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30 minutes of video. Robot learns the task. Open-source, end-to-end. An open-source framework for training robot policies from only 30 minutes of human egocentric videos captured via Meta Aria glasses: Achieving zero-shot transfer to robots without any robot data collection. The method relies on Interaction-Centric Tokens that encode hand-object...

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Ilir Aliu

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17,077 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Robotics keeps hitting the same wall. Single task RL works, but... it does not scale to hundreds of tasks or new embodiments. This new paper looks like a real step toward fixing that. The team introduces MMBench, a benchmark with 200 tasks across many domains and robots, and Newt, a language conditioned world model trained online across all 200 tasks at once. The simple idea behind Newt: The model learns from demos to get the right priors It trains across many tasks through online interaction It uses language to ground the goal It adapts fast when a new task shows up What stood out to me: ✅ One model trained on 200 tasks at the same time ✅ Language conditioned control for both states and RGB ✅ Better data efficiency than strong baselines ✅ Strong open loop control ✅ Fast adaptation to new tasks and embodiments ✅ Full release of 200 checkpoints, 4000 demos, code, and benchmark This is a good push toward general control instead of one model per task. If you want the full paper: Project page: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
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Robotics keeps hitting the same wall. Single task RL works, but... it does not scale to hundreds of tasks or new embodiments. This new paper looks like a real step toward fixing that. The team introduces MMBench, a benchmark with 200 tasks across many domains and robots, and Newt, a language conditioned world model trained online across all 200 tasks at once. The simple idea behind Newt: The model learns from demos to get the right priors It trains across many tasks through online interaction It uses language to ground the goal It adapts fast when a new task shows up What stood out to me: ✅ One model trained on 200 tasks at the same time ✅ Language conditioned control for both states and RGB ✅ Better data efficiency than strong baselines ✅ Strong open loop control ✅ Fast adaptation to new tasks and embodiments ✅ Full release of 200 checkpoints, 4000 demos, code, and benchmark This is a good push toward general control instead of one model per task. If you want the full paper: Project page: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

70,090 views • 8 months ago

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷
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A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷

Axis Robotics

27,858 views • 7 months ago

🚀 Introducing EgoExo Forge - built on top of Rerun, Gradio, and Hugging Face hub (I’ll be in San Francisco July 21–29 — if you’re into robotics, egocentric AI, large-scale data collection, or just want to chat, DM me!) In my opinion, large-scale, diverse, and high-quality data is still the largest bottleneck for generalized robotics deployment. I believe that some version of imitation learning from human examples will be the most scalable + clean way to train humanoid robots 🤖 (similar to what Tesla did for Full Self Driving). Teleop is too expensive to collect a large enough dataset in a reasonable manner, so passive collection via egocentric (and in certain cases, exocentric) views feels like the right bet. Over the past few months, I've been trying to build out the scaffolding for this and using Rerun as my underlying infrastructure. Data being collected needs to be easily inspectable + time series and rerun provides the right tooling for this. My goal is to first build out a ground truth representative dataset from already existing open source data, generate some reasonable baselines, and then go out and collect my own data that adheres to the defined schema. 🔍 Starting with open-source datasets 1. EgoDex from Apple 2. HOCap from Nvidia and the University of Texas at Dallas 3. Assembly101 from Meta All these different datasets have different sensor configurations + annotations, so my goal with egoexo-forge is to have one consistent labeling scheme + data layout. I built a data pipeline that aligns all of the different datasets in one general schema assuming the COCO133 keypoint layout that allows for exo+ego, ego only, or exo only Since the scaffolding is already there, it becomes MUCH easier to add other datasets. So the next ones that I'll be including are HD-EPIC kitchens dataset, HOT3D, and finally my own personal iPhone + insta360 go collection method. Once I have a diverse variety of datasets, I'll double down on what I believe to be the key algorithms required to make useful data for imitation learning 📊 1. Camera Pose estimation via SLAM/SFM for ego perspective (and automatic calibration for exo) 2. Human pose estimation for both egocentric + exocentric views 3. Metric 3D reconstruction + object tracking I'll be setting up reasonable open-source baselines for each of these to validate that these datasets work, and then finally try to use the generated datasets for some imitation learning via the pi0-lerobot repo I've been working on. I plan on making a blog post + providing more info on all of this in the near future so stay tuned
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🚀 Introducing EgoExo Forge - built on top of Rerun, Gradio, and Hugging Face hub (I’ll be in San Francisco July 21–29 — if you’re into robotics, egocentric AI, large-scale data collection, or just want to chat, DM me!) In my opinion, large-scale, diverse, and high-quality data is still the largest bottleneck for generalized robotics deployment. I believe that some version of imitation learning from human examples will be the most scalable + clean way to train humanoid robots 🤖 (similar to what Tesla did for Full Self Driving). Teleop is too expensive to collect a large enough dataset in a reasonable manner, so passive collection via egocentric (and in certain cases, exocentric) views feels like the right bet. Over the past few months, I've been trying to build out the scaffolding for this and using Rerun as my underlying infrastructure. Data being collected needs to be easily inspectable + time series and rerun provides the right tooling for this. My goal is to first build out a ground truth representative dataset from already existing open source data, generate some reasonable baselines, and then go out and collect my own data that adheres to the defined schema. 🔍 Starting with open-source datasets 1. EgoDex from Apple 2. HOCap from Nvidia and the University of Texas at Dallas 3. Assembly101 from Meta All these different datasets have different sensor configurations + annotations, so my goal with egoexo-forge is to have one consistent labeling scheme + data layout. I built a data pipeline that aligns all of the different datasets in one general schema assuming the COCO133 keypoint layout that allows for exo+ego, ego only, or exo only Since the scaffolding is already there, it becomes MUCH easier to add other datasets. So the next ones that I'll be including are HD-EPIC kitchens dataset, HOT3D, and finally my own personal iPhone + insta360 go collection method. Once I have a diverse variety of datasets, I'll double down on what I believe to be the key algorithms required to make useful data for imitation learning 📊 1. Camera Pose estimation via SLAM/SFM for ego perspective (and automatic calibration for exo) 2. Human pose estimation for both egocentric + exocentric views 3. Metric 3D reconstruction + object tracking I'll be setting up reasonable open-source baselines for each of these to validate that these datasets work, and then finally try to use the generated datasets for some imitation learning via the pi0-lerobot repo I've been working on. I plan on making a blog post + providing more info on all of this in the near future so stay tuned

Pablo Vela

32,085 views • 1 year ago

Trained on zero real-world data. Learned to walk, pick up boxes, and follow multi-step instructions... in the REAL world. ( 📌 Paper below) Researchers from Amazon FAR, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU scanned real rooms with an iPhone, rebuilt them as 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, then generated 48,000 synthetic trajectories of a Unitree G1 walking, grasping, and placing objects inside those virtual replicas. They rendered the robot's first-person camera view from each run and paired it with the matching language instruction and motion data. That's the dataset every humanoid team needs and nobody has: synced egocentric video + language + kinematics, at scale. Instead of collecting it in the real world, they manufactured it. They trained a vision-language-kinematics policy on that synthetic data alone, then deployed it on the physical G1 across five task types: navigation to a named object, lifting boxes of three different sizes with no per-size tuning, chained multi-step tasks, robustness to mid-task layout changes and flickering lights, and multi-minute long-horizon runs. No real-world fine-tuning at any point. Real-world interaction data has been the hard limit on humanoid learning... slow, expensive, and small. If scanning a room once and synthesizing thousands of labeled interactions holds up as a general recipe, that limit moves. Data stops being the bottleneck robotics teams have to solve for. 📌 Paper: Project: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
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Trained on zero real-world data. Learned to walk, pick up boxes, and follow multi-step instructions... in the REAL world. ( 📌 Paper below) Researchers from Amazon FAR, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU scanned real rooms with an iPhone, rebuilt them as 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, then generated 48,000 synthetic trajectories of a Unitree G1 walking, grasping, and placing objects inside those virtual replicas. They rendered the robot's first-person camera view from each run and paired it with the matching language instruction and motion data. That's the dataset every humanoid team needs and nobody has: synced egocentric video + language + kinematics, at scale. Instead of collecting it in the real world, they manufactured it. They trained a vision-language-kinematics policy on that synthetic data alone, then deployed it on the physical G1 across five task types: navigation to a named object, lifting boxes of three different sizes with no per-size tuning, chained multi-step tasks, robustness to mid-task layout changes and flickering lights, and multi-minute long-horizon runs. No real-world fine-tuning at any point. Real-world interaction data has been the hard limit on humanoid learning... slow, expensive, and small. If scanning a room once and synthesizing thousands of labeled interactions holds up as a general recipe, that limit moves. Data stops being the bottleneck robotics teams have to solve for. 📌 Paper: Project: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

12,950 views • 1 month ago

Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
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Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

38,997 views • 8 months ago

Robot Utility Models (RUMs) enable basic tasks – door opening, drawer opening, object reorientation, etc. – at ~90% accuracy without ANY finetuning (i.e. zero-shot) in unseen new environments. Fully open source!!! models, data, code & hw. We think this is super exciting, why?👇 1. Unlocks many practical home utility tasks that often involve these basic tasks as part of an action chain. “Go get me a fork” involves opening the kitchen door and then opening the cutlery drawer. 2. This works well **zero-shot in unseen and new** environments, which is practically a huge deal. Turn the robot on, and get going. 3. The recipe for building a new model is fairly generic, and we think with a bit more refinement this can be a general recipe to build many more Utility models. More details and access 👇
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Robot Utility Models (RUMs) enable basic tasks – door opening, drawer opening, object reorientation, etc. – at ~90% accuracy without ANY finetuning (i.e. zero-shot) in unseen new environments. Fully open source!!! models, data, code & hw. We think this is super exciting, why?👇 1. Unlocks many practical home utility tasks that often involve these basic tasks as part of an action chain. “Go get me a fork” involves opening the kitchen door and then opening the cutlery drawer. 2. This works well **zero-shot in unseen and new** environments, which is practically a huge deal. Turn the robot on, and get going. 3. The recipe for building a new model is fairly generic, and we think with a bit more refinement this can be a general recipe to build many more Utility models. More details and access 👇

Mahi Shafiullah 🏠🤖

89,535 views • 1 year ago

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 details
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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 details

Oier Mees

12,379 views • 1 month ago

𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: "𝗪𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 - 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗩𝗟𝗔 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘇𝘆!" Let's talk about what's actually happening in that "A" (Action) part of your VLA model. The Vision and Language components? They're incredible. Pre-trained on internet-scale data, they understand objects, spatial relationships, and task instructions better than ever. But the Action component? That's still learned from scratch on your specific robot demonstrations. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: Your VLA model has internet-scale understanding of what a screwdriver looks like and what "tighten the screw" means. But the actual motor pattern for "rotating wrist while applying downward pressure"? That comes from your 500 robot demos. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 "𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻": • 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Recognises novel objects instantly (thanks to pre-training) • 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Understands new task instructions (thanks to pre-training) • 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Still limited to motor patterns seen during robot training Ask that same robot to "unscrew the bottle cap" and it fails because: • Vision: Recognises bottle and cap • Language: Understands "unscrew" • Action: Never learned the "twist while pulling" motor pattern 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗩𝗟𝗔 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀: The "VL" gives you incredible zero-shot understanding. The "A" still requires task-specific demonstrations. We've cracked the perception and reasoning problem. We haven't cracked the motor generalisation problem.
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𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: "𝗪𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 - 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗩𝗟𝗔 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘇𝘆!" Let's talk about what's actually happening in that "A" (Action) part of your VLA model. The Vision and Language components? They're incredible. Pre-trained on internet-scale data, they understand objects, spatial relationships, and task instructions better than ever. But the Action component? That's still learned from scratch on your specific robot demonstrations. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: Your VLA model has internet-scale understanding of what a screwdriver looks like and what "tighten the screw" means. But the actual motor pattern for "rotating wrist while applying downward pressure"? That comes from your 500 robot demos. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 "𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻": • 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Recognises novel objects instantly (thanks to pre-training) • 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Understands new task instructions (thanks to pre-training) • 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Still limited to motor patterns seen during robot training Ask that same robot to "unscrew the bottle cap" and it fails because: • Vision: Recognises bottle and cap • Language: Understands "unscrew" • Action: Never learned the "twist while pulling" motor pattern 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗩𝗟𝗔 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀: The "VL" gives you incredible zero-shot understanding. The "A" still requires task-specific demonstrations. We've cracked the perception and reasoning problem. We haven't cracked the motor generalisation problem.

Stephen James

51,356 views • 1 year ago

🛠️ What if a robot could invent its own tools. And teach itself how to use them? That’s exactly what VLMgineer does: a new framework that lets Vision Language Models (VLMs) design physical tools and the actions to use them, entirely on their own. No templates. No human demonstrations. Just raw, AI-driven creativity. Why it matters ✅ Co-designs tools and actions together using VLMs, ensuring tight coupling between form and function ✅ Uses VLM-guided evolution (not random search) to refine designs intelligently ✅ Outperforms human-designed tools by +64.7% in task success across 12 RoboToolBench challenges ✅ Produces better-than-everyday tools for real manipulation tasks—measured in success rate and elegance It builds on the emerging trend of large-model-guided evolutionary design (like Eureka and AlphaEvolve) and brings it into physical robotics. It opens the door to general-purpose, automated hardware design, no strong priors needed. Code & paper: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:
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🛠️ What if a robot could invent its own tools. And teach itself how to use them? That’s exactly what VLMgineer does: a new framework that lets Vision Language Models (VLMs) design physical tools and the actions to use them, entirely on their own. No templates. No human demonstrations. Just raw, AI-driven creativity. Why it matters ✅ Co-designs tools and actions together using VLMs, ensuring tight coupling between form and function ✅ Uses VLM-guided evolution (not random search) to refine designs intelligently ✅ Outperforms human-designed tools by +64.7% in task success across 12 RoboToolBench challenges ✅ Produces better-than-everyday tools for real manipulation tasks—measured in success rate and elegance It builds on the emerging trend of large-model-guided evolutionary design (like Eureka and AlphaEvolve) and brings it into physical robotics. It opens the door to general-purpose, automated hardware design, no strong priors needed. Code & paper: —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

13,984 views • 8 months ago

Depth Any Video with Scalable Synthetic Data AI physicists and chemists continue to make strides in depth estimation from video. Check out this new paper featuring some impressive examples. See the thread for more details (unfortunately no code yet). Abstract: Video depth estimation has long been hindered by the scarcity of consistent and scalable ground truth data, leading to inconsistent and unreliable results. In this paper, we introduce Depth Any Video, a model that tackles the challenge through two key innovations. First, we develop a scalable synthetic data pipeline, capturing real-time video depth data from diverse game environments, yielding 40,000 video clips of 5-second duration, each with precise depth annotations. Second, we leverage the powerful priors of generative video diffusion models to handle real-world videos effectively, integrating advanced techniques such as rotary position encoding and flow matching to further enhance flexibility and efficiency. Unlike previous models, which are limited to fixed-length video sequences, our approach introduces a novel mixed-duration training strategy that handles videos of varying lengths and performs robustly across different frame rates 0 - even on single frames. At inference, we propose a depth interpolation method that enables our model to infer high-resolution video depth across sequences of up to 150 frames. Our model outperforms all previous generative depth models in terms of spatial accuracy and temporal consistency.
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Depth Any Video with Scalable Synthetic Data AI physicists and chemists continue to make strides in depth estimation from video. Check out this new paper featuring some impressive examples. See the thread for more details (unfortunately no code yet). Abstract: Video depth estimation has long been hindered by the scarcity of consistent and scalable ground truth data, leading to inconsistent and unreliable results. In this paper, we introduce Depth Any Video, a model that tackles the challenge through two key innovations. First, we develop a scalable synthetic data pipeline, capturing real-time video depth data from diverse game environments, yielding 40,000 video clips of 5-second duration, each with precise depth annotations. Second, we leverage the powerful priors of generative video diffusion models to handle real-world videos effectively, integrating advanced techniques such as rotary position encoding and flow matching to further enhance flexibility and efficiency. Unlike previous models, which are limited to fixed-length video sequences, our approach introduces a novel mixed-duration training strategy that handles videos of varying lengths and performs robustly across different frame rates 0 - even on single frames. At inference, we propose a depth interpolation method that enables our model to infer high-resolution video depth across sequences of up to 150 frames. Our model outperforms all previous generative depth models in terms of spatial accuracy and temporal consistency.

MrNeRF

27,428 views • 1 year ago

This work makes a humanoid robot do simple parkour moves by looking with a depth camera and choosing the right move on the fly. The big deal is that it turns lots of small human moves into long, real-time robot behavior, without hand-coding every transition or retraining for each new course. A humanoid robot is usually good at steady walking, but it often fails when it has to do fast moves like jumping up, vaulting, or rolling, and then keep going to the next obstacle. The hard part is that you cannot easily collect training data for every possible obstacle shape, distance, and mistake, so robots end up learning a few moves that only work in a narrow setup. This work starts from short clips of real human parkour moves, like stepping over, vaulting, climbing, and rolling. It uses motion matching, which is basically a smart “pick the next clip that fits best right now” search, to stitch those short clips into a long, smooth plan that looks like a human doing a whole course. Then it trains a controller with reinforcement learning (RL), which means the robot learns by trial and error to copy that plan while staying balanced and not falling. After training separate expert controllers for different moves, it compresses them into 1 controller that uses only onboard depth sensing and a simple “go this fast in this direction” command. In real tests on a Unitree G1 humanoid, it can clear multiple obstacles in a row, adapt when obstacles get moved, and climb a wall up to 1.25m.
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This work makes a humanoid robot do simple parkour moves by looking with a depth camera and choosing the right move on the fly. The big deal is that it turns lots of small human moves into long, real-time robot behavior, without hand-coding every transition or retraining for each new course. A humanoid robot is usually good at steady walking, but it often fails when it has to do fast moves like jumping up, vaulting, or rolling, and then keep going to the next obstacle. The hard part is that you cannot easily collect training data for every possible obstacle shape, distance, and mistake, so robots end up learning a few moves that only work in a narrow setup. This work starts from short clips of real human parkour moves, like stepping over, vaulting, climbing, and rolling. It uses motion matching, which is basically a smart “pick the next clip that fits best right now” search, to stitch those short clips into a long, smooth plan that looks like a human doing a whole course. Then it trains a controller with reinforcement learning (RL), which means the robot learns by trial and error to copy that plan while staying balanced and not falling. After training separate expert controllers for different moves, it compresses them into 1 controller that uses only onboard depth sensing and a simple “go this fast in this direction” command. In real tests on a Unitree G1 humanoid, it can clear multiple obstacles in a row, adapt when obstacles get moved, and climb a wall up to 1.25m.

Rohan Paul

37,121 views • 6 months ago

You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AI
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You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AI

Jonathan Stephens

17,712 views • 7 months ago

Furniture assembly is the task everyone name-drops and nobody actually attempts at real scale. Every demo I have seen is a scaled down IKEA leg or a single arm on a toy chair. This paper does it properly, real scale, bimanual, up to 7 subtasks and 1,550 control steps per episode, and it is validated on a real Kinova Gen3, not just in sim. That real-robot number is the one that matters: only a 16 percent drop on the hardest task going from simulation to hardware. That is a small enough gap to take seriously, and it did not happen by accident. They built a VR teleoperation rig specifically for coordinated dual-arm collection, because generic single-arm teleop setups do not capture the coordination real assembly needs, and the model predicts a continuous progress signal alongside the action chunk rather than a discrete subtask label, letting it auto-transition and catch drift before it compounds into total failure. The simulation ablation is what got them there, 48 to 80 percent over baselines, with another 21 points from their perception and control design study alone, but that is groundwork, not the headline. Watch the video, there is a clip of the robot misgrasping the seat panel, reopening the gripper, and regrasping on its own. That is not scripted recovery behaviour, it emerged from training, and it emerged on hardware. Excellent work from the team from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, with Oxford and UNC Chapel Hill Clinical Laboratory Science. Video and project page in comments. #Robotics #Manipulation #VLA
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Furniture assembly is the task everyone name-drops and nobody actually attempts at real scale. Every demo I have seen is a scaled down IKEA leg or a single arm on a toy chair. This paper does it properly, real scale, bimanual, up to 7 subtasks and 1,550 control steps per episode, and it is validated on a real Kinova Gen3, not just in sim. That real-robot number is the one that matters: only a 16 percent drop on the hardest task going from simulation to hardware. That is a small enough gap to take seriously, and it did not happen by accident. They built a VR teleoperation rig specifically for coordinated dual-arm collection, because generic single-arm teleop setups do not capture the coordination real assembly needs, and the model predicts a continuous progress signal alongside the action chunk rather than a discrete subtask label, letting it auto-transition and catch drift before it compounds into total failure. The simulation ablation is what got them there, 48 to 80 percent over baselines, with another 21 points from their perception and control design study alone, but that is groundwork, not the headline. Watch the video, there is a clip of the robot misgrasping the seat panel, reopening the gripper, and regrasping on its own. That is not scripted recovery behaviour, it emerged from training, and it emerged on hardware. Excellent work from the team from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, with Oxford and UNC Chapel Hill Clinical Laboratory Science. Video and project page in comments. #Robotics #Manipulation #VLA

Stephen James

14,952 views • 1 month ago

The future of housework just leaked on GitHub and nobody is talking about it. knox byte just open sourced a framework that coordinates swarms of Unitree G1 humanoid robots to clean your entire house on their own. It's called ARGOS. You tell it "clean the bedroom" in plain English and 2+ G1 robots split the room into zones, sweep in parallel, and sync up for the tasks that need four hands like making the bed or moving furniture. The Claude API decomposes your sentence into a task graph. An auction system makes every robot bid on every task based on distance, battery, and current load. The cheapest robot wins. Cooperative jobs go to the cheapest team. Here's what makes this different from every demo video Boston Dynamics keeps teasing: → 12 cleaning tasks baked in sweeping, mopping, wiping, vacuuming, taking out trash, making the bed, changing sheets, moving furniture, sorting items → 3 policy architectures running underneath OpenVLA-7B for language tasks, Diffusion Policy for floor coverage, ACT for dexterous bimanual work → Train it on your own footage record yourself cleaning, run one command, it extracts poses, builds a LeRobot dataset, and LoRA fine-tunes the policy → PEFA protocol for cooperative work Propose, Execute, Feedback, Adjust. If one robot fails halfway through making the bed, the team replans and retries → Full MuJoCo simulation so you test policies before pushing them to real hardware → Silver and cyan terminal dashboard that shows live fleet status, zone maps, task queues, and battery levels in real time The G1 robots talk to each other over CycloneDDS mesh using Unitree's native SDK. No cloud. No middleware. The whole thing runs on a Jetson Orin inside each robot. The wildest part is the training pipeline. Drop cleaning videos into a folder, run argos train ingest, and the framework does the entire pipeline frame extraction, pose estimation, action labeling, HDF5 dataset, fine-tune, evaluate in sim, deploy to robot. One command per stage. Unitree G1s already exist. The framework to make them clean your house just hit GitHub. 52 stars. MIT License. 100% Opensource.
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The future of housework just leaked on GitHub and nobody is talking about it. knox byte just open sourced a framework that coordinates swarms of Unitree G1 humanoid robots to clean your entire house on their own. It's called ARGOS. You tell it "clean the bedroom" in plain English and 2+ G1 robots split the room into zones, sweep in parallel, and sync up for the tasks that need four hands like making the bed or moving furniture. The Claude API decomposes your sentence into a task graph. An auction system makes every robot bid on every task based on distance, battery, and current load. The cheapest robot wins. Cooperative jobs go to the cheapest team. Here's what makes this different from every demo video Boston Dynamics keeps teasing: → 12 cleaning tasks baked in sweeping, mopping, wiping, vacuuming, taking out trash, making the bed, changing sheets, moving furniture, sorting items → 3 policy architectures running underneath OpenVLA-7B for language tasks, Diffusion Policy for floor coverage, ACT for dexterous bimanual work → Train it on your own footage record yourself cleaning, run one command, it extracts poses, builds a LeRobot dataset, and LoRA fine-tunes the policy → PEFA protocol for cooperative work Propose, Execute, Feedback, Adjust. If one robot fails halfway through making the bed, the team replans and retries → Full MuJoCo simulation so you test policies before pushing them to real hardware → Silver and cyan terminal dashboard that shows live fleet status, zone maps, task queues, and battery levels in real time The G1 robots talk to each other over CycloneDDS mesh using Unitree's native SDK. No cloud. No middleware. The whole thing runs on a Jetson Orin inside each robot. The wildest part is the training pipeline. Drop cleaning videos into a folder, run argos train ingest, and the framework does the entire pipeline frame extraction, pose estimation, action labeling, HDF5 dataset, fine-tune, evaluate in sim, deploy to robot. One command per stage. Unitree G1s already exist. The framework to make them clean your house just hit GitHub. 52 stars. MIT License. 100% Opensource.

Guri Singh

27,404 views • 3 months ago

A 22-year-old college student in shenzhen reportedly made $14,700 in one month with a 900-yuan redmi phone. his parents still think he’s spending all his time preparing for exams. here’s what the phone does. every 30 minutes, it opens six chinese news apps, scans the latest headlines, takes screenshots, and sends them to claude for analysis. claude compares that information with polymarket odds and suggests potential betting opportunities. the entire workflow runs without writing a single line of code. it’s powered by phonedriver, an open-source tool that lets ai see your phone’s screen and operate it like a human. you simply describe the task in plain english, and it does the rest. the edge comes from timing. news often appears on chinese platforms like weibo and toutiao 20 to 50 minutes before english speaking traders fully react on polymarket. that small window can create an opportunity before the market catches up. some of those apps block web scrapers, but phonedriver doesn’t scrape data. it simply looks at what’s on the screen, just like a person would, then taps and swipes automatically.
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A 22-year-old college student in shenzhen reportedly made $14,700 in one month with a 900-yuan redmi phone. his parents still think he’s spending all his time preparing for exams. here’s what the phone does. every 30 minutes, it opens six chinese news apps, scans the latest headlines, takes screenshots, and sends them to claude for analysis. claude compares that information with polymarket odds and suggests potential betting opportunities. the entire workflow runs without writing a single line of code. it’s powered by phonedriver, an open-source tool that lets ai see your phone’s screen and operate it like a human. you simply describe the task in plain english, and it does the rest. the edge comes from timing. news often appears on chinese platforms like weibo and toutiao 20 to 50 minutes before english speaking traders fully react on polymarket. that small window can create an opportunity before the market catches up. some of those apps block web scrapers, but phonedriver doesn’t scrape data. it simply looks at what’s on the screen, just like a person would, then taps and swipes automatically.

MIKE

203,601 views • 1 month ago

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 Washington
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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 Washington

Oier Mees

13,032 views • 1 month ago

New open-source agent harness just landed! I got early access to TrueForge by TrueFoundry and have been running it locally for the past few days. The harness layer deserves as much attention as the model, and open source matters here because you can inspect the loop, run it on your own infrastructure, and swap to the latest or cheaper models. TrueForge handles the runtime work that makes an agent reliable. It drives the tool-calling loop, manages context, coordinates subagents, and executes code in a sandbox, with any model you choose. Every tool call re-sends the growing context to the model, so in practice the harness controls most of what an agent costs to run. A few things stood out from my testing and their published benchmarks. Vendor-Neutral by design. It runs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models alongside open-weight models like Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek. Model routing is a setting, and you can send each task to the model that fits it. On a 14-task enterprise agent benchmark, it matched the accuracy of Claude Managed Agents running the same Opus 4.8 model at roughly 30% lower cost per run (3.8M tokens vs 10M for the same answers). Routing the same tasks to GLM-5.2 held accuracy and brought cost down by about 75%, around $3 per run instead of $12. Fully self-hosted and Open Source (MIT License). I had it running locally with one command, with sandboxed code execution working out of the box. It's time to own your agent harness. Thanks to TrueFoundry for partnering on this post.
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New open-source agent harness just landed! I got early access to TrueForge by TrueFoundry and have been running it locally for the past few days. The harness layer deserves as much attention as the model, and open source matters here because you can inspect the loop, run it on your own infrastructure, and swap to the latest or cheaper models. TrueForge handles the runtime work that makes an agent reliable. It drives the tool-calling loop, manages context, coordinates subagents, and executes code in a sandbox, with any model you choose. Every tool call re-sends the growing context to the model, so in practice the harness controls most of what an agent costs to run. A few things stood out from my testing and their published benchmarks. Vendor-Neutral by design. It runs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models alongside open-weight models like Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek. Model routing is a setting, and you can send each task to the model that fits it. On a 14-task enterprise agent benchmark, it matched the accuracy of Claude Managed Agents running the same Opus 4.8 model at roughly 30% lower cost per run (3.8M tokens vs 10M for the same answers). Routing the same tasks to GLM-5.2 held accuracy and brought cost down by about 75%, around $3 per run instead of $12. Fully self-hosted and Open Source (MIT License). I had it running locally with one command, with sandboxed code execution working out of the box. It's time to own your agent harness. Thanks to TrueFoundry for partnering on this post.

elvis

11,303 views • 3 days ago

Robots can now reconstruct 3D scenes in real time from a single RGB camera. [📍 Projects page + paper] No depth sensor. No retraining. 30 FPS. Researchers at the Imperial College London introduced KV-Tracker, a training-free method that makes heavy models like π³ and Depth Anything 3 fast enough for real-time tracking. The idea is simple. These models use global self-attention, which is powerful but computationally expensive. KV-Tracker caches the key and value pairs from selected keyframes and reuses them for new frames. That cache becomes an implicit scene representation. Result: • Up to 30 FPS • 10 to 15x speedup • Accurate 6-DoF tracking on benchmarks like TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes • Works with monocular RGB only It also supports object-level tracking with masks and allows saving the KV-cache for later reuse. For robotics, this reduces hardware constraints and moves real-time 3D perception closer to practical deployment. Credit to Marwan Taher (Marwan Taher) at Imperial’s Dyson Robotics Lab and many others who contributed to this! 📍 Save projects page + paper for later: Video: ——- if it matters in AI or Robotics you'll read it here first:
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Robots can now reconstruct 3D scenes in real time from a single RGB camera. [📍 Projects page + paper] No depth sensor. No retraining. 30 FPS. Researchers at the Imperial College London introduced KV-Tracker, a training-free method that makes heavy models like π³ and Depth Anything 3 fast enough for real-time tracking. The idea is simple. These models use global self-attention, which is powerful but computationally expensive. KV-Tracker caches the key and value pairs from selected keyframes and reuses them for new frames. That cache becomes an implicit scene representation. Result: • Up to 30 FPS • 10 to 15x speedup • Accurate 6-DoF tracking on benchmarks like TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes • Works with monocular RGB only It also supports object-level tracking with masks and allows saving the KV-cache for later reuse. For robotics, this reduces hardware constraints and moves real-time 3D perception closer to practical deployment. Credit to Marwan Taher (Marwan Taher) at Imperial’s Dyson Robotics Lab and many others who contributed to this! 📍 Save projects page + paper for later: Video: ——- if it matters in AI or Robotics you'll read it here first:

Ilir Aliu

53,992 views • 4 months ago

STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft paper page: Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces an instruction-tuned Video Pretraining (VPT) model for Minecraft called STEVE-1, demonstrating that the unCLIP approach, utilized in DALL-E 2, is also effective for creating instruction-following sequential decision-making agents. STEVE-1 is trained in two steps: adapting the pretrained VPT model to follow commands in MineCLIP's latent space, then training a prior to predict latent codes from text. This allows us to finetune VPT through self-supervised behavioral cloning and hindsight relabeling, bypassing the need for costly human text annotations. By leveraging pretrained models like VPT and MineCLIP and employing best practices from text-conditioned image generation, STEVE-1 costs just $60 to train and can follow a wide range of short-horizon open-ended text and visual instructions in Minecraft. STEVE-1 sets a new bar for open-ended instruction following in Minecraft with low-level controls (mouse and keyboard) and raw pixel inputs, far outperforming previous baselines. We provide experimental evidence highlighting key factors for downstream performance, including pretraining, classifier-free guidance, and data scaling. All resources, including our model weights, training scripts, and evaluation tools are made available for further research.
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STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft paper page: Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces an instruction-tuned Video Pretraining (VPT) model for Minecraft called STEVE-1, demonstrating that the unCLIP approach, utilized in DALL-E 2, is also effective for creating instruction-following sequential decision-making agents. STEVE-1 is trained in two steps: adapting the pretrained VPT model to follow commands in MineCLIP's latent space, then training a prior to predict latent codes from text. This allows us to finetune VPT through self-supervised behavioral cloning and hindsight relabeling, bypassing the need for costly human text annotations. By leveraging pretrained models like VPT and MineCLIP and employing best practices from text-conditioned image generation, STEVE-1 costs just $60 to train and can follow a wide range of short-horizon open-ended text and visual instructions in Minecraft. STEVE-1 sets a new bar for open-ended instruction following in Minecraft with low-level controls (mouse and keyboard) and raw pixel inputs, far outperforming previous baselines. We provide experimental evidence highlighting key factors for downstream performance, including pretraining, classifier-free guidance, and data scaling. All resources, including our model weights, training scripts, and evaluation tools are made available for further research.

AK

144,783 views • 3 years ago