NeurIPS 2026 · papers论文

Equipping artificial agents with spatial intelligence requires a comprehensive generative prior over the dynamic 3D world. We propose World Motion Models (WMMs) that capture "what was, is, and will be where across time" via sparse SE(3) pose trajectories. WMMs are built on the observation that elements of dynamic scenes can be well approximated by a set of rigid SE(3) trajectories, a minimal yet expressive primitive for 4D modeling. This representation unifies articulated objects, human bodies, hand-object interactions, piecewise-rigid scene dynamics, camera motion, and even robot states and …

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often rely on data collected from a target environment, which can be expensive and noisy. Although simulators can generate large amounts of additional data, standard simulation mixing approaches, which directly combine simulated and real experience, can degrade performance due to simulator inaccuracies, especially when they bias the solution away from the optimal policy. We propose a conservative simulation-aided learning method based on control variates, where simulated data is used solely to reduce variance in the learning process rather than directly …

Autoregressive VLA planning usually predicts continuous trajectories as the final output, but driving instructions often describe actions rather than ego states, which weakens direct conditioning on the final continuous trajectory. We address this gap with TrajCond, which introduces a discrete trajectory-geometric condition for VLA planning. Specifically, we represent TrajCond as a 1D-Brohan differential action trajectory and learn it with a two-stage training framework before final continuous trajectory prediction. With the simultaneous autoregressive generation of discrete and numeric …

Agent harnesses -- runtime scaffolds that wrap an LLM's reasoning loop with tool dispatch, verification, and persistent memory -- have become the standard substrate for deploying LLMs as autonomous agents, as demonstrated by Claude Code and Codex in software engineering. In trajectory planning, however, this paradigm has not taken hold: existing LLM-based trajectory planning methods either keep the LLM in the decision loop, exceeding the millisecond-level control budget, or offload it to offline rules or training-time supervision -- leaving the runtime planner non-evolving. Intermediate …

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as end-to-end driving planners, yet they suffer from cross-city domain shift. Existing methods treat this shift as a single quantity addressed by uniform alignment or single-site editing. We challenge this view on two counts: (i) domain shift in VLM trajectory planners is inherently structured across modality and layer, and (ii) a locate-then-repair recipe matched to this structure outperforms every uniform-objective baseline. We analyse domain shift via activation patching and uncover two regularities. (F1) Modality axis. Image and text …

Despite recent advances in camera-based online HD map construction, these systems remain susceptible to sensor failures due to their reliance on onboard cameras. In contrast, satellite images remain available independently of real-time sensing conditions as they are cached offline. Existing methods utilizing satellite images, however, primarily leverage them under nominal conditions, without explicitly addressing them as redundancy when a sensor degrades. To address this gap, we propose ReSMap, a redundancy-aware camera-satellite fusion framework for robust online HD map construction. Our …

Behavior cloning (BC) in non-Markovian environments is a challenging problem because policies have to reason over contextual information over long horizons. Existing policy architectures rely on recurrent or attention-based mechanisms to capture long-term dependencies. However, recurrent models suffer from hidden-state collapse and gradient instability under backpropagation through time, while attention-based models are fundamentally limited by context length. To address these issues, we propose Keyframe Mnemonics, a novel self-supervised method that $\textit{discovers}$ a set of …

While offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy optimization from static datasets without costly online interaction, it remains bottlenecked by the risk of executing out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Recent approaches mitigate this by learning a behavior-cloning policy through flow matching and then performing RL within its constrained latent space. However, naively optimizing the latent policy can easily cause the policy to collapse into a brittle mode or exploit sharp artifacts of the learned critic. In this work, we find that entropy regularization is essential in latent-space RL …

Large language model (LLM)-based robot task planning is promising for open-ended instruction following, but degrades on long-horizon tasks in large environments. When spatial information is conveyed to the LLM through text, the model can fail to capture spatial context, and token cost grows with environment size. Generating action sequences directly with an LLM also makes it difficult to satisfy the current world state and action preconditions. We address this with an ontology-grounded scene representation that aligns objects, spaces, relations, and states in a shared symbolic vocabulary for …

A common way for trajectory planning is to leverage generative models trained on large collections of expert trajectories. At inference time, the model generates executable trajectories by conditioning on task goal constraints. However, trajectory-based methods rely on costly supervision, scale poorly with sequence length, and often generalize poorly to unseen constraints such as novel start-goal pairs. We propose an alternative to learn the underlying state-space manifold and use the geometry of the manifold for trajectory planning. This approach requires only state observations and enables …

Category-level object pose estimation (COPE), capable of generalizing to intra-class unknown objects, has become a core technique for robotic 3D scene understanding. However, existing COPE methods still require labor-intensive recollection of real-world training data for novel object categories, which limits their scalability in practical applications. This paper aims to achieve synthetic-to-real (Syn2Real) generalized COPE, where a model is trained solely on rendered synthetic data and directly generalized to real-world deployments. The central challenge lies in the significant domain gap …

Raw radar spectra are widely viewed as too cluttered and noisy for direct representation learning, motivating handcrafted reductions, sparse point clouds, or compact Doppler descriptors in radar perception. We challenge this assumption and argue that the main limitation lies not in the raw representation itself, but in the absence of a learning objective that separates structured signal from noise. Handcrafted reductions partially address this problem but impose rigid assumptions about what constitutes signal, discarding weak yet informative structure while retaining artifacts that fit the …

Reinforcement learning (RL) from raw sensory inputs such as images or onboard sensors can be challenging due to high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. A common strategy is to train a teacher policy with access to privileged state information and then distill it into a student policy that acts from raw inputs alone. However, when the teacher relies on information unavailable to the student, exact imitation may be impossible, creating an irreducible imitation gap. Existing approaches typically mitigate this mismatch through careful reward shaping or additional reinforcement learning …

World models learn internal simulators of environment dynamics for prediction, planning, and control, yet learning them from limited, noisy, and partial observations remains challenging. While much progress has focused on pixel-based observations, many physical systems instead provide vector-valued measurements that reveal only part of the underlying state. We introduce K-PWM, a probabilistic world model for prediction and control under partial observation. K-PWM couples Koopman-bilinear latent dynamics with a nonlinear observation decoder and performs probabilistic latent-state inference …

Iterative neural policies usually spend the same computation on every decision, although the benefit of additional processing varies across states. We introduce Adaptive Internal Computation (AIC), an iterative policy that learns when to stop refining its latent representation and act. In AIC, we train action selection and stopping jointly, an expected-depth penalty values computation and intermediate value predictions provide auxiliary supervision. We show that when only some states benefit from further refinement, an ideal state-dependent allocator outperforms every state-independent …

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) stabilizes policy updates by clipping the importance ratio between the new policy and the data-collecting policy. The standard rule uses one fixed clipping range for all samples. While this choice offers simplicity and effectiveness, it fails to distinguish statistically harmful extreme ratio values from large, yet tolerable changes. We study how to adapt the clipping radius to the reliability of the induced importance ratio distribution. Our case study demonstrates that reliable updates require controlling these extreme ratios, rather than merely verifying …

We propose, HaNDF, object-conditional neural distance fields as data-driven priors for modeling the plausible hand-object configurations, in the product manifold of hand articulations. While recent unconditional generative priors showed success in modeling human pose, hands are versatile articulated bodies often found in interaction with other objects. This makes it crucial to develop a generative prior which can model the plausible hand poses conditioned on the object under interaction. To this end, our HaNDF proposes a geometry-aware, object-conditioned neural distance field, representing …

Accurate long-horizon probabilistic predictions of dynamical systems are a prerequisite for model-based decision-making. Variational Bayesian last layers (VBLLs) are an attractive model class for this setting, offering tractable uncertainty at near-deterministic cost, yet they are trained exclusively with single-step likelihood objectives that may be insufficient for reliable multi-step rollouts. We revisit VBLLs through the lens of Gibbs variational inference, which decouples posterior inference from the choice of training loss. Building on this perspective, we introduce a family of …

Vision-language action (VLA) models excel for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their tendency to over-invoke chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning mirrors a human cognitive pitfall: overthinking. Just as deliberate reasoning can slow or mislead human judgment in routine tasks, excessive CoT in VLA incurs unnecessary compute overhead and can paradoxically degrade planning performance. Recent research tackles this via adaptive reasoning, which dynamically modulates inference complexity by selectively triggering CoT for complex scenes while responding directly to routine ones. While prior adaptive …

Camera localization methods are mostly multi-stage pipelines relying on dedicated and complex maps that are costly to construct, store, and maintain over time. Alternatively, well-structured maps that organize scenes with compact yet expressive primitives are often readily available, providing rich structural and semantic cues that humans can interpret. However, their potential for direct camera localization remains largely unexplored due to the significant modality gap between map primitives and visual observations. This motivates a new concept for localization, which estimates camera poses …

Computer vision models learn hand action only from its visual consequences, without access to the underlying embodied motor signals. We address this absence with MotorSense, the first large-scale paired egocentric video and surface electromyography (EMG) dataset. MotorSense pairs bimanual EMG bands with egocentric video and yields synchronized video, bimanual EMG and IMU, and audio across 100 hours of unscripted manipulation. EMG offers a powerful scalable alternative to manual annotation: it captures finger movement, hand configuration, and the forces exerted between hand and environment as …

Guidance methods are essential tools for steering the generation process in diffusion models, improving the generalizability of stochastic robotic controllers and enabling high-quality controlled image synthesis. Despite strong parallels between flow-matching and diffusion, integrating guidance into flow-matching models remains quite challenging. Recent work has proposed general guidance frameworks for flow-matching, however, they are direct adaptations of diffusion guidance methods and can prove unstable. In this work, we conduct a theoretical analysis of guidance in flow-matching and show …

Radio-frequency (RF) sensing enables robot ego-motion estimation in darkness, smoke, and fog, yet RF odometry remains challenging because multipath and moving reflectors make cross-frame matching highly ambiguous. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary inertial sensors or ground-truth pose supervision. We present RFWalk, a self-supervised, RF-only odometry framework that models dense correspondences across range-azimuth frames as random walks on a space-time graph and learns them from unlabeled sequences through temporal cycle consistency. To rule out correspondences that are …

Multi-objective reinforcement learning is a fundamental problem for modern AI, with applications spanning post-training, reasoning models, and robotic control. A central challenge is to learn policies that balance competing objectives, such as helpfulness versus honesty in safety and alignment, or speed versus energy in robotics. The optimal policy can vary sharply with objective-weighting combinations, and the extent of this variation depends crucially on the degree of conflict among objectives, making per-preference policy learning sample-inefficient. In this paper, we introduce …

Autonomous driving fundamentally demands dense understanding of visual, semantic, and geometric information, yet existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with sparse supervision such as language instructions or trajectory signals. This direct mapping from dense visual observations to sparse representations forces the model to compress or even discard critical scene information essential for safe driving. We argue that this limitation does not stem from insufficient model capacity, but from the lack of explicit mechanisms that encourage the formation of dense world …

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, the massive parameter scale of VLAs strains onboard computational resources during real-time inference. This directly increases energy consumption and limits vehicle battery range, making it critical to minimize computational overhead without compromising driving capability and explainability. Current research on efficient VLA-based driving focuses on sequential adaptation (\textit{e.g.}, Chain-of-Thought and token adjustment), leaving structural adaptation underexplored despite parameter …

Personalization is essential for general-purpose robots to transition into household environments and achieve true practicality. While general robotic manipulation has been extensively studied, personalized robotic manipulation (PeRM) lacks a controlled benchmark for separating task completion from preference satisfaction. We introduce LIBERO-PeRM, a benchmark for preference learning in embodied agents. LIBERO-PeRM studies five questions: 1) how policies follow preferences in zero-shot settings; 2) how they learn single preferences from demonstrations; 3) how efficiently they acquire …

Reinforcement-learning policies for robot locomotion can fail at deployment when operating conditions shift (e.g., rough or slippery terrain, payload changes, sensing degradation), and retraining or manual recalibration is often infeasible under on-device latency and memory constraints. We study test-time adaptation (TTA) for robotic control: adapting a pretrained policy online and in a self-supervised manner during execution, without access to rewards. Our starting point is a lightweight baseline that updates only the actor using a frozen pretrained critic as a deployment-time performance …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong promise in robotic manipulation, yet their post-training still predominantly relies on trajectory-level supervised imitation over robot demonstrations. While effective for learning feasible actions, this paradigm supervises policies to reproduce expert actions at each step, biasing them toward demonstration-specific action paths and providing limited guidance for recovering toward task-progress states once execution deviates from demonstrated trajectories. To address this limitation, we propose OGPO, an Offline Goal-conditioned Policy …

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as powerful foundations for robotic manipulation, but their reliance on fixed camera configurations during training makes them brittle to changes in camera count or pose during deployment. To overcome these limitations, we propose VersaCamVLA, a camera-configurable framework that decouples camera-set representation from action learning. VersaCamVLA learns a unified scene-token interface that maps an arbitrary, variable set of posed RGB views into fixed-size latent scene tokens. This is achieved via multi-signal target-view prediction and …

Modern data-driven decision-making methods, such as imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved great success in solving many complex tasks. However, these methods often suffer from serious control instability and robustness issues when applied in real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous driving, posing notable challenges for their practical deployment. We argue that this instability issue stems largely from their limitations in solely supervising and optimizing zeroth-order actions (i.e., the action labels), failing to account for higher-order action …

Offline MARL increasingly relies on generative policies to model multimodal joint behavior, typically by distilling a centralized teacher into decentralized one-step actors under the CTDE. We identify a failure mode at the teacher training stage: standard flow-based teachers pair noise with replay targets independently, so nearby noise samples can be routed toward conflicting coordination modes. The teacher then produces samples between valid modes, and because the distillation loss regresses each local actor onto the conditional mean of the teacher's output given local input, this error is …

Latent world models based on Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) are deterministic by design. While successful in fully observable scenarios, this paradigm breaks down when past observations and actions lead to multiple plausible future possibilities, e.g., due to occlusion. We introduce EpicWorldModel, a framework to train stochastic JEPAs for environments and tasks with inherent uncertainty under partially observability. We jointly train the EpicWorldModel predictor with its latent representation space to directly predict multiple potential future states using a flow-matching …

Visual token pruning is an effective way to accelerate vision-language models and is especially useful for vision-language-action (VLA) inference, where many visual tokens must be processed before predicting robot actions. Existing pruning methods usually estimate which tokens can be pruned based on attention scores or feature diversity, retaining tokens that are either highly attended or visually different from others. However, most of them use fixed pruning schedules, such as pruning once at a preset layer or pruning at uniformly spaced layers. Such schedules can be risky for VLA models, …

Dual-system Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models improve real-time robotic control by pairing a slow, reasoning-capable generalist with a fast specialist action expert. However, existing methods invoke the generalist at a fixed frequency, ignoring the fact that decision-making complexity varies throughout a rollout. This static strategy wastes computation in easy phases and can delay renewed reasoning when the scene changes unexpectedly. We propose TUD (Triggering generalist reasoning via predictive Uncertainty for Dual-system VLA), an adaptive inference framework that selectively skips …

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is classically solved using Lagrangian optimisation, by jointly optimising a primal-dual problem with gradient descent to obtain the optimal reward function parameters and corresponding optimal policy. While this algorithmic view of IRL has been highly influential, gradient-based reward updates only paint a partial picture, largely ignoring the geometry of the problem in occupancy space. In this paper, we present an occupancy-space view of reward updates in IRL. We leverage the insight that both the optimal solution and its geometry in occupancy space are …

This paper examines the role of Novel View Synthesis (NVS) in geometric representation learning. In principle, NVS should reason about 3D scene structure, thereby enabling transferable multi-view geometric representations. Yet, existing encoder-based NVS methods yield poor representations. This is not because of a lack of supervisory signal, but rather due to inconspicuous architectural choices: \textit{spatially expressive decoders} that dilute representational capabilities of the scene encoder, and \textit{low-level pixel-space targets} that hinder feature learning. We present SNAP, a …

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces a persistent trade-off. Expressive generative policies can represent multi-modal coordination in the data, but cannot distinguish high-value regions, while value-optimized policies exploit the learned Q-function but collapse the multi-modal into a single dominant mode. A single agent's mode collapse can break joint coordination, and simultaneous drift across agents can push the joint policy into unseen regions of the action space. We propose scalable coordination via optimal unified transport (SCOUT), the first offline MARL framework to …

Predictive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to improve robotic manipulation via future observation or world dynamics forecasting. However, existing approaches often fail to realize this potential and underperform direct action prediction models. We argue that these limitations stem from modality misalignment between observations and actions, together with joint optimization conflicts that drive learning away from an action-centric objective. To this end, we introduce ATI-VLA, an Action-Centric Predictive Vision-Language-Action framework via Actionable Alignment Then Adaptive Injection. …