pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Provable Ordering and Continuity in Vision-Language Pretraining for Generalizable Embodied Agents
Authors: Zhizhen Zhang, Lei Zhu, Zhen Fang, Zi Huang, Yadan Luo
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Imitation Learning

Pre-training vision-language representations on human action videos has emerged as a promising approach to reduce reliance on large-scale expert demonstrations for training embodied agents. However, prior methods often employ time contrastive learning based on goal-reaching heuristics, progressively aligning language instructions from the initial to the final frame. This overemphasis on future frames can result in erroneous vision-language associations, as actions may terminate early or include irrelevant moments in the end. To address this issue, we propose Action Temporal Coherence Learning (AcTOL) to learn ordered and continuous vision-language representations without rigid goal-based constraint. AcTOL treats a video as a continuous trajectory where it (1) contrasts semantic differences between frames to reflect their natural ordering, and (2) imposes a local Brownian bridge constraint to ensure smooth transitions across intermediate frames. Extensive imitation learning experiments on both simulated and real robots show that the pretrained features significantly enhance downstream manipulation tasks with high robustness to different linguistic styles of instructions, offering a viable pathway toward generalized embodied agents.
Towards Agile Swarming in Real World: Onboard Relative Localization with Fast Tracking of Active Blinking Markers
Authors: Tim Felix Lakemann, Daniel Bonilla Licea, Viktor Walter, Tomáš Báča, Martin Saska
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

A novel onboard tracking approach enabling vision-based relative localization and communication using Active blinking Marker Tracking (AMT) is introduced in this article. Active blinking markers on multi-robot team members improve the robustness of relative localization for aerial vehicles in tightly coupled swarms during real-world deployments, while also serving as a resilient communication channel. Traditional tracking algorithms struggle to track fast moving blinking markers due to their intermittent appearance in the camera frames. AMT addresses this by using weighted polynomial regression to predict the future appearance of active blinking markers while accounting for uncertainty in the prediction. In outdoor experiments, the AMT approach outperformed state-of-the-art methods in tracking density, accuracy, and complexity. The experimental validation of this novel tracking approach for relative localization involved testing motion patterns motivated by our research on agile multi-robot deployment.
ConditionNET: Learning Preconditions and Effects for Execution Monitoring
Authors: Daniel Sliwowski, Dongheui Lee
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The introduction of robots into everyday scenarios necessitates algorithms capable of monitoring the execution of tasks. In this paper, we propose ConditionNET, an approach for learning the preconditions and effects of actions in a fully data-driven manner. We develop an efficient vision-language model and introduce additional optimization objectives during training to optimize for consistent feature representations. ConditionNET explicitly models the dependencies between actions, preconditions, and effects, leading to improved performance. We evaluate our model on two robotic datasets, one of which we collected for this paper, containing 406 successful and 138 failed teleoperated demonstrations of a Franka Emika Panda robot performing tasks like pouring and cleaning the counter. We show in our experiments that ConditionNET outperforms all baselines on both anomaly detection and phase prediction tasks. Furthermore, we implement an action monitoring system on a real robot to demonstrate the practical applicability of the learned preconditions and effects. Our results highlight the potential of ConditionNET for enhancing the reliability and adaptability of robots in real-world environments. The data is available on the project website: https://dsliwowski1.github.io/ConditionNET_page.
ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills
Authors: Tairan He, Jiawei Gao, Wenli Xiao, Yuanhang Zhang, Zi Wang, Jiashun Wang, Zhengyi Luo, Guanqi He, Nikhil Sobanbab, Chaoyi Pan, Zeji Yi, Guannan Qu, Kris Kitani, Jessica Hodgins, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility in performing human-like, whole-body skills. However, achieving agile and coordinated whole-body motions remains a significant challenge due to the dynamics mismatch between simulation and the real world. Existing approaches, such as system identification (SysID) and domain randomization (DR) methods, often rely on labor-intensive parameter tuning or result in overly conservative policies that sacrifice agility. In this paper, we present ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics), a two-stage framework designed to tackle the dynamics mismatch and enable agile humanoid whole-body skills. In the first stage, we pre-train motion tracking policies in simulation using retargeted human motion data. In the second stage, we deploy the policies in the real world and collect real-world data to train a delta (residual) action model that compensates for the dynamics mismatch. Then, ASAP fine-tunes pre-trained policies with the delta action model integrated into the simulator to align effectively with real-world dynamics. We evaluate ASAP across three transfer scenarios: IsaacGym to IsaacSim, IsaacGym to Genesis, and IsaacGym to the real-world Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our approach significantly improves agility and whole-body coordination across various dynamic motions, reducing tracking error compared to SysID, DR, and delta dynamics learning baselines. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids.
Enhancing Feature Tracking Reliability for Visual Navigation using Real-Time Safety Filter
Authors: Dabin Kim, Inkyu Jang, Youngsoo Han, Sunwoo Hwang, H. Jin Kim
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Visual Navigation

Vision sensors are extensively used for localizing a robot's pose, particularly in environments where global localization tools such as GPS or motion capture systems are unavailable. In many visual navigation systems, localization is achieved by detecting and tracking visual features or landmarks, which provide information about the sensor's relative pose. For reliable feature tracking and accurate pose estimation, it is crucial to maintain visibility of a sufficient number of features. This requirement can sometimes conflict with the robot's overall task objective. In this paper, we approach it as a constrained control problem. By leveraging the invariance properties of visibility constraints within the robot's kinematic model, we propose a real-time safety filter based on quadratic programming. This filter takes a reference velocity command as input and produces a modified velocity that minimally deviates from the reference while ensuring the information score from the currently visible features remains above a user-specified threshold. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed safety filter preserves the invariance condition and ensures the visibility of more features than the required minimum. We also validated its real-world performance by integrating it into a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm, where it maintained high estimation quality in challenging environments, outperforming a simple tracking controller.
UASTHN: Uncertainty-Aware Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Satellite-Thermal Geo-localization
Authors: Jiuhong Xiao, Giuseppe Loianno
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: geo-localization, Homography Estimation, Uncertainty Quantification

Geo-localization is an essential component of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation systems to ensure precise absolute self-localization in outdoor environments. To address the challenges of GPS signal interruptions or low illumination, Thermal Geo-localization (TG) employs aerial thermal imagery to align with reference satellite maps to accurately determine the UAV's location. However, existing TG methods lack uncertainty measurement in their outputs, compromising system robustness in the presence of textureless or corrupted thermal images, self-similar or outdated satellite maps, geometric noises, or thermal images exceeding satellite maps. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents UASTHN, a novel approach for Uncertainty Estimation (UE) in Deep Homography Estimation (DHE) tasks for TG applications. Specifically, we introduce a novel Crop-based Test-Time Augmentation (CropTTA) strategy, which leverages the homography consensus of cropped image views to effectively measure data uncertainty. This approach is complemented by Deep Ensembles (DE) employed for model uncertainty, offering comparable performance with improved efficiency and seamless integration with any DHE model. Extensive experiments across multiple DHE models demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CropTTA in TG applications. Analysis of detected failure cases underscores the improved reliability of CropTTA under challenging conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the capability of combining CropTTA and DE for a comprehensive assessment of both data and model uncertainty. Our research provides profound insights into the broader intersection of localization and uncertainty estimation. The code and models are publicly available.
End-to-End Imitation Learning for Optimal Asteroid Proximity Operations
Authors: Patrick Quinn, George Nehma, Madhur Tiwari
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Imitation Learning, Model Predictive Control

Controlling spacecraft near asteroids in deep space comes with many challenges. The delays involved necessitate heavy usage of limited onboard computation resources while fuel efficiency remains a priority to support the long loiter times needed for gathering data. Additionally, the difficulty of state determination due to the lack of traditional reference systems requires a guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) pipeline that ideally is both computationally and fuel-efficient, and that incorporates a robust state determination system. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end algorithm utilizing neural networks to generate near-optimal control commands from raw sensor data, as well as a hybrid model predictive control (MPC) guided imitation learning controller delivering improvements in computational efficiency over a traditional MPC controller.
Generalizing Safety Beyond Collision-Avoidance via Latent-Space Reachability Analysis
Authors: Kensuke Nakamura, Lasse Peters, Andrea Bajcsy
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a rigorous mathematical framework that enables robots to simultaneously detect unsafe states and generate actions that prevent future failures. While in theory, HJ reachability can synthesize safe controllers for nonlinear systems and nonconvex constraints, in practice, it has been limited to hand-engineered collision-avoidance constraints modeled via low-dimensional state-space representations and first-principles dynamics. In this work, our goal is to generalize safe robot controllers to prevent failures that are hard--if not impossible--to write down by hand, but can be intuitively identified from high-dimensional observations: for example, spilling the contents of a bag. We propose Latent Safety Filters, a latent-space generalization of HJ reachability that tractably operates directly on raw observation data (e.g., RGB images) to automatically compute safety-preserving actions without explicit recovery demonstrations by performing safety analysis in the latent embedding space of a generative world model. Our method leverages diverse robot observation-action data of varying quality (including successes, random exploration, and unsafe demonstrations) to learn a world model. Constraint specification is then transformed into a classification problem in the latent space of the learned world model. In simulation and hardware experiments, we compute an approximation of Latent Safety Filters to safeguard arbitrary policies (from imitation- learned policies to direct teleoperation) from complex safety hazards, like preventing a Franka Research 3 manipulator from spilling the contents of a bag or toppling cluttered objects.
VL-Nav: Real-time Vision-Language Navigation with Spatial Reasoning
Authors: Yi Du, Taimeng Fu, Zhuoqun Chen, Bowen Li, Shaoshu Su, Zhipeng Zhao, Chen Wang
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning, Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language navigation in unknown environments is crucial for mobile robots. In scenarios such as household assistance and rescue, mobile robots need to understand a human command, such as "find a person wearing black". We present a novel vision-language navigation (VL-Nav) system that integrates efficient spatial reasoning on low-power robots. Unlike prior methods that rely on a single image-level feature similarity to guide a robot, our method integrates pixel-wise vision-language features with curiosity-driven exploration. This approach enables robust navigation to human-instructed instances across diverse environments. We deploy VL-Nav on a four-wheel mobile robot and evaluate its performance through comprehensive navigation tasks in both indoor and outdoor environments, spanning different scales and semantic complexities. Remarkably, VL-Nav operates at a real-time frequency of 30 Hz with a Jetson Orin NX, highlighting its ability to conduct efficient vision-language navigation. Results show that VL-Nav achieves an overall success rate of 86.3%, outperforming previous methods by 44.15%.
CAIMAN: Causal Action Influence Detection for Sample-efficient Loco-manipulation
Authors: Yuanchen Yuan, Jin Cheng, Núria Armengol Urpí, Stelian Coros
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

Enabling legged robots to perform non-prehensile loco-manipulation is crucial for enhancing their versatility. Learning behaviors such as whole-body object pushing often requires sophisticated planning strategies or extensive task-specific reward shaping, especially in unstructured environments. In this work, we present CAIMAN, a practical reinforcement learning framework that encourages the agent to gain control over other entities in the environment. CAIMAN leverages causal action influence as an intrinsic motivation objective, allowing legged robots to efficiently acquire object pushing skills even under sparse task rewards. We employ a hierarchical control strategy, combining a low-level locomotion module with a high-level policy that generates task-relevant velocity commands and is trained to maximize the intrinsic reward. To estimate causal action influence, we learn the dynamics of the environment by integrating a kinematic prior with data collected during training.We empirically demonstrate CAIMAN's superior sample efficiency and adaptability to diverse scenarios in simulation, as well as its successful transfer to real-world systems without further fine-tuning.
Environment-Driven Online LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration
Authors: Zhiwei Huang, Jiaqi Li, Ping Zhong, Rui Fan
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration (LCEC) is the core for data fusion in computer vision. Existing methods typically rely on customized calibration targets or fixed scene types, lacking the flexibility to handle variations in sensor data and environmental contexts. This paper introduces EdO-LCEC, the first environment-driven, online calibration approach that achieves human-like adaptability. Inspired by the human perceptual system, EdO-LCEC incorporates a generalizable scene discriminator to actively interpret environmental conditions, creating multiple virtual cameras that capture detailed spatial and textural information. To overcome cross-modal feature matching challenges between LiDAR and camera, we propose dual-path correspondence matching (DPCM), which leverages both structural and textural consistency to achieve reliable 3D-2D correspondences. Our approach formulates the calibration process as a spatial-temporal joint optimization problem, utilizing global constraints from multiple views and scenes to improve accuracy, particularly in sparse or partially overlapping sensor views. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that EdO-LCEC achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing reliable and precise calibration across diverse, challenging environments.
An Event-Based Perception Pipeline for a Table Tennis Robot
Authors: Andreas Ziegler, Thomas Gossard, Arren Glover, Andreas Zell
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

Table tennis robots gained traction over the last years and have become a popular research challenge for control and perception algorithms. Fast and accurate ball detection is crucial for enabling a robotic arm to rally the ball back successfully. So far, most table tennis robots use conventional, frame-based cameras for the perception pipeline. However, frame-based cameras suffer from motion blur if the frame rate is not high enough for fast-moving objects. Event-based cameras, on the other hand, do not have this drawback since pixels report changes in intensity asynchronously and independently, leading to an event stream with a temporal resolution on the order of us. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first real-time perception pipeline for a table tennis robot that uses only event-based cameras. We show that compared to a frame-based pipeline, event-based perception pipelines have an update rate which is an order of magnitude higher. This is beneficial for the estimation and prediction of the ball's position, velocity, and spin, resulting in lower mean errors and uncertainties. These improvements are an advantage for the robot control, which has to be fast, given the short time a table tennis ball is flying until the robot has to hit back.
IEEEICM25: "A High-Performance Disturbance Observer"
Authors: Emre Sariyildiz
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel Disturbance Observer, termed the High-Performance Disturbance Observer, which achieves more accurate disturbance estimation compared to the conventional disturbance observer, thereby delivering significant improvements in robustness and performance for motion control systems.
Strengthening Generative Robot Policies through Predictive World Modeling
Authors: Han Qi, Haocheng Yin, Aris Zhu, Yilun Du, Heng Yang
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

We present generative predictive control (GPC), a learning control framework that (i) clones a generative diffusion-based policy from expert demonstrations, (ii) trains a predictive action-conditioned world model from both expert demonstrations and random explorations, and (iii) synthesizes an online planner that ranks and optimizes the action proposals from (i) by looking ahead into the future using the world model from (ii). Across a variety of robotic manipulation tasks, we demonstrate that GPC consistently outperforms behavior cloning in both state-based and vision-based settings, in simulation and in the real world.
VertiFormer: A Data-Efficient Multi-Task Transformer for Off-Road Robot Mobility
Authors: Mohammad Nazeri, Anuj Pokhrel, Alexandyr Card, Aniket Datar, Garrett Warnell, Xuesu Xiao
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00

Sophisticated learning architectures, e.g., Transformers, present a unique opportunity for robots to understand complex vehicle-terrain kinodynamic interactions for off-road mobility. While internet-scale data are available for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) tasks to train Transformers, real-world mobility data are difficult to acquire with physical robots navigating off-road terrain. Furthermore, training techniques specifically designed to process text and image data in NLP and CV may not apply to robot mobility. In this paper, we propose VertiFormer, a novel data-efficient multi-task Transformer model trained with only one hour of data to address such challenges of applying Transformer architectures for robot mobility on extremely rugged, vertically challenging, off-road terrain. Specifically, VertiFormer employs a new learnable masked modeling and next token prediction paradigm to predict the next pose, action, and terrain patch to enable a variety of off-road mobility tasks simultaneously, e.g., forward and inverse kinodynamics modeling. The non-autoregressive design mitigates computational bottlenecks and error propagation associated with autoregressive models. VertiFormer's unified modality representation also enhances learning of diverse temporal mappings and state representations, which, combined with multiple objective functions, further improves model generalization. Our experiments offer insights into effectively utilizing Transformers for off-road robot mobility with limited data and demonstrate our efficiently trained Transformer can facilitate multiple off-road mobility tasks onboard a physical mobile robot.
MambaGlue: Fast and Robust Local Feature Matching With Mamba
Authors: Kihwan Ryoo, Hyungtae Lim, Hyun Myung
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba

In recent years, robust matching methods using deep learning-based approaches have been actively studied and improved in computer vision tasks. However, there remains a persistent demand for both robust and fast matching techniques. To address this, we propose a novel Mamba-based local feature matching approach, called MambaGlue, where Mamba is an emerging state-of-the-art architecture rapidly gaining recognition for its superior speed in both training and inference, and promising performance compared with Transformer architectures. In particular, we propose two modules: a) MambaAttention mixer to simultaneously and selectively understand the local and global context through the Mamba-based self-attention structure and b) deep confidence score regressor, which is a multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based architecture that evaluates a score indicating how confidently matching predictions correspond to the ground-truth correspondences. Consequently, our MambaGlue achieves a balance between robustness and efficiency in real-world applications. As verified on various public datasets, we demonstrate that our MambaGlue yields a substantial performance improvement over baseline approaches while maintaining fast inference speed. Our code will be available on https://github.com/url-kaist/MambaGlue