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    "story_id": "mp-2026-10-25-026",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-humanoid-contact-attention",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-10-25-morning-0107",
    "edition_url": "https://themachinepress.com/edition/2026-10-25",
    "position": 15,
    "story_type": "dispatch",
    "section": "robotics",
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    "headline": "The Humanoid Plans Contacts Before It Plans the Pose",
    "slug": "the-humanoid-plans-contacts-before-it-plans-the-pose",
    "dek": "A self-supervised attention module predicts future body-environment contacts, giving a whole-body controller a movable interface between perception and action.",
    "summary": "A self-supervised attention module predicts future body-environment contacts, giving a whole-body controller a movable interface between perception and action.",
    "body_text": "Reference-free locomotion policies can adapt broadly but struggle to discover coordinated whole-body motion; imitation produces natural movement but can bind behavior to recorded trajectories. This framework uses motion data only as a training prior. A self-supervised attention planner predicts future contacts, and a contact-conditioned tracker converts those plans into coordinated motion. Fine-tuning then explores terrain variations beyond the original demonstrations. At deployment, the policy uses onboard observations and no reference trajectory. The paper presents versatile humanoid mobility in challenging environments, but the abstract reports no common benchmark margin and the work remains under review. Learned contact structure is a control abstraction, not evidence that the robot can safely traverse every terrain.",
    "why_it_matters": "A self-supervised attention module predicts future body-environment contacts, giving a whole-body controller a movable interface between perception and action.",
    "limitations": [
      "This framework uses motion data only as a training prior.",
      "Learned contact structure is a control abstraction, not evidence that the robot can safely traverse every terrain."
    ],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-10-25T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-10-25T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "qualification": "This framework uses motion data only as a training prior."
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    "source_ids": [
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    "tags": [
      "humanoids",
      "locomotion",
      "contact planning",
      "reinforcement learning"
    ],
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-10-25-015",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.31608, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31608v1",
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      "source_type": "primary_research",
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      "published_at": "2026-10-22T13:37:36.000-04:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-10-25T08:17:14.361-04:00",
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    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Humanoid Plans Contacts Before It Plans the Pose",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-10-25T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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