Shihan Lu

Wanli Qian, Aiden Chang, Shihan Lu et al.

Authoring realistic haptic textures typically requires low-level parameter tuning and repeated trial-and-error, limiting speed, transparency, and creative reach. We present a language-driven authoring system that turns natural-language prompts into multimodal textures: two coordinated haptic channels - sliding vibrations via force/speed-conditioned autoregressive (AR) models and tapping transients - and a text-prompted visual preview from a diffusion model. A shared, language-aligned latent links modalities so a single prompt yields semantically consistent haptic and visual signals; designers can write goals (e.g., "gritty but cushioned surface," "smooth and hard metal surface") and immediately see and feel the result through a 3D haptic device. To verify that the learned latent encodes perceptually meaningful structure, we conduct an anchor-referenced, attribute-wise evaluation for roughness, slipperiness, and hardness. Participant ratings are projected to the interpretable line between two real-material references, revealing consistent trends - asperity effects in roughness, compliance in hardness, and surface-film influence in slipperiness. A human-subject study further indicates coherent cross-modal experience and low effort for prompt-based iteration. The results show that language can serve as a practical control modality for texture authoring: prompts reliably steer material semantics across haptic and visual channels, enabling a prompt-first, designer-oriented workflow that replaces manual parameter tuning with interpretable, text-guided refinement.

Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.