pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Image Quality Assessment: From Human to Machine Preference
Authors: Chunyi Li, Yuan Tian, Xiaoyue Ling, ZiCheng Zhang, Haodong Duan, HaoNing Wu, Ziheng Jia, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guo Lu, Weisi Lin, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) based on human subjective preferences has undergone extensive research in the past decades. However, with the development of communication protocols, the visual data consumption volume of machines has gradually surpassed that of humans. For machines, the preference depends on downstream tasks such as segmentation and detection, rather than visual appeal. Considering the huge gap between human and machine visual systems, this paper proposes the topic: Image Quality Assessment for Machine Vision for the first time. Specifically, we (1) defined the subjective preferences of machines, including downstream tasks, test models, and evaluation metrics; (2) established the Machine Preference Database (MPD), which contains 2.25M fine-grained annotations and 30k reference/distorted image pair instances; (3) verified the performance of mainstream IQA algorithms on MPD. Experiments show that current IQA metrics are human-centric and cannot accurately characterize machine preferences. We sincerely hope that MPD can promote the evolution of IQA from human to machine preferences. Project page is on: https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/MPD.
PanoGen++: Domain-Adapted Text-Guided Panoramic Environment Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Sen Wang, Dongliang Zhou, Liang Xie, Chao Xu, Ye Yan, Erwei Yin
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Image Outpainting, Navigate, Vision and Language Navigation

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) tasks require agents to navigate three-dimensional environments guided by natural language instructions, offering substantial potential for diverse applications. However, the scarcity of training data impedes progress in this field. This paper introduces PanoGen++, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by generating varied and pertinent panoramic environments for VLN tasks. PanoGen++ incorporates pre-trained diffusion models with domain-specific fine-tuning, employing parameter-efficient techniques such as low-rank adaptation to minimize computational costs. We investigate two settings for environment generation: masked image inpainting and recursive image outpainting. The former maximizes novel environment creation by inpainting masked regions based on textual descriptions, while the latter facilitates agents' learning of spatial relationships within panoramas. Empirical evaluations on room-to-room (R2R), room-for-room (R4R), and cooperative vision-and-dialog navigation (CVDN) datasets reveal significant performance enhancements: a 2.44% increase in success rate on the R2R test leaderboard, a 0.63% improvement on the R4R validation unseen set, and a 0.75-meter enhancement in goal progress on the CVDN validation unseen set. PanoGen++ augments the diversity and relevance of training environments, resulting in improved generalization and efficacy in VLN tasks.
Numerically robust Gaussian state estimation with singular observation noise
Authors: Nicholas Krämer, Filip Tronarp
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

This article proposes numerically robust algorithms for Gaussian state estimation with singular observation noise. Our approach combines a series of basis changes with Bayes' rule, transforming the singular estimation problem into a nonsingular one with reduced state dimension. In addition to ensuring low runtime and numerical stability, our proposal facilitates marginal-likelihood computations and Gauss-Markov representations of the posterior process. We analyse the proposed method's computational savings and numerical robustness and validate our findings in a series of simulations.
Numerical Error Analysis of Large Language Models
Authors: Stanislav Budzinskiy, Wenyi Fang, Longbin Zeng, Philipp Petersen
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00

Large language models based on transformer architectures have become integral to state-of-the-art natural language processing applications. However, their training remains computationally expensive and exhibits instabilities, some of which are expected to be caused by finite-precision computations. We provide a theoretical analysis of the impact of round-off errors within the forward pass of a transformer architecture which yields fundamental bounds for these effects. In addition, we conduct a series of numerical experiments which demonstrate the practical relevance of our bounds. Our results yield concrete guidelines for choosing hyperparameters that mitigate round-off errors, leading to more robust and stable inference.
Accuracy of Discretely Sampled Stochastic Policies in Continuous-time Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yanwei Jia, Du Ouyang, Yufei Zhang
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00

Stochastic policies are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open challenges. This work introduces and rigorously analyzes a policy execution framework that samples actions from a stochastic policy at discrete time points and implements them as piecewise constant controls. We prove that as the sampling mesh size tends to zero, the controlled state process converges weakly to the dynamics with coefficients aggregated according to the stochastic policy. We explicitly quantify the convergence rate based on the regularity of the coefficients and establish an optimal first-order convergence rate for sufficiently regular coefficients. Additionally, we show that the same convergence rates hold with high probability concerning the sampling noise, and further establish a $1/2$-order almost sure convergence when the volatility is not controlled. Building on these results, we analyze the bias and variance of various policy evaluation and policy gradient estimators based on discrete-time observations. Our results provide theoretical justification for the exploratory stochastic control framework in [H. Wang, T. Zariphopoulou, and X.Y. Zhou, J. Mach. Learn. Res., 21 (2020), pp. 1-34].
PI-Controlled Variable Time-Step Power System Simulation Using an Adaptive Order Differential Transformation Method
Authors: Kaiyang Huang, Yang Liu, Kai Sun, Feng Qiu
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Numerical Integration

Dynamic simulation plays a crucial role in power system transient stability analysis, but traditional numerical integration-based methods are time-consuming due to the small time step sizes. Other semi-analytical solution methods, such as the Differential Transformation method, often struggle to select proper orders and steps, leading to slow performance and numerical instability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel adaptive dynamic simulation approach for power system transient stability analysis. The approach adds feedback control and optimization to selecting the step and order, utilizing the Differential Transformation method and a proportional-integral control strategy to control truncation errors. Order selection is formulated as an optimization problem resulting in a variable-step-optimal-order method that achieves significantly larger time step sizes without violating numerical stability. It is applied to three systems: the IEEE 9-bus, 3-generator system, IEEE 39-bus, 10-generator system, and a Polish 2383-bus, 327-generator system, promising computational efficiency and numerical robustness for large-scale power system is demonstrated in comprehensive case studies.
A Heterogeneous Multiscale Method for Efficient Simulation of Power Systems with Inverter-Based Resources
Authors: Kaiyang Huang, Min Xiong, Yang Liu, Kai Sun
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00

As inverter-based resources (IBRs) penetrate power systems, the dynamics become more complex, exhibiting multiple timescales, including electromagnetic transient (EMT) dynamics of power electronic controllers and electromechanical dynamics of synchronous generators. Consequently, the power system model becomes highly stiff, posing a challenge for efficient simulation using existing methods that focus on dynamics within a single timescale. This paper proposes a Heterogeneous Multiscale Method for highly efficient multi-timescale simulation of a power system represented by its EMT model. The new method alternates between the microscopic EMT model of the system and an automatically reduced macroscopic model, varying the step size accordingly to achieve significant acceleration while maintaining accuracy in both fast and slow dynamics of interests. It also incorporates a semi-analytical solution method to enable a more adaptive variable-step mechanism. The new simulation method is illustrated using a two-area system and is then tested on a detailed EMT model of the IEEE 39-bus system.
HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model
Authors: Jiaming Liu, Hao Chen, Pengju An, Zhuoyang Liu, Renrui Zhang, Chenyang Gu, Xiaoqi Li, Ziyu Guo, Sixiang Chen, Mengzhen Liu, Chengkai Hou, Mengdi Zhao, KC alex Zhou, Pheng-Ann Heng, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Denoising, Large Language Model, Vision-Language-Action

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) for common-sense reasoning have led to the development of vision-language-action (VLA) models, enabling robots to perform generalized manipulation. Although existing autoregressive VLA methods leverage large-scale pretrained knowledge, they disrupt the continuity of actions. Meanwhile, some VLA methods incorporate an additional diffusion head to predict continuous actions, relying solely on VLM-extracted features, which limits their reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce HybridVLA, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates the strengths of both autoregressive and diffusion policies within a single large language model, rather than simply connecting them. To bridge the generation gap, a collaborative training recipe is proposed that injects the diffusion modeling directly into the next-token prediction. With this recipe, we find that these two forms of action prediction not only reinforce each other but also exhibit varying performance across different tasks. Therefore, we design a collaborative action ensemble mechanism that adaptively fuses these two predictions, leading to more robust control. In experiments, HybridVLA outperforms previous state-of-the-art VLA methods across various simulation and real-world tasks, including both single-arm and dual-arm robots, while demonstrating stable manipulation in previously unseen configurations.
UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation
Authors: Hang Yin, Xiuwei Xu, Lingqing Zhao, Ziwei Wang, Jie zhou, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Graph Matching

In this paper, we propose a general framework for universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation. Existing zero-shot methods build inference framework upon large language models (LLM) for specific tasks, which differs a lot in overall pipeline and fails to generalize across different types of goal. Towards the aim of universal zero-shot navigation, we propose a uniform graph representation to unify different goals, including object category, instance image and text description. We also convert the observation of agent into an online maintained scene graph. With this consistent scene and goal representation, we preserve most structural information compared with pure text and are able to leverage LLM for explicit graph-based reasoning. Specifically, we conduct graph matching between the scene graph and goal graph at each time instant and propose different strategies to generate long-term goal of exploration according to different matching states. The agent first iteratively searches subgraph of goal when zero-matched. With partial matching, the agent then utilizes coordinate projection and anchor pair alignment to infer the goal location. Finally scene graph correction and goal verification are applied for perfect matching. We also present a blacklist mechanism to enable robust switch between stages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show that our UniGoal achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on three studied navigation tasks with a single model, even outperforming task-specific zero-shot methods and supervised universal methods.
NIL: No-data Imitation Learning by Leveraging Pre-trained Video Diffusion Models
Authors: Mert Albaba, Chenhao Li, Markos Diomataris, Omid Taheri, Andreas Krause, Michael Black
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Acquiring physically plausible motor skills across diverse and unconventional morphologies-including humanoid robots, quadrupeds, and animals-is essential for advancing character simulation and robotics. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning (RL) are task- and body-specific, require extensive reward function engineering, and do not generalize well. Imitation learning offers an alternative but relies heavily on high-quality expert demonstrations, which are difficult to obtain for non-human morphologies. Video diffusion models, on the other hand, are capable of generating realistic videos of various morphologies, from humans to ants. Leveraging this capability, we propose a data-independent approach for skill acquisition that learns 3D motor skills from 2D-generated videos, with generalization capability to unconventional and non-human forms. Specifically, we guide the imitation learning process by leveraging vision transformers for video-based comparisons by calculating pair-wise distance between video embeddings. Along with video-encoding distance, we also use a computed similarity between segmented video frames as a guidance reward. We validate our method on locomotion tasks involving unique body configurations. In humanoid robot locomotion tasks, we demonstrate that 'No-data Imitation Learning' (NIL) outperforms baselines trained on 3D motion-capture data. Our results highlight the potential of leveraging generative video models for physically plausible skill learning with diverse morphologies, effectively replacing data collection with data generation for imitation learning.
DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understanding
Authors: Ayesha Ishaq, Jean Lahoud, Ketan More, Omkar Thawakar, Ritesh Thawkar, Dinura Dissanayake, Noor Ahsan, Yuhao Li, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Ivan Laptev, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman Khan
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Autonomous Driving, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning

While large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, certain challenges require complex multi-step reasoning to reach accurate answers. One particularly challenging task is autonomous driving, which demands thorough cognitive processing before decisions can be made. In this domain, a sequential and interpretive understanding of visual cues is essential for effective perception, prediction, and planning. Nevertheless, common VQA benchmarks often focus on the accuracy of the final answer while overlooking the reasoning process that enables the generation of accurate responses. Moreover, existing methods lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating step-by-step reasoning in realistic driving scenarios. To address this gap, we propose DriveLMM-o1, a new dataset and benchmark specifically designed to advance step-wise visual reasoning for autonomous driving. Our benchmark features over 18k VQA examples in the training set and more than 4k in the test set, covering diverse questions on perception, prediction, and planning, each enriched with step-by-step reasoning to ensure logical inference in autonomous driving scenarios. We further introduce a large multimodal model that is fine-tuned on our reasoning dataset, demonstrating robust performance in complex driving scenarios. In addition, we benchmark various open-source and closed-source methods on our proposed dataset, systematically comparing their reasoning capabilities for autonomous driving tasks. Our model achieves a +7.49% gain in final answer accuracy, along with a 3.62% improvement in reasoning score over the previous best open-source model. Our framework, dataset, and model are available at https://github.com/ayesha-ishaq/DriveLMM-o1.
KUDA: Keypoints to Unify Dynamics Learning and Visual Prompting for Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Zixian Liu, Mingtong Zhang, Yunzhu Li
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Visual Prompting

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), significant progress has been made in developing open-vocabulary robotic manipulation systems. However, many existing approaches overlook the importance of object dynamics, limiting their applicability to more complex, dynamic tasks. In this work, we introduce KUDA, an open-vocabulary manipulation system that integrates dynamics learning and visual prompting through keypoints, leveraging both VLMs and learning-based neural dynamics models. Our key insight is that a keypoint-based target specification is simultaneously interpretable by VLMs and can be efficiently translated into cost functions for model-based planning. Given language instructions and visual observations, KUDA first assigns keypoints to the RGB image and queries the VLM to generate target specifications. These abstract keypoint-based representations are then converted into cost functions, which are optimized using a learned dynamics model to produce robotic trajectories. We evaluate KUDA on a range of manipulation tasks, including free-form language instructions across diverse object categories, multi-object interactions, and deformable or granular objects, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. The project page is available at http://kuda-dynamics.github.io.
World Modeling Makes a Better Planner: Dual Preference Optimization for Embodied Task Planning
Authors: Siyin Wang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shiduo Zhang, Panpan Cai, Jinlan Fu, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Task Planning

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown promise for embodied task planning, yet they struggle with fundamental challenges like dependency constraints and efficiency. Existing approaches either solely optimize action selection or leverage world models during inference, overlooking the benefits of learning to model the world as a way to enhance planning capabilities. We propose Dual Preference Optimization (D$^2$PO), a new learning framework that jointly optimizes state prediction and action selection through preference learning, enabling LVLMs to understand environment dynamics for better planning. To automatically collect trajectories and stepwise preference data without human annotation, we introduce a tree search mechanism for extensive exploration via trial-and-error. Extensive experiments on VoTa-Bench demonstrate that our D$^2$PO-based method significantly outperforms existing methods and GPT-4o when applied to Qwen2-VL (7B), LLaVA-1.6 (7B), and LLaMA-3.2 (11B), achieving superior task success rates with more efficient execution paths.
Finetuning Generative Trajectory Model with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Derun Li, Jianwei Ren, Yue Wang, Xin Wen, Pengxiang Li, Leimeng Xu, Kun Zhan, Zhongpu Xia, Peng Jia, Xianpeng Lang, Ningyi Xu, Hang Zhao
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning, Motion Planning, NavSim

Generating human-like and adaptive trajectories is essential for autonomous driving in dynamic environments. While generative models have shown promise in synthesizing feasible trajectories, they often fail to capture the nuanced variability of human driving styles due to dataset biases and distributional shifts. To address this, we introduce TrajHF, a human feedback-driven finetuning framework for generative trajectory models, designed to align motion planning with diverse driving preferences. TrajHF incorporates multi-conditional denoiser and reinforcement learning with human feedback to refine multi-modal trajectory generation beyond conventional imitation learning. This enables better alignment with human driving preferences while maintaining safety and feasibility constraints. TrajHF achieves PDMS of 93.95 on NavSim benchmark, significantly exceeding other methods. TrajHF sets a new paradigm for personalized and adaptable trajectory generation in autonomous driving.
A nonlinear real time capable motion cueing algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Hendrik Scheidel, Camilo Gonzalez, Houshyar Asadi, Tobias Bellmann, Andreas Seefried, Shady Mohamed, Saeid Nahavandi
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Hyperparameter Optimization, Model Predictive Control, Trajectory Planning

In motion simulation, motion cueing algorithms are used for the trajectory planning of the motion simulator platform, where workspace limitations prevent direct reproduction of reference trajectories. Strategies such as motion washout, which return the platform to its center, are crucial in these settings. For serial robotic MSPs with highly nonlinear workspaces, it is essential to maximize the efficient utilization of the MSPs kinematic and dynamic capabilities. Traditional approaches, including classical washout filtering and linear model predictive control, fail to consider platform-specific, nonlinear properties, while nonlinear model predictive control, though comprehensive, imposes high computational demands that hinder real-time, pilot-in-the-loop application without further simplification. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach using deep reinforcement learning for motion cueing, demonstrated here for the first time in a 6-degree-of-freedom setting with full consideration of the MSPs kinematic nonlinearities. Previous work by the authors successfully demonstrated the application of DRL to a simplified 2-DOF setup, which did not consider kinematic or dynamic constraints. This approach has been extended to all 6 DOF by incorporating a complete kinematic model of the MSP into the algorithm, a crucial step for enabling its application on a real motion simulator. The training of the DRL-MCA is based on Proximal Policy Optimization in an actor-critic implementation combined with an automated hyperparameter optimization. After detailing the necessary training framework and the algorithm itself, we provide a comprehensive validation, demonstrating that the DRL MCA achieves competitive performance against established algorithms. Moreover, it generates feasible trajectories by respecting all system constraints and meets all real-time requirements with low...