pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LUMOS: Language-Conditioned Imitation Learning with World Models
Authors: Iman Nematollahi, Branton DeMoss, Akshay L Chandra, Nick Hawes, Wolfram Burgard, Ingmar Posner
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
OSMa-Bench: Evaluating Open Semantic Mapping Under Varying Lighting Conditions
Authors: Maxim Popov, Regina Kurkova, Mikhail Iumanov, Jaafar Mahmoud, Sergey Kolyubin
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition, Semantic Segmentation

Open Semantic Mapping (OSM) is a key technology in robotic perception, combining semantic segmentation and SLAM techniques. This paper introduces a dynamically configurable and highly automated LLM/LVLM-powered pipeline for evaluating OSM solutions called OSMa-Bench (Open Semantic Mapping Benchmark). The study focuses on evaluating state-of-the-art semantic mapping algorithms under varying indoor lighting conditions, a critical challenge in indoor environments. We introduce a novel dataset with simulated RGB-D sequences and ground truth 3D reconstructions, facilitating the rigorous analysis of mapping performance across different lighting conditions. Through experiments on leading models such as ConceptGraphs, BBQ and OpenScene, we evaluate the semantic fidelity of object recognition and segmentation. Additionally, we introduce a Scene Graph evaluation method to analyze the ability of models to interpret semantic structure. The results provide insights into the robustness of these models, forming future research directions for developing resilient and adaptable robotic systems. Our code is available at https://be2rlab.github.io/OSMa-Bench/.
SurgRAW: Multi-Agent Workflow with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Surgical Intelligence
Authors: Chang Han Low, Ziyue Wang, Tianyi Zhang, Zhitao Zeng, Zhu Zhuo, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Yueming Jin
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Instrument Recognition, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Integration of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in surgical intelligence is hindered by hallucinations, domain knowledge gaps, and limited understanding of task interdependencies within surgical scenes, undermining clinical reliability. While recent VLMs demonstrate strong general reasoning and thinking capabilities, they still lack the domain expertise and task-awareness required for precise surgical scene interpretation. Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can structure reasoning more effectively, current approaches rely on self-generated CoT steps, which often exacerbate inherent domain gaps and hallucinations. To overcome this, we present SurgRAW, a CoT-driven multi-agent framework that delivers transparent, interpretable insights for most tasks in robotic-assisted surgery. By employing specialized CoT prompts across five tasks: instrument recognition, action recognition, action prediction, patient data extraction, and outcome assessment, SurgRAW mitigates hallucinations through structured, domain-aware reasoning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is also integrated to external medical knowledge to bridge domain gaps and improve response reliability. Most importantly, a hierarchical agentic system ensures that CoT-embedded VLM agents collaborate effectively while understanding task interdependencies, with a panel discussion mechanism promotes logical consistency. To evaluate our method, we introduce SurgCoTBench, the first reasoning-based dataset with structured frame-level annotations. With comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed SurgRAW with 29.32% accuracy improvement over baseline VLMs on 12 robotic procedures, achieving the state-of-the-art performance and advancing explainable, trustworthy, and autonomous surgical assistance.
PRISM: Preference Refinement via Implicit Scene Modeling for 3D Vision-Language Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yirong Sun, Yanjun Chen
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We propose PRISM, a novel framework designed to overcome the limitations of 2D-based Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning (PBRL) by unifying 3D point cloud modeling and future-aware preference refinement. At its core, PRISM adopts a 3D Point Cloud-Language Model (3D-PC-LLM) to mitigate occlusion and viewpoint biases, ensuring more stable and spatially consistent preference signals. Additionally, PRISM leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to incorporate long-horizon considerations, thereby preventing the short-sighted feedback often seen in static preference comparisons. In contrast to conventional PBRL techniques, this integration of 3D perception and future-oriented reasoning leads to significant gains in preference agreement rates, faster policy convergence, and robust generalization across unseen robotic environments. Our empirical results, spanning tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous navigation, highlight PRISM's potential for real-world applications where precise spatial understanding and reliable long-term decision-making are critical. By bridging 3D geometric awareness with CoT-driven preference modeling, PRISM establishes a comprehensive foundation for scalable, human-aligned reinforcement learning.
GS-SDF: LiDAR-Augmented Gaussian Splatting and Neural SDF for Geometrically Consistent Rendering and Reconstruction
Authors: Jianheng Liu, Yunfei Wan, Bowen Wang, Chunran Zheng, Jiarong Lin, Fu Zhang
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Surface Reconstruction

Digital twins are fundamental to the development of autonomous driving and embodied artificial intelligence. However, achieving high-granularity surface reconstruction and high-fidelity rendering remains a challenge. Gaussian splatting offers efficient photorealistic rendering but struggles with geometric inconsistencies due to fragmented primitives and sparse observational data in robotics applications. Existing regularization methods, which rely on render-derived constraints, often fail in complex environments. Moreover, effectively integrating sparse LiDAR data with Gaussian splatting remains challenging. We propose a unified LiDAR-visual system that synergizes Gaussian splatting with a neural signed distance field. The accurate LiDAR point clouds enable a trained neural signed distance field to offer a manifold geometry field, This motivates us to offer an SDF-based Gaussian initialization for physically grounded primitive placement and a comprehensive geometric regularization for geometrically consistent rendering and reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate superior reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality across diverse trajectories. To benefit the community, the codes will be released at https://github.com/hku-mars/GS-SDF.
An Real-Sim-Real (RSR) Loop Framework for Generalizable Robotic Policy Transfer with Differentiable Simulation
Authors: Lu Shi, Yuxuan Xu, Shiyu Wang, Jinhao Huang, Wenhao Zhao, Yufei Jia, Zike Yan, Weibin Gu, Guyue Zhou
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo

The sim-to-real gap remains a critical challenge in robotics, hindering the deployment of algorithms trained in simulation to real-world systems. This paper introduces a novel Real-Sim-Real (RSR) loop framework leveraging differentiable simulation to address this gap by iteratively refining simulation parameters, aligning them with real-world conditions, and enabling robust and efficient policy transfer. A key contribution of our work is the design of an informative cost function that encourages the collection of diverse and representative real-world data, minimizing bias and maximizing the utility of each data point for simulation refinement. This cost function integrates seamlessly into existing reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., PPO, SAC) and ensures a balanced exploration of critical regions in the real domain. Furthermore, our approach is implemented on the versatile Mujoco MJX platform, and our framework is compatible with a wide range of robotic systems. Experimental results on several robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the sim-to-real gap, achieving high task performance and generalizability across diverse scenarios of both explicit and implicit environmental uncertainties.
IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yiyang Ling, Karan Owalekar, Oluwatobiloba Adesanya, Erdem Biyik, Daniel Seita
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a task without contact. In addition, contacts range from relatively benign (e.g., brushing a soft pillow) to more dangerous (e.g., toppling a glass vase). Due to this diversity, it is difficult to characterize which contacts may be acceptable or unacceptable. In this paper, we propose IMPACT, a novel motion planning framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer environment semantics, identifying which parts of the environment can best tolerate contact based on object properties and locations. Our approach uses the VLM's outputs to produce a dense 3D "cost map" that encodes contact tolerances and seamlessly integrates with standard motion planners. We perform experiments using 20 simulation and 10 real-world scenes and assess using task success rate, object displacements, and feedback from human evaluators. Our results over 3620 simulation and 200 real-world trials suggest that IMPACT enables efficient contact-rich motion planning in cluttered settings while outperforming alternative methods and ablations. Supplementary material is available at https://impact-planning.github.io/.
AhaRobot: A Low-Cost Open-Source Bimanual Mobile Manipulator for Embodied AI
Authors: Haiqin Cui, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

Navigation and manipulation in open-world environments remain unsolved challenges in the Embodied AI. The high cost of commercial mobile manipulation robots significantly limits research in real-world scenes. To address this issue, we propose AhaRobot, a low-cost and fully open-source dual-arm mobile manipulation robot system with a hardware cost of only $1,000 (excluding optional computational resources), which is less than 1/15 of the cost of popular mobile robots. The AhaRobot system consists of three components: (1) a novel low-cost hardware architecture primarily composed of off-the-shelf components, (2) an optimized control solution to enhance operational precision integrating dual-motor backlash control and static friction compensation, and (3) a simple remote teleoperation method RoboPilot. We use handles to control the dual arms and pedals for whole-body movement. The teleoperation process is low-burden and easy to operate, much like piloting. RoboPilot is designed for remote data collection in embodied scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that RoboPilot significantly enhances data collection efficiency in complex manipulation tasks, achieving a 30% increase compared to methods using 3D mouse and leader-follower systems. It also excels at completing extremely long-horizon tasks in one go. Furthermore, AhaRobot can be used to learn end-to-end policies and autonomously perform complex manipulation tasks, such as pen insertion and cleaning up the floor. We aim to build an affordable yet powerful platform to promote the development of embodied tasks on real devices, advancing more robust and reliable embodied AI. All hardware and software systems are available at https://aha-robot.github.io.
SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Xiangyu Shi, Zerui Li, Wenqi Lyu, Jiatong Xia, Feras Dayoub, Yanyuan Qiao, Qi Wu
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Vision and Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires agents to interpret natural language instructions while navigating unconstrained 3D spaces. Existing VLN-CE frameworks rely on a two-stage approach: a waypoint predictor to generate waypoints and a navigator to execute movements. However, current waypoint predictors struggle with spatial awareness, while navigators lack historical reasoning and backtracking capabilities, limiting adaptability. We propose a zero-shot VLN-CE framework integrating an enhanced waypoint predictor with a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based navigator. Our predictor employs a stronger vision encoder, masked cross-attention fusion, and an occupancy-aware loss for better waypoint quality. The navigator incorporates history-aware reasoning and adaptive path planning with backtracking, improving robustness. Experiments on R2R-CE and MP3D benchmarks show our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot settings, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully supervised methods. Real-world validation on Turtlebot 4 further highlights its adaptability.
V2X-ReaLO: An Open Online Framework and Dataset for Cooperative Perception in Reality
Authors: Hao Xiang, Zhaoliang Zheng, Xin Xia, Seth Z. Zhao, Letian Gao, Zewei Zhou, Tianhui Cai, Yun Zhang, Jiaqi Ma
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Cooperative perception enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication holds significant promise for enhancing the perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles, allowing them to overcome occlusions and extend their field of view. However, existing research predominantly relies on simulated environments or static datasets, leaving the feasibility and effectiveness of V2X cooperative perception especially for intermediate fusion in real-world scenarios largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce V2X-ReaLO, an open online cooperative perception framework deployed on real vehicles and smart infrastructure that integrates early, late, and intermediate fusion methods within a unified pipeline and provides the first practical demonstration of online intermediate fusion's feasibility and performance under genuine real-world conditions. Additionally, we present an open benchmark dataset specifically designed to assess the performance of online cooperative perception systems. This new dataset extends V2X-Real dataset to dynamic, synchronized ROS bags and provides 25,028 test frames with 6,850 annotated key frames in challenging urban scenarios. By enabling real-time assessments of perception accuracy and communication lantency under dynamic conditions, V2X-ReaLO sets a new benchmark for advancing and optimizing cooperative perception systems in real-world applications. The codes and datasets will be released to further advance the field.
Post-disaster building indoor damage and survivor detection using autonomous path planning and deep learning with unmanned aerial vehicles
Authors: Xiao Pan, Sina Tavasoli, T. Y. Yang, Sina Poorghasem
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

Rapid response to natural disasters such as earthquakes is a crucial element in ensuring the safety of civil infrastructures and minimizing casualties. Traditional manual inspection is labour-intensive, time-consuming, and can be dangerous for inspectors and rescue workers. This paper proposed an autonomous inspection approach for structural damage inspection and survivor detection in the post-disaster building indoor scenario, which incorporates an autonomous navigation method, deep learning-based damage and survivor detection method, and a customized low-cost micro aerial vehicle (MAV) with onboard sensors. Experimental studies in a pseudo-post-disaster office building have shown the proposed methodology can achieve high accuracy in structural damage inspection and survivor detection. Overall, the proposed inspection approach shows great potential to improve the efficiency of existing manual post-disaster building inspection.
ES-Parkour: Advanced Robot Parkour with Bio-inspired Event Camera and Spiking Neural Network
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Jiahang Cao, Jingkai Sun, Yecheng Shao, Gang Han, Wen Zhao, Yijie Guo, Renjing Xu
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, quadruped robotics has advanced significantly, particularly in perception and motion control via reinforcement learning, enabling complex motions in challenging environments. Visual sensors like depth cameras enhance stability and robustness but face limitations, such as low operating frequencies relative to joint control and sensitivity to lighting, which hinder outdoor deployment. Additionally, deep neural networks in sensor and control systems increase computational demands. To address these issues, we introduce spiking neural networks (SNNs) and event cameras to perform a challenging quadruped parkour task. Event cameras capture dynamic visual data, while SNNs efficiently process spike sequences, mimicking biological perception. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms traditional models, achieving excellent parkour performance with just 11.7% of the energy consumption of an artificial neural network (ANN)-based model, yielding an 88.3% energy reduction. By integrating event cameras with SNNs, our work advances robotic reinforcement learning and opens new possibilities for applications in demanding environments.
CleverDistiller: Simple and Spatially Consistent Cross-modal Distillation
Authors: Hariprasath Govindarajan, Maciej K. Wozniak, Marvin Klingner, Camille Maurice, B Ravi Kiran, Senthil Yogamani
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Spatial Reasoning, Transfer Learning

Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINO have led to a paradigm shift in 2D camera-based perception towards extracting generalized features to support many downstream tasks. Recent works introduce self-supervised cross-modal knowledge distillation (KD) as a way to transfer these powerful generalization capabilities into 3D LiDAR-based models. However, they either rely on highly complex distillation losses, pseudo-semantic maps, or limit KD to features useful for semantic segmentation only. In this work, we propose CleverDistiller, a self-supervised, cross-modal 2D-to-3D KD framework introducing a set of simple yet effective design choices: Unlike contrastive approaches relying on complex loss design choices, our method employs a direct feature similarity loss in combination with a multi layer perceptron (MLP) projection head to allow the 3D network to learn complex semantic dependencies throughout the projection. Crucially, our approach does not depend on pseudo-semantic maps, allowing for direct knowledge transfer from a VFM without explicit semantic supervision. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary self-supervised spatial task of occupancy prediction to enhance the semantic knowledge, obtained from a VFM through KD, with 3D spatial reasoning capabilities. Experiments on standard autonomous driving benchmarks for 2D-to-3D KD demonstrate that CleverDistiller achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and 3D object detection (3DOD) by up to 10% mIoU, especially when fine tuning on really low data amounts, showing the effectiveness of our simple yet powerful KD strategy
SE(3)-Equivariant Robot Learning and Control: A Tutorial Survey
Authors: Joohwan Seo, Soochul Yoo, Junwoo Chang, Hyunseok An, Hyunwoo Ryu, Soomi Lee, Arvind Kruthiventy, Jongeun Choi, Roberto Horowitz
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Imitation Learning

Recent advances in deep learning and Transformers have driven major breakthroughs in robotics by employing techniques such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and LLM-based multimodal perception and decision-making. However, conventional deep learning and Transformer models often struggle to process data with inherent symmetries and invariances, typically relying on large datasets or extensive data augmentation. Equivariant neural networks overcome these limitations by explicitly integrating symmetry and invariance into their architectures, leading to improved efficiency and generalization. This tutorial survey reviews a wide range of equivariant deep learning and control methods for robotics, from classic to state-of-the-art, with a focus on SE(3)-equivariant models that leverage the natural 3D rotational and translational symmetries in visual robotic manipulation and control design. Using unified mathematical notation, we begin by reviewing key concepts from group theory, along with matrix Lie groups and Lie algebras. We then introduce foundational group-equivariant neural network design and show how the group-equivariance can be obtained through their structure. Next, we discuss the applications of SE(3)-equivariant neural networks in robotics in terms of imitation learning and reinforcement learning. The SE(3)-equivariant control design is also reviewed from the perspective of geometric control. Finally, we highlight the challenges and future directions of equivariant methods in developing more robust, sample-efficient, and multi-modal real-world robotic systems.