pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leader and Follower: Interactive Motion Generation under Trajectory Constraints
Authors: Runqi Wang, Caoyuan Ma, Jian Zhao, Hanrui Xu, Dongfang Sun, Haoyang Chen, Lin Xiong, Zheng Wang, Xuelong Li
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation

With the rapid advancement of game and film production, generating interactive motion from texts has garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize content creation processes. In many practical applications, there is a need to impose strict constraints on the motion range or trajectory of virtual characters. However, existing methods that rely solely on textual input face substantial challenges in accurately capturing the user's intent, particularly in specifying the desired trajectory. As a result, the generated motions often lack plausibility and accuracy. Moreover, existing trajectory - based methods for customized motion generation rely on retraining for single - actor scenarios, which limits flexibility and adaptability to different datasets, as well as interactivity in two-actor motions. To generate interactive motion following specified trajectories, this paper decouples complex motion into a Leader - Follower dynamic, inspired by role allocation in partner dancing. Based on this framework, this paper explores the motion range refinement process in interactive motion generation and proposes a training-free approach, integrating a Pace Controller and a Kinematic Synchronization Adapter. The framework enhances the ability of existing models to generate motion that adheres to trajectory by controlling the leader's movement and correcting the follower's motion to align with the leader. Experimental results show that the proposed approach, by better leveraging trajectory information, outperforms existing methods in both realism and accuracy.
SurgPose: a Dataset for Articulated Robotic Surgical Tool Pose Estimation and Tracking
Authors: Zijian Wu, Adam Schmidt, Randy Moore, Haoying Zhou, Alexandre Banks, Peter Kazanzides, Septimiu E. Salcudean
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Stereo Matching

Accurate and efficient surgical robotic tool pose estimation is of fundamental significance to downstream applications such as augmented reality (AR) in surgical training and learning-based autonomous manipulation. While significant advancements have been made in pose estimation for humans and animals, it is still a challenge in surgical robotics due to the scarcity of published data. The relatively large absolute error of the da Vinci end effector kinematics and arduous calibration procedure make calibrated kinematics data collection expensive. Driven by this limitation, we collected a dataset, dubbed SurgPose, providing instance-aware semantic keypoints and skeletons for visual surgical tool pose estimation and tracking. By marking keypoints using ultraviolet (UV) reactive paint, which is invisible under white light and fluorescent under UV light, we execute the same trajectory under different lighting conditions to collect raw videos and keypoint annotations, respectively. The SurgPose dataset consists of approximately 120k surgical instrument instances (80k for training and 40k for validation) of 6 categories. Each instrument instance is labeled with 7 semantic keypoints. Since the videos are collected in stereo pairs, the 2D pose can be lifted to 3D based on stereo-matching depth. In addition to releasing the dataset, we test a few baseline approaches to surgical instrument tracking to demonstrate the utility of SurgPose. More details can be found at surgpose.github.io.
Learning Dexterous Bimanual Catch Skills through Adversarial-Cooperative Heterogeneous-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Taewoo Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Jaehong Kim
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

Robotic catching has traditionally focused on single-handed systems, which are limited in their ability to handle larger or more complex objects. In contrast, bimanual catching offers significant potential for improved dexterity and object handling but introduces new challenges in coordination and control. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning dexterous bimanual catching skills using Heterogeneous-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HARL). Our approach introduces an adversarial reward scheme, where a throw agent increases the difficulty of throws-adjusting speed-while a catch agent learns to coordinate both hands to catch objects under these evolving conditions. We evaluate the framework in simulated environments using 15 different objects, demonstrating robustness and versatility in handling diverse objects. Our method achieved approximately a 2x increase in catching reward compared to single-agent baselines across 15 diverse objects.
PrivilegedDreamer: Explicit Imagination of Privileged Information for Rapid Adaptation of Learned Policies
Authors: Morgan Byrd, Jackson Crandell, Mili Das, Jessica Inman, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation, Meta-Learning, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, parameter estimation

Numerous real-world control problems involve dynamics and objectives affected by unobservable hidden pa- rameters, ranging from autonomous driving to robotic manipu- lation, which cause performance degradation during sim-to-real transfer. To represent these kinds of domains, we adopt hidden- parameter Markov decision processes (HIP-MDPs), which model sequential decision problems where hidden variables parameterize transition and reward functions. Existing ap- proaches, such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, and meta-learning, simply treat the effect of hidden param- eters as additional variance and often struggle to effectively handle HIP-MDP problems, especially when the rewards are parameterized by hidden variables. We introduce Privileged- Dreamer, a model-based reinforcement learning framework that extends the existing model-based approach by incorporating an explicit parameter estimation module. PrivilegedDreamer features its novel dual recurrent architecture that explicitly estimates hidden parameters from limited historical data and enables us to condition the model, actor, and critic networks on these estimated parameters. Our empirical analysis on five diverse HIP-MDP tasks demonstrates that PrivilegedDreamer outperforms state-of-the-art model-based, model-free, and do- main adaptation learning algorithms. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to justify the inclusion of each component in the proposed architecture.
Robot Deformable Object Manipulation via NMPC-generated Demonstrations in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haoyuan Wang, Zihao Dong, Hongliang Lei, Zejia Zhang, Weizhuang Shi, Wei Luo, Weiwei Wan, Jian Huang
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Deformable Object Manipulation, Model Predictive Control, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Manipulation

In this work, we conducted research on deformable object manipulation by robots based on demonstration-enhanced reinforcement learning (RL). To improve the learning efficiency of RL, we enhanced the utilization of demonstration data from multiple aspects and proposed the HGCR-DDPG algorithm. It uses a novel high-dimensional fuzzy approach for grasping-point selection, a refined behavior-cloning method to enhance data-driven learning in Rainbow-DDPG, and a sequential policy-learning strategy. Compared to the baseline algorithm (Rainbow-DDPG), our proposed HGCR-DDPG achieved 2.01 times the global average reward and reduced the global average standard deviation to 45% of that of the baseline algorithm. To reduce the human labor cost of demonstration collection, we proposed a low-cost demonstration collection method based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). Simulation experiment results show that demonstrations collected through NMPC can be used to train HGCR-DDPG, achieving comparable results to those obtained with human demonstrations. To validate the feasibility of our proposed methods in real-world environments, we conducted physical experiments involving deformable object manipulation. We manipulated fabric to perform three tasks: diagonal folding, central axis folding, and flattening. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieved success rates of 83.3%, 80%, and 100% for these three tasks, respectively, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to current large-model approaches for robot manipulation, the proposed algorithm is lightweight, requires fewer computational resources, and offers task-specific customization and efficient adaptability for specific tasks.
A Framework for Learning Scoring Rules in Autonomous Driving Planning Systems
Authors: Zikang Xiong, Joe Kurian Eappen, Suresh Jagannathan
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Motion Planning

In autonomous driving systems, motion planning is commonly implemented as a two-stage process: first, a trajectory proposer generates multiple candidate trajectories, then a scoring mechanism selects the most suitable trajectory for execution. For this critical selection stage, rule-based scoring mechanisms are particularly appealing as they can explicitly encode driving preferences, safety constraints, and traffic regulations in a formalized, human-understandable format. However, manually crafting these scoring rules presents significant challenges: the rules often contain complex interdependencies, require careful parameter tuning, and may not fully capture the nuances present in real-world driving data. This work introduces FLoRA, a novel framework that bridges this gap by learning interpretable scoring rules represented in temporal logic. Our method features a learnable logic structure that captures nuanced relationships across diverse driving scenarios, optimizing both rules and parameters directly from real-world driving demonstrations collected in NuPlan. Our approach effectively learns to evaluate driving behavior even though the training data only contains positive examples (successful driving demonstrations). Evaluations in closed-loop planning simulations demonstrate that our learned scoring rules outperform existing techniques, including expert-designed rules and neural network scoring models, while maintaining interpretability. This work introduces a data-driven approach to enhance the scoring mechanism in autonomous driving systems, designed as a plug-in module to seamlessly integrate with various trajectory proposers. Our video and code are available on xiong.zikang.me/FLoRA.
BFA: Best-Feature-Aware Fusion for Multi-View Fine-grained Manipulation
Authors: Zihan Lan, Weixin Mao, Haosheng Li, Le Wang, Tiancai Wang, Haoqiang Fan, Osamu Yoshie
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00

In real-world scenarios, multi-view cameras are typically employed for fine-grained manipulation tasks. Existing approaches (e.g., ACT) tend to treat multi-view features equally and directly concatenate them for policy learning. However, it will introduce redundant visual information and bring higher computational costs, leading to ineffective manipulation. For a fine-grained manipulation task, it tends to involve multiple stages while the most contributed view for different stages is varied over time. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play best-feature-aware (BFA) fusion strategy for multi-view manipulation tasks, which is adaptable to various policies. Built upon the visual backbone of the policy network, we design a lightweight network to predict the importance score of each view. Based on the predicted importance scores, the reweighted multi-view features are subsequently fused and input into the end-to-end policy network, enabling seamless integration. Notably, our method demonstrates outstanding performance in fine-grained manipulations. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms multiple baselines by 22-46% success rate on different tasks. Our work provides new insights and inspiration for tackling key challenges in fine-grained manipulations.
AdaManip: Adaptive Articulated Object Manipulation Environments and Policy Learning
Authors: Yuanfei Wang, Xiaojie Zhang, Ruihai Wu, Yu Li, Yan Shen, Mingdong Wu, Zhaofeng He, Yizhou Wang, Hao Dong
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Articulated object manipulation is a critical capability for robots to perform various tasks in real-world scenarios. Composed of multiple parts connected by joints, articulated objects are endowed with diverse functional mechanisms through complex relative motions. For example, a safe consists of a door, a handle, and a lock, where the door can only be opened when the latch is unlocked. The internal structure, such as the state of a lock or joint angle constraints, cannot be directly observed from visual observation. Consequently, successful manipulation of these objects requires adaptive adjustment based on trial and error rather than a one-time visual inference. However, previous datasets and simulation environments for articulated objects have primarily focused on simple manipulation mechanisms where the complete manipulation process can be inferred from the object's appearance. To enhance the diversity and complexity of adaptive manipulation mechanisms, we build a novel articulated object manipulation environment and equip it with 9 categories of objects. Based on the environment and objects, we further propose an adaptive demonstration collection and 3D visual diffusion-based imitation learning pipeline that learns the adaptive manipulation policy. The effectiveness of our designs and proposed method is validated through both simulation and real-world experiments. Our project page is available at: https://adamanip.github.io
A Physics-Informed Machine Learning Framework for Safe and Optimal Control of Autonomous Systems
Authors: Manan Tayal, Aditya Singh, Shishir Kolathaya, Somil Bansal
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Physics-informed machine learning

As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult. Learning-based methods, such as Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL), achieve strong performance but lack formal safety guarantees due to safety being enforced as soft constraints, limiting their use in safety-critical settings. Conversely, formal methods such as Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety assurances but often neglect performance, resulting in overly conservative controllers. To bridge this gap, we formulate the co-optimization of safety and performance as a state-constrained optimal control problem, where performance objectives are encoded via a cost function and safety requirements are imposed as state constraints. We demonstrate that the resultant value function satisfies a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which we approximate efficiently using a novel physics-informed machine learning framework. In addition, we introduce a conformal prediction-based verification strategy to quantify the learning errors, recovering a high-confidence safety value function, along with a probabilistic error bound on performance degradation. Through several case studies, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in enabling scalable learning of safe and performant controllers for complex, high-dimensional autonomous systems.
GS-GVINS: A Tightly-integrated GNSS-Visual-Inertial Navigation System Augmented by 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Zelin Zhou, Saurav Uprety, Shichuang Nie, Hongzhou Yang
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

Recently, the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has drawn significant attention in the area of 3D map reconstruction and visual SLAM. While extensive research has explored 3DGS for indoor trajectory tracking using visual sensor alone or in combination with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), its integration with GNSS for large-scale outdoor navigation remains underexplored. To address these concerns, we proposed GS-GVINS: a tightly-integrated GNSS-Visual-Inertial Navigation System augmented by 3DGS. This system leverages 3D Gaussian as a continuous differentiable scene representation in largescale outdoor environments, enhancing navigation performance through the constructed 3D Gaussian map. Notably, GS-GVINS is the first GNSS-Visual-Inertial navigation application that directly utilizes the analytical jacobians of SE3 camera pose with respect to 3D Gaussians. To maintain the quality of 3DGS rendering in extreme dynamic states, we introduce a motionaware 3D Gaussian pruning mechanism, updating the map based on relative pose translation and the accumulated opacity along the camera ray. For validation, we test our system under different driving environments: open-sky, sub-urban, and urban. Both self-collected and public datasets are used for evaluation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of GS-GVINS in enhancing navigation accuracy across diverse driving environments.
Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Athletic Loco-Manipulation
Authors: Nolan Fey, Gabriel B. Margolis, Martin Peticco, Pulkit Agrawal
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00

Achieving athletic loco-manipulation on robots requires moving beyond traditional tracking rewards - which simply guide the robot along a reference trajectory - to task rewards that drive truly dynamic, goal-oriented behaviors. Commands such as "throw the ball as far as you can" or "lift the weight as quickly as possible" compel the robot to exhibit the agility and power inherent in athletic performance. However, training solely with task rewards introduces two major challenges: these rewards are prone to exploitation (reward hacking), and the exploration process can lack sufficient direction. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage training pipeline. First, we introduce the Unsupervised Actuator Net (UAN), which leverages real-world data to bridge the sim-to-real gap for complex actuation mechanisms without requiring access to torque sensing. UAN mitigates reward hacking by ensuring that the learned behaviors remain robust and transferable. Second, we use a pre-training and fine-tuning strategy that leverages reference trajectories as initial hints to guide exploration. With these innovations, our robot athlete learns to lift, throw, and drag with remarkable fidelity from simulation to reality.
Mobile Robotic Multi-View Photometric Stereo
Authors: Suryansh Kumar
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry

Multi-View Photometric Stereo (MVPS) is a popular method for fine-detailed 3D acquisition of an object from images. Despite its outstanding results on diverse material objects, a typical MVPS experimental setup requires a well-calibrated light source and a monocular camera installed on an immovable base. This restricts the use of MVPS on a movable platform, limiting us from taking MVPS benefits in 3D acquisition for mobile robotics applications. To this end, we introduce a new mobile robotic system for MVPS. While the proposed system brings advantages, it introduces additional algorithmic challenges. Addressing them, in this paper, we further propose an incremental approach for mobile robotic MVPS. Our approach leverages a supervised learning setup to predict per-view surface normal, object depth, and per-pixel uncertainty in model-predicted results. A refined depth map per view is obtained by solving an MVPS-driven optimization problem proposed in this paper. Later, we fuse the refined depth map while tracking the camera pose w.r.t the reference frame to recover globally consistent object 3D geometry. Experimental results show the advantages of our robotic system and algorithm, featuring the local high-frequency surface detail recovery with globally consistent object shape. Our work is beyond any MVPS system yet presented, providing encouraging results on objects with unknown reflectance properties using fewer frames without a tiring calibration and installation process, enabling computationally efficient robotic automation approach to photogrammetry. The proposed approach is nearly 100 times computationally faster than the state-of-the-art MVPS methods such as [1, 2] while maintaining the similar results when tested on subjects taken from the benchmark DiLiGenT MV dataset [3].
HIPPo: Harnessing Image-to-3D Priors for Model-free Zero-shot 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Yibo Liu, Zhaodong Jiang, Binbin Xu, Guile Wu, Yuan Ren, Tongtong Cao, Bingbing Liu, Rui Heng Yang, Amir Rasouli, Jinjun Shan
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 6D Pose Estimation, 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Image to 3D, Object, Pose Estimation

This work focuses on model-free zero-shot 6D object pose estimation for robotics applications. While existing methods can estimate the precise 6D pose of objects, they heavily rely on curated CAD models or reference images, the preparation of which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Moreover, in real-world scenarios, 3D models or reference images may not be available in advance and instant robot reaction is desired. In this work, we propose a novel framework named HIPPo, which eliminates the need for curated CAD models and reference images by harnessing image-to-3D priors from Diffusion Models, enabling model-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation. Specifically, we construct HIPPo Dreamer, a rapid image-to-mesh model built on a multiview Diffusion Model and a 3D reconstruction foundation model. Our HIPPo Dreamer can generate a 3D mesh of any unseen objects from a single glance in just a few seconds. Then, as more observations are acquired, we propose to continuously refine the diffusion prior mesh model by joint optimization of object geometry and appearance. This is achieved by a measurement-guided scheme that gradually replaces the plausible diffusion priors with more reliable online observations. Consequently, HIPPo can instantly estimate and track the 6D pose of a novel object and maintain a complete mesh for immediate robotic applications. Thorough experiments on various benchmarks show that HIPPo outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 6D object pose estimation when prior reference images are limited.
Synthesis of Dynamic Masks for Information-Theoretic Opacity in Stochastic Systems
Authors: Sumukha Udupa, Chongyang Shi, Jie Fu
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00

In this work, we investigate the synthesis of dynamic information releasing mechanisms, referred to as ''masks'', to minimize information leakage from a stochastic system to an external observer. Specifically, for a stochastic system, an observer aims to infer whether the final state of the system trajectory belongs to a set of secret states. The dynamic mask seeks to regulate sensor information in order to maximize the observer's uncertainty about the final state, a property known as final-state opacity. While existing supervisory control literature on dynamic masks primarily addresses qualitative opacity, we propose quantifying opacity in stochastic systems by conditional entropy, which is a measure of information leakage in information security. We then formulate a constrained optimization problem to synthesize a dynamic mask that maximizes final-state opacity under a total cost constraint on masking. To solve this constrained optimal dynamic mask synthesis problem, we develop a novel primal-dual policy gradient method. Additionally, we present a technique for computing the gradient of conditional entropy with respect to the masking policy parameters, leveraging observable operators in hidden Markov models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we apply our method to an illustrative example and a stochastic grid world scenario, showing how our algorithm optimally enforces final-state opacity under cost constraints.