pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RANa: Retrieval-Augmented Navigation
Authors: Gianluca Monaci, Rafael S. Rezende, Romain Deffayet, Gabriela Csurka, Guillaume Bono, Hervé Déjean, Stéphane Clinchant, Christian Wolf
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Methods for navigation based on large-scale learning typically treat each episode as a new problem, where the agent is spawned with a clean memory in an unknown environment. While these generalization capabilities to an unknown environment are extremely important, we claim that, in a realistic setting, an agent should have the capacity of exploiting information collected during earlier robot operations. We address this by introducing a new retrieval-augmented agent, trained with RL, capable of querying a database collected from previous episodes in the same environment and learning how to integrate this additional context information. We introduce a unique agent architecture for the general navigation task, evaluated on ObjectNav, ImageNav and Instance-ImageNav. Our retrieval and context encoding methods are data-driven and heavily employ vision foundation models (FM) for both semantic and geometric understanding. We propose new benchmarks for these settings and we show that retrieval allows zero-shot transfer across tasks and environments while significantly improving performance.
Dexterous Manipulation through Imitation Learning: A Survey
Authors: Shan An, Ziyu Meng, Chao Tang, Yuning Zhou, Tengyu Liu, Fangqiang Ding, Shufang Zhang, Yao Mu, Ran Song, Wei zhang, Zeng-Guang Hou, Hong Zhang
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

Dexterous manipulation, which refers to the ability of a robotic hand or multi-fingered end-effector to skillfully control, reorient, and manipulate objects through precise, coordinated finger movements and adaptive force modulation, enables complex interactions similar to human hand dexterity. With recent advances in robotics and machine learning, there is a growing demand for these systems to operate in complex and unstructured environments. Traditional model-based approaches struggle to generalize across tasks and object variations due to the high dimensionality and complex contact dynamics of dexterous manipulation. Although model-free methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) show promise, they require extensive training, large-scale interaction data, and carefully designed rewards for stability and effectiveness. Imitation learning (IL) offers an alternative by allowing robots to acquire dexterous manipulation skills directly from expert demonstrations, capturing fine-grained coordination and contact dynamics while bypassing the need for explicit modeling and large-scale trial-and-error. This survey provides an overview of dexterous manipulation methods based on imitation learning, details recent advances, and addresses key challenges in the field. Additionally, it explores potential research directions to enhance IL-driven dexterous manipulation. Our goal is to offer researchers and practitioners a comprehensive introduction to this rapidly evolving domain.
Learning Dual-Arm Coordination for Grasping Large Flat Objects
Authors: Yongliang Wang, Hamidreza Kasaei
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Grasping large flat objects, such as books or keyboards lying horizontally, presents significant challenges for single-arm robotic systems, often requiring extra actions like pushing objects against walls or moving them to the edge of a surface to facilitate grasping. In contrast, dual-arm manipulation, inspired by human dexterity, offers a more refined solution by directly coordinating both arms to lift and grasp the object without the need for complex repositioning. In this paper, we propose a model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to enable dual-arm coordination for grasping large flat objects. We utilize a large-scale grasp pose detection model as a backbone to extract high-dimensional features from input images, which are then used as the state representation in a reinforcement learning (RL) model. A CNN-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm with shared Actor-Critic layers is employed to learn coordinated dual-arm grasp actions. The system is trained and tested in Isaac Gym and deployed to real robots. Experimental results demonstrate that our policy can effectively grasp large flat objects without requiring additional maneuvers. Furthermore, the policy exhibits strong generalization capabilities, successfully handling unseen objects. Importantly, it can be directly transferred to real robots without fine-tuning, consistently outperforming baseline methods.
DML-RAM: Deep Multimodal Learning Framework for Robotic Arm Manipulation using Pre-trained Models
Authors: Sathish Kumar, Swaroop Damodaran, Naveen Kumar Kuruba, Sumit Jha, Arvind Ramanathan
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This paper presents a novel deep learning framework for robotic arm manipulation that integrates multimodal inputs using a late-fusion strategy. Unlike traditional end-to-end or reinforcement learning approaches, our method processes image sequences with pre-trained models and robot state data with machine learning algorithms, fusing their outputs to predict continuous action values for control. Evaluated on BridgeData V2 and Kuka datasets, the best configuration (VGG16 + Random Forest) achieved MSEs of 0.0021 and 0.0028, respectively, demonstrating strong predictive performance and robustness. The framework supports modularity, interpretability, and real-time decision-making, aligning with the goals of adaptive, human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems.
Point Cloud-based Grasping for Soft Hand Exoskeleton
Authors: Chen Hu, Enrica Tricomi, Eojin Rho, Daekyum Kim, Lorenzo Masia, Shan Luo, Letizia Gionfrida
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00

Grasping is a fundamental skill for interacting with and manipulating objects in the environment. However, this ability can be challenging for individuals with hand impairments. Soft hand exoskeletons designed to assist grasping can enhance or restore essential hand functions, yet controlling these soft exoskeletons to support users effectively remains difficult due to the complexity of understanding the environment. This study presents a vision-based predictive control framework that leverages contextual awareness from depth perception to predict the grasping target and determine the next control state for activation. Unlike data-driven approaches that require extensive labelled datasets and struggle with generalizability, our method is grounded in geometric modelling, enabling robust adaptation across diverse grasping scenarios. The Grasping Ability Score (GAS) was used to evaluate performance, with our system achieving a state-of-the-art GAS of 91% across 15 objects and healthy participants, demonstrating its effectiveness across different object types. The proposed approach maintained reconstruction success for unseen objects, underscoring its enhanced generalizability compared to learning-based models.
Energy Aware and Safe Path Planning for Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Authors: Sebastian Gasche, Christian Kallies, Andreas Himmel, Rolf Findeisen
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a path planning algorithm for multi-agent unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) to autonomously cover a search area, while considering obstacle avoidance, as well as the capabilities and energy consumption of the employed unmanned aerial vehicles. The path planning is optimized in terms of energy efficiency to prefer low energy-consuming maneuvers. In scenarios where a UAS is low on energy, it autonomously returns to its initial position for a safe landing, thus preventing potential battery damage. To accomplish this, an energy-aware multicopter model is integrated into a path planning algorithm based on model predictive control and mixed integer linear programming. Besides factoring in energy consumption, the planning is improved by dynamically defining feasible regions for each UAS to prevent obstacle corner-cutting or over-jumping.
A Modular Energy Aware Framework for Multicopter Modeling in Control and Planning Applications
Authors: Sebastian Gasche, Christian Kallies, Andreas Himmel, Rolf Findeisen
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially multicopters, have recently gained popularity for use in surveillance, monitoring, inspection, and search and rescue missions. Their maneuverability and ability to operate in confined spaces make them particularly useful in cluttered environments. For advanced control and mission planning applications, accurate and resource-efficient modeling of UAVs and their capabilities is essential. This study presents a modular approach to multicopter modeling that considers vehicle dynamics, energy consumption, and sensor integration. The power train model includes detailed descriptions of key components such as the lithium-ion battery, electronic speed controllers, and brushless DC motors. Their models are validated with real test flight data. In addition, sensor models, including LiDAR and cameras, are integrated to describe the equipment often used in surveillance and monitoring missions. The individual models are combined into an energy-aware multicopter model, which provide the basis for a companion study on path planning for unmanned aircaft system (UAS) swarms performing search and rescue missions in cluttered and dynamic environments. The flexible modeling approach enables easy description of different UAVs in a heterogeneous UAS swarm, allowing for energy-efficient operations and autonomous decision making for a reliable mission performance.
Robot Localization Using a Learned Keypoint Detector and Descriptor with a Floor Camera and a Feature Rich Industrial Floor
Authors: Piet Brömmel, Dominik Brämer, Oliver Urbann, Diana Kleingarn
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

The localization of moving robots depends on the availability of good features from the environment. Sensor systems like Lidar are popular, but unique features can also be extracted from images of the ground. This work presents the Keypoint Localization Framework (KOALA), which utilizes deep neural networks that extract sufficient features from an industrial floor for accurate localization without having readable markers. For this purpose, we use a floor covering that can be produced as cheaply as common industrial floors. Although we do not use any filtering, prior, or temporal information, we can estimate our position in 75.7 % of all images with a mean position error of 2 cm and a rotation error of 2.4 %. Thus, the robot kidnapping problem can be solved with high precision in every frame, even while the robot is moving. Furthermore, we show that our framework with our detector and descriptor combination is able to outperform comparable approaches.
Seeing is Believing: Belief-Space Planning with Foundation Models as Uncertainty Estimators
Authors: Linfeng Zhao, Willie McClinton, Aidan Curtis, Nishanth Kumar, Tom Silver, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Lawson L. S. Wong
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Generalizable robotic mobile manipulation in open-world environments poses significant challenges due to long horizons, complex goals, and partial observability. A promising approach to address these challenges involves planning with a library of parameterized skills, where a task planner sequences these skills to achieve goals specified in structured languages, such as logical expressions over symbolic facts. While vision-language models (VLMs) can be used to ground these expressions, they often assume full observability, leading to suboptimal behavior when the agent lacks sufficient information to evaluate facts with certainty. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages VLMs as a perception module to estimate uncertainty and facilitate symbolic grounding. Our approach constructs a symbolic belief representation and uses a belief-space planner to generate uncertainty-aware plans that incorporate strategic information gathering. This enables the agent to effectively reason about partial observability and property uncertainty. We demonstrate our system on a range of challenging real-world tasks that require reasoning in partially observable environments. Simulated evaluations show that our approach outperforms both vanilla VLM-based end-to-end planning or VLM-based state estimation baselines by planning for and executing strategic information gathering. This work highlights the potential of VLMs to construct belief-space symbolic scene representations, enabling downstream tasks such as uncertainty-aware planning.
Real-Time Roadway Obstacle Detection for Electric Scooters Using Deep Learning and Multi-Sensor Fusion
Authors: Zeyang Zheng, Arman Hosseini, Dong Chen, Omid Shoghli, Arsalan Heydarian
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion

The increasing adoption of electric scooters (e-scooters) in urban areas has coincided with a rise in traffic accidents and injuries, largely due to their small wheels, lack of suspension, and sensitivity to uneven surfaces. While deep learning-based object detection has been widely used to improve automobile safety, its application for e-scooter obstacle detection remains unexplored. This study introduces a novel ground obstacle detection system for e-scooters, integrating an RGB camera, and a depth camera to enhance real-time road hazard detection. Additionally, the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measures linear vertical acceleration to identify surface vibrations, guiding the selection of six obstacle categories: tree branches, manhole covers, potholes, pine cones, non-directional cracks, and truncated domes. All sensors, including the RGB camera, depth camera, and IMU, are integrated within the Intel RealSense Camera D435i. A deep learning model powered by YOLO detects road hazards and utilizes depth data to estimate obstacle proximity. Evaluated on the seven hours of naturalistic riding dataset, the system achieves a high mean average precision (mAP) of 0.827 and demonstrates excellent real-time performance. This approach provides an effective solution to enhance e-scooter safety through advanced computer vision and data fusion. The dataset is accessible at https://zenodo.org/records/14583718, and the project code is hosted on https://github.com/Zeyang-Zheng/Real-Time-Roadway-Obstacle-Detection-for-Electric-Scooters.
Taming High-Dimensional Dynamics: Learning Optimal Projections onto Spectral Submanifolds
Authors: Hugo Buurmeijer, Luis A. Pabon, John Irvin Alora, Roshan S. Kaundinya, George Haller, Marco Pavone
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

High-dimensional nonlinear systems pose considerable challenges for modeling and control across many domains, from fluid mechanics to advanced robotics. Such systems are typically approximated with reduced order models, which often rely on orthogonal projections, a simplification that may lead to large prediction errors. In this work, we derive optimality of fiber-aligned projections onto spectral submanifolds, preserving the nonlinear geometric structure and minimizing long-term prediction error. We propose a computationally tractable procedure to approximate these projections from data, and show how the effect of control can be incorporated. For a 180-dimensional robotic system, we demonstrate that our reduced-order models outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches by up to fivefold in trajectory tracking accuracy under model predictive control.
GraphSeg: Segmented 3D Representations via Graph Edge Addition and Contraction
Authors: Haozhan Tang, Tianyi Zhang, Oliver Kroemer, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Weiming Zhi
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Robots operating in unstructured environments often require accurate and consistent object-level representations. This typically requires segmenting individual objects from the robot's surroundings. While recent large models such as Segment Anything (SAM) offer strong performance in 2D image segmentation. These advances do not translate directly to performance in the physical 3D world, where they often over-segment objects and fail to produce consistent mask correspondences across views. In this paper, we present GraphSeg, a framework for generating consistent 3D object segmentations from a sparse set of 2D images of the environment without any depth information. GraphSeg adds edges to graphs and constructs dual correspondence graphs: one from 2D pixel-level similarities and one from inferred 3D structure. We formulate segmentation as a problem of edge addition, then subsequent graph contraction, which merges multiple 2D masks into unified object-level segmentations. We can then leverage \emph{3D foundation models} to produce segmented 3D representations. GraphSeg achieves robust segmentation with significantly fewer images and greater accuracy than prior methods. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on tabletop scenes and show that GraphSeg enables improved performance on downstream robotic manipulation tasks. Code available at https://github.com/tomtang502/graphseg.git.
Distributed Resilience-Aware Control in Multi-Robot Networks
Authors: Haejoon Lee, Dimitra Panagou
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

Ensuring resilient consensus in multi-robot systems with misbehaving agents remains a challenge, as many existing network resilience properties are inherently combinatorial and globally defined. While previous works have proposed control laws to enhance or preserve resilience in multi-robot networks, they often assume a fixed topology with known resilience properties, or require global state knowledge. These assumptions may be impractical in physically-constrained environments, where safety and resilience requirements are conflicting, or when misbehaving agents corrupt the shared information. In this work, we propose a distributed control law that enables each robot to guarantee resilient consensus and safety during its navigation without fixed topologies using only locally available information. To this end, we establish a new sufficient condition for resilient consensus in time-varying networks based on the degree of non-misbehaving or normal agents. Using this condition, we design a Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based controller that guarantees resilient consensus and collision avoidance without requiring estimates of global state and/or control actions of all other robots. Finally, we validate our method through simulations.
MultiMed-ST: Large-scale Many-to-many Multilingual Medical Speech Translation
Authors: Khai Le-Duc, Tuyen Tran, Bach Phan Tat, Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, Quan Dang, Hung-Phong Tran, Thanh-Thuy Nguyen, Ly Nguyen, Tuan-Minh Phan, Thi Thu Phuong Tran, Chris Ngo, Nguyen X. Khanh, Thanh Nguyen-Tang
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Multilingual speech translation (ST) in the medical domain enhances patient care by enabling efficient communication across language barriers, alleviating specialized workforce shortages, and facilitating improved diagnosis and treatment, particularly during pandemics. In this work, we present the first systematic study on medical ST, to our best knowledge, by releasing MultiMed-ST, a large-scale ST dataset for the medical domain, spanning all translation directions in five languages: Vietnamese, English, German, French, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, together with the models. With 290,000 samples, our dataset is the largest medical machine translation (MT) dataset and the largest many-to-many multilingual ST among all domains. Secondly, we present the most extensive analysis study in ST research to date, including: empirical baselines, bilingual-multilingual comparative study, end-to-end vs. cascaded comparative study, task-specific vs. multi-task sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) comparative study, code-switch analysis, and quantitative-qualitative error analysis. All code, data, and models are available online: https://github.com/leduckhai/MultiMed-ST.
Mind the Prompt: Prompting Strategies in Audio Generations for Improving Sound Classification
Authors: Francesca Ronchini, Ho-Hsiang Wu, Wei-Cheng Lin, Fabio Antonacci
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Sound Classification

This paper investigates the design of effective prompt strategies for generating realistic datasets using Text-To-Audio (TTA) models. We also analyze different techniques for efficiently combining these datasets to enhance their utility in sound classification tasks. By evaluating two sound classification datasets with two TTA models, we apply a range of prompt strategies. Our findings reveal that task-specific prompt strategies significantly outperform basic prompt approaches in data generation. Furthermore, merging datasets generated using different TTA models proves to enhance classification performance more effectively than merely increasing the training dataset size. Overall, our results underscore the advantages of these methods as effective data augmentation techniques using synthetic data.
RWKVTTS: Yet another TTS based on RWKV-7
Authors: Lin Yueyu, Liu Xiao
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Human-AI interaction thrives on intuitive and efficient interfaces, among which voice stands out as a particularly natural and accessible modality. Recent advancements in transformer-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems, such as Fish-Speech, CosyVoice, and MegaTTS 3, have delivered remarkable improvements in quality and realism, driving a significant evolution in the TTS domain. In this paper, we introduce RWKV-7 \cite{peng2025rwkv}, a cutting-edge RNN-based architecture tailored for TTS applications. Unlike traditional transformer models, RWKV-7 leverages the strengths of recurrent neural networks to achieve greater computational efficiency and scalability, while maintaining high-quality output. Our comprehensive benchmarks demonstrate that RWKV-7 outperforms transformer-based models across multiple key metrics, including synthesis speed, naturalness of speech, and resource efficiency. Furthermore, we explore its adaptability to diverse linguistic contexts and low-resource environments, showcasing its potential to democratize TTS technology. These findings position RWKV-7 as a powerful and innovative alternative, paving the way for more accessible and versatile voice synthesis solutions in real-world applications.Our code and weights are https://github.com/yynil/RWKVTTS, https://huggingface.co/spaces/RWKV-Red-Team