ResearchResearch paperRobotics & Embodied AI1 source · Oct 8, 2026

RiCo: Neural Simulation of Rigid-Body Interactions via Local Contact Reasoning

Motivated by this observation, we introduce Rigid-body Contact Reasoning (RiCo), which represents interactions between objects through sparse neighborhoods of contact surface points.

Key points

  • Accurate simulation of rigid-body interactions is essential for predictive physical world models.
  • Despite recent progress in modeling object dynamics, capturing how local contacts between surfaces shape object motion remains challenging.
  • While end-to-end world models predict interactions across entire scenes or objects, in practice, rigid-body contact is inherently local, and only nearby surfaces can directly exchange contact forces.
  • By confining cross-object reasoning to nearby surfaces while propagating contact information within each rigid body, RiCo retains fine-grained interaction details without the cost of modeling every pair of scene points.

Sources (1)

  • [1]RiCo: Neural Simulation of Rigid-Body Interactions via Local Contact Reasoning
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 8, 05:11 PM
    Motivated by this observation, we introduce Rigid-body Contact Reasoning (RiCo), which represents interactions between objects through sparse neighborhoods of contact surface points.
    Accurate simulation of rigid-body interactions is essential for predictive physical world models.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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