Your paper timeline
Scroll AI takes the way you would scroll a great paper aggregator: quick signal first, deeper critique when something earns your attention, and challenges when a claim feels off.
67 papers in cs.RO
Trending mixes fresh papers with community signal.
0
cs.ROcs.AIcs.LG Keisuke Shirai, Tomohiro Motoda, Hanbit Oh et al. · Oct 1, 2026

Autoregressive vision-language-action models compress continuous robot motions into discrete tokens, yet deterministic tokenizers like FAST fix a single segmentation even when multiple equivalent token sequences decode to the identical physical motion. TOAST treats action tokenization as a stochastic process, sampling alternative valid segmentations of the same quantized action chunk during training to diversify supervision without collecting new demonstrations. The result is a simple plug-in improvement that yields consistent gains on LIBERO and real-robot tasks, with the largest benefits appearing when training data are scarce.

Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action models often represent continuous robot actions as discrete token sequences, enabling action prediction with standard next-token objectives. FAST has substantially improved this representation by compactly encoding action containing diverse temporal frequencies into relatively few tokens. However, while such compression reduces the number of action tokens required for autoregressive prediction, it does not necessarily improve the efficiency of policy learning from limited demonstrations. In particular, FAST typically assigns a single deterministic tokenization to each quantized action sequence, although multiple token sequences can represent and decode to the same robot motion. We investigate whether exploiting this representational redundancy can improve policy learning. In this paper, we propose TOkenization of Action sequences with STochastic sampling (TOAST), a stochastic action tokenization method that samples alternative tokenizations of the same quantized action sequence during policy training. This diversifies the discrete supervision while preserving the underlying robot action and requires no additional demonstrations. Experiments on LIBERO show that TOAST consistently improves over its deterministic counterpart, with the improvement increasing as training data decreases, achieving a 6.8 point gain in success rate when only 1/16 of training data is available. Across four real-robot manipulation tasks, TOAST further improves mean success rate by 15.8 points over the deterministic counterpart. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of stochastic action tokenization for autoregressive robot policy learning, particularly when training data are limited.
0
cs.ROcs.CV Shota Kobayashi, Koki Seno, Daichi Yashima et al. · Oct 1, 2026

NarrativeFlow tackles language-conditioned robot manipulation by generating dense robot velocity fields through a flow-matching formulation, allowing models to train on heterogeneous cross-embodiment data without platform-specific action labels. It introduces a Narrative Delta loss that aligns intermediate representations with textual descriptions of task-relevant scene changes, along with dual subtask tokens to isolate this auxiliary objective from the primary flow-generation path. On standard benchmarks and real-world mobile manipulation tasks with an HSR robot, the method substantially outperforms sparse-keypoint baselines, though absolute success rates and reliance on large MLLM-generated captions leave room for refinement.

We focus on language-conditioned flow-based manipulation, where robot flows (robot velocity fields) serve as embodiment-agnostic, motion-centric representations for leveraging data collected from multiple robot platforms. This task is crucial because language-conditioned manipulation is essential for practical robotic systems, yet scaling robot foundation models remains limited by the labor-intensive collection of embodiment-specific data. Existing methods either coarsely approximate robot flows with sparse keypoint displacements, or cannot handle language-conditioned manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose NarrativeFlow, which models robot flows as continuous velocity fields using a flow-matching formulation conditioned on language. Accordingly, NarrativeFlow generates robot flows that are physically consistent with real-world manipulation. To validate NarrativeFlow, we have conducted experiments on standard datasets for language-conditioned manipulation. The experimental results show that NarrativeFlow outperforms representative baseline methods on standard evaluation metrics. Furthermore, through real-world experiments, we show that NarrativeFlow achieves higher success rates than baseline methods across multiple manipulation tasks. The project page is available at https://shota0520.github.io/NarrativeFlow-project-page/
0
cs.CVcs.RO Hao Wu, Shengju Qian, Weiyan Wang et al. · Oct 1, 2026

FutureWorlds learns robotic world models by turning model-generated alternative futures into training experiences. The core idea unifies three ingredients: diverse beam search to build informative candidate trajectories, candidate-specific bounded memory to maintain diverging rollout histories, and MemSPO—a GRPO-based post-training algorithm that converts decoded trajectory rewards into group-relative advantages with history-consistent scoring. This addresses the exposure bias and token-level likelihood misalignment that plague autoregressive world models, where teacher-forcing training histories diverge from self-generated inference histories.

Robotic world models predict action-conditioned future scenes, providing a foundation for understanding action outcomes. However, turning alternative predictions into useful learning signals remains challenging: similar candidates limit informative quality comparisons, while diverging trajectories require persistent maintenance of their individual histories. We introduce FutureWorlds, a framework that unifies candidate construction, history maintenance, and learning from relative quality. Built on a multimodal discrete autoregressive model, FutureWorlds uses diverse beam search during reinforcement learning to construct candidate futures that balance confidence and diversity. Candidate-specific bounded memory preserves scene states and ensures that generation and policy scoring use matching histories. We further propose MemSPO (Memory-Conditioned Search-Guided Policy Optimization), which converts video trajectory rewards into group-relative advantages to optimize the world model. On RT-1, BridgeV2, and RoboCasa, FutureWorlds reduces LPIPS for 32-frame predictions by 14.78%, 20.84%, and 9.12%, respectively, relative to the strongest baseline on each dataset. Under fixed evaluation configurations, only 200 MemSPO updates further improve generation quality and support continued prediction beyond the training horizon. Memory ablations, decoding sensitivity analysis, and optical-flow evaluation show that these gains extend beyond visual quality to more accurate motion prediction and more consistent object states. Project page and code: https://github.com/Alexander-wu/FutureWorlds.
0
cs.ROcs.CVcs.LG Chengkai Xu, Yiming Cui, Jiaqi Liu et al. · Oct 1, 2026

End-to-end autonomous driving maps raw sensors directly to control actions, yet its real-world bottleneck lies in the training ecosystem rather than model architecture alone. This survey introduces a Data-Strategy-Platform taxonomy that frames training as an interdependent system: data defines what is learnable, strategies govern how learning aligns with driving objectives, and platforms enable scalability. The authors argue the field must shift from raw data volume to value density, from isolated task-specific learners to universal foundation models, and from static offline training to closed-loop training-testing integration.

Autonomous driving is a cornerstone technology for the future of intelligent transportation, where end-to-end learning has emerged as a transformative paradigm that directly maps multimodal sensory inputs to driving actions through unified differentiable models. While offering advantages, the effectiveness of end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) is ultimately determined by the quality of its training ecosystem. This paper provides a comprehensive review of training methods and ecosystem for E2E-AD. We introduce a Data-Strategy-Platform taxonomy that conceptualizes training as an interdependent system. The data layer defines what can be learned, the strategy layer governs how learning aligns with driving objectives, and the platform layer supports scalability and continuous evolution. Within this framework, we survey recent advances across data-centric pipelines, learning paradigms, and training infrastructures, and analyze their interplay in shaping model performance, robustness, and deployability. Finally, we reflect on current limitations and articulate a forward-looking vision that emphasizes a shift from data quantity to data value, from isolated optimization to foundation-driven generalization, and from static training to integrated training-testing loops, aiming toward robust, scalable, and trustworthy autonomous driving systems. We maintain a continuously updated repository tracking cutting-edge literature and works at \href{https://github.com/Jiaaqiliu/Awesome-Training-Ecosystem-for-E2E-AD}{Our Project Page}.
0
cs.ROcs.CVeess.IV Pengfei Qi, Haoran Lin, Sizhuang Chen et al. · Oct 1, 2026

UniTrackPLA tackles the problem of unifying instruction-guided navigation and dynamic person tracking—two embodied tasks traditionally handled by separate policies—within a single panoramic vision-language-action framework. Its core idea is to fuse omnidirectional perception with a shared continuous waypoint prediction space, using Panoramic-Aware Encoding to adapt perspective pretrained encoders to 360° observations and World-Action Consistency to adaptively decide when to reuse waypoint chunks or replan. This matters because it removes heading-dependent initialization constraints and offers a step toward general-purpose robots that can follow both linguistic routes and moving humans with one model.

General-purpose embodied robots should support both navigation toward language-specified destinations and dynamic person tracking under arbitrary initial target azimuths. However, existing methods typically rely on forward-facing observations and address these tasks with separate policies, limiting omnidirectional perception and unified closed-loop control. We present UniTrackPLA, a unified panorama-language-action model for instruction-guided navigation and dynamic person tracking. Its Panoramic-Aware Encoding (PAE) preserves the temporal and azimuthal structure of perspective views projected from each panorama, enabling perspective-pretrained visual encoders to process omnidirectional observations. A shared vision-language backbone grounds instructions in the panoramic context and predicts continuous robot-centric waypoint chunks for both tasks. World-Action Consistency (WAC) further predicts action-conditioned future visual states and verifies waypoint prefixes online, allowing reliable actions to be reused while triggering replanning upon inconsistency. We also introduce OmniTrackNav-Bench, comprising 5,000 simulated tracking trajectories, 10,000 simulated VLN routes, and 96 verified real-world routes, providing 919,978 waypoint-supervision instances. UniTrackPLA improves overall tracking SR from 23.50% to 35.00% and Omni-VLN SR/SPL from 13.00%/12.77% to 19.75%/19.29%. Incorporating 76 real-world routes further improves held-out EP@0.2m from 42.92% to 92.08%. Closed-loop experiments on a Go2-W robot demonstrate unified panoramic tracking and navigation across indoor and outdoor environments. The project page is at https://tw5775.github.io/UniTrackPLA.
0
cs.ROcs.AIcs.CL Jiawei Fan, Sifeng Wang, Yuqing Hou et al. · Oct 1, 2026

Robotic foundation models currently rely on multi-step flow matching to generate actions, which creates a severe inference bottleneck for real-time control. This paper proposes Kinematic MeanFlow (K-MF), a one-step action policy that reformulates MeanFlow by decoupling the time derivative across two sub-intervals to accommodate the unique late-stage surge and widening spread of local acceleration in robotic velocity fields. By introducing an intermediate anchor point and a learnable partition strategy, K-MF cuts action-head latency by up to 74% while matching or exceeding the success rates of multi-step baselines across manipulation and navigation tasks.

In this paper, we study how to achieve one-step action generation in Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs), aiming to overcome the high inference latency of multi-step flow matching. MeanFlow provides a promising framework for this goal, yet its direct application leads to performance collapse. We discover that this stems from two distinctive dynamics exhibited in the RFM velocity field: (1) the ``local acceleration" exhibits stability early on, but surges sharply towards the end of the denoising process, and (2) the spread of its magnitudes across samples widens as denoising progresses. To address these issues, we introduce Kinematic MeanFlow (K-MF), a novel one-step action policy tailored for RFMs. Specifically, grounded in a kinematic identity, K-MF decouples the time derivative term in the MeanFlow formulation into two sub-interval terms separated by an intermediate point. This decoupled formulation enables the two terms to capture early-stage and late-stage denoising dynamics, respectively, while mitigating the error amplification across the process. As a result, our K-MF empowers RFMs to achieve one-step action generation in both training from scratch and fine-tuning paradigms across diverse tasks, while outperforming multi-step flow matching in most settings. In terms of inference efficiency, K-MF reduces action-head latency of GR00T-N1.6 by 67.5%~74.4% across L40 and Jetson Orin in eager and compiled modes, yielding end-to-end latency reductions of 30.3%~54.9%. Code will be available at https://github.com/IntelChina-AI/K-MF.
0
cs.CVcs.RO Cigdem Kokenoz, Amir Salarpour, Alkim Domeke et al. · Oct 1, 2026

Lang3DSeg tackles annotation-free open-vocabulary 3D segmentation of sparse outdoor LiDAR using a point transformer backbone trained from scratch. Its core idea is to carefully curate 2D-to-3D pseudo-labels via class-priority rasterization and an instance-wise depth-gap test that truncates projected masks at the first occlusion gap, removing systematic depth-ambiguity errors before training. This matters because prior methods rely on voxel-based backbones and temporal voting to compensate for projection noise, whereas Lang3DSeg shows that a point transformer can match and exceed those results in real time when paired with cleaner single-sweep targets.

Accurate 3D semantic perception is critical for safe autonomous navigation. However, supervised LiDAR segmentation remains tied to closed taxonomies and to the cost of point-wise manual annotation. Open-vocabulary methods avoid that cost by projecting the output of 2D vision-language models onto LiDAR and distilling it into a 3D network. These methods rely almost exclusively on voxel-based sparse convolutions, and point transformers have so far been limited to indoor environments, where 3D data is dense and bounded. We present Lang3DSeg, which establishes a point transformer as the backbone for annotation-free open-vocabulary segmentation of outdoor 3D LiDAR, and is trained from scratch without geometric pre-training. This training paradigm necessitates addressing the inherent noise in 2D-to-3D label projections; specifically, naive projection often suffers from depth ambiguity, where points behind an object are erroneously assigned its semantic label. We therefore composite masks using an explicit class-priority rule and truncate each projected instance at the first gap in its depth distribution, correcting the projection error directly rather than averaging it over registered sequences. Lang3DSeg achieves 52.8% mIoU on nuScenes validation and 41.4% on SemanticKITTI, the highest among published annotation-free methods on both benchmarks. Every 3D semantic segmentation is on a single LiDAR sweep, and inference operates in real-time without running vision-language models.
0
cs.ROcs.HCcs.RO Thomas M. Kwok, Jiaan Li, Yue Hu · Apr 9, 2025

Remote caregiving robots could help older adults age in place, but conventional motion-mapping teleoperation forces caregivers into slow, unnatural postures that cause muscle fatigue. This paper proposes a lightweight Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (S-ST-GCN) that recognizes four single-arm daily-living actions from an RGB camera and triggers preset robot trajectories, decoupling the operator's motion from the robot's execution. A finite-state machine filters misclassifications before execution. While still a proof-of-concept, the framework offers a more intuitive alternative to direct motion-tracking teleoperation for assisting with activities of daily living.

Caregiving of older adults is an urgent global challenge, with many older adults preferring to age in place rather than enter residential care. However, providing adequate home-based assistance remains difficult, particularly in geographically vast regions. Teleoperated robots offer a promising solution, but conventional motion-mapping teleoperation imposes unnatural movement constraints on operators, leading to muscle fatigue and reduced usability. This paper presents a novel teleoperation framework that leverages action recognition to enable intuitive remote robot control. Using our simplified Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (S-ST-GCN), the system recognizes human actions and executes corresponding preset robot trajectories, eliminating the need for direct motion synchronization. A finite-state machine (FSM) is integrated to enhance reliability by filtering out misclassified actions. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework enables effortless operator movement while ensuring accurate robot execution. This proof-of-concept study highlights the potential of teleoperation with action recognition for enabling caregivers to remotely assist older adults during activities of daily living (ADLs). Future work will focus on improving the S-ST-GCN's recognition accuracy and generalization, integrating advanced motion planning techniques to further enhance robotic autonomy in older adult care, and conducting a user study to evaluate the system's telepresence and ease of control.
0
cs.CVcs.RO Zhide Zhong, Junfeng Li, Junjie He et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Vision-Language-Action models excel at direct visuomotor mapping but struggle with tasks requiring both fine-grained 3D spatial understanding and long-horizon logical planning. DualCoT-VLA proposes a parallel dual-stream reasoning mechanism that processes visual Chain-of-Thought for spatial perception and linguistic Chain-of-Thought for task planning simultaneously in latent space, using learnable query tokens to bypass autoregressive decoding and achieve single-step inference.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions directly to robotic actions. While effective for simple tasks, standard VLA models often struggle with complex, multi-step tasks requiring logical planning, as well as precise manipulations demanding fine-grained spatial perception. Recent efforts have incorporated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to endow VLA models with a ``thinking before acting'' capability. However, current CoT-based VLA models face two critical limitations: 1) an inability to simultaneously capture low-level visual details and high-level logical planning due to their reliance on isolated, single-modal CoT; 2) high inference latency with compounding errors caused by step-by-step autoregressive decoding. To address these limitations, we propose DualCoT-VLA, a visual-linguistic CoT method for VLA models with a parallel reasoning mechanism. To achieve comprehensive multi-modal reasoning, our method integrates a visual CoT for low-level spatial understanding and a linguistic CoT for high-level task planning. Furthermore, to overcome the latency bottleneck, we introduce a parallel CoT mechanism that incorporates two sets of learnable query tokens, shifting autoregressive reasoning to single-step forward reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DualCoT-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LIBERO and RoboCasa GR1 benchmarks, as well as in real-world platforms.
0
cs.CVcs.RO Suresh Guttikonda, Maximilian Neidhardt, Vidas Raudonis et al. · Mar 23, 2026

This paper tackles robotic optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanning of curved tissue surfaces, addressing the limitation that existing approaches restrict motion to pure translations to avoid challenging hand-eye calibration. The core contribution is a custom ChArUco calibration pattern enabling full six-degree-of-freedom hand-eye calibration, allowing the OCT probe to rotate and follow curved surfaces. This matters because pure translational scanning accumulates registration errors on curved geometries, whereas full 6D motion enables accurate, large-area surface reconstruction.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive volumetric imaging modality with high spatial and temporal resolution. For imaging larger tissue structures, OCT probes need to be moved to scan the respective area. For handheld scanning, stitching of the acquired OCT volumes requires overlap to register the images. For robotic scanning and stitching, a typical approach is to restrict the motion to translations, as this avoids a full hand-eye calibration, which is complicated by the small field of view of most OCT probes. However, stitching by registration or by translational scanning are limited when curved tissue surfaces need to be scanned. We propose a marker for full six-dimensional hand-eye calibration of a robot mounted OCT probe. We show that the calibration results in highly repeatable estimates of the transformation. Moreover, we evaluate robotic scanning of two phantom surfaces to demonstrate that the proposed calibration allows for consistent scanning of large, curved tissue surfaces. As the proposed approach is not relying on image registration, it does not suffer from a potential accumulation of errors along a scan path. We also illustrate the improvement compared to conventional 3D-translational robotic scanning.
0
cs.CVcs.GRcs.RO Hang Dai, Hongwei Fan, Han Zhang et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Articulated object reconstruction typically requires either multi-view capture of discrete states or monocular video with a strict static-base-part assumption, limiting practical deployment. FreeArtGS introduces a "free-moving" setting where both joint angles and object poses vary arbitrarily during capture, using only a monocular RGB-D video. The method combines motion-based part segmentation via point tracking priors with joint estimation and 3D Gaussian Splatting optimization to jointly reconstruct geometry, appearance, and articulation.

The increasing demand for augmented reality and robotics is driving the need for articulated object reconstruction with high scalability. However, existing settings for reconstructing from discrete articulation states or casual monocular videos require non-trivial axis alignment or suffer from insufficient coverage, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we introduce FreeArtGS, a novel method for reconstructing articulated objects under free-moving scenario, a new setting with a simple setup and high scalability. FreeArtGS combines free-moving part segmentation with joint estimation and end-to-end optimization, taking only a monocular RGB-D video as input. By optimizing with the priors from off-the-shelf point-tracking and feature models, the free-moving part segmentation module identifies rigid parts from relative motion under unconstrained capture. The joint estimation module calibrates the unified object-to-camera poses and recovers joint type and axis robustly from part segmentation. Finally, 3DGS-based end-to-end optimization is implemented to jointly reconstruct visual textures, geometry, and joint angles of the articulated object. We conduct experiments on two benchmarks and real-world free-moving articulated objects. Experimental results demonstrate that FreeArtGS consistently excels in reconstructing free-moving articulated objects and remains highly competitive in previous reconstruction settings, proving itself a practical and effective solution for realistic asset generation. The project page is available at: https://freeartgs.github.io/
0
cs.ROcs.CV Zhiyan Cao, Zhengxi Wu, Yiwei Wang et al. · Mar 22, 2026

Cardiac ultrasound view acquisition is notoriously operator-dependent, limiting reproducibility and access. This paper proposes an anatomical prior (AP)-driven framework that unifies cardiac structure segmentation with autonomous probe adjustment. The core innovation is a spatial-relation graph (SRG) module that injects spatial-topological constraints into YOLO-based segmentation, coupled with an RL formulation where states and rewards are built from quantifiable anatomical features drawn from Gaussian priors. The work matters because it offers an interpretable alternative to black-box end-to-end methods, potentially enabling zero-shot sim-to-real deployment for robotic echocardiography.

Cardiac ultrasound diagnosis is critical for cardiovascular disease assessment, but acquiring standard views remains highly operator-dependent. Existing medical segmentation models often yield anatomically inconsistent results in images with poor textural differentiation between distinct feature classes, while autonomous probe adjustment methods either rely on simplistic heuristic rules or black-box learning. To address these issues, our study proposed an anatomical prior (AP)-driven framework integrating cardiac structure segmentation and autonomous probe adjustment for standard view acquisition. A YOLO-based multi-class segmentation model augmented by a spatial-relation graph (SRG) module is designed to embed AP into the feature pyramid. Quantifiable anatomical features of standard views are extracted. Their priors are fitted to Gaussian distributions to construct probabilistic APs. The probe adjustment process of robotic ultrasound scanning is formalized as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, with the RL state built from real-time anatomical features and the reward reflecting the AP matching. Experiments validate the efficacy of the framework. The SRG-YOLOv11s improves mAP50 by 11.3% and mIoU by 6.8% on the Special Case dataset, while the RL agent achieves a 92.5% success rate in simulation and 86.7% in phantom experiments.
0
cs.ROcs.LG Dong Heon Cho, Boyuan Chen · Mar 23, 2026

Soft robot simulators suffer from a sim-to-real gap that widens when optimizing morphology, because calibration parameters identified on one geometry often fail to transfer to unseen shapes. This paper proposes Residual Acceleration Field Learning (RAFL), which learns local corrective accelerations defined on quadrature elements rather than global nodal forces. By operating on deformation and velocity gradients in material space, the model becomes independent of mesh topology and discretization, enabling zero-shot generalization across geometries.

Differentiable simulators enable gradient-based optimization of soft robots over material parameters, control, and morphology, but accurately modeling real systems remains challenging due to the sim-to-real gap. This issue becomes more pronounced when geometry is itself a design variable. System identification reduces discrepancies by fitting global material parameters to data; however, when constitutive models are misspecified or observations are sparse, identified parameters often absorb geometry-dependent effects rather than reflect intrinsic material behavior. More expressive constitutive models can improve accuracy but substantially increase computational cost, limiting practicality. We propose a residual acceleration field learning (RAFL) framework that augments a base simulator with a transferable, element-level corrective dynamics field. Operating on shared local features, the model is agnostic to global mesh topology and discretization. Trained end-to-end through a differentiable simulator using sparse marker observations, the learned residual generalizes across shapes. In both sim-to-sim and sim-to-real experiments, our method achieves consistent zero-shot improvements on unseen morphologies, while system identification frequently exhibits negative transfer. The framework also supports continual refinement, enabling simulation accuracy to accumulate during morphology optimization.
0
cs.ROcs.CV Yuheng Ji, Yuyang Liu, Huajie Tan et al. · Mar 23, 2026

PRM-as-a-Judge addresses the fundamental limitation of binary success metrics in robotic manipulation by repurposing Process Reward Models (PRMs) as dense evaluators. The paper introduces the OPD (Outcome–Process–Diagnosis) metric system, which decomposes execution quality via a task-aligned progress potential $\Phi(x_t) \in [0,1]$ induced from trajectory videos. Validated on the RoboPulse benchmark and RoboTwin policy auditing, the work shows that trajectory-supervised PRMs achieve superior micro-resolution compared to foundation models, revealing behavioral signatures invisible to outcome-only evaluation.

Current robotic evaluation is still largely dominated by binary success rates, which collapse rich execution processes into a single outcome and obscure critical qualities such as progress, efficiency, and stability. To address this limitation, we propose PRM-as-a-Judge, a dense evaluation paradigm that leverages Process Reward Models (PRMs) to audit policy execution directly from trajectory videos by estimating task progress from observation sequences. Central to this paradigm is the OPD (Outcome-Process-Diagnosis) metric system, which explicitly formalizes execution quality via a task-aligned progress potential. We characterize dense robotic evaluation through two axiomatic properties: macro-consistency, which requires additive and path-consistent aggregation, and micro-resolution, which requires sensitivity to fine-grained physical evolution. Under this formulation, potential-based PRM judges provide a natural instantiation of dense evaluation, with macro-consistency following directly from the induced scalar potential. We empirically validate the micro-resolution property using RoboPulse, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed for probing micro-scale progress discrimination, where several trajectory-trained PRM judges outperform discriminative similarity-based methods and general-purpose foundation-model judges. Finally, leveraging PRM-as-a-Judge and the OPD metric system, we conduct a structured audit of mainstream policy paradigms across long-horizon tasks, revealing behavioral signatures and failure modes that are invisible to outcome-only metrics.
0
cs.CVcs.AIcs.CL Haichao Zhang, Yijiang Li, Shwai He et al. · Mar 23, 2026

ThinkJEPA addresses the limitation of JEPA-style latent world models that rely on short, densely sampled windows, which bias predictions toward local dynamics while missing long-horizon semantics. The paper proposes a dual-temporal architecture combining a dense-frame V-JEPA branch for fine-grained motion with a sparsely sampled VLM "thinker" branch that provides semantic guidance via multi-layer feature pyramids. This matters because it attempts to marry the physical consistency of latent world models with the general knowledge of vision-language models for robust trajectory forecasting.

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision--language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM \emph{thinker} branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.
0
cs.ROcs.CV Bowen Jing, Ruiyang Hao, Weitao Zhou et al. · Mar 22, 2026

Existing safety-critical scenario generation methods force collisions through brute-force perturbations, destroying trajectory realism. CounterScene reframes this as a counterfactual inference problem within diffusion-based BEV world models: given a safe scene, identify the single agent whose behavioral change would maximally increase collision risk, then minimally intervene on that agent alone via structured diffusion guidance. This targets the realism-adversarial trade-off by allowing danger to emerge through natural interaction propagation rather than global trajectory distortion.

Generating safety-critical driving scenarios requires understanding why dangerous interactions arise, rather than merely forcing collisions. However, existing methods rely on heuristic adversarial agent selection and unstructured perturbations, lacking explicit modeling of interaction dependencies and thus exhibiting a realism--adversarial trade-off. We present CounterScene, a framework that endows closed-loop generative BEV world models with structured counterfactual reasoning for safety-critical scenario generation. Given a safe scene, CounterScene asks: what if the causally critical agent had behaved differently? To answer this, we introduce causal adversarial agent identification to identify the critical agent and classify conflict types, and develop a conflict-aware interactive world model in which a causal interaction graph is used to explicitly model dynamic inter-agent dependencies. Building on this structure, stage-adaptive counterfactual guidance performs minimal interventions on the identified agent, removing its spatial and temporal safety margins while allowing risk to emerge through natural interaction propagation. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that CounterScene achieves the strongest adversarial effectiveness while maintaining superior trajectory realism across all horizons, improving long-horizon collision rate from 12.3% to 22.7% over the strongest baseline with better realism (ADE 1.88 vs.2.09). Notably, this advantage further widens over longer rollouts, and CounterScene generalizes zero-shot to nuPlan with state-of-the-art realism.
0
cs.NIcs.CVcs.MM Aizierjiang Aiersilan, Zhangfei Yang · Mar 22, 2026

OrbitStream addresses adaptive 360° video streaming for teleoperation by proposing a training-free framework that combines semantic scene understanding with robust control theory. It formulates viewport prediction as a Gravitational Viewport Prediction (GVP) problem where semantic objects (pedestrians, vehicles) generate potential fields that "attract" user gaze with task-relevant mass, while a Saturation-Based Proportional-Derivative (PD) Controller handles bitrate adaptation. This offers an interpretable, zero-shot alternative to black-box Deep Reinforcement Learning methods for safety-critical systems where deployment constraints prohibit lengthy training.

Adaptive 360{\deg} video streaming for teleoperation faces dual challenges: viewport prediction under uncertain gaze patterns and bitrate adaptation over volatile wireless channels. While data-driven and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods achieve high Quality of Experience (QoE), their "black-box" nature and reliance on training data can limit deployment in safety-critical systems. To address this, we propose OrbitStream, a training-free framework that combines semantic scene understanding with robust control theory. We formulate viewport prediction as a Gravitational Viewport Prediction (GVP) problem, where semantic objects generate potential fields that attract user gaze. Furthermore, we employ a Saturation-Based Proportional-Derivative (PD) Controller for buffer regulation. On object-rich teleoperation traces, OrbitStream achieves a 94.7\% zero-shot viewport prediction accuracy without user-specific profiling, approaching trajectory-extrapolation baselines ($\sim$98.5\%). Across 3,600 Monte Carlo simulations on diverse network traces, OrbitStream yields a mean QoE of 2.71. It ranks second among 12 evaluated algorithms, close to the top-performing BOLA-E (2.80) while outperforming FastMPC (1.84). The system exhibits an average decision latency of 1.01 ms with minimal rebuffering events. By providing competitive QoE with interpretability and zero training overhead, OrbitStream demonstrates that physics-based control, combined with semantic modeling, offers a practical solution for 360{\deg} streaming in teleoperation.
0
cs.ROcs.LG Ruiqi Xian, Jing Liang, He Yin et al. · Mar 23, 2026

2-4 sentences for scrolling feed.

Sections:
1. Verdict: Overall assessment - solid incremental contribution, hybrid approach is interesting, results are good but limited scope.
2. What holds up: Gaussian anchoring mechanism, two-stage design, ablation studies showing component effectiveness.
3. Main concerns: Single-frame limitation, dataset limitation (only SemanticKITTI), missing comparison with GaussianFormer, efficiency trade-offs not fully characterized, limited discussion of failure modes.
4. Evidence and comparison: Fair comparison with ETFormer/VoxFormer using same backbone, but missing key Gaussian baselines; ablations validate design choices; qualitative results show improvements.
5. Reproducibility: Good implementation details provided, standard dataset, but no code release mentioned; hyperparameters mostly specified.

Let me write the content now, ensuring I follow the formatting rules:
- Use LaTeX for math
- Keep JSON strings on single lines (use \n for line breaks)
- Include exact quotes with locators
- No markdown fences around JSON

We present \emph{GaussianSSC}, a two-stage, grid-native and triplane-guided approach to semantic scene completion (SSC) that injects the benefits of Gaussians without replacing the voxel grid or maintaining a separate Gaussian set. We introduce \emph{Gaussian Anchoring}, a sub-pixel, Gaussian-weighted image aggregation over fused FPN features that tightens voxel--image alignment and improves monocular occupancy estimation. We further convert point-like voxel features into a learned per-voxel Gaussian field and refine triplane features via a triplane-aligned \emph{Gaussian--Triplane Refinement} module that combines \emph{local gathering} (target-centric) and \emph{global aggregation} (source-centric). This directional, anisotropic support captures surface tangency, scale, and occlusion-aware asymmetry while preserving the efficiency of triplane representations. On SemanticKITTI~\cite{behley2019semantickitti}, GaussianSSC improves Stage~1 occupancy by +1.0\% Recall, +2.0\% Precision, and +1.8\% IoU over state-of-the-art baselines, and improves Stage~2 semantic prediction by +1.8\% IoU and +0.8\% mIoU.
0
cs.ROcs.LGcs.MA Ebasa Temesgen, Nathnael Minyelshowa, Lebsework Negash · Mar 22, 2026

This paper proposes a multi-UAV architecture for autonomous precision agriculture that combines centralized mission planning with decentralized execution control. It integrates coverage path planning, battery-aware task allocation, CNN-based image processing, and battery swapping stations to enable end-to-end farm monitoring. The work targets large-scale agricultural operations with minimal human intervention, claiming advantages in fault-tolerance, scalability, and user-friendliness.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in precision agriculture has seen a huge increase recently. As such, systems that aim to apply various algorithms on the field need a structured framework of abstractions. This paper defines the various tasks of the UAVs in precision agriculture and model them into an architectural framework. The presented architecture is built on the context that there will be minimal physical intervention to do the tasks defined with multiple coordinated and cooperative UAVs. Various tasks such as image processing, path planning, communication, data acquisition, and field mapping are employed in the architecture to provide an efficient system. Besides, different limitation for applying Multi-UAVs in precision agriculture has been considered in designing the architecture. The architecture provides an autonomous end-to-end solution, starting from mission planning, data acquisition and image processing framework that is highly efficient and can enable farmers to comprehensively deploy UAVs onto their lands. Simulation and field tests shows that the architecture offers a number of advantages that include fault-tolerance, robustness, developer and user-friendliness.
0
cs.ROcs.AI Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Justin Wasserman et al. · Mar 22, 2026

This paper addresses robotic reaching in cluttered, unseen environments using a hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator. The core idea is a real-time pipeline that combines multi-view RGB reconstruction (Mast3r), open-world object detection (YOLO-World), shape-aware RRT* planning with asymmetric collision constraints, and a learned controller trained on pose-to-actuation data. If validated at scale, this could enable robots to navigate dense foliage or disaster debris where rigid arms fail and pure soft arms lack reach.

As robotic systems increasingly operate in unstructured, cluttered, and previously unseen environments, there is a growing need for manipulators that combine compliance, adaptability, and precise control. This work presents a real-time hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator system designed for robust open-world object reaching in such challenging environments. The system integrates vision-based perception and 3D scene reconstruction with shape-aware motion planning to generate safe trajectories. A learning-based controller drives the hybrid arm to arbitrary target poses, leveraging the flexibility of the soft segment while maintaining the precision of the rigid segment. The system operates without environment-specific retraining, enabling direct generalization to new scenes. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate consistent reaching performance with errors below 2 cm across diverse cluttered setups, highlighting the potential of hybrid manipulators for adaptive and reliable operation in unstructured environments.