pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Machine Learning in Virtual Sensors for Vehicle Sideslip Angle Estimation
Authors: Abinav Kalyanasundaram, Karthikeyan Chandra Sekaran, Philipp Stauber, Michael Lange, Wolfgang Utschick, Michael Botsch
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Hybrid Machine Learning, State Estimation, Uncertainty Quantification

Precise vehicle state estimation is crucial for safe and reliable autonomous driving. The number of measurable states and their precision offered by the onboard vehicle sensor system are often constrained by cost. For instance, measuring critical quantities such as the Vehicle Sideslip Angle (VSA) poses significant commercial challenges using current optical sensors. This paper addresses these limitations by focusing on the development of high-performance virtual sensors to enhance vehicle state estimation for active safety. The proposed Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Learning (UAHL) architecture integrates a machine learning model with vehicle motion models to estimate VSA directly from onboard sensor data. A key aspect of the UAHL architecture is its focus on uncertainty quantification for individual model estimates and hybrid fusion. These mechanisms enable the dynamic weighting of uncertainty-aware predictions from machine learning and vehicle motion models to produce accurate and reliable hybrid VSA estimates. This work also presents a novel dataset named Real-world Vehicle State Estimation Dataset (ReV-StED), comprising synchronized measurements from advanced vehicle dynamic sensors. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method for VSA estimation, highlighting UAHL as a promising architecture for advancing virtual sensors and enhancing active safety in autonomous vehicles.
MAPLE: Encoding Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Priors Learned From Egocentric Videos
Authors: Alexey Gavryushin, Xi Wang, Robert J. S. Malate, Chenyu Yang, Xiangyi Jia, Shubh Goel, Davide Liconti, René Zurbrügg, Robert K. Katzschmann, Marc Pollefeys
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

Large-scale egocentric video datasets capture diverse human activities across a wide range of scenarios, offering rich and detailed insights into how humans interact with objects, especially those that require fine-grained dexterous control. Such complex, dexterous skills with precise controls are crucial for many robotic manipulation tasks, yet are often insufficiently addressed by traditional data-driven approaches to robotic manipulation. To address this gap, we leverage manipulation priors learned from large-scale egocentric video datasets to improve policy learning for dexterous robotic manipulation tasks. We present MAPLE, a novel method for dexterous robotic manipulation that exploits rich manipulation priors to enable efficient policy learning and better performance on diverse, complex manipulation tasks. Specifically, we predict hand-object contact points and detailed hand poses at the moment of hand-object contact and use the learned features to train policies for downstream manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPLE across existing simulation benchmarks, as well as a newly designed set of challenging simulation tasks, which require fine-grained object control and complex dexterous skills. The benefits of MAPLE are further highlighted in real-world experiments using a dexterous robotic hand, whereas simultaneous evaluation across both simulation and real-world experiments has remained underexplored in prior work.
Deep RL-based Autonomous Navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in a complex GPS-denied Indoor Environment
Authors: Amit Kumar Singh, Prasanth Kumar Duba, P. Rajalakshmi
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

The Autonomy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in indoor environments poses significant challenges due to the lack of reliable GPS signals in enclosed spaces such as warehouses, factories, and indoor facilities. Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are preferred for navigating in these complex, GPS-denied scenarios because of their agility, low power consumption, and limited computational capabilities. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning based Deep-Proximal Policy Optimization (D-PPO) algorithm to enhance realtime navigation through improving the computation efficiency. The end-to-end network is trained in 3D realistic meta-environments created using the Unreal Engine. With these trained meta-weights, the MAV system underwent extensive experimental trials in real-world indoor environments. The results indicate that the proposed method reduces computational latency by 91\% during training period without significant degradation in performance. The algorithm was tested on a DJI Tello drone, yielding similar results.
A Taxonomy of Self-Handover
Authors: Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Jun Takamatsu, Katsushi Ikeuchi
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Self-handover, transferring an object between one's own hands, is a common but understudied bimanual action. While it facilitates seamless transitions in complex tasks, the strategies underlying its execution remain largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the first systematic taxonomy of self-handover, derived from manual annotation of over 12 hours of cooking activity performed by 21 participants. Our analysis reveals that self-handover is not merely a passive transition, but a highly coordinated action involving anticipatory adjustments by both hands. As a step toward automated analysis of human manipulation, we further demonstrate the feasibility of classifying self-handover types using a state-of-the-art vision-language model. These findings offer fresh insights into bimanual coordination, underscoring the role of self-handover in enabling smooth task transitions-an ability essential for adaptive dual-arm robotics.
Path Database Guidance for Motion Planning
Authors: Amnon Attali, Praval Telagi, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

One approach to using prior experience in robot motion planning is to store solutions to previously seen problems in a database of paths. Methods that use such databases are characterized by how they query for a path and how they use queries given a new problem. In this work we present a new method, Path Database Guidance (PDG), which innovates on existing work in two ways. First, we use the database to compute a heuristic for determining which nodes of a search tree to expand, in contrast to prior work which generally pastes the (possibly transformed) queried path or uses it to bias a sampling distribution. We demonstrate that this makes our method more easily composable with other search methods by dynamically interleaving exploration according to a baseline algorithm with exploitation of the database guidance. Second, in contrast to other methods that treat the database as a single fixed prior, our database (and thus our queried heuristic) updates as we search the implicitly defined robot configuration space. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of PDG in a variety of explicitly defined environment distributions in simulation.
EP-Diffuser: An Efficient Diffusion Model for Traffic Scene Generation and Prediction via Polynomial Representations
Authors: Yue Yao, Mohamed-Khalil Bouzidi, Daniel Goehring, Joerg Reichardt
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Scene Generation

As the prediction horizon increases, predicting the future evolution of traffic scenes becomes increasingly difficult due to the multi-modal nature of agent motion. Most state-of-the-art (SotA) prediction models primarily focus on forecasting the most likely future. However, for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles, it is equally important to cover the distribution for plausible motion alternatives. To address this, we introduce EP-Diffuser, a novel parameter-efficient diffusion-based generative model designed to capture the distribution of possible traffic scene evolutions. Conditioned on road layout and agent history, our model acts as a predictor and generates diverse, plausible scene continuations. We benchmark EP-Diffuser against two SotA models in terms of accuracy and plausibility of predictions on the Argoverse 2 dataset. Despite its significantly smaller model size, our approach achieves both highly accurate and plausible traffic scene predictions. We further evaluate model generalization ability in an out-of-distribution (OoD) test setting using Waymo Open dataset and show superior robustness of our approach. The code and model checkpoints can be found here: https://github.com/continental/EP-Diffuser.
TRATSS: Transformer-Based Task Scheduling System for Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Yazan Youssef, Paulo Ricardo Marques de Araujo, Aboelmagd Noureldin, Sidney Givigi
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Scheduling

Efficient scheduling remains a critical challenge in various domains, requiring solutions to complex NP-hard optimization problems to achieve optimal resource allocation and maximize productivity. In this paper, we introduce a framework called Transformer-Based Task Scheduling System (TRATSS), designed to address the intricacies of single agent scheduling in graph-based environments. By integrating the latest advancements in reinforcement learning and transformer architecture, TRATSS provides a novel system that outputs optimized task scheduling decisions while dynamically adapting to evolving task requirements and resource availability. Leveraging the self-attention mechanism in transformers, TRATSS effectively captures complex task dependencies, thereby providing solutions with enhanced resource utilization and task completion efficiency. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate TRATSS's effectiveness in providing high-quality solutions to scheduling problems that involve multiple action profiles.
CloSE: A Compact Shape- and Orientation-Agnostic Cloth State Representation
Authors: Jay Kamat, Júlia Borràs, Carme Torras
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00

Cloth manipulation is a difficult problem mainly because of the non-rigid nature of cloth, which makes a good representation of deformation essential. We present a new representation for the deformation-state of clothes. First, we propose the dGLI disk representation, based on topological indices computed for segments on the edges of the cloth mesh border that are arranged on a circular grid. The heat-map of the dGLI disk uncovers patterns that correspond to features of the cloth state that are consistent for different shapes, sizes of positions of the cloth, like the corners and the fold locations. We then abstract these important features from the dGLI disk onto a circle, calling it the Cloth StatE representation (CloSE). This representation is compact, continuous, and general for different shapes. Finally, we show the strengths of this representation in two relevant applications: semantic labeling and high- and low-level planning. The code, the dataset and the video can be accessed from : https://jaykamat99.github.io/close-representation
A High-Force Gripper with Embedded Multimodal Sensing for Powerful and Perception Driven Grasping
Authors: Edoardo Del Bianco, Davide Torielli, Federico Rollo, Damiano Gasperini, Arturo Laurenzi, Lorenzo Baccelliere, Luca Muratore, Marco Roveri, Nikos G. Tsagarakis
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00

Modern humanoid robots have shown their promising potential for executing various tasks involving the grasping and manipulation of objects using their end-effectors. Nevertheless, in the most of the cases, the grasping and manipulation actions involve low to moderate payload and interaction forces. This is due to limitations often presented by the end-effectors, which can not match their arm-reachable payload, and hence limit the payload that can be grasped and manipulated. In addition, grippers usually do not embed adequate perception in their hardware, and grasping actions are mainly driven by perception sensors installed in the rest of the robot body, frequently affected by occlusions due to the arm motions during the execution of the grasping and manipulation tasks. To address the above, we developed a modular high grasping force gripper equipped with embedded multi-modal perception functionalities. The proposed gripper can generate a grasping force of 110 N in a compact implementation. The high grasping force capability is combined with embedded multi-modal sensing, which includes an eye-in-hand camera, a Time-of-Flight (ToF) distance sensor, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and an omnidirectional microphone, permitting the implementation of perception-driven grasping functionalities. We extensively evaluated the grasping force capacity of the gripper by introducing novel payload evaluation metrics that are a function of the robot arm's dynamic motion and gripper thermal states. We also evaluated the embedded multi-modal sensing by performing perception-guided enhanced grasping operations.
Real-Time Model Predictive Control for the Swing-Up Problem of an Underactuated Double Pendulum
Authors: Blanka Burchard, Franek Stark
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Acrobot, Model Predictive Control

The 3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition poses the challenge of developing a global policy that can swing up and stabilize an underactuated 2-link system Acrobot and/or Pendubot from any configuration in the state space. This paper presents an optimal control-based approach using a real-time Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). The results show that the controller achieves good performance and robustness and can reliably handle disturbances.
Continuous Locomotive Crowd Behavior Generation
Authors: Inhwan Bae, Junoh Lee, Hae-Gon Jeon
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Modeling and reproducing crowd behaviors are important in various domains including psychology, robotics, transport engineering and virtual environments. Conventional methods have focused on synthesizing momentary scenes, which have difficulty in replicating the continuous nature of real-world crowds. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for automatically generating continuous, realistic crowd trajectories with heterogeneous behaviors and interactions among individuals. We first design a crowd emitter model. To do this, we obtain spatial layouts from single input images, including a segmentation map, appearance map, population density map and population probability, prior to crowd generation. The emitter then continually places individuals on the timeline by assigning independent behavior characteristics such as agents' type, pace, and start/end positions using diffusion models. Next, our crowd simulator produces their long-term locomotions. To simulate diverse actions, it can augment their behaviors based on a Markov chain. As a result, our overall framework populates the scenes with heterogeneous crowd behaviors by alternating between the proposed emitter and simulator. Note that all the components in the proposed framework are user-controllable. Lastly, we propose a benchmark protocol to evaluate the realism and quality of the generated crowds in terms of the scene-level population dynamics and the individual-level trajectory accuracy. We demonstrate that our approach effectively models diverse crowd behavior patterns and generalizes well across different geographical environments. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/InhwanBae/CrowdES .
Grounding 3D Object Affordance with Language Instructions, Visual Observations and Interactions
Authors: He Zhu, Quyu Kong, Kechun Xu, Xunlong Xia, Bing Deng, Jieping Ye, Rong Xiong, Yue Wang
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Object

Grounding 3D object affordance is a task that locates objects in 3D space where they can be manipulated, which links perception and action for embodied intelligence. For example, for an intelligent robot, it is necessary to accurately ground the affordance of an object and grasp it according to human instructions. In this paper, we introduce a novel task that grounds 3D object affordance based on language instructions, visual observations and interactions, which is inspired by cognitive science. We collect an Affordance Grounding dataset with Points, Images and Language instructions (AGPIL) to support the proposed task. In the 3D physical world, due to observation orientation, object rotation, or spatial occlusion, we can only get a partial observation of the object. So this dataset includes affordance estimations of objects from full-view, partial-view, and rotation-view perspectives. To accomplish this task, we propose LMAffordance3D, the first multi-modal, language-guided 3D affordance grounding network, which applies a vision-language model to fuse 2D and 3D spatial features with semantic features. Comprehensive experiments on AGPIL demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method on this task, even in unseen experimental settings. Our project is available at https://sites.google.com/view/lmaffordance3d.
Tool-as-Interface: Learning Robot Policies from Human Tool Usage through Imitation Learning
Authors: Haonan Chen, Cheng Zhu, Yunzhu Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Imitation Learning

Tool use is critical for enabling robots to perform complex real-world tasks, and leveraging human tool-use data can be instrumental for teaching robots. However, existing data collection methods like teleoperation are slow, prone to control delays, and unsuitable for dynamic tasks. In contrast, human natural data, where humans directly perform tasks with tools, offers natural, unstructured interactions that are both efficient and easy to collect. Building on the insight that humans and robots can share the same tools, we propose a framework to transfer tool-use knowledge from human data to robots. Using two RGB cameras, our method generates 3D reconstruction, applies Gaussian splatting for novel view augmentation, employs segmentation models to extract embodiment-agnostic observations, and leverages task-space tool-action representations to train visuomotor policies. We validate our approach on diverse real-world tasks, including meatball scooping, pan flipping, wine bottle balancing, and other complex tasks. Our method achieves a 71\% higher average success rate compared to diffusion policies trained with teleoperation data and reduces data collection time by 77\%, with some tasks solvable only by our framework. Compared to hand-held gripper, our method cuts data collection time by 41\%. Additionally, our method bridges the embodiment gap, improves robustness to variations in camera viewpoints and robot configurations, and generalizes effectively across objects and spatial setups.
Nonlinear Robust Optimization for Planning and Control
Authors: Arshiya Taj Abdul, Augustinos D. Saravanos, Evangelos A. Theodorou
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel robust trajectory optimization method for constrained nonlinear dynamical systems subject to unknown bounded disturbances. In particular, we seek optimal control policies that remain robustly feasible with respect to all possible realizations of the disturbances within prescribed uncertainty sets. To address this problem, we introduce a bi-level optimization algorithm. The outer level employs a trust-region successive convexification approach which relies on linearizing the nonlinear dynamics and robust constraints. The inner level involves solving the resulting linearized robust optimization problems, for which we derive tractable convex reformulations and present an Augmented Lagrangian method for efficiently solving them. To further enhance the robustness of our methodology on nonlinear systems, we also illustrate that potential linearization errors can be effectively modeled as unknown disturbances as well. Simulation results verify the applicability of our approach in controlling nonlinear systems in a robust manner under unknown disturbances. The promise of effectively handling approximation errors in such successive linearization schemes from a robust optimization perspective is also highlighted.
Modeling of AUV Dynamics with Limited Resources: Efficient Online Learning Using Uncertainty
Authors: Michal Tešnar, Bilal Wehbe, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00

Machine learning proves effective in constructing dynamics models from data, especially for underwater vehicles. Continuous refinement of these models using incoming data streams, however, often requires storage of an overwhelming amount of redundant data. This work investigates the use of uncertainty in the selection of data points to rehearse in online learning when storage capacity is constrained. The models are learned using an ensemble of multilayer perceptrons as they perform well at predicting epistemic uncertainty. We present three novel approaches: the Threshold method, which excludes samples with uncertainty below a specified threshold, the Greedy method, designed to maximize uncertainty among the stored points, and Threshold-Greedy, which combines the previous two approaches. The methods are assessed on data collected by an underwater vehicle Dagon. Comparison with baselines reveals that the Threshold exhibits enhanced stability throughout the learning process and also yields a model with the least cumulative testing loss. We also conducted detailed analyses on the impact of model parameters and storage size on the performance of the models, as well as a comparison of three different uncertainty estimation methods.
Hierarchical Planning for Complex Tasks with Knowledge Graph-RAG and Symbolic Verification
Authors: Cristina Cornelio, Flavio Petruzzellis, Pietro Lio
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as robotic planners but often struggle with long-horizon and complex tasks, especially in specialized environments requiring external knowledge. While hierarchical planning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) address some of these challenges, they remain insufficient on their own and a deeper integration is required for achieving more reliable systems. To this end, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that enhances LLMs-based planners with Knowledge Graph-based RAG for hierarchical plan generation. This method decomposes complex tasks into manageable subtasks, further expanded into executable atomic action sequences. To ensure formal correctness and proper decomposition, we integrate a Symbolic Validator, which also functions as a failure detector by aligning expected and observed world states. Our evaluation against baseline methods demonstrates the consistent significant advantages of integrating hierarchical planning, symbolic verification, and RAG across tasks of varying complexity and different LLMs. Additionally, our experimental setup and novel metrics not only validate our approach for complex planning but also serve as a tool for assessing LLMs' reasoning and compositional capabilities.