amount of research conducted on 3D hand reconstruction to use various forms of human-computer interaction. However, 3D hand reconstruction in the wild is challenging due to extreme lack of in-the-wild 3D hand datasets. Especially, when hands are in complex pose such as interacting hands, the problems like appearance similarity, self-handed occclusion and depth ambiguity make it more difficult. To overcome these issues, we propose AttentionHand, a novel method for text-driven controllable hand image generation. Since AttentionHand can generate various and numerous in-the-wild hand images well-aligned with 3D hand label, we can acquire a new 3D hand dataset, and can relieve the domain gap between indoor and outdoor scenes. Our method needs easy-to-use four modalities (i.e, an RGB image, a hand mesh image from 3D label, a bounding box, and a text prompt). These modalities are embedded into the latent space by the encoding phase. Then, through the text attention stage, hand-related tokens from the given text prompt are attended to highlight hand-related regions of the latent embedding. After the highlighted embedding is fed to the visual attention stage, hand-related regions in the embedding are attended by conditioning global and local hand mesh images with the diffusion-based pipeline. In the decoding phase, the final feature is decoded to new hand images, which are well-aligned with the given hand mesh image and text prompt. As a result, AttentionHand achieved state-of-the-art among text-to-hand image generation models, and the performance of 3D hand mesh reconstruction was improved by additionally training with hand images generated by AttentionHand.

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

Collecting demonstrations enriched with fine-grained tactile information is critical for dexterous manipulation, particularly in contact-rich tasks that require precise force control and physical interaction. While prior works primarily focus on teleoperation or video-based retargeting, they often suffer from kinematic mismatches and the absence of real-time tactile feedback, hindering the acquisition of high-fidelity tactile data. To mitigate this issue, we propose KineDex, a hand-over-hand kinesthetic teaching paradigm in which the operator's motion is directly transferred to the dexterous hand, enabling the collection of physically grounded demonstrations enriched with accurate tactile feedback. To resolve occlusions from human hand, we apply inpainting technique to preprocess the visual observations. Based on these demonstrations, we then train a visuomotor policy using tactile-augmented inputs and implement force control during deployment for precise contact-rich manipulation. We evaluate KineDex on a suite of challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks, including particularly difficult scenarios such as squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, which require precise multi-finger coordination and stable force regulation. Across these tasks, KineDex achieves an average success rate of 74.4%, representing a 57.7% improvement over the variant without force control. Comparative experiments with teleoperation and user studies further validate the advantages of KineDex in data collection efficiency and operability. Specifically, KineDex collects data over twice as fast as teleoperation across two tasks of varying difficulty, while maintaining a near-100% success rate, compared to under 50% for teleoperation.

Recent advancements in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, yet they continue to struggle with long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Existing methods lack internal reasoning mechanisms that can identify task-relevant interaction cues or track progress within a subtask, leading to critical execution errors such as repeated actions, missed steps, and premature termination. To address these challenges, we introduce PALM, a VLA framework that structures policy learning around interaction-centric affordance reasoning and subtask progress cues. PALM distills complementary affordance representations that capture object relevance, contact geometry, spatial placements, and motion dynamics, and serve as task-relevant anchors for visuomotor control. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, PALM predicts continuous within-subtask progress, enabling seamless subtask transitions. Across extensive simulation and real-world experiments, PALM consistently outperforms baselines, achieving a 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-LONG, a 12.5% improvement in average length on CALVIN ABC->D, and a 2x improvement over real-world baselines across three long-horizon generalization settings.

A hallmark of human dexterity is the cooperative use of fingers, where different fingers take on distinct yet coordinated roles to accomplish fine manipu- lation, such as capping a pen with the hand that holds it. We study this finger-level coordination through in-hand assembly: mating two rigid objects within a single dexterous hand, with no second arm and no fixture. We present a reinforcement learning formulation to solve this problem in a unified framework, which is driven by a goal relative pose between the two parts. Finger coordination is shaped by a function-based auxiliary reward and regularized toward a single human reference pose, while domain randomization and a fusion of historical proprioception and object observation confer robustness to occlusion-induced estimation noise. The same recipe solves three different assembly tasks (Bottle, Syringe, and Marker). Trained purely in simulation, the policies transfer zero-shot to hardware with a single camera, demonstrating robustness to state-estimation errors caused by oc- clusion. Our experiments also reveal that in-hand assembly places demands on hand morphology and can serve as a benchmark for modern robotic hand systems. Videos and code are available at https://ltbgbird.github.io/in-hand-assembly-page/.

We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3Dunderstanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.

We address the challenging task of anticipating human-object interaction in first person videos. Most existing methods ignore how the camera wearer interacts with the objects, or simply consider body motion as a separate modality. In contrast, we observe that the international hand movement reveals critical information about the future activity. Motivated by this, we adopt intentional hand movement as a future representation and propose a novel deep network that jointly models and predicts the egocentric hand motion, interaction hotspots and future action. Specifically, we consider the future hand motion as the motor attention, and model this attention using latent variables in our deep model. The predicted motor attention is further used to characterise the discriminative spatial-temporal visual features for predicting actions and interaction hotspots. We present extensive experiments demonstrating the benefit of the proposed joint model. Importantly, our model produces new state-of-the-art results for action anticipation on both EGTEA Gaze+ and the EPIC-Kitchens datasets. Our project page is available at https://aptx4869lm.github.io/ForecastingHOI/

In real-world scene perception human observers generate sequences of fixations to move image patches into the high-acuity center of the visual field. Models of visual attention developed over the last 25 years aim to predict two-dimensional probabilities of gaze positions for a given image via saliency maps. Recently, progress has been made on models for the generation of scan paths under the constraints of saliency as well as attentional and oculomotor restrictions. Experimental research demonstrated that task constraints can have a strong impact on viewing behavior. Here we propose a scan path model for both fixation positions and fixation durations, which includes influences of task instructions and interindividual differences. Based on an eye-movement experiment with four different task conditions, we estimated model parameters for each individual observer and task condition using a fully Bayesian dynamical modeling framework using a joint spatial-temporal likelihood approach with sequential estimation. Resulting parameter values demonstrate that model properties such as the attentional span are adjusted to task requirements. Posterior predictive checks indicate that our dynamical model can reproduce task differences in scan path statistics across individual observers.

Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/.

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally by allocating more visual tokens to the image centers, focusing computation on task-relevant features. Such Active Visual Fixation (AVF) requires carefully coordinated gaze during task execution, which we accomplish hierarchically by first training a low-level gaze servoing policy conditioned on a goal object, then training a target selector which emits fixation goals based on task progress. Both modules are trained with RL on real-world data: the first is trained with a dense geometric reward and the second co-trains with the BC gripper policy which allows it to discover fixation sequences that can resemble a human's fixation sequence while performing the task. EyeRobot 2.0 further takes advantage of fixation by canonicalizing gripper information into a fixation-relative SE(3) frame, which compacts the size of the action distribution to learn. We collect teleoperation data for 7 real-world and 6 simulated tasks, and conduct over 1000 physical and 1800 simulated robot trials comparing EyeRobot 2.0 against passive stereo and ego + wrist camera policies trained on the same data. Removing wrist cameras is costly for standard policies: with only passive stereo, real-world success drops from 52% to 27%. EyeRobot 2.0 closes this gap with only stereo, outperforming passive stereo by 40% in real and 20% in sim. It matches ego + wrist policies when their wrist views are clear (69% vs. 64%), and more than doubles their success when grasped objects occlude the wrist cameras (48% vs. 22%)

In this work, we present HandMvNet, one of the first real-time method designed to estimate 3D hand motion and shape from multi-view camera images. Unlike previous monocular approaches, which suffer from scale-depth ambiguities, our method ensures consistent and accurate absolute hand poses and shapes. This is achieved through a multi-view attention-fusion mechanism that effectively integrates features from multiple viewpoints. In contrast to previous multi-view methods, our approach eliminates the need for camera parameters as input to learn 3D geometry. HandMvNet also achieves a substantial reduction in inference time while delivering competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods, making it suitable for real-time applications. Evaluated on publicly available datasets, HandMvNet qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms previous methods under identical settings. Code is available at github.com/pyxploiter/handmvnet.

We address the problem of Embodied Reference Understanding, which involves predicting the object that a person in the scene is referring to through both pointing gesture and language. Accurately identifying the referent requires multimodal understanding: integrating textual instructions, visual pointing, and scene context. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively leverage visual clues for disambiguation. We also observe that, while the referent is often aligned with the head-to-fingertip line, it occasionally aligns more closely with the wrist-to-fingertip line. Therefore, relying on a single line assumption can be overly simplistic and may lead to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a dual-model framework, where one model learns from the head-to-fingertip direction and the other from the wrist-to-fingertip direction. We further introduce a Gaussian ray heatmap representation of these lines and use them as input to provide a strong supervisory signal that encourages the model to better attend to pointing cues. To combine the strengths of both models, we present the CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble module, which performs a hybrid ensemble based on CLIP features. Additionally, we propose an object center prediction head as an auxiliary task to further enhance referent localization. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and analysis on the benchmark YouRefIt dataset, achieving an improvement of approximately 4 mAP at the 0.25 IoU threshold.

Estimation eye gaze direction is useful in various human-computer interaction tasks. Knowledge of gaze direction can give valuable information regarding users point of attention. Certain patterns of eye movements known as eye accessing cues are reported to be related to the cognitive processes in the human brain. We propose a real-time framework for the classification of eye gaze direction and estimation of eye accessing cues. In the first stage, the algorithm detects faces using a modified version of the Viola-Jones algorithm. A rough eye region is obtained using geometric relations and facial landmarks. The eye region obtained is used in the subsequent stage to classify the eye gaze direction. A convolutional neural network is employed in this work for the classification of eye gaze direction. The proposed algorithm was tested on Eye Chimera database and found to outperform state of the art methods. The computational complexity of the algorithm is very less in the testing phase. The algorithm achieved an average frame rate of 24 fps in the desktop environment.

Touch and vision go hand in hand, mutually enhancing our ability to understand the world. From a research perspective, the problem of mixing touch and vision is underexplored and presents interesting challenges. To this end, we propose Tactile-Informed 3DGS, a novel approach that incorporates touch data (local depth maps) with multi-view vision data to achieve surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our method optimises 3D Gaussian primitives to accurately model the object's geometry at points of contact. By creating a framework that decreases the transmittance at touch locations, we achieve a refined surface reconstruction, ensuring a uniformly smooth depth map. Touch is particularly useful when considering non-Lambertian objects (e.g. shiny or reflective surfaces) since contemporary methods tend to fail to reconstruct with fidelity specular highlights. By combining vision and tactile sensing, we achieve more accurate geometry reconstructions with fewer images than prior methods. We conduct evaluation on objects with glossy and reflective surfaces and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, offering significant improvements in reconstruction quality.

Robotic manipulators are increasingly used to assist individuals with mobility impairments in object retrieval. However, the predominant joystick-based control interfaces can be challenging due to high precision requirements and unintuitive reference frames. Recent advances in human-robot interaction have explored alternative modalities, yet many solutions still rely on external screens or restrictive control schemes, limiting their intuitiveness and accessibility. To address these challenges, we present an egocentric, gaze-guided robotic manipulation interface that leverages a wearable Mixed Reality (MR) headset. Our system enables users to interact seamlessly with real-world objects using natural gaze fixation from a first-person perspective, while providing augmented visual cues to confirm intent and leveraging a pretrained vision model and robotic arm for intent recognition and object manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves manipulation accuracy, reduces system latency, and achieves single-pass intention and object recognition accuracy greater than 88% across multiple real-world scenarios. These results demonstrate the system's effectiveness in enhancing intuitiveness and accessibility, underscoring its practical significance for assistive robotics applications.

Objects manipulated by the hand (i.e., manipulanda) are particularly challenging to reconstruct from in-the-wild RGB images or videos. Not only does the hand occlude much of the object, but also the object is often only visible in a small number of image pixels. At the same time, two strong anchors emerge in this setting: (1) estimated 3D hands help disambiguate the location and scale of the object, and (2) the set of manipulanda is small relative to all possible objects. With these insights in mind, we present a scalable paradigm for handheld object reconstruction that builds on recent breakthroughs in large language/vision models and 3D object datasets. Our model, MCC-Hand-Object (MCC-HO), jointly reconstructs hand and object geometry given a single RGB image and inferred 3D hand as inputs. Subsequently, we use GPT-4(V) to retrieve a 3D object model that matches the object in the image and rigidly align the model to the network-inferred geometry; we call this alignment Retrieval-Augmented Reconstruction (RAR). Experiments demonstrate that MCC-HO achieves state-of-the-art performance on lab and Internet datasets, and we show how RAR can be used to automatically obtain 3D labels for in-the-wild images of hand-object interactions.

Task-oriented grasping (TOG) requires robots to grasp functional parts of objects (e.g., the handle of a mug for pouring), yet these affordance regions are frequently occluded in cluttered scenes. Active perception via next-best-view (NBV) planning can resolve such occlusions by moving the camera for more informative observations. However, existing NBV methods typically optimize viewpoints for grasping the target object as a whole without distinguishing which part is task-relevant. A naive adaptation, fully scanning the target object before predicting the affordance, wastes most of the viewpoint budget on task-irrelevant surfaces (e.g., the mug body for pouring). To address this, we propose ATAP, an Affordance-Targeted Active Perception framework that shifts viewpoint planning from exhaustive target scanning to targeted affordance verification. ATAP hypothesizes the occluded target geometry via a generative shape prior and predicts the affordance distribution over the imagined complete surface. In cluttered scenes, severe occlusion can make the location of the hidden affordance ambiguous, leaving multiple locations plausible given the partial observation. ATAP therefore introduces an uncertainty-aware viewpoint planner that jointly optimizes expected entropy reduction over these competing hypotheses and expected affordance verification gain from real observations. This process iterates until the affordance is sufficiently verified for grasp execution. Experiments in simulation and real-world cluttered scenes show that ATAP substantially improves the functional grasp success rate over fixed-view TOG baselines, and outperforms reconstruction-based active perception with over 57% fewer NBV steps.

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive progress on vision language benchmarks, yet their capacity for visual cognitive and visuospatial reasoning remains less understood. We introduce "Mind's Eye", a multiple-choice benchmark of eight visuo-cognitive tasks inspired by classic human intelligence tests and organized under a novel "A-R-T" taxonomy: Abstraction, Relation, and Transformation. The tasks probe core processes of fluid intelligence such as pattern induction, analogical relation mapping, and mental transformation. We evaluate a diverse suite of closed-source and open-source MLLMs and compare their performance with human participants. Humans achieve 80% accuracy, while top performing MLLMs remain below 50%. Error analysis reveals failures in: (i) visual attention allocation, (ii) internal perceptual manipulation, and (iii) weak abstraction of underlying visual concepts. Our findings suggest that current MLLMs exhibit limited visuospatial reasoning capabilities, when compared with human participants, highlighting the need for more cognitively grounded evaluation frameworks.

Task-oriented grasping performance degrades significantly when object views suffer from occlusions. Existing task-oriented grasping methods typically assume task-relevant regions are visible in the initial frame, while view planning approaches enable active perception but often ignore task semantics and rely on time-consuming scene reconstruction. To address these limitations, we present GCNGrasp-VP, an efficient framework integrating affordance field prediction with active view planning. Central to this framework is GCNGrasp-v2, a task-oriented grasp model that simultaneously supports grasp evaluation and affordance field prediction, achieving constant-time inference complexity. Leveraging this capability, our Affordance-guided View Planner (Affordance-VP) utilizes the affordance field as an information gain metric to guide camera observation of task-relevant regions without requiring scene reconstruction. View planning results show that our method significantly outperforms scene-uncertainty-driven baselines with only one view adjustment. Real-world validation further confirms substantial improvements in grasp success rates for single-object scenarios while maintaining millisecond-level computational latency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Instinct323/GCNGrasp-VP.

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.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by combining vision, language, and proprioception to predict actions. However, previous methods fuse proprioceptive signals directly with VLM-encoded vision-language features, resulting in state-dominant bias and false completions despite visible execution failures. We attribute this to modality imbalance, where policies over-rely on internal state while underusing visual evidence. To address this, we present ReViP, a novel VLA framework with Vision-Proprioception Rebalance to enhance visual grounding and robustness under perturbations. The key insight is to introduce auxiliary task-aware environment priors to adaptively modulate the coupling between semantic perception and proprioceptive dynamics. Specifically, we use an external VLM as a task-stage observer to extract real-time task-centric visual cues from visual observations, which drive a Vision-Proprioception Feature-wise Linear Modulation to enhance environmental awareness and reduce state-driven errors. Moreover, to evaluate false completion, we propose the first False-Completion Benchmark Suite built on LIBERO with controlled settings such as Object-Drop. Extensive experiments show that ReViP effectively reduces false-completion rates and improves success rates over strong VLA baselines on our suite, with gains extending to LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world evaluations.

Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to 'see through the eyes' of a bionic eye user. To demonstrate its utility, we systematically evaluated how clinically reported visual distortions affect performance in a letter recognition and an immersive obstacle avoidance task. Our results highlight the importance of using an appropriate phosphene model when predicting visual outcomes for bionic vision.

Human actions involving hand manipulations are structured according to the making and breaking of hand-object contact, and human visual understanding of action is reliant on anticipation of contact as is demonstrated by pioneering work in cognitive science. Taking inspiration from this, we introduce representations and models centered on contact, which we then use in action prediction and anticipation. We annotate a subset of the EPIC Kitchens dataset to include time-to-contact between hands and objects, as well as segmentations of hands and objects. Using these annotations we train the Anticipation Module, a module producing Contact Anticipation Maps and Next Active Object Segmentations - novel low-level representations providing temporal and spatial characteristics of anticipated near future action. On top of the Anticipation Module we apply Egocentric Object Manipulation Graphs (Ego-OMG), a framework for action anticipation and prediction. Ego-OMG models longer term temporal semantic relations through the use of a graph modeling transitions between contact delineated action states. Use of the Anticipation Module within Ego-OMG produces state-of-the-art results, achieving 1st and 2nd place on the unseen and seen test sets, respectively, of the EPIC Kitchens Action Anticipation Challenge, and achieving state-of-the-art results on the tasks of action anticipation and action prediction over EPIC Kitchens. We perform ablation studies over characteristics of the Anticipation Module to evaluate their utility.

Robust 3D hand reconstruction in egocentric vision is challenging due to depth ambiguity, self-occlusion, and complex hand-object interactions. Prior methods mitigate these issues by scaling training data or adding auxiliary cues, but they often struggle in unseen contexts. We present EgoHandICL, the first in-context learning (ICL) framework for 3D hand reconstruction that improves semantic alignment, visual consistency, and robustness under challenging egocentric conditions. EgoHandICL introduces complementary exemplar retrieval guided by vision-language models (VLMs), an ICL-tailored tokenizer for multimodal context, and a masked autoencoder (MAE)-based architecture trained with hand-guided geometric and perceptual objectives. Experiments on ARCTIC and EgoExo4D show consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate real-world generalization and improve EgoVLM hand-object interaction reasoning by using reconstructed hands as visual prompts. Code and data: https://github.com/Nicous20/EgoHandICL

The human hand is the main medium through which we interact with our surroundings, making its digitization an important problem. While there are several works modeling the geometry of hands, little attention has been paid to capturing photo-realistic appearance. Moreover, for applications in extended reality and gaming, real-time rendering is critical. We present the first neural-implicit approach to photo-realistically render hands in real-time. This is a challenging problem as hands are textured and undergo strong articulations with pose-dependent effects. However, we show that this aim is achievable through our carefully designed method. This includes training on a low-resolution rendering of a neural radiance field, together with a 3D-consistent super-resolution module and mesh-guided sampling and space canonicalization. We demonstrate a novel application of perceptual loss on the image space, which is critical for learning details accurately. We also show a live demo where we photo-realistically render the human hand in real-time for the first time, while also modeling pose- and view-dependent appearance effects. We ablate all our design choices and show that they optimize for rendering speed and quality. Video results and our code can be accessed from https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/LiveHand/

Understanding the fine-grained articulation of human hands is critical in high-stakes settings such as robot-assisted surgery, chip manufacturing, and AR/VR-based human-AI interaction. Despite achieving near-human performance on general vision-language benchmarks, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, especially in interpreting complex and articulated hand poses. We introduce HandVQA, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' understanding of detailed hand anatomy through visual question answering. Built upon high-quality 3D hand datasets (FreiHAND, InterHand2.6M, FPHA), our benchmark includes over 1.6M controlled multiple-choice questions that probe spatial relationships between hand joints, such as angles, distances, and relative positions. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs (LLaVA, DeepSeek and Qwen-VL) in both base and fine-tuned settings, using lightweight fine-tuning via LoRA. Our findings reveal systematic limitations in current models, including hallucinated finger parts, incorrect geometric interpretations, and poor generalization. HandVQA not only exposes these critical reasoning gaps but provides a validated path to improvement. We demonstrate that the 3D-grounded spatial knowledge learned from our benchmark transfers in a zero-shot setting, significantly improving accuracy of model on novel downstream tasks like hand gesture recognition (+10.33%) and hand-object interaction (+2.63%).

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

We humans are good at translating third-person observations of hand-object interactions (HOI) into an egocentric view. However, current methods struggle to replicate this ability of view adaptation from third-person to first-person. Although some approaches attempt to learn view-agnostic representation from large-scale video datasets, they ignore the relationships among multiple third-person views. To this end, we propose a Prompt-Oriented View-agnostic learning (POV) framework in this paper, which enables this view adaptation with few egocentric videos. Specifically, We introduce interactive masking prompts at the frame level to capture fine-grained action information, and view-aware prompts at the token level to learn view-agnostic representation. To verify our method, we establish two benchmarks for transferring from multiple third-person views to the egocentric view. Our extensive experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our POV framework and prompt tuning techniques in terms of view adaptation and view generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuboshen/pov_acmmm2023.

Hand tracking is a critical component of natural user interactions in extended reality (XR) environments, including extended reality musical instruments (XRMIs). However, self-occlusion remains a significant challenge for vision-based hand tracking systems, leading to inaccurate results and degraded user experiences. In this paper, we propose a multimodal hand tracking system that combines vision-based hand tracking with surface electromyography (sEMG) data for finger joint angle estimation. We validate the effectiveness of our system through a series of hand pose tasks designed to cover a wide range of gestures, including those prone to self-occlusion. By comparing the performance of our multimodal system to a baseline vision-based tracking method, we demonstrate that our multimodal approach significantly improves tracking accuracy for several finger joints prone to self-occlusion. These findings suggest that our system has the potential to enhance XR experiences by providing more accurate and robust hand tracking, even in the presence of self-occlusion.

Recently, active vision has reemerged as an important concept for manipulation, since visual occlusion occurs more frequently when main cameras are mounted on the robot heads. We reflect on the visual occlusion issue and identify its essence as the absence of information useful for task completion. Inspired by this, we come up with the more fundamental problem of Exploratory and Focused Manipulation (EFM). The proposed problem is about actively collecting information to complete challenging manipulation tasks that require exploration or focus. As an initial attempt to address this problem, we establish the EFM-10 benchmark that consists of 4 categories of tasks that align with our definition (10 tasks in total). We further come up with a Bimanual Active Perception (BAP) strategy, which leverages one arm to provide active vision and another arm to provide force sensing while manipulating. Based on this idea, we collect a dataset named BAPData for the tasks in EFM-10. With the dataset, we successfully verify the effectiveness of the BAP strategy in an imitation learning manner. We hope that the EFM-10 benchmark along with the BAP strategy can become a cornerstone that facilitates future research towards this direction. Project website: EFManipulation.github.io.

How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Relatively little is known about how we conceptualize and categorize different visual environments. Traditional models of visual perception posit that scene categorization is achieved through the recognition of a scene's objects, yet these models cannot account for the mounting evidence that human observers are relatively insensitive to the local details in an image. Psychologists have long theorized that the affordances, or actionable possibilities of a stimulus are pivotal to its perception. To what extent are scene categories created from similar affordances? Using a large-scale experiment using hundreds of scene categories, we show that the activities afforded by a visual scene provide a fundamental categorization principle. Affordance-based similarity explained the majority of the structure in the human scene categorization patterns, outperforming alternative similarities based on objects or visual features. We all models were combined, affordances provided the majority of the predictive power in the combined model, and nearly half of the total explained variance is captured only by affordances. These results challenge many existing models of high-level visual perception, and provide immediately testable hypotheses for the functional organization of the human perceptual system.

We present AVI-HT, an adaptive visual-IMU fusion approach for tracking 3D hand poses by jointly modeling the egocentric image with on-glove 6-DoF IMU signals. AVI-HT achieves significantly improved accuracy and availability, particularly in hand-object interaction (HOI) scenarios involving heavy visual occlusion. Two complementary ingredients underpin its success: (1) synchronized multi-modal training data pairing on-body vision-IMU sensor streams with ground-truth 3D hand poses from a motion-capture system, and (2) a cross-sensor deep attention mechanism that adaptively modulates the trust assigned to the vision and individual IMU sensors. To evaluate AVI-HT in real-world settings, we conduct extensive experiments on our DexGloveHOI dataset that consists of 100K+ pairwise vision-IMU samples with synchronized 3D annotated poses, in which users manipulate a variety of objects during daily tasks. We compare against multiple single- and multi-modal tracking approaches under two hand models (UmeTrack, MANO). The results show that AVI-HT reduces mean keypoint error by 16.1% and its wrist-aligned variant by 24.2% over the baselines. Ablation studies further reveal the per-finger contribution of IMU sensors across activity types, and the model's sensitivity to IMU noise and temporal misalignment in vision-IMU fusion.

Vision-language-action policies may predict a transferable manipulation strategy yet fail to realize it reliably on the encountered object: objects compatible with the same grasp differ in geometry and compliance, and visual feedback degrades under closure occlusion. AgenticTactileVLA is presented as an execution-time supervisor that shifts part of object-specific adaptation from prediction to physical interaction. A fixed VLA provides the approach and hand targets; the supervisor decides whether to remain transparent, refine finger flexion, retain or release the corrected configuration, return control to the VLA for retry, or select a compliant hand-control regime. It uses finger-position and motor-effort feedback as proprioceptive contact evidence and requires neither tactile sensors nor VLA retraining. On a Unitree G1 with a BrainCo Revo2 hand, a randomized matched-block evaluation on five objects held out from VLA training yields 61.3% completion for the base VLA, 72.0% for unconditional close-to-stall control, and 84.0% for the supervisor under a shared budget; the gain is positive on every object and persists under moderate pose perturbations. Ablations show the gain is not explained by extended closure alone, and that selective triggering reduces correction episodes by 65.7% with no detected change in completion. A retention audit shows acceptance predicts retention in 88.9% of held-out cases, while compliant objects expose conservative false rejection. A thin-walled-cup study demonstrates contextual routing to compliant control, matching an always-compliant reference. These results suggest that contact-guided execution-time adaptation can improve the object-level generalization of a fixed VLA to held-out objects by adapting physical realization without object-specific retraining.

Hand-object interaction understanding and the barely addressed novel view synthesis are highly desired in the immersive communication, whereas it is challenging due to the high deformation of hand and heavy occlusions between hand and object. In this paper, we propose a neural rendering and pose estimation system for hand-object interaction from sparse views, which can also enable 3D hand-object interaction editing. We share the inspiration from recent scene understanding work that shows a scene specific model built beforehand can significantly improve and unblock vision tasks especially when inputs are sparse, and extend it to the dynamic hand-object interaction scenario and propose to solve the problem in two stages. We first learn the shape and appearance prior knowledge of hands and objects separately with the neural representation at the offline stage. During the online stage, we design a rendering-based joint model fitting framework to understand the dynamic hand-object interaction with the pre-built hand and object models as well as interaction priors, which thereby overcomes penetration and separation issues between hand and object and also enables novel view synthesis. In order to get stable contact during the hand-object interaction process in a sequence, we propose a stable contact loss to make the contact region to be consistent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available in project webpage https://iscas3dv.github.io/HO-NeRF.

Smart glasses are evolving from capture and display accessories into first-person intelligence platforms that connect human perception, persistent context, and digital or physical action. Their on-body viewpoint aligns with the wearer's vision, audition, motion, and hand-object interaction, but must operate under tight energy, thermal, privacy, and feedback constraints. Despite rapid progress in augmented reality, egocentric vision, multimodal models, human-computer interaction, and embodied intelligence, the literature remains fragmented across devices, tasks, and benchmarks. The key challenge is not whether a model can recognize, answer, remember, or act in isolation, but whether a complete system can sustain a reliable, temporally valid, correctable, and governable perception-state-interaction-action loop. This survey is the \textbf{first to systematically study smart glasses through such a unified framework}. We formalize first-person data flow and constrained task utility, characterize devices along eight verifiable hardware capability axes, organize the literature around seven interdependent foundational capabilities, and introduce an L0-L5 framework spanning capture, reactive perception, contextual assistance, persistent state, governed action, and embodied coupling. Across nine application scenes, we connect tasks with datasets, systems, products, stakeholders, failure consequences, and evidence gaps. We further present a nine-dimensional deployment framework, a claim-conditioned evaluation protocol, and an evidence ladder from controlled measurement to longitudinal field validation and audit. Together, these elements make smart glasses more comparable, deployable, and reproducibly evaluated, while outlining a roadmap toward trustworthy first-person intelligence.

Long-term action anticipation from egocentric video is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and assistive technologies, where anticipating user intent enables proactive and context-aware AI assistance. However, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: 1) underutilization of fine-grained visual cues from hand-object interactions, 2) neglect of semantic dependencies between verbs and nouns, and 3) lack of explicit cognitive reasoning, limiting generalization and long-term forecasting ability. To overcome these challenges, we propose INSIGHT, a unified two-stage framework for egocentric action anticipation. In the first stage, INSIGHT focuses on extracting semantically rich features from hand-object interaction regions and enhances action representations using a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix. In the second stage, it introduces a reinforcement learning-based module that simulates explicit cognitive reasoning through a structured process: visual perception (think) -> intention inference (reason) -> action anticipation (answer). Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-55, and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks show that INSIGHT achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and strong generalization capability.

In embodied AI perception systems, visual perception should be active: the goal is not to passively process static images, but to actively acquire more informative data within pixel and spatial budget constraints. Existing vision models and fixed RGB-D camera systems fundamentally fail to reconcile wide-area coverage with fine-grained detail acquisition, severely limiting their efficacy in open-world robotic applications. To address this issue, we propose EyeVLA, a robotic eyeball for active visual perception that can take proactive actions based on instructions, enabling clear observation of fine-grained target objects and detailed information across a wide spatial extent. EyeVLA discretizes action behaviors into action tokens and integrates them with vision-language models (VLMs) that possess strong open-world understanding capabilities, enabling joint modeling of vision, language, and actions within a single autoregressive sequence. By using the 2D bounding box coordinates to guide the reasoning chain and applying reinforcement learning to refine the viewpoint selection policy, we transfer the open-world scene understanding capability of the VLM to a vision language action (VLA) policy using only minimal real-world data. Experiments show that our system efficiently performs instructed scenes in real-world environments and actively acquires more accurate visual information through instruction-driven actions of rotation and zoom, thereby achieving strong environmental perception capabilities. EyeVLA introduces a novel robotic vision system that leverages detailed and spatially rich, large-scale embodied data, and actively acquires highly informative visual observations for downstream embodied tasks.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.

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.

Dexterous manipulation depends on contact dynamics that are often only partially observable from vision. Recent World-Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive video world modeling with action generation, but remain largely vision-centric and therefore cannot directly model these contact dynamics. We present DexTacWAM, a visuo-tactile WAM that encodes each fingertip independently, aggregates the resulting features through a finger- and pose-aware tactile compressor, and injects the tactile latent into a video diffusion world model for joint visuo-tactile world modeling. Across six contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks on a 22-DoF bimanual platform, DexTacWAM achieves the highest score on every task, averaging 70.6 versus 38.0 for the strongest baseline. Ablations attribute the gain to modeling contact evolution as part of the predicted world state rather than tactile conditioning alone: removing tactile world modeling reduces the four-task mean from 74.7 to 26.6 while keeping the same tactile features and action expert. After four hours of tactile-encoder adaptation with a frozen pretrained vision VAE, our continual vision-to-touch learning extends the pretrained video model to touch using roughly 100 demonstrations per task without tactile midtraining, while retaining visual prediction quality within 0.5 dB of vision-only counterparts. The compressor retains 89.4% of pre-fusion contact recall while enabling 2.26x faster training and 1.29x faster inference. Together, these results show that pretrained video priors can be extended to distributed multi-finger contact dynamics in a data- and compute-efficient manner.

Wearable cameras allow people to record their daily activities from a user-centered (First Person Vision) perspective. Due to their favorable location, wearable cameras frequently capture the hands of the user, and may thus represent a promising user-machine interaction tool for different applications. Existent First Person Vision methods handle hand segmentation as a background-foreground problem, ignoring two important facts: i) hands are not a single "skin-like" moving element, but a pair of interacting cooperative entities, ii) close hand interactions may lead to hand-to-hand occlusions and, as a consequence, create a single hand-like segment. These facts complicate a proper understanding of hand movements and interactions. Our approach extends traditional background-foreground strategies, by including a hand-identification step (left-right) based on a Maxwell distribution of angle and position. Hand-to-hand occlusions are addressed by exploiting temporal superpixels. The experimental results show that, in addition to a reliable left/right hand-segmentation, our approach considerably improves the traditional background-foreground hand-segmentation.

In-hand manipulation of pen-like objects is an important skill in our daily lives, as many tools such as hammers and screwdrivers are similarly shaped. However, current learning-based methods struggle with this task due to a lack of high-quality demonstrations and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. In this work, we push the boundaries of learning-based in-hand manipulation systems by demonstrating the capability to spin pen-like objects. We first use reinforcement learning to train an oracle policy with privileged information and generate a high-fidelity trajectory dataset in simulation. This serves two purposes: 1) pre-training a sensorimotor policy in simulation; 2) conducting open-loop trajectory replay in the real world. We then fine-tune the sensorimotor policy using these real-world trajectories to adapt it to the real world dynamics. With less than 50 trajectories, our policy learns to rotate more than ten pen-like objects with different physical properties for multiple revolutions. We present a comprehensive analysis of our design choices and share the lessons learned during development.

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) records muscle activity during hand movement and can be decoded to recover detailed hand articulation. EMG and egocentric vision are complementary for hand sensing: EMG captures fine-grained finger articulation even under occlusion and poor lighting, while vision provides global hand configuration. However, no existing dataset synchronizes both modalities. We present EgoEMG, a multimodal egocentric dataset for bimanual hand pose estimation. EgoEMG includes bilateral wristband EMG with 16 total channels (8 per wrist) sampled at 2 kHz, 120 Hz IMU, egocentric wide-angle RGB video, external RGB-D video, and mocap-derived hand motion with wrist articulation angles. The dataset covers 41 participants performing 60 gesture classes, including 30 single-hand gestures and 30 bimanual gestures, totaling more than 10 hours of recording. We also introduce a benchmark with three tasks -- EMG-to-pose, vision-to-pose, and EMG+vision fusion -- under a shared joint-angle prediction target and common generalization split axes (cross-gesture, cross-user, and combined). As baselines, we evaluate EMGFormer for EMG-to-pose and generic ResNet/ViT backbones for vision-to-pose. We further study a residual fusion architecture that improves over matched lightweight vision-only baselines. Together, EgoEMG and its benchmark establish a foundation for future research on multimodal hand pose estimation with EMG and vision.

Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel embodied knowledge understanding benchmark based on the perceptual theory from psychology, encompassing visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory external senses, and interoception. The benchmark assesses the models' perceptual abilities across different sensory modalities through vector comparison and question-answering tasks with over 1,700 questions. By comparing 30 state-of-the-art LMs, we surprisingly find that vision-language models (VLMs) do not outperform text-only models in either task. Moreover, the models perform significantly worse in the visual dimension compared to other sensory dimensions. Further analysis reveals that the vector representations are easily influenced by word form and frequency, and the models struggle to answer questions involving spatial perception and reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for more effective integration of embodied knowledge in LMs to enhance their understanding of the physical world.

The "thinking-with-images" paradigm equips multimodal LLMs with active visual operations such as crop-and-zoom. However, models using these operations often achieve only marginal or negative gains over direct inference at substantially higher token cost. They may also repeatedly crop irrelevant regions and fail on questions that direct inference answers correctly. We ask whether the returned visual evidence causally affects the answer. To answer this question, we formulate visual tool-use as a causal graph that separates observation-mediated paths from action-induced shortcuts. We then audit it through interventions at the three levels: policy (comparing tool-use with direct inference), trajectory (corrupting all observations during rollout), and step (counterfactually replacing one individual observation under a fixed prefix). Our step-level estimand, Visual Evidence Gain, isolates the contribution of each returned observation. Across six representative models and five fine-grained perception benchmarks, we uncover policy miscalibration with two failure modes. In Calling Without Looking, returned observations have no causal effect on the answer. In Looking Without Planning, observations are informative but the call schedule is incoherent. A trajectory-level diagnostic decomposes the policy-level accuracy gain and shows that the gain is concentrated in a Calibrated minority. We term this discrepancy the illusion of visual tool-use: despite aggregate accuracy gains, visual tool-use is not causally effective across a broad range of rollouts. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/CauAudit.

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) models trained on human-like egocentric visual inputs substantially underperform on image recognition tasks compared to humans. These models train on raw, uniform visual inputs collected from head-mounted cameras. This is different from humans, as the anatomical structure of the retina and visual cortex relatively amplifies the central visual information, i.e. around humans' gaze location. This selective amplification in humans likely aids in forming object-centered visual representations. Here, we investigate whether focusing on central visual information boosts egocentric visual object learning. We simulate 5-months of egocentric visual experience using the large-scale Ego4D dataset and generate gaze locations with a human gaze prediction model. To account for the importance of central vision in humans, we crop the visual area around the gaze location. Finally, we train a time-based SSL model on these modified inputs. Our experiments demonstrate that focusing on central vision leads to better object-centered representations. Our analysis shows that the SSL model leverages the temporal dynamics of the gaze movements to build stronger visual representations. Overall, our work marks a significant step toward bio-inspired learning of visual representations.

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

This study reveals an unexpected parallel between instructible vision-language models (VLMs) and human cognitive disorders, specifically constructive apraxia. We tested 25 state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4 Vision, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney v5, on their ability to generate images of the Ponzo illusion, a task that requires basic spatial reasoning and is often used in clinical assessments of constructive apraxia. Remarkably, 24 out of 25 models failed to correctly render two horizontal lines against a perspective background, mirroring the deficits seen in patients with parietal lobe damage. The models consistently misinterpreted spatial instructions, producing tilted or misaligned lines that followed the perspective of the background rather than remaining horizontal. This behavior is strikingly similar to how apraxia patients struggle to copy or construct simple figures despite intact visual perception and motor skills. Our findings suggest that current VLMs, despite their advanced capabilities in other domains, lack fundamental spatial reasoning abilities akin to those impaired in constructive apraxia. This limitation in AI systems provides a novel computational model for studying spatial cognition deficits and highlights a critical area for improvement in VLM architecture and training methodologies.

Accurately estimating 3D hand pose is crucial for understanding how humans interact with the world. Despite remarkable progress, existing methods often struggle to generate plausible hand poses when the hand is heavily occluded or blurred. In videos, the movements of the hand allow us to observe various parts of the hand that may be occluded or blurred in a single frame. To adaptively leverage the visual clue before and after the occlusion or blurring for robust hand pose estimation, we propose the Deformer: a framework that implicitly reasons about the relationship between hand parts within the same image (spatial dimension) and different timesteps (temporal dimension). We show that a naive application of the transformer self-attention mechanism is not sufficient because motion blur or occlusions in certain frames can lead to heavily distorted hand features and generate imprecise keys and queries. To address this challenge, we incorporate a Dynamic Fusion Module into Deformer, which predicts the deformation of the hand and warps the hand mesh predictions from nearby frames to explicitly support the current frame estimation. Furthermore, we have observed that errors are unevenly distributed across different hand parts, with vertices around fingertips having disproportionately higher errors than those around the palm. We mitigate this issue by introducing a new loss function called maxMSE that automatically adjusts the weight of every vertex to focus the model on critical hand parts. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 10%, and is more robust to occlusions (over 14%).

Despite decades of research, general purpose in-hand manipulation remains one of the unsolved challenges of robotics. One of the contributing factors that limit current robotic manipulation systems is the difficulty of precisely sensing contact forces -- sensing and reasoning about contact forces are crucial to accurately control interactions with the environment. As a step towards enabling better robotic manipulation, we introduce DIGIT, an inexpensive, compact, and high-resolution tactile sensor geared towards in-hand manipulation. DIGIT improves upon past vision-based tactile sensors by miniaturizing the form factor to be mountable on multi-fingered hands, and by providing several design improvements that result in an easier, more repeatable manufacturing process, and enhanced reliability. We demonstrate the capabilities of the DIGIT sensor by training deep neural network model-based controllers to manipulate glass marbles in-hand with a multi-finger robotic hand. To provide the robotic community access to reliable and low-cost tactile sensors, we open-source the DIGIT design at https://digit.ml/.

A core aspect of human perception is situated awareness, the ability to relate ourselves to the surrounding physical environment and reason over possible actions in context. However, most existing benchmarks for multimodal foundation models (MFMs) emphasize environment-centric spatial relations (relations among objects in a scene), while largely overlooking observer-centric relationships that require reasoning relative to agent's viewpoint, pose, and motion. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAW-Bench (Situated Awareness in the Real World), a novel benchmark for evaluating egocentric situated awareness using real-world videos. SAW-Bench comprises 786 self-recorded videos captured with Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) smart glasses spanning diverse indoor and outdoor environments, and over 2,071 human-annotated question-answer pairs. It probes a model's observer-centric understanding with six different awareness tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 37.66%, even with the best-performing MFM, Gemini 3 Flash. Beyond this gap, our in-depth analysis uncovers several notable findings; for example, while models can exploit partial geometric cues in egocentric videos, they often fail to infer a coherent camera geometry, leading to systematic spatial reasoning errors. We position SAW-Bench as a benchmark for situated spatial intelligence, moving beyond passive observation to understanding physically grounded, observer-centric dynamics.

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.

Urban perception describes how people subjectively evaluate urban environments, shaping how cities are experienced and understood. Existing computational approaches primarily model urban perception directly from street view images, but largely ignore the human perceptual process through which such judgments are formed. In this paper, we introduce Place Pulse-Gaze, an urban perception dataset that augments street view images with synchronized eye-tracking recordings and individual perception labels. Based on this dataset, we propose a Gaze-Guided Urban Perception Framework to study how gaze behavior contributes to the modeling of subjective urban perception. The framework systematically investigates three complementary settings: gaze-only modeling, gaze fusion with explicit semantic scene representations, and gaze fusion with implicit richer visual representations. Experiments show that gaze alone already carries useful predictive signals for subjective urban perception, and that integrating gaze with scene representations further improves prediction under both semantic and richer visual representations. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of incorporating human perceptual processes into urban scene understanding and open a direction for gaze-guided multimodal urban computing.

Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex.

Visual perception is conventionally formulated as a one-shot prediction from a single glance at the image, under the assumption that the image content and the model's parametric knowledge suffice to resolve the query. This assumption often fails in real-world scenarios that hinge on fine-grained visual details or require knowledge-intensive and up-to-date information. We term such cases perception under insufficient evidence and formulate perception as an agentic process that can obtain information beyond a single glance. To address the absence of data for this setting, we design two dedicated data generation pipelines, yielding EviRover-SFT-5K and EviRover-RL-12K for training. We further construct EviLens, a human-verified benchmark comprising 688 instances across five perception categories. Building on these data, we present EviRover, to our knowledge the first perception agent explicitly trained to resolve perceptual queries through interaction, using supervised fine-tuning followed by agentic reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the 4B EviRover outperforms its backbone by 30 points on average on EviLens, reaching performance comparable to advanced proprietary models. The gains transfer beyond EviLens to WebEyes, conventional perception benchmarks, and general multimodal benchmarks, including a 15-point improvement on BrowseComp-VL. All code, models, and data are released.

Visual perspective-taking (VPT), the ability to understand the viewpoint of another person, enables individuals to anticipate the actions of other people. For instance, a driver can avoid accidents by assessing what pedestrians see. Humans typically develop this skill in early childhood, but it remains unclear whether the recently emerging Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess such capability. Furthermore, as these models are increasingly deployed in the real world, understanding how they perform nuanced tasks like VPT becomes essential. In this paper, we introduce two manually curated datasets, Isle-Bricks and Isle-Dots for testing VPT skills, and we use it to evaluate 12 commonly used VLMs. Across all models, we observe a significant performance drop when perspective-taking is required. Additionally, we find performance in object detection tasks is poorly correlated with performance on VPT tasks, suggesting that the existing benchmarks might not be sufficient to understand this problem. The code and the dataset will be available at https://sites.google.com/view/perspective-taking

How can we reconstruct 3D hand poses when large portions of the hand are heavily occluded by itself or by objects? Humans often resolve such ambiguities by leveraging contextual knowledge -- such as affordances, where an object's shape and function suggest how the object is typically grasped. Inspired by this observation, we propose a generative prior for hand pose refinement guided by affordance-aware textual descriptions of hand-object interactions (HOI). Our method employs a diffusion-based generative model that learns the distribution of plausible hand poses conditioned on affordance descriptions, which are inferred from a large vision-language model (VLM). This enables the refinement of occluded regions into more accurate and functionally coherent hand poses. Extensive experiments on HOGraspNet, a 3D hand-affordance dataset with severe occlusions, demonstrate that our affordance-guided refinement significantly improves hand pose estimation over both recent regression methods and diffusion-based refinement lacking contextual reasoning.

The ability to grasp objects, signal with gestures, and share emotion through touch all stem from the unique capabilities of human hands. Yet creating high-quality personalized hand avatars from images remains challenging due to complex geometry, appearance, and articulation, particularly under unconstrained lighting and limited views. Progress has also been limited by the lack of datasets that jointly provide accurate 3D geometry, high-resolution multiview imagery, and a diverse population of subjects. To address this, we present PALM, a large-scale dataset comprising 13k high-quality hand scans from 263 subjects and 90k multi-view images, capturing rich variation in skin tone, age, and geometry. To show its utility, we present a baseline PALM-Net, a multi-subject prior over hand geometry and material properties learned via physically based inverse rendering, enabling realistic, relightable single-image hand avatar personalization. PALM's scale and diversity make it a valuable real-world resource for hand modeling and related research.

Predicting future human behavior from egocentric videos is a challenging but critical task for human intention understanding. Existing methods for forecasting 2D hand positions rely on visual representations and mainly focus on hand-object interactions. In this paper, we investigate the hand forecasting task and tackle two significant issues that persist in the existing methods: (1) 2D hand positions in future frames are severely affected by ego-motions in egocentric videos; (2) prediction based on visual information tends to overfit to background or scene textures, posing a challenge for generalization on novel scenes or human behaviors. To solve the aforementioned problems, we propose EMAG, an ego-motion-aware and generalizable 2D hand forecasting method. In response to the first problem, we propose a method that considers ego-motion, represented by a sequence of homography matrices of two consecutive frames. We further leverage modalities such as optical flow, trajectories of hands and interacting objects, and ego-motions, thereby alleviating the second issue. Extensive experiments on two large-scale egocentric video datasets, Ego4D and EPIC-Kitchens 55, verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, our model outperforms prior methods by 1.7% and 7.0% on intra and cross-dataset evaluations, respectively. Project page: https://masashi-hatano.github.io/EMAG/

Continuous perception, the ability to integrate visual observations over time in a continuous stream fashion, is essential for robust real-world understanding, yet remains largely untested in current multimodal models. We introduce CP-Bench, a minimal and fully controlled benchmark designed to isolate this capability using an extremely simple task: counting identical cubes in a synthetic scene while the camera moves and only reveals subsets of objects at any moment. Despite the simplicity of the setting, we find that state-of-the-art open-source and commercial models, including Qwen-3-VL, InternVL3, GPT-5, and Gemini-3-Pro, fail dramatically. A static-camera control variant confirms that the failure arises not from object recognition but from an inability to accumulate evidence across time. Further experiments show that neither higher sampling FPS, perception- or spatial-enhanced models, nor finetuning with additional videos leads to meaningful cross-temporal generalization. Our results reveal a fundamental limitation in modern multimodal architectures and training paradigms. CP-Bench provides a simple yet powerful diagnostic tool and establishes a clean testbed for developing models capable of genuine time-consistent visual reasoning.

Perceiving multimodal cues and forecasting fine-grained actions from an egocentric (Ego) perspective is vital for applications like robot manipulation. However, previous studies either rely mainly on under-informed visual inputs to predict coarse human motions or follow the VRM/VLA paradigm, which suffers from insufficient robot data and the gap between human and robot embodiments. We observe that 3D hand pose naturally serves as a unified representation to bridge human-robot actions. Hence, we investigate an under-explored Vision-Language guided Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Forecasting (VL-EHPF) task, which aims to predict future Ego 3D hand poses from visual observations, a language instruction, and pose states. To overcome the limited field-of-view and highly dynamic motions in the Ego view, we propose a framework dubbed Exo2EgoPose, which innovatively leverages holistic and stable exocentric (Exo) demonstrations as guidance to compensate for partial and dynamic Ego-view cues. Specifically, we introduce a Dual-level Exocentric Reconstruction Module (DERM), which incorporates the paired Exo videos as supervision to reconstruct their video-level and chunked frame-level representations, thereby modeling spatial contexts and temporal dynamics. Then, the Global-to-Local Modulation Module (GLMM) utilizes the reconstructed hierarchical Exo representations for progressive feature refinement via attention mechanisms and adaptive modulation, enabling comprehensive Exo guidance for accurate Ego hand pose forecasting. Extensive experiments on AssemblyHands, Ego-Exo4D, and our newly constructed EgoMe-pose benchmarks show the superiority of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Moreover, it demonstrates an effective human-to-robot transfer capability and yields improvements on the CALVIN dataset. Code will be released.

Sensing gloves have become important tools for teleoperation and robotic policy learning as they are able to provide rich signals like speed, acceleration and tactile feedback. A common approach to track gloved hands is to directly use the sensor signals (e.g., angular velocity, gravity orientation) to estimate 3D hand poses. However, sensor-based tracking can be restrictive in practice as the accuracy is often impacted by sensor signal and calibration quality. Recent advances in vision-based approaches have achieved strong performance on human hands via large-scale pre-training, but their performance on gloved hands with distinct visual appearances remains underexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic evaluation of vision-based hand tracking models on gloved hands under both zero-shot and fine-tuning setups. Our analysis shows that existing bare-hand models suffer from substantial performance degradation on sensing gloves due to large appearance gap between bare-hand and glove designs. We therefore propose AirGlove, which leverages existing gloves to generalize the learned glove representations towards new gloves with limited data. Experiments with multiple sensing gloves show that AirGlove effectively generalizes the hand pose models to new glove designs and achieves a significant performance boost over the compared schemes.

Humans perceive far more in a scene than what is explicitly depicted: a single glance captures past causes and future trajectories; a quick peek determines if a vehicle can fit between two parked cars; a few seconds of video reveals who holds authority in a room; and a fleeting clip highlights subtle abstract patterns like unwritten rules or hidden labels. This capacity reflects a form of humanity's sixth sense: an intuitive reasoning mechanism that recovers implicit information beyond raw sensory perception. Crucially, this rapid, zero-shot visual intuition underpins everyday navigation and social interaction, making it a vital capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deployed alongside people. Existing visual benchmarks, however, target either deliberate expert-level analysis in academic and mathematical domains or low-level perception, leaving the intuitive reasoning that people perform largely untested. To bridge this gap, we introduce Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark for intuitive visual reasoning. HSS spans diverse image and video inputs, organizes items under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human-written prompts probing the implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract structure that people infer at a glance. Frontier MLLMs fall short of human performance: participants reach 93.1% accuracy, while the strongest model, GPT-6-astra, reaches only 53.6% even at maximum reasoning effort. Despite excelling in many complex tasks that require advanced perception and knowledge, current models still struggle significantly on these visual tasks that are intuitive for humans. We further explore agentic setup that apply dynamic visual manipulation to HSS, which narrows but does not close the gap. HSS establishes intuitive visual reasoning as a measurable axis and directs attention to a capability that scaling on current benchmarks has so far left behind.

Robotic foundation models have recently made substantial progress in multi-task capability, cross-embodiment transfer, and language-conditioned control. Yet robust deployment across diverse real-world settings remains difficult, in part because policies often fail to distinguish causally relevant visual structure from spurious scene-level correlations. We identify this failure mode as shortcut learning: the tendency to exploit predictive but non-causal correlations in the training distribution rather than the task-relevant visual evidence that determines successful action. Although shortcut learning has been extensively studied in computer vision and broader machine learning, its role in robotic foundation models remains comparatively underexplored. We propose Artificial Foveated Perception (AFP), a lightweight, policy-agnostic module that takes the same vision and language inputs as Vision-Language-Action and World Action Model pipelines and predicts task-conditioned masks over relevant objects, the robot, and other action-critical regions. We use these masks primarily as an auxiliary grounding signal during fine-tuning, aligning policy attention with task-relevant regions while leaving the core architecture unchanged. After fine-tuning, the policy executes on the original observation stream without requiring AFP in the control loop. We evaluate AFP across state-of-the-art robotic foundation models and show that foveated perception reduces fine-tuning time, suppresses overfitting, and improves generalization under environmental perturbations. Ablations over mask quality and grounding-loss design further show that these gains arise from directing policy learning toward task-relevant visual evidence. These results suggest that task-conditioned foveated perception is a practical mechanism for making robotic foundation models more robust, data-efficient, and scalable.

We introduce PerceptionBench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the atomic visual perception capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing benchmarks often fail to isolate perception: holistic evaluations conflate perceptual errors with failures in reasoning or domain knowledge, while application-driven benchmarks only cover narrow, fragmented domains shaped by heuristic designs. To address these limitations, PerceptionBench adopts a bottom-up approach: by diagnosing the earliest failure points in the responses of frontier MLLMs across 42 existing benchmarks, we construct an error taxonomy whose perception branch defines ten atomic perceptual capabilities. Guided by this taxonomy, we construct 3,000 verified questions with short, unambiguous answers, each isolating a single capability, with difficulty stemming from perception rather than reasoning or knowledge. Benchmark results across sixteen frontier MLLMs reveal that atomic perception remains largely unsolved---no model reaches 60\% accuracy, perception-related hallucination is the weakest capability on average, and similar overall scores conceal sharply divergent capability profiles. PerceptionBench thus provides a capability-level standard for measuring and diagnosing the visual perception boundaries of MLLMs.

The proliferation of XR devices has made egocentric hand pose estimation a vital task, yet this perspective is inherently challenged by frequent finger occlusions. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages the rich information in dorsal hand skin deformation, unlocked by recent advances in dense visual featurizers. We introduce a dual-stream delta encoder that learns pose by contrasting features from a dynamic hand with a baseline relaxed position. Our evaluation demonstrates that, using only cropped dorsal images, our method reduces the Mean Per Joint Angle Error (MPJAE) by 18% in self-occluded scenarios (fingers >= 50% occluded) compared to state-of-the-art techniques that depend on the whole hand's geometry and large model backbones. Consequently, our method not only enhances the reliability of downstream tasks like index finger pinch and tap estimation in occluded scenarios but also unlocks new interaction paradigms, such as detecting isometric force for a surface "click" without visible movement while minimizing model size.

Hand Pose Estimation (HPE) is a fundamental technology for various applications such as AR/VR and robotics. In these applications, the visibility of each hand joint in the image is crucial for assessing the reliability of estimation results under occlusion. However, most existing HPE methods output joint positions without explicitly indicating their visibility. Although some methods account for occlusion or visibility, visibility estimation has mainly been used as an auxiliary signal for improving pose estimation. To our knowledge, per-joint hand visibility estimation has not been systematically studied as a standalone task. In this work, we propose Hand Visibility Detector, a model for estimating the visibility of individual hand joints, and present the first systematic investigation of visibility estimation as an independent task. We show that leveraging the prior knowledge of HPE models pretrained on large-scale data as a backbone yields high performance in this task. We further demonstrate the utility of Hand Visibility Detector on a downstream task of 3D hand pose annotation via multi-view triangulation of 2D keypoints, showing that visibility-weighted triangulation reduces reprojection error. Our method is released as a ready-to-use package, and the code and demo are available at https://github.com/ryhara/hand_visibility_detector .

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.

Egocentric hand-object motion generation is crucial for immersive AR/VR and robotic imitation but remains challenging due to unstable viewpoints, self-occlusions, perspective distortion, and noisy ego-motion. Existing methods rely on predefined 3D object priors, limiting generalization to novel objects, which restricts their generalizability to novel objects. Meanwhile, recent multimodal approaches suffer from ambiguous generation from abstract textual cues, intricate pipelines for modeling 3D hand-object correlation, and compounding errors in open-loop prediction. We propose MEgoHand, a multimodal framework that synthesizes physically plausible hand-object interactions from egocentric RGB, text, and initial hand pose. MEgoHand introduces a bi-level architecture: a high-level "cerebrum" leverages a vision language model (VLM) to infer motion priors from visual-textual context and a monocular depth estimator for object-agnostic spatial reasoning, while a low-level DiT-based flow-matching policy generates fine-grained trajectories with temporal orthogonal filtering to enhance stability. To address dataset inconsistency, we design a dataset curation paradigm with an Inverse MANO Retargeting Network and Virtual RGB-D Renderer, curating a unified dataset of 3.35M RGB-D frames, 24K interactions, and 1.2K objects. Extensive experiments across five in-domain and two cross-domain datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MEgoHand, achieving substantial reductions in wrist translation error (86.9%) and joint rotation error (34.1%), highlighting its capacity to accurately model fine-grained hand joint structures and generalize robustly across diverse scenarios.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM answers fine-grained questions more accurately when conditioned on evidence-centered crops than on the corresponding full images, suggesting that many failures stem from difficulty to focus on relevant evidence rather than insufficient local recognition ability. Motivated by this observation, we propose Vision-OPD (Vision On-Policy Distillation), a regional-to-global self-distillation framework that transfers the model's own privileged regional perception to its full-image policy. Vision-OPD instantiates two conditional policies from the same MLLM: a crop-conditioned teacher and a full-image-conditioned student. The student generates on-policy rollouts, and Vision-OPD minimizes token-level divergence between the teacher and student next-token distributions along these rollouts. This enables the model to internalize the benefit of visual zooming without external teacher models, ground-truth labels, reward verifiers, or inference-time tool use. Experiments on multiple fine-grained visual understanding benchmarks show that Vision-OPD models achieve competitive or superior performance against much larger open-source, closed-source, and "Thinking-with-Images" agentic models.

Visual search is a ubiquitous and often challenging daily task, exemplified by looking for the car keys at home or a friend in a crowd. An intriguing property of some classical search tasks is an asymmetry such that finding a target A among distractors B can be easier than finding B among A. To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for asymmetry in visual search, we propose a computational model that takes a target and a search image as inputs and produces a sequence of eye movements until the target is found. The model integrates eccentricity-dependent visual recognition with target-dependent top-down cues. We compared the model against human behavior in six paradigmatic search tasks that show asymmetry in humans. Without prior exposure to the stimuli or task-specific training, the model provides a plausible mechanism for search asymmetry. We hypothesized that the polarity of search asymmetry arises from experience with the natural environment. We tested this hypothesis by training the model on augmented versions of ImageNet where the biases of natural images were either removed or reversed. The polarity of search asymmetry disappeared or was altered depending on the training protocol. This study highlights how classical perceptual properties can emerge in neural network models, without the need for task-specific training, but rather as a consequence of the statistical properties of the developmental diet fed to the model. All source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/kreimanlab/VisualSearchAsymmetry.

Current digital human studies focusing on lip-syncing and body movement are no longer sufficient to meet the growing industrial demand, while human video generation techniques that support interacting with real-world environments (e.g., objects) have not been well investigated. Despite human hand synthesis already being an intricate problem, generating objects in contact with hands and their interactions presents an even more challenging task, especially when the objects exhibit obvious variations in size and shape. To tackle these issues, we present a novel video Reenactment framework focusing on Human-Object Interaction (HOI) via an adaptive Layout-instructed Diffusion model (Re-HOLD). Our key insight is to employ specialized layout representation for hands and objects, respectively. Such representations enable effective disentanglement of hand modeling and object adaptation to diverse motion sequences. To further improve the generation quality of HOI, we design an interactive textural enhancement module for both hands and objects by introducing two independent memory banks. We also propose a layout adjustment strategy for the cross-object reenactment scenario to adaptively adjust unreasonable layouts caused by diverse object sizes during inference. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods. Project page: https://fyycs.github.io/Re-HOLD.

Image retouching is commonly formulated as enhancing overall visual quality through color adjustment, but in practice, it also serves to emphasize visual focus by guiding viewers' attention toward a specific subject or region. Achieving such focus-oriented retouching is inherently challenging, as it requires well-coordinated global and local adjustments to manipulate perceptual saliency while maintaining visual naturalness. This intricate process typically demands substantial professional expertise. In this study, we propose EyeControl, a MLLM-driven agent with a diffusion-based retouching executor that enables visual focus enhancement under weak user intent. With only a few clicks or coarse strokes, EyeControl directs visual attention to the intended region, effectively "dotting the eye" of the image. The core idea is to explicitly link the weak user intention with the target editing region and the corresponding tonal adjustment operations during retouching. To achieve this, the system first interprets the intent and image content to infer the visual focus and generate structured intent guidance for the retouching executor. Second, the retouching executor is encouraged to respond more strongly to the target region, explicitly aligning its attention map with a designed pseudo-intent map. We also introduce an operation-consistency constraint to improve coordination between global and local adjustments, achieving more natural and coherent retouching. Additionally, we contribute ControlArt-Bench, a high-quality evaluation dataset for visual focus enhancement. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EyeControl yields perceptually appealing results with stronger intent alignment. Code can be found in https://github.com/DragonisCV/EyeControl.

A robot that observes people interacting with objects should be able to carry out later requests that refer back to those interactions. Such requests may specify a grasp target by the role it played in a past event rather than by its name or appearance. Moreover, the target may no longer be visible when the robot is asked to act. We present BeyondSCe, a zero-shot robotic grasping system for this event-referential setting. Given the event history and the current scene, the system identifies the requested object or part and localizes it for grasping. If the target is occluded, it combines an event prior recovered from the history with current scene geometry to select camera viewpoints likely to reveal the target. The system uses pretrained models without additional task-specific training. In real-robot experiments with a single wrist-mounted RGB-D camera, it achieves grasp success rates of 76% and 77% for initially visible and occluded targets, respectively, compared with 40% and 55% for the strongest baseline in each condition. On four additional scenes with heavy occlusion, it increases grasp success rates from 75% to 95% while reducing the mean number of views from 3.35 to 2.20, compared with an active-perception baseline given the target's ground-truth 3D bounding box.

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.

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.

How human interact with objects depends on the functional roles of the target objects, which introduces the problem of affordance-aware hand-object interaction. It requires a large number of human demonstrations for the learning and understanding of plausible and appropriate hand-object interactions. In this work, we present AffordPose, a large-scale dataset of hand-object interactions with affordance-driven hand pose. We first annotate the specific part-level affordance labels for each object, e.g. twist, pull, handle-grasp, etc, instead of the general intents such as use or handover, to indicate the purpose and guide the localization of the hand-object interactions. The fine-grained hand-object interactions reveal the influence of hand-centered affordances on the detailed arrangement of the hand poses, yet also exhibit a certain degree of diversity. We collect a total of 26.7K hand-object interactions, each including the 3D object shape, the part-level affordance label, and the manually adjusted hand poses. The comprehensive data analysis shows the common characteristics and diversity of hand-object interactions per affordance via the parameter statistics and contacting computation. We also conduct experiments on the tasks of hand-object affordance understanding and affordance-oriented hand-object interaction generation, to validate the effectiveness of our dataset in learning the fine-grained hand-object interactions. Project page: https://github.com/GentlesJan/AffordPose.

When interacting with objects, humans effectively reason about which regions of objects are viable for an intended action, i.e., the affordance regions of the object. They can also account for subtle differences in object regions based on the task to be performed and whether one or two hands need to be used. However, current vision-based affordance prediction methods often reduce the problem to naive object part segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework for extracting affordance data from human activity video datasets. Our extracted 2HANDS dataset contains precise object affordance region segmentations and affordance class-labels as narrations of the activity performed. The data also accounts for bimanual actions, i.e., two hands co-ordinating and interacting with one or more objects. We present a VLM-based affordance prediction model, 2HandedAfforder, trained on the dataset and demonstrate superior performance over baselines in affordance region segmentation for various activities. Finally, we show that our predicted affordance regions are actionable, i.e., can be used by an agent performing a task, through demonstration in robotic manipulation scenarios.

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities humans rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at the contact area, and indicates the hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT, research on visual-tactile learning is becoming more accessible and reproducible. Leveraging this tactile sensor, we propose a novel visual-tactile in-hand object reconstruction framework VTacO, and extend it to VTacOH for hand-object reconstruction. Since our method can support both rigid and deformable object reconstruction, no existing benchmarks are proper for the goal. We propose a simulation environment, VT-Sim, which supports generating hand-object interaction for both rigid and deformable objects. With VT-Sim, we generate a large-scale training dataset and evaluate our method on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can outperform the previous baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, we directly apply our model trained in simulation to various real-world test cases, which display qualitative results. Codes, models, simulation environment, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vtaco/.

Human visual search is serial: the fovea must land on a candidate to confirm it, and those landings form a scanpath. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs), given the same foveated input, search as humans do bears on their use as models of human vision and on attention-alignment scores. We compare three general-purpose MLLMs with human eye-movement scanpaths on goal-directed search (COCO-Search18), driving each model fixation by fixation through an identical, human-matched foveated view and assessing it along three axes: the decision of target presence, the efficiency of reaching the target, and the gaze process itself. The axes dissociate. On the decision and on target acquisition the models match or exceed humans, detecting present targets near ceiling and reaching them on the first saccade more often than people do. The gaze process is not human. Under the human-matched condition, all three share one signature: low-entropy, large-amplitude, self-consistent scanpaths that agree with themselves far more closely than two humans agree with each other. That is consistent with a single-pass, non-serial architecture rather than a limit of acuity. Matched retinal input reproduces where humans look but not how the looking unfolds in time, and no degradation regime recovers human-like search at human-like success. The gap sits on a process axis that answer-alignment and saliency metrics do not measure. Because they miss it, such metrics cannot certify human-like vision, and zero-shot models suit outcome and spatial questions but not temporal, process-level ones.

Dexterous manipulation involves contact-rich and fine-grained interactions with the physical world, posing significant challenges for existing vision-language-action (VLA) models due to severe visual occlusions and complex contact dynamics. While recent works have incorporated tactile sensing into robotic manipulation, most approaches still rely on homogeneous multimodal fusion, lacking adaptive tactile integration and explicit modeling of physical dynamics. In this work, we present DeCAL, a physically-grounded dexterous vision-language-action model that unifies understanding, imagination and action generation for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, DeCAL leverages specialized experts for each capability while enabling efficient information flow among them. To effectively leverage tactile information, we introduce Adaptive Visuo-Tactile Fusion that dynamically regulates tactile interactions via a contact-aware gating strategy. Furthermore, we propose Visuo-Tactile Latent Co-Imagination to jointly model visual and tactile dynamics, equipping the policy with implicit physical world knowledge. Experimental results show that DeCAL consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, attaining a 71% average success rate and an 83.4% progress success rate, while also demonstrating strong generalization to unseen scenarios. The website is available at https://aureleopku.github.io/DeCAL.

Egocentric Interactive hand-object segmentation (EgoIHOS) requires the segmentation of hands and interacting objects in egocentric images, which is crucial for understanding human behavior in assistive systems. Previous methods typically recognize hands and interacting objects as distinct semantic categories based solely on visual features, or simply use hand predictions as auxiliary cues for object segmentation. Despite the promising progress achieved by these methods, they fail to adequately model the interactive relationships between hands and objects while ignoring the coupled physical relationships among object categories, ultimately constraining their segmentation performance. To make up for the shortcomings of existing methods, we propose a novel method called CaRe-Ego that achieves state-of-the-art performance by emphasizing the contact between hands and objects from two aspects. First, we introduce a Hand-guided Object Feature Enhancer (HOFE) to establish the hand-object interactive relationships to extract more contact-relevant and discriminative object features. Second, we design the Contact-centric Object Decoupling Strategy (CODS) to explicitly model and disentangle coupling relationships among object categories, thereby emphasizing contact-aware feature learning. Experiments on various in-domain and out-of-domain test sets show that Care-Ego significantly outperforms existing methods with robust generalization capability. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yuggiehk/CaRe-Ego/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of attention applied to visual inputs based on linguistic framing even when alternative framings demand identical visual reasoning. Using visual attention as a probe, we quantify how framing alters both the amount and distribution of attention over the image. Constrained framings, such as multiple choice and yes/no, induce substantially lower attention to image context compared to open-ended, reduce focus on task-relevant regions, and shift attention towards uninformative tokens. We further demonstrate that this attention misallocation is the principal cause of degraded accuracy and cross-framing inconsistency. Building on this mechanistic insight, we introduce a lightweight prompt-tuning method using learnable tokens that encourages the robust, visually grounded attention patterns observed in open-ended settings, improving visual grounding and improving performance across framings.

Learning how humans manipulate objects requires machines to acquire knowledge from two perspectives: one for understanding object affordances and the other for learning human's interactions based on the affordances. Even though these two knowledge bases are crucial, we find that current databases lack a comprehensive awareness of them. In this work, we propose a multi-modal and rich-annotated knowledge repository, OakInk, for visual and cognitive understanding of hand-object interactions. We start to collect 1,800 common household objects and annotate their affordances to construct the first knowledge base: Oak. Given the affordance, we record rich human interactions with 100 selected objects in Oak. Finally, we transfer the interactions on the 100 recorded objects to their virtual counterparts through a novel method: Tink. The recorded and transferred hand-object interactions constitute the second knowledge base: Ink. As a result, OakInk contains 50,000 distinct affordance-aware and intent-oriented hand-object interactions. We benchmark OakInk on pose estimation and grasp generation tasks. Moreover, we propose two practical applications of OakInk: intent-based interaction generation and handover generation. Our datasets and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/lixiny/OakInk.

Recent studies on 3D hand reconstruction have demonstrated the effectiveness of synthetic training data to improve estimation performance. However, most methods rely on game engines to synthesize hand images, which often lack diversity in textures and environments, and fail to include crucial components like arms or interacting objects. Generative models are promising alternatives to generate diverse hand images, but still suffer from misalignment issues. In this paper, we present SesaHand, which enhances controllable hand image generation from both semantic and structural alignment perspectives for 3D hand reconstruction. Specifically, for semantic alignment, we propose a pipeline with Chain-of-Thought inference to extract human behavior semantics from image captions generated by the Vision-Language Model. This semantics suppresses human-irrelevant environmental details and ensures sufficient human-centric contexts for hand image generation. For structural alignment, we introduce hierarchical structural fusion to integrate structural information with different granularity for feature refinement to better align the hand and the overall human body in generated images. We further propose a hand structure attention enhancement method to efficiently enhance the model's attention on hand regions. Experiments demonstrate that our method not only outperforms prior work in generation performance but also improves 3D hand reconstruction with the generated hand images.

Driven by the demand for spatial intelligence and holistic scene perception, omnidirectional images (ODIs), which provide a complete 360 field of view, are receiving growing attention across diverse applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and embodied robotics. Despite their unique characteristics, ODIs exhibit remarkable differences from perspective images in geometric projection, spatial distribution, and boundary continuity, making it challenging for direct domain adaption from perspective methods. This survey reviews recent panoramic vision techniques with a particular emphasis on the perspective-to-panorama adaptation. We first revisit the panoramic imaging pipeline and projection methods to build the prior knowledge required for analyzing the structural disparities. Then, we summarize three challenges of domain adaptation: severe geometric distortions near the poles, non-uniform sampling in Equirectangular Projection (ERP), and periodic boundary continuity. Building on this, we cover 20+ representative tasks drawn from more than 300 research papers in two dimensions. On one hand, we present a cross-method analysis of representative strategies for addressing panoramic specific challenges across different tasks. On the other hand, we conduct a cross-task comparison and classify panoramic vision into four major categories: visual quality enhancement and assessment, visual understanding, multimodal understanding, and visual generation. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in data, models, and applications that will drive the advancement of panoramic vision research. We hope that our work can provide new insight and forward looking perspectives to advance the development of panoramic vision technologies. Our project page is https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Survey-of-Panorama

Recent advances in robot manipulation have leveraged pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) and explored integrating 3D spatial signals into these models for effective action prediction, giving rise to the promising vision-language-action (VLA) paradigm. However, most existing approaches overlook the importance of active perception: they typically rely on static, wrist-mounted cameras that provide an end-effector-centric viewpoint. As a result, these models are unable to adaptively select optimal viewpoints or resolutions during task execution, which significantly limits their performance in long-horizon tasks and fine-grained manipulation scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose ActiveVLA, a novel vision-language-action framework that empowers robots with active perception capabilities for high-precision, fine-grained manipulation. ActiveVLA adopts a coarse-to-fine paradigm, dividing the process into two stages: (1) Critical region localization. ActiveVLA projects 3D inputs onto multi-view 2D projections, identifies critical 3D regions, and supports dynamic spatial awareness. (2) Active perception optimization. Drawing on the localized critical regions, ActiveVLA uses an active view selection strategy to choose optimal viewpoints. These viewpoints aim to maximize amodal relevance and diversity while minimizing occlusions. Additionally, ActiveVLA applies a 3D zoom-in to improve resolution in key areas. Together, these steps enable finer-grained active perception for precise manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ActiveVLA achieves precise 3D manipulation and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three simulation benchmarks. Moreover, ActiveVLA transfers seamlessly to real-world scenarios, enabling robots to learn high-precision tasks in complex environments.

Interacting with the world is a multi-sensory experience: achieving effective general-purpose interaction requires making use of all available modalities -- including vision, touch, and audio -- to fill in gaps from partial observation. For example, when vision is occluded reaching into a bag, a robot should rely on its senses of touch and sound. However, state-of-the-art generalist robot policies are typically trained on large datasets to predict robot actions solely from visual and proprioceptive observations. In this work, we propose FuSe, a novel approach that enables finetuning visuomotor generalist policies on heterogeneous sensor modalities for which large datasets are not readily available by leveraging natural language as a common cross-modal grounding. We combine a multimodal contrastive loss with a sensory-grounded language generation loss to encode high-level semantics. In the context of robot manipulation, we show that FuSe enables performing challenging tasks that require reasoning jointly over modalities such as vision, touch, and sound in a zero-shot setting, such as multimodal prompting, compositional cross-modal prompting, and descriptions of objects it interacts with. We show that the same recipe is applicable to widely different generalist policies, including both diffusion-based generalist policies and large vision-language-action (VLA) models. Extensive experiments in the real world show that FuSeis able to increase success rates by over 20% compared to all considered baselines.

Embodied systems must make knowledge acquired during one encounter usable in another despite changes in viewpoint, motion, and illumination. Yet aggregate cross-video accuracy conflates failures of local perception with failures to preserve observation identity, establish correspondence, and compose evidence, obscuring whether local video understanding actually transfers. We introduce EgoGears, a complementary single- and multi-video benchmark designed to diagnose this transition. It contains 567 single-video and 1,487 multi-video questions derived from 126 human-collected egocentric recordings covering 39 outdoor routes. Repeated traversals across movement speeds and lighting conditions ground comparisons in shared physical environments; 531 questions require alignment across independent recordings. Single-video questions measure the local visual, spatial, and motion evidence available to a model, while multi-video questions test whether evidence remains bound to the correct observation and can be composed into consistent route relationships. We report 29 single-video and 31 multi-video MLLM configurations across six model families in the main leaderboard. Among the 20 configurations evaluated comparably on both splits, every model performs worse on multi-video questions, with a mean decrease of 22.5 percentage points, and the gap persists when answer format and scoring are held fixed. The gap is not explained simply by additional videos or recording boundaries. The central bottlenecks are observation--evidence binding and ordered route-state tracking. The code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/lei-qi-233/EgoGears.

While passive surfaces offer numerous benefits for interaction in mixed reality, reliably detecting touch input solely from head-mounted cameras has been a long-standing challenge. Camera specifics, hand self-occlusion, and rapid movements of both head and fingers introduce considerable uncertainty about the exact location of touch events. Existing methods have thus not been capable of achieving the performance needed for robust interaction. In this paper, we present a real-time pipeline that detects touch input from all ten fingers on any physical surface, purely based on egocentric hand tracking. Our method TouchInsight comprises a neural network to predict the moment of a touch event, the finger making contact, and the touch location. TouchInsight represents locations through a bivariate Gaussian distribution to account for uncertainties due to sensing inaccuracies, which we resolve through contextual priors to accurately infer intended user input. We first evaluated our method offline and found that it locates input events with a mean error of 6.3 mm, and accurately detects touch events (F1=0.99) and identifies the finger used (F1=0.96). In an online evaluation, we then demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for a core application of dexterous touch input: two-handed text entry. In our study, participants typed 37.0 words per minute with an uncorrected error rate of 2.9% on average.

Learning robust visuomotor policies for robotic manipulation remains a challenge in real-world settings, where visual distractors can significantly degrade performance and safety. In this work, we propose an effective and scalable framework, Naturalistic Inpainting for Context Enhancement (NICE). Our method minimizes out-of-distribution (OOD) gap in imitation learning by increasing visual diversity through construction of new experiences using existing demonstrations. By utilizing image generative frameworks and large language models, NICE performs three editing operations, object replacement, restyling, and removal of distracting (non-target) objects. These changes preserve spatial relationships without obstructing target objects and maintain action-label consistency. Unlike previous approaches, NICE requires no additional robot data collection, simulator access, or custom model training, making it readily applicable to existing robotic datasets. Using real-world scenes, we showcase the capability of our framework in producing photo-realistic scene enhancement. For downstream tasks, we use NICE data to finetune a vision-language model (VLM) for spatial affordance prediction and a vision-language-action (VLA) policy for object manipulation. Our evaluations show that NICE successfully minimizes OOD gaps, resulting in over 20% improvement in accuracy for affordance prediction in highly cluttered scenes. For manipulation tasks, success rate increases on average by 11% when testing in environments populated with distractors in different quantities. Furthermore, we show that our method improves visual robustness, lowering target confusion by 6%, and enhances safety by reducing collision rate by 7%.

The goal of this work is to characterize the representational impact that foveation operations have for machine vision systems, inspired by the foveated human visual system, which has higher acuity at the center of gaze and texture-like encoding in the periphery. To do so, we introduce models consisting of a first-stage fixed image transform followed by a second-stage learnable convolutional neural network, and we varied the first stage component. The primary model has a foveated-textural input stage, which we compare to a model with foveated-blurred input and a model with spatially-uniform blurred input (both matched for perceptual compression), and a final reference model with minimal input-based compression. We find that: 1) the foveated-texture model shows similar scene classification accuracy as the reference model despite its compressed input, with greater i.i.d. generalization than the other models; 2) the foveated-texture model has greater sensitivity to high-spatial frequency information and greater robustness to occlusion, w.r.t the comparison models; 3) both the foveated systems, show a stronger center image-bias relative to the spatially-uniform systems even with a weight sharing constraint. Critically, these results are preserved over different classical CNN architectures throughout their learning dynamics. Altogether, this suggests that foveation with peripheral texture-based computations yields an efficient, distinct, and robust representational format of scene information, and provides symbiotic computational insight into the representational consequences that texture-based peripheral encoding may have for processing in the human visual system, while also potentially inspiring the next generation of computer vision models via spatially-adaptive computation. Code + Data available here: https://github.com/ArturoDeza/EmergentProperties

We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a novel set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes, in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations - such as object position relative to the humanoid minifigure and the humanoid minifigure's orientation - and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each visual task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, reveals that while they excel in scene understanding, the performance declines significantly on spatial reasoning and further deteriorates on perspective-taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.

Imitation learning from human demonstrations offers a promising approach for robot skill acquisition, but egocentric human data introduces fundamental challenges due to the embodiment gap. During manipulation, humans actively coordinate head and hand movements, continuously reposition their viewpoint and use pre-action visual fixation search strategies to locate relevant objects. These behaviors create dynamic, task-driven head motions that static robot sensing systems cannot replicate, leading to a significant distribution shift that degrades policy performance. We present EgoMI (Egocentric Manipulation Interface), a framework that captures synchronized end-effector and active head trajectories during manipulation tasks, resulting in data that can be retargeted to compatible semi-humanoid robot embodiments. To handle rapid and wide-spanning head viewpoint changes, we introduce a memory-augmented policy that selectively incorporates historical observations. We evaluate our approach on a bimanual robot equipped with an actuated camera head and find that policies with explicit head-motion modeling consistently outperform baseline methods. Results suggest that coordinated hand-eye learning with EgoMI effectively bridges the human-robot embodiment gap for robust imitation learning on semi-humanoid embodiments. Project page: https://egocentric-manipulation-interface.github.io

Vision-language-action (VLA) models often treat main-view and wrist-view observations as parallel visual inputs, overlooking their distinct roles in robot manipulation. Fine-grained manipulation, however, benefits from anticipating how wrist-local interactions may evolve under the global task context. To address this limitation, we present World-to-Wrist VLA (W2-VLA), a VLA model for fine-grained robot manipulation with task-conditioned future wrist modeling. Given current multi-view observations and a task instruction, W2-VLA contextualizes a set of latent modeling tokens as a compact interface between the vision-language model and the wrist predictor. Conditioned on this interface and the observed wrist history, the predictor forecasts future wrist latents, which are transformed into future-aware context for action prediction. In addition, we introduce W2-CoT, a synthesis pipeline that produces structured annotations describing manipulation progress, physical transition cues, and wrist-local evidence. These annotations provide auxiliary supervision that shapes the task-conditioned latent interface. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improved fine-grained and contact-sensitive manipulation across both single-arm and bimanual settings, while maintaining action-generation rates above 80 Hz.

Can embodied task agents use tactile experience to perform fine manipulation without task-specific model training? We investigate this capability through Tactile-ETA, a system that incorporates tactile experience into an embodied task agent through in-context learning. Successful expert demonstrations show how contact changes during manipulation. We pair each recorded robot movement with its camera views and bilateral tactile observations. We keep tactile observations at the start and end of each movement and add two neighboring time points when the tactile images change markedly in between. The agent combines these demonstrations with current vision, tactile observations, and proprioception to select actions through general-purpose robot tools, without updating model parameters. Across four simulated manipulation tasks, adding tactile observations to the same two expert demonstrations increases average success from 15.75% to 24.00%, with current sensing and execution interfaces held fixed. Further experiments show that performance depends on the sensory content and representation of demonstrations, while comparing agent models on Lift Bottle reveals substantial differences under the same system configuration. On the real-robot tasks, demonstrations with aligned visual and tactile observations increase the task success rate from 0% to 60%. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of using tactile experience in context for fine manipulation and suggest a path toward extending embodied task agents to additional sensory inputs.

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is the next frontier of robotics, yet learned hand skills remain limited to simple grasps or basic repeated motions, such as rotating an object. As robots attempt more demanding in-hand maneuvers, safety, such as not dropping the object, becomes critical, yet it is rarely measured. We study in-hand object pose reaching, a task that demands diverse and difficult grasps: moving an object to almost any position and orientation within reach of the fingers, at any wrist orientation, through long sequences of consecutive goals. We present a recipe for training such policies for a LEAP hand in simulation without human data, built on a range of insights, from diverse resets and goals via generated grasp datasets to an adaptive friction curriculum. With careful system identification, the policies transfer zero-shot to the real hand, using either motion capture or a single wrist-mounted depth camera, and prove remarkably capable and robust. On top of the task policy, we add a learned residual safety filter with adjustable conservativeness, letting us tune the balance between performance and safety and greatly reduce object drops. In 13.3 hours of real-robot evaluation over 4,800 unseen goals across 4 objects and diverse wrist orientations, the state-based policy reaches 95.2% of goals within 2 cm and 0.4 rad, and the filter cuts its drops by 75% while still reaching 91.5% of goals. The policies can also spin a lightbulb held in an arbitrary pose, reach out-of-distribution goals, withstand fast arm motion and perturbations, and, needing only a wrist camera, serve as portable skills such as screwing in a lightbulb. We release the full recipe as a platform for studying performance, reliability, and safety in high-dimensional dexterous systems. Videos and more are available at https://ian-chuang.github.io/dexsafe/.

In this paper, we study depth perception of vision-language models (VLMs) to isolate the effects of pictorial depth cues and disentangle vision and language influences on model performance. To this end, we combine depth-ordering and odd-one-out psychophysical tasks: the VLMs are presented with images where one object is at different depth relative to other, otherwise identical, objects, and must determine whether the odd-one-out target is closer or farther to the observer. To create stimuli, we generate 2D views from simulated and real 3D scenes while controlling the presence of individual pictorial depth cues, enabling a fine-grained analysis of cue-level contributions. Language effects are examined by varying referring expression clarity. We also introduce a novel metric to quantify vision-vs-language sensitivities. Applying this methodology, we create the Odd-One-Out Depth (O3-D) dataset with 37K real and synthetic images and 147K image-question pairs. Evaluation of 12 open-source and commercial models on O3-D shows under-utilization of depth cues and depth-ordering accuracies between 47% and 56%, with no model above chance level. At the same time, our metric reveals strong linguistic bias in the answers. Neither chain-of-thought (CoT) nor in-context learning (ICL) significantly improves performance, suggesting that static image data alone may be insufficient for depth understanding. All code, the image generation pipeline, and the O3-D dataset are publicly released at https://github.com/lyiqian/o3-d.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

Pixel-level recognition of objects manipulated by the user from egocentric images enables key applications spanning assistive technologies, industrial safety, and activity monitoring. However, progress in this area is currently hindered by the scarcity of annotated datasets, as existing approaches rely on costly manual labels. In this paper, we propose to learn human-object interaction detection leveraging narrations x2013 natural language descriptions of the actions performed by the camera wearer which contain clues about manipulated objects. We introduce Narration-Supervised in-Hand Object Segmentation (NS-iHOS), a novel task where models have to learn to segment in-hand objects by learning from natural-language narrations in a weakly-supervised regime. Narrations are then not employed at inference time. We showcase the potential of the task by proposing Weakly-Supervised In-hand Object Segmentation from Human Narrations (WISH), an end-to-end model distilling knowledge from narrations to learn plausible hand-object associations and enable in-hand object segmentation without using narrations at test time. We benchmark WISH against different baselines based on open-vocabulary object detectors and vision-language models. Experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and Ego4D show that WISH surpasses all baselines, recovering more than 50% of the performance of fully supervised methods, without employing fine-grained pixel-wise annotations. Code and data can be found at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/WISH.