pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model
Authors: Jun Cen, Chaohui Yu, Hangjie Yuan, Yuming Jiang, Siteng Huang, Jiayan Guo, Xin Li, Yibing Song, Hao Luo, Fan Wang, Deli Zhao, Hao Chen
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, model, Vision-Language-Action

We present WorldVLA, an autoregressive action world model that unifies action and image understanding and generation. Our WorldVLA intergrates Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model and world model in one single framework. The world model predicts future images by leveraging both action and image understanding, with the purpose of learning the underlying physics of the environment to improve action generation. Meanwhile, the action model generates the subsequent actions based on image observations, aiding in visual understanding and in turn helps visual generation of the world model. We demonstrate that WorldVLA outperforms standalone action and world models, highlighting the mutual enhancement between the world model and the action model. In addition, we find that the performance of the action model deteriorates when generating sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner. This phenomenon can be attributed to the model's limited generalization capability for action prediction, leading to the propagation of errors from earlier actions to subsequent ones. To address this issue, we propose an attention mask strategy that selectively masks prior actions during the generation of the current action, which shows significant performance improvement in the action chunk generation task.
Flow-Based Single-Step Completion for Efficient and Expressive Policy Learning
Authors: Prajwal Koirala, Cody Fleming
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Decision Making, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Generative models such as diffusion and flow-matching offer expressive policies for offline reinforcement learning (RL) by capturing rich, multimodal action distributions, but their iterative sampling introduces high inference costs and training instability due to gradient propagation across sampling steps. We propose the \textit{Single-Step Completion Policy} (SSCP), a generative policy trained with an augmented flow-matching objective to predict direct completion vectors from intermediate flow samples, enabling accurate, one-shot action generation. In an off-policy actor-critic framework, SSCP combines the expressiveness of generative models with the training and inference efficiency of unimodal policies, without requiring long backpropagation chains. Our method scales effectively to offline, offline-to-online, and online RL settings, offering substantial gains in speed and adaptability over diffusion-based baselines. We further extend SSCP to goal-conditioned RL, enabling flat policies to exploit subgoal structures without explicit hierarchical inference. SSCP achieves strong results across standard offline RL and behavior cloning benchmarks, positioning it as a versatile, expressive, and efficient framework for deep RL and sequential decision-making.
EndoFlow-SLAM: Real-Time Endoscopic SLAM with Flow-Constrained Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Taoyu Wu, Yiyi Miao, Zhuoxiao Li, Haocheng Zhao, Kang Dang, Jionglong Su, Limin Yu, Haoang Li
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction, Novel View Synthesis, Optical Flow Estimation, Pose Estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Efficient three-dimensional reconstruction and real-time visualization are critical in surgical scenarios such as endoscopy. In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable performance in efficient 3D reconstruction and rendering. Most 3DGS-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods only rely on the appearance constraints for optimizing both 3DGS and camera poses. However, in endoscopic scenarios, the challenges include photometric inconsistencies caused by non-Lambertian surfaces and dynamic motion from breathing affects the performance of SLAM systems. To address these issues, we additionally introduce optical flow loss as a geometric constraint, which effectively constrains both the 3D structure of the scene and the camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a depth regularisation strategy to mitigate the problem of photometric inconsistencies and ensure the validity of 3DGS depth rendering in endoscopic scenes. In addition, to improve scene representation in the SLAM system, we improve the 3DGS refinement strategy by focusing on viewpoints corresponding to Keyframes with suboptimal rendering quality frames, achieving better rendering results. Extensive experiments on the C3VD static dataset and the StereoMIS dynamic dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and pose estimation, exhibiting high performance in both static and dynamic surgical scenes. The source code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.
ToosiCubix: Monocular 3D Cuboid Labeling via Vehicle Part Annotations
Authors: Behrooz Nasihatkon, Hossein Resani, Amirreza Mehrzadian
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

Many existing methods for 3D cuboid annotation of vehicles rely on expensive and carefully calibrated camera-LiDAR or stereo setups, limiting their accessibility for large-scale data collection. We introduce ToosiCubix, a simple yet powerful approach for annotating ground-truth cuboids using only monocular images and intrinsic camera parameters. Our method requires only about 10 user clicks per vehicle, making it highly practical for adding 3D annotations to existing datasets originally collected without specialized equipment. By annotating specific features (e.g., wheels, car badge, symmetries) across different vehicle parts, we accurately estimate each vehicle's position, orientation, and dimensions up to a scale ambiguity (8 DoF). The geometric constraints are formulated as an optimization problem, which we solve using a coordinate descent strategy, alternating between Perspective-n-Points (PnP) and least-squares subproblems. To handle common ambiguities such as scale and unobserved dimensions, we incorporate probabilistic size priors, enabling 9 DoF cuboid placements. We validate our annotations against the KITTI and Cityscapes3D datasets, demonstrating that our method offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for high-quality 3D cuboid annotation.
Real-Time ESFP: Estimating, Smoothing, Filtering, and Pose-Mapping
Authors: Qifei Cui, Yuang Zhou, Ruichen Deng
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This paper presents ESFP, an end-to-end pipeline that converts monocular RGB video into executable joint trajectories for a low-cost 4-DoF desktop arm. ESFP comprises four sequential modules. (1) Estimating: ROMP lifts each frame to a 24-joint 3-D skeleton. (2) Smoothing: the proposed HPSTM-a sequence-to-sequence Transformer with self-attention-combines long-range temporal context with a differentiable forward-kinematics decoder, enforcing constant bone lengths and anatomical plausibility while jointly predicting joint means and full covariances. (3) Filtering: root-normalized trajectories are variance-weighted according to HPSTM's uncertainty estimates, suppressing residual noise. (4) Pose-Mapping: a geometric retargeting layer transforms shoulder-elbow-wrist triples into the uArm's polar workspace, preserving wrist orientation.
World-aware Planning Narratives Enhance Large Vision-Language Model Planner
Authors: Junhao Shi, Zhaoye Fei, Siyin Wang, Qipeng Guo, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Spatial Reasoning, Visual Reasoning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show promise for embodied planning tasks but struggle with complex scenarios involving unfamiliar environments and multi-step goals. Current approaches rely on environment-agnostic imitation learning that disconnects instructions from environmental contexts, causing models to struggle with context-sensitive instructions and rely on supplementary cues rather than visual reasoning during long-horizon interactions. In this work, we propose World-Aware Planning Narrative Enhancement (WAP), a framework that infuses LVLMs with comprehensive environmental understanding through four cognitive capabilities (visual appearance modeling, spatial reasoning, functional abstraction, and syntactic grounding) while developing and evaluating models using only raw visual observations through curriculum learning. Evaluations on the EB-ALFRED benchmark demonstrate substantial improvements, with Qwen2.5-VL achieving a 60.7 absolute improvement in task success rates, particularly in commonsense reasoning (+60.0) and long-horizon planning (+70.0). Notably, our enhanced open-source models outperform proprietary systems like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet by a large margin.
Unlocking Constraints: Source-Free Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation
Authors: Yihong Cao, Jiaming Zhang, Xu Zheng, Hao Shi, Kunyu Peng, Hang Liu, Kailun Yang, HUI ZHANG
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Panoramic image processing is essential for omni-context perception, yet faces constraints like distortions, perspective occlusions, and limited annotations. Previous unsupervised domain adaptation methods transfer knowledge from labeled pinhole data to unlabeled panoramic images, but they require access to source pinhole data. To address these, we introduce a more practical task, i.e., Source-Free Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation (SFOASS), and propose its first solution, called UNconstrained Learning Omni-Context Knowledge (UNLOCK). Specifically, UNLOCK includes two key modules: Omni Pseudo-Labeling Learning and Amodal-Driven Context Learning. While adapting without relying on source data or target labels, this framework enhances models to achieve segmentation with 360{\deg} viewpoint coverage and occlusion-aware reasoning. Furthermore, we benchmark the proposed SFOASS task through both real-to-real and synthetic-to-real adaptation settings. Experimental results show that our source-free method achieves performance comparable to source-dependent methods, yielding state-of-the-art scores of 10.9 in mAAP and 11.6 in mAP, along with an absolute improvement of +4.3 in mAPQ over the source-only method. All data and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yihong-97/UNLOCK.
Out-of-Distribution Semantic Occupancy Prediction
Authors: Yuheng Zhang, Mengfei Duan, Kunyu Peng, Yuhang Wang, Ruiping Liu, Fei Teng, Kai Luo, Zhiyong Li, Kailun Yang
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction, Autonomous Driving, Prediction

3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction is crucial for autonomous driving, providing a dense, semantically rich environmental representation. However, existing methods focus on in-distribution scenes, making them susceptible to Out-of-Distribution (OoD) objects and long-tail distributions, which increases the risk of undetected anomalies and misinterpretations, posing safety hazards. To address these challenges, we introduce Out-of-Distribution Semantic Occupancy Prediction, targeting OoD detection in 3D voxel space. To fill the gaps in the dataset, we propose a Synthetic Anomaly Integration Pipeline that injects synthetic anomalies while preserving realistic spatial and occlusion patterns, enabling the creation of two datasets: VAA-KITTI and VAA-KITTI-360. We introduce OccOoD, a novel framework integrating OoD detection into 3D semantic occupancy prediction, with Voxel-BEV Progressive Fusion (VBPF) leveraging an RWKV-based branch to enhance OoD detection via geometry-semantic fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that OccOoD achieves state-of-the-art OoD detection with an AuROC of 67.34% and an AuPRCr of 29.21% within a 1.2m region, while maintaining competitive occupancy prediction performance. The established datasets and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/OccOoD.
PCF-Grasp: Converting Point Completion to Geometry Feature to Enhance 6-DoF Grasp
Authors: Yaofeng Cheng, Fusheng Zha, Wei Guo, Pengfei Wang, Chao Zeng, Lining Sun, Chenguang Yang
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

The 6-Degree of Freedom (DoF) grasp method based on point clouds has shown significant potential in enabling robots to grasp target objects. However, most existing methods are based on the point clouds (2.5D points) generated from single-view depth images. These point clouds only have one surface side of the object providing incomplete geometry information, which mislead the grasping algorithm to judge the shape of the target object, resulting in low grasping accuracy. Humans can accurately grasp objects from a single view by leveraging their geometry experience to estimate object shapes. Inspired by humans, we propose a novel 6-DoF grasping framework that converts the point completion results as object shape features to train the 6-DoF grasp network. Here, point completion can generate approximate complete points from the 2.5D points similar to the human geometry experience, and converting it as shape features is the way to utilize it to improve grasp efficiency. Furthermore, due to the gap between the network generation and actual execution, we integrate a score filter into our framework to select more executable grasp proposals for the real robot. This enables our method to maintain a high grasp quality in any camera viewpoint. Extensive experiments demonstrate that utilizing complete point features enables the generation of significantly more accurate grasp proposals and the inclusion of a score filter greatly enhances the credibility of real-world robot grasping. Our method achieves a 17.8\% success rate higher than the state-of-the-art method in real-world experiments.
GoIRL: Graph-Oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Muleilan Pei, Shaoshuai Shi, Lu Zhang, Peiliang Li, Shaojie Shen
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Motion Forecasting, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction for surrounding agents is a challenging task in autonomous driving due to its inherent uncertainty and underlying multimodality. Unlike prevailing data-driven methods that primarily rely on supervised learning, in this paper, we introduce a novel Graph-oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning (GoIRL) framework, which is an IRL-based predictor equipped with vectorized context representations. We develop a feature adaptor to effectively aggregate lane-graph features into grid space, enabling seamless integration with the maximum entropy IRL paradigm to infer the reward distribution and obtain the policy that can be sampled to induce multiple plausible plans. Furthermore, conditioned on the sampled plans, we implement a hierarchical parameterized trajectory generator with a refinement module to enhance prediction accuracy and a probability fusion strategy to boost prediction confidence. Extensive experimental results showcase our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale Argoverse & nuScenes motion forecasting benchmarks but also exhibits superior generalization abilities compared to existing supervised models.
V2X-REALM: Vision-Language Model-Based Robust End-to-End Cooperative Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Long-Tail Modeling
Authors: Junwei You, Pei Li, Zhuoyu Jiang, Zilin Huang, Rui Gan, Haotian Shi, Bin Ran
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Ensuring robust planning and decision-making under rare, diverse, and visually degraded long-tail scenarios remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving in urban environments. This issue becomes more critical in cooperative settings, where vehicles and infrastructure jointly perceive and reason across complex environments. To address this challenge, we propose V2X-REALM, a vision-language model (VLM)-based framework with adaptive multimodal learning for robust cooperative autonomous driving under long-tail scenarios. V2X-REALM introduces three core innovations: (i) a prompt-driven long-tail scenario generation and evaluation pipeline that leverages foundation models to synthesize realistic long-tail conditions such as snow and fog across vehicle- and infrastructure-side views, enriching training diversity efficiently; (ii) a gated multi-scenario adaptive attention module that modulates the visual stream using scenario priors to recalibrate ambiguous or corrupted features; and (iii) a multi-task scenario-aware contrastive learning objective that improves multimodal alignment and promotes cross-scenario feature separability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V2X-REALM significantly outperforms existing baselines in robustness, semantic reasoning, safety, and planning accuracy under complex, challenging driving conditions, advancing the scalability of end-to-end cooperative autonomous driving.
ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation
Authors: Shruti Bansal, Wenshan Wang, Yifei Liu, Parv Maheshwari
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Depth Estimation, Image-to-Image Translation, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Segmentation

Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.
Parallels Between VLA Model Post-Training and Human Motor Learning: Progress, Challenges, and Trends
Authors: Tian-Yu Xiang, Ao-Qun Jin, Xiao-Hu Zhou, Mei-Jiang Gui, Xiao-Liang Xie, Shi-Qi Liu, Shuang-Yi Wang, Sheng-Bin Duan, Fu-Chao Xie, Wen-Kai Wang, Si-Cheng Wang, Ling-Yun Li, Tian Tu, Zeng-Guang Hou
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Vision-Language-Action

Vision-language-action (VLA) models extend vision-language models (VLM) by integrating action generation modules for robotic manipulation. Leveraging strengths of VLM in vision perception and instruction understanding, VLA models exhibit promising generalization across diverse manipulation tasks. However, applications demanding high precision and accuracy reveal performance gaps without further adaptation. Evidence from multiple domains highlights the critical role of post-training to align foundational models with downstream applications, spurring extensive research on post-training VLA models. VLA model post-training aims to address the challenge of improving an embodiment's ability to interact with the environment for the given tasks, analogous to the process of humans motor skills acquisition. Accordingly, this paper reviews post-training strategies for VLA models through the lens of human motor learning, focusing on three dimensions: environments, embodiments, and tasks. A structured taxonomy is introduced aligned with human learning mechanisms: (1) enhancing environmental perception, (2) improving embodiment awareness, (3) deepening task comprehension, and (4) multi-component integration. Finally, key challenges and trends in post-training VLA models are identified, establishing a conceptual framework to guide future research. This work delivers both a comprehensive overview of current VLA model post-training methods from a human motor learning perspective and practical insights for VLA model development. (Project website: https://github.com/AoqunJin/Awesome-VLA-Post-Training)
Model-Based Real-Time Pose and Sag Estimation of Overhead Power Lines Using LiDAR for Drone Inspection
Authors: Alexandre Girard, Steven A. Parkison, Philippe Hamelin
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Drones can inspect overhead power lines while they remain energized, significantly simplifying the inspection process. However, localizing a drone relative to all conductors using an onboard LiDAR sensor presents several challenges: (1) conductors provide minimal surface for LiDAR beams limiting the number of conductor points in a scan, (2) not all conductors are consistently detected, and (3) distinguishing LiDAR points corresponding to conductors from other objects, such as trees and pylons, is difficult. This paper proposes an estimation approach that minimizes the error between LiDAR measurements and a single geometric model representing the entire conductor array, rather than tracking individual conductors separately. Experimental results, using data from a power line drone inspection, demonstrate that this method achieves accurate tracking, with a solver converging under 50 ms per frame, even in the presence of partial observations, noise, and outliers. A sensitivity analysis shows that the estimation approach can tolerate up to twice as many outlier points as valid conductors measurements.
Steering Your Diffusion Policy with Latent Space Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Andrew Wagenmaker, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Yunchu Zhang, Seohong Park, Waleed Yagoub, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta, Sergey Levine
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Robotic control policies learned from human demonstrations have achieved impressive results in many real-world applications. However, in scenarios where initial performance is not satisfactory, as is often the case in novel open-world settings, such behavioral cloning (BC)-learned policies typically require collecting additional human demonstrations to further improve their behavior -- an expensive and time-consuming process. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of enabling autonomous online policy improvement, but often falls short of achieving this due to the large number of samples it typically requires. In this work we take steps towards enabling fast autonomous adaptation of BC-trained policies via efficient real-world RL. Focusing in particular on diffusion policies -- a state-of-the-art BC methodology -- we propose diffusion steering via reinforcement learning (DSRL): adapting the BC policy by running RL over its latent-noise space. We show that DSRL is highly sample efficient, requires only black-box access to the BC policy, and enables effective real-world autonomous policy improvement. Furthermore, DSRL avoids many of the challenges associated with finetuning diffusion policies, obviating the need to modify the weights of the base policy at all. We demonstrate DSRL on simulated benchmarks, real-world robotic tasks, and for adapting pretrained generalist policies, illustrating its sample efficiency and effective performance at real-world policy improvement.