Surgical tissue retraction requires effective manipulation planning under partial and noisy perception. We study state estimation for deformable tissue retraction, where only sparse observations of the tissue surface are available at decision time. We propose a learned state estimator that reconstructs the full deformable mesh state from 40 noisy vertex observations. The estimator combines a multilayer perceptron with a low-dimensional PCA latent representation and is trained using geometry-aware regularization that encourages smooth and physically plausible deformations. We evaluate the approach in a 2D deformable sheet simulation using single-step and multi-step retraction planning. Results show that the learned estimator achieves 98.1% of oracle performance in multi-step retraction while supporting efficient inference. These results demonstrate that learned, geometry-regularized state estimation can support effective deformable manipulation under realistic perception constraints.
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…
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…
Path planning under partial observability remains challenging because an agent must make long-horizon navigation decisions from only locally bounded observations. Nevertheless, historical trajectories contain reusable experience-guided directional preferences. Classical planners,…
Autonomous robotic craniotomy requires continuous regulation of tool-tissue interactions to mitigate mechanical overload and thermal damage while maintaining surgical efficiency. However, this process is inherently partially observable due to unknown, time-varying tissue properti…
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has shown strong promise for robotic manipulation. Among RL methods, critic-based approaches rely on a value estimator that predominantly operates on single-frame observations or single-frame VLM bac…
Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction and failure-mode classification are central tasks in predictive maintenance. Many data-driven pipelines use fixed-window supervised learning with complete terminal labels; such routes do not naturally encode the temporal recursion linking su…