8.6ROJul 6
Spatial Attention: Adapting Execution Horizons for Diffusion Policies via Observation SensitivityChe-Sang Park, Junsu Ha, Jianlong Fu et al.
Sampling action chunks via generative models has become a widely adopted methodology for robotic learning from demonstration. However, existing methods often struggle to balance responsiveness and computational cost because they execute each action chunk for a fixed execution horizon. In this paper, we adaptively adjust the execution horizon of sampled action chunks, balancing responsiveness and computational efficiency. We introduce Spatial Attention -- defined as the expected squared norm of the gradient of the action log-likelihood with respect to the observation -- which indicates the sensitivity of the policy's action distribution to variations in the observation. We show that, under a fixed budget of chunk samplings, the execution horizon that minimizes the cumulative likelihood drop induced by disturbances decreases as Spatial Attention increases. By forecasting future Spatial Attention values alongside the action chunk, our framework dynamically assigns shorter execution horizons to phases with high Spatial Attention, and longer horizons to phases with low Spatial Attention. Experiments on standard and perturbed tasks, in both simulation and on a real robot, show that our method significantly improves success rates over fixed-horizon baselines while maintaining the average execution horizon.
15.5ROAug 4, 2025
ScrewSplat: An End-to-End Method for Articulated Object RecognitionSeungyeon Kim, Junsu Ha, Young Hun Kim et al.
Articulated object recognition -- the task of identifying both the geometry and kinematic joints of objects with movable parts -- is essential for enabling robots to interact with everyday objects such as doors and laptops. However, existing approaches often rely on strong assumptions, such as a known number of articulated parts; require additional inputs, such as depth images; or involve complex intermediate steps that can introduce potential errors -- limiting their practicality in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce ScrewSplat, a simple end-to-end method that operates solely on RGB observations. Our approach begins by randomly initializing screw axes, which are then iteratively optimized to recover the object's underlying kinematic structure. By integrating with Gaussian Splatting, we simultaneously reconstruct the 3D geometry and segment the object into rigid, movable parts. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy across a diverse set of articulated objects, and further enables zero-shot, text-guided manipulation using the recovered kinematic model. See the project website at: https://screwsplat.github.io.