pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ARC-Calib: Autonomous Markerless Camera-to-Robot Calibration via Exploratory Robot Motions
Authors: Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Yiting Chen, Joshua T. Grace, Aaron M. Dollar, Kaiyu Hang
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Robot Manipulation

Camera-to-robot (also known as eye-to-hand) calibration is a critical component of vision-based robot manipulation. Traditional marker-based methods often require human intervention for system setup. Furthermore, existing autonomous markerless calibration methods typically rely on pre-trained robot tracking models that impede their application on edge devices and require fine-tuning for novel robot embodiments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a model-based markerless camera-to-robot calibration framework, ARC-Calib, that is fully autonomous and generalizable across diverse robots and scenarios without requiring extensive data collection or learning. First, exploratory robot motions are introduced to generate easily trackable trajectory-based visual patterns in the camera's image frames. Then, a geometric optimization framework is proposed to exploit the coplanarity and collinearity constraints from the observed motions to iteratively refine the estimated calibration result. Our approach eliminates the need for extra effort in either environmental marker setup or data collection and model training, rendering it highly adaptable across a wide range of real-world autonomous systems. Extensive experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate its robustness and generalizability.
These Magic Moments: Differentiable Uncertainty Quantification of Radiance Field Models
Authors: Parker Ewen, Hao Chen, Seth Isaacson, Joey Wilson, Katherine A. Skinner, Ram Vasudevan
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Scene Understanding, Uncertainty Quantification

This paper introduces a novel approach to uncertainty quantification for radiance fields by leveraging higher-order moments of the rendering equation. Uncertainty quantification is crucial for downstream tasks including view planning and scene understanding, where safety and robustness are paramount. However, the high dimensionality and complexity of radiance fields pose significant challenges for uncertainty quantification, limiting the use of these uncertainty quantification methods in high-speed decision-making. We demonstrate that the probabilistic nature of the rendering process enables efficient and differentiable computation of higher-order moments for radiance field outputs, including color, depth, and semantic predictions. Our method outperforms existing radiance field uncertainty estimation techniques while offering a more direct, computationally efficient, and differentiable formulation without the need for post-processing. Beyond uncertainty quantification, we also illustrate the utility of our approach in downstream applications such as next-best-view (NBV) selection and active ray sampling for neural radiance field training. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world scenes confirm the efficacy of our approach, which achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining simplicity.
SuperPC: A Single Diffusion Model for Point Cloud Completion, Upsampling, Denoising, and Colorization
Authors: Yi Du, Zhipeng Zhao, Shaoshu Su, Sharath Golluri, Haoze Zheng, Runmao Yao, Chen Wang
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Colorization, Denoising, Point Cloud Completion

Point cloud (PC) processing tasks-such as completion, upsampling, denoising, and colorization-are crucial in applications like autonomous driving and 3D reconstruction. Despite substantial advancements, prior approaches often address each of these tasks independently, with separate models focused on individual issues. However, this isolated approach fails to account for the fact that defects like incompleteness, low resolution, noise, and lack of color frequently coexist, with each defect influencing and correlating with the others. Simply applying these models sequentially can lead to error accumulation from each model, along with increased computational costs. To address these challenges, we introduce SuperPC, the first unified diffusion model capable of concurrently handling all four tasks. Our approach employs a three-level-conditioned diffusion framework, enhanced by a novel spatial-mix-fusion strategy, to leverage the correlations among these four defects for simultaneous, efficient processing. We show that SuperPC outperforms the state-of-the-art specialized models as well as their combination on all four individual tasks.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning in a Real World Robot
Authors: Ali Parsaee, Fahim Shahriar, Chuxin He, Ruiqing Tan
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent times, reinforcement learning (RL) with physical robots has attracted the attention of a wide range of researchers. However, state-of-the-art RL algorithms do not consider that physical environments do not wait for the RL agent to make decisions or updates. RL agents learn by periodically conducting computationally expensive gradient updates. When decision-making and gradient update tasks are carried out sequentially by the RL agent in a physical robot, it significantly increases the agent's response time. In a rapidly changing environment, this increased response time may be detrimental to the performance of the learning agent. Asynchronous RL methods, which separate the computation of decision-making and gradient updates, are a potential solution to this problem. However, only a few comparisons between asynchronous and synchronous RL have been made with physical robots. For this reason, the exact performance benefits of using asynchronous RL methods over synchronous RL methods are still unclear. In this study, we provide a performance comparison between asynchronous and synchronous RL using a physical robotic arm called Franka Emika Panda. Our experiments show that the agents learn faster and attain significantly more returns using asynchronous RL. Our experiments also demonstrate that the learning agent with a faster response time performs better than the agent with a slower response time, even if the agent with a slower response time performs a higher number of gradient updates.
PANDORA: Diffusion Policy Learning for Dexterous Robotic Piano Playing
Authors: Yanjia Huang, Renjie Li, Zhengzhong Tu
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We present PANDORA, a novel diffusion-based policy learning framework designed specifically for dexterous robotic piano performance. Our approach employs a conditional U-Net architecture enhanced with FiLM-based global conditioning, which iteratively denoises noisy action sequences into smooth, high-dimensional trajectories. To achieve precise key execution coupled with expressive musical performance, we design a composite reward function that integrates task-specific accuracy, audio fidelity, and high-level semantic feedback from a large language model (LLM) oracle. The LLM oracle assesses musical expressiveness and stylistic nuances, enabling dynamic, hand-specific reward adjustments. Further augmented by a residual inverse-kinematics refinement policy, PANDORA achieves state-of-the-art performance in the ROBOPIANIST environment, significantly outperforming baselines in both precision and expressiveness. Ablation studies validate the critical contributions of diffusion-based denoising and LLM-driven semantic feedback in enhancing robotic musicianship. Videos available at: https://taco-group.github.io/PANDORA
Learning-based 3D Reconstruction in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Liewen Liao, Weihao Yan, Ming Yang, Songan Zhang
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Scene Understanding

Learning-based 3D reconstruction has emerged as a transformative technique in autonomous driving, enabling precise modeling of both dynamic and static environments through advanced neural representations. Despite data augmentation, 3D reconstruction inspires pioneering solution for vital tasks in the field of autonomous driving, such as scene understanding and closed-loop simulation. We investigates the details of 3D reconstruction and conducts a multi-perspective, in-depth analysis of recent advancements. Specifically, we first provide a systematic introduction of preliminaries, including data modalities, benchmarks and technical preliminaries of learning-based 3D reconstruction, facilitating instant identification of suitable methods according to sensor suites. Then, we systematically review learning-based 3D reconstruction methods in autonomous driving, categorizing approaches by subtasks and conducting multi-dimensional analysis and summary to establish a comprehensive technical reference. The development trends and existing challenges are summarized in the context of learning-based 3D reconstruction in autonomous driving. We hope that our review will inspire future researches.
Robot Policy Transfer with Online Demonstrations: An Active Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Muhan Hou, Koen Hindriks, A. E. Eiben, Kim Baraka
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Transfer Learning (TL) is a powerful tool that enables robots to transfer learned policies across different environments, tasks, or embodiments. To further facilitate this process, efforts have been made to combine it with Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) for more flexible and efficient policy transfer. However, these approaches are almost exclusively limited to offline demonstrations collected before policy transfer starts, which may suffer from the intrinsic issue of covariance shift brought by LfD and harm the performance of policy transfer. Meanwhile, extensive work in the learning-from-scratch setting has shown that online demonstrations can effectively alleviate covariance shift and lead to better policy performance with improved sample efficiency. This work combines these insights to introduce online demonstrations into a policy transfer setting. We present Policy Transfer with Online Demonstrations, an active LfD algorithm for policy transfer that can optimize the timing and content of queries for online episodic expert demonstrations under a limited demonstration budget. We evaluate our method in eight robotic scenarios, involving policy transfer across diverse environment characteristics, task objectives, and robotic embodiments, with the aim to transfer a trained policy from a source task to a related but different target task. The results show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines in terms of average success rate and sample efficiency, compared to two canonical LfD methods with offline demonstrations and one active LfD method with online demonstrations. Additionally, we conduct preliminary sim-to-real tests of the transferred policy on three transfer scenarios in the real-world environment, demonstrating the policy effectiveness on a real robot manipulator.
Exploring 3D Activity Reasoning and Planning: From Implicit Human Intentions to Route-Aware Planning
Authors: Xueying Jiang, Wenhao Li, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Segmentation, Task Planning

3D activity reasoning and planning has attracted increasing attention in human-robot interaction and embodied AI thanks to the recent advance in multimodal learning. However, most existing studies are facing two common challenges: 1) heavy reliance on explicit instructions with little reasoning on implicit user intention; 2) negligence of inter-step route planning on robot moves. We address the above challenges by proposing 3D activity reasoning and planning, a novel 3D task that reasons the intended activities from implicit instructions and decomposes them into steps with inter-step routes and planning under the guidance of fine-grained 3D object shapes and locations from scene segmentation. We tackle the new 3D task from two perspectives. First, we construct ReasonPlan3D, a large-scale benchmark that covers diverse 3D scenes with rich implicit instructions and detailed annotations for multi-step task planning, inter-step route planning, and fine-grained segmentation. Second, we design a novel framework that introduces progressive plan generation with contextual consistency across multiple steps, as well as a scene graph that is updated dynamically for capturing critical objects and their spatial relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and framework in reasoning activities from implicit human instructions, producing accurate stepwise task plans and seamlessly integrating route planning for multi-step moves. The dataset and code will be released.
OptiPMB: Enhancing 3D Multi-Object Tracking with Optimized Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Filtering
Authors: Guanhua Ding, Yuxuan Xia, Runwei Guan, Qinchen Wu, Tao Huang, Weiping Ding, Jinping Sun, Guoqiang Mao
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Multi-Object Tracking, Autonomous Driving, Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

Accurate 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is crucial for autonomous driving, as it enables robust perception, navigation, and planning in complex environments. While deep learning-based solutions have demonstrated impressive 3D MOT performance, model-based approaches remain appealing for their simplicity, interpretability, and data efficiency. Conventional model-based trackers typically rely on random vector-based Bayesian filters within the tracking-by-detection (TBD) framework but face limitations due to heuristic data association and track management schemes. In contrast, random finite set (RFS)-based Bayesian filtering handles object birth, survival, and death in a theoretically sound manner, facilitating interpretability and parameter tuning. In this paper, we present OptiPMB, a novel RFS-based 3D MOT method that employs an optimized Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) filter while incorporating several key innovative designs within the TBD framework. Specifically, we propose a measurement-driven hybrid adaptive birth model for improved track initialization, employ adaptive detection probability parameters to effectively maintain tracks for occluded objects, and optimize density pruning and track extraction modules to further enhance overall tracking performance. Extensive evaluations on nuScenes and KITTI datasets show that OptiPMB achieves superior tracking accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods, thereby establishing a new benchmark for model-based 3D MOT and offering valuable insights for future research on RFS-based trackers in autonomous driving.
NuPlanQA: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-View Driving Scene Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Authors: Sung-Yeon Park, Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Rohit Gupta, Kyungtae Han, Ziran Wang
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Scene Understanding, Spatial Reasoning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various domains; however, their ability to comprehend driving scenes remains less proven. The complexity of driving scenarios, which includes multi-view information, poses significant challenges for existing MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce NuPlanQA-Eval, a multi-view, multi-modal evaluation benchmark for driving scene understanding. To further support generalization to multi-view driving scenarios, we also propose NuPlanQA-1M, a large-scale dataset comprising 1M real-world visual question-answering (VQA) pairs. For context-aware analysis of traffic scenes, we categorize our dataset into nine subtasks across three core skills: Road Environment Perception, Spatial Relations Recognition, and Ego-Centric Reasoning. Furthermore, we present BEV-LLM, integrating Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features from multi-view images into MLLMs. Our evaluation results reveal key challenges that existing MLLMs face in driving scene-specific perception and spatial reasoning from ego-centric perspectives. In contrast, BEV-LLM demonstrates remarkable adaptability to this domain, outperforming other models in six of the nine subtasks. These findings highlight how BEV integration enhances multi-view MLLMs while also identifying key areas that require further refinement for effective adaptation to driving scenes. To facilitate further research, we publicly release NuPlanQA at https://github.com/sungyeonparkk/NuPlanQA.
Logic-RAG: Augmenting Large Multimodal Models with Visual-Spatial Knowledge for Road Scene Understanding
Authors: Imran Kabir, Md Alimoor Reza, Syed Billah
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, road scene understanding, Scene Understanding, Spatial Reasoning

Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly integrated into autonomous driving systems for user interaction. However, their limitations in fine-grained spatial reasoning pose challenges for system interpretability and user trust. We introduce Logic-RAG, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that improves LMMs' spatial understanding in driving scenarios. Logic-RAG constructs a dynamic knowledge base (KB) about object-object relationships in first-order logic (FOL) using a perception module, a query-to-logic embedder, and a logical inference engine. We evaluated Logic-RAG on visual-spatial queries using both synthetic and real-world driving videos. When using popular LMMs (GPT-4V, Claude 3.5) as proxies for an autonomous driving system, these models achieved only 55% accuracy on synthetic driving scenes and under 75% on real-world driving scenes. Augmenting them with Logic-RAG increased their accuracies to over 80% and 90%, respectively. An ablation study showed that even without logical inference, the fact-based context constructed by Logic-RAG alone improved accuracy by 15%. Logic-RAG is extensible: it allows seamless replacement of individual components with improved versions and enables domain experts to compose new knowledge in both FOL and natural language. In sum, Logic-RAG addresses critical spatial reasoning deficiencies in LMMs for autonomous driving applications. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Imran2205/LogicRAG.
VISO-Grasp: Vision-Language Informed Spatial Object-centric 6-DoF Active View Planning and Grasping in Clutter and Invisibility
Authors: Yitian Shi, Di Wen, Guanqi Chen, Edgar Welte, Sheng Liu, Kunyu Peng, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Rania Rayyes
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning

We propose VISO-Grasp, a novel vision-language-informed system designed to systematically address visibility constraints for grasping in severely occluded environments. By leveraging Foundation Models (FMs) for spatial reasoning and active view planning, our framework constructs and updates an instance-centric representation of spatial relationships, enhancing grasp success under challenging occlusions. Furthermore, this representation facilitates active Next-Best-View (NBV) planning and optimizes sequential grasping strategies when direct grasping is infeasible. Additionally, we introduce a multi-view uncertainty-driven grasp fusion mechanism that refines grasp confidence and directional uncertainty in real-time, ensuring robust and stable grasp execution. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that VISO-Grasp achieves a success rate of $87.5\%$ in target-oriented grasping with the fewest grasp attempts outperforming baselines. To the best of our knowledge, VISO-Grasp is the first unified framework integrating FMs into target-aware active view planning and 6-DoF grasping in environments with severe occlusions and entire invisibility constraints.
Focusing Robot Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning Through Users' Purposes
Authors: Emilio Cartoni, Gianluca Cioccolini, Gianluca Baldassarre
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Speech-to-Text

Open-Ended Learning (OEL) autonomous robots can acquire new skills and knowledge through direct interaction with their environment, relying on mechanisms such as intrinsic motivations and self-generated goals to guide learning processes. OEL robots are highly relevant for applications as they can autonomously leverage acquired knowledge to perform tasks beneficial to human users in unstructured environments, addressing challenges unforeseen at design time. However, OEL robots face a significant limitation: their openness may lead them to waste time learning information that is irrelevant to tasks desired by specific users. Here, we propose a solution called `Purpose-Directed Open-Ended Learning' (POEL), based on the novel concept of `purpose' introduced in previous work. A purpose specifies what users want the robot to achieve. The key insight of this work is that purpose can focus OEL on learning self-generated classes of tasks that, while unknown during autonomous learning (as typical in OEL), involve objects relevant to the purpose. This concept is operationalised in a novel robot architecture capable of receiving a human purpose through speech-to-text, analysing the scene to identify objects, and using a Large Language Model to reason about which objects are purpose-relevant. These objects are then used to bias OEL exploration towards their spatial proximity and to self-generate rewards that favour interactions with them. The solution is tested in a simulated scenario where a camera-arm-gripper robot interacts freely with purpose-related and distractor objects. For the first time, the results demonstrate the potential advantages of purpose-focused OEL over state-of-the-art OEL methods, enabling robots to handle unstructured environments while steering their learning toward knowledge acquisition relevant to users.
Grasping Partially Occluded Objects Using Autoencoder-Based Point Cloud Inpainting
Authors: Alexander Koebler, Ralf Gross, Florian Buettner, Ingo Thon
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Robotic Grasping

Flexible industrial production systems will play a central role in the future of manufacturing due to higher product individualization and customization. A key component in such systems is the robotic grasping of known or unknown objects in random positions. Real-world applications often come with challenges that might not be considered in grasping solutions tested in simulation or lab settings. Partial occlusion of the target object is the most prominent. Examples of occlusion can be supporting structures in the camera's field of view, sensor imprecision, or parts occluding each other due to the production process. In all these cases, the resulting lack of information leads to shortcomings in calculating grasping points. In this paper, we present an algorithm to reconstruct the missing information. Our inpainting solution facilitates the real-world utilization of robust object matching approaches for grasping point calculation. We demonstrate the benefit of our solution by enabling an existing grasping system embedded in a real-world industrial application to handle occlusions in the input. With our solution, we drastically decrease the number of objects discarded by the process.