9.0ROMar 25
MiniBEE: A New Form Factor for Compact Bimanual DexteritySharfin Islam, Zewen Chen, Zhanpeng He et al.
Bimanual robot manipulators can achieve impressive dexterity, but typically rely on two full six- or seven- degree-of-freedom arms so that paired grippers can coordinate effectively. This traditional framework increases system complexity while only exploiting a fraction of the overall workspace for dexterous interaction. We introduce the MiniBEE (Miniature Bimanual End-effector), a compact system in which two reduced-mobility arms (3+ DOF each) are coupled into a kinematic chain that preserves full relative positioning between grippers. To guide our design, we formulate a kinematic dexterity metric that enlarges the dexterous workspace while keeping the mechanism lightweight and wearable. The resulting system supports two complementary modes: (i) wearable kinesthetic data collection with self-tracked gripper poses, and (ii) deployment on a standard robot arm, extending dexterity across its entire workspace. We present kinematic analysis and design optimization methods for maximizing dexterous range, and demonstrate an end-to-end pipeline in which wearable demonstrations train imitation learning policies that perform robust, real-world bimanual manipulation.
Causality for Tabular Data Synthesis: A High-Order Structure Causal Benchmark FrameworkRuibo Tu, Zineb Senane, Lele Cao et al.
Tabular synthesis models remain ineffective at capturing complex dependencies, and the quality of synthetic data is still insufficient for comprehensive downstream tasks, such as prediction under distribution shifts, automated decision-making, and cross-table understanding. A major challenge is the lack of prior knowledge about underlying structures and high-order relationships in tabular data. We argue that a systematic evaluation on high-order structural information for tabular data synthesis is the first step towards solving the problem. In this paper, we introduce high-order structural causal information as natural prior knowledge and provide a benchmark framework for the evaluation of tabular synthesis models. The framework allows us to generate benchmark datasets with a flexible range of data generation processes and to train tabular synthesis models using these datasets for further evaluation. We propose multiple benchmark tasks, high-order metrics, and causal inference tasks as downstream tasks for evaluating the quality of synthetic data generated by the trained models. Our experiments demonstrate to leverage the benchmark framework for evaluating the model capability of capturing high-order structural causal information. Furthermore, our benchmarking results provide an initial assessment of state-of-the-art tabular synthesis models. They have clearly revealed significant gaps between ideal and actual performance and how baseline methods differ. Our benchmark framework is available at URL https://github.com/TURuibo/CauTabBench.