#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.RO
One Policy for 100 Household Tasks: Our Solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge
Ilia Larchenko, Gleb Zarin, Atindra Nair and 4 more
We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $π_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the model for longer, optimizing some training parameters, making each training step slightly faster and reducing the gradient noise: a migration from 50 to 100 tasks (semantic stages built from the demonstrations' skill annotations, task and stage embeddings of new tasks warm-started from similar old ones, and a 21-dimensional action space matching the teleoperation controls); variance-reduced multi-sample flow matching with a simple noise-vs-compute model that picks the number of action-expert samples per observation without ablations; and a 200k-step training run, about one pass over the 211M frames of the demonstrations. A cloud evaluation infrastructure keeps a shared record with provenance, episode diagnostics and restorable simulator states, and runs six simulators on one GPU together faster than real time. On top of the learned policy, 14 tasks are routed to a GPT-6 Astra coding agent that controls the robot through observation and motion tools, starting every episode from a frozen copy of its own practice session on training instances. Across these 14 tasks, Astra's mean Q is 0.639, against 0.108 for the learned policy. The public submission included only part of the Astra results and scored 0.446 Q with 27.3% full-task success.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
A Lightweight Differentiable Method for Real-Time Skin Rendering and Digitization
Mario Marquez-Balduque, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Jorge Lopez-Moreno
Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.RO
Elastic-WAM: Adaptive Spatiotemporal Imagination for Efficient Robot Control
Haitian Li, Tianfu Li, Xuxi Zhao and 8 more
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
C$^2$-Routing: Complementary Cropping and Compression for Efficient Vision-Language Inference
Guorui Lu, Qinyu Chen
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
AutoThreshold: Joint Confusion-Profile Learning for Adaptive Mask Binarization
Shaokai Wu, Xunchu Zhou, Pinzhi Wang and 5 more
A single validation-tuned threshold can become brittle when dense-score distributions shift. We introduce AutoThreshold, a post-hoc policy that predicts the joint mass of positive and negative pixels over score bins. This target directly parameterizes threshold-indexed confusion counts, avoiding products of independently estimated prevalence and class-conditional rates. Softmax normalization and cumulative decoding yield coherent, monotone confusion profiles; a plug-in decoder then selects a threshold for any $F_β$ objective without retraining the head. Across three independently trained Kvasir pipelines transferred to four polyp datasets, Joint exceeds continuous Otsu by $0.0080 \pm 0.0046$ external macro Dice, with positive gains in 3/3 runs. On the reference pipeline, three head seeds achieve $0.6324 \pm 0.0027$, 0.0085 above Otsu; direct-utility Ridge achieves 0.6342, with the paired difference interval spanning zero. The same Joint checkpoints outperform Otsu for $F_{0.5}$, Dice, and $F_2$. On developmental KITTI Road leave-one-corruption-family-out evaluation, Joint improves over scalar regression by 0.0082 [0.0064, 0.0101], while direct utility is 0.0022 higher. These results establish joint confusion prediction as a useful, metric-retargetable inductive bias, without claiming Bayes-optimal $F_β$ decisions.