Resources

Some good resources and papers to take a look if you are applying for PhD, Research Assistant or Research Intern positions:

具身智能技术指南 Embodied-AI-Guide

How to Get Started with Embodied AI Research

ScaleLab 具身智能入门指南

Keynote Talks in ICRA/IROS

CoRL 2025 Livestream

RSS 2025 Livestream

Lumina具身智能社区

Blog - Physical Commonsense

Sharpa GTC 2026 Presentation - Unlocking High-DoF Dexterity via Tactile AI

Robot Learning

1. Luo, J., Xu, C., Wu, J., & Levine, S. (2025). Precise and Dexterous Robotic Manipulation via Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning. Science Robotics. 10, eads5033. DOI:10.1126/scirobotics.ads5033

2. Lei, K., Li, H., Yu, D., Wei, Z., Guo, L., Jiang, Z., ... & Xu, H. (2025). RL-100: Performant Robotic Manipulation with Real-World Reinforcement Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14830.

3. Li, H., Lei, K., Zang, S., Hu, K., Liang, Y., An, B., ... & Xu, H. (2026). Failure-Aware RL: Reliable Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Self-Recovery for Real-World Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07821.

4. Yang, J., Lin, K., Li, J., Zhang, W., Lin, T., Wu, L., ... & Li, H. (2026). Rise: Self-improving robot policy with compositional world model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11075. (RSS 2026)

5. Hou, Y., Liu, Z., Chi, C., Cousineau, E., Kuppuswamy, N., Feng, S., ... & Song, S. (2024). Adaptive Compliance Policy: Learning Approximate Compliance for Diffusion Guided Control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.09309.

6. Choi, H., Hou, Y., Pan, C., Hong, S., Patel, A., Xu, X., ... & Song, S. (2026). In-the-Wild Compliant Manipulation with UMI-FT. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09988.

7. Zhang, H., Huang, W. H., Tong, Q., Solak, G., Liu, P., Liu, S., ... & Ajoudani, A. (2026). CompliantVLA-adaptor: VLM-Guided Variable Impedance Action for Safe Contact-Rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15541.

8. Xue, H., Ren, J., Chen, W., Zhang, G., Fang, Y., Gu, G., ... & Lu, C. (2025). Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02881.

9. Chen, W., Xue, H., Wang, Y., Zhou, F., Lv, J., Jin, Y., ... & Lu, C. (2025). ImplicitRDP: An End-to-End Visual-Force Diffusion Policy with Structural Slow-Fast Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.10946.

10. Li, X., Xie, Y., Liu, H., Hou, W., Chen, G., Li, S., & Ding, W. (2026). Master Micro Residual Correction with Adaptive Tactile Fusion and Force-Mixed Control for Contact-Rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.15152.

11. Fang, H., Tang, S., Mei, M., Qin, H., He, Z., Chen, J., ... & Wang, S. (2026). Force Policy: Learning Hybrid Force-Position Control Policy under Interaction Frame for Contact-Rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22088.

12. Yu, J., Liu, H., Yu, Q., Ren, J., Hao, C., Ding, H., ... & Zhang, W. (2025). ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.22159.

13. Yang, Y., Chen, A., Zhu, Z., Xu, K., Mao, Y., Wei, Y., ... & Wang, Y. (2026). Direction Matters: Learning Force Direction Enables Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14174.

14. Huang, Y., Lin, P., Li, W., Li, D., Li, J., Jiang, J., ... & Jiao, Z. (2026). Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20321.

15. Zhu, X., Huang, B., & Li, Y. (2025). Touch in the Wild: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with a Portable Visuo-Tactile Gripper. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15062., NeurIPS 2025.

16. Huang, B., Xu, J., Akinola, I., Yang, W., Sundaralingam, B., O'Flaherty, R., ... & Li, Y. (2025). VT-Refine: Learning Bimanual Assembly with Visuo-Tactile Feedback via Simulation Fine-Tuning, CoRL 2025.

17. Sun, Z., & Song, S. (2025). Latent Policy Barrier: Learning Robust Visuomotor Policies by Staying In-Distribution. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.05941.

18. Zhang, Z., Xu, H., Yang, Z., Yue, C., Lin, Z., Gao, H. A., ... & Zhao, H. (2025). TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07962, CoRL 2025.

19. Xiao, W., Lin, H., Peng, A., Xue, H., He, T., Xie, Y., ... & Zhu, Y. (2025). Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.00091.

20. Huang, D., Navab, N., & Jiang, Z. (2025). Improving Robustness to Out-of-Distribution States in Imitation Learning via Deep Koopman-Boosted Diffusion Policy. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

21. Gong, Z., Lyu, S., Ding, P., Xiao, W., & Wang, D. (2025). Robust Online Residual Refinement via Koopman-Guided Dynamics Modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12562.

22. Xu, Z., Miao, Z., Qiu, Q., Zhang, Z., & She, Y. (2025). DiffOG: Differentiable Policy Trajectory Optimization with Generalizability. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13807. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

23. Ruan, M., Zhou, L., Li, H., Wang, Z., Lu, Z., Zhang, J., & Fang, B. (2026). ReTac-ACT: A State-Gated Vision-Tactile Fusion Transformer for Precision Assembly. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09565. (Manipulation Net Evaluation)

24. Zhang, Z., Ma, J., Yang, X., Wen, X., Zhang, Y., Li, B., ... & Ma, D. (2026). TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidance. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20239. (RSS 2026)

25. Zheng, Y., Gu, S., Li, W., Zheng, Y., Zang, Y., Tian, S., ... & Ding, W. (2026). OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19201.

26. Yuan, H., Yi, W., Zhang, Z., Chen, W., Mo, Y., Yin, J., ... & Lourentzou, I. (2026). Vtam: Video-tactile-action models for complex physical interaction beyond vlas. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.23481. 

27. Bronars, A., Park, Y., & Agrawal, P. (2026). Tune to Learn: How Controller Gains Shape Robot Policy Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02523. (connecting controller tuning, compliance control and robot learning)

Dexterous Hand Manipulation 

28. Heng, L., Geng, H., Zhang, K., Abbeel, P., & Malik, J. (2025). ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.15953. (RSS 2026)

29. Yang, M., Lu, C., Church, A., Lin, Y., Ford, C., Li, H., ... & Lepora, N. F. (2024). Anyrotate: Gravity-invariant in-hand object rotation with sim-to-real touch. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.07391, CoRL 2024.

30. Qi, H., Kumar, A., Calandra, R., Ma, Y., & Malik, J. (2023). In-hand object rotation via rapid motor adaptation. In Conference on Robot Learning (pp. 1722-1732). PMLR.

31. Yin, Z. H., Huang, B., Qin, Y., Chen, Q., & Wang, X. (2023). Rotating without seeing: Towards in-hand dexterity through touch. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.10880, RSS 2023.

32. Huang, J., Ye, Y., Gong, Y., Zhu, X., Gao, Y., & Zhang, K. (2025). Spatially anchored Tactile Awareness for Robust Dexterous Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14647.

33. Chen, C., Yu, Z., Choi, H., Cutkosky, M., & Bohg, J. (2025). Dexforce: Extracting force-informed actions from kinesthetic demonstrations for dexterous manipulation. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. (Similar to ACP, dexterous hand version)

34. Hsieh, E., Hsieh, W. H., Wang, Y. J., Lin, T., Malik, J., Sreenath, K., & Qi, H. (2025). Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Imperfect Simulations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02011.

35. Suresh, S., Qi, H., Wu, T., Fan, T., Pineda, L., Lambeta, M., ... & Mukadam, M. (2024). NeuralFeels with neural fields: Visuotactile perception for in-hand manipulation. Science Robotics, 9(96), eadl0628.

36. Ye, Q., Liu, Q., Wang, S., Chen, J., Cui, Y., Jin, K., ... & Chen, J. (2026). Visual-tactile pretraining and online multitask learning for humanlike manipulation dexterity. Science Robotics, 11(110), eady2869.

37. Jin, Piaopiao, et al. "Dual-Actor Fine-Tuning of VLA Models: A Talk-and-Tweak Human-in-the-Loop Approach." arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.13774 (2025).

38. Tang, T., Ji, X., Xing, W., Hao, C., Xu, W., Shao, L., ... & Zhang, K. (2026). Towards Human-Like Manipulation through RL-Augmented Teleoperation and Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08122.

39. Han, Y., Chen, Z., Zhao, Y., Xu, C., Shao, Y., Peng, Y., ... & Lian, W. (2026). DexHiL: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training in Dexterous Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09121.

40. Liu, X., Wang, H., & Yi, L. (2025). DexNDM: Closing the Reality Gap for Dexterous In-Hand Rotation via Joint-Wise Neural Dynamics Model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.08556.

41. Zheng, R., Niu, D., Xie, Y., Wang, J., Xu, M., Jiang, Y., ... & Fan, L. (2026). EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.16710.

42. Zhang, C., Cai, P., Yuan, H., Xu, C., & Lu, Z. (2025). UniTacHand: Unified Spatio-Tactile Representation for Human to Robotic Hand Skill Transfer. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.21233.

43. Wi, Y., Yin, J., Xiang, E., Sharma, A., Malik, J., Mukadam, M., ... & Hellebrekers, T. (2026). TactAlign: Human-to-Robot Policy Transfer via Tactile Alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.13579.

44. Chen, C., Yu, Z., Choi, H., Cutkosky, M., & Bohg, J. (2025). Dexforce: Extracting force-informed actions from kinesthetic demonstrations for dexterous manipulation. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

45. Lin, P., Huang, Y., Li, W., Xiao, C., & Jiao, Z. DexMove: Learning Tactile-Guided Non-Prehensile Manipulation with Dexterous Hands. In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations. (Non-prehensile manipulation)

46. Zheng, Y., Lyu, J., Zhang, Y., Chen, J., Yan, M., Deng, Y., ... & Wang, H. (2026). Emerging Extrinsic Dexterity in Cluttered Scenes via Dynamics-aware Policy Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09882. (Non-prehensile manipulation)

47. Xu, Z., Wang, Y., Abbatematteo, B., Preechayasomboon, J., Chan, S., Colonnese, N., & Memar, A. H. (2026). Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05687. (RSS 2026)

Robot Compliance Control

48. Shi, H., Hu, S., Hou, Y., Wang, W., Liu, K., & Shuran Song. (2026). Minimalist Compliance Control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.00913.

49. Haddadin, S., & Shahriari, E. (2024). Unified force-impedance control. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 43(13), 2112-2141.

50. Iskandar, M., Ott, C., Albu-Schäffer, A., Siciliano, B., & Dietrich, A. (2023). Hybrid force-impedance control for fast end-effector motions. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 8(7), 3931-3938.

51. Li, Y., Zheng, L., Wang, Y., Dong, E., & Zhang, S. (2025). Impedance Learning-based Adaptive Force Tracking for Robot on Unknown Terrains. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

52. Hou, Y., Liu, Z., Chi, C., Cousineau, E., Kuppuswamy, N., Feng, S., ... & Song, S. (2024). Adaptive Compliance Policy: Learning Approximate Compliance for Diffusion Guided Control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.09309.

53. Zhi, P., Li, P., Yin, J., Jia, B., & Huang, S. (2025). Learning Unified Force and Position Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20829, CoRL 2025 Best Paper Award.

54. Geiger, N., Asfour, T., Hogan, N., & Lachner, J. (2025). Diffusion-Based Impedance Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.19696.

Aerial Manipulation

55. Wang, M., Chen, Z., Guo, K., Yu, X., Zhang, Y., Guo, L., & Wang, W. (2023). Millimeter-level pick and peg-in-hole task achieved by aerial manipulator. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 40, 1242-1260.

56. He, G., Guo, X., Tang, L., Zhang, Y., Mousaei, M., Xu, J., ... & Shi, G. (2025). Flying Hand: End-Effector-Centric Framework for Versatile Aerial Manipulation Teleoperation and Policy Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10334.

57. Li, G., Liu, X., & Loianno, G. (2024). Human-aware physical human-robot collaborative transportation and manipulation with multiple aerial robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

58. Zeng, J., Gimenez, A. M., Vinitsky, E., Alonso-Mora, J., & Sun, S. Decentralized Aerial Manipulation of a Cable-Suspended Load Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. In 9th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2025).

59. Gupta, H., Guo, X., Ha, H., Pan, C., Cao, M., Lee, D., ... & Shi, G. (2025). UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.02614.

60. Sun, S., Wang, X., Sanalitro, D., Franchi, A., Tognon, M., & Alonso-Mora, J. (2025). Agile and Cooperative Aerial Manipulation of a Cable-Suspended Load. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18802. Science Robotics.

61. Duan, Y., Li, H., Wu, Y., Yu, W., Zhang, X., Shen, Y., ... & Zhang, Y. (2025). STDArm: Transferring Visuomotor Policies From Static Data Training to Dynamic Robot Manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18792, RSS 2025