GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Towards Efficient and Robust Manipulation via Multi-Frame Vision-Language-Action Modeling
Authors: Hao Li; Shuai Yang; Yilun Chen; Xinyi Chen; Xiaoda Yang; Yang Tian; Hanqing Wang; Tai Wang; Dahua Lin; Feng Zhao; Jiangmiao Pang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation. However, these models remain constrained by the single-frame image paradigm and fail to fully leverage the temporal information offered by multi-frame histories, as directly feeding multiple frames into VLM backbones incurs substantial computational overhead and inference latency. We propose CronusVLA, a unified framework that extends single-frame VLA models to the multi-frame paradigm. CronusVLA follows a two-stage process: (1) Single-frame pretraining on large-scale embodied datasets with autoregressive prediction of action tokens, establishing an effective embodied vision-language foundation; (2) Multi-frame post-training, which adapts the prediction of the vision-language backbone from discrete tokens to learnable features, and aggregates historical information via feature chunking. CronusVLA effectively addresses the existing challenges of multi-frame modeling while enhancing performance. To evaluate the robustness under temporal and spatial disturbances, we introduce SimplerEnv-OR, a novel benchmark featuring 24 types of observational disturbances and 120 severity levels. Experiments across three embodiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that CronusVLA achieves leading performance and superior robustness, with a 70.9% success rate on SimplerEnv, a 26.8% improvement over OpenVLA on LIBERO, and the highest robustness score on SimplerEnv-OR, showing the promise of efficient multi-frame adaptation for real-world VLA deployment.
SemanticVLA: Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Wei Li; Renshan Zhang; Rui Shao; Zhijian Fang; Kaiwen Zhou; Zhuotao Tian; Liqiang Nie
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced in robotic manipulation, yet practical deployment remains hindered by two key limitations: **1) perceptual redundancy**, where irrelevant visual inputs are processed inefficiently, and **2) superficial instruction-vision alignment**, which hampers semantic grounding of actions.
In this paper, we propose **SemanticVLA**, a novel VLA framework that performs Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation. Specifically:
**1)** To sparsify redundant perception while preserving semantic alignment, **Semantic-guided Dual Visual Pruner (SD-Pruner)** performs: Instruction-driven Pruner (ID-Pruner) extracts global action cues and local semantic anchors in SigLIP; Spatial-aggregation Pruner (SA-Pruner) compacts geometry-rich features into task-adaptive tokens in DINOv2.
**2)** To exploit sparsified features and integrate semantics with spatial geometry, **Semantic-complementary Hierarchical Fuser (SH-Fuser)** fuses dense patches and sparse tokens across SigLIP and DINOv2 for coherent representation.
**3)** To enhance the transformation from perception to action, **Semantic-conditioned Action Coupler (SA-Coupler)** replaces the conventional observation-to-DoF approach, yielding more efficient and interpretable behavior modeling for manipulation tasks.
Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world tasks show that SemanticVLA sets a new SOTA in both performance and efficiency. SemanticVLA surpasses OpenVLA on LIBERO benchmark by **21.1%** in success rate, while reducing training cost and inference latency by **3.0×** and **2.7×**.
LiDARCrafter: Dynamic 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences
Authors: Alan Liang; Youquan Liu; Yu Yang; Dongyue Lu; Linfeng Li; Lingdong Kong; Huaici Zhao; Wei Tsang Ooi
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generative world models have become essential data engines for autonomous driving, yet most focus on videos or occupancy grids and overlook the unique challenges of LiDAR. Extending LiDAR generation to dynamic 4D modeling requires addressing controllability, temporal coherence, and standardized evaluation. We present LiDARCrafter, a unified framework for controllable 4D LiDAR generation and editing. Free-form language instructions are converted into ego-centric scene graphs that guide a tri-branch diffusion model to generate object geometry, motion, and structural priors. An autoregressive module further produces temporally coherent and stable LiDAR sequences with improved global consistency. To enable fair comparison, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering scene-, object-, and sequence-level metrics for rigorous and reproducible evaluation. Experiments on nuScenes show that LiDARCrafter achieves state-of-the-art fidelity, controllability, and temporal consistency, paving the way for scalable data augmentation and realistic simulation in diverse scenarios. Code have been publicly available at https://lidarcrafter.github.io.
Cook and Clean Together: Teaching Embodied Agents for Parallel Task Execution
Authors: Dingkang Liang; Cheng Zhang; Xiaopeng Xu; Jianzhong Ju; Zhenbo Luo; Xiang Bai
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Task scheduling has become increasingly critical for embodied AI, where agents need to follow natural language instructions and execute actions efficiently in 3D physical worlds. Existing datasets for task planning in 3D environments often simplify the problem, lacking operations research knowledge for task scheduling and 3D grounding for real-world applications. In this work, we propose Operations Research Knowledge-based 3D Grounded Task Scheduling (OKS3D), a new task that requires synerization of language understanding, 3D grounding, and efficiency optimization for embodied agents. OKS3D reflects real-world demands by requiring agents to generate efficient, step-by-step schedules that are grounded in 3D space. To facilitate research on OKS3D, we construct a large-scale dataset called OKS3D-60K, comprising 60K tasks across 4K real-world scenes. Furthermore, we propose GRANT, an embodied multi-modal large language model equipped with a simple yet effective scheduling token mechanism to generate efficient task schedules and grounded actions. Extensive experiments on the OKS3D-60K dataset validate the effectiveness of GRANT across language understanding, 3D grounding, and scheduling efficiency.
A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation
Authors: Jiaqi Liang; Yue Chen; Qize Yu; Yan Shen; Haipeng Zhang; Hao Dong; Ruihai Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dual-arm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. 
To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. 
We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions.
We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.
Whole-Body Coordination for Dynamic Object Grasping with Legged Manipulators
Authors: Qiwei Liang; Boyang Cai; Rongyi He; Hui Li; Tao Teng; Haihan Duan; Changxin Huang; Runhao Zeng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Quadrupedal robots with manipulators offer strong mobility and adaptability for grasping in unstructured, dynamic environments through coordinated whole-body control. However, existing research has predominantly focused on static-object grasping, neglecting the challenges posed by dynamic targets and thus limiting applicability in dynamic scenarios such as logistics sorting and human–robot collaboration. To address this, we introduce DQ-Bench, a new benchmark that systematically evaluates dynamic grasping across varying object motions, velocities, heights, object types, and terrain complexities, along with comprehensive evaluation metrics. Building upon this benchmark, we propose DQ-Net, a compact teacher–student framework designed to infer grasp configurations from limited perceptual cues. During training, the teacher network leverages privileged information to holistically model both the static geometric properties and dynamic motion characteristics of the target, and integrates a grasp fusion module to deliver robust guidance for motion planning. Concurrently, we design a lightweight student network that performs dual-viewpoint temporal modeling using only the target mask, depth map, and proprioceptive state, enabling closed-loop action outputs without reliance on privileged data. Extensive experiments on DQ-Bench demonstrate that DQ-Net achieves robust dynamic objects grasping across multiple task settings, substantially outperforming baseline methods in both success rate and responsiveness. We will release our codebase and benchmark publicly.
Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration for Base Placement in Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation
Authors: Tzu-Jung Lin; Jia-Fong Yeh; Hung-Ting Su; Chung-Yi Lin; Yi-Ting Chen; Winston H. Hsu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM), task success often hinges on the selection of an appropriate base placement for the robot. Existing approaches typically navigate to proximity-based regions without considering affordances, resulting in frequent manipulation failures. We propose Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration, a zero-shot framework for base placement that integrates semantic understanding from vision-language models (VLMs) with geometric feasibility through an iterative optimization process. Our method constructs cross-modal representations, namely Affordance RGB and Obstacle Map+, to align semantics with spatial context. This enables reasoning that extends beyond the egocentric limitations of RGB perception. To ensure interaction is guided by task-relevant affordances, we leverage coarse semantic priors from VLMs to guide the search toward task-relevant regions and refine placements with geometric constraints, thereby reducing the risk of convergence to local optima. Evaluated on five diverse open-vocabulary mobile manipulation tasks, our system achieves an 85% success rate, significantly outperforming classical geometric planners and VLM-based methods. This demonstrates the promise of affordance-aware and multimodal reasoning for generalizable, instruction-conditioned planning in OVMM.
TTF-VLA: Temporal Token Fusion via Pixel-Attention Integration for Vision-Language-Action Models
Authors: Chenghao Liu; Jiachen Zhang; Chengxuan Li; Zhimu Zhou; Shixin Wu; Songfang Huang; Huiling Duan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models process visual inputs independently at each timestep, discarding valuable temporal information inherent in robotic manipulation tasks. This frame-by-frame processing makes models vulnerable to visual noise while ignoring the substantial coherence between consecutive frames in manipulation sequences. We propose Temporal Token Fusion (TTF), a training-free approach that intelligently integrates historical and current visual representations to enhance VLA inference quality. Our method employs dual-dimension detection combining efficient grayscale pixel difference analysis with attention-based semantic relevance assessment, enabling selective temporal token fusion through hard fusion strategies and keyframe anchoring to prevent error accumulation. Comprehensive experiments across LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and real robot tasks demonstrate consistent improvements: 4.0 percentage points average on LIBERO (72.4% vs 68.4% baseline), cross-environment validation on SimplerEnv (4.8% relative improvement), and 8.7% relative improvement on real robot tasks. Our approach proves model-agnostic, working across OpenVLA and VLA-Cache architectures. Notably, TTF reveals that selective Query matrix reuse in attention mechanisms enhances rather than compromises performance, suggesting promising directions for direct KQV matrix reuse strategies that achieve computational acceleration while improving task success rates.
FoAM: Foresight-Augmented Multi-Task Imitation Policy for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Litao Liu; Wentao Wang; Yifan Han; Zhuoli Xie; Pengfei Yi; Junyan Li; Wenzhao Lian
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-task imitation learning (MTIL) has shown significant potential in robotic manipulation by enabling agents to perform various tasks using a single policy. It simplifies the policy deployment and enhances the agent's adaptability across different scenarios. However, key challenges remain, such as maintaining action reliability (e.g., avoiding abnormal action sequences that deviate from nominal task trajectories) and generalizing to unseen tasks with a few expert demonstrations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Foresight-Augmented Manipulation (FoAM) policy, a novel MTIL policy that pioneers the use of multi-modal goal conditions as input and introduces a foresight augmentation in addition to the general action reconstruction. FoAM enables the agent to reason about its actions' visual consequences (foresight) and to be guided by these more expressive representations during task execution. Extensive experiments on over 100 tasks in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that FoAM significantly enhances MTIL policy performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 41% in success rate. We released our simulation suites that include over 80 challenging tasks across more than 10 scenarios designed for manipulation policy training and evaluation.
Intention-Aware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Yu Liu; Zhijie Liu; Xiao Ren; Youfu Li; He Kong
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for the path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. Recent diffusion-based models have shown promising results in capturing the inherent stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, the absence of explicit semantic modelling of pedestrian intent in many diffusion-based methods may result in misinterpreted behaviors and reduced prediction accuracy. To address the above challenges, we propose a diffusion-based pedestrian trajectory prediction framework that incorporates both short-term and long-term motion intentions. Short-term intent is modelled using a residual polar representation, which decouples direction and magnitude to capture fine-grained local motion patterns. Long-term intent is estimated through a learnable, token-based endpoint predictor that generates multiple candidate goals with associated probabilities, enabling multimodal and context-aware intention modelling. Furthermore, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating adaptive guidance and a residual noise predictor that dynamically refines denoising accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated on the widely used ETH, UCY, NBA, and SDD benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.
SIAM: Towards Generalizable Articulated Object Modeling via Single Robot-Object Interaction
Authors: Yuyan Liu; Li Zhang; Di Wu; Yan Zhang; Anran Huang; Zhi Wang; Liu Liu; Dan Guo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Articulated object modeling, which represents interconnected rigid bodies with their geometry, part segmentation, articulation tree, and physical properties, is crucial for robotic perception and manipulation. Recently existing methods like SAGCI leverage Interactive Perception (IP) to refine models through robot interaction. However, SAGCI suffers from prior-dependency (requiring initialization), neglects kinematic/dynamic constraints, and generates non-watertight meshes. To overcome these limitations, we propose SIAM, a novel framework for efficient and generalizable Single-Interaction Articulated Modeling. Given an initial point cloud, SIAM first enables minimal robot interaction to trigger object motion. It then precisely segments parts by analyzing point cloud differences pre- and post-interaction. For joint parameter estimation, we introduce an optimization incorporating novel kinematic energy constraints, enhancing physical consistency. Finally, we reconstruct a high-quality, topologically watertight mesh by learning 3D Gaussian Primitives from multi-view RGB-D observations under deformation. Extensive experiments on the PartNet-Mobility benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art articulation modeling performance. Successful real-world deployment with an xArm robot further validates the framework's practicality and transferability. SIAM achieves accurate, prior-free modeling with significantly reduced interaction cost.
DNOI-4DRO: Deep 4D Radar Odometry with Differentiable Neural-Optimization Iterations
Authors: Shouyi Lu; Huanyu Zhou; Guirong Zhuo; Xiao Tang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: A novel learning-optimization-combined 4D radar odometry model, named DNOI-4DRO, is proposed in this paper. The proposed model seamlessly integrates traditional geometric optimization with end-to-end neural network training, leveraging an innovative differentiable neural-optimization iteration operator. In this framework, point-wise motion flow is first estimated using a neural network, followed by the construction of a cost function based on the relationship between point motion and pose in 3D space. The radar pose is then refined using Gauss-Newton updates. Additionally, we design a dual-stream 4D radar backbone that integrates multi-scale geometric features and clustering-based class-aware features to enhance the representation of sparse 4D radar point clouds. Extensive experiments on the VoD and Snail-Radar datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model, which outperforms recent classical and learning-based approaches. Notably, our method even achieves results comparable to A-LOAM with mapping optimization using LiDAR point clouds as input.
TouchFormer: A Robust Transformer-based Framework for Multimodal Material Perception
Authors: Kailin Lyu; Long Xiao; Jianing Zeng; Junhao Dong; Xuexin Liu; Zhuojun Zou; Haoyue Yang; Lin Shu; Jie Hao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Traditional vision-based material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer. Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation.
UrbanNav: Learning Language-Guided Embodied Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Human Trajectories
Authors: Yanghong Mei; Yirong Yang; Longteng Guo; Qunbo Wang; Ming-Ming Yu; Xingjian He; Wenjun Wu; Jing Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or off-street environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.
Autonomous Vehicle Path Planning by Searching with Differentiable Simulation
Authors: Asen Nachkov; Jan-Nico Zaech; Danda Pani Paudel; Xi Wang; Luc Van Gool
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Planning allows an agent to safely refine its actions before executing them in the real world. In autonomous driving, this is crucial to avoid collisions and navigate in complex, dense traffic scenarios. One way to plan is to search for the best action sequence. However, this is challenging when all necessary components – policy, next-state predictor, and critic – have to be learned. Here we propose Differentiable Simulation for Search (DSS), a framework that leverages the differentiable simulator Waymax as both a next state predictor and a critic. It relies on the simulator’s hardcoded dynamics, making state predictions highly accurate, while utilizing the simulator’s differentiability to effectively search across action sequences. Our DSS agent optimizes its actions using gradient descent over imagined future trajectories. We show experimentally that DSS – the combination of planning gradients and stochastic search – significantly improves tracking and path planning accuracy compared to sequence prediction, imitation learning, model-free RL, and other planning methods.