Unassigned · 2026-10-14
Interaction Latents as Actions for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Yuhang Zheng, Yujie Zang, Yuchen Liu, Yupeng Zheng, Zhennan Jiang, Zebin Xing, Shuai Tian, Songen Gu, Jingxiang Guo, Chen Gao, Zhongpu Xia, Shuicheng Yan
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Abstract (from arXiv)
Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to coordinate not only where to move, but also how contact and force should evolve throughout an interaction. Yet most robot policies represent actions primarily as motion trajectories, using tactile signals as inputs or auxiliary prediction targets without explicitly encoding contact dynamics in the action representation. We propose ILA (Interaction Latents as Actions), which uses decodable interaction latents that jointly capture the evolution of motion, contact, and force application as policy action units, providing a shared representation for action generation, evaluation, and offline improvement. We learn these latents through visually conditioned joint action-tactile reconstruction with a time-conditioned implicit decoder. Using them as flow-matching generation targets supports post-training of pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world action models (WAMs), as well as training flow-matching policies from scratch. A shared decoder maps generated latents to executable actions. For offline improvement, we learn a tactile-conditioned expert reference model from interaction latents encoded from expert demonstrations. The resulting expert-consistency rewards guide weighted learning from successful rollouts, while observation-compatible expert references guide correction of low-reward predictions from failed rollouts. Across three policy families, ILA improves success rates averaged over four real-world tasks by 21.0-36.5 percentage points relative to tactile-conditioned direct-action baselines. Ablations highlight the benefit of encoding contact evolution in action targets beyond tactile conditioning, while the same latent space supports expert-guided offline improvement. Project website: https://mrsecant.github.io/ILA/.
Related papers
- ACTS: Learning Visuo-Tactile World Models from Human Physical Interaction
- ForceWAM: Decoupling Future and Response Learning from Demo and Play Data for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model
- UniLAP: A Unified Latent Action Policy for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation
- Physical Canvas: A Vision Tactile World Model For Robot Policy Evaluation And Learning
Publication record
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First public release: 2026-10-13 · Indexed by Pub-AI: 2026-10-14 UTC
Interaction Latents as Actions for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Preprint posted: 2026-10-13 · Original record ↗
- arxiv
- 2610.18855
Explicit source versions (1)
- v2 · 2026-10-14
- Explicit source version detected · v2
Source date: 2026-10-14 · First detected: 2026-10-25 UTC · Historical baseline
Source evidence (1)
- Official evidence ↗ · atom:id explicit version (official metadata)
- Preprint available
Source date: 2026-10-13 · First detected: 2026-10-25 UTC · Historical baseline
Source evidence (1)
- Official evidence ↗ · atom:published (official metadata)
Abstract · arxiv
Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to coordinate not only where to move, but also how contact and force should evolve throughout an interaction. Yet most robot policies represent actions primarily as motion trajectories, using tactile signals as inputs or auxiliary prediction targets without explicitly encoding contact dynamics in the action representation. We propose ILA (Interaction Latents as Actions), which uses decodable interaction latents that jointly capture the evolution of motion, contact, and force application as policy action units, providing a shared representation for action generation, evaluation, and offline improvement. We learn these latents through visually conditioned joint action-tactile reconstruction with a time-conditioned implicit decoder. Using them as flow-matching generation targets supports post-training of pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world action models (WAMs), as well as training flow-matching policies from scratch. A shared decoder maps generated latents to executable actions. For offline improvement, we learn a tactile-conditioned expert reference model from interaction latents encoded from expert demonstrations. The resulting expert-consistency rewards guide weighted learning from successful rollouts, while observation-compatible expert references guide correction of low-reward predictions from failed rollouts. Across three policy families, ILA improves success rates averaged over four real-world tasks by 21.0-36.5 percentage points relative to tactile-conditioned direct-action baselines. Ablations highlight the benefit of encoding contact evolution in action targets beyond tactile conditioning, while the same latent space supports expert-guided offline improvement. Project website: https://mrsecant.github.io/ILA/.