Pith. sign in

REVIEW 10 cited by

Beyond Sight: Finetuning Generalist Robot Policies with Heterogeneous Sensors via Language Grounding

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2501.04693 v3 pith:WY6ZE7WI submitted 2025-01-08 cs.RO cs.AI

classification cs.ROcs.AI
keywords generalistpoliciesrobotlanguagelargemodalitiestouchvision
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Interacting with the world is a multi-sensory experience: achieving effective general-purpose interaction requires making use of all available modalities -- including vision, touch, and audio -- to fill in gaps from partial observation. For example, when vision is occluded reaching into a bag, a robot should rely on its senses of touch and sound. However, state-of-the-art generalist robot policies are typically trained on large datasets to predict robot actions solely from visual and proprioceptive observations. In this work, we propose FuSe, a novel approach that enables finetuning visuomotor generalist policies on heterogeneous sensor modalities for which large datasets are not readily available by leveraging natural language as a common cross-modal grounding. We combine a multimodal contrastive loss with a sensory-grounded language generation loss to encode high-level semantics. In the context of robot manipulation, we show that FuSe enables performing challenging tasks that require reasoning jointly over modalities such as vision, touch, and sound in a zero-shot setting, such as multimodal prompting, compositional cross-modal prompting, and descriptions of objects it interacts with. We show that the same recipe is applicable to widely different generalist policies, including both diffusion-based generalist policies and large vision-language-action (VLA) models. Extensive experiments in the real world show that FuSeis able to increase success rates by over 20% compared to all considered baselines.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. VP-VLA: Visual Prompting as an Interface for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    VP-VLA decouples high-level reasoning from low-level control in VLA models by rendering spatial anchors as visual prompts directly in the RGB observation space, outperforming end-to-end baselines.

  2. Heterogeneous Tactile Transformer

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    HTT learns shared representations across heterogeneous tactile sensors using a new paired dataset and pretraining objectives, enabling transfer to unseen sensors and tasks.

  3. FADA: Few-Shot Domain Adaptation via Dynamics Alignment for Humanoid Control

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    FADA is a three-stage Planner-IDM method that achieves few-shot domain adaptation for humanoid control by distilling an oracle policy then finetuning only the IDM on short target-domain rollouts via supervised learning.

  4. ThermoAct:Thermal-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Perception and Decision-Making

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    ThermoAct integrates thermal imaging into VLA models via a VLM planner to enable robots to perceive physical properties like heat and improve safety over vision-only systems.

  5. Tactile Modality Fusion for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A FiLM-based tactile fusion method that conditions VLA visual features on frozen pretrained touch embeddings improves real-robot insertion success, speed, and force control relative to vision-only and concatenation baselines.

  6. Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A vision-language-action policy that predicts future tactile images and uses that predicted touch to refine its actions reaches up to 95% success on contact-rich manipulation.

  7. Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    DreamTacVLA grounds VLA models in contact physics by aligning multi-scale vision-tactile inputs and predicting future tactile states, reaching up to 95% success on contact-rich tasks.

  8. FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2025-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    FAST applies discrete cosine transform to robot action sequences for efficient tokenization, enabling autoregressive VLAs to succeed on high-frequency dexterous tasks and scale to 10k hours of data while matching diff...

  9. Modality-Aware Zero-Shot Pruning and Sparse Attention for Efficient Multimodal Edge Inference

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    SentryFuse delivers modality-aware zero-shot pruning and sparse attention that improves accuracy by 12.7% on average and up to 18% under sensor dropout while cutting memory 28.2% and latency up to 1.63x across multimo...

  10. World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper introduces World Action Models as a new paradigm unifying predictive world modeling with action generation in embodied foundation models and provides a taxonomy of existing approaches.

Pith tools