Paper Detail

TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Yujie Zang, Yuhang Zheng, Xian Nie, Yupeng Zheng, Shuai Tian, Songen Gu, Chen Gao, Zining Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Wenchao Ding

arxiv Score 5.3

Published 2026-06-09 · First seen 2026-06-10

General AI

Abstract

Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to continuously perceive and regulate evolving physical interactions under dynamic contact transitions or complex surface geometries. Recent imitation learning methods improve contact-aware control by incorporating tactile or force feedback, but they rarely model the asymmetric spatiotemporal roles of global force and local tactile sensing. To address this, we propose TacForeSight, a lightweight force-conditioned tactile foresight framework for real-time manipulation. The core component is TacForceWM, a tactile world model that predicts short-horizon tactile latent dynamics from dual-finger tactile observations conditioned on high-frequency wrist force and torque signals. Another key component, the Predictive Tactile-Conditioned Policy, leverages the predicted latents as anticipatory contact priors, models the current-to-future tactile evolution via cross-attention, and adaptively fuses visuo-tactile features through a tactile-guided gating module. By forecasting purely within a compact latent space, TacForeSight enables proactive contact reasoning with efficient real-time inference suitable for high-frequency manipulation control. Real-robot experiments on five representative tasks and three in-process perturbation settings show that TacForeSight consistently outperforms existing baselines, particularly under dynamic contact disturbances. All models and datasets will be made publicly available on the project website at https://tacforesight.github.io/ProjectPage.

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BibTeX

@article{zang2026tacforesight,
  title = {TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation},
  author = {Yujie Zang and Yuhang Zheng and Xian Nie and Yupeng Zheng and Shuai Tian and Songen Gu and Chen Gao and Zining Wang and Shuicheng Yan and Wenchao Ding},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to continuously perceive and regulate evolving physical interactions under dynamic contact transitions or complex surface geometries. Recent imitation learning methods improve contact-aware control by incorporating tactile or force feedback, but they rarely model the asymmetric spatiotemporal roles of global force and local tactile sensing. To address this, we propose TacForeSight, a lightweight force-conditioned tactile foresight framework for real-time},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11184},
  keywords = {cs.RO},
  eprint = {2606.11184},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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