Thursday, November 12, 2026
8 papers added this day. New papers stay for 14 days.
Robot foundation models 1
Humanoids and mobile manipulation 1
Computer vision for robots 1
3D perception and scene representation 2
Planning and control 2
Human motion prediction 1
UGG: Unified Generative Geometry Model
November 2026
One video diffusion transformer models RGB, depth and camera rays jointly, so camera-controlled video generation, depth estimation and pose estimation become the same fill-in-the-missing-modality task. It cuts dense camera trajectory error on ScanNet++ from 0.190 (Geo4D) to 0.087, and sampling 16 candidates at test time improves it further.
A computational framework for understanding embodied plans
November 2026
GenEA models how people infer others' goals and plans by adding noisy kinematics and a physics-simulation level to task-and-motion planning, then turning plan costs into a probability distribution over goals and plans. Its predictions correlate with human judgments at r = .88 to .93 across three preregistered experiments, ahead of plain TAMP, heuristics and a vision-language model.
Benchmarking Real-World Robotic Manipulation through Stochastic Challenges
November 2026
Instead of a fixed test set, a real-world benchmark standardizes a seeded distribution of scenes, so labs with different robots can be compared statistically. On randomized IKEA KALLAX shelves, 568 trials in two labs separate a Spot from a Stretch 3 on door opening (71% against 18%) and drawer opening (88% against 64%).
Rethinking Radar 3D Perception: Representation Learning from Raw Spectra
November 2026
Masked-autoencoder pretraining directly on raw 4D radar spectra, with a corruption that mimics spectral leakage and Doppler treated as a spatial axis. A generic detector pretrained this way reaches 55.9/50.1 mAP (BEV/3D) on K-Radar, about 5 points above point-cloud-based self-supervised baselines.
Embodied First Exam
November 2026
A simulation benchmark of 1,156 robot tasks on 47 robots in which general-purpose coding agents choose how to control the robot (direct actions, written controllers or a trained policy). On 456 hard core tasks the best agent solves 34% when it only gets sensor observations and, by default, no resets.
MOSU2: Long-range Navigation System with Multi-modal Scene Understanding
November 2026
An outdoor navigation system where a VLM first screens each scene from one image and, only when needed, pulls positions and velocities of nearby road users from a local map before picking a trajectory. Across real-world social and traffic scenarios, mean navigation success rises from 61.8% to 94.2% over its predecessor MOSU, at about 2.2 times the decision latency.
SoftPAT3D: Physics-Augmented Text-to-3D Scene Generation with Deformables
November 2026
A text-to-3D scene pipeline whose physics stage simulates cloth, pillows and ropes instead of treating them as rigid, by building each object's rest shape from how it is manufactured. Across 65 prompts no cloth intersects its support, and 21 of 34 scenes pass a completion check against at most 8 for any baseline.
Deploying Physically and Epistemically Compliant Agents by Distilling Belief-Space Task and Motion Planners
November 2026
Plan offline with a belief-space task-and-motion planner, then distill the plans into a history-based policy that acts on raw images and language. In the new Scavenger search domain the policy succeeds over 90% of the time, against at most 5% for reward-engineered PPO.
Summaries are written automatically from each paper's text. Figures and videos come from the paper and its project page; all credit goes to the authors.