pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Personalized and Demand-Based Education Concept: Practical Tools for Control Engineers
Authors: Balint Varga, Lars Fischer, Levente Kovacs
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

This paper presents a personalized lecture concept using educational blocks and its demonstrative application in a new university lecture. Higher education faces daily challenges: deep and specialized knowledge is available from everywhere and accessible to almost everyone. University lecturers of specialized master courses confront the problem that their lectures are either too boring or too complex for the attending students. Additionally, curricula are changing more rapidly than they have in the past 10-30 years. The German education system comprises different educational forms, with universities providing less practical content. Consequently, many university students do not obtain the practical skills they should ideally gain through university lectures. Therefore, in this work, a new lecture concept is proposed based on the extension of the just-in-time teaching paradigm: Personalized and Demand-Based Education. This concept includes: 1) an initial assessment of students' backgrounds, 2) selecting the appropriate educational blocks, and 3) collecting ongoing feedback during the semester. The feedback was gathered via Pingo, ensuring anonymity for the students. Our concept was exemplarily tested in the new lecture "Practical Tools for Control Engineers" at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The initial results indicate that our proposed concept could be beneficial in addressing the current challenges in higher education.
ASHiTA: Automatic Scene-grounded HIerarchical Task Analysis
Authors: Yun Chang, Leonor Fermoselle, Duy Ta, Bernadette Bucher, Luca Carlone, Jiuguang Wang
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: graph construction

While recent work in scene reconstruction and understanding has made strides in grounding natural language to physical 3D environments, it is still challenging to ground abstract, high-level instructions to a 3D scene. High-level instructions might not explicitly invoke semantic elements in the scene, and even the process of breaking a high-level task into a set of more concrete subtasks, a process called hierarchical task analysis, is environment-dependent. In this work, we propose ASHiTA, the first framework that generates a task hierarchy grounded to a 3D scene graph by breaking down high-level tasks into grounded subtasks. ASHiTA alternates LLM-assisted hierarchical task analysis, to generate the task breakdown, with task-driven 3D scene graph construction to generate a suitable representation of the environment. Our experiments show that ASHiTA performs significantly better than LLM baselines in breaking down high-level tasks into environment-dependent subtasks and is additionally able to achieve grounding performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
CORTEX-AVD: A Framework for CORner Case Testing and EXploration in Autonomous Vehicle Development
Authors: Gabriel Kenji Godoy Shimanuki, Alexandre Moreira Nascimento, Lucio Flavio Vismari, Joao Batista Camargo Junior, Jorge Rady de Almeida Junior, Paulo Sergio Cugnasca
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Synthetic Data Generation

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) aim to improve traffic safety and efficiency by reducing human error. However, ensuring AVs reliability and safety is a challenging task when rare, high-risk traffic scenarios are considered. These 'Corner Cases' (CC) scenarios, such as unexpected vehicle maneuvers or sudden pedestrian crossings, must be safely and reliable dealt by AVs during their operations. But they arehard to be efficiently generated. Traditional CC generation relies on costly and risky real-world data acquisition, limiting scalability, and slowing research and development progress. Simulation-based techniques also face challenges, as modeling diverse scenarios and capturing all possible CCs is complex and time-consuming. To address these limitations in CC generation, this research introduces CORTEX-AVD, CORner Case Testing & EXploration for Autonomous Vehicles Development, an open-source framework that integrates the CARLA Simulator and Scenic to automatically generate CC from textual descriptions, increasing the diversity and automation of scenario modeling. Genetic Algorithms (GA) are used to optimize the scenario parameters in six case study scenarios, increasing the occurrence of high-risk events. Unlike previous methods, CORTEX-AVD incorporates a multi-factor fitness function that considers variables such as distance, time, speed, and collision likelihood. Additionally, the study provides a benchmark for comparing GA-based CC generation methods, contributing to a more standardized evaluation of synthetic data generation and scenario assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that the CORTEX-AVD framework significantly increases CC incidence while reducing the proportion of wasted simulations.
Neural Motion Simulator: Pushing the Limit of World Models in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Chenjie Hao, Weyl Lu, Yifan Xu, Yubei Chen
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

An embodied system must not only model the patterns of the external world but also understand its own motion dynamics. A motion dynamic model is essential for efficient skill acquisition and effective planning. In this work, we introduce the neural motion simulator (MoSim), a world model that predicts the future physical state of an embodied system based on current observations and actions. MoSim achieves state-of-the-art performance in physical state prediction and provides competitive performance across a range of downstream tasks. This works shows that when a world model is accurate enough and performs precise long-horizon predictions, it can facilitate efficient skill acquisition in imagined worlds and even enable zero-shot reinforcement learning. Furthermore, MoSim can transform any model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm into a model-based approach, effectively decoupling physical environment modeling from RL algorithm development. This separation allows for independent advancements in RL algorithms and world modeling, significantly improving sample efficiency and enhancing generalization capabilities. Our findings highlight that world models for motion dynamics is a promising direction for developing more versatile and capable embodied systems.
RayFronts: Open-Set Semantic Ray Frontiers for Online Scene Understanding and Exploration
Authors: Omar Alama, Avigyan Bhattacharya, Haoyang He, Seungchan Kim, Yuheng Qiu, Wenshan Wang, Cherie Ho, Nikhil Keetha, Sebastian Scherer
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Benchmarking, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Open-set semantic mapping is crucial for open-world robots. Current mapping approaches either are limited by the depth range or only map beyond-range entities in constrained settings, where overall they fail to combine within-range and beyond-range observations. Furthermore, these methods make a trade-off between fine-grained semantics and efficiency. We introduce RayFronts, a unified representation that enables both dense and beyond-range efficient semantic mapping. RayFronts encodes task-agnostic open-set semantics to both in-range voxels and beyond-range rays encoded at map boundaries, empowering the robot to reduce search volumes significantly and make informed decisions both within & beyond sensory range, while running at 8.84 Hz on an Orin AGX. Benchmarking the within-range semantics shows that RayFronts's fine-grained image encoding provides 1.34x zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation performance while improving throughput by 16.5x. Traditionally, online mapping performance is entangled with other system components, complicating evaluation. We propose a planner-agnostic evaluation framework that captures the utility for online beyond-range search and exploration, and show RayFronts reduces search volume 2.2x more efficiently than the closest online baselines.
GraspClutter6D: A Large-scale Real-world Dataset for Robust Perception and Grasping in Cluttered Scenes
Authors: Seunghyeok Back, Joosoon Lee, KangMin Kim, Heeseon Rho, Geonhyup Lee, Raeyoung Kang, Sangbeom Lee, Sangjun Noh, Youngjin Lee, Taeyeop Lee, Kyoobin Lee
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Robust grasping in cluttered environments remains an open challenge in robotics. While benchmark datasets have significantly advanced deep learning methods, they mainly focus on simplistic scenes with light occlusion and insufficient diversity, limiting their applicability to practical scenarios. We present GraspClutter6D, a large-scale real-world grasping dataset featuring: (1) 1,000 highly cluttered scenes with dense arrangements (14.1 objects/scene, 62.6\% occlusion), (2) comprehensive coverage across 200 objects in 75 environment configurations (bins, shelves, and tables) captured using four RGB-D cameras from multiple viewpoints, and (3) rich annotations including 736K 6D object poses and 9.3B feasible robotic grasps for 52K RGB-D images. We benchmark state-of-the-art segmentation, object pose estimation, and grasping detection methods to provide key insights into challenges in cluttered environments. Additionally, we validate the dataset's effectiveness as a training resource, demonstrating that grasping networks trained on GraspClutter6D significantly outperform those trained on existing datasets in both simulation and real-world experiments. The dataset, toolkit, and annotation tools are publicly available on our project website: https://sites.google.com/view/graspclutter6d.
Digital Gene: Learning about the Physical World through Analytic Concepts
Authors: Jianhua Sun, Cewu Lu
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, object-detection, Object Detection, Philosophy

Reviewing the progress in artificial intelligence over the past decade, various significant advances (e.g. object detection, image generation, large language models) have enabled AI systems to produce more semantically meaningful outputs and achieve widespread adoption in internet scenarios. Nevertheless, AI systems still struggle when it comes to understanding and interacting with the physical world. This reveals an important issue: relying solely on semantic-level concepts learned from internet data (e.g. texts, images) to understand the physical world is far from sufficient -- machine intelligence currently lacks an effective way to learn about the physical world. This research introduces the idea of analytic concept -- representing the concepts related to the physical world through programs of mathematical procedures, providing machine intelligence a portal to perceive, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Except for detailing the design philosophy and providing guidelines for the application of analytic concepts, this research also introduce about the infrastructure that has been built around analytic concepts. I aim for my research to contribute to addressing these questions: What is a proper abstraction of general concepts in the physical world for machine intelligence? How to systematically integrate structured priors with neural networks to constrain AI systems to comply with physical laws?
Learning global control of underactuated systems with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Niccolò Turcato, Marco Calì, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Acrobot, Model-based Reinforcement Learning

This short paper describes our proposed solution for the third edition of the "AI Olympics with RealAIGym" competition, held at ICRA 2025. We employed Monte-Carlo Probabilistic Inference for Learning Control (MC-PILCO), an MBRL algorithm recognized for its exceptional data efficiency across various low-dimensional robotic tasks, including cart-pole, ball \& plate, and Furuta pendulum systems. MC-PILCO optimizes a system dynamics model using interaction data, enabling policy refinement through simulation rather than direct system data optimization. This approach has proven highly effective in physical systems, offering greater data efficiency than Model-Free (MF) alternatives. Notably, MC-PILCO has previously won the first two editions of this competition, demonstrating its robustness in both simulated and real-world environments. Besides briefly reviewing the algorithm, we discuss the most critical aspects of the MC-PILCO implementation in the tasks at hand: learning a global policy for the pendubot and acrobot systems.
Optimal Sensor Placement Using Combinations of Hybrid Measurements for Source Localization
Authors: Kang Tang, Sheng Xu, YuQi Yang, He Kong, Yongsheng Ma
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

This paper focuses on static source localization employing different combinations of measurements, including time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA), received-signal-strength (RSS), angle-of-arrival (AOA), and time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements. Since sensor-source geometry significantly impacts localization accuracy, the strategies of optimal sensor placement are proposed systematically using combinations of hybrid measurements. Firstly, the relationship between sensor placement and source estimation accuracy is formulated by a derived Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB). Secondly, the A-optimality criterion, i.e., minimizing the trace of the CRB, is selected to calculate the smallest reachable estimation mean-squared-error (MSE) in a unified manner. Thirdly, the optimal sensor placement strategies are developed to achieve the optimal estimation bound. Specifically, the specific constraints of the optimal geometries deduced by specific measurement, i.e., TDOA, AOA, RSS, and TOA, are found and discussed theoretically. Finally, the new findings are verified by simulation studies.
CAFE-AD: Cross-Scenario Adaptive Feature Enhancement for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving
Authors: JunRui Zhang, Chenjie Wang, Jie Peng, Haoyu Li, Jianmin Ji, Yu Zhang, Yanyong Zhang
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Feature Importance, Imitation Learning, Trajectory Planning

Imitation learning based planning tasks on the nuPlan dataset have gained great interest due to their potential to generate human-like driving behaviors. However, open-loop training on the nuPlan dataset tends to cause causal confusion during closed-loop testing, and the dataset also presents a long-tail distribution of scenarios. These issues introduce challenges for imitation learning. To tackle these problems, we introduce CAFE-AD, a Cross-Scenario Adaptive Feature Enhancement for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving method, designed to enhance feature representation across various scenario types. We develop an adaptive feature pruning module that ranks feature importance to capture the most relevant information while reducing the interference of noisy information during training. Moreover, we propose a cross-scenario feature interpolation module that enhances scenario information to introduce diversity, enabling the network to alleviate over-fitting in dominant scenarios. We evaluate our method CAFE-AD on the challenging public nuPlan Test14-Hard closed-loop simulation benchmark. The results demonstrate that CAFE-AD outperforms state-of-the-art methods including rule-based and hybrid planners, and exhibits the potential in mitigating the impact of long-tail distribution within the dataset. Additionally, we further validate its effectiveness in real-world environments. The code and models will be made available at https://github.com/AlniyatRui/CAFE-AD.
OPAL: Encoding Causal Understanding of Physical Systems for Robot Learning
Authors: Daniel Tcheurekdjian, Joshua Klasmeier, Tom Cooney, Christopher McCann, Tyler Fenstermaker
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language-Action

We present OPAL (Operant Physical Agent with Language), a novel vision-language-action architecture that introduces topological constraints to flow matching for robotic control. To do so, we further introduce topological attention. Our approach models action sequences as topologically-structured representations with non-trivial constraints. Experimental results across 10 complex manipulation tasks demonstrate OPAL's superior performance compared to previous approaches, including Octo, OpenVLA, and ${\pi}$0. Our architecture achieves significant improvements in zero-shot performance without requiring task-specific fine-tuning, while reducing inference computational requirements by 42%. The theoretical guarantees provided by our topological approach result in more coherent long-horizon action sequences. Our results highlight the potential of constraining the search space of learning problems in robotics by deriving from fundamental physical laws, and the possibility of using topological attention to embed causal understanding into transformer architectures.
Controller Distillation Reduces Fragile Brain-Body Co-Adaptation and Enables Migrations in MAP-Elites
Authors: Alican Mertan, Nick Cheney
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Brain-body co-optimization suffers from fragile co-adaptation where brains become over-specialized for particular bodies, hindering their ability to transfer well to others. Evolutionary algorithms tend to discard such low-performing solutions, eliminating promising morphologies. Previous work considered applying MAP-Elites, where niche descriptors are based on morphological features, to promote better search over morphology space. In this work, we show that this approach still suffers from fragile co-adaptation: where a core mechanism of MAP-Elites, creating stepping stones through solutions that migrate from one niche to another, is disrupted. We suggest that this disruption occurs because the body mutations that move an offspring to a new morphological niche break the robots' fragile brain-body co-adaptation and thus significantly decrease the performance of those potential solutions -- reducing their likelihood of outcompeting an existing elite in that new niche. We utilize a technique, we call Pollination, that periodically replaces the controllers of certain solutions with a distilled controller with better generalization across morphologies to reduce fragile brain-body co-adaptation and thus promote MAP-Elites migrations. Pollination increases the success of body mutations and the number of migrations, resulting in better quality-diversity metrics. We believe we develop important insights that could apply to other domains where MAP-Elites is used.
Data-driven Fuzzy Control for Time-Optimal Aggressive Trajectory Following
Authors: August Phelps, Juan Augusto Paredes Salazar, Ankit Goel
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00

Optimal trajectories that minimize a user-defined cost function in dynamic systems require the solution of a two-point boundary value problem. The optimization process yields an optimal control sequence that depends on the initial conditions and system parameters. However, the optimal sequence may result in undesirable behavior if the system's initial conditions and parameters are erroneous. This work presents a data-driven fuzzy controller synthesis framework that is guided by a time-optimal trajectory for multicopter tracking problems. In particular, we consider an aggressive maneuver consisting of a mid-air flip and generate a time-optimal trajectory by numerically solving the two-point boundary value problem. A fuzzy controller consisting of a stabilizing controller near hover conditions and an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) controller, trained to mimic the time-optimal aggressive trajectory, is constructed using the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy framework.
Holistic Fusion: Task- and Setup-Agnostic Robot Localization and State Estimation with Factor Graphs
Authors: Julian Nubert, Turcan Tuna, Jonas Frey, Cesar Cadena, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Sensor Fusion, State Estimation

Seamless operation of mobile robots in challenging environments requires low-latency local motion estimation (e.g., dynamic maneuvers) and accurate global localization (e.g., wayfinding). While most existing sensor-fusion approaches are designed for specific scenarios, this work introduces a flexible open-source solution for task- and setup-agnostic multimodal sensor fusion that is distinguished by its generality and usability. Holistic Fusion formulates sensor fusion as a combined estimation problem of i) the local and global robot state and ii) a (theoretically unlimited) number of dynamic context variables, including automatic alignment of reference frames; this formulation fits countless real-world applications without any conceptual modifications. The proposed factor-graph solution enables the direct fusion of an arbitrary number of absolute, local, and landmark measurements expressed with respect to different reference frames by explicitly including them as states in the optimization and modeling their evolution as random walks. Moreover, local smoothness and consistency receive particular attention to prevent jumps in the robot state belief. HF enables low-latency and smooth online state estimation on typical robot hardware while simultaneously providing low-drift global localization at the IMU measurement rate. The efficacy of this released framework is demonstrated in five real-world scenarios on three robotic platforms, each with distinct task requirements.
Agent-Arena: A General Framework for Evaluating Control Algorithms
Authors: Halid Abdulrahim Kadi, Kasim Terzić
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Robotic research is inherently challenging, requiring expertise in diverse environments and control algorithms. Adapting algorithms to new environments often poses significant difficulties, compounded by the need for extensive hyper-parameter tuning in data-driven methods. To address these challenges, we present Agent-Arena, a Python framework designed to streamline the integration, replication, development, and testing of decision-making policies across a wide range of benchmark environments. Unlike existing frameworks, Agent-Arena is uniquely generalised to support all types of control algorithms and is adaptable to both simulation and real-robot scenarios. Please see our GitHub repository https://github.com/halid1020/agent-arena-v0.
Addressing Relative Degree Issues in Control Barrier Function Synthesis with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Lukas Brunke, SiQi Zhou, Francesco D'Orazio, Angela P. Schoellig
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

In robotics, control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filters are commonly used to enforce state constraints. A critical challenge arises when the relative degree of the CBF varies across the state space. This variability can create regions within the safe set where the control input becomes unconstrained. When implemented as a safety filter, this may result in chattering near the safety boundary and ultimately compromise system safety. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach for CBF synthesis by formulating it as solving a set of boundary value problems. The solutions to the boundary value problems are determined using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Our approach ensures that the synthesized CBFs maintain a constant relative degree across the set of admissible states, thereby preventing unconstrained control scenarios. We illustrate the approach in simulation and further verify it through real-world quadrotor experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving desired system safety properties.