Jicong Ao

Wang Honghui, Jing Zhi, Ao Jicong et al.

The high cost of collecting real-robot data has made robotic simulation a scalable platform for both evaluation and data generation. Yet most existing benchmarks concentrate on simple manipulation tasks such as pick-and-place, failing to capture the non-Markovian characteristics of real-world tasks and the complexity of articulated object interactions. To address this limitation, we present RuleSafe, a new articulated manipulation benchmark built upon a scalable LLM-aided simulation framework. RuleSafe features safes with diverse unlocking mechanisms, such as key locks, password locks, and logic locks, which require different multi-stage reasoning and manipulation strategies. These LLM-generated rules produce non-Markovian and long-horizon tasks that require temporal modeling and memory-based reasoning. We further propose VQ-Memory, a compact and structured temporal representation that uses vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) to encode past proprioceptive states into discrete latent tokens. This representation filters low-level noise while preserving high-level task-phase context, providing lightweight yet robust temporal cues that are compatible with existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLA). Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art VLA models and diffusion policies show that VQ-Memory consistently improves long-horizon planning, enhances generalization to unseen configurations, and enables more efficient manipulation with reduced computational cost. Project page: vqmemory.github.io

Zhi Jing, Jinbin Qiao, Ouyang Lu et al.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental capability for embodied intelligence, especially for fine-grained manipulation tasks such as robotic assembly. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit preliminary spatial awareness, they largely rely on coarse 2D perception and lack the ability to perform accurate reasoning over 3D geometry, which is crucial for precise assembly operations. To address this limitation, we propose AssemLM, a spatial multimodal large language model tailored for robotic assembly. AssemLM integrates assembly manuals, point clouds, and textual instructions to reason about and predict task-critical 6D assembly poses, enabling explicit geometric understanding throughout the assembly process. To effectively bridge raw 3D perception and high-level reasoning, we adopt a specialized point cloud encoder to capture fine-grained geometric and rotational features, which are then integrated into the multimodal language model to support accurate 3D spatial reasoning for assembly tasks. In addition, we construct AssemBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for assembly-oriented spatial reasoning, comprising over 900K multimodal samples with precise 6D pose annotations. AssemBench extends spatial reasoning evaluation beyond 2D and grounding tasks into full 3D geometric inference, filling a critical gap in existing embodied AI benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AssemLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in 6D pose reasoning across diverse assembly scenarios. Furthermore, real-robot evaluations show that our model can support fine-grained and multi-step assembly execution in real-world settings, demonstrating its potential for robotic assembly applications.

Zhi Jing, Siyuan Yang, Jicong Ao et al.

For robotic manipulation, existing robotics datasets and simulation benchmarks predominantly cater to robot-arm platforms. However, for humanoid robots equipped with dual arms and dexterous hands, simulation tasks and high-quality demonstrations are notably lacking. Bimanual dexterous manipulation is inherently more complex, as it requires coordinated arm movements and hand operations, making autonomous data collection challenging. This paper presents HumanoidGen, an automated task creation and demonstration collection framework that leverages atomic dexterous operations and LLM reasoning to generate relational constraints. Specifically, we provide spatial annotations for both assets and dexterous hands based on the atomic operations, and perform an LLM planner to generate a chain of actionable spatial constraints for arm movements based on object affordances and scenes. To further improve planning ability, we employ a variant of Monte Carlo tree search to enhance LLM reasoning for long-horizon tasks and insufficient annotation. In experiments, we create a novel benchmark with augmented scenarios to evaluate the quality of the collected data. The results show that the performance of the 2D and 3D diffusion policies can scale with the generated dataset. Project page is https://openhumanoidgen.github.io.