Kyle Xu
Publications
LeHome: A Simulation Environment for Deformable Object Manipulation in Household Scenarios
Household environments present one of the most common, impactful yet challenging application domains for robotics. Within household scenarios, manipulating deformable objects is particularly difficult, both in simulation and real-world execution, due to varied categories and shapes, complex dynamics, and diverse material properties, as well as the lack of reliable deformable-object support in existing simulations. We introduce LeHome, a comprehensive simulation environment designed for deformable object manipulation in household scenarios. LeHome covers a wide spectrum of deformable objects, such as garments and food items, offering high-fidelity dynamics and realistic interactions that existing simulators struggle to simulate accurately. Moreover, LeHome supports multiple robotic embodiments and emphasizes low-cost robots as a core focus, enabling end-to-end evaluation of household tasks on resource-constrained hardware. By bridging the gap between realistic deformable object simulation and practical robotic platforms, LeHome provides a scalable testbed for advancing household robotics. Webpage: https://lehome-web.github.io/ .
RoboWM-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating World Models in Robotic Manipulation
Recent advances in large-scale video world models have enabled increasingly realistic future prediction, raising the prospect of leveraging imagined videos for robot learning. However, visual realism does not imply physical plausibility, and behaviors inferred from generated videos may violate dynamics and fail when executed by embodied agents. Existing benchmarks begin to incorporate notions of physical plausibility, but they largely remain perception- or diagnostic-oriented and do not systematically evaluate whether predicted behaviors can be translated into executable actions that complete the intended task. To address this gap, we introduce RoboWM-Bench, a manipulation-centric benchmark for embodiment-grounded evaluation of video world models. RoboWM-Bench converts generated behaviors from both human-hand and robotic manipulation videos into embodied action sequences and validates them through robotic execution. The benchmark spans diverse manipulation scenarios and establishes a unified protocol for consistent and reproducible evaluation. Using RoboWM-Bench, we evaluate state-of-the-art video world models and find that reliably generating physically executable behaviors remains an open challenge. Common failure modes include errors in spatial reasoning, unstable contact prediction, and non-physical deformations. While finetuning on manipulation data yields improvements, physical inconsistencies still persist, suggesting opportunities for more physically grounded video generation for robots.