Anqi Li

Shaoan Wang, Jiazhao Zhang, Minghan Li et al.

Embodied visual tracking is a fundamental skill in Embodied AI, enabling an agent to follow a specific target in dynamic environments using only egocentric vision. This task is inherently challenging as it requires both accurate target recognition and effective trajectory planning under conditions of severe occlusion and high scene dynamics. Existing approaches typically address this challenge through a modular separation of recognition and planning. In this work, we propose TrackVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that learns the synergy between object recognition and trajectory planning. Leveraging a shared LLM backbone, we employ a language modeling head for recognition and an anchor-based diffusion model for trajectory planning. To train TrackVLA, we construct an Embodied Visual Tracking Benchmark (EVT-Bench) and collect diverse difficulty levels of recognition samples, resulting in a dataset of 1.7 million samples. Through extensive experiments in both synthetic and real-world environments, TrackVLA demonstrates SOTA performance and strong generalizability. It significantly outperforms existing methods on public benchmarks in a zero-shot manner while remaining robust to high dynamics and occlusion in real-world scenarios at 10 FPS inference speed. Our project page is: https://pku-epic.github.io/TrackVLA-web.

Jesse Zhang, Marius Memmel, Kevin Kim et al.

Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in how to act. We present PEEK (Policy-agnostic Extraction of Essential Keypoints), which fine-tunes VLMs to predict a unified point-based intermediate representation: 1. end-effector paths specifying what actions to take, and 2. task-relevant masks indicating where to focus. These annotations are directly overlaid onto robot observations, making the representation policy-agnostic and transferable across architectures. To enable scalable training, we introduce an automatic annotation pipeline, generating labeled data across 20+ robot datasets spanning 9 embodiments. In real-world evaluations, PEEK consistently boosts zero-shot generalization, including a 41.4x real-world improvement for a 3D policy trained only in simulation, and 2-3.5x gains for both large VLAs and small manipulation policies. By letting VLMs absorb semantic and visual complexity, PEEK equips manipulation policies with the minimal cues they need--where, what, and how. Website at https://peek-robot.github.io/.

Wenzhao Liu, Haoran Li, Congying Han et al.

Achieving generalization in neural approaches across different scales and distributions remains a significant challenge for the Traveling Salesman Problem~(TSP). A key obstacle is that neural networks often fail to learn robust principles for identifying universal patterns and deriving optimal solutions from diverse instances. In this paper, we first uncover Purity Law (PuLa), a fundamental structural principle for optimal TSP solutions, defining that edge prevalence grows exponentially with the sparsity of surrounding vertices. Statistically validated across diverse instances, PuLa reveals a consistent bias toward local sparsity in global optima. Building on this insight, we propose Purity Policy Optimization~(PUPO), a novel training paradigm that explicitly aligns characteristics of neural solutions with PuLa during the solution construction process to enhance generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PUPO can be seamlessly integrated with popular neural solvers, significantly enhancing their generalization performance without incurring additional computational overhead during inference.