Daily Papers

Developing embodied agents capable of performing complex interactive tasks in real-world scenarios remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI. Although recent advances in simulation platforms have greatly enhanced task diversity to train embodied Vision Language Models (VLMs), most platforms rely on simplified robot morphologies and bypass the stochastic nature of low-level execution, which limits their transferability to real-world robots. To address these issues, we present a physics-based simulation platform DualTHOR for complex dual-arm humanoid robots, built upon an extended version of AI2-THOR. Our simulator includes real-world robot assets, a task suite for dual-arm collaboration, and inverse kinematics solvers for humanoid robots. We also introduce a contingency mechanism that incorporates potential failures through physics-based low-level execution, bridging the gap to real-world scenarios. Our simulator enables a more comprehensive evaluation of the robustness and generalization of VLMs in household environments. Extensive evaluations reveal that current VLMs struggle with dual-arm coordination and exhibit limited robustness in realistic environments with contingencies, highlighting the importance of using our simulator to develop more capable VLMs for embodied tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ds199895/DualTHOR.git.

Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.

Recent advancements in behavior cloning have enabled robots to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, accurately assessing training performance remains challenging, particularly for real-world applications, as behavior cloning losses often correlate poorly with actual task success. Consequently, researchers resort to success rate metrics derived from costly and time-consuming real-world evaluations, making the identification of optimal policies and detection of overfitting or underfitting impractical. To address these issues, we propose real-is-sim, a novel behavior cloning framework that incorporates a dynamic digital twin (based on Embodied Gaussians) throughout the entire policy development pipeline: data collection, training, and deployment. By continuously aligning the simulated world with the physical world, demonstrations can be collected in the real world with states extracted from the simulator. The simulator enables flexible state representations by rendering image inputs from any viewpoint or extracting low-level state information from objects embodied within the scene. During training, policies can be directly evaluated within the simulator in an offline and highly parallelizable manner. Finally, during deployment, policies are run within the simulator where the real robot directly tracks the simulated robot's joints, effectively decoupling policy execution from real hardware and mitigating traditional domain-transfer challenges. We validate real-is-sim on the PushT manipulation task, demonstrating strong correlation between success rates obtained in the simulator and real-world evaluations. Videos of our system can be found at https://realissim.rai-inst.com.

We present a framework for building interactive, real-time, natural language-instructable robots in the real world, and we open source related assets (dataset, environment, benchmark, and policies). Trained with behavioral cloning on a dataset of hundreds of thousands of language-annotated trajectories, a produced policy can proficiently execute an order of magnitude more commands than previous works: specifically we estimate a 93.5% success rate on a set of 87,000 unique natural language strings specifying raw end-to-end visuo-linguo-motor skills in the real world. We find that the same policy is capable of being guided by a human via real-time language to address a wide range of precise long-horizon rearrangement goals, e.g. "make a smiley face out of blocks". The dataset we release comprises nearly 600,000 language-labeled trajectories, an order of magnitude larger than prior available datasets. We hope the demonstrated results and associated assets enable further advancement of helpful, capable, natural-language-interactable robots. See videos at https://interactive-language.github.io.

Robot learning increasingly relies on simulation to advance complex ability such as dexterous manipulations and precise interactions, necessitating high-quality digital assets to bridge the sim-to-real gap. However, existing open-source articulated-object datasets for simulation are limited by insufficient visual realism and low physical fidelity, which hinder their utility for training models mastering robotic tasks in real world. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtVIP, a comprehensive open-source dataset comprising high-quality digital-twin articulated objects, accompanied by indoor-scene assets. Crafted by professional 3D modelers adhering to unified standards, ArtVIP ensures visual realism through precise geometric meshes and high-resolution textures, while physical fidelity is achieved via fine-tuned dynamic parameters. Meanwhile, the dataset pioneers embedded modular interaction behaviors within assets and pixel-level affordance annotations. Feature-map visualization and optical motion capture are employed to quantitatively demonstrate ArtVIP's visual and physical fidelity, with its applicability validated across imitation learning and reinforcement learning experiments. Provided in USD format with detailed production guidelines, ArtVIP is fully open-source, benefiting the research community and advancing robot learning research. Our project is at https://x-humanoid-artvip.github.io/ .