35.5ROMay 28
DynaFLIP: Rethinking Robotics Perception via Tri-Modal-Dynamics Guided RepresentationJusuk Lee, Seungjae Lee, Jonghun Shin et al.
Robot manipulation critically depends on perception that preserves the action-relevant aspects of a scene. Yet most robot learning pipelines are built upon visual encoders pre-trained for static recognition or vision-language alignment, leaving motion understanding to downstream policies. We introduce DynaFLIP, a dynamics-aware multimodal pre-training framework that pushes motion understanding upstream into perception. We construct image-language-3D flow triplets from heterogeneous human and robot videos, and use these triplets as training-time supervision to shape an image-only encoder. Our key idea is to encourage the three modalities to span a small simplex volume in the shared hyperspherical space -- a smaller simplex volume indicating stronger alignment. To avoid the geometric ambiguity and trivial collapse of naive volume minimization, we combine simplex-volume minimization with a cosine regularizer and a contrastive objective. Our analyses show that DynaFLIP focuses on control-relevant regions critical for manipulation. The resulting dynamics-aware representations serve as reusable visual backbones and consistently outperform baselines across diverse downstream policies, including VLAs. We validate this across diverse simulation and real-world setups, with gains reaching +22.5% under out-of-distribution scenarios. Our results suggest that robot generalization improves when visual representations are trained to encode not just what is present, but how the world changes under action.
ROFeb 21
Temporal Action Representation Learning for Tactical Resource Control and Subsequent Maneuver GenerationHoseong Jung, Sungil Son, Daesol Cho et al.
Autonomous robotic systems should reason about resource control and its impact on subsequent maneuvers, especially when operating with limited energy budgets or restricted sensing. Learning-based control is effective in handling complex dynamics and represents the problem as a hybrid action space unifying discrete resource usage and continuous maneuvers. However, prior works on hybrid action space have not sufficiently captured the causal dependencies between resource usage and maneuvers. They have also overlooked the multi-modal nature of tactical decisions, both of which are critical in fast-evolving scenarios. In this paper, we propose TART, a Temporal Action Representation learning framework for Tactical resource control and subsequent maneuver generation. TART leverages contrastive learning based on a mutual information objective, designed to capture inherent temporal dependencies in resource-maneuver interactions. These learned representations are quantized into discrete codebook entries that condition the policy, capturing recurring tactical patterns and enabling multi-modal and temporally coherent behaviors. We evaluate TART in two domains where resource deployment is critical: (i) a maze navigation task where a limited budget of discrete actions provides enhanced mobility, and (ii) a high-fidelity air combat simulator in which an F-16 agent operates weapons and defensive systems in coordination with flight maneuvers. Across both domains, TART consistently outperforms hybrid-action baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging limited resources and producing context-aware subsequent maneuvers.