Robotics paper index

Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation

2026-06-02 · arXiv: 2606.04269

One-line summary

A robotics research paper on Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation.

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is challenging due to high-dimensional, partially observable states that evolve through long-horizon, topology-changing interactions with multiple valid manipulation modes. We introduce Instant-Fold, an in-context imitation learning framework for DOM. Given a single human demonstration, our policy infers and executes diverse manipulation modes directly from the demonstration, including variations in spatial execution and ordering, without requiring gradient updates. Our approach first learns deformation-aware visual representations via temporal contrastive pretraining, after which a flow-matching transformer policy conditioned on the demonstration predicts actions to execute the intended manipulation mode. Trained entirely in simulation, Instant-Fold generalizes across diverse folding modes and transfers zero-shot to real-world settings without additional data collection or finetuning. Videos are available at https://instant-fold.github.io.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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