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Physical Kernel: Structured Visual Latents for Dark Manipulation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 4, 2026 · UTC

We study dark manipulation: after a brief lit Write encodes z0 = Enc(rgb), a policy pi(z) and open-loop dynamics f(z,a) complete contact-rich skills without further pixels (dark_f). On ManiSkill StackCube (n=160; seed packs 0/1000), dark_f attains 68.1% stacked on the five-rung chain (near_A -> grasped -> lifted -> on_B -> stacked), compared with 35.6% for per-step lit_reenc and 0% for freeze/encode_black. On a shared Write->HOLD protocol (n=40), occlusion and camera-aligned GT contact-neighbor masks drive lit lift from 43% to 0%, while dark_f holds 82.5%; shuffling actions inflates dynamics M

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