pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Motion Control in Multi-Rotor Aerial Robots Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Gaurav Shetty, Mahya Ramezani, Hamed Habibi, Holger Voos, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement (DRL) Learning to address motion control challenges in drones for additive manufacturing (AM). Drone-based additive manufacturing promises flexible and autonomous material deposition in large-scale or hazardous environments. However, achieving robust real-time control of a multi-rotor aerial robot under varying payloads and potential disturbances remains challenging. Traditional controllers like PID often require frequent parameter re-tuning, limiting their applicability in dynamic scenarios. We propose a DRL framework that learns adaptable control policies for multi-rotor drones performing waypoint navigation in AM tasks. We compare Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) within a curriculum learning scheme designed to handle increasing complexity. Our experiments show TD3 consistently balances training stability, accuracy, and success, particularly when mass variability is introduced. These findings provide a scalable path toward robust, autonomous drone control in additive manufacturing.
Redefining Robot Generalization Through Interactive Intelligence
Authors: Sharmita Dey
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still portrays robots as single, autonomous decision-makers, performing tasks like manipulation and navigation, with limited human involvement. However, a large class of real-world robotic systems, including wearable robotics (e.g., prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons), teleoperation, and neural interfaces, are semiautonomous, and require ongoing interactive coordination with human partners, challenging single-agent assumptions. In this position paper, we argue that robot foundation models must evolve to an interactive multi-agent perspective in order to handle the complexities of real-time human-robot co-adaptation. We propose a generalizable, neuroscience-inspired architecture encompassing four modules: (1) a multimodal sensing module informed by sensorimotor integration principles, (2) an ad-hoc teamwork model reminiscent of joint-action frameworks in cognitive science, (3) a predictive world belief model grounded in internal model theories of motor control, and (4) a memory/feedback mechanism that echoes concepts of Hebbian and reinforcement-based plasticity. Although illustrated through the lens of cyborg systems, where wearable devices and human physiology are inseparably intertwined, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to robots operating in semi-autonomous or interactive contexts. By moving beyond single-agent designs, our position emphasizes how foundation models in robotics can achieve a more robust, personalized, and anticipatory level of performance.
Skill Expansion and Composition in Parameter Space
Authors: Tenglong Liu, Jianxiong Li, Yinan Zheng, Haoyi Niu, Yixing Lan, Xin Xu, Xianyuan Zhan
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL

Humans excel at reusing prior knowledge to address new challenges and developing skills while solving problems. This paradigm becomes increasingly popular in the development of autonomous agents, as it develops systems that can self-evolve in response to new challenges like human beings. However, previous methods suffer from limited training efficiency when expanding new skills and fail to fully leverage prior knowledge to facilitate new task learning. In this paper, we propose Parametric Skill Expansion and Composition (PSEC), a new framework designed to iteratively evolve the agents' capabilities and efficiently address new challenges by maintaining a manageable skill library. This library can progressively integrate skill primitives as plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules in parameter-efficient finetuning, facilitating efficient and flexible skill expansion. This structure also enables the direct skill compositions in parameter space by merging LoRA modules that encode different skills, leveraging shared information across skills to effectively program new skills. Based on this, we propose a context-aware module to dynamically activate different skills to collaboratively handle new tasks. Empowering diverse applications including multi-objective composition, dynamics shift, and continual policy shift, the results on D4RL, DSRL benchmarks, and the DeepMind Control Suite show that PSEC exhibits superior capacity to leverage prior knowledge to efficiently tackle new challenges, as well as expand its skill libraries to evolve the capabilities. Project website: https://ltlhuuu.github.io/PSEC/.
DexVLA: Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for General Robot Control
Authors: Junjie Wen, Yichen Zhu, Jinming Li, Zhibin Tang, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Vision-Language-Action

Enabling robots to perform diverse tasks across varied environments is a central challenge in robot learning. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise for generalizable robot skills, realizing their full potential requires addressing limitations in action representation and efficient training. Current VLA models often focus on scaling the vision-language model (VLM) component, while the action space representation remains a critical bottleneck. This paper introduces DexVLA, a novel framework designed to enhance the efficiency and generalization capabilities of VLAs for complex, long-horizon tasks across diverse robot embodiments. DexVLA features a novel diffusion-based action expert, scaled to one billion parameters, designed for cross-embodiment learning. A novel embodiment curriculum learning strategy facilitates efficient training: (1) pre-training the diffusion expert that is separable from the VLA on cross-embodiment data, (2) aligning the VLA model to specific embodiments, and (3) post-training for rapid adaptation to new tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple embodiments, including single-arm, bimanual, and dexterous hand, demonstrating DexVLA's adaptability to challenging tasks without task-specific adaptation, its ability to learn dexterous skills on novel embodiments with limited data, and its capacity to complete complex, long-horizon tasks using only direct language prompting, such as laundry folding. In all settings, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models like Octo, OpenVLA, and Diffusion Policy.
Surprise Potential as a Measure of Interactivity in Driving Scenarios
Authors: Wenhao Ding, Sushant Veer, Karen Leung, Yulong Cao, Marco Pavone
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Validating the safety and performance of an autonomous vehicle (AV) requires benchmarking on real-world driving logs. However, typical driving logs contain mostly uneventful scenarios with minimal interactions between road users. Identifying interactive scenarios in real-world driving logs enables the curation of datasets that amplify critical signals and provide a more accurate assessment of an AV's performance. In this paper, we present a novel metric that identifies interactive scenarios by measuring an AV's surprise potential on others. First, we identify three dimensions of the design space to describe a family of surprise potential measures. Second, we exhaustively evaluate and compare different instantiations of the surprise potential measure within this design space on the nuScenes dataset. To determine how well a surprise potential measure correctly identifies an interactive scenario, we use a reward model learned from human preferences to assess alignment with human intuition. Our proposed surprise potential, arising from this exhaustive comparative study, achieves a correlation of more than 0.82 with the human-aligned reward function, outperforming existing approaches. Lastly, we validate motion planners on curated interactive scenarios to demonstrate downstream applications.
Generating Physically Realistic and Directable Human Motions from Multi-Modal Inputs
Authors: Aayam Shrestha, Pan Liu, German Ros, Kai Yuan, Alan Fern
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

This work focuses on generating realistic, physically-based human behaviors from multi-modal inputs, which may only partially specify the desired motion. For example, the input may come from a VR controller providing arm motion and body velocity, partial key-point animation, computer vision applied to videos, or even higher-level motion goals. This requires a versatile low-level humanoid controller that can handle such sparse, under-specified guidance, seamlessly switch between skills, and recover from failures. Current approaches for learning humanoid controllers from demonstration data capture some of these characteristics, but none achieve them all. To this end, we introduce the Masked Humanoid Controller (MHC), a novel approach that applies multi-objective imitation learning on augmented and selectively masked motion demonstrations. The training methodology results in an MHC that exhibits the key capabilities of catch-up to out-of-sync input commands, combining elements from multiple motion sequences, and completing unspecified parts of motions from sparse multimodal input. We demonstrate these key capabilities for an MHC learned over a dataset of 87 diverse skills and showcase different multi-modal use cases, including integration with planning frameworks to highlight MHC's ability to solve new user-defined tasks without any finetuning.
Vision-Ultrasound Robotic System based on Deep Learning for Gas and Arc Hazard Detection in Manufacturing
Authors: Jin-Hee Lee, Dahyun Nam, Robin Inho Kee, Youngkey Kim, Seok-Jun Buu
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Fairness

Gas leaks and arc discharges present significant risks in industrial environments, requiring robust detection systems to ensure safety and operational efficiency. Inspired by human protocols that combine visual identification with acoustic verification, this study proposes a deep learning-based robotic system for autonomously detecting and classifying gas leaks and arc discharges in manufacturing settings. The system is designed to execute all experimental tasks entirely onboard the robot. Utilizing a 112-channel acoustic camera operating at a 96 kHz sampling rate to capture ultrasonic frequencies, the system processes real-world datasets recorded in diverse industrial scenarios. These datasets include multiple gas leak configurations (e.g., pinhole, open end) and partial discharge types (Corona, Surface, Floating) under varying environmental noise conditions. Proposed system integrates visual detection and a beamforming-enhanced acoustic analysis pipeline. Signals are transformed using STFT and refined through Gamma Correction, enabling robust feature extraction. An Inception-inspired CNN further classifies hazards, achieving 99% gas leak detection accuracy. The system not only detects individual hazard sources but also enhances classification reliability by fusing multi-modal data from both vision and acoustic sensors. When tested in reverberation and noise-augmented environments, the system outperformed conventional models by up to 44%p, with experimental tasks meticulously designed to ensure fairness and reproducibility. Additionally, the system is optimized for real-time deployment, maintaining an inference time of 2.1 seconds on a mobile robotic platform. By emulating human-like inspection protocols and integrating vision with acoustic modalities, this study presents an effective solution for industrial automation, significantly improving safety and operational reliability.
Temporal Representation Alignment: Successor Features Enable Emergent Compositionality in Robot Instruction Following
Authors: Vivek Myers, Bill Chunyuan Zheng, Anca Dragan, Kuan Fang, Sergey Levine
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Effective task representations should facilitate compositionality, such that after learning a variety of basic tasks, an agent can perform compound tasks consisting of multiple steps simply by composing the representations of the constituent steps together. While this is conceptually simple and appealing, it is not clear how to automatically learn representations that enable this sort of compositionality. We show that learning to associate the representations of current and future states with a temporal alignment loss can improve compositional generalization, even in the absence of any explicit subtask planning or reinforcement learning. We evaluate our approach across diverse robotic manipulation tasks as well as in simulation, showing substantial improvements for tasks specified with either language or goal images.
ConRFT: A Reinforced Fine-tuning Method for VLA Models via Consistency Policy
Authors: Yuhui Chen, Shuai Tian, Shugao Liu, Yingting Zhou, Haoran Li, Dongbin Zhao
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Safe Exploration, Vision-Language-Action

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown substantial potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, fine-tuning these models through supervised learning struggles to achieve robust performance due to limited, inconsistent demonstrations, especially in contact-rich environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforced fine-tuning approach for VLA models, named ConRFT, which consists of offline and online fine-tuning with a unified consistency-based training objective, to address these challenges. In the offline stage, our method integrates behavior cloning and Q-learning to effectively extract policy from a small set of demonstrations and stabilize value estimating. In the online stage, the VLA model is further fine-tuned via consistency policy, with human interventions to ensure safe exploration and high sample efficiency. We evaluate our approach on eight diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 96.3% within 45-90 minutes of online fine-tuning, outperforming prior supervised methods with a 144% improvement in success rate and 1.9x shorter episode length. This work highlights the potential of integrating reinforcement learning to enhance the performance of VLA models for real-world robotic applications. Videos and code are available at our project website https://cccedric.github.io/conrft/.
Vision-in-the-loop Simulation for Deep Monocular Pose Estimation of UAV in Ocean Environment
Authors: Maneesha Wickramasuriya, Beomyeol Yu, Taeyoung Lee, Murray Snyder
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a vision-in-the-loop simulation environment for deep monocular pose estimation of a UAV operating in an ocean environment. Recently, a deep neural network with a transformer architecture has been successfully trained to estimate the pose of a UAV relative to the flight deck of a research vessel, overcoming several limitations of GPS-based approaches. However, validating the deep pose estimation scheme in an actual ocean environment poses significant challenges due to the limited availability of research vessels and the associated operational costs. To address these issues, we present a photo-realistic 3D virtual environment leveraging recent advancements in Gaussian splatting, a novel technique that represents 3D scenes by modeling image pixels as Gaussian distributions in 3D space, creating a lightweight and high-quality visual model from multiple viewpoints. This approach enables the creation of a virtual environment integrating multiple real-world images collected in situ. The resulting simulation enables the indoor testing of flight maneuvers while verifying all aspects of flight software, hardware, and the deep monocular pose estimation scheme. This approach provides a cost-effective solution for testing and validating the autonomous flight of shipboard UAVs, specifically focusing on vision-based control and estimation algorithms.
NextBestPath: Efficient 3D Mapping of Unseen Environments
Authors: Shiyao Li, Antoine Guédon, Clémentin Boittiaux, ShiZhe Chen, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

This work addresses the problem of active 3D mapping, where an agent must find an efficient trajectory to exhaustively reconstruct a new scene. Previous approaches mainly predict the next best view near the agent's location, which is prone to getting stuck in local areas. Additionally, existing indoor datasets are insufficient due to limited geometric complexity and inaccurate ground truth meshes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel dataset AiMDoom with a map generator for the Doom video game, enabling to better benchmark active 3D mapping in diverse indoor environments. Moreover, we propose a new method we call next-best-path (NBP), which predicts long-term goals rather than focusing solely on short-sighted views. The model jointly predicts accumulated surface coverage gains for long-term goals and obstacle maps, allowing it to efficiently plan optimal paths with a unified model. By leveraging online data collection, data augmentation and curriculum learning, NBP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the existing MP3D dataset and our AiMDoom dataset, achieving more efficient mapping in indoor environments of varying complexity.
Robotouille: An Asynchronous Planning Benchmark for LLM Agents
Authors: Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega, Leong Su Yean, Neha Sunkara, Sanjiban Choudhury
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Task Planning

Effective asynchronous planning, or the ability to efficiently reason and plan over states and actions that must happen in parallel or sequentially, is essential for agents that must account for time delays, reason over diverse long-horizon tasks, and collaborate with other agents. While large language model (LLM) agents show promise in high-level task planning, current benchmarks focus primarily on short-horizon tasks and do not evaluate such asynchronous planning capabilities. We introduce Robotouille, a challenging benchmark environment designed to test LLM agents' ability to handle long-horizon asynchronous scenarios. Our synchronous and asynchronous datasets capture increasingly complex planning challenges that go beyond existing benchmarks, requiring agents to manage overlapping tasks and interruptions. Our results show that ReAct (gpt4-o) achieves 47% on synchronous tasks but only 11% on asynchronous tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement. We further analyze failure modes, demonstrating the need for LLM agents to better incorporate long-horizon feedback and self-audit their reasoning during task execution. Code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/robotouille.
LoRP-TTS: Low-Rank Personalized Text-To-Speech
Authors: Łukasz Bondaruk, Jakub Kubiak
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Speech synthesis models convert written text into natural-sounding audio. While earlier models were limited to a single speaker, recent advancements have led to the development of zero-shot systems that generate realistic speech from a wide range of speakers using their voices as additional prompts. However, they still struggle with imitating non-studio-quality samples that differ significantly from the training datasets. In this work, we demonstrate that utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) allows us to successfully use even single recordings of spontaneous speech in noisy environments as prompts. This approach enhances speaker similarity by up to $30pp$ while preserving content and naturalness. It represents a significant step toward creating truly diverse speech corpora, that is crucial in all speech-related tasks.
JamendoMaxCaps: A Large Scale Music-caption Dataset with Imputed Metadata
Authors: Abhinaba Roy, Renhang Liu, Tongyu Lu, Dorien Herremans
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Representation Learning, Retrieval

We introduce JamendoMaxCaps, a large-scale music-caption dataset featuring over 362,000 freely licensed instrumental tracks from the renowned Jamendo platform. The dataset includes captions generated by a state-of-the-art captioning model, enhanced with imputed metadata. We also introduce a retrieval system that leverages both musical features and metadata to identify similar songs, which are then used to fill in missing metadata using a local large language model (LLLM). This approach allows us to provide a more comprehensive and informative dataset for researchers working on music-language understanding tasks. We validate this approach quantitatively with five different measurements. By making the JamendoMaxCaps dataset publicly available, we provide a high-quality resource to advance research in music-language understanding tasks such as music retrieval, multimodal representation learning, and generative music models.
Vevo: Controllable Zero-Shot Voice Imitation with Self-Supervised Disentanglement
Authors: Xueyao Zhang, Xiaohui Zhang, Kainan Peng, Zhenyu Tang, Vimal Manohar, Yingru Liu, Jeff Hwang, Dangna Li, Yuhao Wang, Julian Chan, Yuan Huang, Zhizheng Wu, Mingbo Ma
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

The imitation of voice, targeted on specific speech attributes such as timbre and speaking style, is crucial in speech generation. However, existing methods rely heavily on annotated data, and struggle with effectively disentangling timbre and style, leading to challenges in achieving controllable generation, especially in zero-shot scenarios. To address these issues, we propose Vevo, a versatile zero-shot voice imitation framework with controllable timbre and style. Vevo operates in two core stages: (1) Content-Style Modeling: Given either text or speech's content tokens as input, we utilize an autoregressive transformer to generate the content-style tokens, which is prompted by a style reference; (2) Acoustic Modeling: Given the content-style tokens as input, we employ a flow-matching transformer to produce acoustic representations, which is prompted by a timbre reference. To obtain the content and content-style tokens of speech, we design a fully self-supervised approach that progressively decouples the timbre, style, and linguistic content of speech. Specifically, we adopt VQ-VAE as the tokenizer for the continuous hidden features of HuBERT. We treat the vocabulary size of the VQ-VAE codebook as the information bottleneck, and adjust it carefully to obtain the disentangled speech representations. Solely self-supervised trained on 60K hours of audiobook speech data, without any fine-tuning on style-specific corpora, Vevo matches or surpasses existing methods in accent and emotion conversion tasks. Additionally, Vevo's effectiveness in zero-shot voice conversion and text-to-speech tasks further demonstrates its strong generalization and versatility. Audio samples are available at https://versavoice.github.io.