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Jiafei Duan

18 accepted papers

2026

MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models That Can Reason in Space

ICRA 2026poster

Reasoning is essential for purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, limiting adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), which integrate perception, planning, and control through …

2026

MolmoSpaces: Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Manipulation and Navigation

RSS 2026poster

Deploying robots at scale demands robustness to the long tail of everyday situations. The countless variations in scene layout, object geometry, and task specifications that characterize real environments are vast and underrepresented in existing robot benchmarks. Measuring this level of generalizat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RoboCade: Gamifying Robot Data Collection

ICRA 2026poster

Imitation learning from human demonstrations has become a dominant approach for training autonomous robot policies. However, collecting demonstration datasets is costly: it often requires access to robots and needs sustained effort in a tedious, long process. These factors limit the scale of data av…

2026

RoboEval: Where Robotic Manipulation Meets Structured and Scalable Evaluation

ICRA 2026poster

We introduce RoboEval, a structured evaluation framework and benchmark for robotic manipulation that augments binary success with principled behavioral and outcome metrics. Existing evaluations often collapse performance into outcome counts, masking differences in execution quality and obscuring fai…

2026

The One RING: A Robotic Indoor Navigation Generalist

ICRA 2026poster

Modern robots vary significantly in shape, size, and sensor configurations used to perceive and interact with their environments. However, most navigation policies are embodiment-specific—a policy trained on one robot typically fails to generalize to another, even with minor changes in body size or …

2026

Uncovering Robot Vulnerabilities through Semantic Potential Fields

ICLR 2026poster

Robot manipulation policies, while central to the promise of physical AI, are highly vulnerable in the presence of external variations in the real world. Diagnosing these vulnerabilities is hindered by two key challenges: (i) the relevant variations to test against are often unknown, and (ii) direct…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulation

ICLR 2025poster

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they sti…

2025

GraspMolmo: Generalizable Task-Oriented Grasping via Large-Scale Synthetic Data Generation

CoRL 2025poster

We present GraspMolmo, a generalizable open-vocabulary task-oriented grasping (TOG) model. GraspMolmo predicts semantically appropriate, stable grasps conditioned on a natural language instruction and a single RGB-D frame. For instance, given "pour me some tea", GraspMolmo selects a grasp on a teapo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation

ICML 2025poster

Robotic manipulation systems operating in diverse, dynamic environments must exhibit three critical abilities: multitask interaction, generalization to unseen scenarios, and spatial memory. While significant progress has been made in robotic manipulation, existing approaches often fall short in gene…

2024

Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models

CoRL 2024poster

Large-scale endeavors like RT-1 and widespread community efforts such as Open-X-Embodiment have contributed to growing the scale of robot demonstration data. However, there is still an opportunity to improve the quality, quantity, and diversity of robot demonstration data. Although vision-language m…

Cited by 39SourcecodeScholar
2024

Octopi: Object Property Reasoning with Large Tactile-Language Models

RSS 2024poster

Physical reasoning is important for effective robot manipulation. Recent work has investigated both vision and language modalities for physical reasoning; vision can reveal information about objects in the environment and language serves as an abstraction and communication medium for additional cont…

2024

RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction in Robotics

CoRL 2024poster

From rearranging objects on a table to putting groceries into shelves, robots must plan precise action points to perform tasks accurately and reliably. In spite of the recent adoption of vision language models (VLMs) to control robot behavior, VLMs struggle to precisely articulate robot actions usin…

Cited by 53SourcecodeScholar
2024

Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied AI

ICLR 2024spotlight

Embodied AI models often employ off the shelf vision backbones like CLIP to encode their visual observations. Although such general purpose representations encode rich syntactic and semantic information about the scene, much of this information is often irrelevant to the specific task at hand. This…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

THE COLOSSEUM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization for Robotic Manipulation

RSS 2024poster

To realize effective large-scale, real-world robotic applications, we must evaluate how well our robot policies adapt to changes in environmental conditions. Unfortunately, a majority of studies evaluate robot performance in environments closely resembling or even identical to the training setup. We…

2023

NEWTON: Are Large Language Models Capable of Physical Reasoning?

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs), through their contextualized representations, have been empirically proven to encapsulate syntactic, semantic, word sense, and common-sense knowledge. However, there has been limited exploration of their physical reasoning abilities, specifically concerning the crucial…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

A Survey on Machine Learning Approaches for Modelling Intuitive Physics

IJCAI 2022poster

Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With advancements in deep learning, there is an increasing interest in b…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2022

PIP: Physical Interaction Prediction via Mental Simulation with Span Selection

ECCV 2022poster

"Accurate prediction of physical interaction outcomes is a crucial component of human intelligence and is important for safe and efficient deployments of robots in the real world. While there are existing vision-based intuitive physics models that learn to predict physical interaction outcomes, they…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar