RIL-LAB Robotic Intelligence and Learning Laboratory

The incorporation of world modeling into manipulation policy learning has pushed the boundary of manipulation performance. However, existing efforts simply model the 2D visual dynamics, which is insufficient for robust manipulation when target tasks involve prominent depth-wise movement. To address this, we present a 3D dynamics-aware manipulation framework that seamlessly integrates 3D world modeling and policy learning. Three self-supervised learning tasks (current depth estimation, future RGB-D prediction, 3D flow prediction) are introduced within our framework, which complement each other and endow the policy model with 3D foresight. Extensive experiments on simulation and the real world show that 3D foresight can greatly boost the performance of manipulation policies without sacrificing inference speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Stardust-hyx/3D-Foresight.

Recently, active vision has reemerged as an important concept for manipulation, since visual occlusion occurs more frequently when main cameras are mounted on the robot heads. We reflect on the visual occlusion issue and identify its essence as the absence of information useful for task completion. Inspired by this, we come up with the more fundamental problem of Exploratory and Focused Manipulation (EFM). The proposed problem is about actively collecting information to complete challenging manipulation tasks that require exploration or focus. As an initial attempt to address this problem, we establish the EFM-10 benchmark that consists of 4 categories of tasks that align with our definition (10 tasks in total). We further come up with a Bimanual Active Perception (BAP) strategy, which leverages one arm to provide active vision and another arm to provide force sensing while manipulating. Based on this idea, we collect a dataset named BAPData for the tasks in EFM-10. With the dataset, we successfully verify the effectiveness of the BAP strategy in an imitation learning manner. We hope that the EFM-10 benchmark along with the BAP strategy can become a cornerstone that facilitates future research towards this direction. Project website: https://efmanipulation.github.io .

Identification of fine-grained embryo developmental stages during In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is crucial for assessing embryo viability. Although recent deep learning methods have achieved promising accuracy, existing discriminative models fail to utilize the distributional prior of embryonic development to improve accuracy. Moreover, their reliance on single focal information leads to incomplete embryonic representations, making them susceptible to feature ambiguity under cell occlusions. To address these limitations, we propose EmbryoDiff, a two-stage diffusion-based framework that formulates the task as a conditional sequence denoising process. Specifically, we first train and freeze a frame-level encoder to extract robust multi-focal features. In the second stage, we introduce a Multi-Focal Feature Fusion Strategy that aggregates information across focal planes to construct a 3D-aware morphological representation, effectively alleviating ambiguities arising from cell occlusions. Building on this fused representation, we derive complementary semantic and boundary cues and design a Hybrid Semantic-Boundary Condition Block to inject them into the diffusion-based denoising process, enabling accurate embryonic stage classification. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, with only a single denoising step, our model obtains the best average test performance, reaching 82.8% and 81.3% accuracy on the two datasets, respectively.

Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models enable cross-task generalization in robotics, but many existing methods remain imitation-driven and lack intrinsic action understanding. Training on human or robot demonstrations provides sequential experience, yet models often mimic low-level motion patterns rather than capturing the essential semantics of actions. Learning the physical concept of an action is further complicated by feature entanglement, where the acting subject, manipulated object, and background context are tightly coupled in manipulation videos. As a result, learned representations may remain tied to specific scenes, subjects, or objects, limiting generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboAct-CLIP, a video-driven backbone for atomic action understanding. Our approach learns subject-invariant, action-focused representations from heterogeneous manipulation videos. We construct a dataset where different subjects (robots or humans) perform the same atomic action, encouraging focus on action essence rather than subject-specific appearance. We further propose a spatiotemporal disentanglement architecture that separates subject, action, and object semantics while enforcing consistent compositional alignment across modalities. RoboAct-CLIP achieves 99.49% action recognition accuracy, demonstrating compact and disentangled action representations. When integrated as a frozen visual backbone with lightweight policy heads in a strong VLA baseline, it improves success rates by 12.0 and 5.7 percentage points on LIBERO and Franka Kitchen, respectively. Moreover, RoboAct-CLIP enables real-world long-horizon task completion through atomic action recomposition, highlighting its effectiveness for practical robotic applications.

Artificial intelligence has recently shown promise in automated embryo selection for In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). However, current approaches either address partial embryo evaluation lacking holistic quality assessment or target clinical outcomes inevitably confounded by extra-embryonic factors, both limiting clinical utility. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task called Video-Based Embryo Grading - the first paradigm that directly utilizes full-length time-lapse monitoring (TLM) videos to predict embryologists’ overall quality assessments. To support this task, we curate a real-world clinical dataset comprising over 2,500 TLM videos, each annotated with a grading label indicating the overall quality of embryos. Grounded in clinical decision-making principles, we propose a Complementary Spatial-Temporal Pattern Mining (CoSTeM) framework that conceptually replicates embryologists’ evaluation process. The CoSTeM comprises two branches: (1) a morphological branch using a Mixture of Cross-Attentive Experts layer and a Temporal Selection Block to select discriminative local structural features, and (2) a morphokinetic branch employing a Temporal Transformer to model global developmental trajectories, synergistically integrating static and dynamic determinants for grading embryos. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our design. This work provides a valuable methodological framework for AI-assisted embryo selection. The dataset and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

Scaling up motion datasets is crucial to enhance motion generation capabilities. However, training on large-scale multi-source datasets introduces data heterogeneity challenges due to variations in motion content. To address this, we propose Generative Pretrained Multi-path Motion Model (GenM\(^3\)), a comprehensive framework designed to learn unified motion representations. GenM\(^3\) comprises two components: 1) a Multi-Expert VQ-VAE (MEVQ-VAE) that adapts to different dataset distributions to learn a unified discrete motion representation, and 2) a Multi-path Motion Transformer (MMT) that improves intra-modal representations by using separate modality-specific pathways, each with densely activated experts to accommodate variations within that modality, and improves inter-modal alignment by the text-motion shared pathway. To enable large-scale training, we integrate and unify 11 high-quality motion datasets (approximately 220 hours of motion data) and augment it with textual annotations (nearly 10,000 motion sequences labeled by a large language model and 300+ by human experts). After training on our integrated dataset, GenM\(^3\) achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 0.035 on the HumanML3D benchmark, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on IDEA400 dataset, highlighting its effectiveness and adaptability across diverse motion scenarios.