Peiyuan Tang, Yao Li, Xiaodong Zhang, Wuyang Zhang, Qin Xia, Yanyong Zhang, Zijiang Yang
Contact-rich manipulation requires fine-grained control and complex physical interactions with the environment, posing significant challenges for robot policy learning. Vision-only policies struggle with such tasks, as contact states and interaction forces are difficult to infer from visual observations alone. Existing methods mitigate this issue by incorporating force or tactile sensing. However, they often treat these signals as auxiliary observations without fully exploiting their role in modeling future interaction dynamics. To address this, we propose ForceLDM, a force-aware latent dynamics model that learns future contact and motion dynamics to guide action generation. Rather than directly predicting future observations, which can entangle task-relevant dynamics with irrelevant sensory details, ForceLDM learns a compact representation of future dynamics through knowledge distillation. Specifically, a teacher network with privileged future force/torque and optical flow signals extracts future dynamic features, which are then distilled into a student network trained only on current observations. This enables the student model to reason about upcoming contacts and physical dynamics without relying on future sensory inputs at deployment. To improve robustness and generalization, we further introduce a curriculum-based progressive noise injection strategy to mitigate over-reliance on future features. Experiments on five real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrate that ForceLDM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, generalizes effectively to novel objects, and remains robust to environmental perturbations. Project page and code are available at https://tpy001.github.io/ForceLDM/.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate high-level reasoning with low-level action execution for end-to-end robotic control. However, most VLA models target static manipulation in unconstrained environments, overlooking spatial constraints and dynamic obstacles. Fine-tuning VLAs on obstacle-avoidance data is a straightforward solution, but collecting such data is costly, especially for dynamic scenarios, and may degrade their original task capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose VLA-Stem, a lightweight, reinforcement-learning-based safety mechanism for VLA systems. Without fine-tuning the underlying VLA policy, VLA-Stem converts its action chunks into motion references and uses trajectory-level guidance to preserve their spatial intent while allowing flexible motion and timing adjustments. Conditioned on these references, robot proprioception, and local obstacle information, the Stem policy adaptively modifies execution at inference time, preserving the original task intent while enabling responsive adaptation to spatial constraints and dynamic obstacles. For robust and sample-efficient training, we combine teacher-student distillation with curriculum learning. We evaluate VLA-Stem on reference following, static spatial constraints, and dynamic obstacle avoidance. Across six constrained simulation settings, VLA-Stem achieves 52.8% average collision-free task success versus 23.7% for the strongest safety baseline, while preserving base-policy performance in obstacle-free settings; real-world experiments further show consistent collision reductions under static and dynamic obstacles. These results demonstrate that VLA-Stem couples high-level VLA task intent with rapid, reflex-like responses to immediate physical risks, providing a brainstem-inspired mechanism for robust robot execution.
Jiaming Leng, Yunying Bi University of Science and Technology of China, Chuan Qin Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhenya Huang University of Science and Technology of China, Bing Yin iFLYTEK, Haojie Ren, Yanyong Zhang University of Science and Technology of China, Chao Wang University of Science and Technology of China
Urban transportation systems require precise modeling of dynamic spatiotemporal patterns across diverse tasks, such as traffic forecasting, electric vehicle (EV) charging demand prediction, and taxi dispatch. Existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: traditional deep learning models are task-specific and lack generalization capabilities, whereas Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with structured spatiotemporal data and numerical reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose TransLLM, a unified multi-task framework that synergizes spatiotemporal encoding with LLM reasoning through learnable prompt composition. To enable LLMs to perceive complex graph dependencies, we design a noise-augmented spatiotemporal encoder that projects structured signals into the LLM’s embedding space. Furthermore, to overcome the rigidity of fixed prompt templates in heterogeneous traffic scenarios, we introduce an instance-level prompt routing mechanism trained via reinforcement learning. The framework operates by encoding spatiotemporal patterns into contextual representations, dynamically composing personalized prompts to guide LLM reasoning, and projecting the resulting representations through specialized output layers to generate task-specific predictions. Experiments on seven datasets and three tasks demonstrate that TransLLM outperforms many baselines, showing superior adaptability in both supervised and zero-shot settings with excellent generalization and robustness. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/lengjiaming/TransLLM.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表