Liming Chen

2papers

2 Papers

5.1ROJun 22
Flowing With Purpose: Latent Action Guided Flow Matching Policies For Robotic Manipulation

Bruno Machado, Alexandre Chapin, Emmanuel Dellandrea et al.

Flow matching has recently become a new standard for behavior cloning in robotic manipulation. However, state-of-the-art flow matching policies suffer from a systematic structural mismatch: they rely on a globally fixed isotropic source distribution despite the strongly fragmented and heteroscedastic structure of robotic action spaces. This agnostic initialization forces the model to learn highly entangled vector fields, bottlenecking training efficiency and limiting overall policy performance. To address this limitation, we introduce Latent Action Guided Flow Matching (LAFM), a novel framework that replaces the monolithic Gaussian with an adaptive library of learned prior distributions. By grounding these distributions using a latent action model, LAFM maps current observations to discrete motion primitives, selecting a specialized base distribution that provides an informed, structurally aligned initialization for the denoising process. This dynamic adaptivity naturally accommodates heteroscedasticity in human demonstrations and makes transport trajectories shorter and less entangled. Empirically, LAFM substantially outperforms standard flow matching formulations, increasing task success rates by 23.4% in real-world robotic deployments and by 10.4% on the LIBERO-90 benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LAFM achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing massively pre-trained vision-language-action models while utilizing significantly smaller architectures.

8.9AIJun 20
REBA: A Revealed Belief Automaton Framework for Online Planning in Continuous POMDPs

Xiangwei Chen, Lingling Fang, Andreas Holzinger et al.

Online planning in continuous partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) using $ω$-regular specifications requires handling continuous belief dynamics within the finite symbolic memory in order to track temporal progress. Existing methods based on either direct search in belief space or predefined discrete abstractions suffer from drawbacks, e.g., lack of symbolic memory for long-horizon logical progress or difficult to certify from noisy online beliefs. As such, obtaining reliable symbolic states online from continuous observations remains a challenge. To address this issue, we introduce the Revealed Belief Automaton (REBA), an event-driven framework that advances the research from global belief-space discretization to a fundamental new way of thinking, namely online certification of revelation events. Specifically, we propose an online revelation method that, through information-theoretic gates, can dynamically analyse and establish belief abstraction from the continuous belief space by discovering reliable anchors among noisy beliefs. We then develop an incremental topology adaptation mechanism over the certified anchors to realise the online finite Belief Automaton. By combining with the $ω$-regular specification, REBA is able to support formal parity policy synthesis without a predefined discrete abstraction, which in turn can guide the Monte Carlo Tree Search process to perform online search beyond its local horizon. In addition, we design an error decomposition analysis which can assess the effectiveness and reliability of this discrete guidance for the underlying continuous POMDP. Empirical evaluations in patrolling and navigation scenarios show that REBA matches or exceeds all evaluated baselines, with primary metric gains of +17.0\% to +47.4\% over state-of-the-art approaches.