SwapBot: Tool-Centric Robot Manipulation via Interchangeable End-Effectors and Tactile Sensing
Yunchu Zhang, Ray Song, Junhan Jiao, Liyiming Ke, Yuchen Yang, Ruihan Gao, Emma Romig, Siddhartha Srinivasa 等 9 位作者
AI 速览：SwapBot 提出一种模块化、以工具为中心的末端执行器系统，用低成本适配器把常见家用工具快速转换为机器人末端执行器，并结合触觉传感与模仿学习完成接触丰富的工具操作任务。
Robot manipulation in everyday environments inherently involves substantial tool usage. Seemingly simple household tasks, such as cooking pan-fried tofu, require forceful cutting, delicate brushing, and precise placement using different tools under contact-rich interaction. Thus, the ability to autonomously swap and use task-appropriate tools is important for tool-centric manipulation. We introduce SwapBot, a modular, tool-centric end effector system featuring low-cost adapters that quickly convert common household tools into robot end effectors. Rather than pursuing a single universal gripper, SwapBot adopts a unified design principle that combines a fixed robot-side coupling interface with low-cost, tool-side adapters, enabling compatibility with diverse tools, including articulated ones, and multiple robot platforms. Each adapter integrates compact tactile sensors, supports fast autonomous swapping, and interfaces with an intuitive teleoperation system for efficient demonstration collection. User studies show that, during teleoperation, SwapBot reduces task completion time and operator workload. Using collected demonstrations on the robot, we train imitation learning policies to successfully perform tool-centric tasks like cooking tofu, stirring salad, flipping meat. Our ablation study shows that using tactile-augmented demonstrations improves policy performance across contact-rich skills, increasing success rates by 15 to 25 percentage points over RGB-only policies. These results highlight modular, tactile-equipped tools as a practical and extensible pathway toward robust and capable robot manipulation. Project website https://personalrobotics.github.io/SwapBot.
Long-horizon consistency is essential for video world models, yet it becomes difficult to maintain once observed content falls outside the context window. Existing memory mechanisms either retrieve history as implicit context, which remains constrained by context capacity and entangles static and dynamic information or consolidate history into explicit global representations, which struggle to model evolving dynamics and accumulate geometric errors. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textbf{GROME}, a novel factorized memory framework that augments video world models for long-horizon coherence across both static scenes and dynamic entities. GROME operates via three synergistic components: 1)~\emph{Static-Dynamic Factorization} decouples historical evidence into static and dynamic components, preserving static scene geometry and dynamic entity states separately; 2)~\emph{Local Memory Retrieval} selects spatially aligned static history to eliminate geometric drift alongside the latest dynamic entity states to ensure temporal continuity; 3)~\emph{Training-Free Memory Injection} seamlessly grounds the factorized memory into video world models via their native conditioning pathways. Experiments on long-horizon revisit scenarios demonstrate that GROME substantially enhances scene persistence and dynamic entity fidelity over existing methods, all while preserving the visual quality and controllability of the frozen backbone without additional training. Beyond self-rollouts, GROME readily accommodates external observations as plug-and-play memory, unlocking flexible and controllable video continuation and scene exploration.
The growing computational power of modern GPU data centers has let a few industrial giants train and deploy large language models (LLMs) on massive amounts of data. Yet the sheer scale of these models and their training data makes centralized development increasingly hard to sustain, and at the same time shuts out smaller institutions that hold relevant private data but lack comparable infrastructure. In this paper, we organize our positions on distributed LLM training around the pretraining and fine-tuning paradigms, covering federated learning, split learning, and decentralized approaches, and we assess their readiness for geo-distributed settings with heterogeneous hardware and unreliable connectivity. We then present a {\em unified} system architecture built around a cloud-hosted parameter server that coordinates heterogeneous clients over outbound gRPC connections, reusing one communication, compression, and fault-tolerance stack for both pretraining and a family of fine-tuning methods. We validate the design with real geo-distributed experiments on GPT-2 Medium and Llama3-1B pretraining across multiple university sites, showing stable convergence under realistic conditions. Finally, we chart the road ahead, identifying open problems that span frontier model support, elastic fault tolerance, adaptive compression, federated alignment, privacy and trust, incentive design, and system--algorithm co-design, all of which must be addressed to make democratized LLM training a reality.
Xiaoyue Lu, Xianglin Yang National University of Singapore, Haijun Liu, Jiahao Liu National University of Singapore, Kuntai Cai ByteDance Inc., Yan Xiao Sun Yat-Sen University, Jin Song Dong
The widespread integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates rigorous and systematic safety evaluation. Existing paradigms either rely on constructed benchmarks to assess safety from predefined perspectives, or employ dynamic red-teaming to probe potential vulnerabilities. While effective, these approaches face challenges, as they depend heavily on expert domain knowledge, offer limited systematic guarantees, and are vulnerable to rapid obsolescence. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework POLARIS that brings the rigor of specification-based software testing to AI safety. POLARIS first compiles unstructured natural-language policies into First-Order Logic (FOL) representations, establishing a traceable link between high-level rules and concrete test cases. This formalization enables the construction of a Semantic Policy Graph, where complex policy violation scenarios are encoded as traversable paths. By systematically exploring this graph, POLARIS uncovers compositional violation patterns, which are then instantiated into executable natural-language test queries, enabling coverage-driven and reproducible safety testing. Experiments demonstrate that POLARIS achieves higher policy coverage and attack success counts compared to established baselines. Crucially, by bridging formal methods and AI safety, POLARIS provides a principled, automated approach to ensuring LLMs adhere to safety-critical policies with verifiable traceability.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表