Robust and accurate perception of humans in their 3D scene context is essential for integrating robots into everyday environments. Existing approaches, however, often fail to predict plausible and accurate human motion estimates that are consistent with the surrounding scene, especially in the presence of heavy occlusions or partial visibility. This can limit both safety and efficiency for robotic operations. We introduce HumanFlow, a latent diffusion model that unifies human motion tracking and forecasting, conditioned on the 3D scene context. We show that our human motion model produces smooth and accurate predictions under challenging conditions, including heavy occlusions, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in tracking accuracy while being significantly more efficient. Furthermore, we show how HumanFlow's latent space can be tightly coupled with control by conditioning a flow-matching-based, approximate MPC policy on these representations. We validate our policy in simulation with real human trajectories for MAV social navigation, demonstrating superior navigation performance and remaining collision-free, even under partial observability of the human.
Generative motion prediction must satisfy three simultaneous requirements for real-world autonomy: high accuracy, diverse multimodal futures, and strictly bounded latency. Diffusion models meet the first two but violate the third, requiring tens to hundreds of denoising steps. We identify a conditioning strategy that resolves this tension: \textit{single-step integration is accurate when the underlying transport problem is local}. A model that must both discover the correct behavioral mode and traverse a long displacement in one step accumulates large discretization errors; conditioning the base distribution to lie near plausible futures reduces the problem to short-range refinement, the regime where a single Euler step suffices. We instantiate this \emph{local transport conditioning} in FlowS, a conditional flow matching framework with two mechanisms. First, an online, scene-conditioned learned prior emits K calibrated anchor trajectories per agent, each already near a plausible future, converting mode discovery into local correction. Second, a step-consistent displacement field enforces semigroup self-consistency, guaranteeing that a single step inherits multi-step accuracy. Crucially, anchoring this field at learned priors along straight-line paths yields a {stable, low-variance} training target, unlike prior self-consistency methods that suffer from {high-variance bootstrap} signals on curved diffusion paths. On the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, FlowS achieves state-of-the-art Soft mAP {(0.4804) and mAP (0.4703) with ensemble at 75,FPS} with single-step inference, demonstrating that local transport conditioning makes one-step generative motion prediction practical for safety-critical autonomy. Code and pretrained models will be released upon acceptance.
Motion priors improve reinforcement learning for physics-based humanoid tracking, but temporal priors require ordered motion clips, while pose priors provide limited guidance for policy-induced pose transitions. We present Pose Flow Matching for Humanoid Robots (PFM-HR), a reusable flow matching prior trained directly on large scale unordered pose data. PFM-HR introduces the Pose Geometry Score (PGS), which quantifies how joint coordinate changes during rollouts align with the local geometry of pose variation captured by the prior. Using PGS to modulate the tracking reward guides policy exploration toward structured pose changes while keeping the prior frozen across tracking tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PFM-HR improves both single motion and general motion tracking, especially for highly dynamic motions.
Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.
Francesco Argenziano, Miguel Saavedra-Ruiz, Sacha Morin +3