Learning bimanual, contact-rich robot manipulation policies that generalize over... diverse objects has long been a challenge. Excited to share our work: Planning-Guided Diffusion Policy Learning for Generalizable Contact-Rich Bimanual Manipulation! 🧵1/nshow more

Track2Act: Our latest on training goal-conditioned policies for diverse... manipulation in the real-world. We train a model for embodiment-agnostic point track prediction from web videos combined with embodiment-specific residual policy learning 1/nshow more

Introducing Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME) A low-cost exoskeleton with... real-time haptic torque feedback for learning autonomous policies that perform highly force-mediated, tightly space-constrained, visually occluded, whole-body, and long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks. Using UME, the teleoperator can unsheathe a heavy metal sword completely blindfolded. 🧵1/Nshow more

How can we more effectively leverage robot data from... different embodiments for skill transfer? Excited to share that our new work, RoVi-Aug, has been accepted to Conference on Robot Learning as an oral paper！ WIth RoVi-Aug, you can augment an existing robot dataset into a different robot and different viewpoints. A policy trained on the augmented dataset can zero-shot deploy on the unseen target robot with significantly different camera angles! 🧵👇 🔗 Check out our paper:show more

Imitation learning is powerful, but hard to scale due... to lack of high quality data. Introducing Optimus: TAMP-supervised visuomotor transformers. Optimus solves over 300 long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages and 72 different objects. NVIDIA AI Developer CMU Robotics Institute 1/Nshow more

🚀 Excited to share our #ICLR2025 work on planning... with neural dynamics models! While our lab has developed diverse neural dynamics models for manipulating rigid, deformable, and granular objects, having the model alone doesn’t solve the problem—planning with it remains a challenge. 💡 Enter BaB-ND, led by Keyi and Jiangwei! We propose a scalable, GPU-accelerated branch-and-bound algorithm, inspired by neural network verification, to enable effective planning for diverse objects modeled with neural dynamics. 🔗 Project page (open-source + detailed docs!): 🎥 Watch the video to see T being pushed around obstacles, and check out Keyi’s thread for more details!show more

We’ve seen humanoid robots walk around for a while,... but when will they actually help with useful tasks in daily life? The challenge here is the diversity and complexity of real-world scenes. Our new work tackles this problem via 3D visuomotor policy learning. Using data from only 1 scene, our Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3) enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously pick&place objects, pour water, and wipe tables, in the wild open world. (and all these skills are useful, right?) Web: Fully open-sourced code:show more

Here’s a pretty weird and surprising result - retrieval-augmented... generation works unreasonably well for robot learning – but only when parameterized using difference vectors! We introduce Difference-Aware Retrieval Policies for Imitation Learning (DARP), a simple, semi-parametric RAG architecture for imitation learning that achieves gains of up to 200% over standard behavior cloning. No additional assumptions beyond BC, just a little architecture switch! The theory backing it up is pretty cool too and it works on real robots! :) Play with our website to understand better: 🧵(1/7)show more

It's been incredible to see neural networks working so... well on our humanoid robots Humanoids are crazy complex - an individual motor can rotate 360 degrees and you have 40+ joints. If you do the math, that means more possible robot states than atoms in the universe Figure has our own AI model called Helix that we've designed in-house. A single Helix neural network now outputs both manipulation and navigation, end-to-end from language and pixel input Every leap in machine learning has come from massive, diverse datasets. At Figure, we’re currently building the largest pretraining dataset for humanoids in history - excited to see what this unlocksshow more

✨ Any static 3D assets ➡️ 4D dynamic worlds.... Introducing CHORD, a universal framework for generating scene-level 4D dynamic motion from any static 3D inputs. It generalizes surprisingly well across a wide range of objects 🤯 and can even be used to learn robotics manipulation policy 🤖! Project page: Dive deeper in a 🧵: 1/nshow more

𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻... 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 — 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘀. Most robot learning systems assume failure is the end of learning. In our new work, we study whether robots can improve after deployment by learning from their own failures, without any human intervention, teleoperation, or corrective labels. The key idea is simple: human videos contain structure about how the world works. We use them to learn cross-embodiment representations of action, dynamics, and value, enabling a shared predictive space between human behavior and robot experience. This allows a new learning loop: 👉 pretrain on human videos 👉 deploy robot policy 👉 observe failures 👉 reinterpret failures using human priors 👉 improve autonomously We evaluate this across 7 real-world manipulation tasks, showing: 📈 40% → 81% success rate 🏆 Strong improvements over π0.6 RECAP and RISE ✔️ Zero human intervention during post-deployment improvement 🧬 Generalizes across robot embodiments and policy backbones A key finding is that explicit failure repair significantly outperforms failure reweighting, yielding substantially larger gains under identical data conditions (+25 pts vs +5 pts on the same π0.5 base policy). Overall, the results suggest a shift in how we think about robot learning: Human videos are not only for pretraining policies. They can provide the structure needed for continual self-improvement after deployment. 📄 Paper: 🌐 Project: I am grateful for working with the fantastic leads Hanzhi Chen and Anran Zhang, and our collaborators Simon Schaefer, Kejia Chen, Shi Chen, Daniel Cremers. Special thanks to Stefan Leutenegger for co-advising this project with me. ETH Zürich TU München Microsoft Check out Hanzhi's 🧵 for more detailsshow more

Haven't been to a conference in a while, really... excited to be at #NeurIPS2024! I'll be helping present 4 of our group's recent papers: 1. Overcoming the Sim-to-Real Gap: Leveraging Simulation to Learn to Explore for Real-World RL 2. Distributional Successor Features Enable Zero-Shot Policy Optimization 3. Learning to Cooperate with Humans using Generative Agents 4. Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learning Find more details on each paper and where to find us in this thread (1/6)show more

My mom has been telling me to work out... for a billion years but hey omma I finally did it LMAO 😭😂 I’m sorry it took this long!! I’m still learning how to improve my posture as I’m a noob 🥹 So excited to hit my goal body shape! 💪show more

🤔 How to fine-tune an Imitation Learning policy (e.g.,... Diffusion Policy, ACT) with RL? As an RL practitioner, I’ve been struggling with this problem for a while. Here’s why it’s tough: 1️⃣ Special designs (usually for multimodal action distributions) in modern IL models make them non-trivial to fine-tune by RL. 2️⃣ Large policy models + RL's poor sample efficiency = a nightmare But finally, we figured out a simple solution that works for any model architecture! 🌟 Check out our #ICLR2025 paper: “Policy Decorator: Model-Agnostic Online Refinement for Large Policy Models”, led by my amazing mentee Xiu Yuan. 🔗 🧵 Read more below!show more

Today, I’m excited to share that Glean has raised... over $260M in new funding at a $4.6B valuation co-led by Altimeter and DST Global, as well as launched exciting new product capabilities that together will enable Glean’s Work AI platform to expand its reach and deliver everyday AI for everyone at work. 🧵 #WorkAIForAllshow more

Robots don’t just need better brains. They need WAY... more real-world data. 🤖 And collecting high-quality dexterous robot data at scale is one of the hardest problems in physical AI. A fascinating approach is emerging: Wearable human demonstrations + structurally matched dexterous robots. Instead of humans directly teleoperating a robot, Chinese embodied AI startup X Square Robot's TwinDEX system captures the motion, contact, and visual information needed to train the robot — while keeping the data closer to the hardware that will actually execute the task. Early results show promising performance on tool use, fine manipulation, and complex contact-rich tasks. If this approach scales, it could change how we build real-world robotics datasets. The next frontier of physical AI might not be bigger models. It might be better data.show more

Robora Sim: A PyBullet-Powered Environment for Learning Robotic Physical... Intelligence We are currently building our Robora simulation environment setup for our sim based learning, leveraging PyBullet, an industry-standard physics engine widely used in AI-driven robotics research and development. The environment is optimized with GPU-accelerated learning algorithms, enabling high-speed imitation learning and reinforcement learning within a safe and controlled virtual setup before shipping out to real world. This simulation platform allows our models to learn, adapt, and generalize across different robot morphologies, terrain types and task objectives - all before deployment to the real world. At it's core, the system combines a VLA-powered high-level planner with low-level motion control algorithms, working cohesively to produce emergent, physically intelligent behaviors. This synergy between simulation, learning, and real-world transfer marks a major step forward in our pursuit of adaptive and intelligent robotic systems. Through advanced domain randomization and synthetic data generation, the Robora Simulation Environment ensures that policies trained in simulation transfer effectively to real-world robots, minimizing the sim-to-real gap. Moreover, users will be able to test and integrate their own hardware kits within selected simulation environments in the Robora Dapp, ensuring seamless compatibility and safer real-world implementation.show more

The Hidden Language of Diffusion Models paper page: tackle... the challenge of understanding concept representations in text-to-image models by decomposing an input text prompt into a small set of interpretable elements. This is achieved by learning a pseudo-token that is a sparse weighted combination of tokens from the model's vocabulary, with the objective of reconstructing the images generated for the given concept. Applied over the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, this decomposition reveals non-trivial and surprising structures in the representations of concepts. For example, we find that some concepts such as "a president" or "a composer" are dominated by specific instances (e.g., "Obama", "Biden") and their interpolations. Other concepts, such as "happiness" combine associated terms that can be concrete ("family", "laughter") or abstract ("friendship", "emotion"). In addition to peering into the inner workings of Stable Diffusion, our method also enables applications such as single-image decomposition to tokens, bias detection and mitigation, and semantic image manipulationshow more

𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲-𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻... 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱, 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘆 Modern VLAs and world-action models can perform impressive manipulation skills, but adapting them reliably to new robots and tasks remains challenging. A natural solution is DAgger-style online imitation learning: deploy the robot, collect human corrections, and update the policy. Yet foundation models are fragile in the low-data regime, fine-tuning on a handful of interventions can improve one behavior while degrading others. Online post-training or reinforcement learning can require costly data collection and exploration, making real-world learning expensive and potentially unsafe. In our new paper, 𝗙𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗗𝗔𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿, we take a different approach: 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹, 𝘄𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The key idea is 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: we map human corrective actions back into the latent noise space of the frozen generative policy. These latent targets train a lightweight controller that adapts the robot while preserving the original model's capabilities. Across simulation and real robots, FlowDAgger: 📈 Learns from only 5–20 human intervention episodes 🏆 Outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space reinforcement learning 🤖 Works across VLAs, diffusion policies, and world-action models ✔️ Provides reliable improvements without modifying the pretrained policy We believe this offers a practical path toward making robot foundation models improve during deployment, learning from the way humans naturally teach: through corrections. 📄 Paper: 🌐 Project: 💻 Code: This project was led by my amazing colleague Michael Murray with help from Daphne Chen, Simran Bagaria, Dean Fortier, Tess Hellebrekers, Harshavardhan Reddy Gajarla, Galen Mullins and Andrey Kolobov at Microsoft Research and Maya Cakmak at University of Washingtonshow more

Imagine having a ping pong robot! 🏓 Researchers and... developers building physical AI: meet Reachy 2 from Pollen Robotics, an open-source, humanoid robot for real-world experimentation. It’s a bimanual mobile manipulator: each 7-DOF arm mimics human proportions and can lift up to 3 kg, giving dexterity for object handling. It can be controlled with Python and ROS2 Humble, or go straight into VR teleoperation, use a headset to move Reachy’s arms, hands, and head, and see through its cameras as if you’re in the robot’s own body. Want it to move around? A mobile base with three omnidirectional wheels, rich sensors, and LiDAR lets Reachy 2 navigate and explore its surroundings smoothly. 🗺️ Under the hood, it’s powered by a CPU system that’s ready for machine learning, perfect for loading AI frameworks and testing new models from Hugging Face directly on the robot. Keep making robots more, and more accessible Pollen team! ... and keep making more open source models to make robots more mainstream clem 🤗!show more