Estimating the full shape of a deformable object is especially challenging when vision is unavailable: in the dark, inside an opaque bag, behind the manipulating hand, or under heavy self-occlusion. Touch is the natural sensor in these settings, but touches are sparse and local. We present a single topology-agnostic estimator that reconstructs the full mesh of a deformable object from only a few touches and no vision, using one permutation-invariant cross-attention architecture that handles a 1D rope, a 2D cloth, and a 3D volumetric soft body. The learned estimator reduces reconstruction error by roughly two-thirds relative to non-learned geometric mesh completion and a Gaussian-process surface baseline, and it outperforms a simpler global-pool set encoder, with the gap growing as more touches are observed. We then show that the estimator's deep-ensemble uncertainty can be used to learn where to touch next, which lowers error further and beats both random touching and a Gaussian-process active baseline at sparse budgets. This gain is modest on average but grows with self-occlusion and on the error tail. When vision is also available, where to touch barely matters, motivating the vision-free setting we study.
Multi-stream robot manipulation policies achieve unparalleled sample efficiency and generalization by modeling actions relative to environmental reference frames. However, existing approaches typically assume these frames to be strictly exogenous. This causal assumption collapses…
Coordinating autonomous vehicles at unsignalized intersections remains a critical challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems, which typically struggle with combinatorial action spaces, reliance on privileged information, or rigid agent designs. We propose Mas…
PDE discovery from sparse observations requires reconstructing a continuous field and selecting the correct differential terms. Our analysis of optimization paths in coupled neural PDE discovery reveals three behaviors: the exact support can persist to the end of training, appear…
Full self-attention in large language models scales as O(N^2), which limits long-context document analysis to 65,536 tokens and requires costly GPU clusters. The Reduced Interaction Sampling (RIS) inference engine addresses this constraint as a model-agnostic architecture. Withou…
Creating dynamic and physically realistic 4D worlds from natural language descriptions is both fascinating and challenging. Traditional computer graphics methods rely on manual creation, requiring extensive human effort to fine-tune materials, motions, and visual fidelity. Recent…
A defining problem of the Anthropocene is to model the physical Earth and human societies as one coupled system, yet no learned representation spans their observational breadth. We argue the obstacle is geometric: the physical Earth is measured as continuous fields that ignore po…