Daily Papers

We present a novel approach for generating motion primitives for kinodynamic motion planning using diffusion models. The motions generated by our approach are adapted to each problem instance by utilizing problem-specific parameters, allowing for finding solutions faster and of better quality. The diffusion models used in our approach are trained on randomly cut solution trajectories. These trajectories are created by solving randomly generated problem instances with a kinodynamic motion planner. Experimental results show significant improvements up to 30 percent in both computation time and solution quality across varying robot dynamics such as second-order unicycle or car with trailer.

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are widely used for robot motion planning with complex kinodynamic constraints in high-dimensional spaces, yet they struggle to achieve real-time performance due to their serial computation design. Recent efforts to parallelize SBMPs have achieved significant speedups in finding feasible solutions; however, they provide no guarantees of optimizing an objective function. We introduce Kino-PAX^{+}, a massively parallel kinodynamic SBMP with asymptotic near-optimal guarantees. Kino-PAX^{+} builds a sparse tree of dynamically feasible trajectories by decomposing traditionally serial operations into three massively parallel subroutines. The algorithm focuses computation on the most promising nodes within local neighborhoods for propagation and refinement, enabling rapid improvement of solution cost. We prove that, while maintaining probabilistic δ-robust completeness, this focus on promising nodes ensures asymptotic δ-robust near-optimality. Our results show that Kino-PAX^{+} finds solutions up to three orders of magnitude faster than existing serial methods and achieves lower solution costs than a state-of-the-art GPU-based planner.

This paper proposes a novel sampling-based motion planner, which integrates in RRT* (Rapidly exploring Random Tree star) a database of pre-computed motion primitives to alleviate its computational load and allow for motion planning in a dynamic or partially known environment. The database is built by considering a set of initial and final state pairs in some grid space, and determining for each pair an optimal trajectory that is compatible with the system dynamics and constraints, while minimizing a cost. Nodes are progressively added to the tree of feasible trajectories in the RRT* algorithm by extracting at random a sample in the gridded state space and selecting the best obstacle-free motion primitive in the database that joins it to an existing node. The tree is rewired if some nodes can be reached from the new sampled state through an obstacle-free motion primitive with lower cost. The computationally more intensive part of motion planning is thus moved to the preliminary offline phase of the database construction {at the price of some performance degradation due to gridding. Grid resolution can be tuned so as to compromise between (sub)optimality and size of the database. The planner is shown to be }asymptotically optimal as the grid resolution goes to zero and the number of sampled states grows to infinity.

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are effective for planning with complex kinodynamic constraints in high-dimensional spaces, but they still struggle to achieve real-time performance, which is mainly due to their serial computation design. We present Kinodynamic Parallel Accelerated eXpansion (Kino-PAX), a novel highly parallel kinodynamic SBMP designed for parallel devices such as GPUs. Kino-PAX grows a tree of trajectory segments directly in parallel. Our key insight is how to decompose the iterative tree growth process into three massively parallel subroutines. Kino-PAX is designed to align with the parallel device execution hierarchies, through ensuring that threads are largely independent, share equal workloads, and take advantage of low-latency resources while minimizing high-latency data transfers and process synchronization. This design results in a very efficient GPU implementation. We prove that Kino-PAX is probabilistically complete and analyze its scalability with compute hardware improvements. Empirical evaluations demonstrate solutions in the order of 10 ms on a desktop GPU and in the order of 100 ms on an embedded GPU, representing up to 1000 times improvement compared to coarse-grained CPU parallelization of state-of-the-art sequential algorithms over a range of complex environments and systems.

Kinodynamic motion planning is concerned with computing collision-free trajectories while abiding by the robot's dynamic constraints. This critical problem is often tackled using sampling-based planners (SBPs) that explore the robot's high-dimensional state space by constructing a search tree via action propagations. Although SBPs can offer global guarantees on completeness and solution quality, their performance is often hindered by slow exploration due to uninformed action sampling. Learning-based approaches can yield significantly faster runtimes, yet they fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and lack critical guarantees, e.g., safety, thus limiting their deployment on physical robots. We present Diffusion Tree (DiTree): a provably-generalizable framework leveraging diffusion policies (DPs) as informed samplers to efficiently guide state-space search within SBPs. DiTree combines DP's ability to model complex distributions of expert trajectories, conditioned on local observations, with the completeness of SBPs to yield provably-safe solutions within a few action propagation iterations for complex dynamical systems. We demonstrate DiTree's power with an implementation combining the popular RRT planner with a DP action sampler trained on a single environment. In comprehensive evaluations on OOD scenarios, % DiTree has comparable runtimes to a standalone DP (3x faster than classical SBPs), while improving the average success rate over DP and SBPs. DiTree is on average 3x faster than classical SBPs, and outperforms all other approaches by achieving roughly 30\% higher success rate. Project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/ditree.

Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e., kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-\dof robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics over time, both of which are computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops AkinoPDF, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning technique for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP and dynamics integration can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our method is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.

Probabilistic completeness is an important property in motion planning. Although it has been established with clear assumptions for geometric planners, the panorama of completeness results for kinodynamic planners is still incomplete, as most existing proofs rely on strong assumptions that are difficult, if not impossible, to verify on practical systems. In this paper, we focus on an important class of kinodynamic planners, namely those that interpolate trajectories in the state space. We provide a proof of probabilistic completeness for these planners under assumptions that can be readily verified from the system's equations of motion and the user-defined interpolation function. Our proof relies crucially on a property of interpolated trajectories, termed second-order continuity (SOC), which we show is tightly related to the ability of a planner to benefit from denser sampling. We analyze the impact of this property in simulations on a low-torque pendulum. Our results show that a simple RRT using a second-order continuous interpolation swiftly finds solution, while it is impossible for the same planner using standard Bezier curves (which are not SOC) to find any solution.

This paper presents an equivalence between feasible kinodynamic planning and optimal kinodynamic planning, in that any optimal planning problem can be transformed into a series of feasible planning problems in a state-cost space whose solutions approach the optimum. This transformation gives rise to a meta-algorithm that produces an asymptotically optimal planner, given any feasible kinodynamic planner as a subroutine. The meta-algorithm is proven to be asymptotically optimal, and a formula is derived relating expected running time and solution suboptimality. It is directly applicable to a wide range of optimal planning problems because it does not resort to the use of steering functions or numerical boundary-value problem solvers. On a set of benchmark problems, it is demonstrated to perform, using the EST and RRT algorithms as subroutines, at a superior or comparable level to related planners.

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to address the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler, steps: first, find a path in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, find a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step should be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints in the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm -- Admissible Velocity Propagation -- which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path while respecting the system kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.

Sampling-based kinodynamic planners, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs), pose two fundamental challenges: computing a reliable (pseudo-)metric for the distance between two randomly sampled nodes, and computing a steering input to connect the nodes. The core of these challenges is a Two Point Boundary Value Problem, which is known to be NP-hard. Recently, the distance metric has been approximated using supervised learning, reducing computation time drastically. The previous work on such learning RRTs use direct optimal control to generate the data for supervised learning. This paper proposes to use indirect optimal control instead, because it provides two benefits: it reduces the computational effort to generate the data, and it provides a low dimensional parametrization of the action space. The latter allows us to learn both the distance metric and the steering input to connect two nodes. This eliminates the need for a local planner in learning RRTs. Experimental results on a pendulum swing up show 10-fold speed-up in both the offline data generation and the online planning time, leading to at least a 10-fold speed-up in the overall planning time.

We present Kinodynamic RRT*, an incremental sampling-based approach for asymptotically optimal motion planning for robots with linear differential constraints. Our approach extends RRT*, which was introduced for holonomic robots (Karaman et al. 2011), by using a fixed-final-state-free-final-time controller that exactly and optimally connects any pair of states, where the cost function is expressed as a trade-off between the duration of a trajectory and the expended control effort. Our approach generalizes earlier work on extending RRT* to kinodynamic systems, as it guarantees asymptotic optimality for any system with controllable linear dynamics, in state spaces of any dimension. Our approach can be applied to non-linear dynamics as well by using their first-order Taylor approximations. In addition, we show that for the rich subclass of systems with a nilpotent dynamics matrix, closed-form solutions for optimal trajectories can be derived, which keeps the computational overhead of our algorithm compared to traditional RRT* at a minimum. We demonstrate the potential of our approach by computing asymptotically optimal trajectories in three challenging motion planning scenarios: (i) a planar robot with a 4-D state space and double integrator dynamics, (ii) an aerial vehicle with a 10-D state space and linearized quadrotor dynamics, and (iii) a car-like robot with a 5-D state space and non-linear dynamics.

This paper presents methods for dramatically improving the performance of sampling-based kinodynamic planners. The key component is the first-known complete, exact steering method that produces a time-optimal trajectory between any states for a vector of synchronized double integrators. This method is applied in three ways: 1) to generate RRT edges that quickly solve the two-point boundary-value problems, 2) to produce a (quasi)metric for more accurate Voronoi bias in RRTs, and 3) to iteratively time-optimize a given collision-free trajectory. Experiments are performed for state spaces with up to 2000 dimensions, resulting in improved computed trajectories and orders of magnitude computation time improvements over using ordinary metrics and constant controls.

Sampling-based algorithms are viewed as practical solutions for high-dimensional motion planning. Recent progress has taken advantage of random geometric graph theory to show how asymptotic optimality can also be achieved with these methods. Achieving this desirable property for systems with dynamics requires solving a two-point boundary value problem (BVP) in the state space of the underlying dynamical system. It is difficult, however, if not impractical, to generate a BVP solver for a variety of important dynamical models of robots or physically simulated ones. Thus, an open challenge was whether it was even possible to achieve optimality guarantees when planning for systems without access to a BVP solver. This work resolves the above question and describes how to achieve asymptotic optimality for kinodynamic planning using incremental sampling-based planners by introducing a new rigorous framework. Two new methods, Stable Sparse-RRT (SST) and SST*, result from this analysis, which are asymptotically near-optimal and optimal, respectively. The techniques are shown to converge fast to high-quality paths, while they maintain only a sparse set of samples, which makes them computationally efficient. The good performance of the planners is confirmed by experimental results using dynamical systems benchmarks, as well as physically simulated robots.

Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) and its variations have emerged as a robust and efficient tool for finding collision-free paths in robotic systems. However, adding dynamic constraints makes the motion planning problem significantly harder, as it requires solving two-value boundary problems (computationally expensive) or propagating random control inputs (uninformative). Alternatively, Iterative Discontinuity Bounded A* (iDb-A*), introduced in our previous study, combines search and optimization iteratively. The search step connects short trajectories (motion primitives) while allowing a bounded discontinuity between the motion primitives, which is later repaired in the trajectory optimization step. Building upon these foundations, in this paper, we present iDb-RRT, a sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning algorithm that combines motion primitives and trajectory optimization within the RRT framework. iDb-RRT is probabilistically complete and can be implemented in forward or bidirectional mode. We have tested our algorithm across a benchmark suite comprising 30 problems, spanning 8 different systems, and shown that iDb-RRT can find solutions up to 10x faster than previous methods, especially in complex scenarios that require long trajectories or involve navigating through narrow passages.

In this letter, an integrated task planning and reactive motion planning framework termed Multi-FLEX is presented that targets real-world, industrial multi-robot applications. Reactive motion planning has been attractive for the purposes of collision avoidance, particularly when there are sources of uncertainty and variation. Most industrial applications, though, typically require parts of motion to be at least partially non-reactive in order to achieve functional objectives. Multi-FLEX resolves this dissonance and enables such applications to take advantage of reactive motion planning. The Multi-FLEX framework achieves 1) coordination of motion requests to resolve task-level conflicts and overlaps, 2) incorporation of application-specific task constraints into online motion planning using the new concepts of task dependency accommodation, task decomposition, and task bundling, and 3) online generation of robot trajectories using a custom, online reactive motion planner. This planner combines fast-to-create, sparse dynamic roadmaps (to find a complete path to the goal) with fast-to-execute, short-horizon, online, optimization-based local planning (for collision avoidance and high performance). To demonstrate, we use two six-degree-of-freedom, high-speed industrial robots in a deburring application to show the ability of this approach to not just handle collision avoidance and task variations, but to also achieve industrial applications.

Recent advances in motion planning for autonomous driving have led to models capable of generating high-quality trajectories. However, most existing planners tend to fix their policy after supervised training, leading to consistent but rigid driving behaviors. This limits their ability to reflect human preferences or adapt to dynamic, instruction-driven demands. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based multi-head trajectory planner(M-diffusion planner). During the early training stage, all output heads share weights to learn to generate high-quality trajectories. Leveraging the probabilistic nature of diffusion models, we then apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune the pre-trained model for diverse policy-specific behaviors. At inference time, we incorporate a large language model (LLM) to guide strategy selection, enabling dynamic, instruction-aware planning without switching models. Closed-loop simulation demonstrates that our post-trained planner retains strong planning capability while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the nuPlan val14 benchmark. Open-loop results further show that the generated trajectories exhibit clear diversity, effectively satisfying multi-modal driving behavior requirements. The code and related experiments will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

This work presents a novel online model-predictive trajectory planner for robotic manipulators called BoundMPC. This planner allows the collision-free following of Cartesian reference paths in the end-effector's position and orientation, including via-points, within desired asymmetric bounds of the orthogonal path error. The path parameter synchronizes the position and orientation reference paths. The decomposition of the path error into the tangential direction, describing the path progress, and the orthogonal direction, which represents the deviation from the path, is well known for the position from the path-following control in the literature. This paper extends this idea to the orientation by utilizing the Lie theory of rotations. Moreover, the orthogonal error plane is further decomposed into basis directions to define asymmetric Cartesian error bounds easily. Using piecewise linear position and orientation reference paths with via-points is computationally very efficient and allows replanning the pose trajectories during the robot's motion. This feature makes it possible to use this planner for dynamically changing environments and varying goals. The flexibility and performance of BoundMPC are experimentally demonstrated by two scenarios on a 7-DoF Kuka LBR iiwa 14 R820 robot. The first scenario shows the transfer of a larger object from a start to a goal pose through a confined space where the object must be tilted. The second scenario deals with grasping an object from a table where the grasping point changes during the robot's motion, and collisions with other obstacles in the scene must be avoided.

Recent models for video generation have achieved remarkable progress and are now deployed in film, social media production, and advertising. Beyond their creative potential, such models also hold promise as world simulators for robotics and embodied decision making. Despite strong advances, however, current approaches still struggle to generate physically plausible object interactions and lack physics-grounded control mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce KineMask, an approach for physics-guided video generation that enables realistic rigid body control, interactions, and effects. Given a single image and a specified object velocity, our method generates videos with inferred motions and future object interactions. We propose a two-stage training strategy that gradually removes future motion supervision via object masks. Using this strategy we train video diffusion models (VDMs) on synthetic scenes of simple interactions and demonstrate significant improvements of object interactions in real scenes. Furthermore, KineMask integrates low-level motion control with high-level textual conditioning via predictive scene descriptions, leading to effective support for synthesis of complex dynamical phenomena. Extensive experiments show that KineMask achieves strong improvements over recent models of comparable size. Ablation studies further highlight the complementary roles of low- and high-level conditioning in VDMs. Our code, model, and data will be made publicly available.

In this paper, we address the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are independent of the agent. We study this through the context of trapping a moving ball with a UR5 robotic arm. Our key contribution is an approach to utilize a static planner for dynamic tasks using a Dynamic Planning add-on; that is, if we can successfully solve a task with a static target, then our approach can solve the same task when the target is moving. Our approach has three key components: an off-the-shelf static planner, a trajectory forecasting network, and a network to predict robot's estimated time of arrival at any location. We demonstrate the generalization of our approach across environments. More information and videos at https://mlevy2525.github.io/DynamicAddOn.

Recent advances in real-time interactive text-driven motion generation have enabled humanoids to perform diverse behaviors. However, kinematics-only generators often exhibit physical hallucinations, producing motion trajectories that are physically infeasible to track with a downstream motion tracking controller or unsafe for real-world deployment. These failures often arise from the lack of explicit physics-aware objectives for real-robot execution and become more severe under out-of-distribution (OOD) user inputs. Hence, we propose SafeFlow, a text-driven humanoid whole-body control framework that combines physics-guided motion generation with a 3-Stage Safety Gate driven by explicit risk indicators. SafeFlow adopts a two-level architecture. At the high level, we generate motion trajectories using Physics-Guided Rectified Flow Matching in a VAE latent space to improve real-robot executability, and further accelerate sampling via Reflow to reduce the number of function evaluations (NFE) for real-time control. The 3-Stage Safety Gate enables selective execution by detecting semantic OOD prompts using a Mahalanobis score in text-embedding space, filtering unstable generations via a directional sensitivity discrepancy metric, and enforcing final hard kinematic constraints such as joint and velocity limits before passing the generated trajectory to a low-level motion tracking controller. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that SafeFlow outperforms prior diffusion-based methods in success rate, physical compliance, and inference speed, while maintaining diverse expressiveness.

Deploying large, complex policies in the real world requires the ability to steer them to fit the needs of a situation. Most common steering approaches, like goal-conditioning, require training the robot policy with a distribution of test-time objectives in mind. To overcome this limitation, we present DynaGuide, a steering method for diffusion policies using guidance from an external dynamics model during the diffusion denoising process. DynaGuide separates the dynamics model from the base policy, which gives it multiple advantages, including the ability to steer towards multiple objectives, enhance underrepresented base policy behaviors, and maintain robustness on low-quality objectives. The separate guidance signal also allows DynaGuide to work with off-the-shelf pretrained diffusion policies. We demonstrate the performance and features of DynaGuide against other steering approaches in a series of simulated and real experiments, showing an average steering success of 70% on a set of articulated CALVIN tasks and outperforming goal-conditioning by 5.4x when steered with low-quality objectives. We also successfully steer an off-the-shelf real robot policy to express preference for particular objects and even create novel behavior. Videos and more can be found on the project website: https://dynaguide.github.io

Generalizable articulated object manipulation is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent efforts focus on imitation learning from demonstrations or reinforcement learning in simulation, however, due to the prohibitive costs of real-world data collection and precise object simulation, it still remains challenging for these works to achieve broad adaptability across diverse articulated objects. Recently, many works have tried to utilize the strong in-context learning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve generalizable robotic manipulation, but most of these researches focus on high-level task planning, sidelining low-level robotic control. In this work, building on the idea that the kinematic structure of the object determines how we can manipulate it, we propose a kinematic-aware prompting framework that prompts LLMs with kinematic knowledge of objects to generate low-level motion trajectory waypoints, supporting various object manipulation. To effectively prompt LLMs with the kinematic structure of different objects, we design a unified kinematic knowledge parser, which represents various articulated objects as a unified textual description containing kinematic joints and contact location. Building upon this unified description, a kinematic-aware planner model is proposed to generate precise 3D manipulation waypoints via a designed kinematic-aware chain-of-thoughts prompting method. Our evaluation spanned 48 instances across 16 distinct categories, revealing that our framework not only outperforms traditional methods on 8 seen categories but also shows a powerful zero-shot capability for 8 unseen articulated object categories. Moreover, the real-world experiments on 7 different object categories prove our framework's adaptability in practical scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/LLM_articulated_object_manipulation/tree/main.

We consider the problem of designing a smooth trajectory that traverses a sequence of convex sets in minimum time, while satisfying given velocity and acceleration constraints. This problem is naturally formulated as a nonconvex program. To solve it, we propose a biconvex method that quickly produces an initial trajectory and iteratively refines it by solving two convex subproblems in alternation. This method is guaranteed to converge, returns a feasible trajectory even if stopped early, and does not require the selection of any line-search or trust-region parameter. Exhaustive experiments show that our method finds high-quality trajectories in a fraction of the time of state-of-the-art solvers for nonconvex optimization. In addition, it achieves runtimes comparable to industry-standard waypoint-based motion planners, while consistently designing lower-duration trajectories than existing optimization-based planners.

We present a novel approach named OmniControl for incorporating flexible spatial control signals into a text-conditioned human motion generation model based on the diffusion process. Unlike previous methods that can only control the pelvis trajectory, OmniControl can incorporate flexible spatial control signals over different joints at different times with only one model. Specifically, we propose analytic spatial guidance that ensures the generated motion can tightly conform to the input control signals. At the same time, realism guidance is introduced to refine all the joints to generate more coherent motion. Both the spatial and realism guidance are essential and they are highly complementary for balancing control accuracy and motion realism. By combining them, OmniControl generates motions that are realistic, coherent, and consistent with the spatial constraints. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets show that OmniControl not only achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on pelvis control but also shows promising results when incorporating the constraints over other joints.

Despite the rise of billion-parameter foundation models trained across thousands of GPUs, similar scaling gains have not been shown for humanoid control. Current neural controllers for humanoids remain modest in size, target a limited set of behaviors, and are trained on a handful of GPUs over several days. We show that scaling up model capacity, data, and compute yields a generalist humanoid controller capable of creating natural and robust whole-body movements. Specifically, we posit motion tracking as a natural and scalable task for humanoid control, leveraging dense supervision from diverse motion-capture data to acquire human motion priors without manual reward engineering. We build a foundation model for motion tracking by scaling along three axes: network size (from 1.2M to 42M parameters), dataset volume (over 100M frames, 700 hours of high-quality motion data), and compute (9k GPU hours). Beyond demonstrating the benefits of scale, we show the practical utility of our model through two mechanisms: (1) a real-time universal kinematic planner that bridges motion tracking to downstream task execution, enabling natural and interactive control, and (2) a unified token space that supports various motion input interfaces, such as VR teleoperation devices, human videos, and vision-language-action (VLA) models, all using the same policy. Scaling motion tracking exhibits favorable properties: performance improves steadily with increased compute and data diversity, and learned representations generalize to unseen motions, establishing motion tracking at scale as a practical foundation for humanoid control.

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling the generation of highly realistic videos and drawing the attention of the community in their potential as world simulators. However, despite their capabilities, VDMs often fail to produce physically plausible videos due to an inherent lack of understanding of physics, resulting in incorrect dynamics and event sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-stage image-to-video generation framework that explicitly incorporates physics. In the first stage, we employ a Vision Language Model (VLM) as a coarse-grained motion planner, integrating chain-of-thought and physics-aware reasoning to predict a rough motion trajectories/changes that approximate real-world physical dynamics while ensuring the inter-frame consistency. In the second stage, we use the predicted motion trajectories/changes to guide the video generation of a VDM. As the predicted motion trajectories/changes are rough, noise is added during inference to provide freedom to the VDM in generating motion with more fine details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce physically plausible motion, and comparative evaluations highlight the notable superiority of our approach over existing methods. More video results are available on our Project Page: https://madaoer.github.io/projects/physically_plausible_video_generation.

Finding high-quality solutions quickly is an important objective in motion planning. This is especially true for high-degree-of-freedom robots. Satisficing planners have traditionally found feasible solutions quickly but provide no guarantees on their optimality, while almost-surely asymptotically optimal (a.s.a.o.) planners have probabilistic guarantees on their convergence towards an optimal solution but are more computationally expensive. This paper uses the AO-x meta-algorithm to extend the satisficing RRT-Connect planner to optimal planning. The resulting Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) finds initial solutions in similar times as RRT-Connect and uses any additional planning time to converge towards the optimal solution in an anytime manner. It is proven to be probabilistically complete and a.s.a.o. AORRTC was tested with the Panda (7 DoF) and Fetch (8 DoF) robotic arms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset. These experiments show that AORRTC finds initial solutions as fast as RRT-Connect and faster than the tested state-of-the-art a.s.a.o. algorithms while converging to better solutions faster. AORRTC finds solutions to difficult high-DoF planning problems in milliseconds where the other a.s.a.o. planners could not consistently find solutions in seconds. This performance was demonstrated both with and without single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) acceleration.

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots while preserving a desired trajectory via a layered controller. The top-level planner generates a safety-ensured trajectory for each agent, accounting for the dynamic constraints in the environment. This planner leverages high-order CBFs based on the forward reachable set to ensure safety-critical coordination control, i.e., guarantee the safe coordination of the robots during locomotion. The middle-level trajectory planner employs single rigid body (SRB) dynamics to generate optimal ground reaction forces (GRFs) to track the safety-ensured trajectories from the top-level planner. The whole-body motions to adhere to the optimal GRFs while ensuring the friction cone condition at the end of each stance leg are generated from the low-level controller. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through simulation and hardware experiments.

Prior motion generation largely follows two paradigms: continuous diffusion models that excel at kinematic control, and discrete token-based generators that are effective for semantic conditioning. To combine their strengths, we propose a three-stage framework comprising condition feature extraction (Perception), discrete token generation (Planning), and diffusion-based motion synthesis (Control). Central to this framework is MoTok, a diffusion-based discrete motion tokenizer that decouples semantic abstraction from fine-grained reconstruction by delegating motion recovery to a diffusion decoder, enabling compact single-layer tokens while preserving motion fidelity. For kinematic conditions, coarse constraints guide token generation during planning, while fine-grained constraints are enforced during control through diffusion-based optimization. This design prevents kinematic details from disrupting semantic token planning. On HumanML3D, our method significantly improves controllability and fidelity over MaskControl while using only one-sixth of the tokens, reducing trajectory error from 0.72 cm to 0.08 cm and FID from 0.083 to 0.029. Unlike prior methods that degrade under stronger kinematic constraints, ours improves fidelity, reducing FID from 0.033 to 0.014.

Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

High-level autonomous driving requires motion planners capable of modeling multimodal future uncertainties while remaining robust in closed-loop interactions. Although diffusion-based planners are effective at modeling complex trajectory distributions, they often suffer from stochastic instabilities and the lack of corrective negative feedback when trained purely with imitation learning. To address these issues, we propose RAD-2, a unified generator-discriminator framework for closed-loop planning. Specifically, a diffusion-based generator is used to produce diverse trajectory candidates, while an RL-optimized discriminator reranks these candidates according to their long-term driving quality. This decoupled design avoids directly applying sparse scalar rewards to the full high-dimensional trajectory space, thereby improving optimization stability. To further enhance reinforcement learning, we introduce Temporally Consistent Group Relative Policy Optimization, which exploits temporal coherence to alleviate the credit assignment problem. In addition, we propose On-policy Generator Optimization, which converts closed-loop feedback into structured longitudinal optimization signals and progressively shifts the generator toward high-reward trajectory manifolds. To support efficient large-scale training, we introduce BEV-Warp, a high-throughput simulation environment that performs closed-loop evaluation directly in Bird's-Eye View feature space via spatial warping. RAD-2 reduces the collision rate by 56% compared with strong diffusion-based planners. Real-world deployment further demonstrates improved perceived safety and driving smoothness in complex urban traffic.

Trajectory optimization offers mature tools for motion planning in high-dimensional spaces under dynamic constraints. However, when facing complex configuration spaces, cluttered with obstacles, roboticists typically fall back to sampling-based planners that struggle in very high dimensions and with continuous differential constraints. Indeed, obstacles are the source of many textbook examples of problematic nonconvexities in the trajectory-optimization problem. Here we show that convex optimization can, in fact, be used to reliably plan trajectories around obstacles. Specifically, we consider planning problems with collision-avoidance constraints, as well as cost penalties and hard constraints on the shape, the duration, and the velocity of the trajectory. Combining the properties of Bézier curves with a recently-proposed framework for finding shortest paths in Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS), we formulate the planning problem as a compact mixed-integer optimization. In stark contrast with existing mixed-integer planners, the convex relaxation of our programs is very tight, and a cheap rounding of its solution is typically sufficient to design globally-optimal trajectories. This reduces the mixed-integer program back to a simple convex optimization, and automatically provides optimality bounds for the planned trajectories. We name the proposed planner GCS, after its underlying optimization framework. We demonstrate GCS in simulation on a variety of robotic platforms, including a quadrotor flying through buildings and a dual-arm manipulator (with fourteen degrees of freedom) moving in a confined space. Using numerical experiments on a seven-degree-of-freedom manipulator, we show that GCS can outperform widely-used sampling-based planners by finding higher-quality trajectories in less time.

The release of nuPlan marks a new era in vehicle motion planning research, offering the first large-scale real-world dataset and evaluation schemes requiring both precise short-term planning and long-horizon ego-forecasting. Existing systems struggle to simultaneously meet both requirements. Indeed, we find that these tasks are fundamentally misaligned and should be addressed independently. We further assess the current state of closed-loop planning in the field, revealing the limitations of learning-based methods in complex real-world scenarios and the value of simple rule-based priors such as centerline selection through lane graph search algorithms. More surprisingly, for the open-loop sub-task, we observe that the best results are achieved when using only this centerline as scene context (\ie, ignoring all information regarding the map and other agents). Combining these insights, we propose an extremely simple and efficient planner which outperforms an extensive set of competitors, winning the nuPlan planning challenge 2023.

This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simple optimization techniques with many parallel seeds leads to solving difficult motion generation problems within 50ms on average, 60x faster than state-of-the-art (SOTA) trajectory optimization methods. We achieve SOTA performance by combining L-BFGS step direction estimation with a novel parallel noisy line search scheme and a particle-based optimization solver. To further aid trajectory optimization, we develop a parallel geometric planner that plans within 20ms and also introduce a collision-free IK solver that can solve over 7000 queries/s. We package our contributions into a state of the art GPU accelerated motion generation library, cuRobo and release it to enrich the robotics community. Additional details are available at https://curobo.org

Sampling-based motion planning algorithms, like the Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) and its widely used variant, RRT-Connect, provide efficient solutions for high-dimensional planning problems faced by real-world robots. However, these methods remain computationally intensive, particularly in complex environments that require many collision checks. To improve performance, recent efforts have explored parallelizing specific components of RRT such as collision checking, or running multiple planners independently. However, little has been done to develop an integrated parallelism approach, co-designed for large-scale parallelism. In this work we present pRRTC, a RRT-Connect based planner co-designed for GPU acceleration across the entire algorithm through parallel expansion and SIMT-optimized collision checking. We evaluate the effectiveness of pRRTC on the MotionBenchMaker dataset using robots with 7, 8, and 14 degrees of freedom (DoF). Compared to the state-of-the-art, pRRTC achieves as much as a 10x speedup on constrained reaching tasks with a 5.4x reduction in standard deviation. pRRTC also achieves a 1.4x reduction in average initial path cost. Finally, we deploy pRRTC on a 14-DoF dual Franka Panda arm setup and demonstrate real-time, collision-free motion planning with dynamic obstacles. We open-source our planner to support the wider community.

Motion diffusion models and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based control for physics-based simulations have complementary strengths for human motion generation. The former is capable of generating a wide variety of motions, adhering to intuitive control such as text, while the latter offers physically plausible motion and direct interaction with the environment. In this work, we present a method that combines their respective strengths. CLoSD is a text-driven RL physics-based controller, guided by diffusion generation for various tasks. Our key insight is that motion diffusion can serve as an on-the-fly universal planner for a robust RL controller. To this end, CLoSD maintains a closed-loop interaction between two modules -- a Diffusion Planner (DiP), and a tracking controller. DiP is a fast-responding autoregressive diffusion model, controlled by textual prompts and target locations, and the controller is a simple and robust motion imitator that continuously receives motion plans from DiP and provides feedback from the environment. CLoSD is capable of seamlessly performing a sequence of different tasks, including navigation to a goal location, striking an object with a hand or foot as specified in a text prompt, sitting down, and getting up. https://guytevet.github.io/CLoSD-page/

Achieving human-like driving behaviors in complex open-world environments is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. Contemporary learning-based planning approaches such as imitation learning methods often struggle to balance competing objectives and lack of safety assurance,due to limited adaptability and inadequacy in learning complex multi-modal behaviors commonly exhibited in human planning, not to mention their strong reliance on the fallback strategy with predefined rules. We propose a novel transformer-based Diffusion Planner for closed-loop planning, which can effectively model multi-modal driving behavior and ensure trajectory quality without any rule-based refinement. Our model supports joint modeling of both prediction and planning tasks under the same architecture, enabling cooperative behaviors between vehicles. Moreover, by learning the gradient of the trajectory score function and employing a flexible classifier guidance mechanism, Diffusion Planner effectively achieves safe and adaptable planning behaviors. Evaluations on the large-scale real-world autonomous planning benchmark nuPlan and our newly collected 200-hour delivery-vehicle driving dataset demonstrate that Diffusion Planner achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop performance with robust transferability in diverse driving styles.

Effective planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-predictive control (MPC) relies on the accuracy of the learned dynamics model. In many instances of MBRL and MPC, this model is assumed to be stationary and is periodically re-trained from scratch on state transition experience collected from the beginning of environment interactions. This implies that the time required to train the dynamics model - and the pause required between plan executions - grows linearly with the size of the collected experience. We argue that this is too slow for lifelong robot learning and propose HyperCRL, a method that continually learns the encountered dynamics in a sequence of tasks using task-conditional hypernetworks. Our method has three main attributes: first, it includes dynamics learning sessions that do not revisit training data from previous tasks, so it only needs to store the most recent fixed-size portion of the state transition experience; second, it uses fixed-capacity hypernetworks to represent non-stationary and task-aware dynamics; third, it outperforms existing continual learning alternatives that rely on fixed-capacity networks, and does competitively with baselines that remember an ever increasing coreset of past experience. We show that HyperCRL is effective in continual model-based reinforcement learning in robot locomotion and manipulation scenarios, such as tasks involving pushing and door opening. Our project website with videos is at this link https://rvl.cs.toronto.edu/blog/2020/hypercrl

We introduce a learning-guided motion planning framework that generates seed trajectories using a diffusion model for trajectory optimization. Given a workspace, our method approximates the configuration space (C-space) obstacles through an environment representation consisting of a sparse set of task-related key configurations, which is then used as a conditioning input to the diffusion model. The diffusion model integrates regularization terms that encourage smooth, collision-free trajectories during training, and trajectory optimization refines the generated seed trajectories to correct any colliding segments. Our experimental results demonstrate that high-quality trajectory priors, learned through our C-space-grounded diffusion model, enable the efficient generation of collision-free trajectories in narrow-passage environments, outperforming previous learning- and planning-based baselines. Videos and additional materials can be found on the project page: https://kiwi-sherbet.github.io/PRESTO.

Current state-of-the-art paradigms predominantly treat Text-to-Motion (T2M) generation as a direct translation problem, mapping symbolic language directly to continuous poses. While effective for simple actions, this System 1 approach faces a fundamental theoretical bottleneck we identify as the Semantic-Kinematic Impedance Mismatch: the inherent difficulty of grounding semantically dense, discrete linguistic intent into kinematically dense, high-frequency motion data in a single shot. In this paper, we argue that the solution lies in an architectural shift towards Latent System 2 Reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Hierarchical Motor Control in cognitive science, we propose Latent Motion Reasoning (LMR) that reformulates generation as a two-stage Think-then-Act decision process. Central to LMR is a novel Dual-Granularity Tokenizer that disentangles motion into two distinct manifolds: a compressed, semantically rich Reasoning Latent for planning global topology, and a high-frequency Execution Latent for preserving physical fidelity. By forcing the model to autoregressively reason (plan the coarse trajectory) before it moves (instantiates the frames), we effectively bridge the ineffability gap between language and physics. We demonstrate LMR's versatility by implementing it for two representative baselines: T2M-GPT (discrete) and MotionStreamer (continuous). Extensive experiments show that LMR yields non-trivial improvements in both semantic alignment and physical plausibility, validating that the optimal substrate for motion planning is not natural language, but a learned, motion-aligned concept space. Codes and demos can be found in https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/}

We propose a novel approach to multi-robot collaboration that harnesses the power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for both high-level communication and low-level path planning. Robots are equipped with LLMs to discuss and collectively reason task strategies. They then generate sub-task plans and task space waypoint paths, which are used by a multi-arm motion planner to accelerate trajectory planning. We also provide feedback from the environment, such as collision checking, and prompt the LLM agents to improve their plan and waypoints in-context. For evaluation, we introduce RoCoBench, a 6-task benchmark covering a wide range of multi-robot collaboration scenarios, accompanied by a text-only dataset for agent representation and reasoning. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach -- it achieves high success rates across all tasks in RoCoBench and adapts to variations in task semantics. Our dialog setup offers high interpretability and flexibility -- in real world experiments, we show RoCo easily incorporates human-in-the-loop, where a user can communicate and collaborate with a robot agent to complete tasks together. See project website https://project-roco.github.io for videos and code.

End-to-end multi-modal planning has been widely adopted to model the uncertainty of driving behavior, typically by scoring candidate trajectories and selecting the optimal one. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: scoring a large static trajectory vocabulary, or scoring a small set of dynamically generated proposals. While static vocabularies often suffer from coarse discretization of the action space, dynamic proposals provide finer-grained precision and have shown stronger empirical performance on existing benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether dynamic generation is fundamentally necessary, or whether static vocabularies can already achieve comparable performance when they are sufficiently dense to cover the action space. In this work, we start with a systematic scaling study of Hydra-MDP, a representative scoring-based method, revealing that performance consistently improves as trajectory anchors become denser, without exhibiting saturation before computational constraints are reached. Motivated by this observation, we propose SparseDriveV2 to push the performance boundary of scoring-based planning through two complementary innovations: (1) a scalable vocabulary representation with a factorized structure that decomposes trajectories into geometric paths and velocity profiles, enabling combinatorial coverage of the action space, and (2) a scalable scoring strategy with coarse factorized scoring over paths and velocity profiles followed by fine-grained scoring on a small set of composed trajectories. By combining these two techniques, SparseDriveV2 achieves 92.0 PDMS and 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM, with 89.15 Driving Score and 70.00 Success Rate on Bench2Drive with a lightweight ResNet-34 as backbone. Code and model are released at https://github.com/swc-17/SparseDriveV2.

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous driving and perhaps the most challenging to comprehensively evaluate because of the associated risks and expenses of real-world deployment. Therefore, simulations play an important role in efficient development of planning algorithms. To be effective, simulations must be accurate and realistic, both in terms of dynamics and behavior modeling, and also highly customizable in order to accommodate a broad spectrum of research frameworks. In this paper, we introduce SMARTS 2.0, the second generation of our motion planning simulator which, in addition to being highly optimized for large-scale simulation, provides many new features, such as realistic map integration, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, traffic and pedestrian simulation, and a broad variety of sensor models. Moreover, we present a novel benchmark suite for evaluating planning algorithms in various highly challenging scenarios, including interactive driving, such as turning at intersections, and adaptive driving, in which the task is to closely follow a lead vehicle without any explicit knowledge of its intention. Each scenario is characterized by a variety of traffic patterns and road structures. We further propose a series of common and task-specific metrics to effectively evaluate the performance of the planning algorithms. At the end, we evaluate common motion planning algorithms using the proposed benchmark and highlight the challenges the proposed scenarios impose. The new SMARTS 2.0 features and the benchmark are publicly available at github.com/huawei-noah/SMARTS.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), significant progress has been made in developing open-vocabulary robotic manipulation systems. However, many existing approaches overlook the importance of object dynamics, limiting their applicability to more complex, dynamic tasks. In this work, we introduce KUDA, an open-vocabulary manipulation system that integrates dynamics learning and visual prompting through keypoints, leveraging both VLMs and learning-based neural dynamics models. Our key insight is that a keypoint-based target specification is simultaneously interpretable by VLMs and can be efficiently translated into cost functions for model-based planning. Given language instructions and visual observations, KUDA first assigns keypoints to the RGB image and queries the VLM to generate target specifications. These abstract keypoint-based representations are then converted into cost functions, which are optimized using a learned dynamics model to produce robotic trajectories. We evaluate KUDA on a range of manipulation tasks, including free-form language instructions across diverse object categories, multi-object interactions, and deformable or granular objects, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. The project page is available at http://kuda-dynamics.github.io.

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, variance is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. These approximations can be easily incorporated with negligible additional overhead into any existing trajectory forecasting framework utilizing probabilistic predictions, whether it is autoregressive or one-shot prediction. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning. In this paper, we show four analytical formulations of probabilistic kinematic priors which can be used for any Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based deep learning models, quantify the error bound on linear approximations applied during trajectory unrolling, and show results to evaluate each formulation in trajectory forecasting.

Existing human motion generation methods with trajectory and pose inputs operate global processing on both modalities, leading to suboptimal outputs. In this paper, we propose IKMo, an image-keyframed motion generation method based on the diffusion model with trajectory and pose being decoupled. The trajectory and pose inputs go through a two-stage conditioning framework. In the first stage, the dedicated optimization module is applied to refine inputs. In the second stage, trajectory and pose are encoded via a Trajectory Encoder and a Pose Encoder in parallel. Then, motion with high spatial and semantic fidelity is guided by a motion ControlNet, which processes the fused trajectory and pose data. Experiment results based on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art on all metrics under trajectory-keyframe constraints. In addition, MLLM-based agents are implemented to pre-process model inputs. Given texts and keyframe images from users, the agents extract motion descriptions, keyframe poses, and trajectories as the optimized inputs into the motion generation model. We conducts a user study with 10 participants. The experiment results prove that the MLLM-based agents pre-processing makes generated motion more in line with users' expectation. We believe that the proposed method improves both the fidelity and controllability of motion generation by the diffusion model.

We propose ComDrive: the first comfort-oriented end-to-end autonomous driving system to generate temporally consistent and comfortable trajectories. Recent studies have demonstrated that imitation learning-based planners and learning-based trajectory scorers can effectively generate and select safety trajectories that closely mimic expert demonstrations. However, such trajectory planners and scorers face the challenge of generating temporally inconsistent and uncomfortable trajectories. To address these issues, ComDrive first extracts 3D spatial representations through sparse perception, which then serves as conditional inputs. These inputs are used by a Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM)-based motion planner to generate temporally consistent multi-modal trajectories. A dual-stream adaptive trajectory scorer subsequently selects the most comfortable trajectory from these candidates to control the vehicle. Experiments demonstrate that ComDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in both comfort and safety, outperforming UniAD by 17% in driving comfort and reducing collision rates by 25% compared to SparseDrive. More results are available on our project page: https://jmwang0117.github.io/ComDrive/.

Seamless human-robot manipulation in close proximity relies on accurate forecasts of human motion. While there has been significant progress in learning forecast models at scale, when applied to manipulation tasks, these models accrue high errors at critical transition points leading to degradation in downstream planning performance. Our key insight is that instead of predicting the most likely human motion, it is sufficient to produce forecasts that capture how future human motion would affect the cost of a robot's plan. We present ManiCast, a novel framework that learns cost-aware human forecasts and feeds them to a model predictive control planner to execute collaborative manipulation tasks. Our framework enables fluid, real-time interactions between a human and a 7-DoF robot arm across a number of real-world tasks such as reactive stirring, object handovers, and collaborative table setting. We evaluate both the motion forecasts and the end-to-end forecaster-planner system against a range of learned and heuristic baselines while additionally contributing new datasets. We release our code and datasets at https://portal-cornell.github.io/manicast/.

Controlling human motion based on text presents an important challenge in computer vision. Traditional approaches often rely on holistic action descriptions for motion synthesis, which struggle to capture subtle movements of local body parts. This limitation restricts the ability to isolate and manipulate specific movements. To address this, we propose a novel motion representation that decomposes motion into distinct body joint group movements and interactions from a kinematic perspective. We design an automatic dataset collection pipeline that enhances the existing text-motion benchmark by incorporating fine-grained local joint-group motion and interaction descriptions. To bridge the gap between text and motion domains, we introduce a hierarchical motion semantics approach that progressively fuses joint-level interaction information into the global action-level semantics for modality alignment. With this hierarchy, we introduce a coarse-to-fine motion synthesis procedure for various generation and editing downstream applications. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation enhances text-motion retrieval by improving joint-spatial understanding, and enables more precise joint-motion generation and control. Project Page: {\smallhttps://andypinxinliu.github.io/KinMo/}

Embodied Planning is dedicated to the goal of creating agents capable of executing long-horizon tasks in complex physical worlds. However, existing embodied planning benchmarks frequently feature short-horizon tasks and coarse-grained action primitives. To address this challenge, we introduce CookBench, a benchmark for long-horizon planning in complex cooking scenarios. By leveraging a high-fidelity simulation environment built upon the powerful Unity game engine, we define frontier AI challenges in a complex, realistic environment. The core task in CookBench is designed as a two-stage process. First, in Intention Recognition, an agent needs to accurately parse a user's complex intent. Second, in Embodied Interaction, the agent should execute the identified cooking goal through a long-horizon, fine-grained sequence of physical actions. Unlike existing embodied planning benchmarks, we refine the action granularity to a spatial level that considers crucial operational information while abstracting away low-level robotic control. Besides, We provide a comprehensive toolset that encapsulates the simulator. Its unified API supports both macro-level operations, such as placing orders and purchasing ingredients, and a rich set of fine-grained embodied actions for physical interaction, enabling researchers to focus on high-level planning and decision-making. Furthermore, we present an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art, closed-source Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model, revealing their major shortcomings and challenges posed by complex, long-horizon tasks. The full benchmark will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

Fast and efficient motion planning algorithms are crucial for many state-of-the-art robotics applications such as self-driving cars. Existing motion planning methods become ineffective as their computational complexity increases exponentially with the dimensionality of the motion planning problem. To address this issue, we present Motion Planning Networks (MPNet), a neural network-based novel planning algorithm. The proposed method encodes the given workspaces directly from a point cloud measurement and generates the end-to-end collision-free paths for the given start and goal configurations. We evaluate MPNet on various 2D and 3D environments including the planning of a 7 DOF Baxter robot manipulator. The results show that MPNet is not only consistently computationally efficient in all environments but also generalizes to completely unseen environments. The results also show that the computation time of MPNet consistently remains less than 1 second in all presented experiments, which is significantly lower than existing state-of-the-art motion planning algorithms.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

Robots are increasingly being used in dynamic environments like workplaces, hospitals, and homes. As a result, interactions with robots must be simple and intuitive, with robots perception adapting efficiently to human-induced changes. This paper presents a robot control architecture that addresses key challenges in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on the dynamic creation and continuous update of the robot state representation. The architecture uses Large Language Models to integrate diverse information sources, including natural language commands, robotic skills representation, real-time dynamic semantic mapping of the perceived scene. This enables flexible and adaptive robotic behavior in complex, dynamic environments. Traditional robotic systems often rely on static, pre-programmed instructions and settings, limiting their adaptability to dynamic environments and real-time collaboration. In contrast, this architecture uses LLMs to interpret complex, high-level instructions and generate actionable plans that enhance human-robot collaboration. At its core, the system Perception Module generates and continuously updates a semantic scene graph using RGB-D sensor data, providing a detailed and structured representation of the environment. A particle filter is employed to ensure accurate object localization in dynamic, real-world settings. The Planner Module leverages this up-to-date semantic map to break down high-level tasks into sub-tasks and link them to robotic skills such as navigation, object manipulation (e.g., PICK and PLACE), and movement (e.g., GOTO). By combining real-time perception, state tracking, and LLM-driven communication and task planning, the architecture enhances adaptability, task efficiency, and human-robot collaboration in dynamic environments.

State-of-the-art text-to-motion generation models rely on the kinematic-aware, local-relative motion representation popularized by HumanML3D, which encodes motion relative to the pelvis and to the previous frame with built-in redundancy. While this design simplifies training for earlier generation models, it introduces critical limitations for diffusion models and hinders applicability to downstream tasks. In this work, we revisit the motion representation and propose a radically simplified and long-abandoned alternative for text-to-motion generation: absolute joint coordinates in global space. Through systematic analysis of design choices, we show that this formulation achieves significantly higher motion fidelity, improved text alignment, and strong scalability, even with a simple Transformer backbone and no auxiliary kinematic-aware losses. Moreover, our formulation naturally supports downstream tasks such as text-driven motion control and temporal/spatial editing without additional task-specific reengineering and costly classifier guidance generation from control signals. Finally, we demonstrate promising generalization to directly generate SMPL-H mesh vertices in motion from text, laying a strong foundation for future research and motion-related applications.

Improving the performance of motion planning algorithms for high-degree-of-freedom robots usually requires reducing the cost or frequency of computationally expensive operations. Traditionally, and especially for asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planners, the most expensive operations are local motion validation and querying the nearest neighbours of a configuration. Recent advances have significantly reduced the cost of motion validation by using single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) parallelism to improve solution times for satisficing motion planning problems. These advances have not yet been applied to asymptotically optimal motion planning. This paper presents Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*), the first fully connected, informed, anytime almost-surely asymptotically optimal (ASAO) algorithm. FCIT* exploits the radically reduced cost of edge evaluation via SIMD parallelism to build and search fully connected graphs. This removes the need for nearest-neighbours structures, which are a dominant cost for many sampling-based motion planners, and allows it to find initial solutions faster than state-of-the-art ASAO (VAMP, OMPL) and satisficing (OMPL) algorithms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset while converging towards optimal plans in an anytime manner.

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

Vehicle motion planning is an essential component of autonomous driving technology. Current rule-based vehicle motion planning methods perform satisfactorily in common scenarios but struggle to generalize to long-tailed situations. Meanwhile, learning-based methods have yet to achieve superior performance over rule-based approaches in large-scale closed-loop scenarios. To address these issues, we propose PlanAgent, the first mid-to-mid planning system based on a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). MLLM is used as a cognitive agent to introduce human-like knowledge, interpretability, and common-sense reasoning into the closed-loop planning. Specifically, PlanAgent leverages the power of MLLM through three core modules. First, an Environment Transformation module constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) map and a lane-graph-based textual description from the environment as inputs. Second, a Reasoning Engine module introduces a hierarchical chain-of-thought from scene understanding to lateral and longitudinal motion instructions, culminating in planner code generation. Last, a Reflection module is integrated to simulate and evaluate the generated planner for reducing MLLM's uncertainty. PlanAgent is endowed with the common-sense reasoning and generalization capability of MLLM, which empowers it to effectively tackle both common and complex long-tailed scenarios. Our proposed PlanAgent is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging nuPlan benchmarks. A comprehensive set of experiments convincingly demonstrates that PlanAgent outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in the closed-loop motion planning task. Codes will be soon released.

Text-conditioned human motion generation, which allows for user interaction through natural language, has become increasingly popular. Existing methods typically generate short, isolated motions based on a single input sentence. However, human motions are continuous and can extend over long periods, carrying rich semantics. Creating long, complex motions that precisely respond to streams of text descriptions, particularly in an online and real-time setting, remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, incorporating spatial constraints into text-conditioned motion generation presents additional challenges, as it requires aligning the motion semantics specified by text descriptions with geometric information, such as goal locations and 3D scene geometry. To address these limitations, we propose DartControl, in short DART, a Diffusion-based Autoregressive motion primitive model for Real-time Text-driven motion control. Our model effectively learns a compact motion primitive space jointly conditioned on motion history and text inputs using latent diffusion models. By autoregressively generating motion primitives based on the preceding history and current text input, DART enables real-time, sequential motion generation driven by natural language descriptions. Additionally, the learned motion primitive space allows for precise spatial motion control, which we formulate either as a latent noise optimization problem or as a Markov decision process addressed through reinforcement learning. We present effective algorithms for both approaches, demonstrating our model's versatility and superior performance in various motion synthesis tasks. Experiments show our method outperforms existing baselines in motion realism, efficiency, and controllability. Video results are available on the project page: https://zkf1997.github.io/DART/.

We develop a novel policy synthesis algorithm, RMPflow, based on geometrically consistent transformations of Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs). RMPs are a class of reactive motion policies designed to parameterize non-Euclidean behaviors as dynamical systems in intrinsically nonlinear task spaces. Given a set of RMPs designed for individual tasks, RMPflow can consistently combine these local policies to generate an expressive global policy, while simultaneously exploiting sparse structure for computational efficiency. We study the geometric properties of RMPflow and provide sufficient conditions for stability. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that accounting for the geometry of task policies can simplify classically difficult problems, such as planning through clutter on high-DOF manipulation systems.

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

Industrial robot applications require increasingly flexible systems that non-expert users can easily adapt for varying tasks and environments. However, different adaptations benefit from different interaction modalities. We present an interactive framework that enables robot skill adaptation through three complementary modalities: kinesthetic touch for precise spatial corrections, natural language for high-level semantic modifications, and a graphical web interface for visualizing geometric relations and trajectories, inspecting and adjusting parameters, and editing via-points by drag-and-drop. The framework integrates five components: energy-based human-intention detection, a tool-based LLM architecture (where the LLM selects and parameterizes predefined functions rather than generating code) for safe natural language adaptation, Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMPs) for motion encoding, probabilistic Virtual Fixtures for guided demonstration recording, and ergodic control for surface finishing. We demonstrate that this tool-based LLM architecture generalizes skill adaptation from KMPs to ergodic control, enabling voice-commanded surface finishing. Validation on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot at the Automatica 2025 trade fair demonstrates the practical applicability of our approach in industrial settings.

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured representation and generation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in periodic or quasi-periodic motions. The motion dynamics in a continuously parameterized latent space enable our method to enhance the interpolation and generalization capabilities of motion learning algorithms. The motion learning controller, informed by the motion parameterization, operates online tracking of a wide range of motions, including targets unseen during training. With a fallback mechanism, the controller dynamically adapts its tracking strategy and automatically resorts to safe action execution when a potentially risky target is proposed. By leveraging the identified spatial-temporal structure, our work opens new possibilities for future advancements in general motion representation and learning algorithms.

Diffusion-based planners have emerged as a promising approach for human-like trajectory generation in autonomous driving. Recent works incorporate reinforcement fine-tuning to enhance the robustness of diffusion planners through reward-oriented optimization in a generation-evaluation loop. However, they struggle to generate multi-modal, scenario-adaptive trajectories, hindering the exploitation efficiency of informative rewards during fine-tuning. To resolve this, we propose PlannerRFT, a sample-efficient reinforcement fine-tuning framework for diffusion-based planners. PlannerRFT adopts a dual-branch optimization that simultaneously refines the trajectory distribution and adaptively guides the denoising process toward more promising exploration, without altering the original inference pipeline. To support parallel learning at scale, we develop nuMax, an optimized simulator that achieves 10 times faster rollout compared to native nuPlan. Extensive experiments shows that PlannerRFT yields state-of-the-art performance with distinct behaviors emerging during the learning process.

While generative models have become effective at producing human-like motions from text, transferring these motions to humanoid robots for physical execution remains challenging. Existing pipelines are often limited by retargeting, where kinematic quality is undermined by physical infeasibility, contact-transition errors, and the high cost of real-world dynamical data. We present a unified latent-driven framework that bridges natural language and whole-body humanoid locomotion through a retarget-free, physics-optimized pipeline. Rather than treating generation and control as separate stages, our key insight is to couple them bidirectionally under physical constraints.We introduce a Physical Plausibility Optimization (PP-Opt) module as the coupling interface. In the forward direction, PP-Opt refines a teacher-student distillation policy with a plausibility-centric reward to suppress artifacts such as floating, skating, and penetration. In the backward direction, it converts reward-optimized simulation rollouts into high-quality explicit motion data, which is used to fine-tune the motion generator toward a more physically plausible latent distribution. This bidirectional design forms a self-improving cycle: the generator learns a physically grounded latent space, while the controller learns to execute latent-conditioned behaviors with dynamical integrity.Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid show that our bidirectional optimization improves tracking accuracy and success rates. Across IsaacLab and MuJoCo, the implicit latent-driven pipeline consistently outperforms conventional explicit retargeting baselines in both precision and stability. By coupling diffusion-based motion generation with physical plausibility optimization, our framework provides a practical path toward deployable text-guided humanoid intelligence.

Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in long-horizon missions that require coordination among robots with diverse capabilities. However, existing planning approaches struggle to construct accurate symbolic representations and maintain plan consistency in dynamic environments. Classical PDDL planners require manually crafted symbolic models, while LLM-based planners often ignore agent heterogeneity and environmental uncertainty. We introduce KGLAMP, a knowledge-graph-guided LLM planning framework for heterogeneous multi-robot teams. The framework maintains a structured knowledge graph encoding object relations, spatial reachability, and robot capabilities, which guides the LLM in generating accurate PDDL problem specifications. The knowledge graph serves as a persistent, dynamically updated memory that incorporates new observations and triggers replanning upon detecting inconsistencies, enabling symbolic plans to adapt to evolving world states. Experiments on the MAT-THOR benchmark show that KGLAMP improves performance by at least 25.5% over both LLM-only and PDDL-based variants.

We propose MotionAgent, enabling fine-grained motion control for text-guided image-to-video generation. The key technique is the motion field agent that converts motion information in text prompts into explicit motion fields, providing flexible and precise motion guidance. Specifically, the agent extracts the object movement and camera motion described in the text and converts them into object trajectories and camera extrinsics, respectively. An analytical optical flow composition module integrates these motion representations in 3D space and projects them into a unified optical flow. An optical flow adapter takes the flow to control the base image-to-video diffusion model for generating fine-grained controlled videos. The significant improvement in the Video-Text Camera Motion metrics on VBench indicates that our method achieves precise control over camera motion. We construct a subset of VBench to evaluate the alignment of motion information in the text and the generated video, outperforming other advanced models on motion generation accuracy.

World models have become crucial for autonomous driving, as they learn how scenarios evolve over time to address the long-tail challenges of the real world. However, current approaches relegate world models to limited roles: they operate within ostensibly unified architectures that still keep world prediction and motion planning as decoupled processes. To bridge this gap, we propose DriveLaW, a novel paradigm that unifies video generation and motion planning. By directly injecting the latent representation from its video generator into the planner, DriveLaW ensures inherent consistency between high-fidelity future generation and reliable trajectory planning. Specifically, DriveLaW consists of two core components: DriveLaW-Video, our powerful world model that generates high-fidelity forecasting with expressive latent representations, and DriveLaW-Act, a diffusion planner that generates consistent and reliable trajectories from the latent of DriveLaW-Video, with both components optimized by a three-stage progressive training strategy. The power of our unified paradigm is demonstrated by new state-of-the-art results across both tasks. DriveLaW not only advances video prediction significantly, surpassing best-performing work by 33.3% in FID and 1.8% in FVD, but also achieves a new record on the NAVSIM planning benchmark.

Conditional human motion generation is an important topic with many applications in virtual reality, gaming, and robotics. While prior works have focused on generating motion guided by text, music, or scenes, these typically result in isolated motions confined to short durations. Instead, we address the generation of long, continuous sequences guided by a series of varying textual descriptions. In this context, we introduce FlowMDM, the first diffusion-based model that generates seamless Human Motion Compositions (HMC) without any postprocessing or redundant denoising steps. For this, we introduce the Blended Positional Encodings, a technique that leverages both absolute and relative positional encodings in the denoising chain. More specifically, global motion coherence is recovered at the absolute stage, whereas smooth and realistic transitions are built at the relative stage. As a result, we achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy, realism, and smoothness on the Babel and HumanML3D datasets. FlowMDM excels when trained with only a single description per motion sequence thanks to its Pose-Centric Cross-ATtention, which makes it robust against varying text descriptions at inference time. Finally, to address the limitations of existing HMC metrics, we propose two new metrics: the Peak Jerk and the Area Under the Jerk, to detect abrupt transitions.

Human motion driven control (HMDC) is an effective approach for generating natural and compelling robot motions while preserving high-level semantics. However, establishing the correspondence between humans and robots with different body structures is not straightforward due to the mismatches in kinematics and dynamics properties, which causes intrinsic ambiguity to the problem. Many previous algorithms approach this motion retargeting problem with unsupervised learning, which requires the prerequisite skill sets. However, it will be extremely costly to learn all the skills without understanding the given human motions, particularly for high-dimensional robots. In this work, we introduce CrossLoco, a guided unsupervised reinforcement learning framework that simultaneously learns robot skills and their correspondence to human motions. Our key innovation is to introduce a cycle-consistency-based reward term designed to maximize the mutual information between human motions and robot states. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate compelling robot motions by translating diverse human motions, such as running, hopping, and dancing. We quantitatively compare our CrossLoco against the manually engineered and unsupervised baseline algorithms along with the ablated versions of our framework and demonstrate that our method translates human motions with better accuracy, diversity, and user preference. We also showcase its utility in other applications, such as synthesizing robot movements from language input and enabling interactive robot control.

Lattice-based planning techniques simplify the motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles by limiting available motions to a pre-computed set of primitives. These primitives are then combined online to generate more complex maneuvers. A set of motion primitives t-span a lattice if, given a real number t at least 1, any configuration in the lattice can be reached via a sequence of motion primitives whose cost is no more than a factor of t from optimal. Computing a minimal t-spanning set balances a trade-off between computed motion quality and motion planning performance. In this work, we formulate this problem for an arbitrary lattice as a mixed integer linear program. We also propose an A*-based algorithm to solve the motion planning problem using these primitives. Finally, we present an algorithm that removes the excessive oscillations from planned motions -- a common problem in lattice-based planning. Our method is validated for autonomous driving in both parking lot and highway scenarios.

Generating realistic and interactive dynamics of traffic participants according to specific instruction is critical for street scene simulation. However, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive method that generates realistic dynamics of different types of participants including vehicles and pedestrians, with different kinds of interactions between them. In this paper, we introduce ChatDyn, the first system capable of generating interactive, controllable and realistic participant dynamics in street scenes based on language instructions. To achieve precise control through complex language, ChatDyn employs a multi-LLM-agent role-playing approach, which utilizes natural language inputs to plan the trajectories and behaviors for different traffic participants. To generate realistic fine-grained dynamics based on the planning, ChatDyn designs two novel executors: the PedExecutor, a unified multi-task executor that generates realistic pedestrian dynamics under different task plannings; and the VehExecutor, a physical transition-based policy that generates physically plausible vehicle dynamics. Extensive experiments show that ChatDyn can generate realistic driving scene dynamics with multiple vehicles and pedestrians, and significantly outperforms previous methods on subtasks. Code and model will be available at https://vfishc.github.io/chatdyn.

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/.

Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) are popular in motion planning because they find solutions efficiently to single-query problems. Optimal RRTs (RRT*s) extend RRTs to the problem of finding the optimal solution, but in doing so asymptotically find the optimal path from the initial state to every state in the planning domain. This behaviour is not only inefficient but also inconsistent with their single-query nature. For problems seeking to minimize path length, the subset of states that can improve a solution can be described by a prolate hyperspheroid. We show that unless this subset is sampled directly, the probability of improving a solution becomes arbitrarily small in large worlds or high state dimensions. In this paper, we present an exact method to focus the search by directly sampling this subset. The advantages of the presented sampling technique are demonstrated with a new algorithm, Informed RRT*. This method retains the same probabilistic guarantees on completeness and optimality as RRT* while improving the convergence rate and final solution quality. We present the algorithm as a simple modification to RRT* that could be further extended by more advanced path-planning algorithms. We show experimentally that it outperforms RRT* in rate of convergence, final solution cost, and ability to find difficult passages while demonstrating less dependence on the state dimension and range of the planning problem.

Markerless multiview motion capture is often constrained by the need for precise camera calibration, limiting accessibility for non-experts and in-the-wild captures. Existing calibration-free approaches mitigate this requirement but suffer from high computational cost and reduced reconstruction accuracy. We present Kineo, a fully automatic, calibration-free pipeline for markerless motion capture from videos captured by unsynchronized, uncalibrated, consumer-grade RGB cameras. Kineo leverages 2D keypoints from off-the-shelf detectors to simultaneously calibrate cameras, including Brown-Conrady distortion coefficients, and reconstruct 3D keypoints and dense scene point maps at metric scale. A confidence-driven spatio-temporal keypoint sampling strategy, combined with graph-based global optimization, ensures robust calibration at a fixed computational cost independent of sequence length. We further introduce a pairwise reprojection consensus score to quantify 3D reconstruction reliability for downstream tasks. Evaluations on EgoHumans and Human3.6M demonstrate substantial improvements over prior calibration-free methods. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, Kineo reduces camera translation error by approximately 83-85%, camera angular error by 86-92%, and world mean-per-joint error (W-MPJPE) by 83-91%. Kineo is also efficient in real-world scenarios, processing multi-view sequences faster than their duration in specific configuration (e.g., 36min to process 1h20min of footage). The full pipeline and evaluation code are openly released to promote reproducibility and practical adoption at https://liris-xr.github.io/kineo/.

Robotic manipulation is often challenging due to the long-horizon tasks and the complex object relationships. A common solution is to develop a task and motion planning framework that integrates planning for high-level task and low-level motion. Recently, inspired by the powerful reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based planning approaches have achieved remarkable progress. However, these methods still heavily rely on expert-specific knowledge, often generating invalid plans for unseen and unfamiliar tasks. To address this issue, we propose an innovative language-guided symbolic task planning (LM-SymOpt) framework with optimization. It is the first expert-free planning framework since we combine the world knowledge from LLMs with formal reasoning, resulting in improved generalization capability to new tasks. Specifically, differ to most existing work, our LM-SymOpt employs LLMs to translate natural language instructions into symbolic representations, thereby representing actions as high-level symbols and reducing the search space for planning. Next, after evaluating the action probability of completing the task using LLMs, a weighted random sampling method is introduced to generate candidate plans. Their feasibility is assessed through symbolic reasoning and their cost efficiency is then evaluated using trajectory optimization for selecting the optimal planning. Our experimental results show that LM-SymOpt outperforms existing LLM-based planning approaches.

Trajectory planning is commonly used as part of a local planner in autonomous driving. This paper considers the problem of planning a continuous-curvature-rate trajectory between fixed start and goal states that minimizes a tunable trade-off between passenger comfort and travel time. The problem is an instance of infinite dimensional optimization over two continuous functions: a path, and a velocity profile. We propose a simplification of this problem that facilitates the discretization of both functions. This paper also proposes a method to quickly generate minimal-length paths between start and goal states based on a single tuning parameter: the second derivative of curvature. Furthermore, we discretize the set of velocity profiles along a given path into a selection of acceleration way-points along the path. Gradient-descent is then employed to minimize cost over feasible choices of the second derivative of curvature, and acceleration way-points, resulting in a method that repeatedly solves the path and velocity profiles in an iterative fashion. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the benefits of the proposed methods.

World models aim to endow AI systems with the ability to represent, generate, and interact with dynamic environments in a coherent and temporally consistent manner. While recent video generation models have demonstrated impressive visual quality, they remain limited in real-time interaction, long-horizon consistency, and persistent memory of dynamic scenes, hindering their evolution into practical world models. In this report, we present TeleWorld, a real-time multimodal 4D world modeling framework that unifies video generation, dynamic scene reconstruction, and long-term world memory within a closed-loop system. TeleWorld introduces a novel generation-reconstruction-guidance paradigm, where generated video streams are continuously reconstructed into a dynamic 4D spatio-temporal representation, which in turn guides subsequent generation to maintain spatial, temporal, and physical consistency. To support long-horizon generation with low latency, we employ an autoregressive diffusion-based video model enhanced with Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL)--a hierarchical planning method that reduces error accumulation from frame-level to segment-level-alongside efficient Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), enabling real-time synthesis under practical computational budgets. Our approach achieves seamless integration of dynamic object modeling and static scene representation within a unified 4D framework, advancing world models toward practical, interactive, and computationally accessible systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeleWorld achieves strong performance in both static and dynamic world understanding, long-term consistency, and real-time generation efficiency, positioning it as a practical step toward interactive, memory-enabled world models for multimodal generation and embodied intelligence.

Motion planning problems have been studied by both the robotics and the controls research communities for a long time, and many algorithms have been developed for their solution. Among them, incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithms, such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs), and the Probabilistic Road Maps (PRMs) have become very popular recently, owing to their implementation simplicity and their advantages in handling high-dimensional problems. Although these algorithms work very well in practice, the quality of the computed solution is often not good, i.e., the solution can be far from the optimal one. A recent variation of RRT, namely the RRT* algorithm, bypasses this drawback of the traditional RRT algorithm, by ensuring asymptotic optimality as the number of samples tends to infinity. Nonetheless, the convergence rate to the optimal solution may still be slow. This paper presents a new incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithm based on Rapidly-exploring Random Graphs (RRG), denoted RRT# (RRT "sharp") which also guarantees asymptotic optimality but, in addition, it also ensures that the constructed spanning tree of the geometric graph is consistent after each iteration. In consistent trees, the vertices which have the potential to be part of the optimal solution have the minimum cost-come-value. This implies that the best possible solution is readily computed if there are some vertices in the current graph that are already in the goal region. Numerical results compare with the RRT* algorithm.

Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is represented as optical flow and rendered using computer graphics pipelines. This approach offers two key advantages. First, synthetic motion offers diverse motion patterns and precise control signals that are difficult to obtain from real data. Second, unlike rendered videos with artificial appearances, rendered optical flow encodes only motion and is decoupled from appearance, thereby preventing models from reproducing the unnatural look of synthetic videos. Building on this idea, DynaVid adopts a two-stage generation framework: a motion generator first synthesizes motion, and then a motion-guided video generator produces video frames conditioned on that motion. This decoupled formulation enables the model to learn dynamic motion patterns from synthetic data while preserving visual realism from real-world videos. We validate our framework on two challenging scenarios, vigorous human motion generation and extreme camera motion control, where existing datasets are particularly limited. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaVid improves the realism and controllability in dynamic motion generation and camera motion control.

Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to unseen objects. We conjecture that this is due to the high-dimensional action space for joint control. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and separate the task of learning 'what to do' from 'how to do it' i.e., whole-body control. We pose the RL problem as one of determining the skill dynamics for a disembodied virtual manipulator interacting with articulated objects. The whole-body robotic kinematic control is optimized to execute the high-dimensional joint motion to reach the goals in the workspace. It does so by solving a quadratic programming (QP) model with robotic singularity and kinematic constraints. Our experiments on manipulating complex articulated objects show that the proposed approach is more generalizable to unseen objects with large intra-class variations, outperforming previous approaches. The evaluation results indicate that our approach generates more compliant robotic motion and outperforms the pure RL and IL baselines in task success rates. Additional information and videos are available at https://kl-research.github.io/decoupskill

Aerial robots can enhance construction site productivity by autonomously handling inspection and mapping tasks. However, ensuring safe navigation near human workers remains challenging. While navigation in static environments has been well studied, navigating dynamic environments remains open due to challenges in perception and planning. Payload limitations restrict the robots to using cameras with limited fields of view, resulting in unreliable perception and tracking during collision avoidance. Moreover, the rapidly changing conditions of dynamic environments can quickly make the generated optimal trajectory outdated.To address these challenges, this paper presents a comprehensive navigation framework that integrates perception, intent prediction, and planning. Our perception module detects and tracks dynamic obstacles efficiently and handles tracking loss and occlusion during collision avoidance. The proposed intent prediction module employs a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to forecast potential actions of dynamic obstacles with the possible future trajectories. Finally, a novel intent-based planning algorithm, leveraging model predictive control (MPC), is applied to generate navigation trajectories. Simulation and physical experiments demonstrate that our method improves the safety of navigation by achieving the fewest collisions compared to benchmarks.

Crowd Motion Generation is essential in entertainment industries such as animation and games as well as in strategic fields like urban simulation and planning. This new task requires an intricate integration of control and generation to realistically synthesize crowd dynamics under specific spatial and semantic constraints, whose challenges are yet to be fully explored. On the one hand, existing human motion generation models typically focus on individual behaviors, neglecting the complexities of collective behaviors. On the other hand, recent methods for multi-person motion generation depend heavily on pre-defined scenarios and are limited to a fixed, small number of inter-person interactions, thus hampering their practicality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce CrowdMoGen, a zero-shot text-driven framework that harnesses the power of Large Language Model (LLM) to incorporate the collective intelligence into the motion generation framework as guidance, thereby enabling generalizable planning and generation of crowd motions without paired training data. Our framework consists of two key components: 1) Crowd Scene Planner that learns to coordinate motions and dynamics according to specific scene contexts or introduced perturbations, and 2) Collective Motion Generator that efficiently synthesizes the required collective motions based on the holistic plans. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments have validated the effectiveness of our framework, which not only fills a critical gap by providing scalable and generalizable solutions for Crowd Motion Generation task but also achieves high levels of realism and flexibility.

Predicting the future motion of dynamic agents is of paramount importance to ensuring safety and assessing risks in motion planning for autonomous robots. In this study, we propose a two-stage motion prediction method, called R-Pred, designed to effectively utilize both scene and interaction context using a cascade of the initial trajectory proposal and trajectory refinement networks. The initial trajectory proposal network produces M trajectory proposals corresponding to the M modes of the future trajectory distribution. The trajectory refinement network enhances each of the M proposals using 1) tube-query scene attention (TQSA) and 2) proposal-level interaction attention (PIA) mechanisms. TQSA uses tube-queries to aggregate local scene context features pooled from proximity around trajectory proposals of interest. PIA further enhances the trajectory proposals by modeling inter-agent interactions using a group of trajectory proposals selected by their distances from neighboring agents. Our experiments conducted on Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that the proposed refinement network provides significant performance improvements compared to the single-stage baseline and that R-Pred achieves state-of-the-art performance in some categories of the benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction. More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can interact with a visual-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form natural language. Project website: https://voxposer.github.io

This work introduces MotionLCM, extending controllable motion generation to a real-time level. Existing methods for spatial control in text-conditioned motion generation suffer from significant runtime inefficiency. To address this issue, we first propose the motion latent consistency model (MotionLCM) for motion generation, building upon the latent diffusion model (MLD). By employing one-step (or few-step) inference, we further improve the runtime efficiency of the motion latent diffusion model for motion generation. To ensure effective controllability, we incorporate a motion ControlNet within the latent space of MotionLCM and enable explicit control signals (e.g., pelvis trajectory) in the vanilla motion space to control the generation process directly, similar to controlling other latent-free diffusion models for motion generation. By employing these techniques, our approach can generate human motions with text and control signals in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable generation and controlling capabilities of MotionLCM while maintaining real-time runtime efficiency.

Compositional video generation aims to synthesize multiple instances with diverse appearance and motion, which is widely applicable in real-world scenarios. However, current approaches mainly focus on binding semantics, neglecting to understand diverse motion categories specified in prompts. In this paper, we propose a motion factorization framework that decomposes complex motion into three primary categories: motionlessness, rigid motion, and non-rigid motion. Specifically, our framework follows a planning before generation paradigm. (1) During planning, we reason about motion laws on the motion graph to obtain frame-wise changes in the shape and position of each instance. This alleviates semantic ambiguities in the user prompt by organizing it into a structured representation of instances and their interactions. (2) During generation, we modulate the synthesis of distinct motion categories in a disentangled manner. Conditioned on the motion cues, guidance branches stabilize appearance in motionless regions, preserve rigid-body geometry, and regularize local non-rigid deformations. Crucially, our two modules are model-agnostic, which can be seamlessly incorporated into various diffusion model architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves impressive performance in motion synthesis on real-world benchmarks. Our code will be released soon.

We study a challenging task: text-to-motion synthesis, aiming to generate motions that align with textual descriptions and exhibit coordinated movements. Currently, the part-based methods introduce part partition into the motion synthesis process to achieve finer-grained generation. However, these methods encounter challenges such as the lack of coordination between different part motions and difficulties for networks to understand part concepts. Moreover, introducing finer-grained part concepts poses computational complexity challenges. In this paper, we propose Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis (ParCo), endowed with enhanced capabilities for understanding part motions and communication among different part motion generators, ensuring a coordinated and fined-grained motion synthesis. Specifically, we discretize whole-body motion into multiple part motions to establish the prior concept of different parts. Afterward, we employ multiple lightweight generators designed to synthesize different part motions and coordinate them through our part coordination module. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on common benchmarks with economic computations, including HumanML3D and KIT-ML, providing substantial evidence of its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/qrzou/ParCo .

We propose Text2Motion, a language-based planning framework enabling robots to solve sequential manipulation tasks that require long-horizon reasoning. Given a natural language instruction, our framework constructs both a task- and motion-level plan that is verified to reach inferred symbolic goals. Text2Motion uses feasibility heuristics encoded in Q-functions of a library of skills to guide task planning with Large Language Models. Whereas previous language-based planners only consider the feasibility of individual skills, Text2Motion actively resolves geometric dependencies spanning skill sequences by performing geometric feasibility planning during its search. We evaluate our method on a suite of problems that require long-horizon reasoning, interpretation of abstract goals, and handling of partial affordance perception. Our experiments show that Text2Motion can solve these challenging problems with a success rate of 82%, while prior state-of-the-art language-based planning methods only achieve 13%. Text2Motion thus provides promising generalization characteristics to semantically diverse sequential manipulation tasks with geometric dependencies between skills.

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

Simulators offer the possibility of safe, low-cost development of self-driving systems. However, current driving simulators exhibit na\"ive behavior models for background traffic. Hand-tuned scenarios are typically added during simulation to induce safety-critical situations. An alternative approach is to adversarially perturb the background traffic trajectories. In this paper, we study this approach to safety-critical driving scenario generation using the CARLA simulator. We use a kinematic bicycle model as a proxy to the simulator's true dynamics and observe that gradients through this proxy model are sufficient for optimizing the background traffic trajectories. Based on this finding, we propose KING, which generates safety-critical driving scenarios with a 20% higher success rate than black-box optimization. By solving the scenarios generated by KING using a privileged rule-based expert algorithm, we obtain training data for an imitation learning policy. After fine-tuning on this new data, we show that the policy becomes better at avoiding collisions. Importantly, our generated data leads to reduced collisions on both held-out scenarios generated via KING as well as traditional hand-crafted scenarios, demonstrating improved robustness.

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.

Contact-rich bimanual manipulation involves precise coordination of two arms to change object states through strategically selected contacts and motions. Due to the inherent complexity of these tasks, acquiring sufficient demonstration data and training policies that generalize to unseen scenarios remain a largely unresolved challenge. Building on recent advances in planning through contacts, we introduce Generalizable Planning-Guided Diffusion Policy Learning (GLIDE), an approach that effectively learns to solve contact-rich bimanual manipulation tasks by leveraging model-based motion planners to generate demonstration data in high-fidelity physics simulation. Through efficient planning in randomized environments, our approach generates large-scale and high-quality synthetic motion trajectories for tasks involving diverse objects and transformations. We then train a task-conditioned diffusion policy via behavior cloning using these demonstrations. To tackle the sim-to-real gap, we propose a set of essential design options in feature extraction, task representation, action prediction, and data augmentation that enable learning robust prediction of smooth action sequences and generalization to unseen scenarios. Through experiments in both simulation and the real world, we demonstrate that our approach can enable a bimanual robotic system to effectively manipulate objects of diverse geometries, dimensions, and physical properties. Website: https://glide-manip.github.io/

Embodied agents often struggle with efficient navigation because they rely primarily on partial egocentric observations, which restrict global foresight and lead to inefficient exploration. In contrast, humans plan using maps: we reason globally first, then act locally. We introduce ReasonNavi, a human-inspired framework that operationalizes this reason-then-act paradigm by coupling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with deterministic planners. ReasonNavi converts a top-down map into a discrete reasoning space by room segmentation and candidate target nodes sampling. An MLLM is then queried in a multi-stage process to identify the candidate most consistent with the instruction (object, image, or text goal), effectively leveraging the model's semantic reasoning ability while sidestepping its weakness in continuous coordinate prediction. The selected waypoint is grounded into executable trajectories using a deterministic action planner over an online-built occupancy map, while pretrained object detectors and segmenters ensure robust recognition at the goal. This yields a unified zero-shot navigation framework that requires no MLLM fine-tuning, circumvents the brittleness of RL-based policies and scales naturally with foundation model improvements. Across three navigation tasks, ReasonNavi consistently outperforms prior methods that demand extensive training or heavy scene modeling, offering a scalable, interpretable, and globally grounded solution to embodied navigation. Project page: https://reasonnavi.github.io/

Planning safe robot motions in the presence of humans requires reliable forecasts of future human motion. However, simply predicting the most likely motion from prior interactions does not guarantee safety. Such forecasts fail to model the long tail of possible events, which are rarely observed in limited datasets. On the other hand, planning for worst-case motions leads to overtly conservative behavior and a "frozen robot". Instead, we aim to learn forecasts that predict counterfactuals that humans guard against. We propose a novel game-theoretic framework for joint planning and forecasting with the payoff being the performance of the planner against the demonstrator, and present practical algorithms to train models in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm results in safer plans in a crowd navigation simulator and real-world datasets of pedestrian motion. We release our code at https://github.com/portal-cornell/Game-Theoretic-Forecasting-Planning.

In recent years, lightweight large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in the robotics field due to their low computational resource requirements and suitability for edge deployment. However, in task planning -- particularly for complex tasks that involve dynamic semantic logic reasoning -- lightweight LLMs have underperformed. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task planner, LightPlanner, which enhances the performance of lightweight LLMs in complex task planning by fully leveraging their reasoning capabilities. Unlike conventional planners that use fixed skill templates, LightPlanner controls robot actions via parameterized function calls, dynamically generating parameter values. This approach allows for fine-grained skill control and improves task planning success rates in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce hierarchical deep reasoning. Before generating each action decision step, LightPlanner thoroughly considers three levels: action execution (feedback verification), semantic parsing (goal consistency verification), and parameter generation (parameter validity verification). This ensures the correctness of subsequent action controls. Additionally, we incorporate a memory module to store historical actions, thereby reducing context length and enhancing planning efficiency for long-term tasks. We train the LightPlanner-1.5B model on our LightPlan-40k dataset, which comprises 40,000 action controls across tasks with 2 to 13 action steps. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves the highest task success rate despite having the smallest number of parameters. In tasks involving spatial semantic reasoning, the success rate exceeds that of ReAct by 14.9 percent. Moreover, we demonstrate LightPlanner's potential to operate on edge devices.

Current robotic planning methods often rely on predicting multi-frame images with full pixel details. While this fine-grained approach can serve as a generic world model, it introduces two significant challenges for downstream policy learning: substantial computational costs that hinder real-time deployment, and accumulated inaccuracies that can mislead action extraction. Planning with coarse-grained subgoals partially alleviates efficiency issues. However, their forward planning schemes can still result in off-task predictions due to accumulation errors, leading to misalignment with long-term goals. This raises a critical question: Can robotic planning be both efficient and accurate enough for real-time control in long-horizon, multi-stage tasks? To address this, we propose a Latent Space Backward Planning scheme (LBP), which begins by grounding the task into final latent goals, followed by recursively predicting intermediate subgoals closer to the current state. The grounded final goal enables backward subgoal planning to always remain aware of task completion, facilitating on-task prediction along the entire planning horizon. The subgoal-conditioned policy incorporates a learnable token to summarize the subgoal sequences and determines how each subgoal guides action extraction. Through extensive simulation and real-robot long-horizon experiments, we show that LBP outperforms existing fine-grained and forward planning methods, achieving SOTA performance. Project Page: https://lbp-authors.github.io

Recently, world-action models (WAM) have emerged to bridge vision-language-action (VLA) models and world models, unifying their reasoning and instruction-following capabilities and spatio-temporal world modeling. However, existing WAM approaches often focus on modeling 2D appearance or latent representations, with limited geometric grounding-an essential element for embodied systems operating in the physical world. We present DriveDreamer-Policy, a unified driving world-action model that integrates depth generation, future video generation, and motion planning within a single modular architecture. The model employs a large language model to process language instructions, multi-view images, and actions, followed by three lightweight generators that produce depth, future video, and actions. By learning a geometry-aware world representation and using it to guide both future prediction and planning within a unified framework, the proposed model produces more coherent imagined futures and more informed driving actions, while maintaining modularity and controllable latency. Experiments on the Navsim v1 and v2 benchmarks demonstrate that DriveDreamer-Policy achieves strong performance on both closed-loop planning and world generation tasks. In particular, our model reaches 89.2 PDMS on Navsim v1 and 88.7 EPDMS on Navsim v2, outperforming existing world-model-based approaches while producing higher-quality future video and depth predictions. Ablation studies further show that explicit depth learning provides complementary benefits to video imagination and improves planning robustness.

Animating images with interactive motion control has garnered popularity for image-to-video (I2V) generation. Modern approaches typically rely on large Gaussian kernels to extend motion trajectories as condition without explicitly defining movement region, leading to coarse motion control and failing to disentangle object and camera moving. To alleviate these, we present MotionPro, a precise motion controller that novelly leverages region-wise trajectory and motion mask to regulate fine-grained motion synthesis and identify target motion category (i.e., object or camera moving), respectively. Technically, MotionPro first estimates the flow maps on each training video via a tracking model, and then samples the region-wise trajectories to simulate inference scenario. Instead of extending flow through large Gaussian kernels, our region-wise trajectory approach enables more precise control by directly utilizing trajectories within local regions, thereby effectively characterizing fine-grained movements. A motion mask is simultaneously derived from the predicted flow maps to capture the holistic motion dynamics of the movement regions. To pursue natural motion control, MotionPro further strengthens video denoising by incorporating both region-wise trajectories and motion mask through feature modulation. More remarkably, we meticulously construct a benchmark, i.e., MC-Bench, with 1.1K user-annotated image-trajectory pairs, for the evaluation of both fine-grained and object-level I2V motion control. Extensive experiments conducted on WebVid-10M and MC-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of MotionPro. Please refer to our project page for more results: https://zhw-zhang.github.io/MotionPro-page/.

In our pursuit of advancing multi-modal AI assistants capable of guiding users to achieve complex multi-step goals, we propose the task of "Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA)". Given a succinct natural language goal, e.g., "make a shelf", and a video of the user's progress so far, the aim of VPA is to devise a plan, i.e., a sequence of actions such as "sand shelf", "paint shelf", etc. to realize the specified goal. This requires assessing the user's progress from the (untrimmed) video, and relating it to the requirements of natural language goal, i.e., which actions to select and in what order? Consequently, this requires handling long video history and arbitrarily complex action dependencies. To address these challenges, we decompose VPA into video action segmentation and forecasting. Importantly, we experiment by formulating the forecasting step as a multi-modal sequence modeling problem, allowing us to leverage the strength of pre-trained LMs (as the sequence model). This novel approach, which we call Visual Language Model based Planner (VLaMP), outperforms baselines across a suite of metrics that gauge the quality of the generated plans. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablations, we also isolate the value of each component--language pre-training, visual observations, and goal information. We have open-sourced all the data, model checkpoints, and training code.

To make effective decisions in novel environments with long-horizon goals, it is crucial to engage in hierarchical reasoning across spatial and temporal scales. This entails planning abstract subgoal sequences, visually reasoning about the underlying plans, and executing actions in accordance with the devised plan through visual-motor control. We propose Compositional Foundation Models for Hierarchical Planning (HiP), a foundation model which leverages multiple expert foundation model trained on language, vision and action data individually jointly together to solve long-horizon tasks. We use a large language model to construct symbolic plans that are grounded in the environment through a large video diffusion model. Generated video plans are then grounded to visual-motor control, through an inverse dynamics model that infers actions from generated videos. To enable effective reasoning within this hierarchy, we enforce consistency between the models via iterative refinement. We illustrate the efficacy and adaptability of our approach in three different long-horizon table-top manipulation tasks.

Denoising diffusion models have shown great promise in human motion synthesis conditioned on natural language descriptions. However, integrating spatial constraints, such as pre-defined motion trajectories and obstacles, remains a challenge despite being essential for bridging the gap between isolated human motion and its surrounding environment. To address this issue, we propose Guided Motion Diffusion (GMD), a method that incorporates spatial constraints into the motion generation process. Specifically, we propose an effective feature projection scheme that manipulates motion representation to enhance the coherency between spatial information and local poses. Together with a new imputation formulation, the generated motion can reliably conform to spatial constraints such as global motion trajectories. Furthermore, given sparse spatial constraints (e.g. sparse keyframes), we introduce a new dense guidance approach to turn a sparse signal, which is susceptible to being ignored during the reverse steps, into denser signals to guide the generated motion to the given constraints. Our extensive experiments justify the development of GMD, which achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in text-based motion generation while allowing control of the synthesized motions with spatial constraints.

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving leverage multi-view images to construct BEV representations for motion planning. In motion planning, autonomous vehicles need considering both hard constraints imposed by geometrically occupied obstacles (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians) and soft, rule-based semantics with no explicit geometry (e.g., lane boundaries, traffic priors). However, existing end-to-end frameworks typically rely on BEV features learned in an implicit manner, lacking explicit modeling of risk and guidance priors for safe and interpretable planning. To address this, we propose FlowDrive, a novel framework that introduces physically interpretable energy-based flow fields-including risk potential and lane attraction fields-to encode semantic priors and safety cues into the BEV space. These flow-aware features enable adaptive refinement of anchor trajectories and serve as interpretable guidance for trajectory generation. Moreover, FlowDrive decouples motion intent prediction from trajectory denoising via a conditional diffusion planner with feature-level gating, alleviating task interference and enhancing multimodal diversity. Experiments on the NAVSIM v2 benchmark demonstrate that FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance with an EPDMS of 86.3, surpassing prior baselines in both safety and planning quality. The project is available at https://astrixdrive.github.io/FlowDrive.github.io/.

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful specification language for describing complex temporal behaviors of continuous signals, making it well-suited for high-level robotic task descriptions. However, generating executable plans for STL tasks is challenging, as it requires consideration of the coupling between the task specification and the system dynamics. Existing approaches either follow a model-based setting that explicitly requires knowledge of the system dynamics or adopt a task-oriented data-driven approach to learn plans for specific tasks. In this work, we address the problem of generating executable STL plans for systems with unknown dynamics. We propose a hierarchical planning framework that enables zero-shot generalization to new STL tasks by leveraging only task-agnostic trajectory data during offline training. The framework consists of three key components: (i) decomposing the STL specification into several progresses and time constraints, (ii) searching for timed waypoints that satisfy all progresses under time constraints, and (iii) generating trajectory segments using a pre-trained diffusion model and stitching them into complete trajectories. We formally prove that our method guarantees STL satisfaction, and simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness in generating dynamically feasible trajectories across diverse long-horizon STL tasks.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem, with the goal being to produce a sequence of actions that leads to a sequence of high rewards. Viewed in this way, it is tempting to consider whether high-capacity sequence prediction models that work well in other domains, such as natural-language processing, can also provide effective solutions to the RL problem. To this end, we explore how RL can be tackled with the tools of sequence modeling, using a Transformer architecture to model distributions over trajectories and repurposing beam search as a planning algorithm. Framing RL as sequence modeling problem simplifies a range of design decisions, allowing us to dispense with many of the components common in offline RL algorithms. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach across long-horizon dynamics prediction, imitation learning, goal-conditioned RL, and offline RL. Further, we show that this approach can be combined with existing model-free algorithms to yield a state-of-the-art planner in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks.

Tool use is a hallmark of advanced intelligence, exemplified in both animal behavior and robotic capabilities. This paper investigates the feasibility of imbuing robots with the ability to creatively use tools in tasks that involve implicit physical constraints and long-term planning. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we develop RoboTool, a system that accepts natural language instructions and outputs executable code for controlling robots in both simulated and real-world environments. RoboTool incorporates four pivotal components: (i) an "Analyzer" that interprets natural language to discern key task-related concepts, (ii) a "Planner" that generates comprehensive strategies based on the language input and key concepts, (iii) a "Calculator" that computes parameters for each skill, and (iv) a "Coder" that translates these plans into executable Python code. Our results show that RoboTool can not only comprehend explicit or implicit physical constraints and environmental factors but also demonstrate creative tool use. Unlike traditional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) methods that rely on explicit optimization, our LLM-based system offers a more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly solution for complex robotics tasks. Through extensive experiments, we validate that RoboTool is proficient in handling tasks that would otherwise be infeasible without the creative use of tools, thereby expanding the capabilities of robotic systems. Demos are available on our project page: https://creative-robotool.github.io/.

The scarcity of manipulation data has motivated the use of pretrained large models from other modalities in robotics. In this work, we build upon autoregressive video generation models to propose a Physical Autoregressive Model (PAR), where physical tokens combine frames and actions to represent the joint evolution of the robot and its environment. PAR leverages the world knowledge embedded in video pretraining to understand physical dynamics without requiring action pretraining, enabling accurate video prediction and consistent action trajectories. It also adopts a DiT-based de-tokenizer to model frames and actions as continuous tokens, mitigating quantization errors and facilitating mutual enhancement. Furthermore, we incorporate a causal mask with inverse kinematics, parallel training, and the KV-cache mechanism to further improve performance and efficiency. Experiments on the ManiSkill benchmark show that PAR achieves a 100\% success rate on the PushCube task, matches the performance of action-pretrained baselines on other tasks, and accurately predicts future videos with tightly aligned action trajectories. These findings underscore a promising direction for robotic manipulation by transferring world knowledge from autoregressive video pretraining. The project page is here: https://hcplab-sysu.github.io/PhysicalAutoregressiveModel/

Human motion generation and editing are key components of computer graphics and vision. However, current approaches in this field tend to offer isolated solutions tailored to specific tasks, which can be inefficient and impractical for real-world applications. While some efforts have aimed to unify motion-related tasks, these methods simply use different modalities as conditions to guide motion generation. Consequently, they lack editing capabilities, fine-grained control, and fail to facilitate knowledge sharing across tasks. To address these limitations and provide a versatile, unified framework capable of handling both human motion generation and editing, we introduce a novel paradigm: Motion-Condition-Motion, which enables the unified formulation of diverse tasks with three concepts: source motion, condition, and target motion. Based on this paradigm, we propose a unified framework, MotionLab, which incorporates rectified flows to learn the mapping from source motion to target motion, guided by the specified conditions. In MotionLab, we introduce the 1) MotionFlow Transformer to enhance conditional generation and editing without task-specific modules; 2) Aligned Rotational Position Encoding} to guarantee the time synchronization between source motion and target motion; 3) Task Specified Instruction Modulation; and 4) Motion Curriculum Learning for effective multi-task learning and knowledge sharing across tasks. Notably, our MotionLab demonstrates promising generalization capabilities and inference efficiency across multiple benchmarks for human motion. Our code and additional video results are available at: https://diouo.github.io/motionlab.github.io/.

In the endeavor to make autonomous robots take actions, task planning is a major challenge that requires translating high-level task descriptions into long-horizon action sequences. Despite recent advances in language model agents, they remain prone to planning errors and limited in their ability to plan ahead. To address these limitations in robotic planning, we advocate a self-refining scheme that iteratively refines a draft plan until an equilibrium is reached. Remarkably, this process can be optimized end-to-end from an analytical perspective without the need to curate additional verifiers or reward models, allowing us to train self-refining planners in a simple supervised learning fashion. Meanwhile, a nested equilibrium sequence modeling procedure is devised for efficient closed-loop planning that incorporates useful feedback from the environment (or an internal world model). Our method is evaluated on the VirtualHome-Env benchmark, showing advanced performance with better scaling for inference computation. Code is available at https://github.com/Singularity0104/equilibrium-planner.

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) seeks to generate realistic human behaviors within complex environments, yet it faces significant challenges in handling long-horizon, high-level tasks and generalizing to unseen scenes. To address these limitations, we introduce FantasyHSI, a novel HSI framework centered on video generation and multi-agent systems that operates without paired data. We model the complex interaction process as a dynamic directed graph, upon which we build a collaborative multi-agent system. This system comprises a scene navigator agent for environmental perception and high-level path planning, and a planning agent that decomposes long-horizon goals into atomic actions. Critically, we introduce a critic agent that establishes a closed-loop feedback mechanism by evaluating the deviation between generated actions and the planned path. This allows for the dynamic correction of trajectory drifts caused by the stochasticity of the generative model, thereby ensuring long-term logical consistency. To enhance the physical realism of the generated motions, we leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train the action generator, significantly reducing artifacts such as limb distortion and foot-sliding. Extensive experiments on our custom SceneBench benchmark demonstrate that FantasyHSI significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization, long-horizon task completion, and physical realism. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-hsi/

End-to-end autonomous driving increasingly leverages self-supervised video pretraining to learn transferable planning representations. However, pretraining video world models for scene understanding has so far brought only limited improvements. This limitation is compounded by the inherent ambiguity of driving: each scene typically provides only a single human trajectory, making it difficult to learn multimodal behaviors. In this work, we propose Drive-JEPA, a framework that integrates Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) with multimodal trajectory distillation for end-to-end driving. First, we adapt V-JEPA for end-to-end driving, pretraining a ViT encoder on large-scale driving videos to produce predictive representations aligned with trajectory planning. Second, we introduce a proposal-centric planner that distills diverse simulator-generated trajectories alongside human trajectories, with a momentum-aware selection mechanism to promote stable and safe behavior. When evaluated on NAVSIM, the V-JEPA representation combined with a simple transformer-based decoder outperforms prior methods by 3 PDMS in the perception-free setting. The complete Drive-JEPA framework achieves 93.3 PDMS on v1 and 87.8 EPDMS on v2, setting a new state-of-the-art.

Text-conditioned motion synthesis has made remarkable progress with the emergence of diffusion models. However, the majority of these motion diffusion models are primarily designed for a single character and overlook multi-human interactions. In our approach, we strive to explore this problem by synthesizing human motion with interactions for a group of characters of any size in a zero-shot manner. The key aspect of our approach is the adaptation of human-wise interactions as pairs of human joints that can be either in contact or separated by a desired distance. In contrast to existing methods that necessitate training motion generation models on multi-human motion datasets with a fixed number of characters, our approach inherently possesses the flexibility to model human interactions involving an arbitrary number of individuals, thereby transcending the limitations imposed by the training data. We introduce a novel controllable motion generation method, InterControl, to encourage the synthesized motions maintaining the desired distance between joint pairs. It consists of a motion controller and an inverse kinematics guidance module that realistically and accurately aligns the joints of synthesized characters to the desired location. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the distance between joint pairs for human-wise interactions can be generated using an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM). Experimental results highlight the capability of our framework to generate interactions with multiple human characters and its potential to work with off-the-shelf physics-based character simulators.

Hair care is an essential daily activity, yet it remains inaccessible to individuals with limited mobility and challenging for autonomous robot systems due to the fine-grained physical structure and complex dynamics of hair. In this work, we present DYMO-Hair, a model-based robot hair care system. We introduce a novel dynamics learning paradigm that is suited for volumetric quantities such as hair, relying on an action-conditioned latent state editing mechanism, coupled with a compact 3D latent space of diverse hairstyles to improve generalizability. This latent space is pre-trained at scale using a novel hair physics simulator, enabling generalization across previously unseen hairstyles. Using the dynamics model with a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planner, DYMO-Hair is able to perform visual goal-conditioned hair styling. Experiments in simulation demonstrate that DYMO-Hair's dynamics model outperforms baselines on capturing local deformation for diverse, unseen hairstyles. DYMO-Hair further outperforms baselines in closed-loop hair styling tasks on unseen hairstyles, with an average of 22% lower final geometric error and 42% higher success rate than the state-of-the-art system. Real-world experiments exhibit zero-shot transferability of our system to wigs, achieving consistent success on challenging unseen hairstyles where the state-of-the-art system fails. Together, these results introduce a foundation for model-based robot hair care, advancing toward more generalizable, flexible, and accessible robot hair styling in unconstrained physical environments. More details are available on our project page: https://chengyzhao.github.io/DYMOHair-web/.

Reliable forecasting of the future behavior of road agents is a critical component to safe planning in autonomous vehicles. Here, we represent continuous trajectories as sequences of discrete motion tokens and cast multi-agent motion prediction as a language modeling task over this domain. Our model, MotionLM, provides several advantages: First, it does not require anchors or explicit latent variable optimization to learn multimodal distributions. Instead, we leverage a single standard language modeling objective, maximizing the average log probability over sequence tokens. Second, our approach bypasses post-hoc interaction heuristics where individual agent trajectory generation is conducted prior to interactive scoring. Instead, MotionLM produces joint distributions over interactive agent futures in a single autoregressive decoding process. In addition, the model's sequential factorization enables temporally causal conditional rollouts. The proposed approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance for multi-agent motion prediction on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, ranking 1st on the interactive challenge leaderboard.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in creating 3D avatars and motions, driven by their diverse applications in areas like film-making, video games, AR/VR, and human-robot interaction. However, current efforts primarily concentrate on either generating the 3D avatar mesh alone or producing motion sequences, with integrating these two aspects proving to be a persistent challenge. Additionally, while avatar and motion generation predominantly target humans, extending these techniques to animals remains a significant challenge due to inadequate training data and methods. To bridge these gaps, our paper presents three key contributions. Firstly, we proposed a novel agent-based approach named Motion Avatar, which allows for the automatic generation of high-quality customizable human and animal avatars with motions through text queries. The method significantly advanced the progress in dynamic 3D character generation. Secondly, we introduced a LLM planner that coordinates both motion and avatar generation, which transforms a discriminative planning into a customizable Q&A fashion. Lastly, we presented an animal motion dataset named Zoo-300K, comprising approximately 300,000 text-motion pairs across 65 animal categories and its building pipeline ZooGen, which serves as a valuable resource for the community. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionAvatar/

Density of the reachable states can help understand the risk of safety-critical systems, especially in situations when worst-case reachability is too conservative. Recent work provides a data-driven approach to compute the density distribution of autonomous systems' forward reachable states online. In this paper, we study the use of such approach in combination with model predictive control for verifiable safe path planning under uncertainties. We first use the learned density distribution to compute the risk of collision online. If such risk exceeds the acceptable threshold, our method will plan for a new path around the previous trajectory, with the risk of collision below the threshold. Our method is well-suited to handle systems with uncertainties and complicated dynamics as our data-driven approach does not need an analytical form of the systems' dynamics and can estimate forward state density with an arbitrary initial distribution of uncertainties. We design two challenging scenarios (autonomous driving and hovercraft control) for safe motion planning in environments with obstacles under system uncertainties. We first show that our density estimation approach can reach a similar accuracy as the Monte-Carlo-based method while using only 0.01X training samples. By leveraging the estimated risk, our algorithm achieves the highest success rate in goal reaching when enforcing the safety rate above 0.99.

Travel planning is a sophisticated decision-making process that requires synthesizing multifaceted information to construct itineraries. However, existing travel planning approaches face several challenges: (1) Pruning candidate points of interest (POIs) while maintaining a high recall rate; (2) A single reasoning path restricts the exploration capability within the feasible solution space for travel planning; (3) Simultaneously optimizing hard constraints and soft constraints remains a significant difficulty. To address these challenges, we propose TourPlanner, a comprehensive framework featuring multi-path reasoning and constraint-gated reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first introduce a Personalized Recall and Spatial Optimization (PReSO) workflow to construct spatially-aware candidate POIs' set. Subsequently, we propose Competitive consensus Chain-of-Thought (CCoT), a multi-path reasoning paradigm that improves the ability of exploring the feasible solution space. To further refine the plan, we integrate a sigmoid-based gating mechanism into the reinforcement learning stage, which dynamically prioritizes soft-constraint satisfaction only after hard constraints are met. Experimental results on travel planning benchmarks demonstrate that TourPlanner achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both feasibility and user-preference alignment.

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive action sequence prediction capabilities but often struggle with dynamic, long-horizon tasks such as real-time strategic games. In a game such as StarCraftII (SC2), agents need to manage resource constraints and adapt to evolving battlefield situations in a partially observable environment. This often overwhelms exisiting LLM-based approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that employs specialized imitation learning agents under a meta-controller called Strategic Planner (SP). By expert demonstrations, each specialized agent learns a distinctive strategy, such as aerial support or defensive maneuvers, and produces coherent, structured multistep action sequences. The SP then orchestrates these proposals into a single, environmentally adaptive plan that ensures local decisions aligning with long-term strategies. We call this HIMA (Hierarchical Imitation Multi-Agent). We also present TEXTSCII-ALL, a comprehensive SC2 testbed that encompasses all race match combinations in SC2. Our empirical results show that HIMA outperforms state of the arts in strategic clarity, adaptability, and computational efficiency, underscoring the potential of combining specialized imitation modules with meta-level orchestration to develop more robust, general-purpose AI agents.

Current autoregressive diffusion models excel at video generation but are generally limited to short temporal durations. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the autoregressive modeling typically suffers from temporal drift caused by error accumulation and hinders parallelization in long video synthesis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel planning-then-populating framework centered on Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL) for long video generation. MMPL sketches a global storyline for the entire video through two hierarchical stages: Micro Planning and Macro Planning. Specifically, Micro Planning predicts a sparse set of future keyframes within each short video segment, offering motion and appearance priors to guide high-quality video segment generation. Macro Planning extends the in-segment keyframes planning across the entire video through an autoregressive chain of micro plans, ensuring long-term consistency across video segments. Subsequently, MMPL-based Content Populating generates all intermediate frames in parallel across segments, enabling efficient parallelization of autoregressive generation. The parallelization is further optimized by Adaptive Workload Scheduling for balanced GPU execution and accelerated autoregressive video generation. Extensive experiments confirm that our method outperforms existing long video generation models in quality and stability. Generated videos and comparison results are in our project page.