pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ConViTac: Aligning Visual-Tactile Fusion with Contrastive Representations
Authors: Zhiyuan Wu, Yongqiang Zhao, Shan Luo
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Material Classification, Representation Learning

Vision and touch are two fundamental sensory modalities for robots, offering complementary information that enhances perception and manipulation tasks. Previous research has attempted to jointly learn visual-tactile representations to extract more meaningful information. However, these approaches often rely on direct combination, such as feature addition and concatenation, for modality fusion, which tend to result in poor feature integration. In this paper, we propose ConViTac, a visual-tactile representation learning network designed to enhance the alignment of features during fusion using contrastive representations. Our key contribution is a Contrastive Embedding Conditioning (CEC) mechanism that leverages a contrastive encoder pretrained through self-supervised contrastive learning to project visual and tactile inputs into unified latent embeddings. These embeddings are used to couple visual-tactile feature fusion through cross-modal attention, aiming at aligning the unified representations and enhancing performance on downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of ConViTac in real world over current state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of our proposed CEC mechanism, which improves accuracy by up to 12.0% in material classification and grasping prediction tasks.
Unified Vision-Language-Action Model
Authors: Yuqi Wang, Xinghang Li, Wenxuan Wang, Junbo Zhang, Yingyan Li, Yuntao Chen, Xinlong Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, model, Vision-Language-Action

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have garnered significant attention for their potential in advancing robotic manipulation. However, previous approaches predominantly rely on the general comprehension capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) to generate action signals, often overlooking the rich temporal and causal structure embedded in visual observations. In this paper, we present UniVLA, a unified and native multimodal VLA model that autoregressively models vision, language, and action signals as discrete token sequences. This formulation enables flexible multimodal tasks learning, particularly from large-scale video data. By incorporating world modeling during post-training, UniVLA captures causal dynamics from videos, facilitating effective transfer to downstream policy learning--especially for long-horizon tasks. Our approach sets new state-of-the-art results across several widely used simulation benchmarks, including CALVIN, LIBERO, and Simplenv-Bridge, significantly surpassing previous methods. For example, UniVLA achieves 95.5% average success rate on LIBERO benchmark, surpassing pi0-FAST's 85.5%. We further demonstrate its broad applicability on real-world ALOHA manipulation and autonomous driving.
ManiGaussian++: General Robotic Bimanual Manipulation with Hierarchical Gaussian World Model
Authors: Tengbo Yu, Guanxing Lu, Zaijia Yang, Haoyuan Deng, Season Si Chen, Jiwen Lu, Wenbo Ding, Guoqiang Hu, Yansong Tang, Ziwei Wang
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00

Multi-task robotic bimanual manipulation is becoming increasingly popular as it enables sophisticated tasks that require diverse dual-arm collaboration patterns. Compared to unimanual manipulation, bimanual tasks pose challenges to understanding the multi-body spatiotemporal dynamics. An existing method ManiGaussian pioneers encoding the spatiotemporal dynamics into the visual representation via Gaussian world model for single-arm settings, which ignores the interaction of multiple embodiments for dual-arm systems with significant performance drop. In this paper, we propose ManiGaussian++, an extension of ManiGaussian framework that improves multi-task bimanual manipulation by digesting multi-body scene dynamics through a hierarchical Gaussian world model. To be specific, we first generate task-oriented Gaussian Splatting from intermediate visual features, which aims to differentiate acting and stabilizing arms for multi-body spatiotemporal dynamics modeling. We then build a hierarchical Gaussian world model with the leader-follower architecture, where the multi-body spatiotemporal dynamics is mined for intermediate visual representation via future scene prediction. The leader predicts Gaussian Splatting deformation caused by motions of the stabilizing arm, through which the follower generates the physical consequences resulted from the movement of the acting arm. As a result, our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art bimanual manipulation techniques by an improvement of 20.2% in 10 simulated tasks, and achieves 60% success rate on average in 9 challenging real-world tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/April-Yz/ManiGaussian_Bimanual.
Look to Locate: Vision-Based Multisensory Navigation with 3-D Digital Maps for GNSS-Challenged Environments
Authors: Ola Elmaghraby, Eslam Mounier, Paulo Ricardo Marques de Araujo, Aboelmagd Noureldin
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments such as indoor parking structures or dense urban canyons, achieving accurate and robust vehicle positioning remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a cost-effective, vision-based multi-sensor navigation system that integrates monocular depth estimation, semantic filtering, and visual map registration (VMR) with 3-D digital maps. Extensive testing in real-world indoor and outdoor driving scenarios demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system, achieving sub-meter accuracy of 92% indoors and more than 80% outdoors, with consistent horizontal positioning and heading average root mean-square errors of approximately 0.98 m and 1.25 {\deg}, respectively. Compared to the baselines examined, the proposed solution significantly reduced drift and improved robustness under various conditions, achieving positioning accuracy improvements of approximately 88% on average. This work highlights the potential of cost-effective monocular vision systems combined with 3D maps for scalable, GNSS-independent navigation in land vehicles.
CronusVLA: Transferring Latent Motion Across Time for Multi-Frame Prediction in Manipulation
Authors: Hao Li, Shuai Yang, Yilun Chen, Yang Tian, Xiaoda Yang, Xinyi Chen, Hanqing Wang, Tai Wang, Feng Zhao, Dahua Lin, Jiangmiao Pang
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Vision-Language-Action

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization across manipulation tasks. However, they remain constrained by a single-frame observation paradigm and cannot fully benefit from the motion information offered by aggregated multi-frame historical observations, as the large vision-language backbone introduces substantial computational cost and inference latency. We propose CronusVLA, a unified framework that extends single-frame VLA models to the multi-frame paradigm through an efficient post-training stage. CronusVLA comprises three key components: (1) single-frame pretraining on large-scale embodied datasets with autoregressive action tokens prediction, which establishes an embodied vision-language foundation; (2) multi-frame encoding, adapting the prediction of vision-language backbones from discrete action tokens to motion features during post-training, and aggregating motion features from historical frames into a feature chunking; (3) cross-frame decoding, which maps the feature chunking to accurate actions via a shared decoder with cross-attention. By reducing redundant token computation and caching past motion features, CronusVLA achieves efficient inference. As an application of motion features, we further propose an action adaptation mechanism based on feature-action retrieval to improve model performance during finetuning. CronusVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on SimplerEnv with 70.9% success rate, and 12.7% improvement over OpenVLA on LIBERO. Real-world Franka experiments also show the strong performance and robustness.
Systematic Comparison of Projection Methods for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation on Fisheye Images
Authors: Stephanie Käs, Sven Peter, Henrik Thillmann, Anton Burenko, David Benjamin Adrian, Dennis Mack, Timm Linder, Bastian Leibe
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Fisheye cameras offer robots the ability to capture human movements across a wider field of view (FOV) than standard pinhole cameras, making them particularly useful for applications in human-robot interaction and automotive contexts. However, accurately detecting human poses in fisheye images is challenging due to the curved distortions inherent to fisheye optics. While various methods for undistorting fisheye images have been proposed, their effectiveness and limitations for poses that cover a wide FOV has not been systematically evaluated in the context of absolute human pose estimation from monocular fisheye images. To address this gap, we evaluate the impact of pinhole, equidistant and double sphere camera models, as well as cylindrical projection methods, on 3D human pose estimation accuracy. We find that in close-up scenarios, pinhole projection is inadequate, and the optimal projection method varies with the FOV covered by the human pose. The usage of advanced fisheye models like the double sphere model significantly enhances 3D human pose estimation accuracy. We propose a heuristic for selecting the appropriate projection model based on the detection bounding box to enhance prediction quality. Additionally, we introduce and evaluate on our novel dataset FISHnCHIPS, which features 3D human skeleton annotations in fisheye images, including images from unconventional angles, such as extreme close-ups, ground-mounted cameras, and wide-FOV poses, available at: https://www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/fishnchips
ADA-DPM: A Neural Descriptors-based Adaptive Noise Point Filtering Strategy for SLAM
Authors: Yongxin Shao, Binrui Wang, Aihong Tan
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation

LiDAR SLAM has demonstrated significant application value in various fields, including mobile robot navigation and high-precision map construction. However, existing methods often need to make a trade-off between positioning accuracy and system robustness when faced with dynamic object interference, point cloud noise, and unstructured environments. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive noise filtering SLAM strategy-ADA-DPM, achieving excellent preference in both aspects. We design the Dynamic Segmentation Head to predict the category of feature points belonging to dynamic points, to eliminate dynamic feature points; design the Global Importance Scoring Head to adaptively select feature points with higher contribution and features while suppressing noise interference; and construct the Cross Layer Intra-Graph Convolution Module (GLI-GCN) to fuse multi-scale neighborhood structures, thereby enhancing the discriminative ability of overlapping features. Finally, to further validate the effectiveness of our method, we tested it on several publicly available datasets and achieved outstanding results.
Newtonian and Lagrangian Neural Networks: A Comparison Towards Efficient Inverse Dynamics Identification
Authors: Minh Trinh, Andreas René Geist, Josefine Monnet, Stefan Vilceanu, Sebastian Trimpe, Christian Brecher
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Industrial Robots, regression

Accurate inverse dynamics models are essential tools for controlling industrial robots. Recent research combines neural network regression with inverse dynamics formulations of the Newton-Euler and the Euler-Lagrange equations of motion, resulting in so-called Newtonian neural networks and Lagrangian neural networks, respectively. These physics-informed models seek to identify unknowns in the analytical equations from data. Despite their potential, current literature lacks guidance on choosing between Lagrangian and Newtonian networks. In this study, we show that when motor torques are estimated instead of directly measuring joint torques, Lagrangian networks prove less effective compared to Newtonian networks as they do not explicitly model dissipative torques. The performance of these models is compared to neural network regression on data of a MABI MAX 100 industrial robot.
GeNIE: A Generalizable Navigation System for In-the-Wild Environments
Authors: JiaMing Wang, Diwen Liu, Jizhuo Chen, Jiaxuan Da, Nuowen Qian, Tram Minh Man, Harold Soh
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation

Reliable navigation in unstructured, real-world environments remains a significant challenge for embodied agents, especially when operating across diverse terrains, weather conditions, and sensor configurations. In this paper, we introduce GeNIE (Generalizable Navigation System for In-the-Wild Environments), a robust navigation framework designed for global deployment. GeNIE integrates a generalizable traversability prediction model built on SAM2 with a novel path fusion strategy that enhances planning stability in noisy and ambiguous settings. We deployed GeNIE in the Earth Rover Challenge (ERC) at ICRA 2025, where it was evaluated across six countries spanning three continents. GeNIE took first place and achieved 79% of the maximum possible score, outperforming the second-best team by 17%, and completed the entire competition without a single human intervention. These results set a new benchmark for robust, generalizable outdoor robot navigation. We will release the codebase, pretrained model weights, and newly curated datasets to support future research in real-world navigation.
Evolving Prompts In-Context: An Open-ended, Self-replicating Perspective
Authors: Jianyu Wang, Zhiqiang Hu, Lidong Bing
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Large Language Model, Math, Question Answering

We propose a novel prompt design paradigm that challenges conventional wisdom in large language model (LLM) prompting. While conventional wisdom prioritizes well-crafted instructions and demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL), we show that pruning random demonstrations into seemingly incoherent "gibberish" can remarkably improve performance across diverse tasks. Notably, the "gibberish" always matches or surpasses state-of-the-art automatic prompt optimization techniques, achieving substantial gains regardless of LLM alignment. Nevertheless, discovering an effective pruning strategy is non-trivial, as existing attribution methods and prompt compression algorithms fail to deliver robust results, let alone human intuition. In terms of this, we propose a self-discover prompt optimization framework, PromptQuine, an evolutionary search framework that automatically searches for the pruning strategy by itself using only low-data regimes. Much like the emergent complexity in nature--such as symbiosis and self-organization--arising in response to resource constraints, our framework evolves and refines unconventional yet highly effective prompts by leveraging only the tokens present within the context. We demonstrate its effectiveness across classification, multi-choice question answering, generation and math reasoning tasks across LLMs, while achieving decent runtime efficiency. We hope our findings can guide mechanistic studies on in-context learning, and provide a call to action, to pave the way for more open-ended search algorithms for more effective LLM prompting.
Cross-modal State Space Modeling for Real-time RGB-thermal Wild Scene Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xiaodong Guo, Zi'ang Lin, Luwen Hu, Zhihong Deng, Tong Liu, WuJie Zhou
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

The integration of RGB and thermal data can significantly improve semantic segmentation performance in wild environments for field robots. Nevertheless, multi-source data processing (e.g. Transformer-based approaches) imposes significant computational overhead, presenting challenges for resource-constrained systems. To resolve this critical limitation, we introduced CM-SSM, an efficient RGB-thermal semantic segmentation architecture leveraging a cross-modal state space modeling (SSM) approach. Our framework comprises two key components. First, we introduced a cross-modal 2D-selective-scan (CM-SS2D) module to establish SSM between RGB and thermal modalities, which constructs cross-modal visual sequences and derives hidden state representations of one modality from the other. Second, we developed a cross-modal state space association (CM-SSA) module that effectively integrates global associations from CM-SS2D with local spatial features extracted through convolutional operations. In contrast with Transformer-based approaches, CM-SSM achieves linear computational complexity with respect to image resolution. Experimental results show that CM-SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CART dataset with fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Further experiments on the PST900 dataset demonstrate its generalizability. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/CMSSM.
Geometric Contact Flows: Contactomorphisms for Dynamics and Control
Authors: Andrea Testa, Søren Hauberg, Tamim Asfour, Leonel Rozo
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00

Accurately modeling and predicting complex dynamical systems, particularly those involving force exchange and dissipation, is crucial for applications ranging from fluid dynamics to robotics, but presents significant challenges due to the intricate interplay of geometric constraints and energy transfer. This paper introduces Geometric Contact Flows (GFC), a novel framework leveraging Riemannian and Contact geometry as inductive biases to learn such systems. GCF constructs a latent contact Hamiltonian model encoding desirable properties like stability or energy conservation. An ensemble of contactomorphisms then adapts this model to the target dynamics while preserving these properties. This ensemble allows for uncertainty-aware geodesics that attract the system's behavior toward the data support, enabling robust generalization and adaptation to unseen scenarios. Experiments on learning dynamics for physical systems and for controlling robots on interaction tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Generative Grasp Detection and Estimation with Concept Learning-based Safety Criteria
Authors: Al-Harith Farhad, Khalil Abuibaid, Christiane Plociennik, Achim Wagner, Martin Ruskowski
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00

Neural networks are often regarded as universal equations that can estimate any function. This flexibility, however, comes with the drawback of high complexity, rendering these networks into black box models, which is especially relevant in safety-centric applications. To that end, we propose a pipeline for a collaborative robot (Cobot) grasping algorithm that detects relevant tools and generates the optimal grasp. To increase the transparency and reliability of this approach, we integrate an explainable AI method that provides an explanation for the underlying prediction of a model by extracting the learned features and correlating them to corresponding classes from the input. These concepts are then used as additional criteria to ensure the safe handling of work tools. In this paper, we show the consistency of this approach and the criterion for improving the handover position. This approach was tested in an industrial environment, where a camera system was set up to enable a robot to pick up certain tools and objects.
Leveling the Playing Field: Carefully Comparing Classical and Learned Controllers for Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking
Authors: Pratik Kunapuli, Jake Welde, Dinesh Jayaraman, Vijay Kumar
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning-based control approaches like reinforcement learning (RL) have recently produced a slew of impressive results for tasks like quadrotor trajectory tracking and drone racing. Naturally, it is common to demonstrate the advantages of these new controllers against established methods like analytical controllers. We observe, however, that reliably comparing the performance of such very different classes of controllers is more complicated than might appear at first sight. As a case study, we take up the problem of agile tracking of an end-effector for a quadrotor with a fixed arm. We develop a set of best practices for synthesizing the best-in-class RL and geometric controllers (GC) for benchmarking. In the process, we resolve widespread RL-favoring biases in prior studies that provide asymmetric access to: (1) the task definition, in the form of an objective function, (2) representative datasets, for parameter optimization, and (3) feedforward information, describing the desired future trajectory. The resulting findings are the following: our improvements to the experimental protocol for comparing learned and classical controllers are critical, and each of the above asymmetries can yield misleading conclusions. Prior works have claimed that RL outperforms GC, but we find the gaps between the two controller classes are much smaller than previously published when accounting for symmetric comparisons. Geometric control achieves lower steady-state error than RL, while RL has better transient performance, resulting in GC performing better in relatively slow or less agile tasks, but RL performing better when greater agility is required. Finally, we open-source implementations of geometric and RL controllers for these aerial vehicles, implementing best practices for future development. Website and code is available at https://pratikkunapuli.github.io/rl-vs-gc/
Learning to Dock: A Simulation-based Study on Closing the Sim2Real Gap in Autonomous Underwater Docking
Authors: Kevin Chang, Rakesh Vivekanandan, Noah Pragin, Sean Bullock, Geoffrey Hollinger
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) docking in dynamic and uncertain environments is a critical challenge for underwater robotics. Reinforcement learning is a promising method for developing robust controllers, but the disparity between training simulations and the real world, or the sim2real gap, often leads to a significant deterioration in performance. In this work, we perform a simulation study on reducing the sim2real gap in autonomous docking through training various controllers and then evaluating them under realistic disturbances. In particular, we focus on the real-world challenge of docking under different payloads that are potentially outside the original training distribution. We explore existing methods for improving robustness including randomization techniques and history-conditioned controllers. Our findings provide insights into mitigating the sim2real gap when training docking controllers. Furthermore, our work indicates areas of future research that may be beneficial to the marine robotics community.