pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways
Authors: Andrea Mattia Garavagno, Edoardo Ragusa, Antonio Frisoli, Paolo Gastaldo
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis

This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that -- on the Visual Wake Words dataset -- the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.
Anomaly Detection and Improvement of Clusters using Enhanced K-Means Algorithm
Authors: Vardhan Shorewala, Shivam Shorewala
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This paper introduces a unified approach to cluster refinement and anomaly detection in datasets. We propose a novel algorithm that iteratively reduces the intra-cluster variance of N clusters until a global minimum is reached, yielding tighter clusters than the standard k-means algorithm. We evaluate the method using intrinsic measures for unsupervised learning, including the silhouette coefficient, Calinski-Harabasz index, and Davies-Bouldin index, and extend it to anomaly detection by identifying points whose assignment causes a significant variance increase. External validation on synthetic data and the UCI Breast Cancer and UCI Wine Quality datasets employs the Jaccard similarity score, V-measure, and F1 score. Results show variance reductions of 18.7% and 88.1% on the synthetic and Wine Quality datasets, respectively, along with accuracy and F1 score improvements of 22.5% and 20.8% on the Wine Quality dataset.
SwiftEval: Developing a Language-Specific Benchmark for LLM-generated Code Evaluation
Authors: Ivan Petrukha, Yana Kurliak, Nataliia Stulova
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have showcased significant advancements in code generation. However, most evaluation benchmarks are primarily oriented towards Python, making it difficult to evaluate other programming languages, such as Swift, with high quality. By examining widely established multilingual benchmarks like HumanEval-XL and MultiPL-E, we identified critical issues specific to their Swift components, making them insufficient or even irrelevant for assessing LLM coding capabilities on Swift. Unlike these existing approaches, which prioritize rapid scaling and generalization by automatically translating Python-centric benchmarks with LLMs, we adopt a quality-over-quantity methodology. We present SwiftEval, the first Swift-oriented benchmark consisting of 28 carefully hand-crafted problems, and evaluate 44 popular Code LLMs on it. Our results show significant LLM scores drop for problems requiring language-specific features, most noticeable in the models of smaller sizes.
DexMachina: Functional Retargeting for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation
Authors: Zhao Mandi, Yifan Hou, Dieter Fox, Yashraj Narang, Ajay Mandlekar, Shuran Song
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We study the problem of functional retargeting: learning dexterous manipulation policies to track object states from human hand-object demonstrations. We focus on long-horizon, bimanual tasks with articulated objects, which is challenging due to large action space, spatiotemporal discontinuities, and embodiment gap between human and robot hands. We propose DexMachina, a novel curriculum-based algorithm: the key idea is to use virtual object controllers with decaying strength: an object is first driven automatically towards its target states, such that the policy can gradually learn to take over under motion and contact guidance. We release a simulation benchmark with a diverse set of tasks and dexterous hands, and show that DexMachina significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our algorithm and benchmark enable a functional comparison for hardware designs, and we present key findings informed by quantitative and qualitative results. With the recent surge in dexterous hand development, we hope this work will provide a useful platform for identifying desirable hardware capabilities and lower the barrier for contributing to future research. Videos and more at https://project-dexmachina.github.io/
Bi-Manual Joint Camera Calibration and Scene Representation
Authors: Haozhan Tang, Tianyi Zhang, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Weiming Zhi
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration, Robot Manipulation, Semantic Segmentation

Robot manipulation, especially bimanual manipulation, often requires setting up multiple cameras on multiple robot manipulators. Before robot manipulators can generate motion or even build representations of their environments, the cameras rigidly mounted to the robot need to be calibrated. Camera calibration is a cumbersome process involving collecting a set of images, with each capturing a pre-determined marker. In this work, we introduce the Bi-Manual Joint Calibration and Representation Framework (Bi-JCR). Bi-JCR enables multiple robot manipulators, each with cameras mounted, to circumvent taking images of calibration markers. By leveraging 3D foundation models for dense, marker-free multi-view correspondence, Bi-JCR jointly estimates: (i) the extrinsic transformation from each camera to its end-effector, (ii) the inter-arm relative poses between manipulators, and (iii) a unified, scale-consistent 3D representation of the shared workspace, all from the same captured RGB image sets. The representation, jointly constructed from images captured by cameras on both manipulators, lives in a common coordinate frame and supports collision checking and semantic segmentation to facilitate downstream bimanual coordination tasks. We empirically evaluate the robustness of Bi-JCR on a variety of tabletop environments, and demonstrate its applicability on a variety of downstream tasks.
RealDrive: Retrieval-Augmented Driving with Diffusion Models
Authors: Wenhao Ding, Sushant Veer, Yuxiao Chen, Yulong Cao, Chaowei Xiao, Marco Pavone
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Learning-based planners generate natural human-like driving behaviors by learning to reason about nuanced interactions from data, overcoming the rigid behaviors that arise from rule-based planners. Nonetheless, data-driven approaches often struggle with rare, safety-critical scenarios and offer limited controllability over the generated trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose RealDrive, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that initializes a diffusion-based planning policy by retrieving the most relevant expert demonstrations from the training dataset. By interpolating between current observations and retrieved examples through a denoising process, our approach enables fine-grained control and safe behavior across diverse scenarios, leveraging the strong prior provided by the retrieved scenario. Another key insight we produce is that a task-relevant retrieval model trained with planning-based objectives results in superior planning performance in our framework compared to a task-agnostic retriever. Experimental results demonstrate improved generalization to long-tail events and enhanced trajectory diversity compared to standard learning-based planners -- we observe a 40% reduction in collision rate on the Waymo Open Motion dataset with RAG.
DiG-Net: Enhancing Quality of Life through Hyper-Range Dynamic Gesture Recognition in Assistive Robotics
Authors: Eran Bamani Beeri, Eden Nissinman, Avishai Sintov
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition

Dynamic hand gestures play a pivotal role in assistive human-robot interaction (HRI), facilitating intuitive, non-verbal communication, particularly for individuals with mobility constraints or those operating robots remotely. Current gesture recognition methods are mostly limited to short-range interactions, reducing their utility in scenarios demanding robust assistive communication from afar. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach designed specifically for assistive robotics, enabling dynamic gesture recognition at extended distances of up to 30 meters, thereby significantly improving accessibility and quality of life. Our proposed Distance-aware Gesture Network (DiG-Net) effectively combines Depth-Conditioned Deformable Alignment (DADA) blocks with Spatio-Temporal Graph modules, enabling robust processing and classification of gesture sequences captured under challenging conditions, including significant physical attenuation, reduced resolution, and dynamic gesture variations commonly experienced in real-world assistive environments. We further introduce the Radiometric Spatio-Temporal Depth Attenuation Loss (RSTDAL), shown to enhance learning and strengthen model robustness across varying distances. Our model demonstrates significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art gesture recognition frameworks, achieving a recognition accuracy of 97.3% on a diverse dataset with challenging hyper-range gestures. By effectively interpreting gestures from considerable distances, DiG-Net significantly enhances the usability of assistive robots in home healthcare, industrial safety, and remote assistance scenarios, enabling seamless and intuitive interactions for users regardless of physical limitations
Black-box Adversarial Attacks on CNN-based SLAM Algorithms
Authors: Maria Rafaela Gkeka, Bowen Sun, Evgenia Smirni, Christos D. Antonopoulos, Spyros Lalis, Nikolaos Bellas
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Continuous advancements in deep learning have led to significant progress in feature detection, resulting in enhanced accuracy in tasks like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Nevertheless, the vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial attacks remains a challenge for their reliable deployment in applications, such as navigation of autonomous agents. Even though CNN-based SLAM algorithms are a growing area of research there is a notable absence of a comprehensive presentation and examination of adversarial attacks targeting CNN-based feature detectors, as part of a SLAM system. Our work introduces black-box adversarial perturbations applied to the RGB images fed into the GCN-SLAM algorithm. Our findings on the TUM dataset [30] reveal that even attacks of moderate scale can lead to tracking failure in as many as 76% of the frames. Moreover, our experiments highlight the catastrophic impact of attacking depth instead of RGB input images on the SLAM system.
How can AI reduce wrist injuries in the workplace?
Authors: Roberto F. Pitzalis, Nicholas Cartocci, Christian Di Natali, Darwin G. Caldwell, Giovanni Berselli, Jesús Ortiz
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00

This paper explores the development of a control and sensor strategy for an industrial wearable wrist exoskeleton by classifying and predicting workers' actions. The study evaluates the correlation between exerted force and effort intensity, along with sensor strategy optimization, for designing purposes. Using data from six healthy subjects in a manufacturing plant, this paper presents EMG-based models for wrist motion classification and force prediction. Wrist motion recognition is achieved through a pattern recognition algorithm developed with surface EMG data from an 8-channel EMG sensor (Myo Armband); while a force regression model uses wrist and hand force measurements from a commercial handheld dynamometer (Vernier GoDirect Hand Dynamometer). This control strategy forms the foundation for a streamlined exoskeleton architecture designed for industrial applications, focusing on simplicity, reduced costs, and minimal sensor use while ensuring reliable and effective assistance.
SR3D: Unleashing Single-view 3D Reconstruction for Transparent and Specular Object Grasping
Authors: Mingxu Zhang, Xiaoqi Li, Jiahui Xu, Kaichen Zhou, Hojin Bae, Yan Shen, Chuyan Xiong, Hao Dong
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Depth Completion, Object Reconstruction, Robotic Grasping, Single-View 3D Reconstruction

Recent advancements in 3D robotic manipulation have improved grasping of everyday objects, but transparent and specular materials remain challenging due to depth sensing limitations. While several 3D reconstruction and depth completion approaches address these challenges, they suffer from setup complexity or limited observation information utilization. To address this, leveraging the power of single view 3D object reconstruction approaches, we propose a training free framework SR3D that enables robotic grasping of transparent and specular objects from a single view observation. Specifically, given single view RGB and depth images, SR3D first uses the external visual models to generate 3D reconstructed object mesh based on RGB image. Then, the key idea is to determine the 3D object's pose and scale to accurately localize the reconstructed object back into its original depth corrupted 3D scene. Therefore, we propose view matching and keypoint matching mechanisms,which leverage both the 2D and 3D's inherent semantic and geometric information in the observation to determine the object's 3D state within the scene, thereby reconstructing an accurate 3D depth map for effective grasp detection. Experiments in both simulation and real world show the reconstruction effectiveness of SR3D.
Towards a Generalizable Bimanual Foundation Policy via Flow-based Video Prediction
Authors: Chenyou Fan, Fangzheng Yan, Chenjia Bai, Jiepeng Wang, Chi Zhang, Zhen Wang, Xuelong Li
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Prediction, Vision-Language-Action

Learning a generalizable bimanual manipulation policy is extremely challenging for embodied agents due to the large action space and the need for coordinated arm movements. Existing approaches rely on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to acquire bimanual policies. However, transferring knowledge from single-arm datasets or pre-trained VLA models often fails to generalize effectively, primarily due to the scarcity of bimanual data and the fundamental differences between single-arm and bimanual manipulation. In this paper, we propose a novel bimanual foundation policy by fine-tuning the leading text-to-video models to predict robot trajectories and training a lightweight diffusion policy for action generation. Given the lack of embodied knowledge in text-to-video models, we introduce a two-stage paradigm that fine-tunes independent text-to-flow and flow-to-video models derived from a pre-trained text-to-video model. Specifically, optical flow serves as an intermediate variable, providing a concise representation of subtle movements between images. The text-to-flow model predicts optical flow to concretize the intent of language instructions, and the flow-to-video model leverages this flow for fine-grained video prediction. Our method mitigates the ambiguity of language in single-stage text-to-video prediction and significantly reduces the robot-data requirement by avoiding direct use of low-level actions. In experiments, we collect high-quality manipulation data for real dual-arm robot, and the results of simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Nonlinear Oscillatory Response of Automated Vehicle Car-following: Theoretical Analysis with Traffic State and Control Input Limits
Authors: Sixu Li, Yang Zhou
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00

This paper presents a framework grounded in the theory of describing function (DF) and incremental-input DF to theoretically analyze the nonlinear oscillatory response of automated vehicles (AVs) car-following (CF) amidst traffic oscillations, considering the limits of traffic state and control input. While prevailing approaches largely ignore these limits (i.e., saturation of acceleration/deceleration and speed) and focus on linear string stability analysis, this framework establishes a basis for theoretically analyzing the frequency response of AV systems with nonlinearities imposed by these limits. To this end, trajectories of CF pairs are decomposed into nominal and oscillatory trajectories, subsequently, the controlled AV system is repositioned within the oscillatory trajectory coordinates. Built on this base, DFs are employed to approximate the frequency responses of nonlinear saturation components by using their first harmonic output, thereby capturing the associated amplification ratio and phase shift. Considering the closed-loop nature of AV control systems, where system states and control input mutually influence each other, amplification ratios and phase shifts are balanced within the loop to ensure consistency. This balancing process may render multiple solutions, hence the incremental-input DF is further applied to identify the reasonable ones. The proposed method is validated by estimations from Simulink, and further comparisons with prevailing methods are conducted. Results confirm the alignment of our framework with Simulink results and exhibit its superior accuracy in analysis compared to the prevailing methods. Furthermore, the framework proves valuable in string stability analysis, especially when conventional linear methods offer misleading insights.
Exploiting Euclidean Distance Field Properties for Fast and Safe 3D planning with a modified Lazy Theta*
Authors: Jose A. Cobano, L. Merino, F. Caballero
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00

Graph search planners have been widely used for 3D path planning in the literature, and Euclidean Distance Fields (EDFs) are increasingly being used as a representation of the environment. However, to the best of our knowledge, the integration of EDFs into heuristic planning has been carried out in a loosely coupled fashion, dismissing EDF properties that can be used to accelerate/improve the planning process and enhance the safety margins of the resultant trajectories. This paper presents a fast graph search planner based on a modified Lazy Theta* planning algorithm for aerial robots in challenging 3D environments that exploits the EDF properties. The proposed planner outperforms classic graph search planners in terms of path smoothness and safety. It integrates EDFs as environment representation and directly generates fast and smooth paths avoiding the use of post-processing methods; it also considers the analytical properties of EDFs to obtain an approximation of the EDF cost along the line-of-sight segments and to reduce the number of visibility neighbours, which directly impacts the computation time. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed EDF-based cost function satisfies the triangle inequality, which reduces calculations during exploration and, hence, computation time. Many experiments and comparatives are carried out in 3D challenging indoor and outdoor simulation environments to evaluate and validate the proposed planner. The results show an efficient and safe planner in these environments.
Directional Non-Commutative Monoidal Structures with Interchange Law via Commutative Generators
Authors: Mahesh Godavarti
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00

We introduce a novel framework consisting of a class of algebraic structures that generalize one-dimensional monoidal systems into higher dimensions by defining per-axis composition operators subject to non-commutativity and a global interchange law. These structures, defined recursively from a base case of vector-matrix pairs, model directional composition in multiple dimensions while preserving structural coherence through commutative linear operators. We show that the framework that unifies several well-known linear transforms in signal processing and data analysis. In this framework, data indices are embedded into a composite structure that decomposes into simpler components. We show that classic transforms such as the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), the Walsh transform, and the Hadamard transform are special cases of our algebraic structure. The framework provides a systematic way to derive these transforms by appropriately choosing vector and matrix pairs. By subsuming classical transforms within a common structure, the framework also enables the development of learnable transformations tailored to specific data modalities and tasks.
Voice Conversion Improves Cross-Domain Robustness for Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification
Authors: Badr M. Abdullah, Matthew Baas, Bernd Möbius, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialect Identification, Voice Conversion

Arabic dialect identification (ADI) systems are essential for large-scale data collection pipelines that enable the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic language varieties. However, the reliability of current ADI systems is limited by poor generalization to out-of-domain speech. In this paper, we present an effective approach based on voice conversion for training ADI models that achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves robustness in cross-domain scenarios. Evaluated on a newly collected real-world test set spanning four different domains, our approach yields consistent improvements of up to +34.1% in accuracy across domains. Furthermore, we present an analysis of our approach and demonstrate that voice conversion helps mitigate the speaker bias in the ADI dataset. We release our robust ADI model and cross-domain evaluation dataset to support the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic.
Speech-to-Text Translation with Phoneme-Augmented CoT: Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer in Low-Resource Scenarios
Authors: Gerard I. Gállego, Oriol Pareras, Martí Cortada Garcia, Lucas Takanori, Javier Hernando
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Phoneme Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

We propose a Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) approach that integrates phoneme representations into a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework to improve translation in low-resource and zero-resource settings. By introducing phoneme recognition as an intermediate step, we enhance cross-lingual transfer, enabling translation even for languages with no labeled speech data. Our system builds on a multilingual LLM, which we extend to process speech and phonemes. Training follows a curriculum learning strategy that progressively introduces more complex tasks. Experiments on multilingual S2TT benchmarks show that phoneme-augmented CoT improves translation quality in low-resource conditions and enables zero-resource translation, while slightly impacting high-resource performance. Despite this trade-off, our findings demonstrate that phoneme-based CoT is a promising step toward making S2TT more accessible across diverse languages.