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Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly

-cross Abstract: Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable interpretation of forces…

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Revised 2 changes recorded since we first saw this
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  1. Current Summary changed

    2 new sentences, beginning: “Static domain-specific factors, including lighting, texture, and sensor bias, contain little information about joint motion;…”

    Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly

    -cross Abstract: Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable interpretation of forces during sustained contact. Although simulation-based reinforcement learning offers a scalable training paradigm, discrepancies in visual observations, contact dynamics, and force/torque (F/T) measurements often limit policy transfer. We observe that proprioception is comparatively consistent across domains because joint positions are expressed in a shared calibrated coordinate system and joint velocities are computed consistently in simulation and on hardware. Based on this observation, we present PACE (Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Encoder), which supervises temporal visual and F/T representations by predicting proprioceptive state transitions. Static domain-specific factors, including lighting, texture, and sensor bias, contain little information about joint motion; optimizing the proposed objective therefore suppresses their influence on the learned representation while retaining task-relevant motion cues. Policies trained on frozen PACE features are directly deployed on hardware without real-world fine-tuning or object-pose tracking. Across four contact-rich assembly tasks, PACE attains an average real-world success rate of 93.3\% and only a 2.7-percentage-point sim-to-real drop, while remaining robust to perturbations that substantially degrade pose-based and learned-fusion baselines.

  2. Version 2 Headline and summary changed

    The headline was rewritten. 3 new sentences, beginning: “-cross Abstract: Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable…”

    Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly

    -cross Abstract: Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable interpretation of forces during sustained contact. Although simulation-based reinforcement learning offers a scalable training paradigm, discrepancies in visual observations, contact dynamics, and force/torque (F/T) measurements often limit policy transfer. We observe that proprioception is comparatively consistent across domains because joint positions are expressed in a shared calibrated coordinate system and joint velocities are computed consistently in simulation and on hardware. Based on this observation, we present PACE (Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Encoder), which supervises temporal visual and F/T representations by predicting proprioceptive state transitions. Static domain-specific factors, including lighting, texture, and sensor bias, contain little information about joint motion; the proposed objective therefore encourages the encoder to suppress these factors while retaining task-relevant motion cues. Policies trained on frozen PACE features are deployed on hardware without real-world fine-tuning or object-pose tracking. Across four contact-rich assembly tasks, PACE attains an average real-world success rate of 93.3\% and only a 2.7-percentage-point sim-to-real drop, while remaining robust to perturbations that substantially degrade pose-based and learned-fusion baselines.

  3. As first published

    Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly via Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining

    Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable interpretation of forces during sustained contact. Although simulation-based reinforcement learning offers a scalable training paradigm, discrepancies in visual observations, contact dynamics, and force/torque (F/T) measurements often limit policy transfer. We observe that proprioception is comparatively consistent across domains because calibrated joint positions and consistently computed joint velocities align closely between simulation and hardware. Based on this observation, we present PACE (Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Encoder), which supervises temporal visual and F/T representations by predicting proprioceptive state transitions. Static domain-specific factors, including lighting, texture, and sensor bias, contain little information about joint motion; the proposed objective therefore encourages the encoder to suppress these factors while retaining task-relevant motion cues. Policies trained on frozen PACE features are deployed on hardware without real-world fine-tuning or object-pose tracking. Across four contact-rich assembly tasks, PACE attains an average real-world success rate of 93.3\% and only a 2.7-percentage-point sim-to-real drop, meanwhile remaining robust to perturbations that substantially degrade pose-based and learned-fusion baselines.

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Blended score 0.402 — every figure below is computed, none of it is editorial.
FactorWeightScore ContributionWhere it came from
Corroboration 0.35 0.39 +0.135 34% 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true.
Source trustleads 0.25 0.85 +0.212 53% arXiv is the highest-trust source on this story and is first-party — the organisation announcing its own news. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged.
Pickup rate 0.20 0.00 +0.000 0% One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate.
Freshness 0.20 0.27 +0.054 14% Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent.

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What happened

-cross Abstract: Contact-rich assembly remains challenging because it requires submillimeter spatial accuracy and reliable interpretation of forces during sustained contact. Although simulation-based reinforcement learning offers a scalable training paradigm, discrepancies in visual observations, contact dynamics, and force/torque (F/T) measurements often limit policy transfer. We observe that proprioception is comparatively consistent across domains because joint positions are expressed in a shared calibrated coordinate system and joint velocities are computed consistently in simulation and on hardware.

1independent orgs
40story score
0velocity
85source trust
26passes seen

How this story arrived

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  1. 01 Arxivfirst-party first seen Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly via Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretrain

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