GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
BTPG: A Platform and Benchmark for Behavior Tree Planning in Everyday Service Robots
Authors: Xinglin Chen; Yishuai Cai; Minglong Li; Yunxin Mao; Zhou Yang; Wenjing Yang; Weixia Xu; Ji Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Behavior Trees (BTs) are a widely used control architecture in robotics, renowned for their robustness and safety, which are especially crucial for everyday service robots. Recently, several methods have been proposed to automatically plan BTs to accomplish specific tasks. However, existing research in BT planning lacks two main aspects: (1) the absence of a standard platform for modeling and planning BTs, along with testing benchmarks; and (2) insufficient metrics for a comprehensive evaluation of BT planning algorithms. In this paper, we propose Behavior Tree Planning Gym (BTPG), the first platform and benchmark for BT planning in everyday service robots. In BTPG, behavior nodes are represented by predicate logic, and objects are categorized to better define the predicate domains and action models. The BT planning problem is then formulated in the STRIPS style. We support four environments and three simulators with different action models, which cover most of the needs of everyday service activities. We design a dataset generator for each environment and test three state-of-the-art BT planning algorithms, as well as one proposed by us, using various common metrics. In addition, we design three advanced metrics, planning progress, region distance, and execution robustness, to gain deeper insights into these BT planning algorithms. With a standard test benchmark, we hope BTPG can inspire and accelerate progress in the field of BT planning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/DIDS-EI/BTPG.
State Revisit and Re-explore: Bridging Sim-to-Real Gaps in Offline-and-Online Reinforcement Learning with An Imperfect Simulator
Authors: Xingyu Chen; Jiayi Xie; Zhijian Xu; Ruixun Liu; Shuai Yang; Zeyang Liu; Lipeng Wan; Xuguang Lan
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL) based robot skill acquisition, a high-fidelity simulator is usually indispensable but unattainable since the real environment dynamics are difficult to model, which leads to severe sim-to-real gaps. Existing methods solve this problem by combining offline and online RL to jointly learn transferable policies from limited offline data and imperfect simulators. However, due to the unrestricted exploration in the imperfect simulator, the hybrid offline-and-online RL methods inevitably suffer from low sample efficiency and insufficient state-action space coverage during training. To solve this problem, we propose a State Revisit and Re-exploration (SR2) hybrid offline-and-online RL framework. In particular, the proposed algorithm employs a meta-policy and a sub-policy, where the meta-policy aims to find high-quality states in the offline trajectories for online exploration, and the sub-policy learns the robot skill using mixed offline and online data. By introducing the state revisit and explore mechanism, our approach efficiently improves performance on a set of sim-to-real robotic tasks. Through extensive simulation and real-world tasks, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach against other state-of-the-art methods.
Risk-Aware Task Migration for Multiplex Unmanned Swarm Networks in Adversarial Environments
Authors: Kai Di; Tienyu Zuo; Pan Li; Yuanshuang Jiang; Fulin Chen; Yichuan Jiang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: With the rapid development and deep integration of artificial intelligence and automation technologies, autonomous unmanned swarms dynamically organize into multiplex network structures based on diverse task requirements in adversarial environments. Frequent task variations lead to load imbalances among agents and between network layers, significantly increasing the risk of enemy detection and destruction. Existing approaches typically simplify multiplex networks into single-layer structures for task scheduling, failing to address these load imbalance issues. Moreover, the coupling between task dynamics and network multiplexity dramatically increases the complexity of designing task migration strategies, and it is proven NP-hard to achieve such load balancing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a risk-aware task migration method that achieves dynamic load balancing by matching task requirements with both intra-layer agent capabilities and inter-layer swarm capabilities. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms benchmark algorithms in task completion cost, task completion proportion, and system robustness. In particular, the algorithm achieves solutions statistically indistinguishable from the optimal solutions computed by the CPLEX solver, while exhibiting significantly reduced computational overhead.
GCNT: Graph-Based Transformer Policies for Morphology-Agnostic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yingbo Luo; Meibao Yao; Xueming Xiao
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Training a universal controller for robots with different morphologies is a promising research trend, since it can significantly enhance the robustness and resilience of the robotic system. However, diverse morphologies can yield different dimensions of state space and action space, making it difficult to comply with traditional policy networks. Existing methods address this issue by modularizing the robot configuration, while do not adequately extract and utilize the overall morphological information, which has been proven crucial for training a universal controller. To this end, we propose GCNT, a morphology-agnostic policy network based on improved Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Transformer. It exploits the fact that GCN and Transformer can handle arbitrary number of modules to achieve compatibility with diverse morphologies. Our key insight is that the GCN is able to efficiently extract morphology information of robots, while Transformer ensures that it is fully utilized by allowing each node of the robot to communicate this information directly. Experimental results show that our method can generate resilient locomotion behaviors for robots with different configurations, including zero-shot generalization to robot morphologies not seen during training. In particular, GCNT achieved the best performance on 8 tasks in the 2 standard benchmarks.
Beyond the Map: Learning to Navigate Unseen Urban Dynamics Using Diffusion-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Monu Nagar; Debasis Das
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Vision-based motion planning is a crucial task in Autonomous Driving (AD). Recent advancements in urban AD show that integrating Imitation Learning (IL) with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) improves decision-making to be more like humans. However, IL methods depend on expert demonstrations to learn the optimal policy. The main drawback of this approach is the assumption that expert demonstrations are always optimal, which is not always true in real-world settings. This creates challenges in adapting to diverse weather conditions and dynamic traffic scenarios, often resulting in higher collision rates and increased risks to pedestrian safety. To address these challenges, we propose a Diffusion-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning (DGDRL) framework that integrates a diffusion model with a Soft Actor-Critic DRL method to effectively mitigate environmental uncertainties and enable self-learning beyond the training maps for new tasks. This framework follows a novel modified partially observable Markov decision process (mPOMDP) to choose optimal action from original and diffusion-generated observations, ensuring that the policy behavior remains consistent with the current action. We use the CARLA NoCrash benchmark to train and evaluate the proposed framework. The method is validated in diverse urban environments (e.g., empty, regular, and dense) across multiple towns. Additionally, we compare our model against state-of-the-art techniques to ensure robustness and generalizability to new environments. The project page and code are available at the link https://autovisionproject.github.io/project/.
Understanding Matters: Semantic-Structural Determined Visual Relocalization for Large Scenes
Authors: Jingyi Nie; Liangliang Cai; Qichuan Geng; Zhong Zhou
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) estimates 3D scene coordinates from 2D images, and has become an important approach in visual relocalization. Existing methods exhibit high localization accuracy in small scenes, but still face substantial challenges in large-scale scenes, which usually have significant variations in depth, scale, and occlusion. Although structure-guided scene partitioning is commonly adopted, the over-partitioned elements and large feature variances within subscenes impede the estimation of the 3D coordinates, introducing misleading information for subsequent processing. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose the Semantic-Structural Determined Visual Relocalization method for SCR, which leverages semantic-structural partition learning and partition-determined pose refinement to better understand the semantic and structural information on large scenes. Firstly, we partition the scene into small subscenes with label assignments, ensuring semantic consistency and structural continuity within each subscene. A classifier is then trained with sampling-based learning to predict these labels. Secondly, the partition predictions are encoded into embeddings and integrated with local features for intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, producing partition-aware features. To further decrease feature variances, we employ a discriminability metric and suppress ambiguous points, improving subsequent computations. Experimental results on the Cambridge Landmarks dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements with fewer training costs on large-scale scenes, reducing the median error by 38% compared to the state-of-the-art SCR method DSAC*. Code is available: https://gitee.com/VR_NAVE/ss-dvr.
Imitation Learning via Focused Satisficing
Authors: Rushit N. Shah; Nikolaos Agadakos; Synthia Sasulski; Ali Farajzadeh; Sanjiban Choudhury; Brian Ziebart
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Imitation learning often assumes that demonstrations are close to optimal according to some fixed, but unknown, cost function. However, according to satisficing theory, humans often choose acceptable behavior based on their personal (and potentially dynamic) levels of aspiration, rather than achieving (near-) optimality. For example, a lunar lander demonstration that successfully lands without crashing might be acceptable to a novice despite being slow or jerky. Using a margin-based objective to guide deep reinforcement learning, our focused satisficing approach to imitation learning seeks a policy that surpasses the demonstrator's aspiration levels---defined over trajectories or portions of trajectories---on unseen demonstrations without explicitly learning those aspirations. We show experimentally that this focuses the policy to imitate the highest quality (portions of) demonstrations better than existing imitation learning methods, providing much higher rates of guaranteed acceptability to the demonstrator, and competitive true returns on a range of environments.
Language-Conditioned Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation with Pretrained Models
Authors: Shen Tan; Dong Zhou; Xiangyu Shao; Junqiao Wang; Guanghui Sun
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) that involves the handling of novel and unseen objects across different workspaces remains a significant challenge for real-world robotic applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Language-conditioned Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation framework, named LOVMM, incorporating the large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) to tackle various mobile manipulation tasks in household environments. Our approach is capable of solving various OVMM tasks with free-form natural language instructions (e.g. "toss the food boxes on the office room desk to the trash bin in the corner", and "pack the bottles from the bed to the box in the guestroom"). Extensive experiments simulated in complex household environments show strong zero-shot generalization and multi-task learning abilities of LOVMM. Moreover, our approach can also generalize to multiple tabletop manipulation tasks and achieve better success rates compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
DiffusionIMU: Diffusion-Based Inertial Navigation with Iterative Motion Refinement
Authors: Xiaoqiang Teng; Chenyang Li; Shibiao Xu; Zhihao Hao; Deke Guo; Jingyuan Li; Haisheng Li; Weiliang Meng; Xiaopeng Zhang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Inertial navigation enables self-contained localization using only Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), making it widely applicable in various domains such as navigation, augmented reality, and robotics. However, existing methods suffer from drift accumulation due to the sensor noise and difficulty capturing long-range temporal dependencies, limiting their robustness and accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose DiffusionIMU, a novel diffusion-based framework for inertial navigation. DiffusionIMU enhances direct velocity regression from IMU data through an iterative generative denoising process, progressively refining motion state estimation. It integrates the noise-adaptive feature modulation for sensor variability handling, the feature alignment mechanism for representation consistency, and the diffusion-based temporal modeling to decrease accumulated drift. Experiments show that DiffusionIMU consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating superior generalization to unseen users while alleviating the impact of the sensor noise.
DisPIM: Distilling PreTrained Image Models for Generalizable Visuo-Motor Control
Authors: Haitao Wang; Hejun Wu
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: We introduce DisPIM, a framework that leverages pretrained image models (PIMs) for visuo-motor control. Applying PIMs to visuo-motor control faces a big difficulty due to the distribution shift between the distribution of visual environmental states and that of the pretraining datasets. Due to such a distribution shift, fine-tuning PIMs specifically for visuo-motor control may hurt the generalizability of PIMs, while adding additional tunable parameters for specific actions apparently lead to high computational costs. DisPIM addresses these challenges using a novel feature distillation approach, which obtains a compact model that not only inherit the generalization capability of PIMs but also acquire task-specific skills for visuo-motor control. This good for both sides is mainly achieved by means of a target Q-ensemble mechanism, which is inspired by double Q-learning. This Q-ensemble mechanism can adaptively adjust the distillation rate, so as to balance the objective of generalization and task-specific ability during training. With this balancing mechanism, DisPIM achieves both task-specific and generalizable control requiring a low computation cost. Across a series of algorithms, task domains, and evaluation metrics in both simulation and real robot, our DisPIM demonstrates significant improvements in generalization and overall performance with low computational overhead.
SDDiff: Boosting Radar Perception via Spatial-Doppler Diffusion
Authors: Shengpeng Wang; Xin Luo; Yulong Xie; Wei Wang
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Point cloud extraction (PCE) and ego velocity estimation (EVE) are key capabilities gaining attention in 3D radar perception. However, existing work typically treats these two tasks independently, which may neglect the interplay between radar's spatial and Doppler domain features, potentially introducing additional bias. In this paper, we observe an underlying correlation between 3D points and ego velocity, which offers reciprocal benefits for PCE and EVE. To fully unlock such inspiring potential, we take the first step to design a Spatial-Doppler Diffusion (SDDiff) model for simultaneously dense PCE and accurate EVE. To seamlessly tailor it to radar perception, SDDiff improves the conventional latent diffusion process in three major aspects. First, we introduce a representation that embodies both spatial occupancy and Doppler features. Second, we design a directional diffusion with radar priors to streamline the sampling. Third, we propose Iterative Doppler Refinement to enhance the model’s adaptability to density variations and ghosting effects. Extensive evaluations show that SDDiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by achieving 59% higher in EVE accuracy, 4X greater in valid generation density while boosting PCE effectiveness and reliability. The code and dataset will be available on https://github.com/StellarEsti/SDDiff.
Code-BT: A Code-Driven Approach to Behavior Tree Generation for Robot Tasks Planning with Large Language Models
Authors: Siyang Zhang; Bin Li; Jingtao Qi; Xueying Wang; Fu Li; Jianan Wang; En Zhu; Jinjing Sun
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Behavior trees(BTs) provide a systematic and structured control architecture extensively employed in game AI and robotic behavior control, owing to their modularity, reactivity, and reusability. Nonetheless, manual BTs design requires significant expertise and becomes inefficient as task complexity increases. Recent automation technologies have avoided manual work, but often have high application barriers and face challenges in adapting to new tasks, making it difficult to easily configure them to specific requirements. Code-BT introduces a novel approach that utilizes large language models(LLMs) to automatically generate BTs, representing the task planning process as the process of coding and organizing sequences. By retrieving control flow information from the generated code, BTs can be efficiently constructed to address the complexity and diversity of task planning challenges. Rather than relying on manual design, Code-BT uses task instructions to guide the selection of relevant APIs, and then systematically assembles these APIs into modular code to align with the BTs structure. Finally, action sequences and control logic are extracted from the generated code to construct the BTs. Our approach not only ensures the automation of BTs generation but also guarantees the scalability and adaptability for long-term tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that Code-BT substantially improves LLM performance in BTs generation, achieving improvements ranging from16.67% to 29.17%.
DiffSQL: Leveraging Diffusion Model for Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Heyuan Zheng; Yunji Liang; Lei Liu; Zhiwen Yu
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has attracted significant attention due to its broad applications in autonomous driving and robotics. Although significant performance improvements have been achieved by learning the relative distance of objects with the introduction of Self Query Layer (SQL), it struggles with zero-shot generalization due to the lack of geometric features and the fixed number of query sizes. To address these problems, we propose a diffusion-augmented self-supervised depth estimation framework, named DiffSQL, to learn geometric priors for feature augmentation. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic self-query layer that implicitly computes the relative distances between objects by adjusting the query size according to the feature distribution. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that DiffSQL outperforms SQLdepth by 1.03% in terms of AbsRel and 2.79% in terms of SqRel. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that DiffSQL is superior in zero-shot generalization.
Proven Approximation Guarantees in Multi-Objective Optimization: SPEA2 Beats NSGA-II
Authors: Yasser Alghouass; Benjamin Doerr; Martin S. Krejca; Mohammed Lagmah
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Together with the NSGA-II and SMS-EMOA, the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is one of the most prominent dominance-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Different from the NSGA-II, it does not employ the crowding distance (essentially the distance to neighboring solutions) to compare pairwise non-dominating solutions but a complex system of σ-distances that builds on the distances to all other solutions. In this work, we give a first mathematical proof showing that this more complex system of distances can be superior. More specifically, we prove that a simple steady-state SPEA2 can compute optimal approximations of the Pareto front of the OneMinMax benchmark in polynomial time. The best proven guarantee for a comparable variant of the NSGA-II only assures approximation ratios of roughly a factor of two, and both mathematical analyses and experiments indicate that optimal approximations are not found efficiently.
Evolutionary Algorithms Are Significantly More Robust to Noise When They Ignore It
Authors: Denis Antipov; Benjamin Doerr
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Randomized search heuristics (RSHs) are known to have a certain robustness to noise. Mathematical analyses trying to quantify rigorously how robust RSHs are to a noisy access to the objective function typically assume that each solution is re-evaluated whenever it is compared to others. This aims at preventing that a single noisy evaluation has a lasting negative effect, but is computationally expensive and requires the user to foresee that noise is present (as in a noise-free setting, one would never re-evaluate solutions). In this work, we conduct the first mathematical runtime analysis of an evolutionary algorithm solving a single-objective noisy problem without re-evaluations. We prove that the (1+1) evolutionary algorithm without re-evaluations can optimize the classic LeadingOnes benchmark with up to constant noise rates, in sharp contrast to the version with re-evaluations, where only noise with rates O(n⁻²log n) can be tolerated. This result suggests that re-evaluations are much less needed than what was previously thought, and that they actually can be highly detrimental. The insights from our mathematical proofs indicate that this similar results are plausible for other classic benchmarks.
Speeding Up Hyper-Heuristics With Markov-Chain Operator Selection and the Only-Worsening Acceptance Operator
Authors: Abderrahim Bendahi; Benjamin Doerr; Adrien Fradin; Johannes F. Lutzeyer
Venue: IJCAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The move-acceptance hyper-heuristic was recently shown to be able to leave local optima with astonishing efficiency (Lissovoi et al., Artificial Intelligence (2023)). In this work, we propose two modifications to this algorithm that demonstrate impressive performances on a large class of benchmarks including the classic CLIFF_d and JUMP_m function classes. (i) Instead of randomly choosing between the only-improving and any-move acceptance operator, we take this choice via a simple two-state Markov chain. This modification alone reduces the runtime on JUMP_m functions with gap parameter m from ?(n²ᵐ⁻¹) to O(nᵐ⁺¹). (ii) We then replace the all-moves acceptance operators with the operator that only accepts worsenings. Such a, counter-intuitive, operator has not been used before in the literature. However, our proofs show that our only-worsening operator can greatly help in leaving local optima, reducing, e.g., the runtime on Jump functions to O(n³ log n) independent of the gap size. In general, we prove a remarkably good runtime of O(nᵏ⁺¹ log n) for our Markov move-acceptance hyper-heuristic on all members of a new benchmark class SEQOPT_k, which contains a large number of functions having k successive local optima, and which contains the commonly studied JUMP_m and CLIFF_d functions for k=2.