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Earlier sources: AI and robotics
Robotics combines physical machines with sensing, planning, and control. This AI thread follows learning-based robot policies, simulation, perception, and evaluation in physical environments.
SYMTRI organizes observations from public sources into a living map. Connections reflect shared subject matter; they do not establish causation or endorse a source.
Open in the map ↗41 classified signals in the fourteen-day window. These counts include signals awaiting readable evidence.
Earlier sources
Up to ten sources with readable evidence, ordered by their feed timestamp. These archive sources can be older than the live fourteen-day window. This list is a sample, not a measure of total activity. Dates distinguish paper publication, repository creation, model/dataset activity, Hacker News posts, and KEV catalog additions. “First archived” records when SYMTRI first stored the signal.
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Watch, Infer, Coordinate: Inferring Robot Partner Constraints for Zero-Shot Coordination ↗
Robots operating in the physical world will increasingly need to coordinate with other robots, particularly in manipulation tasks where an object may be too large or heavy for a single robot to carry alone. Physical limitations caused by hardware degradation or actuator faults can restrict the actions a robot can reliably execute, yet these limitations may be unknown to its partner. We study whether a helper can infer a robot partner's physical constraints from observing it coordinate with another robot, then use the inferred capability to coordinate with the same partner on a new task. This i…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
DuoMind: Enabling Distributed Multi-Robot Coordination with Semantic Communication ↗
Vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently driven rapid progress in general-purpose robots, yet most progress has focused on single-robot settings. Extending these capabilities to multi-robot systems remains challenging because robots must coordinate long-horizon behaviors while maintaining reliable, fine-grained execution. We introduce DuoMind, a distributed hierarchical framework for multi-robot coordination through semantic communication. Each robot uses a VLA-based action model for low-level execution and a VLM-based orchestrator for high-level rea…
- Hacker News · Posted on Hacker News · First archived
Someone Torturing LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI ↗
Hacker News discussion.
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Ego4WAM: What Matters When Scaling Egocentric Human Data for Robot Learning? ↗
Egocentric human data provides a scalable source of experience for robot learning, but varies substantially in human-robot alignment, behavioral coverage, and available supervision. Existing work shows favorable scaling with increasing human data, but it remains unclear which data properties drive downstream robot gains and how to use such data throughout the training pipeline. We present a systematic study of egocentric human data with different alignment and supervision under a unified world-action model framework. With the model backbone fixed, we disentangle the effects of human-robot alig…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
STARS: From Spatiotemporal Dynamics to Social Representations in Human-Robot Interaction ↗
Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition, common-sense reasoning, and contextual understanding, capabilities that align with the nuanced requirements of social robot navigation. However, it remains unclear whether VLMs can accurately understand complex social navigation scenes (e.g., inferring the spatial-temporal relations among agents and human intentions), which is essential for safe and socially complian…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
ASENA: Self-evolving Agents for Embodied Navigation ↗
We present ASENA, an embodied agent system that connects general-purpose coding agents to robot sensing, computation, supervised execution, and persistent experience. Agents can write and execute programs, inspect recorded outcomes, repair failures, and reuse notes and executable skills while keeping their model weights fixed. We further introduce ASENA-VLN, a 4B monocular navigation policy that serves as an optional tool within this programmable system. ASENA-VLN predicts body-frame trajectories for both extended routes and short-horizon behaviors using a shared vision-language decoder traine…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Linear Recurrent Memory Suffices to Distil a World-Model Policy for Robot Air Hockey ↗
Does memory-dependent control need nonlinear recurrent dynamics? We study simulated air-hockey defence under temporary loss of puck tracking. A DreamerV3 teacher outperforms a memoryless policy under tracking loss, while resetting the teacher's recurrent state sharply reduces performance, which demonstrates that the task requires memory. We distil this teacher into compact recurrent policies with a 64 dimensional state, with a combination of a diagonal linear recurrence and an optional rank-$k$ nonlinear innovation while retaining nonlinear observation encoders and action heads. Across five ma…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Refusals That Bend: Measuring and Predicting Task Malleability in Embodied VLM Planners ↗
Embodied vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for robots because they generalize across diverse environments. However, this requires their safety alignment to also hold in unseen environments. Existing red-teaming assumes an adversary who optimizes the prompt, the pixels, or text in the environment, and existing benchmarks ask whether a planner recognizes or mitigates a hazard in a fixed scene. Neither asks whether a refusal the planner has already given survives an ordinary change to the environment. We ask that question by placing a single everyday o…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
Skill-Space Shooting for Autonomous Robot Policy Improvement ↗
Robots deployed in the physical world must be able to improve beyond their initial training as they encounter new situations and failures. For this improvement to scale across tasks, it must make effective use of experience without requiring human demonstration of each correction. Recent agentic systems offer a way to reduce this reliance on human effort by using foundation models to autonomously compose learned behaviors to complete tasks. Yet completing tasks this way does not itself teach a task policy to overcome its own failures; that requires turning these behaviors into learnable correc…
- arXiv · Published · First archived
In-context Robot Learning Made Simple: A Democratized Recipe for Manipulation Tasks ↗
We study robotic in-context learning (ICL), an emerging paradigm that enables robots to infer and execute tasks from visual demonstrations. Despite its growing promise, the problem itself remains under-defined: a visual demonstration simultaneously conveys action trajectories, object semantics, manipulation affordances, spatial relations, and task goals, making it unclear what information the robot is actually expected to follow. In this work, we first provide a clear problem definition of robot ICL that explicitly defines its learning target and resolves this fundamental prompt ambiguity. Bui…
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How to assess evidence about AI and robotics
Check each original source for its methods, release status, limitations, and supporting data. A repository announcement, a preprint, and a published study provide different kinds of evidence. SYMTRI’s subject classification helps discovery; it does not independently validate the source’s claims.
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