pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generalized Trajectory Scoring for End-to-end Multimodal Planning
Authors: Zhenxin Li, Wenhao Yao, Zi Wang, Xinglong Sun, Joshua Chen, Nadine Chang, Maying Shen, Zuxuan Wu, Shiyi Lan, Jose M. Alvarez
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Generalization, NavSim

End-to-end multi-modal planning is a promising paradigm in autonomous driving, enabling decision-making with diverse trajectory candidates. A key component is a robust trajectory scorer capable of selecting the optimal trajectory from these candidates. While recent trajectory scorers focus on scoring either large sets of static trajectories or small sets of dynamically generated ones, both approaches face significant limitations in generalization. Static vocabularies provide effective coarse discretization but struggle to make fine-grained adaptation, while dynamic proposals offer detailed precision but fail to capture broader trajectory distributions. To overcome these challenges, we propose GTRS (Generalized Trajectory Scoring), a unified framework for end-to-end multi-modal planning that combines coarse and fine-grained trajectory evaluation. GTRS consists of three complementary innovations: (1) a diffusion-based trajectory generator that produces diverse fine-grained proposals; (2) a vocabulary generalization technique that trains a scorer on super-dense trajectory sets with dropout regularization, enabling its robust inference on smaller subsets; and (3) a sensor augmentation strategy that enhances out-of-domain generalization while incorporating refinement training for critical trajectory discrimination. As the winning solution of the Navsim v2 Challenge, GTRS demonstrates superior performance even with sub-optimal sensor inputs, approaching privileged methods that rely on ground-truth perception. Code will be available at https://github.com/NVlabs/GTRS.
DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planning
Authors: Wenhao Yao, Zhenxin Li, Shiyi Lan, Zi Wang, Xinglong Sun, Jose M. Alvarez, Zuxuan Wu
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Collision Avoidance, Navigate, NavSim

In complex driving environments, autonomous vehicles must navigate safely. Relying on a single predicted path, as in regression-based approaches, usually does not explicitly assess the safety of the predicted trajectory. Selection-based methods address this by generating and scoring multiple trajectory candidates and predicting the safety score for each, but face optimization challenges in precisely selecting the best option from thousands of possibilities and distinguishing subtle but safety-critical differences, especially in rare or underrepresented scenarios. We propose DriveSuprim to overcome these challenges and advance the selection-based paradigm through a coarse-to-fine paradigm for progressive candidate filtering, a rotation-based augmentation method to improve robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios, and a self-distillation framework to stabilize training. DriveSuprim achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 93.5% PDMS in NAVSIM v1 and 87.1% EPDMS in NAVSIM v2 without extra data, demonstrating superior safetycritical capabilities, including collision avoidance and compliance with rules, while maintaining high trajectory quality in various driving scenarios.
Self-Adapting Improvement Loops for Robotic Learning
Authors: Calvin Luo, Zilai Zeng, Mingxi Jia, Yilun Du, Chen Sun
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00

Video generative models trained on expert demonstrations have been utilized as performant text-conditioned visual planners for solving robotic tasks. However, generalization to unseen tasks remains a challenge. Whereas improved generalization may be facilitated by leveraging learned prior knowledge from additional pre-collected offline data sources, such as web-scale video datasets, in the era of experience we aim to design agents that can continuously improve in an online manner from self-collected behaviors. In this work we thus propose the Self-Adapting Improvement Loop (SAIL), where an in-domain video model iteratively updates itself on self-produced trajectories, collected through adaptation with an internet-scale pretrained video model, and steadily improves its performance for a specified task of interest. We apply SAIL to a diverse suite of MetaWorld tasks, as well as two manipulation tasks on a real robot arm, and find that performance improvements continuously emerge over multiple iterations for novel tasks initially unseen during original in-domain video model training. Furthermore, we discover that SAIL is surprisingly robust regarding if and how the self-collected experience is filtered, and the quality of the initial in-domain demonstrations. Through adaptation with summarized internet-scale data, and learning through online experience, we thus demonstrate a way to iteratively bootstrap a high-performance video model for solving novel robotic tasks through self-improvement.
Active Test-time Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Heeju Ko, Sungjune Kim, Gyeongrok Oh, Jeongyoon Yoon, Honglak Lee, Sujin Jang, Seungryong Kim, Sangpil Kim
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) policies trained on offline datasets often exhibit degraded task performance when deployed in unfamiliar navigation environments at test time, where agents are typically evaluated without access to external interaction or feedback. Entropy minimization has emerged as a practical solution for reducing prediction uncertainty at test time; however, it can suffer from accumulated errors, as agents may become overconfident in incorrect actions without sufficient contextual grounding. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ATENA (Active TEst-time Navigation Agent), a test-time active learning framework that enables a practical human-robot interaction via episodic feedback on uncertain navigation outcomes. In particular, ATENA learns to increase certainty in successful episodes and decrease it in failed ones, improving uncertainty calibration. Here, we propose mixture entropy optimization, where entropy is obtained from a combination of the action and pseudo-expert distributions-a hypothetical action distribution assuming the agent's selected action to be optimal-controlling both prediction confidence and action preference. In addition, we propose a self-active learning strategy that enables an agent to evaluate its navigation outcomes based on confident predictions. As a result, the agent stays actively engaged throughout all iterations, leading to well-grounded and adaptive decision-making. Extensive evaluations on challenging VLN benchmarks-REVERIE, R2R, and R2R-CE-demonstrate that ATENA successfully overcomes distributional shifts at test time, outperforming the compared baseline methods across various settings.
Astra: Toward General-Purpose Mobile Robots via Hierarchical Multimodal Learning
Authors: Sheng Chen, Peiyu He, Jiaxin Hu, Ziyang Liu, Yansheng Wang, Tao Xu, Chongchong Zhang, Chao An, Shiyu Cai, Duo Cao, Kangping Chen, Shuai Chu, Tianwei Chu, Mingdi Dan, Min Du, Weiwei Fang, Pengyou Fu, Junkai Hu, Xiaowei Jiang, Zhaodi Jiang, Fuxuan Li, Jun Li, Minghui Li, Mingyao Li, Yanchang Li, Zhibin Li, Guangming Liu, Kairui Liu, Lihao Liu, Weizhi Liu, Xiaoshun Liu, Yufei Liu, Yunfei Liu, Qiang Lu, Yuanfei Luo, Xiang Lv, Hongying Ma, Sai Ma, Lingxian Mi, Sha Sa, Hongxiang Shu, Lei Tian, Chengzhi Wang, Jiayu Wang, Kaijie Wang, Qingyi Wang, Renwen Wang, Tao Wang, Wei Wang, Xirui Wang, Chao Wei, Xuguang Wei, Zijun Xia, Zhaohao Xiao, Tingshuai Yan, Liyan Yang, Yifan Yang, Zhikai Yang, Zhong Yin, Li Yuan, Liuchun Yuan, Chi Zhang, Jinyang Zhang, Junhui Zhang, Linge Zhang, Zhenyi Zhang, Zheyu Zhang, Dongjie Zhu, Hang Li, Yangang Zhang
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation, Self-Supervised Learning, Visual Place Recognition

Modern robot navigation systems encounter difficulties in diverse and complex indoor environments. Traditional approaches rely on multiple modules with small models or rule-based systems and thus lack adaptability to new environments. To address this, we developed Astra, a comprehensive dual-model architecture, Astra-Global and Astra-Local, for mobile robot navigation. Astra-Global, a multimodal LLM, processes vision and language inputs to perform self and goal localization using a hybrid topological-semantic graph as the global map, and outperforms traditional visual place recognition methods. Astra-Local, a multitask network, handles local path planning and odometry estimation. Its 4D spatial-temporal encoder, trained through self-supervised learning, generates robust 4D features for downstream tasks. The planning head utilizes flow matching and a novel masked ESDF loss to minimize collision risks for generating local trajectories, and the odometry head integrates multi-sensor inputs via a transformer encoder to predict the relative pose of the robot. Deployed on real in-house mobile robots, Astra achieves high end-to-end mission success rate across diverse indoor environments.
On-board Mission Replanning for Adaptive Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems
Authors: Elim Kwan, Rehman Qureshi, Liam Fletcher, Colin Laganier, Victoria Nockles, Richard Walters
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention

Cooperative autonomous robotic systems have significant potential for executing complex multi-task missions across space, air, ground, and maritime domains. But they commonly operate in remote, dynamic and hazardous environments, requiring rapid in-mission adaptation without reliance on fragile or slow communication links to centralised compute. Fast, on-board replanning algorithms are therefore needed to enhance resilience. Reinforcement Learning shows strong promise for efficiently solving mission planning tasks when formulated as Travelling Salesperson Problems (TSPs), but existing methods: 1) are unsuitable for replanning, where agents do not start at a single location; 2) do not allow cooperation between agents; 3) are unable to model tasks with variable durations; or 4) lack practical considerations for on-board deployment. Here we define the Cooperative Mission Replanning Problem as a novel variant of multiple TSP with adaptations to overcome these issues, and develop a new encoder/decoder-based model using Graph Attention Networks and Attention Models to solve it effectively and efficiently. Using a simple example of cooperative drones, we show our replanner consistently (90% of the time) maintains performance within 10% of the state-of-the-art LKH3 heuristic solver, whilst running 85-370 times faster on a Raspberry Pi. This work paves the way for increased resilience in autonomous multi-agent systems.
Trajectory Optimization for UAV-Based Medical Delivery with Temporal Logic Constraints and Convex Feasible Set Collision Avoidance
Authors: Kaiyuan Chen, Yuhan Suo, Shaowei Cui, Yuanqing Xia, Wannian Liang, Shuo Wang
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

This paper addresses the problem of trajectory optimization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) performing time-sensitive medical deliveries in urban environments. Specifically, we consider a single UAV with 3 degree-of-freedom dynamics tasked with delivering blood packages to multiple hospitals, each with a predefined time window and priority. Mission objectives are encoded using Signal Temporal Logic (STL), enabling the formal specification of spatial-temporal constraints. To ensure safety, city buildings are modeled as 3D convex obstacles, and obstacle avoidance is handled through a Convex Feasible Set (CFS) method. The entire planning problem-combining UAV dynamics, STL satisfaction, and collision avoidance-is formulated as a convex optimization problem that ensures tractability and can be solved efficiently using standard convex programming techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method generates dynamically feasible, collision-free trajectories that satisfy temporal mission goals, providing a scalable and reliable approach for autonomous UAV-based medical logistics.
End-to-End Framework for Robot Lawnmower Coverage Path Planning using Cellular Decomposition
Authors: Nikunj Shah, Utsav Dey, Kenji Nishimiya
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Efficient Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is necessary for autonomous robotic lawnmowers to effectively navigate and maintain lawns with diverse and irregular shapes. This paper introduces a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline for CPP, designed to convert user-defined boundaries on an aerial map into optimized coverage paths seamlessly. The pipeline includes user input extraction, coordinate transformation, area decomposition and path generation using our novel AdaptiveDecompositionCPP algorithm, preview and customization through an interactive coverage path visualizer, and conversion to actionable GPS waypoints. The AdaptiveDecompositionCPP algorithm combines cellular decomposition with an adaptive merging strategy to reduce non-mowing travel thereby enhancing operational efficiency. Experimental evaluations, encompassing both simulations and real-world lawnmower tests, demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in coverage completeness and mowing efficiency.
Equivariant Filter for Relative Attitude and Target Angular Velocity Estimation
Authors: Gil Serrano, Bruno J. Guerreiro, Pedro Lourenço, Rita Cunha
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00

Accurate estimation of the relative attitude and angular velocity between two rigid bodies is fundamental in aerospace applications such as spacecraft rendezvous and docking. In these scenarios, a chaser vehicle must determine the orientation and angular velocity of a target object using onboard sensors. This work addresses the challenge of designing an Equivariant Filter (EqF) that can reliably estimate both the relative attitude and the target angular velocity using noisy observations of two known, non-collinear vectors fixed in the target frame. To derive the EqF, a symmetry for the system is proposed and an equivariant lift onto the symmetry group is calculated. Observability and convergence properties are analyzed. Simulations demonstrate the filter's performance, with Monte Carlo runs yielding statistically significant results. The impact of low-rate measurements is also examined and a strategy to mitigate this effect is proposed. Experimental results, using fiducial markers and both conventional and event cameras for measurement acquisition, further validate the approach, confirming its effectiveness in a realistic setting.
Dynamic Mixture of Progressive Parameter-Efficient Expert Library for Lifelong Robot Learning
Authors: YuHeng Lei, Sitong Mao, Shunbo Zhou, Hongyuan Zhang, Xuelong Li, Ping Luo
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

A generalist agent must continuously learn and adapt throughout its lifetime, achieving efficient forward transfer while minimizing catastrophic forgetting. Previous work within the dominant pretrain-then-finetune paradigm has explored parameter-efficient fine-tuning for single-task adaptation, effectively steering a frozen pretrained model with a small number of parameters. However, in the context of lifelong learning, these methods rely on the impractical assumption of a test-time task identifier and restrict knowledge sharing among isolated adapters. To address these limitations, we propose Dynamic Mixture of Progressive Parameter-Efficient Expert Library (DMPEL) for lifelong robot learning. DMPEL progressively learn a low-rank expert library and employs a lightweight router to dynamically combine experts into an end-to-end policy, facilitating flexible behavior during lifelong adaptation. Moreover, by leveraging the modular structure of the fine-tuned parameters, we introduce coefficient replay to guide the router in accurately retrieving frozen experts for previously encountered tasks, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This method is significantly more storage- and computationally-efficient than applying demonstration replay to the entire policy. Extensive experiments on the lifelong manipulation benchmark LIBERO demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods in success rates across continual adaptation, while utilizing minimal trainable parameters and storage.
Gradual Transition from Bellman Optimality Operator to Bellman Operator in Online Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Motoki Omura, Kazuki Ota, Takayuki Osa, Yusuke Mukuta, Tatsuya Harada
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality operator, RL algorithms for continuous actions typically model Q-values for the current policy using the Bellman operator. These algorithms for continuous actions rely exclusively on policy updates for improvement, which often results in low sample efficiency. This study examines the effectiveness of incorporating the Bellman optimality operator into actor-critic frameworks. Experiments in a simple environment show that modeling optimal values accelerates learning but leads to overestimation bias. To address this, we propose an annealing approach that gradually transitions from the Bellman optimality operator to the Bellman operator, thereby accelerating learning while mitigating bias. Our method, combined with TD3 and SAC, significantly outperforms existing approaches across various locomotion and manipulation tasks, demonstrating improved performance and robustness to hyperparameters related to optimality.
Object Navigation with Structure-Semantic Reasoning-Based Multi-level Map and Multimodal Decision-Making LLM
Authors: Chongshang Yan, Jiaxuan He, Delun Li, Yi Yang, Wenjie Song
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Object

The zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unknown open-ended environments coupled with semantically novel target often suffers from the significant decline in performance due to the neglect of high-dimensional implicit scene information and the long-range target searching task. To address this, we proposed an active object navigation framework with Environmental Attributes Map (EAM) and MLLM Hierarchical Reasoning module (MHR) to improve its success rate and efficiency. EAM is constructed by reasoning observed environments with SBERT and predicting unobserved ones with Diffusion, utilizing human space regularities that underlie object-room correlations and area adjacencies. MHR is inspired by EAM to perform frontier exploration decision-making, avoiding the circuitous trajectories in long-range scenarios to improve path efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the EAM module achieves 64.5\% scene mapping accuracy on MP3D dataset, while the navigation task attains SPLs of 28.4\% and 26.3\% on HM3D and MP3D benchmarks respectively - representing absolute improvements of 21.4\% and 46.0\% over baseline methods.
Trajectory Entropy: Modeling Game State Stability from Multimodality Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Yesheng Zhang, Wenjian Sun, YuHeng Chen, Qingwei Liu, Qi Lin, Rui Zhang, Xu Zhao
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Trajectory Prediction

Complex interactions among agents present a significant challenge for autonomous driving in real-world scenarios. Recently, a promising approach has emerged, which formulates the interactions of agents as a level-k game framework. It effectively decouples agent policies by hierarchical game levels. However, this framework ignores both the varying driving complexities among agents and the dynamic changes in agent states across game levels, instead treating them uniformly. Consequently, redundant and error-prone computations are introduced into this framework. To tackle the issue, this paper proposes a metric, termed as Trajectory Entropy, to reveal the game status of agents within the level-k game framework. The key insight stems from recognizing the inherit relationship between agent policy uncertainty and the associated driving complexity. Specifically, Trajectory Entropy extracts statistical signals representing uncertainty from the multimodality trajectory prediction results of agents in the game. Then, the signal-to-noise ratio of this signal is utilized to quantify the game status of agents. Based on the proposed Trajectory Entropy, we refine the current level-k game framework through a simple gating mechanism, significantly improving overall accuracy while reducing computational costs. Our method is evaluated on the Waymo and nuPlan datasets, in terms of trajectory prediction, open-loop and closed-loop planning tasks. The results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method, with precision improved by up to 19.89% for prediction and up to 16.48% for planning.
Robust sensor fusion against on-vehicle sensor staleness
Authors: Meng Fan, Yifan Zuo, Patrick Blaes, Harley Montgomery, Subhasis Das
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Data Augmentation, Sensor Fusion

Sensor fusion is crucial for a performant and robust Perception system in autonomous vehicles, but sensor staleness, where data from different sensors arrives with varying delays, poses significant challenges. Temporal misalignment between sensor modalities leads to inconsistent object state estimates, severely degrading the quality of trajectory predictions that are critical for safety. We present a novel and model-agnostic approach to address this problem via (1) a per-point timestamp offset feature (for LiDAR and radar both relative to camera) that enables fine-grained temporal awareness in sensor fusion, and (2) a data augmentation strategy that simulates realistic sensor staleness patterns observed in deployed vehicles. Our method is integrated into a perspective-view detection model that consumes sensor data from multiple LiDARs, radars and cameras. We demonstrate that while a conventional model shows significant regressions when one sensor modality is stale, our approach reaches consistently good performance across both synchronized and stale conditions.
You Only Estimate Once: Unified, One-stage, Real-Time Category-level Articulated Object 6D Pose Estimation for Robotic Grasping
Authors: Jingshun Huang, Haitao Lin, Tianyu Wang, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Gang Jiang, xiangyang xue
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Instance Segmentation, Pose Estimation, Robotic Grasping, Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses the problem of category-level pose estimation for articulated objects in robotic manipulation tasks. Recent works have shown promising results in estimating part pose and size at the category level. However, these approaches primarily follow a complex multi-stage pipeline that first segments part instances in the point cloud and then estimates the Normalized Part Coordinate Space (NPCS) representation for 6D poses. These approaches suffer from high computational costs and low performance in real-time robotic tasks. To address these limitations, we propose YOEO, a single-stage method that simultaneously outputs instance segmentation and NPCS representations in an end-to-end manner. We use a unified network to generate point-wise semantic labels and centroid offsets, allowing points from the same part instance to vote for the same centroid. We further utilize a clustering algorithm to distinguish points based on their estimated centroid distances. Finally, we first separate the NPCS region of each instance. Then, we align the separated regions with the real point cloud to recover the final pose and size. Experimental results on the GAPart dataset demonstrate the pose estimation capabilities of our proposed single-shot method. We also deploy our synthetically-trained model in a real-world setting, providing real-time visual feedback at 200Hz, enabling a physical Kinova robot to interact with unseen articulated objects. This showcases the utility and effectiveness of our proposed method.