ForeTac: Predictive Contact Guidance for Generative Robot Policies

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Article Summary

Visually similar actions can produce contact loss, jamming, slippage, or irreversible damage, while tactile feedback may arrive after a critical transition. Contact-rich manipulation therefore requires generative policies to anticipate and evaluate whether candidate actions will produce desirable contact outcomes, then adjust action generation before execution. We present ForeTac, a predictive contact-guidance framework organized as a represent-predict-evaluate-guide loop. ForeTac encodes the current tactile state, predicts the tactile consequences of a candidate action sequence, and evaluates the predicted trajectory using a contact-quality objective learned from successful and failed physical interactions. At deployment, its gradient propagates through the tactile predictor to guide action generation while the pretrained model parameters remain frozen. We evaluate ForeTac on four real-robot tasks (planar and curved-surface wiping, card swiping, and fragile-object grasping) with diffusion and flow-matching policies. Across these tasks, ForeTac raises the average task success rate from 36.3% to 71.3% and the average contact success rate (CSR) from 20.0% to 66.3% compared with vision-only Diffusion Policy. Component analyses support the tactile representation and action-conditioned foresight, and show that predicted touch preserves contact-quality ordering. Project page: https://foretac.github.io/.

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