pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Casper: Inferring Diverse Intents for Assistive Teleoperation with Vision Language Models
Authors: Huihan Liu, Rutav Shah, Shuijing Liu, Jack Pittenger, Mingyo Seo, Yuchen Cui, Yonatan Bisk, Roberto Martín-Martín, Yuke Zhu
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00

Assistive teleoperation, where control is shared between a human and a robot, enables efficient and intuitive human-robot collaboration in diverse and unstructured environments. A central challenge in real-world assistive teleoperation is for the robot to infer a wide range of human intentions from user control inputs and to assist users with correct actions. Existing methods are either confined to simple, predefined scenarios or restricted to task-specific data distributions at training, limiting their support for real-world assistance. We introduce Casper, an assistive teleoperation system that leverages commonsense knowledge embedded in pre-trained visual language models (VLMs) for real-time intent inference and flexible skill execution. Casper incorporates an open-world perception module for a generalized understanding of novel objects and scenes, a VLM-powered intent inference mechanism that leverages commonsense reasoning to interpret snippets of teleoperated user input, and a skill library that expands the scope of prior assistive teleoperation systems to support diverse, long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks. Extensive empirical evaluation, including human studies and system ablations, demonstrates that Casper improves task performance, reduces human cognitive load, and achieves higher user satisfaction than direct teleoperation and assistive teleoperation baselines.
DiFuse-Net: RGB and Dual-Pixel Depth Estimation using Window Bi-directional Parallax Attention and Cross-modal Transfer Learning
Authors: Kunal Swami, Debtanu Gupta, Amrit Kumar Muduli, Chirag Jaiswal, Pankaj Kumar Bajpai
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Disparity Estimation, Stereo Disparity Estimation, Transfer Learning

Depth estimation is crucial for intelligent systems, enabling applications from autonomous navigation to augmented reality. While traditional stereo and active depth sensors have limitations in cost, power, and robustness, dual-pixel (DP) technology, ubiquitous in modern cameras, offers a compelling alternative. This paper introduces DiFuse-Net, a novel modality decoupled network design for disentangled RGB and DP based depth estimation. DiFuse-Net features a window bi-directional parallax attention mechanism (WBiPAM) specifically designed to capture the subtle DP disparity cues unique to smartphone cameras with small aperture. A separate encoder extracts contextual information from the RGB image, and these features are fused to enhance depth prediction. We also propose a Cross-modal Transfer Learning (CmTL) mechanism to utilize large-scale RGB-D datasets in the literature to cope with the limitations of obtaining large-scale RGB-DP-D dataset. Our evaluation and comparison of the proposed method demonstrates its superiority over the DP and stereo-based baseline methods. Additionally, we contribute a new, high-quality, real-world RGB-DP-D training dataset, named Dual-Camera Dual-Pixel (DCDP) dataset, created using our novel symmetric stereo camera hardware setup, stereo calibration and rectification protocol, and AI stereo disparity estimation method.
SENIOR: Efficient Query Selection and Preference-Guided Exploration in Preference-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hexian Ni, Tao Lu, Haoyuan Hu, Yinghao Cai, Shuo Wang
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Robot Manipulation

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) methods provide a solution to avoid reward engineering by learning reward models based on human preferences. However, poor feedback- and sample- efficiency still remain the problems that hinder the application of PbRL. In this paper, we present a novel efficient query selection and preference-guided exploration method, called SENIOR, which could select the meaningful and easy-to-comparison behavior segment pairs to improve human feedback-efficiency and accelerate policy learning with the designed preference-guided intrinsic rewards. Our key idea is twofold: (1) We designed a Motion-Distinction-based Selection scheme (MDS). It selects segment pairs with apparent motion and different directions through kernel density estimation of states, which is more task-related and easy for human preference labeling; (2) We proposed a novel preference-guided exploration method (PGE). It encourages the exploration towards the states with high preference and low visits and continuously guides the agent achieving the valuable samples. The synergy between the two mechanisms could significantly accelerate the progress of reward and policy learning. Our experiments show that SENIOR outperforms other five existing methods in both human feedback-efficiency and policy convergence speed on six complex robot manipulation tasks from simulation and four real-worlds.
VisLanding: Monocular 3D Perception for UAV Safe Landing via Depth-Normal Synergy
Authors: Zhuoyue Tan, Boyong He, Yuxiang Ji, Liaoni Wu
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-shot Generalization

This paper presents VisLanding, a monocular 3D perception-based framework for safe UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) landing. Addressing the core challenge of autonomous UAV landing in complex and unknown environments, this study innovatively leverages the depth-normal synergy prediction capabilities of the Metric3D V2 model to construct an end-to-end safe landing zones (SLZ) estimation framework. By introducing a safe zone segmentation branch, we transform the landing zone estimation task into a binary semantic segmentation problem. The model is fine-tuned and annotated using the WildUAV dataset from a UAV perspective, while a cross-domain evaluation dataset is constructed to validate the model's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that VisLanding significantly enhances the accuracy of safe zone identification through a depth-normal joint optimization mechanism, while retaining the zero-shot generalization advantages of Metric3D V2. The proposed method exhibits superior generalization and robustness in cross-domain testing compared to other approaches. Furthermore, it enables the estimation of landing zone area by integrating predicted depth and normal information, providing critical decision-making support for practical applications.
GAMORA: A Gesture Articulated Meta Operative Robotic Arm for Hazardous Material Handling in Containment-Level Environments
Authors: Farha Abdul Wasay, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, Hania Ghouse
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, Unity, Virology

The convergence of robotics and virtual reality (VR) has enabled safer and more efficient workflows in high-risk laboratory settings, particularly virology labs. As biohazard complexity increases, minimizing direct human exposure while maintaining precision becomes essential. We propose GAMORA (Gesture Articulated Meta Operative Robotic Arm), a novel VR-guided robotic system that enables remote execution of hazardous tasks using natural hand gestures. Unlike existing scripted automation or traditional teleoperation, GAMORA integrates the Oculus Quest 2, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and Robot Operating System (ROS) to provide real-time immersive control, digital twin simulation, and inverse kinematics-based articulation. The system supports VR-based training and simulation while executing precision tasks in physical environments via a 3D-printed robotic arm. Inverse kinematics ensure accurate manipulation for delicate operations such as specimen handling and pipetting. The pipeline includes Unity-based 3D environment construction, real-time motion planning, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. GAMORA achieved a mean positional discrepancy of 2.2 mm (improved from 4 mm), pipetting accuracy within 0.2 mL, and repeatability of 1.2 mm across 50 trials. Integrated object detection via YOLOv8 enhances spatial awareness, while energy-efficient operation (50% reduced power output) ensures sustainable deployment. The system's digital-physical feedback loop enables safe, precise, and repeatable automation of high-risk lab tasks. GAMORA offers a scalable, immersive solution for robotic control and biosafety in biomedical research environments.
Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays
Authors: John Wikman, Alexandre Proutiere, David Broman
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects an action without delay, and executes it immediately. In real-world dynamic environments, such as cyber-physical systems, this assumption often breaks down due to delays in the interaction between the agent and the system. These delays can vary stochastically over time and are typically unobservable, meaning they are unknown when deciding on an action. Existing methods deal with this uncertainty conservatively by assuming a known fixed upper bound on the delay, even if the delay is often much lower. In this work, we introduce the interaction layer, a general framework that enables agents to adaptively and seamlessly handle unobservable and time-varying delays. Specifically, the agent generates a matrix of possible future actions to handle both unpredictable delays and lost action packets sent over networks. Building on this framework, we develop a model-based algorithm, Actor-Critic with Delay Adaptation (ACDA), which dynamically adjusts to delay patterns. Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across a wide range of locomotion benchmark environments.
IKDiffuser: A Generative Inverse Kinematics Solver for Multi-arm Robots via Diffusion Model
Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Ziyuan Jiao
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diversity

Solving Inverse Kinematics (IK) problems is fundamental to robotics, but has primarily been successful with single serial manipulators. For multi-arm robotic systems, IK remains challenging due to complex self-collisions, coupled joints, and high-dimensional redundancy. These complexities make traditional IK solvers slow, prone to failure, and lacking in solution diversity. In this paper, we present IKDiffuser, a diffusion-based model designed for fast and diverse IK solution generation for multi-arm robotic systems. IKDiffuser learns the joint distribution over the configuration space, capturing complex dependencies and enabling seamless generalization to multi-arm robotic systems of different structures. In addition, IKDiffuser can incorporate additional objectives during inference without retraining, offering versatility and adaptability for task-specific requirements. In experiments on 6 different multi-arm systems, the proposed IKDiffuser achieves superior solution accuracy, precision, diversity, and computational efficiency compared to existing solvers. The proposed IKDiffuser framework offers a scalable, unified approach to solving multi-arm IK problems, facilitating the potential of multi-arm robotic systems in real-time manipulation tasks.
Uncertainty-Driven Radar-Inertial Fusion for Instantaneous 3D Ego-Velocity Estimation
Authors: Prashant Kumar Rai, Elham Kowsari, Nataliya Strokina, Reza Ghabcheloo
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Motion Estimation

We present a method for estimating ego-velocity in autonomous navigation by integrating high-resolution imaging radar with an inertial measurement unit. The proposed approach addresses the limitations of traditional radar-based ego-motion estimation techniques by employing a neural network to process complex-valued raw radar data and estimate instantaneous linear ego-velocity along with its associated uncertainty. This uncertainty-aware velocity estimate is then integrated with inertial measurement unit data using an Extended Kalman Filter. The filter leverages the network-predicted uncertainty to refine the inertial sensor's noise and bias parameters, improving the overall robustness and accuracy of the ego-motion estimation. We evaluated the proposed method on the publicly available ColoRadar dataset. Our approach achieves significantly lower error compared to the closest publicly available method and also outperforms both instantaneous and scan matching-based techniques.
AMPLIFY: Actionless Motion Priors for Robot Learning from Videos
Authors: Jeremy A. Collins, Loránd Cheng, Kunal Aneja, Albert Wilcox, Benjamin Joffe, Animesh Garg
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction, Video Prediction

Action-labeled data for robotics is scarce and expensive, limiting the generalization of learned policies. In contrast, vast amounts of action-free video data are readily available, but translating these observations into effective policies remains a challenge. We introduce AMPLIFY, a novel framework that leverages large-scale video data by encoding visual dynamics into compact, discrete motion tokens derived from keypoint trajectories. Our modular approach separates visual motion prediction from action inference, decoupling the challenges of learning what motion defines a task from how robots can perform it. We train a forward dynamics model on abundant action-free videos and an inverse dynamics model on a limited set of action-labeled examples, allowing for independent scaling. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the learned dynamics are both accurate, achieving up to 3.7x better MSE and over 2.5x better pixel prediction accuracy compared to prior approaches, and broadly useful. In downstream policy learning, our dynamics predictions enable a 1.2-2.2x improvement in low-data regimes, a 1.4x average improvement by learning from action-free human videos, and the first generalization to LIBERO tasks from zero in-distribution action data. Beyond robotic control, we find the dynamics learned by AMPLIFY to be a versatile latent world model, enhancing video prediction quality. Our results present a novel paradigm leveraging heterogeneous data sources to build efficient, generalizable world models. More information can be found at https://amplify-robotics.github.io/.
Hard Contacts with Soft Gradients: Refining Differentiable Simulators for Learning and Control
Authors: Anselm Paulus, A. René Geist, Pierre Schumacher, Vít Musil, Georg Martius
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo

Contact forces pose a major challenge for gradient-based optimization of robot dynamics as they introduce jumps in the system's velocities. Penalty-based simulators, such as MuJoCo, simplify gradient computation by softening the contact forces. However, realistically simulating hard contacts requires very stiff contact settings, which leads to incorrect gradients when using automatic differentiation. On the other hand, using non-stiff settings strongly increases the sim-to-real gap. We analyze the contact computation of penalty-based simulators to identify the causes of gradient errors. Then, we propose DiffMJX, which combines adaptive integration with MuJoCo XLA, to notably improve gradient quality in the presence of hard contacts. Finally, we address a key limitation of contact gradients: they vanish when objects do not touch. To overcome this, we introduce Contacts From Distance (CFD), a mechanism that enables the simulator to generate informative contact gradients even before objects are in contact. To preserve physical realism, we apply CFD only in the backward pass using a straight-through trick, allowing us to compute useful gradients without modifying the forward simulation.
GAF: Gaussian Action Field as a Dvnamic World Model for Robotic Mlanipulation
Authors: Ying Chai, Litao Deng, Ruizhi Shao, Jiajun Zhang, Liangjun Xing, Hongwen Zhang, Yebin Liu
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

Accurate action inference is critical for vision-based robotic manipulation. Existing approaches typically follow either a Vision-to-Action (V-A) paradigm, predicting actions directly from visual inputs, or a Vision-to-3D-to-Action (V-3D-A) paradigm, leveraging intermediate 3D representations. However, these methods often struggle with action inaccuracies due to the complexity and dynamic nature of manipulation scenes. In this paper, we propose a V-4D-A framework that enables direct action reasoning from motion-aware 4D representations via a Gaussian Action Field (GAF). GAF extends 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) by incorporating learnable motion attributes, allowing simultaneous modeling of dynamic scenes and manipulation actions. To learn time-varying scene geometry and action-aware robot motion, GAF supports three key query types: reconstruction of the current scene, prediction of future frames, and estimation of initial action via robot motion. Furthermore, the high-quality current and future frames generated by GAF facilitate manipulation action refinement through a GAF-guided diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements, with GAF achieving +11.5385 dB PSNR and -0.5574 LPIPS improvements in reconstruction quality, while boosting the average success rate in robotic manipulation tasks by 10.33% over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: http://chaiying1.github.io/GAF.github.io/project_page/
KDMOS:Knowledge Distillation for Motion Segmentation
Authors: Chunyu Cao, Jintao Cheng, Zeyu Chen, Linfan Zhan, Rui Fan, Zhijian He, Xiaoyu Tang
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Knowledge Distillation, Motion Segmentation, Scene Flow Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Motion Object Segmentation (MOS) is crucial for autonomous driving, as it enhances localization, path planning, map construction, scene flow estimation, and future state prediction. While existing methods achieve strong performance, balancing accuracy and real-time inference remains a challenge. To address this, we propose a logits-based knowledge distillation framework for MOS, aiming to improve accuracy while maintaining real-time efficiency. Specifically, we adopt a Bird's Eye View (BEV) projection-based model as the student and a non-projection model as the teacher. To handle the severe imbalance between moving and non-moving classes, we decouple them and apply tailored distillation strategies, allowing the teacher model to better learn key motion-related features. This approach significantly reduces false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce dynamic upsampling, optimize the network architecture, and achieve a 7.69% reduction in parameter count, mitigating overfitting. Our method achieves a notable IoU of 78.8% on the hidden test set of the SemanticKITTI-MOS dataset and delivers competitive results on the Apollo dataset. The KDMOS implementation is available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/KDMOS.
ASMR: Augmenting Life Scenario using Large Generative Models for Robotic Action Reflection
Authors: Shang-Chi Tsai, Seiya Kawano, Angel Garcia Contreras, Koichiro Yoshino, Yun-Nung Chen
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Large Language Model

When designing robots to assist in everyday human activities, it is crucial to enhance user requests with visual cues from their surroundings for improved intent understanding. This process is defined as a multimodal classification task. However, gathering a large-scale dataset encompassing both visual and linguistic elements for model training is challenging and time-consuming. To address this issue, our paper introduces a novel framework focusing on data augmentation in robotic assistance scenarios, encompassing both dialogues and related environmental imagery. This approach involves leveraging a sophisticated large language model to simulate potential conversations and environmental contexts, followed by the use of a stable diffusion model to create images depicting these environments. The additionally generated data serves to refine the latest multimodal models, enabling them to more accurately determine appropriate actions in response to user interactions with the limited target data. Our experimental results, based on a dataset collected from real-world scenarios, demonstrate that our methodology significantly enhances the robot's action selection capabilities, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Scaling Algorithm Distillation for Continuous Control with Mamba
Authors: Samuel Beaussant, Mehdi Mounsif
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, In-Context Reinforcement Learning, Mamba, Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Algorithm Distillation (AD) was recently proposed as a new approach to perform In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) by modeling across-episodic training histories autoregressively with a causal transformer model. However, due to practical limitations induced by the attention mechanism, experiments were bottlenecked by the transformer's quadratic complexity and limited to simple discrete environments with short time horizons. In this work, we propose leveraging the recently proposed Selective Structured State Space Sequence (S6) models, which achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on long-range sequence modeling while scaling linearly in sequence length. Through four complex and continuous Meta Reinforcement Learning environments, we demonstrate the overall superiority of Mamba, a model built with S6 layers, over a transformer model for AD. Additionally, we show that scaling AD to very long contexts can improve ICRL performance and make it competitive even with a SOTA online meta RL baseline.
Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulation
Authors: Zifan Zhao, Siddhant Haldar, Jinda Cui, Lerrel Pinto, Raunaq Bhirangi
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Contact-rich Manipulation, Imitation Learning

Data-driven approaches struggle with precise manipulation; imitation learning requires many hard-to-obtain demonstrations, while reinforcement learning yields brittle, non-generalizable policies. We introduce VisuoTactile Local (ViTaL) policy learning, a framework that solves fine-grained manipulation tasks by decomposing them into two phases: a reaching phase, where a vision-language model (VLM) enables scene-level reasoning to localize the object of interest, and a local interaction phase, where a reusable, scene-agnostic ViTaL policy performs contact-rich manipulation using egocentric vision and tactile sensing. This approach is motivated by the observation that while scene context varies, the low-level interaction remains consistent across task instances. By training local policies once in a canonical setting, they can generalize via a localize-then-execute strategy. ViTaL achieves around 90% success on contact-rich tasks in unseen environments and is robust to distractors. ViTaL's effectiveness stems from three key insights: (1) foundation models for segmentation enable training robust visual encoders via behavior cloning; (2) these encoders improve the generalizability of policies learned using residual RL; and (3) tactile sensing significantly boosts performance in contact-rich tasks. Ablation studies validate each of these insights, and we demonstrate that ViTaL integrates well with high-level VLMs, enabling robust, reusable low-level skills. Results and videos are available at https://vitalprecise.github.io.