Daily Papers

Text and image conditioned 3D models now generate convincing assets, but they still offer little direct control over the space an object should occupy or avoid. In authoring, this spatial intent is often known before generation starts. A chair should fit a seating envelope, a prop should leave clearance for motion, or a part should expose a contact surface. Prompts and image views are poor carriers for such constraints, requiring the need for an explicit control interface. We present Arbor, a trainable attachment for text conditioned latent 3D generation. Arbor introduces constraint meshes as a native 3D control interface. The interface uses hull regions where geometry should exist, avoidance regions that should remain empty, and touch regions the object should contact. Unlike completion or whole object scaffold control, these meshes are not target evidence. They are local typed requirements and can include regions where no surface should appear. Arbor keeps this signal as geometry by converting constraint meshes into tokens and learning a routed attachment inside a frozen denoiser. Each latent region can therefore receive the part of the constraint that matters for its spatial location. We evaluate Arbor on automatic and artist curated control benchmarks with hull, avoidance, and touch constraints, and compare the metric trends to a user preference study. Even without dedicated compliance losses, Arbor improves constraint obedience while preserving object quality and variation under fixed constraints.

We address the problem of tactile localization, where the goal is to identify image regions that share the same material properties as a tactile input. Existing visuo-tactile methods rely on global alignment and thus fail to capture the fine-grained local correspondences required for this task. The challenge is amplified by existing datasets, which predominantly contain close-up, low-diversity images. We propose a model that learns local visuo-tactile alignment via dense cross-modal feature interactions, producing tactile saliency maps for touch-conditioned material segmentation. To overcome dataset constraints, we introduce: (i) in-the-wild multi-material scene images that expand visual diversity, and (ii) a material-diversity pairing strategy that aligns each tactile sample with visually varied yet tactilely consistent images, improving contextual localization and robustness to weak signals. We also construct two new tactile-grounded material segmentation datasets for quantitative evaluation. Experiments on both new and existing benchmarks show that our approach substantially outperforms prior visuo-tactile methods in tactile localization.

Real-world software development requires coding agents to operate in shared workspaces where users may inspect and modify code during an ongoing task, yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate agents working alone or restrict user participation to messages. This leads us to ask: how do coding agents understand and respond to code changes in a shared workspace? We introduce SWE-Touch, a framework that stress-tests this setting through validated Counter-Edits: plausible edits to task-relevant code that conflict with task completion. SWE-Touch mines task-critical regions from multiple repair trajectories, uses a separate User Patch Generator to construct the edits, and injects them with contextual user messages when agents reach the relevant code. We evaluate nine coding models on SWE-bench Verified, with additional experiments on longer-horizon tasks from SWE-Bench Pro and DeepSWE. Counter-Edit lowers average resolve rate by 7.7 percentage points on SWE-bench Verified, with degradation also persisting on both longer-horizon benchmarks. Trajectory analysis links these failures to limited awareness of the evolving workspace: agents may retain conflicting code or replace it without sufficiently re-inspecting the repository and validating the revised code with targeted tests. These findings show that strong autonomous performance does not yet ensure the state awareness and adaptive behavior needed for shared-workspace collaboration, and point to detecting workspace changes, reconciling conflicting edits with the task, and verifying the affected behavior as key capabilities for future optimization.

Handheld grippers are increasingly used to collect human demonstrations due to their ease of deployment and versatility. However, most existing designs lack tactile sensing, despite the critical role of tactile feedback in precise manipulation. We present a portable, lightweight gripper with integrated tactile sensors that enables synchronized collection of visual and tactile data in diverse, real-world, and in-the-wild settings. Building on this hardware, we propose a cross-modal representation learning framework that integrates visual and tactile signals while preserving their distinct characteristics. The learning procedure allows the emergence of interpretable representations that consistently focus on contacting regions relevant for physical interactions. When used for downstream manipulation tasks, these representations enable more efficient and effective policy learning, supporting precise robotic manipulation based on multimodal feedback. We validate our approach on fine-grained tasks such as test tube insertion and pipette-based fluid transfer, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness under external disturbances. Our project page is available at https://binghao-huang.github.io/touch_in_the_wild/ .

We address the challenging task of detecting the precise moment when hands make contact with objects in egocentric videos. This frame-level detection is crucial for augmented reality, human-computer interaction, assistive technologies, and robot learning applications, where contact onset signals action initiation or completion. Temporally precise detection is particularly challenging due to subtle hand motion variations near contact, frequent occlusions, fine-grained manipulation patterns, and the inherent motion dynamics of first-person perspectives. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Hand-informed Context Enhanced module (HiCE; pronounced `high-see') that leverages spatiotemporal features from hand regions and their surrounding context through cross-attention mechanisms, learning to identify potential contact patterns. Our approach is further refined with a grasp-aware loss and soft label that emphasizes hand pose patterns and movement dynamics characteristic of touch events, enabling the model to distinguish between near-contact and actual contact frames. We also introduce TouchMoment, an egocentric dataset containing 4,021 videos and 8,456 annotated contact moments spanning over one million frames. Experiments on TouchMoment show that, under a strict evaluation criterion that counts a prediction as correct only if it falls within a two-frame tolerance of the ground-truth moment, our method achieves substantial gains and outperforms state-of-the-art event-spotting baselines by 16.91% average precision.

Existing image inpainting methods typically fill holes by borrowing information from surrounding pixels. They often produce unsatisfactory results when the holes overlap with or touch foreground objects due to lack of information about the actual extent of foreground and background regions within the holes. These scenarios, however, are very important in practice, especially for applications such as the removal of distracting objects. To address the problem, we propose a foreground-aware image inpainting system that explicitly disentangles structure inference and content completion. Specifically, our model learns to predict the foreground contour first, and then inpaints the missing region using the predicted contour as guidance. We show that by such disentanglement, the contour completion model predicts reasonable contours of objects, and further substantially improves the performance of image inpainting. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods and achieves superior inpainting results on challenging cases with complex compositions.

Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding environment (Johansson and Flanagan, 2009; Li et al., 2020; Calandra et al., 2017). However, no existing systems provide rich, multi-modal digital touch-sensing capabilities through a hemispherical compliant embodiment. Here, we describe several conceptual and technological innovations to improve the digitization of touch. These advances are embodied in an artificial finger-shaped sensor with advanced sensing capabilities. Significantly, this fingertip contains high-resolution sensors (~8.3 million taxels) that respond to omnidirectional touch, capture multi-modal signals, and use on-device artificial intelligence to process the data in real time. Evaluations show that the artificial fingertip can resolve spatial features as small as 7 um, sense normal and shear forces with a resolution of 1.01 mN and 1.27 mN, respectively, perceive vibrations up to 10 kHz, sense heat, and even sense odor. Furthermore, it embeds an on-device AI neural network accelerator that acts as a peripheral nervous system on a robot and mimics the reflex arc found in humans. These results demonstrate the possibility of digitizing touch with superhuman performance. The implications are profound, and we anticipate potential applications in robotics (industrial, medical, agricultural, and consumer-level), virtual reality and telepresence, prosthetics, and e-commerce. Toward digitizing touch at scale, we open-source a modular platform to facilitate future research on the nature of touch.

Acquiring contact patterns between hands and nonrigid objects is a common concern in the vision and robotics community. However, existing learning-based methods focus more on contact with rigid ones from monocular images. When adopting them for nonrigid contact, a major problem is that the existing contact representation is restricted by the geometry of the object. Consequently, contact neighborhoods are stored in an unordered manner and contact features are difficult to align with image cues. At the core of our approach lies a novel hand-object contact representation called RUPs (Region Unwrapping Profiles), which unwrap the roughly estimated hand-object surfaces as multiple high-resolution 2D regional profiles. The region grouping strategy is consistent with the hand kinematic bone division because they are the primitive initiators for a composite contact pattern. Based on this representation, our Regional Unwrapping Transformer (RUFormer) learns the correlation priors across regions from monocular inputs and predicts corresponding contact and deformed transformations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can robustly estimate the deformed degrees and deformed transformations, which makes it suitable for both nonrigid and rigid contact.

Contact often occurs without macroscopic surface deformation, such as during interaction with liquids, semi-liquids, or ultra-soft materials. However, most existing tactile sensors rely on deformation to infer contact, making such light-contact interactions difficult to perceive robustly. To address this, we present LightTact, a visual-tactile fingertip sensor that makes contact directly visible via a deformation-independent principle. LightTact features an ambient-blocking optical configuration that suppresses both external light and internal illumination at non-contact regions, while transmitting only the scattered light generated at true contacts. As a result, LightTact produces high-contrast raw images in which non-contact pixels remain near-black (mean gray value < 3) and contact pixels preserve the natural appearance of the contacting surface. Built on this, LightTact achieves accurate pixel-level contact segmentation that is robust to material properties, contact force, surface appearance, and environmental lighting. We further demonstrate that LightTact unlocks new robotic manipulation behaviors that require detection of extremely light contact, including water spreading, facial-cream dipping, and soft thin-film interaction. In addition, we show that LightTact's spatially aligned visual-tactile images can be directly interpreted by vision-language models.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) is fundamental for humans to express intent. Existing HOI generation research is predominantly confined to fixed grasping patterns, where control is tied to physical priors such as force closure or generic intent instructions, even when expressed through elaborate language. Such an overly general conditioning imposes a strong inductive bias for stable grasps, thus failing to capture the diversity of daily HOI. To address these limitations, we introduce Free-Form HOI Generation, which aims to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible HOI conditioned on fine-grained intent, extending HOI from grasping to free-form interactions, like pushing, poking, and rotating. To support this task, we construct WildO2, an in-the-wild diverse 3D HOI dataset, which includes diverse HOI derived from internet videos. Specifically, it contains 4.4k unique interactions across 92 intents and 610 object categories, each with detailed semantic annotations. Building on this dataset, we propose TOUCH, a three-stage framework centered on a multi-level diffusion model that facilitates fine-grained semantic control to generate versatile hand poses beyond grasping priors. This process leverages explicit contact modeling for conditioning and is subsequently refined with contact consistency and physical constraints to ensure realism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's ability to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible hand interactions representative of daily activities. The project page is https://guangyid.github.io/hoi123touch{here}.

Interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) for text editing on mobile devices currently requires users to break out of their writing environment and switch to a conversational AI interface. In this paper, we propose to control the LLM via touch gestures performed directly on the text. We first chart a design space that covers fundamental touch input and text transformations. In this space, we then concretely explore two control mappings: spread-to-generate and pinch-to-shorten, with visual feedback loops. We evaluate this concept in a user study (N=14) that compares three feedback designs: no visualisation, text length indicator, and length + word indicator. The results demonstrate that touch-based control of LLMs is both feasible and user-friendly, with the length + word indicator proving most effective for managing text generation. This work lays the foundation for further research into gesture-based interaction with LLMs on touch devices.

While passive surfaces offer numerous benefits for interaction in mixed reality, reliably detecting touch input solely from head-mounted cameras has been a long-standing challenge. Camera specifics, hand self-occlusion, and rapid movements of both head and fingers introduce considerable uncertainty about the exact location of touch events. Existing methods have thus not been capable of achieving the performance needed for robust interaction. In this paper, we present a real-time pipeline that detects touch input from all ten fingers on any physical surface, purely based on egocentric hand tracking. Our method TouchInsight comprises a neural network to predict the moment of a touch event, the finger making contact, and the touch location. TouchInsight represents locations through a bivariate Gaussian distribution to account for uncertainties due to sensing inaccuracies, which we resolve through contextual priors to accurately infer intended user input. We first evaluated our method offline and found that it locates input events with a mean error of 6.3 mm, and accurately detects touch events (F1=0.99) and identifies the finger used (F1=0.96). In an online evaluation, we then demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for a core application of dexterous touch input: two-handed text entry. In our study, participants typed 37.0 words per minute with an uncorrected error rate of 2.9% on average.

The ability to associate touch with sight is essential for tasks that require physically interacting with objects in the world. We propose a dataset with paired visual and tactile data called Touch and Go, in which human data collectors probe objects in natural environments using tactile sensors, while simultaneously recording egocentric video. In contrast to previous efforts, which have largely been confined to lab settings or simulated environments, our dataset spans a large number of "in the wild" objects and scenes. To demonstrate our dataset's effectiveness, we successfully apply it to a variety of tasks: 1) self-supervised visuo-tactile feature learning, 2) tactile-driven image stylization, i.e., making the visual appearance of an object more consistent with a given tactile signal, and 3) predicting future frames of a tactile signal from visuo-tactile inputs.

Touch and vision go hand in hand, mutually enhancing our ability to understand the world. From a research perspective, the problem of mixing touch and vision is underexplored and presents interesting challenges. To this end, we propose Tactile-Informed 3DGS, a novel approach that incorporates touch data (local depth maps) with multi-view vision data to achieve surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our method optimises 3D Gaussian primitives to accurately model the object's geometry at points of contact. By creating a framework that decreases the transmittance at touch locations, we achieve a refined surface reconstruction, ensuring a uniformly smooth depth map. Touch is particularly useful when considering non-Lambertian objects (e.g. shiny or reflective surfaces) since contemporary methods tend to fail to reconstruct with fidelity specular highlights. By combining vision and tactile sensing, we achieve more accurate geometry reconstructions with fewer images than prior methods. We conduct evaluation on objects with glossy and reflective surfaces and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, offering significant improvements in reconstruction quality.

Hand segmentation and fingertip detection play an indispensable role in hand gesture-based human-machine interaction systems. In this study, we propose a method to discriminate hand components and to locate fingertips in RGB-D images. The system consists of three main steps: hand detection using RGB images providing regions which are considered as promising areas for further processing, hand segmentation, and fingertip detection using depth image and our modified SegNet, a single lightweight architecture that can process two independent tasks at the same time. The experimental results show that our system is a promising method for hand segmentation and fingertip detection which achieves a comparable performance while model complexity is suitable for real-time applications.

When interacting with objects, humans effectively reason about which regions of objects are viable for an intended action, i.e., the affordance regions of the object. They can also account for subtle differences in object regions based on the task to be performed and whether one or two hands need to be used. However, current vision-based affordance prediction methods often reduce the problem to naive object part segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework for extracting affordance data from human activity video datasets. Our extracted 2HANDS dataset contains precise object affordance region segmentations and affordance class-labels as narrations of the activity performed. The data also accounts for bimanual actions, i.e., two hands co-ordinating and interacting with one or more objects. We present a VLM-based affordance prediction model, 2HandedAfforder, trained on the dataset and demonstrate superior performance over baselines in affordance region segmentation for various activities. Finally, we show that our predicted affordance regions are actionable, i.e., can be used by an agent performing a task, through demonstration in robotic manipulation scenarios.

Reinforcement learning explores effectively in domains such as Atari games, navigation, and locomotion, where novelty over states or dynamics is a sufficient signal. In contrast, dexterous manipulation requires rich physical hand--object interactions, but existing methods often suffer from unstable contact-based novelty signals, inefficient distance novelty signals, or reliance on task-specific priors. We propose ContactExplorer, a general exploration method for dexterous manipulation tasks. ContactExplorer represents contact as the intersection between object surface points and hand keypoints, encouraging dexterous hands to discover diverse and novel contact patterns, namely which fingers contact which object regions. It maintains a contact counter conditioned on discretized object states obtained via learned hash codes. This counter is leveraged in two complementary ways: (1) a count-based contact coverage reward that promotes exploration of novel contact patterns, and (2) an energy-based reaching reward that guides the agent toward under-explored contact regions. We evaluate ContactExplorer on seven contact-rich manipulation tasks and five dexterous hand embodiments. Experimental results show that ContactExplorer substantially improves sample efficiency and success rates over existing exploration methods, that it reduces the need for task-specific priors, and that it remains effective across hand embodiments and transfers to the real world. Project page is https://contact-explorer.github.io.

Touch is an important sensing modality for humans, but it has not yet been incorporated into a multimodal generative language model. This is partially due to the difficulty of obtaining natural language labels for tactile data and the complexity of aligning tactile readings with both visual observations and language descriptions. As a step towards bridging that gap, this work introduces a new dataset of 44K in-the-wild vision-touch pairs, with English language labels annotated by humans (10%) and textual pseudo-labels from GPT-4V (90%). We use this dataset to train a vision-language-aligned tactile encoder for open-vocabulary classification and a touch-vision-language (TVL) model for text generation using the trained encoder. Results suggest that by incorporating touch, the TVL model improves (+29% classification accuracy) touch-vision-language alignment over existing models trained on any pair of those modalities. Although only a small fraction of the dataset is human-labeled, the TVL model demonstrates improved visual-tactile understanding over GPT-4V (+12%) and open-source vision-language models (+32%) on a new touch-vision understanding benchmark. Code and data: https://tactile-vlm.github.io.

Robots in many real-world settings have access to force/torque sensors in their gripper and tactile sensing is often necessary in tasks that involve contact-rich motion. In this work, we leverage surprise from mismatches in touch feedback to guide exploration in hard sparse-reward reinforcement learning tasks. Our approach, Touch-based Curiosity (ToC), learns what visible objects interactions are supposed to "feel" like. We encourage exploration by rewarding interactions where the expectation and the experience don't match. In our proposed method, an initial task-independent exploration phase is followed by an on-task learning phase, in which the original interactions are relabeled with on-task rewards. We test our approach on a range of touch-intensive robot arm tasks (e.g. pushing objects, opening doors), which we also release as part of this work. Across multiple experiments in a simulated setting, we demonstrate that our method is able to learn these difficult tasks through sparse reward and curiosity alone. We compare our cross-modal approach to single-modality (touch- or vision-only) approaches as well as other curiosity-based methods and find that our method performs better and is more sample-efficient.

The ability to associate touch with other modalities has huge implications for humans and computational systems. However, multimodal learning with touch remains challenging due to the expensive data collection process and non-standardized sensor outputs. We introduce UniTouch, a unified tactile model for vision-based touch sensors connected to multiple modalities, including vision, language, and sound. We achieve this by aligning our UniTouch embeddings to pretrained image embeddings already associated with a variety of other modalities. We further propose learnable sensor-specific tokens, allowing the model to learn from a set of heterogeneous tactile sensors, all at the same time. UniTouch is capable of conducting various touch sensing tasks in the zero-shot setting, from robot grasping prediction to touch image question answering. To the best of our knowledge, UniTouch is the first to demonstrate such capabilities. Project page: https://cfeng16.github.io/UniTouch/

In this paper, we present RAG, a Regional-Aware text-to-image Generation method conditioned on regional descriptions for precise layout composition. Regional prompting, or compositional generation, which enables fine-grained spatial control, has gained increasing attention for its practicality in real-world applications. However, previous methods either introduce additional trainable modules, thus only applicable to specific models, or manipulate on score maps within cross-attention layers using attention masks, resulting in limited control strength when the number of regions increases. To handle these limitations, we decouple the multi-region generation into two sub-tasks, the construction of individual region (Regional Hard Binding) that ensures the regional prompt is properly executed, and the overall detail refinement (Regional Soft Refinement) over regions that dismiss the visual boundaries and enhance adjacent interactions. Furthermore, RAG novelly makes repainting feasible, where users can modify specific unsatisfied regions in the last generation while keeping all other regions unchanged, without relying on additional inpainting models. Our approach is tuning-free and applicable to other frameworks as an enhancement to the prompt following property. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that RAG achieves superior performance over attribute binding and object relationship than previous tuning-free methods.

Many cultures around the world believe that palm reading can be used to predict the future life of a person. Palmistry uses features of the hand such as palm lines, hand shape, or fingertip position. However, the research on palm-line detection is still scarce, many of them applied traditional image processing techniques. In most real-world scenarios, images usually are not in well-conditioned, causing these methods to severely under-perform. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to extract principle palm lines from an image of a person's hand. Our method applies deep learning networks (DNNs) to improve performance. Another challenge of this problem is the lack of training data. To deal with this issue, we handcrafted a dataset from scratch. From this dataset, we compare the performance of readily available methods with ours. Furthermore, based on the UNet segmentation neural network architecture and the knowledge of attention mechanism, we propose a highly efficient architecture to detect palm-lines. We proposed the Context Fusion Module to capture the most important context feature, which aims to improve segmentation accuracy. The experimental results show that it outperforms the other methods with the highest F1 Score about 99.42% and mIoU is 0.584 for the same dataset.

There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.

Robotic manipulation integrates vision, touch, and language, whose importance shifts across stages: vision guides reaching, while touch, through its evolution over time, decides grasping, alignment, and contact. Yet existing multi-modal manipulation policies typically use fixed temporal contexts and fusion strategies, despite shifts in what each modality contributes across different skills. We study how vision and touch should be combined at the level of primitive skills, asking what each skill needs from each sensor, and propose a skill-conditioned representation in which the queried skill conditions fusion over modality-specific short-term observation tokens while attending to a sparse event memory that retains terminal observations from the last K executed skills. Evaluated by skill progress estimation on three contact-rich tasks, it reduces slip-detection delay by 87% against fine-tuned SOTA progress models, twist-completion delay by 67.5% against a vision-only ablation, and progress error on a blind search task by 92% through sparse event memory. Gains concentrate exactly where completion is defined by contact or task history. More broadly, our results suggest that observation formation not only policy architecture is a central challenge in multi-modal representation. Project Website: http://what-to-attend-what-to-keep.github.io/

Three-dimensional (3D) applications have come to every corner of life. We present 3DTouch, a novel 3D wearable input device worn on the fingertip for interacting with 3D applications. 3DTouch is self-contained, and designed to universally work on various 3D platforms. The device employs touch input for the benefits of passive haptic feedback, and movement stability. Moreover, with touch interaction, 3DTouch is conceptually less fatiguing to use over many hours than 3D spatial input devices such as Kinect. Our approach relies on relative positioning technique using an optical laser sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit. We implemented a set of 3D interaction techniques including selection, translation, and rotation using 3DTouch. An evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space. With 3DTouch project, we would like to provide an input device that reduces the gap between 3D applications and users.

The human hand is our primary interface to the physical world, yet egocentric perception rarely knows when, where, or how forcefully it makes contact. Robust wearable tactile sensors are scarce, and no existing in-the-wild datasets align first-person video with full-hand touch. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical interaction, we present OpenTouch, the first in-the-wild egocentric full-hand tactile dataset, containing 5.1 hours of synchronized video-touch-pose data and 2,900 curated clips with detailed text annotations. Using OpenTouch, we introduce retrieval and classification benchmarks that probe how touch grounds perception and action. We show that tactile signals provide a compact yet powerful cue for grasp understanding, strengthen cross-modal alignment, and can be reliably retrieved from in-the-wild video queries. By releasing this annotated vision-touch-pose dataset and benchmark, we aim to advance multimodal egocentric perception, embodied learning, and contact-rich robotic manipulation.

We present MidasTouch, a tactile perception system for online global localization of a vision-based touch sensor sliding on an object surface. This framework takes in posed tactile images over time, and outputs an evolving distribution of sensor pose on the object's surface, without the need for visual priors. Our key insight is to estimate local surface geometry with tactile sensing, learn a compact representation for it, and disambiguate these signals over a long time horizon. The backbone of MidasTouch is a Monte-Carlo particle filter, with a measurement model based on a tactile code network learned from tactile simulation. This network, inspired by LIDAR place recognition, compactly summarizes local surface geometries. These generated codes are efficiently compared against a precomputed tactile codebook per-object, to update the pose distribution. We further release the YCB-Slide dataset of real-world and simulated forceful sliding interactions between a vision-based tactile sensor and standard YCB objects. While single-touch localization can be inherently ambiguous, we can quickly localize our sensor by traversing salient surface geometries. Project page: https://suddhu.github.io/midastouch-tactile/

Touch contact and pressure are essential for understanding how humans interact with and manipulate objects, insights which can significantly benefit applications in mixed reality and robotics. However, estimating these interactions from an egocentric camera perspective is challenging, largely due to the lack of comprehensive datasets that provide both accurate hand poses on contacting surfaces and detailed annotations of pressure information. In this paper, we introduce EgoPressure, a novel egocentric dataset that captures detailed touch contact and pressure interactions. EgoPressure provides high-resolution pressure intensity annotations for each contact point and includes accurate hand pose meshes obtained through our proposed multi-view, sequence-based optimization method processing data from an 8-camera capture rig. Our dataset comprises 5 hours of recorded interactions from 21 participants captured simultaneously by one head-mounted and seven stationary Kinect cameras, which acquire RGB images and depth maps at 30 Hz. To support future research and benchmarking, we present several baseline models for estimating applied pressure on external surfaces from RGB images, with and without hand pose information. We further explore the joint estimation of the hand mesh and applied pressure. Our experiments demonstrate that pressure and hand pose are complementary for understanding hand-object interactions. ng of hand-object interactions in AR/VR and robotics research. Project page: https://yiming-zhao.github.io/EgoPressure/.

Touch sensing is beneficial for solving a wide variety of manipulation tasks. While there exists a wide range of tactile sensors with different properties, exploiting the fusion of multiple heterogeneous tactile sensors to improve manipulation learning remains underexplored. We present Multi-Resolution Tactile Sensing (MiTaS), a representation framework that leverages multiple tactile sensors operating at different temporal resolutions in order to solve complex contact-rich manipulation tasks. We propose a novel architecture using modality-specific convolutional stems and transformer-based fusion that effectively fuses information from an RGB camera stream, a vision-based GelSight Mini sensor and a high-frequency event-based Evetac sensor. This multi-sensor representation then conditions a flow-matching policy for solving downstream tasks. Experimental results across five contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-resolution tactile features in imitation learning. MiTaS achieves an average success rate of 80 %, while vision-only (31 %) and visual-tactile (54 %) baselines cannot solve the task reliably. Co-training a visuo-tactile model with multi-tactile data boosts performance by over 10 \% in certain tasks, without having access to the Evetac sensor during policy evaluation. A detailed sensor-reading and attention analysis reveals the importance of different sensors throughout task execution, validating our multi-resolution tactile sensing approach. Project Page: http://mitas-touch.github.io.

Recent research has made significant progress in localizing and editing image regions based on text. However, most approaches treat these regions in isolation, relying solely on local cues without accounting for how each part contributes to the overall visual and semantic composition. This often results in inconsistent edits, unnatural transitions, or loss of coherence across the image. In this work, we propose Region in Context, a novel framework for text-conditioned image editing that performs multilevel semantic alignment between vision and language, inspired by the human ability to reason about edits in relation to the whole scene. Our method encourages each region to understand its role within the global image context, enabling precise and harmonized changes. At its core, the framework introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism: regions are represented with full-image context and aligned with detailed region-level descriptions, while the entire image is simultaneously matched to a comprehensive scene-level description generated by a large vision-language model. These descriptions serve as explicit verbal references of the intended content, guiding both local modifications and global structure. Experiments show that it produces more coherent and instruction-aligned results. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuyvuphuong/Region-in-Context.git

Humans constantly contact objects to move and perform tasks. Thus, detecting human-object contact is important for building human-centered artificial intelligence. However, there exists no robust method to detect contact between the body and the scene from an image, and there exists no dataset to learn such a detector. We fill this gap with HOT ("Human-Object conTact"), a new dataset of human-object contacts for images. To build HOT, we use two data sources: (1) We use the PROX dataset of 3D human meshes moving in 3D scenes, and automatically annotate 2D image areas for contact via 3D mesh proximity and projection. (2) We use the V-COCO, HAKE and Watch-n-Patch datasets, and ask trained annotators to draw polygons for the 2D image areas where contact takes place. We also annotate the involved body part of the human body. We use our HOT dataset to train a new contact detector, which takes a single color image as input, and outputs 2D contact heatmaps as well as the body-part labels that are in contact. This is a new and challenging task that extends current foot-ground or hand-object contact detectors to the full generality of the whole body. The detector uses a part-attention branch to guide contact estimation through the context of the surrounding body parts and scene. We evaluate our detector extensively, and quantitative results show that our model outperforms baselines, and that all components contribute to better performance. Results on images from an online repository show reasonable detections and generalizability.

3D generation methods have shown visually compelling results powered by diffusion image priors. However, they often fail to produce realistic geometric details, resulting in overly smooth surfaces or geometric details inaccurately baked in albedo maps. To address this, we introduce a new method that incorporates touch as an additional modality to improve the geometric details of generated 3D assets. We design a lightweight 3D texture field to synthesize visual and tactile textures, guided by 2D diffusion model priors on both visual and tactile domains. We condition the visual texture generation on high-resolution tactile normals and guide the patch-based tactile texture refinement with a customized TextureDreambooth. We further present a multi-part generation pipeline that enables us to synthesize different textures across various regions. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage high-resolution tactile sensing to enhance geometric details for 3D generation tasks. We evaluate our method in both text-to-3D and image-to-3D settings. Our experiments demonstrate that our method provides customized and realistic fine geometric textures while maintaining accurate alignment between two modalities of vision and touch.

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.

Human skin provides a rich tactile sensing stream, localizing intentional and unintentional contact events over a large and contoured region. Replicating these tactile sensing capabilities for dexterous robotic manipulation systems remains a longstanding challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by introducing DexSkin. DexSkin is a soft, conformable capacitive electronic skin that enables sensitive, localized, and calibratable tactile sensing, and can be tailored to varying geometries. We demonstrate its efficacy for learning downstream robotic manipulation by sensorizing a pair of parallel jaw gripper fingers, providing tactile coverage across almost the entire finger surfaces. We empirically evaluate DexSkin's capabilities in learning challenging manipulation tasks that require sensing coverage across the entire surface of the fingers, such as reorienting objects in hand and wrapping elastic bands around boxes, in a learning-from-demonstration framework. We then show that, critically for data-driven approaches, DexSkin can be calibrated to enable model transfer across sensor instances, and demonstrate its applicability to online reinforcement learning on real robots. Our results highlight DexSkin's suitability and practicality for learning real-world, contact-rich manipulation. Please see our project webpage for videos and visualizations: https://dex-skin.github.io/.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have moved beyond generating responses to executing multi-step tasks by calling tools, observing the results, and iteratively deciding the next action. Most agent systems run on desktops or servers, which support tool use and task automation. Mobile devices are also important agent environments because they are widely accessible and contain users' data, sensors, and daily-use applications. Existing mobile agents mainly operate smartphones through graphical user interface (GUI) actions such as tapping, swiping, and typing, which often form long, interface-dependent sequences, cannot directly access device capabilities, and make execution boundaries difficult to define. We present PalmClaw, an open-source agent framework that runs natively on mobile phones and manages the sessions, memory, skills, tools, and agent loop directly on the device. PalmClaw exposes device capabilities as device tools with explicit arguments, structured results, and clearly defined execution boundaries. This design enables agents to use mobile capabilities directly while keeping each action explicit and controlled. Experiments show an 11.5\% relative improvement in task success and a 94.9\% reduction in completion time over the strongest baseline, with lower setup burden and traces illustrating how execution boundaries are applied. Code is available at https://github.com/ModalityDance/PalmClaw.

Humans rely on their visual and tactile senses to develop a comprehensive 3D understanding of their physical environment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring and manipulating objects using data-driven approaches that utilise high-resolution vision-based tactile sensors. However, 3D shape reconstruction using tactile sensing has lagged behind visual shape reconstruction because of limitations in existing techniques, including the inability to generalise over unseen shapes, the absence of real-world testing, and limited expressive capacity imposed by discrete representations. To address these challenges, we propose TouchSDF, a Deep Learning approach for tactile 3D shape reconstruction that leverages the rich information provided by a vision-based tactile sensor and the expressivity of the implicit neural representation DeepSDF. Our technique consists of two components: (1) a Convolutional Neural Network that maps tactile images into local meshes representing the surface at the touch location, and (2) an implicit neural function that predicts a signed distance function to extract the desired 3D shape. This combination allows TouchSDF to reconstruct smooth and continuous 3D shapes from tactile inputs in simulation and real-world settings, opening up research avenues for robust 3D-aware representations and improved multimodal perception in robotics. Code and supplementary material are available at: https://touchsdf.github.io/

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

In this work, we propose a novel method to supervise 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes using optical tactile sensors. Optical tactile sensors have become widespread in their use in robotics for manipulation and object representation; however, raw optical tactile sensor data is unsuitable to directly supervise a 3DGS scene. Our representation leverages a Gaussian Process Implicit Surface to implicitly represent the object, combining many touches into a unified representation with uncertainty. We merge this model with a monocular depth estimation network, which is aligned in a two stage process, coarsely aligning with a depth camera and then finely adjusting to match our touch data. For every training image, our method produces a corresponding fused depth and uncertainty map. Utilizing this additional information, we propose a new loss function, variance weighted depth supervised loss, for training the 3DGS scene model. We leverage the DenseTact optical tactile sensor and RealSense RGB-D camera to show that combining touch and vision in this manner leads to quantitatively and qualitatively better results than vision or touch alone in a few-view scene syntheses on opaque as well as on reflective and transparent objects. Please see our project page at http://armlabstanford.github.io/touch-gs

Tactile sensing plays a vital role in enabling robots to perform fine-grained, contact-rich tasks. However, the high dimensionality of tactile data, due to the large coverage on dexterous hands, poses significant challenges for effective tactile feature learning, especially for 3D tactile data, as there are no large standardized datasets and no strong pretrained backbones. To address these challenges, we propose a novel canonical representation that reduces the difficulty of 3D tactile feature learning and further introduces a force-based self-supervised pretraining task to capture both local and net force features, which are crucial for dexterous manipulation. Our method achieves an average success rate of 78% across four fine-grained, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks in real-world experiments, demonstrating effectiveness and robustness compared to other methods. Further analysis shows that our method fully utilizes both spatial and force information from 3D tactile data to accomplish the tasks. The codes and videos can be viewed at https://3dtacdex.github.io.

Traditional vision-based material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer. Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation. The code and datasets will be open-source, and the videos are available in the supplementary materials.

World Action Models (WAMs) generate actions together with predicted futures, offering a powerful interface for robot decision making. In contact-rich manipulation, however, visually plausible futures can be physically incomplete: insertion, assembly, search, and reorientation often depend on slip, jamming, contact normals, or small alignment errors that are weakly visible or hidden in RGB. A natural solution is to predict future tactile states, however, we identify tactile pollution, a failure mode where unconstrained tactile-token injection degrades video and action prediction by forcing a visual dynamics model to absorb sparse, local, event-driven contact signals. To address this, we propose Tactile-WAM, a touch-aware WAM with a Tactile Asymmetric Attention Mechanism (TAAM). TAAM combines a VideoClean mask, which blocks video-query access to tactile key/value tokens while preserving action-query access, with a touch-aware bias for action attention. The VideoClean mask protects visual prediction while keeping contact information available for action generation; the touch-aware bias is derived from predicted touch changes and modulates action attention to tactile tokens during denoising. On ManiFeel, Tactile-WAM improves the mean success rate by 38.9% overall and by 86% on contact-rich tasks.

We present an advance in wearable technology: a mobile-optimized, real-time, ultra-low-power event camera system that enables natural hand gesture control for smart glasses, dramatically improving user experience. While hand gesture recognition in computer vision has advanced significantly, critical challenges remain in creating systems that are intuitive, adaptable across diverse users and environments, and energy-efficient enough for practical wearable applications. Our approach tackles these challenges through carefully selected microgestures: lateral thumb swipes across the index finger (in both directions) and a double pinch between thumb and index fingertips. These human-centered interactions leverage natural hand movements, ensuring intuitive usability without requiring users to learn complex command sequences. To overcome variability in users and environments, we developed a novel simulation methodology that enables comprehensive domain sampling without extensive real-world data collection. Our power-optimised architecture maintains exceptional performance, achieving F1 scores above 80\% on benchmark datasets featuring diverse users and environments. The resulting models operate at just 6-8 mW when exploiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon Hexagon DSP, with our 2-channel implementation exceeding 70\% F1 accuracy and our 6-channel model surpassing 80\% F1 accuracy across all gesture classes in user studies. These results were achieved using only synthetic training data. This improves on the state-of-the-art for F1 accuracy by 20\% with a power reduction 25x when using DSP. This advancement brings deploying ultra-low-power vision systems in wearable devices closer and opens new possibilities for seamless human-computer interaction.

Hands are essential to human interaction, and understanding contact between hands and the world can promote comprehensive understanding of their function. Recently, there have been growing number of hand interaction datasets that cover interaction with object, other hand, scene, and body. Despite the significance of the task and increasing high-quality data, how to effectively learn dense hand contact estimation remains largely underexplored. There are two major challenges for learning dense hand contact estimation. First, there exists class imbalance issue from hand contact datasets where majority of samples are not in contact. Second, hand contact datasets contain spatial imbalance issue with most of hand contact exhibited in finger tips, resulting in challenges for generalization towards contacts in other hand regions. To tackle these issues, we present a framework that learns dense HAnd COntact estimation (HACO) from imbalanced data. To resolve the class imbalance issue, we introduce balanced contact sampling, which builds and samples from multiple sampling groups that fairly represent diverse contact statistics for both contact and non-contact samples. Moreover, to address the spatial imbalance issue, we propose vertex-level class-balanced (VCB) loss, which incorporates spatially varying contact distribution by separately reweighting loss contribution of each vertex based on its contact frequency across dataset. As a result, we effectively learn to predict dense hand contact estimation with large-scale hand contact data without suffering from class and spatial imbalance issue. The codes will be released.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at holistic understanding, they struggle in capturing the dense world with complex scenes, requiring fine-grained analysis of intricate details and object inter-relationships. Region-level MLLMs have been a promising step. However, previous attempts are generally optimized to understand given regions in isolation, neglecting crucial global contexts. To address this, we introduce Grasp Any Region (GAR) for comprehen- sive region-level visual understanding. Empowered by an effective RoI-aligned feature replay technique, GAR supports (1) precise perception by leveraging necessary global contexts, and (2) modeling interactions between multiple prompts. Together, it then naturally achieves (3) advanced compositional reasoning to answer specific free-form questions about any region, shifting the paradigm from passive description to active dialogue. Moreover, we construct GAR-Bench, which not only provides a more accurate evaluation of single-region comprehension, but also, more importantly, measures interactions and complex reasoning across multiple regions. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GAR-1B not only maintains the state-of-the-art captioning capabilities, e.g., outperforming DAM-3B +4.5 on DLC-Bench, but also excels at modeling relationships between multiple prompts with advanced comprehension capabilities, even surpassing InternVL3-78B on GAR-Bench-VQA. More importantly, our zero-shot GAR-8B even outperforms in-domain VideoRefer-7B on VideoRefer-BenchQ, indicating its strong capabilities can be easily transferred to videos.

The contour estimation of transparent fragments is very important for autonomous reassembly, especially in the fields of precision optical instrument repair, cultural relic restoration, and identification of other precious device broken accidents. Different from general intact transparent objects, the contour estimation of transparent fragments face greater challenges due to strict optical properties, irregular shapes and edges. To address this issue, a general transparent fragments contour estimation framework based on visual-tactile fusion is proposed in this paper. First, we construct the transparent fragment dataset named TransFrag27K, which includes a multiscene synthetic data of broken fragments from multiple types of transparent objects, and a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline. Secondly, we propose a visual grasping position detection network named TransFragNet to identify, locate and segment the sampling grasping position. And, we use a two-finger gripper with Gelsight Mini sensors to obtain reconstructed tactile information of the lateral edge of the fragments. By fusing this tactile information with visual cues, a visual-tactile fusion material classifier is proposed. Inspired by the way humans estimate a fragment's contour combining vision and touch, we introduce a general transparent fragment contour estimation framework based on visual-tactile fusion, demonstrates strong performance in real-world validation. Finally, a multi-dimensional similarity metrics based contour matching and reassembly algorithm is proposed, providing a reproducible benchmark for evaluating visual-tactile contour estimation and fragment reassembly. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/Keithllin/Transparent-Fragments-Contour-Estimation.

Point-drag-based image editing methods, like DragDiffusion, have attracted significant attention. However, point-drag-based approaches suffer from computational overhead and misinterpretation of user intentions due to the sparsity of point-based editing instructions. In this paper, we propose a region-based copy-and-paste dragging method, RegionDrag, to overcome these limitations. RegionDrag allows users to express their editing instructions in the form of handle and target regions, enabling more precise control and alleviating ambiguity. In addition, region-based operations complete editing in one iteration and are much faster than point-drag-based methods. We also incorporate the attention-swapping technique for enhanced stability during editing. To validate our approach, we extend existing point-drag-based datasets with region-based dragging instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that RegionDrag outperforms existing point-drag-based approaches in terms of speed, accuracy, and alignment with user intentions. Remarkably, RegionDrag completes the edit on an image with a resolution of 512x512 in less than 2 seconds, which is more than 100x faster than DragDiffusion, while achieving better performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/regiondrag.

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd.edu/AcTExplore

For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) generating sensor signals in novel scenarios, and 3) learning sensor-based policies. For visuotactile sensors, interpretation has been facilitated by their close relationship with vision sensors (e.g., RGB cameras). However, generation is still difficult, as visuotactile sensors typically involve contact, deformation, illumination, and imaging, all of which are expensive to simulate; in turn, policy learning has been challenging, as simulation cannot be leveraged for large-scale data collection. We present TacSL (taxel), a library for GPU-based visuotactile sensor simulation and learning. TacSL can be used to simulate visuotactile images and extract contact-force distributions over 200times faster than the prior state-of-the-art, all within the widely-used Isaac Gym simulator. Furthermore, TacSL provides a learning toolkit containing multiple sensor models, contact-intensive training environments, and online/offline algorithms that can facilitate policy learning for sim-to-real applications. On the algorithmic side, we introduce a novel online reinforcement-learning algorithm called asymmetric actor-critic distillation (\sysName), designed to effectively and efficiently learn tactile-based policies in simulation that can transfer to the real world. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our library and algorithms by evaluating the benefits of distillation and multimodal sensing for contact-rich manip ulation tasks, and most critically, performing sim-to-real transfer. Supplementary videos and results are at https://iakinola23.github.io/tacsl/.

Dexterous manipulation in everyday environments requires both anticipation and reaction: a robot must predict how contact should evolve while rapidly correcting local errors caused by slip, misalignment, unstable grasping, or force mismatch. Vision and language provide semantic and geometric guidance, but they cannot reliably reveal hidden contact states such as force, slip, and contact stability. Although tactile sensing exposes these physical cues, most existing policies treat touch as a low-frequency observation stream within a monolithic action model, coupling slow task reasoning, action generation, and fast contact feedback in a single loop. We introduce TouchWorld, a predictive-and-reactive tactile foundation model for dexterous manipulation. TouchWorld uses a hierarchical policy that separates vision-language subtask planning, tactile world-model prediction, visuo-tactile goal-conditioned action generation, and high-frequency tactile residual refinement. A High-Level Planning Layer produces executable subtasks and predicts tactile subgoals; a Visuo-Tactile Goal-Conditioned Policy generates nominal action chunks; and a Tactile-Conditioned Refinement Policy performs online residual correction using recent tactile and proprioceptive feedback. By using touch as both a predictive contact reference and a fast feedback signal, TouchWorld preserves the semantic generalization of vision-language-action policies while improving local contact adaptation. Across six long-horizon and contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks, TouchWorld achieves 65.0% success in the clean setting and 53.7% success under human perturbations, outperforming the strongest baseline by 15.7 and 18.5 percentage points, respectively.

Dense hand contact estimation requires both high-level semantic understanding and fine-grained geometric reasoning of human interaction to accurately localize contact regions. Recently, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding visual semantics, enabled by vision-language priors learned from large-scale data. However, leveraging MLLMs for dense hand contact estimation remains underexplored. There are two major challenges in applying MLLMs to dense hand contact estimation. First, encoding explicit 3D hand geometry is difficult, as MLLMs primarily operate on vision and language modalities. Second, capturing fine-grained vertex-level contact remains challenging, as MLLMs tend to focus on high-level semantics rather than detailed geometric reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose ContactPrompt, a training-free and zero-shot approach for dense hand contact estimation using MLLMs. To effectively encode 3D hand geometry, we introduce a detailed hand-part segmentation and a part-wise vertex-grid representation that provides structured, localized geometric information. To enable accurate and efficient dense contact prediction, we develop a multi-stage structured contact reasoning with part conditioning, progressively bridging global semantics and fine-grained geometry. Therefore, our method effectively leverages the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs while enabling precise dense hand contact estimation. Surprisingly, the proposed approach outperforms previous supervised methods trained on large-scale dense contact datasets without requiring any training. The codes will be released.

Touch is the primary medium through which humans interact with the environment. Currently, tactile learning mainly focuses on image-level pretraining or alignment. However, tactile signals correspond to local object contact, while research into scale alignment and holographic matching remains limited and proper datasets and benchmarks also lack. To bridge this gap, we first construct a data collection system to acquire a large-scale tactile dataset, with over 20 K tactile contacts from 505 real-world objects. Building on this dataset, we design a Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark to evaluate vision-tactile local-to-global alignment ability. Then we propose Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods for vision-tactile representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that these exceed the performance of methods without alignment and align with whole-object images.

Generalist robot policies benefit from large-scale visual pretraining but often struggle with contact-rich dexterous manipulation, where force, compliance, and incipient slip are hard to observe from images. We present Spark-0, a spatially aligned vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) model that uses touch in two complementary ways. During pretraining, image-space contact maps derived from tactile gloves, together with features from a frozen 3D geometry teacher, supervise the visual tokens; these objectives are removed at inference. In parallel, a tactile pathway encodes regional force histories and 3D taxel states to condition the action expert. A single checkpoint therefore supports both vision-only and tactile-conditioned deployment. To scale this supervision, we build HumanTouch, a 1,000-hour dataset of full-hand tactile human manipulation, and pretrain Spark-0 on it together with egocentric video, robot data, and simulation. We also release SparkArena, which pairs vision-only simulated tasks with tactile-conditioned real-robot tasks on one dexterous embodiment. Spark-0 achieves the highest mean success rate on both SparkArena tracks and ranks first on all eight aggregate metrics of the Ego Humanoid Manipulation Benchmark. Compared with vision-only pretraining on the same data and compute with touch discarded, retaining the touch of 1,000 hours of HumanTouch raises vision-only success on Ego Humanoid from 52.5% to 71.7%, and success on SparkArena-Real, where touch is also used at deployment, from 44.0% to 52.0%, indicating that touch serves not only as a policy input but also as scalable supervision for dexterous visuomotor pretraining. The Website is available at: https://xsparkai.com/Spark-0.

Tactile sensing provides essential contact information for robotic manipulation, yet incorporating it into pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging. A common concern is that simply introducing touch during task-specific fine-tuning may fail to bridge the cross-modal gap, yielding limited gains or even reduced success. Consequently, existing methods often rely on large-scale tactile policy pretraining or separate visuotactile alignment, adding data requirements and training stages. We introduce SimpleTouch, a simple VLA extension that augments π_{0.5} with a tactile expert, to test whether these additional stages are necessary. Leveraging all tokens from a frozen pretrained tactile encoder, the expert learns from action supervision and multi-horizon prediction of future tactile latents. This single-stage training uses only task demonstrations, without additional tactile policy pretraining or separate alignment. With 50 demonstrations per task, SimpleTouch achieves the highest success rate among evaluated methods on all six UniVTAC tasks. Its average success rate reaches 77.5%, compared with 45.2% for FTP-π_{0.5} and 66.7% for FTP-1, corresponding to gains of 32.3 and 10.8 percentage points, respectively. Across four real-world tasks, it averages 71.3%, exceeding FTP-1 by 8.8 percentage points. These results demonstrate that, given pretrained VLA and tactile representations, additional tactile policy pretraining is not a prerequisite for strong performance on these tasks, offering a simpler route to contact-rich manipulation. Project page: https://simpletouch-robot.github.io/

Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

Real-world contact-rich manipulation demands robots to perceive temporal tactile feedback, capture subtle surface deformations, and reason about object properties as well as force dynamics. Although optical tactile sensors are uniquely capable of providing such rich information, existing tactile datasets and models remain limited. These resources primarily focus on object-level attributes (e.g., material) while largely overlooking fine-grained tactile temporal dynamics during physical interactions. We consider that advancing dynamic tactile perception requires a systematic hierarchy of dynamic perception capabilities to guide both data collection and model design. To address the lack of tactile data with rich dynamic information, we present ToucHD, a large-scale hierarchical tactile dataset spanning tactile atomic actions, real-world manipulations, and touch-force paired data. Beyond scale, ToucHD establishes a comprehensive tactile dynamic data ecosystem that explicitly supports hierarchical perception capabilities from the data perspective. Building on it, we propose AnyTouch 2, a general tactile representation learning framework for diverse optical tactile sensors that unifies object-level understanding with fine-grained, force-aware dynamic perception. The framework captures both pixel-level and action-specific deformations across frames, while explicitly modeling physical force dynamics, thereby learning multi-level dynamic perception capabilities from the model perspective. We evaluate our model on benchmarks that covers static object properties and dynamic physical attributes, as well as real-world manipulation tasks spanning multiple tiers of dynamic perception capabilities-from basic object-level understanding to force-aware dexterous manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate consistent and strong performance across sensors and tasks.

Tactile-enhanced vision-language-action (VLA) policies have been introduced for contact-rich manipulation, where critical interaction states are often hidden from vision. Future tactile prediction is a promising way to use touch because it turns tactile outcomes into supervision for action-induced contact dynamics. Yet VLA policies contain representations with different roles, from perceptual encoding to motor prediction, making it unclear where this supervision should be applied. We study this as a representation-alignment problem. Through a linear probe analysis, we find that future tactile states are most predictable from intermediate action-expert features, rather than from vision-language features or final action states. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a lightweight Latent Tactile Predictor (LTP), which predicts compact future tactile embeddings from the identified intermediate representation. By avoiding direct prediction of noisy raw tactile signals, LTP provides an action-outcome grounding signal that aligns intermediate action representations with future contact consequences. Experiments on real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks show that representation-aligned tactile grounding outperforms less aligned or multi-interface tactile prediction, highlighting the importance of where tactile supervision is applied.

Visual grounding is a central challenge for GUI agents, requiring an instruction to be mapped to a target within a crowded screenshot. Coordinate generation with single-point supervision reduces a spatially extended target to one position, despite the presence of many valid click locations. Region-based patch scoring alleviates this ambiguity, but its spatial decisions remain tied to visual-token footprints that may span the target, neighboring controls, and background. To address these limitations, we propose Seg2Click, which reformulates GUI grounding as executable-region prediction: identifying where a click can validly execute the given instruction. Using bounding-box supervision, Seg2Click predicts an executable-region mask and computes the final click point through a deterministic rule. This formulation captures the spatial extent of valid click locations and enables finer localization beyond the visual-token grid, making it well suited to small, densely arranged controls without requiring a verifier or zoom-in pass. Experiments across five backbone configurations from two model families demonstrate the effectiveness of Seg2Click. Seg2Click-9B achieves 92.06\%, 94.10\%, and 55.22\% on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and ScreenSpot-Pro, respectively, while matched-backbone comparisons show improvements over both coordinate generation and patch-based grounding. Code will be available at https://github.com/jcwang0602/Seg2Click.

Reconstructing 3D hand mesh is challenging but an important task for human-computer interaction and AR/VR applications. In particular, RGB and/or depth cameras have been widely used in this task. However, methods using these conventional cameras face challenges in low-light environments and during motion blur. Thus, to address these limitations, event cameras have been attracting attention in recent years for their high dynamic range and high temporal resolution. Despite their advantages, event cameras are sensitive to background noise or camera motion, which has limited existing studies to static backgrounds and fixed cameras. In this study, we propose EventEgoHands, a novel method for event-based 3D hand mesh reconstruction in an egocentric view. Our approach introduces a Hand Segmentation Module that extracts hand regions, effectively mitigating the influence of dynamic background events. We evaluated our approach and demonstrated its effectiveness on the N-HOT3D dataset, improving MPJPE by approximately more than 4.5 cm (43%).

Wearable cameras allow people to record their daily activities from a user-centered (First Person Vision) perspective. Due to their favorable location, wearable cameras frequently capture the hands of the user, and may thus represent a promising user-machine interaction tool for different applications. Existent First Person Vision methods handle hand segmentation as a background-foreground problem, ignoring two important facts: i) hands are not a single "skin-like" moving element, but a pair of interacting cooperative entities, ii) close hand interactions may lead to hand-to-hand occlusions and, as a consequence, create a single hand-like segment. These facts complicate a proper understanding of hand movements and interactions. Our approach extends traditional background-foreground strategies, by including a hand-identification step (left-right) based on a Maxwell distribution of angle and position. Hand-to-hand occlusions are addressed by exploiting temporal superpixels. The experimental results show that, in addition to a reliable left/right hand-segmentation, our approach considerably improves the traditional background-foreground hand-segmentation.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches within unconstrained images, such as in open-world object detection, represents a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient region recognition architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Through extensive experiments in the context of open-world object recognition, our RegionSpot demonstrates significant performance improvements over prior alternatives, while also providing substantial computational savings. For instance, training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs. Our model outperforms GLIP by 6.5 % in mean average precision (mAP), with an even larger margin by 14.8 % for more challenging and rare categories.

Recent trend of touch-screen devices produces an accessibility barrier for visually impaired people. On the other hand, these devices come with sensors such as accelerometer. This calls for new approaches to human computer interface (HCI). In this study, our aim is to find an alternative approach to classify 20 different hand gestures captured by iPhone 3GS's built-in accelerometer and make high accuracy on user-independent classifications using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) with dynamic warping window sizes. 20 gestures with 1,100 gesture data are collected from 15 normal-visioned people. This data set is used for training. Experiment-1 based on this data set produced an accuracy rate of 96.7~\%. In order for visually impaired people to use the system, a gesture recognition based "talking" calculator is implemented. In Experiment-2, 4 visually impaired end-users used the calculator and obtained 95.5~\% accuracy rate among 17 gestures with 720 gesture data totally. Contributions of the techniques to the end result is also investigated. Dynamic warping window size is found to be the most effective one. The data and the code is available.

Data-driven approaches struggle with precise manipulation; imitation learning requires many hard-to-obtain demonstrations, while reinforcement learning yields brittle, non-generalizable policies. We introduce VisuoTactile Local (ViTaL) policy learning, a framework that solves fine-grained manipulation tasks by decomposing them into two phases: a reaching phase, where a vision-language model (VLM) enables scene-level reasoning to localize the object of interest, and a local interaction phase, where a reusable, scene-agnostic ViTaL policy performs contact-rich manipulation using egocentric vision and tactile sensing. This approach is motivated by the observation that while scene context varies, the low-level interaction remains consistent across task instances. By training local policies once in a canonical setting, they can generalize via a localize-then-execute strategy. ViTaL achieves around 90% success on contact-rich tasks in unseen environments and is robust to distractors. ViTaL's effectiveness stems from three key insights: (1) foundation models for segmentation enable training robust visual encoders via behavior cloning; (2) these encoders improve the generalizability of policies learned using residual RL; and (3) tactile sensing significantly boosts performance in contact-rich tasks. Ablation studies validate each of these insights, and we demonstrate that ViTaL integrates well with high-level VLMs, enabling robust, reusable low-level skills. Results and videos are available at https://vitalprecise.github.io.

Large-scale egocentric human interaction data is becoming an important source of physical supervision for embodied learning, yet video alone leaves the contact and pressure that characterize physical interaction unrecorded. Recent visual-tactile datasets provide this missing supervision, but their synchronized tactile data remain far smaller in volume than human video. Moreover, the largest resources often merge recordings from different sensors or annotation procedures, which makes the effect of data scale difficult to isolate. We therefore introduce TouchScale, a 500-hour dataset of contact-rich human interaction recorded with a single unified wearable setup. Its approximately 2K predefined task descriptions span everyday activities and structured manipulation, and each recording temporally aligns egocentric RGB-D video with wrist RGB video and dense full-hand bimanual tactile measurements. Compared with prior tactile data, training on the full TouchScale raises zero-shot contact IoU on data from an unseen tactile sensor from 0.134 to 0.383. Pretraining a visual encoder on TouchScale also yields the highest action recognition accuracy on three benchmarks among the compared visual-tactile datasets. Used for visual-tactile mid-training of a robot policy, TouchScale improves the average real-world success rate across four contact-rich manipulation tasks from 22.5% to 57.5%. With the sensor and collection protocol held fixed, both zero-shot tactile prediction and robot success show an overall upward trend as more TouchScale data is used. These results suggest that human visual-tactile data collected at scale with consistent sensing benefits both perception and robot manipulation. We will publicly release TouchScale, including all synchronized visual-tactile recordings and reconstructed object models, to support future research on scalable visual-tactile learning.

Mobile UI understanding is important for enabling various interaction tasks such as UI automation and accessibility. Previous mobile UI modeling often depends on the view hierarchy information of a screen, which directly provides the structural data of the UI, with the hope to bypass challenging tasks of visual modeling from screen pixels. However, view hierarchies are not always available, and are often corrupted with missing object descriptions or misaligned structure information. As a result, despite the use of view hierarchies could offer short-term gains, it may ultimately hinder the applicability and performance of the model. In this paper, we propose Spotlight, a vision-only approach for mobile UI understanding. Specifically, we enhance a vision-language model that only takes the screenshot of the UI and a region of interest on the screen -- the focus -- as the input. This general architecture of Spotlight is easily scalable and capable of performing a range of UI modeling tasks. Our experiments show that our model establishes SoTA results on several representative UI tasks and outperforms previous methods that use both screenshots and view hierarchies as inputs. Furthermore, we explore multi-task learning and few-shot prompting capacities of the proposed models, demonstrating promising results in the multi-task learning direction.

We present N_0-TWAM, a tactile-native world-action model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts both future vision and future contact. To our knowledge, it is the first tactile world-action model trained at large scale, and it shows strong capability on contact-rich tasks. We pre-train N_0-TWAM at large scale with visuo-tactile joint training over tactile-rich demonstrations spanning six embodiments and 450 tasks. We use NeoForce, a unified force-based tactile representation, to form a physically grounded contact signal that conditions action generation. To improve long-horizon and multi-stage manipulation, we introduce tactile contact events for task staging and advance through them during execution. For real-time efficiency, we adopt an asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that pairs a full-width expert for video prediction with slim experts for downstream action and tactile prediction. Evaluations on both real and simulated benchmarks justify the capabilities of N_0-TWAM across a range of contact-rich tasks, and demonstrate the benefit of data scaling for precise tactile and action prediction. In summary, N_0-TWAM endows a world-action model with predictive capabilities to foresee vision, touch and action, building a solid foundation for fine-grained manipulation on open contact-rich tasks. The codebase and model checkpoints will be made publicly available to foster further research and development in tactile-enabled robotic manipulation.

The ability to grasp objects, signal with gestures, and share emotion through touch all stem from the unique capabilities of human hands. Yet creating high-quality personalized hand avatars from images remains challenging due to complex geometry, appearance, and articulation, particularly under unconstrained lighting and limited views. Progress has also been limited by the lack of datasets that jointly provide accurate 3D geometry, high-resolution multiview imagery, and a diverse population of subjects. To address this, we present PALM, a large-scale dataset comprising 13k high-quality hand scans from 263 subjects and 90k multi-view images, capturing rich variation in skin tone, age, and geometry. To show its utility, we present a baseline PALM-Net, a multi-subject prior over hand geometry and material properties learned via physically based inverse rendering, enabling realistic, relightable single-image hand avatar personalization. PALM's scale and diversity make it a valuable real-world resource for hand modeling and related research.

Tactile perception has the potential to significantly enhance dexterous robotic manipulation by providing rich local information that can complement or substitute for other sensory modalities such as vision. However, because tactile sensing is inherently local, it is not well-suited for tasks that require broad spatial awareness or global scene understanding on its own. A human-inspired strategy to address this issue is to consider active perception techniques instead. That is, to actively guide sensors toward regions with more informative or significant features and integrate such information over time in order to understand a scene or complete a task. Both active perception and different methods for tactile sensing have received significant attention recently. Yet, despite advancements, both fields lack standardized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Tactile MNIST Benchmark Suite, an open-source, Gymnasium-compatible benchmark specifically designed for active tactile perception tasks, including localization, classification, and volume estimation. Our benchmark suite offers diverse simulation scenarios, from simple toy environments all the way to complex tactile perception tasks using vision-based tactile sensors. Furthermore, we also offer a comprehensive dataset comprising 13,500 synthetic 3D MNIST digit models and 153,600 real-world tactile samples collected from 600 3D printed digits. Using this dataset, we train a CycleGAN for realistic tactile simulation rendering. By providing standardized protocols and reproducible evaluation frameworks, our benchmark suite facilitates systematic progress in the fields of tactile sensing and active perception.

This paper presents a novel object-centric contact representation ContactGen for hand-object interaction. The ContactGen comprises three components: a contact map indicates the contact location, a part map represents the contact hand part, and a direction map tells the contact direction within each part. Given an input object, we propose a conditional generative model to predict ContactGen and adopt model-based optimization to predict diverse and geometrically feasible grasps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can generate high-fidelity and diverse human grasps for various objects. Project page: https://stevenlsw.github.io/contactgen/

Injury to the cervical spinal cord can cause quadriplegia, impairing muscle function in all four limbs. People with impaired hand function and mobility encounter significant difficulties in carrying out essential self-care and household tasks. Despite the impairment of their neural drive, their volitional myoelectric activity is often partially preserved. High-density electromyography (HDEMG) can detect this myoelectric activity, which can serve as control inputs to assistive devices. Previous HDEMG-controlled robotic interfaces have primarily been limited to controlling table-mounted robot arms. These have constrained reach capabilities. Instead, the ability to control mobile manipulators, which have no such workspace constraints, could allow individuals with quadriplegia to perform a greater variety of assistive tasks, thus restoring independence and reducing caregiver workload. In this study, we introduce a non-invasive wearable HDEMG interface with real-time myoelectric hand gesture recognition, enabling both coarse and fine control over the intricate mobility and manipulation functionalities of an 8 degree-of-freedom mobile manipulator. Our evaluation, involving 13 participants engaging in challenging self-care and household activities, demonstrates the potential of our wearable HDEMG system to profoundly enhance user independence by enabling non-invasive control of a mobile manipulator.

Egocentric Interactive hand-object segmentation (EgoIHOS) requires the segmentation of hands and interacting objects in egocentric images, which is crucial for understanding human behavior in assistive systems. Previous methods typically recognize hands and interacting objects as distinct semantic categories based solely on visual features, or simply use hand predictions as auxiliary cues for object segmentation. Despite the promising progress achieved by these methods, they fail to adequately model the interactive relationships between hands and objects while ignoring the coupled physical relationships among object categories, ultimately constraining their segmentation performance. To make up for the shortcomings of existing methods, we propose a novel method called CaRe-Ego that achieves state-of-the-art performance by emphasizing the contact between hands and objects from two aspects. First, we introduce a Hand-guided Object Feature Enhancer (HOFE) to establish the hand-object interactive relationships to extract more contact-relevant and discriminative object features. Second, we design the Contact-centric Object Decoupling Strategy (CODS) to explicitly model and disentangle coupling relationships among object categories, thereby emphasizing contact-aware feature learning. Experiments on various in-domain and out-of-domain test sets show that Care-Ego significantly outperforms existing methods with robust generalization capability. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yuggiehk/CaRe-Ego/.

The emergent large language/multimodal models facilitate the evolution of mobile agents, especially in mobile UI task automation. However, existing evaluation approaches, which rely on human validation or established datasets to compare agent-predicted actions with predefined action sequences, are unscalable and unfaithful. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents LlamaTouch, a testbed for on-device mobile UI task execution and faithful, scalable task evaluation. By observing that the task execution process only transfers UI states, LlamaTouch employs a novel evaluation approach that only assesses whether an agent traverses all manually annotated, essential application/system states. LlamaTouch comprises three key techniques: (1) On-device task execution that enables mobile agents to interact with realistic mobile environments for task execution. (2) Fine-grained UI component annotation that merges pixel-level screenshots and textual screen hierarchies to explicitly identify and precisely annotate essential UI components with a rich set of designed annotation primitives. (3) A multi-level application state matching algorithm that utilizes exact and fuzzy matching to accurately detect critical information in each screen, even with unpredictable UI layout/content dynamics. LlamaTouch currently incorporates four mobile agents and 496 tasks, encompassing both tasks in the widely-used datasets and our self-constructed ones to cover more diverse mobile applications. Evaluation results demonstrate LlamaTouch's high faithfulness of evaluation in real-world mobile environments and its better scalability than human validation. LlamaTouch also enables easy task annotation and integration of new mobile agents. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/LlamaTouch/LlamaTouch.

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder framework can learn a representation from a sequence of tactile measurements that contains all the relevant information about the palpated object. We conjecture that such a representation can be used for downstream tasks such as tactile imaging and change detection. With enough training data, it should capture intricate patterns in the tactile measurements that go beyond a simple map of forces -- the current state of the art. To validate our approach, we both develop a simulation environment and collect a real-world dataset of soft objects and corresponding ground truth images obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We collect palpation sequences using a robot equipped with a tactile sensor, and train a model that predicts sensory readings at different positions on the object. We investigate the representation learned in this process, and demonstrate its use in imaging and change detection.

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.

We present a novel algorithm for transferring artistic styles of semantically meaningful local regions of an image onto local regions of a target video while preserving its photorealism. Local regions may be selected either fully automatically from an image, through using video segmentation algorithms, or from casual user guidance such as scribbles. Our method, based on a deep neural network architecture inspired by recent work in photorealistic style transfer, is real-time and works on arbitrary inputs without runtime optimization once trained on a diverse dataset of artistic styles. By augmenting our video dataset with noisy semantic labels and jointly optimizing over style, content, mask, and temporal losses, our method can cope with a variety of imperfections in the input and produce temporally coherent videos without visual artifacts. We demonstrate our method on a variety of style images and target videos, including the ability to transfer different styles onto multiple objects simultaneously, and smoothly transition between styles in time.

Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to react to local deformation, pressure, slip, and friction, yet these cues are temporally sparse and often invisible in visual observations. Existing visual-tactile policies usually feed tactile observations directly into action prediction, but rarely model tactile deformation dynamics during action generation. In this paper, we introduce VT-WAM, a Visual-Tactile World Action Model that jointly learns future visual prediction, tactile deformation prediction, and action prediction within a unified flow matching framework. In particular, VT-WAM introduces (1) Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention to bridge a first-frame visual anchor with temporal tactile dynamics, and (2) contact-gated Action-Visual-Tactile Attention Guidance (AVTAG) to encourage action queries to rely on tactile evidence during contact phases. Across six real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, VT-WAM achieves a 71.67% average success rate, outperforming Fast-WAM by 26.67% and OmniVTLA by 35.84%. Ablations demonstrate that modeling tactile deformation dynamics and guiding contact-phase tactile attention are both important for contact-rich tasks. Project website: https://vt-wam.github.io/.

Despite the importance of tactile sensing for reliable manipulation, most existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) datasets remain vision-only, and those that do incorporate tactile information typically lack the joint combination of task diversity, language conditioning, and action trajectories. Furthermore, existing teleoperation pipelines rarely provide haptic feedback to the operator, despite its established role in demonstration quality and manipulation stability. In this work, we present HapTile, a contact-grounded visuotactile manipulation dataset that advances beyond vision-only trajectory datasets by embedding physical interaction sensing at two levels: fingertip tactile feedback at the robot end-effector, and haptic-informed demonstrations at the teleoperator side. The data collection platform integrates haptic feedback directly into the teleoperation controller, enabling the operator to perceive contact interactions in real time. It is built around a standard and reproducible robotic system equipped with custom-designed fingertip tactile sensors. The dataset comprises everyday manipulation tasks spanning a broad range of contact-rich skills, including pick-and-place, folding, pressing, stacking, and other routine activities. Each task is paired with language instructions that condition the policy on the manipulation objective, together with synchronized visuotactile observations and action trajectories. In addition, we provide a benchmarking study on contact-rich policy learning using two baseline models to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed contact-grounded dataset. The dataset and additional details are available on our website: haptile-dataset.github.io.

Cell instance segmentation in cytology images has significant importance for biology analysis and cancer screening, while remains challenging due to 1) the extensive overlapping translucent cell clusters that cause the ambiguous boundaries, and 2) the confusion of mimics and debris as nuclei. In this work, we proposed a De-overlapping Network (DoNet) in a decompose-and-recombined strategy. A Dual-path Region Segmentation Module (DRM) explicitly decomposes the cell clusters into intersection and complement regions, followed by a Semantic Consistency-guided Recombination Module (CRM) for integration. To further introduce the containment relationship of the nucleus in the cytoplasm, we design a Mask-guided Region Proposal Strategy (MRP) that integrates the cell attention maps for inner-cell instance prediction. We validate the proposed approach on ISBI2014 and CPS datasets. Experiments show that our proposed DoNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) cell instance segmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepDoNet/DoNet.

Vision-specific concepts such as "region" have played a key role in extending general machine learning frameworks to tasks like object detection. Given the success of region-based detectors for supervised learning and the progress of intra-image methods for contrastive learning, we explore the use of regions for reconstructive pre-training. Starting from Masked Autoencoding (MAE) both as a baseline and an inspiration, we propose a parallel pre-text task tailored to address the one-to-many mapping between images and regions. Since such regions can be generated in an unsupervised way, our approach (R-MAE) inherits the wide applicability from MAE, while being more "region-aware". We conduct thorough analyses during the development of R-MAE, and converge on a variant that is both effective and efficient (1.3% overhead over MAE). Moreover, it shows consistent quantitative improvements when generalized to various pre-training data and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks. Finally, we provide extensive qualitative visualizations to enhance the understanding of R-MAE's behaviour and potential. Code will be made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.

Contact-rich policies often fail because distinct physical states look alike yet require different actions. Cameras may not reveal whether a connector is aligned or fully seated, while many normal-only tactile sensors can miss the tangential interactions perpendicular to the grasping direction that distinguish these states. We ask whether a learning policy needs calibrated shear measurements, or only a repeatable observation that separates shear-dependent contact states. We introduce TacGooseBumps (TacGB), a passive domed film that mechanically encodes tangential loading as pattern changes in an existing sensor's pressure map. Tangential loading tilts each dome and redistributes pressure across its footprint; an end-to-end policy consumes the resulting maps without added electronics, force reconstruction, or taxel-level dome alignment. Across four imitation-learning tasks and two data-collection pipelines, TacGB improves goal attainment, efficiency, and contact quality: insertion success increases by up to 36 percentage points, and successful insertions are completed faster, while fragile-object placement becomes gentler and drawing becomes more continuous and straight. Signal, stage-wise, failure-mode, and trajectory analyses link these gains to contact regimes in which task-relevant tangential interactions are poorly resolved by vision and normal pressure alone. Together, these results show that shear need not be measured metrically to benefit robot learning; it can instead be mechanically encoded without changing the underlying tactile sensor or the policy's pressure-map input format.

Tactile sensing is particularly valuable for contact-rich robotic manipulation. Recent work has made substantial progress in tactile representation learning for robotic manipulation. However, similar tactile observations can arise from interaction conditions with very different task-risk implications, such as sensor noise, task-necessary variations, and emerging undesirable contact. Without context-grounded risk information, these cases can be ambiguous to downstream policies, leading to unnecessary corrections to benign variations or delayed responses to genuinely risky contact. To address this limitation, we propose Risk-Aware Tactile Encoding (RATE), which learns tactile representations that encode task-conditioned interaction risk. Specifically, history-conditioned prediction captures interaction context, while alert supervision associates this context with task-conditioned risk. The learned risk-aware representation complements conventional tactile features through a lightweight residual adapter. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate substantial improvements in task success, with controlled ablations confirming the complementary benefits of alert-guided learning and predictive temporal modeling.

3D generation, editing, and completion are typically treated as regenerating the complete 3D asset under task-specific constraints, even when only a local region needs modification. This leads to task isolation, inconsistency in content that should remain unchanged, and dependence on task-specific paired data. We address these issues with a key observation: the three tasks all synthesize a designated region while keeping the rest intact---the full region for generation, the target region for editing, and the missing region for completion. We term this paradigm Selective Modeling and build SeMo3D upon it; it naturally unifies the three tasks, preserves unchanged content by construction, and enables training without paired editing or completion data, since any 3D asset can be partitioned into a selected region and its context. For training, we propose region-selective denoising, which randomly selects regions of varying sizes on standard 3D assets and applies noise and loss only to them, jointly learning all three tasks. For architecture, we propose Omni3DiT, a multi-condition 3D diffusion transformer that distinguishes regions to create from those to retain and fuses image, text, and point guidance for fine-grained control. Experiments across three benchmarks show SeMo3D surpasses state-of-the-art methods on all tasks, delivering multimodal controllability in generation and strong consistency and accuracy in editing and completion. SeMo3D further serves as a unified modeling tool for agents, enabling efficient 3D creation through natural-language interaction. Project page: https://xiaokunsun.github.io/SeMo3D.github.io/.

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities humans rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at the contact area, and indicates the hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT, research on visual-tactile learning is becoming more accessible and reproducible. Leveraging this tactile sensor, we propose a novel visual-tactile in-hand object reconstruction framework VTacO, and extend it to VTacOH for hand-object reconstruction. Since our method can support both rigid and deformable object reconstruction, no existing benchmarks are proper for the goal. We propose a simulation environment, VT-Sim, which supports generating hand-object interaction for both rigid and deformable objects. With VT-Sim, we generate a large-scale training dataset and evaluate our method on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can outperform the previous baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, we directly apply our model trained in simulation to various real-world test cases, which display qualitative results. Codes, models, simulation environment, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vtaco/.

UMI-style interfaces enable scalable robot learning, but existing systems remain largely visuomotor, relying primarily on RGB observations and trajectory while providing only limited access to physical interaction signals. This becomes a fundamental limitation in contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on contact dynamics such as tactile interaction, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench that are difficult to infer from vision alone. We present OmniUMI, a unified framework for physically grounded robot learning via human-aligned multimodal interaction. OmniUMI synchronously captures RGB, depth, trajectory, tactile sensing, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench within a compact handheld system, while maintaining collection--deployment consistency through a shared embodiment design. To support human-aligned demonstration, OmniUMI enables natural perception and modulation of internal grasping force, external interaction wrench, and tactile interaction through bilateral gripper feedback and the handheld embodiment. Built on this interface, we extend diffusion policy with visual, tactile, and force-related observations, and deploy the learned policy through impedance-based execution for unified regulation of motion and contact behavior. Experiments demonstrate reliable sensing and strong downstream performance on force-sensitive pick-and-place, interactive surface erasing, and tactile-informed selective release. Overall, OmniUMI combines physically grounded multimodal data acquisition with human-aligned interaction, providing a scalable foundation for learning contact-rich manipulation.

Interactive segmentation enables users to segment as needed by providing cues of objects, which introduces human-computer interaction for many fields, such as image editing and medical image analysis. Typically, massive and expansive pixel-level annotations are spent to train deep models by object-oriented interactions with manually labeled object masks. In this work, we reveal that informative interactions can be made by simulation with semantic-consistent yet diverse region exploration in an unsupervised paradigm. Concretely, we introduce a Multi-granularity Interaction Simulation (MIS) approach to open up a promising direction for unsupervised interactive segmentation. Drawing on the high-quality dense features produced by recent self-supervised models, we propose to gradually merge patches or regions with similar features to form more extensive regions and thus, every merged region serves as a semantic-meaningful multi-granularity proposal. By randomly sampling these proposals and simulating possible interactions based on them, we provide meaningful interaction at multiple granularities to teach the model to understand interactions. Our MIS significantly outperforms non-deep learning unsupervised methods and is even comparable with some previous deep-supervised methods without any annotation.

To achieve dexterity comparable to that of humans, robots must intelligently process tactile sensor data. Taxel-based tactile signals often have low spatial-resolution, with non-standardized representations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, HyperTaxel, for learning a geometrically-informed representation of taxel-based tactile signals to address challenges associated with their spatial resolution. We use this representation and a contrastive learning objective to encode and map sparse low-resolution taxel signals to high-resolution contact surfaces. To address the uncertainty inherent in these signals, we leverage joint probability distributions across multiple simultaneous contacts to improve taxel hyper-resolution. We evaluate our representation by comparing it with two baselines and present results that suggest our representation outperforms the baselines. Furthermore, we present qualitative results that demonstrate the learned representation captures the geometric features of the contact surface, such as flatness, curvature, and edges, and generalizes across different objects and sensor configurations. Moreover, we present results that suggest our representation improves the performance of various downstream tasks, such as surface classification, 6D in-hand pose estimation, and sim-to-real transfer.

Recently, large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models have shown impressive performance in generating high-fidelity images, but with limited controllability, e.g., precisely specifying the content in a specific region with a free-form text description. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for such regional control in T2I generation. We augment T2I models' inputs with an extra set of position tokens, which represent the quantized spatial coordinates. Each region is specified by four position tokens to represent the top-left and bottom-right corners, followed by an open-ended natural language regional description. Then, we fine-tune a pre-trained T2I model with such new input interface. Our model, dubbed as ReCo (Region-Controlled T2I), enables the region control for arbitrary objects described by open-ended regional texts rather than by object labels from a constrained category set. Empirically, ReCo achieves better image quality than the T2I model strengthened by positional words (FID: 8.82->7.36, SceneFID: 15.54->6.51 on COCO), together with objects being more accurately placed, amounting to a 20.40% region classification accuracy improvement on COCO. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ReCo can better control the object count, spatial relationship, and region attributes such as color/size, with the free-form regional description. Human evaluation on PaintSkill shows that ReCo is +19.28% and +17.21% more accurate in generating images with correct object count and spatial relationship than the T2I model.