论文检索

Theory · Learning Theory

Tianwei Wang, Xinhui Ma, Wei Pang

Motivated by the geometric advantages of quaternions in representing rotations and postures, we propose a quaternion-valued supervised learning Hopfield-structured neural network (QSHNN) with a fully connected structure inspired by the classic Hopfield neural network (HNN). Starting from a continuous-time dynamical model of HNNs, we extend the formulation to the quaternionic domain and establish the existence and uniqueness of fixed points with asymptotic stability. For the learning rules, we introduce a periodic projection strategy that modifies standard gradient descent by periodically projecting each $4\times 4$ block of the weight matrix onto the closest quaternionic structure in the least-squares sense. This approach preserves both convergence and quaternionic consistency throughout training. Benefiting from this rigorous mathematical foundation, the experimental model implementation achieves high accuracy, fast convergence, and strong reliability across randomly generated target sets. Moreover, the evolution trajectories of the QSHNN exhibit well-bounded curvature, i.e., sufficient smoothness, which is crucial for applications such as control systems or path planning modules in robotic arms, where joint postures are parameterized by quaternion neurons. Beyond these application scenarios, the proposed model offers a practical implementation framework and a general mathematical methodology for designing neural networks under hypercomplex or non-commutative algebraic structures.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Jiawen Yu, Hairuo Liu, Qiaojun Yu, Jieji Ren, Ce Hao, Haitong Ding, Guangyu Huang, Guofan Huang, Yan Song, Panpan Cai 等

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{ForceVLA}, a novel end-to-end manipulation framework that treats external force sensing as a first-class modality within VLA systems. ForceVLA introduces \textbf{FVLMoE}, a force-aware Mixture-of-Experts fusion module that dynamically integrates pretrained visual-language embeddings with real-time 6-axis force feedback during action decoding. This enables context-aware routing across modality-specific experts, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to subtle contact dynamics. We also introduce \textbf{ForceVLA-Data}, a new dataset comprising synchronized vision, proprioception, and force-torque signals across five contact-rich manipulation tasks. ForceVLA improves average task success by 23.2\% over strong $\pi_0$-based baselines, achieving up to 80\% success in tasks such as plug insertion. Our approach highlights the importance of multimodal integration for dexterous manipulation and sets a new benchmark for physically intelligent robotic control. Code and data will be released at https://sites.google.com/view/forcevla2025/.

Applications · Robotics

Zhiwen Chen, Hanming Deng, Zhuoren Li, Huanxi Wen, Guizhe Jin, Ran Yu, Bo Leng

Integrating the understanding and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) with the self-learning capabilities of Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables more reliable driving performance under complex driving conditions. There has been a lot of work exploring LLM-Dominated RL methods in the field of autonomous driving motion planning. These methods, which utilize LLM to directly generate policies or provide decisive instructions during policy learning of RL agent, are centrally characterized by an over-reliance on LLM outputs. However, LLM outputs are susceptible to hallucinations. Evaluations show that state-of-the-art LLM indicates a non-hallucination rate of only approximately 57.95\% when assessed on essential driving-related tasks. Thus, in these methods, hallucinations from the LLM can directly jeopardize the performance of driving policies. This paper argues that maintaining relative independence between the LLM and the RL is vital for solving the hallucinations problem. Consequently, this paper is devoted to propose a novel LLM-Hinted RL paradigm. The LLM is used to generate semantic hints for state augmentation and policy optimization to assist RL agent in motion planning, while the RL agent counteracts potential erroneous semantic indications through policy learning to achieve excellent driving performance. Based on this paradigm, we propose the HCRMP (LLM-Hinted Contextual Reinforcement Learning Motion Planner) architecture, which is designed that includes ①Augmented Semantic Representation Module to extend state space. ②Contextual Stability Anchor Module enhances the reliability of multi-critic weight hints by utilizing information from the knowledge base. ③Semantic Cache Module is employed to seamlessly integrate LLM low-frequency guidance with RL high-frequency control. Extensive experiments in CARLA validate HCRMP's strong overall driving performance. HCRMP achieves a task success rate of up to 80.3\% under diverse driving conditions with different traffic densities. Under safety-critical driving conditions, HCRMP significantly reduces the collision rate by 11.4\%, which effectively improves the driving performance in complex scenarios.

Applications · Robotics

Xiaochen Shang, Pengwei Luo, Xinning Wang, Jiayue Zhao, Huilin Ge, Bo Dong, Xin Yang

Unmanned aerial vehicles could accurately accomplish complex navigation and obstacle avoidance tasks under external control. However, enabling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to rely solely on onboard computation and sensing for real-time navigation and dynamic obstacle avoidance remains a significant challenge due to stringent latency and energy constraints. Inspired by the efficiency of biological systems, we propose a fully neuromorphic framework achieving end-to-end obstacle avoidance during navigation with an overall latency of just 2.3 milliseconds. Specifically, our bio-inspired approach enables accurate moving object detection and avoidance without requiring target recognition or trajectory computation. Additionally, we introduce the first monocular event-based pose correction dataset with over 50,000 paired and labeled event streams. We validate our system on an autonomous quadrotor using only onboard resources, demonstrating reliable navigation and avoidance of diverse obstacles moving at speeds up to 10 m/s.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Anupam Pani, Yanchao Yang

Eye gaze offers valuable cues about attention, short-term intent, and future actions, making it a powerful signal for modeling egocentric behavior. In this work, we propose a gaze-regularized framework that enhances VLMs for two key egocentric understanding tasks: fine-grained future event prediction and current activity understanding. Unlike prior approaches that rely solely on visual inputs or use gaze as an auxiliary input signal , our method uses gaze only during training. We introduce a gaze-regularized attention mechanism that aligns model focus with human visual gaze. This design is flexible and modular, allowing it to generalize across multiple VLM architectures that utilize attention. Experimental results show that our approach improves semantic prediction scores by up to 11$\%$ for future event prediction and around 7$\%$ for current activity understanding, compared to the corresponding baseline models trained without gaze regularization. These results highlight the value of gaze-guided training in improving the accuracy and robustness of egocentric VLMs. Overall, this work establishes a foundation for using human gaze to enhance the predictive capabilities of VLMs in real-world scenarios like assistive robots and human-machine collaboration. Code and additional information is available at: https://github.com/anupampani/Gaze-VLM

Applications · Robotics

Dian Wang, Boce Hu, Shuran Song, Robin Walters, Robert Platt

Recently, equivariant neural networks for policy learning have shown promising improvements in sample efficiency and generalization, however, their wide adoption faces substantial barriers due to implementation complexity. Equivariant architectures typically require specialized mathematical formulations and custom network design, posing significant challenges when integrating with modern policy frameworks like diffusion-based models. In this paper, we explore a number of straightforward and practical approaches to incorporate symmetry benefits into diffusion policies without the overhead of full equivariant designs. Specifically, we investigate (i) invariant representations via relative trajectory actions and eye-in-hand perception, (ii) integrating equivariant vision encoders, and (iii) symmetric feature extraction with pretrained encoders using Frame Averaging. We first prove that combining eye-in-hand perception with relative or delta action parameterization yields inherent SE(3)-invariance, thus improving policy generalization. We then perform a systematic experimental study on those design choices for integrating symmetry in diffusion policies, and conclude that an invariant representation with equivariant feature extraction significantly improves the policy performance. Our method achieves performance on par with or exceeding fully equivariant architectures while greatly simplifying implementation.

Computer Vision · 3D Rendering & Reconstruction

Jonas Kulhanek, Torsten Sattler

Novel view synthesis is an important problem with many applications, including AR/VR, gaming, and robotic simulations. With the recent rapid development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods, it is becoming difficult to keep track of the current state of the art (SoTA) due to methods using different evaluation protocols, codebases being difficult to install and use, and methods not generalizing well to novel 3D scenes. In our experiments, we show that even tiny differences in the evaluation protocols of various methods can artificially boost the performance of these methods. This raises questions about the validity of quantitative comparisons performed in the literature. To address these questions, we propose NerfBaselines, an evaluation framework which provides consistent benchmarking tools, ensures reproducibility, and simplifies the installation and use of various methods. We validate our implementation experimentally by reproducing the numbers reported in the original papers. For improved accessibility, we release a web platform that compares commonly used methods on standard benchmarks. We strongly believe NerfBaselines is a valuable contribution to the community as it ensures that quantitative results are comparable and thus truly measure progress in the field of novel view synthesis.

Computer Vision · Everything Else

Jikai Wang, Qifan Zhang, Yu-Wei Chao, Bowen Wen, Xiaohu Guo, Yu Xiang

We introduce a data capture system and a new dataset, HO-Cap, for 3D reconstruction and pose tracking of hands and objects in videos. The system leverages multiple RGB-D cameras and a HoloLens headset for data collection, avoiding the use of expensive 3D scanners or motion capture systems. We propose a semiautomatic method for annotating the shape and pose of hands and objects in the collected videos, significantly reducing the annotation time and cost compared to manual labeling. With this system, we captured a video dataset of humans performing various single- and dual-hand manipulation tasks, including simple pick-and-place actions, handovers between hands, and using objects according to their affordance. This dataset can serve as human demonstrations for research in embodied AI and robot manipulation. Our capture setup and annotation framework will be made available to the community for reconstructing 3D shapes of objects and human hands, as well as tracking their poses in videos.

Applications

Wei LIN, Yiwei Zhou, Junkai Zhang, Rui Shao, Zhiyuan Zhao, Junyu Gao, Antoni Chan, Xuelong Li

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled GUI agents to leverage visual features for interface understanding and operation in the digital world. However, limited research has addressed the interpretation and interaction with control panels in real-world settings. To bridge this gap, we propose the Panel Understanding and Operation (PUO) benchmark, comprising annotated panel images from appliances and associated vision-language instruction pairs. Experimental results on the benchmark demonstrate significant performance disparities between zero-shot and fine-tuned VLMs, revealing the lack of PUO-specific capabilities in existing language models. Furthermore, we introduce a Privacy-Preserving Framework (PPF) to address privacy concerns in cloud-based panel parsing and reasoning. PPF employs a dual-stage architecture, performing panel understanding on edge devices while delegating complex reasoning to cloud-based LLMs. Although this design introduces a performance trade-off due to edge model limitations, it eliminates the transmission of raw visual data, thereby mitigating privacy risks. Overall, this work provides foundational resources and methodologies for advancing interactive human-machine systems and robotic field in panel-centric applications.

Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL

Yujie Zhu, Charles Hepburn, Matthew Thorpe, Giovanni Montana

In reinforcement learning with sparse rewards, demonstrations can accelerate learning, but determining when to imitate them remains challenging. We propose Smooth Policy Regularisation from Demonstrations (SPReD), a framework that addresses the fundamental question: when should an agent imitate a demonstration versus follow its own policy? SPReD uses ensemble methods to explicitly model Q-value distributions for both demonstration and policy actions, quantifying uncertainty for comparisons. We develop two complementary uncertainty-aware methods: a probabilistic approach estimating the likelihood of demonstration superiority, and an advantage-based approach scaling imitation by statistical significance. Unlike prevailing methods (e.g. Q-filter) that make binary imitation decisions, SPReD applies continuous, uncertainty-proportional regularisation weights, reducing gradient variance during training. Despite its computational simplicity, SPReD achieves remarkable gains in experiments across eight robotics tasks, outperforming existing approaches by up to a factor of 14 in complex tasks while maintaining robustness to demonstration quality and quantity. Our code is available at https://github.com/YujieZhu7/SPReD.

Reinforcement Learning · Multi-agent

Batuhan Altundas, Shengkang Chen, Shivika Singh, Shivangi Deo, Minwoo Cho, Matthew Gombolay

Coordinating large teams of heterogeneous mobile agents to perform complex tasks efficiently has scalability bottlenecks in feasible and optimal task scheduling, with critical applications in logistics, manufacturing, and disaster response. Existing task allocation and scheduling methods, including heuristics and optimization-based solvers, often fail to scale and overlook inter-task dependencies and agent heterogeneity. We propose a novel Simultaneous Decision-Making model for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Task Allocation and Scheduling (HM-MATAS), built on a Residual Heterogeneous Graph Transformer with edge and node-level attention. Our model encodes agent capabilities, travel times, and temporospatial constraints into a rich graph representation and is trainable via reinforcement learning. Trained on small-scale problems (10 agents, 20 tasks), our model generalizes effectively to significantly larger scenarios (up to 40 agents and 200 tasks), enabling fast, one-shot task assignment and scheduling. Our simultaneous model outperforms classical heuristics by assigning 164.10\% more feasible tasks given temporal constraints in 3.83\% of the time, metaheuristics by 201.54\% in 0.01\% of the time and exact solver by 231.73\% in 0.03\% of the time, while achieving $20\times$-to-$250\times$ speedup from prior graph-based methods across scales.

General Machine Learning · Causality

Guangyi Chen, Yunlong Deng, Peiyuan Zhu, Yan Li, Yifan Shen, Zijian Li, Kun Zhang

Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims to uncover the data-generating process and identify the underlying causal variables and relations, whose evaluation remains inherently challenging due to the requirement of known ground-truth causal variables and causal structure. Existing evaluations often rely on either simplistic synthetic datasets or downstream performance on real-world tasks, generally suffering a dilemma between realism and evaluative precision. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for CRL using high-fidelity simulated visual data that retains both realistic visual complexity and, more importantly, access to ground-truth causal generating processes. The dataset comprises around 200 thousand images and 3 million video frames across 24 sub-scenes in four domains: static image generation, dynamic physical simulations, robotic manipulations, and traffic situation analysis. These scenarios range from static to dynamic settings, simple to complex structures, and single to multi-agent interactions, offering a comprehensive testbed that hopefully bridges the gap between rigorous evaluation and real-world applicability. In addition, we provide flexible access to the underlying causal structures, allowing users to modify or configure them to align with the required assumptions in CRL, such as available domain labels, temporal dependencies, or intervention histories. Leveraging this benchmark, we evaluated representative CRL methods across diverse paradigms and offered empirical insights to assist practitioners and newcomers in choosing or extending appropriate CRL frameworks to properly address specific types of real problems that can benefit from the CRL perspective. Welcome to visit our: Project page: https://causal-verse.github.io/ , Dataset: https://huggingface.co/CausalVerse

Yuan Zang, Zitian Tang, Junho Cho, Jaewook Yoo, Chen Sun

Recognizing the physical states of objects and their transformations within videos is crucial for structured video understanding and enabling robust real-world applications, such as robotic manipulation. However, pretrained vision-language models often struggle to capture these nuanced dynamics and their temporal context, and specialized object state recognition frameworks may not generalize to unseen actions or objects. We introduce SAGE (State-Action Graph Embeddings), a novel framework that offers a unified model of physical state transitions by decomposing states into fine-grained, language-described visual concepts that are sharable across different objects and actions. SAGE initially leverages Large Language Models to construct a State-Action Graph, which is then multimodally refined using Vision-Language Models. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms baselines, generalizes effectively to unseen objects and actions in open-world settings. SAGE improves the prior state-of-the-art by as much as 14.6% on novel state recognition with less than 5% of its inference time.

Applications · Robotics

Ruiqi Wang, Dezhong Zhao, Ziqin Yuan, Tianyu Shao, Guohua Chen, Dominic Kao, Sungeun Hong, Byung-Cheol Min

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for teaching robots complex behaviors without reward engineering. However, its effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: the reliance on extensive human input and the inherent difficulties in resolving query ambiguity and credit assignment during reward learning. In this paper, we introduce PRIMT, a PbRL framework designed to overcome these challenges by leveraging foundation models (FMs) for multimodal synthetic feedback and trajectory synthesis. Unlike prior approaches that rely on single-modality FM evaluations, PRIMT employs a hierarchical neuro-symbolic fusion strategy, integrating the complementary strengths of vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) in evaluating robot behaviors for more reliable and comprehensive feedback. PRIMT also incorporates foresight trajectory generation to warm-start the trajectory buffer with bootstrapped samples, reducing early-stage query ambiguity, and hindsight trajectory augmentation for counterfactual reasoning with a causal auxiliary loss to improve credit assignment. We evaluate PRIMT on 2 locomotion and 6 manipulation tasks on various benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over FM-based and scripted baselines. Website at https://primt25.github.io/.

Computer Vision · Everything Else

Zhenhao Zhang, Ye Shi, Lingxiao Yang, Suting Ni, Qi Ye, Jingya Wang

Understanding and synthesizing realistic 3D hand-object interactions (HOI) is critical for applications ranging from immersive AR/VR to dexterous robotics. Existing methods struggle with generalization, performing well on closed-set objects and predefined tasks but failing to handle unseen objects or open-vocabulary instructions. We introduce OpenHOI, the first framework for open-world HOI synthesis, capable of generating long-horizon manipulation sequences for novel objects guided by free-form language commands. Our approach integrates a 3D Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) fine-tuned for joint affordance grounding and semantic task decomposition, enabling precise localization of interaction regions (e.g., handles, buttons) and breakdown of complex instructions (e.g., “Find a water bottle and take a sip”) into executable sub-tasks. To synthesize physically plausible interactions, we propose an affordance-driven diffusion model paired with a training-free physics refinement stage that minimizes penetration and optimizes affordance alignment. Evaluations across diverse scenarios demonstrate OpenHOI’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generalizing to novel object categories, multi-stage tasks, and complex language instructions.

Applications · Robotics

Korneel Van den Berghe, Stein Stroobants, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Guido de Croon

Neuromorphic computing systems are set to revolutionize energy-constrained robotics by achieving orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains, while enabling native temporal processing. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent a promising algorithmic approach for these systems, yet their application to complex control tasks faces two critical challenges: (1) the non-differentiable nature of spiking neurons necessitates surrogate gradients with unclear optimization properties, and (2) the stateful dynamics of SNNs require training on sequences, which in reinforcement learning (RL) is hindered by limited sequence lengths during early training, preventing the network from bridging its warm-up period. We address these challenges by systematically analyzing surrogate gradient slope settings, showing that shallower slopes increase gradient magnitude in deeper layers but reduce alignment with true gradients. In supervised learning, we find no clear preference for fixed or scheduled slopes. The effect is much more pronounced in RL settings, where shallower slopes or scheduled slopes lead to a $\times2.1$ improvement in both training and final deployed performance. Next, we propose a novel training approach that leverages a privileged guiding policy to bootstrap the learning process, while still exploiting online environment interactions with the spiking policy. Combining our method with an adaptive slope schedule for a real-world drone position control task, we achieve an average return of 400 points, substantially outperforming prior techniques, including Behavioral Cloning and TD3BC, which achieve at most –200 points under the same conditions. This work advances both the theoretical understanding of surrogate gradient learning in SNNs and practical training methodologies for neuromorphic controllers demonstrated in real-world robotic systems.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Zihan Wang, Seungjun Lee, Gim Hee Lee

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a core task where embodied agents leverage their spatial mobility to navigate in 3D environments toward designated destinations based on natural language instructions. Recently, video-language large models (Video-VLMs) with strong generalization capabilities and rich commonsense knowledge have shown remarkable performance when applied to VLN tasks. However, these models still encounter the following challenges when applied to real-world 3D navigation: 1) Insufficient understanding of 3D geometry and spatial semantics; 2) Limited capacity for large-scale exploration and long-term environmental memory; 3) Poor adaptability to dynamic and changing environments.To address these limitations, we propose Dynam3D, a dynamic layered 3D representation model that leverages language-aligned, generalizable, and hierarchical 3D representations as visual input to train 3D-VLM in navigation action prediction. Given posed RGB-D images, our Dynam3D projects 2D CLIP features into 3D space and constructs multi-level 3D patch-instance-zone representations for 3D geometric and semantic understanding with a dynamic and layer-wise update strategy. Our Dynam3D is capable of online encoding and localization of 3D instances, and dynamically updates them in changing environments to provide large-scale exploration and long-term memory capabilities for navigation. By leveraging large-scale 3D-language pretraining and task-specific adaptation, our Dynam3D sets new state-of-the-art performance on VLN benchmarks including R2R-CE, REVERIE-CE and NavRAG-CE under monocular settings. Furthermore, experiments for pre-exploration, lifelong memory, and real-world robot validate the effectiveness of practical deployment.

Applications

Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Zaijing Li, Haokun Wen, Weili Guan, Yaowei Wang, Liqiang Nie

Visual-spatial understanding, the ability to infer object relationships and layouts from visual input, is fundamental to downstream tasks such as robotic navigation and embodied interaction. However, existing methods face spatial uncertainty and data scarcity, limiting the 3D spatial reasoning capability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). To address these challenges, we present a unified framework for enhancing 3D spatial reasoning in pre-trained VLMs without modifying their architecture. This framework combines SpatialMind, a structured prompting strategy that decomposes complex scenes and questions into interpretable reasoning steps, with ScanForgeQA, a scalable question-answering dataset built from diverse 3D simulation scenes through an automated construction process designed for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the individual and combined effectiveness of our prompting and fine-tuning strategies, and yield insights that may inspire future research on visual-spatial understanding.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Tianran Liu, Shengwen Zhao, Nicholas Rhinehart

LiDAR-based world models offer more structured and geometry-aware representations than their image-based counterparts. However, existing LiDAR world models are narrowly trained; each model excels only in the domain for which it was built. This raises a critical question: can we develop LiDAR world models that exhibit strong transferability across multiple domains? To answer this, we conduct the first systematic domain transfer study across three demanding scenarios: (i) outdoor to indoor generalization, (ii) sparse- to dense-beam adaptation, and (iii) non-semantic to semantic transfer. Given different amounts of fine-tuning data, our experiments show that a single pretrained model can achieve up to 11\% absolute improvement (83\% relative) over training from scratch and outperforms training from scratch in 30/36 of our comparisons. This transferability significantly reduces the reliance on manually annotated data for semantic occupancy forecasting: our method exceeds previous baselines with only 5\% of the labeled training data of prior work. We also observed inefficiencies of current generative-model-based LiDAR world models, mainly through their under-compression of LiDAR data and inefficient training objectives. To address these issues, we propose a latent conditional flow matching (CFM)-based framework that achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy using only half the training data and a compression ratio 6 times higher than that of prior methods. Our model also achieves SOTA performance on semantic occupancy forecasting while being 1.98x-23x more computationally efficient (a 1.1x-3.9x FPS speedup) than previous methods.

Hao LU, Tianshuo Xu, Wenzhao Zheng, Yunpeng Zhang, Wei Zhan, Dalong Du, Masayoshi TOMIZUKA, Kurt Keutzer, Yingcong Chen

Large reconstruction model has remarkable progress, which can directly predict 3D or 4D representations for unseen scenes and objects. However, current work has not systematically explored the potential of large reconstruction models in the field of autonomous driving. To achieve this, we introduce the Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model (DrivingRecon). With an elaborate and simple framework design, it not only ensures efficient and high-quality reconstruction, but also provides potential for downstream tasks. There are two core contributions: firstly, the Prune and Dilate Block (PD-Block) is proposed to prune redundant and overlapping Gaussian points and dilate Gaussian points for complex objects. Then, dynamic and static decoupling is tailored to better learn the temporary-consistent geometry across different time. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingRecon significantly improves scene reconstruction quality compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we explore applications of DrivingRecon in model pre-training, vehicle type adaptation, and scene editing. Our code will be available.