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Papers

Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

DeVI: Physics-based Dexterous Human-Object Interaction via Synthetic Video Imitation

Recent advances in video generative models enable the synthesis of realistic human-object interaction videos across a wide range of scenarios and object categories, including complex dexterous manipulations that are difficult to capture with motion capture systems. While the rich interaction knowledge embedded in these synthetic videos holds strong potential for motion planning in dexterous robotic manipulation, their limited physical fidelity and purely 2D nature make them difficult to use directly as imitation targets in physics-based character control. We present DeVI (Dexterous Video Imitation), a novel framework that leverages text-conditioned synthetic videos to enable physically plausible dexterous agent control for interacting with unseen target objects. To overcome the imprecision of generative 2D cues, we introduce a hybrid tracking reward that integrates 3D human tracking with robust 2D object tracking. Unlike methods relying on high-quality 3D kinematic demonstrations, DeVI requires only the generated video, enabling zero-shot generalization across diverse objects and interaction types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeVI outperforms existing approaches that imitate 3D human-object interaction demonstrations, particularly in modeling dexterous hand-object interactions. We further validate the effectiveness of DeVI in multi-object scenes and text-driven action diversity, showcasing the advantage of using video as an HOI-aware motion planner.
Hyeonwoo Kim, Jeonghwan Kim, Kyungwon Cho +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.SD

ATRIE: Adaptive Tuning for Robust Inference and Emotion in Persona-Driven Speech Synthesis

High-fidelity character voice synthesis is a cornerstone of immersive multimedia applications, particularly for interacting with anime avatars and digital humans. However, existing systems struggle to maintain consistent persona traits across diverse emotional contexts. To bridge this gap, we present ATRIE, a unified framework utilizing a Persona-Prosody Dual-Track (P2-DT) architecture. Our system disentangles generation into a static Timbre Track (via Scalar Quantization) and a dynamic Prosody Track (via Hierarchical Flow-Matching), distilled from a 14B LLM teacher. This design enables robust identity preservation (Zero-Shot Speaker Verification EER: 0.04) and rich emotional expression. Evaluated on our extended AnimeTTS-Bench (50 characters), ATRIE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both generation and cross-modal retrieval (mAP: 0.75), establishing a new paradigm for persona-driven multimedia content creation.
Aoduo Li, Haoran Lv, Hongjian Xu +5
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL

HorizonBench: Long-Horizon Personalization with Evolving Preferences

User preferences evolve across months of interaction, and tracking them requires inferring when a stated preference has been changed by a subsequent life event. We define this problem as long-horizon personalization and observe that progress on it is limited by data availability and measurement, with no existing resource providing both naturalistic long-horizon interactions and the ground-truth provenance needed to diagnose why models fail. We introduce a data generator that produces conversations from a structured mental state graph, yielding ground-truth provenance for every preference change across 6-month timelines, and from it construct HorizonBench, a benchmark of 4,245 items from 360 simulated users with 6-month conversation histories averaging ~4,300 turns and ~163K tokens. HorizonBench provides a testbed for long-context modeling, memory-augmented architectures, theory-of-mind reasoning, and user modeling. Across 25 frontier models, the best model reaches 52.8% and most score at or below the 20% chance baseline. When these models err on evolved preferences, over a third of the time they select the user's originally stated value without tracking the updated user state. This belief-update failure persists across context lengths and expression explicitness levels, identifying state-tracking capability as the primary bottleneck for long-horizon personalization.
Shuyue Stella Li, Bhargavi Paranjape, Kerem Oktar +9
Apr 18, 2026cs.LG

The Topological Trouble With Transformers

Transformers encode structure in sequences via an expanding contextual history. However, their purely feedforward architecture fundamentally limits dynamic state tracking. State tracking -- the iterative updating of latent variables reflecting an evolving environment -- involves inherently sequential dependencies that feedforward networks struggle to maintain. Consequently, feedforward models push evolving state representations deeper into their layer stack with each new input step, rendering information inaccessible in shallow layers and ultimately exhausting the model's depth. While this depth limit can be bypassed by dynamic depth models and by explicit or latent thinking that externalizes state representations, these solutions are computationally and memory inefficient. In this article, we argue that temporally extended cognition requires refocusing from explicit thought traces to implicit activation dynamics via recurrent architectures. We introduce a taxonomy of recurrent and continuous-thought transformer architectures, categorizing them by their recurrence axis (depth versus step) and their ratio of input tokens to recurrence steps. Finally, we outline promising research directions, including enhanced state-space models and coarse-grained recurrence, to better integrate state tracking into modern foundation models.
Michael C. Mozer, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Rosanne Liu
Apr 18, 2026cs.RO

Refinement of Accelerated Demonstrations via Incremental Iterative Reference Learning Control for Fast Contact-Rich Imitation Learning

Fast execution of contact-rich manipulation is critical for practical deployment, yet providing fast demonstrations for imitation learning (IL) remains challenging: humans cannot demonstrate at high speed, and naively accelerating demonstrations alters contact dynamics and induces large tracking errors. We present a method to autonomously refine time-accelerated demonstrations by repurposing Iterative Reference Learning Control (IRLC) to iteratively update the reference trajectory from observed tracking errors. However, applying IRLC directly at high speed tends to produce larger early-iteration errors and less stable transients. To address this issue, we propose Incremental Iterative Reference Learning Control (I2RLC), which gradually increases the speed while updating the reference, yielding high-fidelity trajectories. We validate on real-robot whiteboard erasing and peg-in-hole tasks using a teleoperation setup with a compliance-controlled follower and a 3D-printed haptic leader. Both IRLC and I2RLC achieve up to 10x faster demonstrations with reduced tracking error; moreover, I2RLC improves spatial similarity to the original trajectories by 22.5% on average over IRLC across three tasks and multiple speeds (3x-10x). We then use the refined trajectories to train IL policies; the resulting policies execute faster than the demonstrations and achieve 100% success rates in the peg-in-hole task at both seen and unseen positions, with I2RLC-trained policies exhibiting lower contact forces than those trained on IRLC-refined demonstrations. These results indicate that gradual speed scheduling coupled with reference adaptation provides a practical path to fast, contact-rich IL.
Koki Yamane, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Steven Oh +2
Apr 16, 2026cs.RO

Switch: Learning Agile Skills Switching for Humanoid Robots

Recent advancements in whole-body control through deep reinforcement learning have enabled humanoid robots to achieve remarkable progress in real-world chal lenging locomotion skills. However, existing approaches often struggle with flexible transitions between distinct skills, cre ating safety concerns and practical limitations. To address this challenge, we introduce a hierarchical multi-skill system, Switch, enabling seamless skill transitions at any moment. Our approach comprises three key components: (1) a Skill Graph (SG) that establishes potential cross-skill transitions based on kinematic similarity within multi-skill motion data, (2) a whole-body tracking policy trained on this skill graph through deep reinforcement learning, and (3) an online skill scheduler to drive the tracking policy for robust skill execution and smooth transitions. For skill switching or significant tracking deviations, the scheduler performs online graph search to find the optimal feasible path, which ensures efficient, stable, and real-time execution of diverse locomotion skills. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Switch empowers humanoid to execute agile skill transitions with high success rates while maintaining strong motion imitation performance.
Yuen-Fui Lau, Qihan Zhao, Yinhuai Wang +4
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

Integrating Object Detection, LiDAR-Enhanced Depth Estimation, and Segmentation Models for Railway Environments

Obstacle detection in railway environments is crucial for ensuring safety. However, very few studies address the problem using a complete, modular, and flexible system that can both detect objects in the scene and estimate their distance from the vehicle. Most works focus solely on detection, others attempt to identify the track, and only a few estimate obstacle distances. Additionally, evaluating these systems is challenging due to the lack of ground truth data. In this paper, we propose a modular and flexible framework that identifies the rail track, detects potential obstacles, and estimates their distance by integrating three neural networks for object detection, track segmentation, and monocular depth estimation with LiDAR point clouds. To enable a reliable and quantitative evaluation, the proposed framework is assessed using a synthetic dataset (SynDRA), which provides accurate ground truth annotations, allowing for direct performance comparison with existing methods. The proposed system achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) as low as 0.63 meters by integrating monocular depth maps with LiDAR, enabling not only accurate distance estimates but also spatial perception of the scene.
Enrico Francesco Giannico, Federico Nesti, Gianluca D'Amico +5
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

The Fourth Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (×\times4) at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution (×\times4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a ×\times4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution.
Zheng Chen, Kai Liu, Jingkai Wang +150
Mar 16, 2026cs.RO

CycleRL: Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Autonomous Bicycle Control

Autonomous bicycles offer a promising agile solution for urban mobility and last-mile logistics. However, conventional control strategies often struggle with underactuated nonlinear dynamics, suffering from sensitivity to model mismatches and limited adaptability to real-world uncertainties. To address this, we develop CycleRL, a comprehensive sim-to-real framework for robust autonomous bicycle control. Our approach establishes a direct perception-to-action mapping within the high-fidelity NVIDIA Isaac Sim environment, leveraging Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to optimize the control policy. The framework features a composite reward function tailored for concurrent balance maintenance, velocity tracking, and steering control. Crucially, systematic domain randomization is employed to reduce the reliance on precise system modeling, bridge the simulation-to-reality gap and facilitate direct transfer. In simulation, CycleRL achieves promising performance, including a 99.90% balance success rate, a heading tracking error of 1.15°, and a velocity tracking error of 0.18 m/s. These quantitative results, coupled with successful hardware deployment, validate DRL as an effective paradigm for autonomous bicycle control, offering superior adaptability over traditional methods. Video demonstrations are available at https://cpnt-lab.github.io/CycleRL/.
Gelu Liu, Teng Wang, Zhijie Wu +3
Mar 13, 2026cs.CV

SVCBench: A Streaming Video Counting Benchmark for Spatial-Temporal State Maintenance

Video understanding requires models to continuously track and update world state during playback. Although existing benchmarks have advanced video understanding evaluation across multiple dimensions, they provide limited visibility into how models maintain world state over time. We propose SVCBench, a Streaming Video Counting Benchmark that repositions counting as a minimal, controlled probe for diagnosing models' world-state maintenance capability. We decompose this capability into object counting and event counting, forming 8 fine-grained subcategories. Object counting covers tracking currently visible objects and cumulative unique identities, while event counting covers detecting instantaneous actions and tracking complete activity cycles. SVCBench contains 406 videos with frame-by-frame annotations of 10,071 event occurrences and object state changes, yielding 1,000 streaming QA pairs with 4,576 query points distributed along video timelines. By observing state maintenance trajectories through streaming multi-point queries, we design three complementary metrics to diagnose numerical precision, trajectory consistency, and temporal awareness. Evaluations of mainstream video-language models show that current models still exhibit significant deficiencies in spatial-temporal state maintenance, with especially poor performance on periodic event counting. SVCBench provides a diagnostic framework for measuring and improving state maintenance in video understanding systems. Our code and data are available at https://buaa-colalab.github.io/SVCBench.
Pengyiang Liu, Zhongyue Shi, Hongye Hao +7
Mar 10, 2026cs.RO

ZeroWBC: Learning Natural Whole-Body Humanoid Interaction from Human Egocentric Data

Achieving versatile and natural whole-body humanoid interaction control remains challenging due to the high cost of whole-body teleoperation data. We present ZeroWBC, a teleoperation-free framework that learns humanoid whole-body interaction from human egocentric videos paired with synchronized whole-body motion and text annotations. ZeroWBC adopts a generation-then-tracking formulation to tackle the static scene whole-body interaction control problem. Given an initial egocentric image and a language instruction, a fine-tuned Vision-Language Model generates future human whole-body motion tokens, which are decoded into continuous motions and retargeted to the humanoid. The resulting reference motions, together with root and key body-part trajectories, are then executed by a general interactive motion tracking policy. To improve interaction performance, we introduce an interaction-oriented tracking reward that prioritizes global root and key body-part trajectory alignment while preserving natural whole-body motion. Experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot show that ZeroWBC enables diverse scene-aware behaviors without robot teleoperation demonstrations. These results suggest a scalable paradigm for learning natural humanoid whole-body interaction from human egocentric data.
Haoran Yang, Jiacheng Bao, Yucheng Xin +5
Feb 13, 2026cs.LG

Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning

Long-context LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation defer state tracking and evidence consolidation to query time, which is brittle when facts evolve and answers depend on latent states. We introduce Unified Memory Agent (UMA) for a one-to-many setting: query-agnostic external memory is constructed once from a stream and reused across multiple future QA sessions. A single policy maintains a structured Memory Bank through CRUD operations and answers using both the Memory Bank and raw context. Task-Stratified GRPO uses the mean reward of QA trajectories branching from each sampled memory state to supervise memory maintenance, while normalizing memory and per-question QA groups separately. We also introduce Ledger-QA, a diagnostic benchmark for long-horizon state tracking over accumulated updates. At the 16k budget, UMA-Generalist achieves the highest average score among compared methods across the test-time-learning and accurate-retrieval benchmarks and transfers to Ledger-QA without task-specific training; UMA-Specialist further improves long-horizon tracking after task adaptation. These results support learned proactive memory management for long-context reasoning.
Kehao Zhang, Shangtong Gui, Sheng Yang +2
Feb 2, 2026cs.RO

Tilt-Ropter: A Fully Actuated Hybrid Aerial-Terrestrial Vehicle with Tilt Rotors and Passive Wheels

In this work, we present Tilt-Ropter, a fully actuated hybrid aerial-terrestrial vehicle (HATV) that integrates tilt rotors with passive wheels to enable efficient multi-modal locomotion. Unlike conventional underactuated HATVs, the fully actuated design of Tilt-Ropter allows decoupled force and torque control, improving maneuverability and ground locomotion efficiency. A unified nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) is developed to track reference trajectories, enforce non-holonomic constraints, and accommodate contact effects across locomotion modes, while ensuring actuator feasibility through dedicated control allocation. To address complex wheel-ground dynamics, an external wrench estimator is incorporated to provide real-time interaction wrench estimates. The system is validated through simulation and real-world experiments, including seamless air-ground transitions and trajectory tracking tasks. Experimental results demonstrate low tracking errors in both modes and reveal a 92.8% reduction in power consumption during ground locomotion compared with flight, highlighting the platform's potential for long-duration missions where energy efficiency is critical.
Ruoyu Wang, Xuchen Liu, Zongzhou Wu +3
Dec 13, 2025cs.RO

Temporal Cascading of Planning and Control for Quadrotor MPC

Many aerial tasks involving quadrotors demand both instant reactivity and long-horizon planning for obstacle avoidance, energy efficiency, or trajectory tracking. High-fidelity models enable accurate control but are too slow for long horizons. Low-fidelity planners scale but cannot directly control the system, necessitating cascaded architectures. Prevailing hierarchical approaches plan with a simplified model and use a high-fidelity controller for tracking, yet this decomposition is inherently suboptimal. The controller is limited by the coarse plan, and conventional MPC alternatives shorten the horizon to stay real-time feasible. We present UNIQUE, an MPC architecture that replaces this hierarchical stacking with temporal cascading. The planning problem is formulated as the second-tail horizon of a single multi-phase MPC, rather than being solved separately. We align costs across horizons, derive feasibility constraints for the point-mass planning model, and introduce transition constraints that convert high-fidelity states into meaningful low-fidelity states. Parallel point-mass and mixed-integer solvers address nonconvexities while incorporating progressive 3D obstacle smoothing over the planning horizon. In simulations and real flights, under equal computational budgets, UNIQUE improves closed-loop tracking by up to 75% compared with standard MPC and hierarchical baselines. Ablations and Pareto analyses confirm performance gains across variations in horizon, constraint approximations, and smoothing schedules.
Rudolf Reiter, Chao Qin, Leonard Bauersfeld +1
Nov 28, 2025cs.CV

Robust 3DGS-based SLAM via Adaptive Kernel Smoothing

In this paper, we challenge the conventional notion in 3DGS-SLAM that rendering quality is the primary determinant of tracking accuracy. We argue that, compared to solely pursuing a perfect scene representation, it is more critical to enhance the robustness of the rasterization process against parameter errors to ensure stable camera pose tracking. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages a smooth kernel strategy to enhance the robustness of 3DGS-based SLAM. Unlike conventional methods that focus solely on minimizing rendering error, our core insight is to make the rasterization process more resilient to imperfections in the 3DGS parameters. We hypothesize that by allowing each Gaussian to influence a smoother, wider distribution of pixels during rendering, we can mitigate the detrimental effects of parameter noise from outlier Gaussians. This approach intentionally introduces a controlled blur to the rendered image, which acts as a regularization term, stabilizing the subsequent pose optimization. While a complete redesign of the rasterization pipeline is an ideal solution, we propose a practical and effective alternative that is readily integrated into existing 3DGS frameworks. Our method, termed Corrective Blurry KNN (CB-KNN), adaptively modifies the RGB values and locations of the K-nearest neighboring Gaussians within a local region. This dynamic adjustment generates a smoother local rendering, reducing the impact of erroneous GS parameters on the overall image. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, while maintaining the overall quality of the scene reconstruction (mapping), significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of camera pose tracking.
Shouhe Zhang, Dayong Ren, Wen Jie Li +4
Oct 30, 2025cs.RO

Thor: Towards Human-Inspired Whole-Body Reactions for Intense Contact-Rich Environments

Maintaining whole-body stability and motion tracking under large interaction forces remains challenging for humanoids. We present Thor, a reinforcement learning framework for forceful humanoid loco-manipulation. Thor jointly trains lower-body, waist, and upper-body policies with shared whole-body observations and body-specific rewards to coordinate locomotion and force adaptation, waist posture regulation, and upper-body motion tracking. We further introduce a force-adaptive torso-tilt (FAT2) objective that derives a load-dependent horizontal center-of-mass offset reference from quasi-static moment balance. Capacity-matched simulation blations show that the three-policy architecture improves tracking under large external force disturbances, while real-world ablations demonstrate that FAT2 increases peak pulling capability. On the Unitree G1, Thor achieves mean peak dual-hand pulling forces of 167.7 N and 145.5 N during backward and forward locomotion, exceeding the best-performing baseline by 68.9% and 74.7%, respectively. Real-world demonstrations include opening a fire door with one hand using approximately 60 N of pulling force and towing a 1.7-ton passenger car.
Gangyang Li, Hongzhe Shi, Qing Shi +5
Date pendingcs.CV

NSL-SLAM: High-Fidelity Neural Structured-Light Depth for Practical SLAM and Reconstruction

Structured-light (SL) cameras power depth sensing in millions of devices, and recent neural SL decoding methods have substantially improved their depth quality. SLAM systems can benefit greatly from such strong depth sensing, where reliable geometry enables stable tracking and faithful reconstruction. In this work, we present NSL-SLAM, a practical SLAM system tailored for high-fidelity structured-light depth. We first strengthen SL depth sensing: inspired by the neural structured-light (NSL) method, we further incorporate strong monocular depth priors into the SL stereo decoding, reducing depth RMSE by 35% on Replica-SL compared to NSL. We then build a depth-centric SLAM pipeline with this stronger depth: because structured-light geometry is dense and metrically accurate, we keep it as the primary tracking signal, and add only sparse visual correspondences for geometrically degenerate cases and lightweight bundle adjustment for long-range drift. Our depth estimator and SLAM design reinforce each other: stronger depth makes a simple SLAM pipeline effective, and the depth-centric pipeline ensures this advantage transfers to downstream reconstruction. Experimentally, on the synthetic Replica-SL benchmark, NSL-SLAM achieves the best tracking accuracy and improves reconstruction F-score by 1.6 points over the SOTA baseline under a shared-depth protocol. On a real benchmark of 8 challenging scenes, it is the only method that avoids catastrophic failure on all sequences while achieving 43.3% lower trajectory deviation than selected baselines. The SLAM system runs online at 20.9 FPS, demonstrating that stronger structured-light depth and depth-centric system design together enable practical, robust SLAM.
Jiaheng Li, Binsheng Zhang, Xinhai Chang +1
Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

PROVIA: Procedure State Tracking for Online Mistake Detection in Egocentric Videos

An assistant watching egocentric video should notice a mistake from past frames alone, before the next step begins, and keep working once the person recovers. A mistake changes the state of the work, so every later step has to be read against what was done rather than against the plan. The first-mistake protocol that current online methods report on cuts each recording at its first mistake, so a fixed-time rule that never looks at the video is right on every case. We evaluate on complete trials, where mistakes and recoveries arise naturally, under a validation false-alarm budget and against controls that use timing alone. PROVIA keeps two records apart: a factual state, a learned summary of the steps each actor performed, mistakes included, and the accepted progress, an exact posterior over the state of an automaton induced from correct demonstrations by Bayesian state merging and over the execution status of each actor. Procedure-state transitions occur only in the correct-status branch; the mistake and correction branches retain the source state. A sequential test turns the per-frame mistake probability into alarms. With one filter and one optimization rule, PROVIA ranks mistakes best among the evaluated controlled baselines on CaptainCook4D, IndustReal, HoloAssist and IMPACT-ego. At a validation budget of 0.1 false alarms per minute it recalls .154 against .128 on CaptainCook4D and .034 against .015 on HoloAssist, where it leads at every budget. The pipeline runs at 58-70 frames per second. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/PROVIA.
Di Wen, Kailun Yang, Jimmy Weissert +7
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Tracking the Ground: Online Lidar Identification of Robot-Induced Soil Deformation in Agricultural Environments

Agriculture faces many challenges, and robotic systems can play an important role in addressing them by improving the efficiency and sustainability of field operations. Among these challenges, preserving soil health is a critical concern, as vehicle-soil interactions can degrade the soil structure and produce unwanted surface deformation. A key step toward soil-aware robotics is to explicitly account for how vehicle traffic deforms the ground, yet soil state is typically not treated as a variable. We address this gap by proposing a framework to quantify traffic-induced soil deformation and estimate its evolution online from lidar observations. The method relies on a reduced-order parametric model that represents the soil behavior via physically interpretable parameters, yielding a continuously updated and observable representation of soil state. Experiments conducted in different soil conditions demonstrate the ability of the approach to capture deformation induced by the robot. By making soil response measurable and interpretable during operation, the proposed framework establishes a basis for soil-aware robotic operation, in which the estimated state can be exploited to adapt robotic behaviors in order to reduce soil degradation.
Tom Montagnon, Johann Laconte, Benoit Thuilot +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

Context-Aware Causal Gaze Forecasting for Human-Vehicle Interaction During In-Cabin Tracking Dropouts

Dashboard-mounted gaze trackers often lose sight of the driver's eyes during large head rotations, including shoulder checks, mirror glances, and intersection scanning. These maneuvers occur when information about the driver's visual attention is most useful. Offline gap-filling methods may reconstruct a missing interval using observations from both sides, but an online driver-monitoring system cannot rely on measurements that have not yet occurred. We therefore formulate causal gaze recovery: forecasting unavailable gaze at time t without target-tracker gaze at t or later. We introduce the Causal Context-Gated Forecaster (CCGF), which encodes a 60-frame pre-dropout history of gaze and head pose and combines it with DINOv3 scene features. A learned reliability gate controls the contribution of the history and scene representations as the dropout progresses. We evaluate two scene conditions: Live, in which the scene representation continues to update during tracker loss, and Frozen, in which the final pre-dropout representation is used throughout the missing interval. We evaluate CCGF on 2,047 eligible, naturally occurring GazeSense head_lost events drawn from 10.5 h of naturalistic driving by ten drivers. Across all recordings, head_lost accounts for 8.5 percent of GazeSense recording time. Synchronized gaze coordinates from a head-mounted Neon tracker provide supervision and evaluation targets but are never used as model inputs. Under leave-one-driver-out evaluation, CCGF achieves a mean per-driver median error of 175.7 px (10.5 deg) with Live scene updates, a 33 percent reduction relative to history-only causal forecasting. With Frozen scene input, the error increases to 210.8 px (12.9 deg), indicating that scene observations acquired during the dropout provide useful predictive information. We will release the dataset, evaluation protocol, and causal baselines.
Shabnam Shabani, Ghazal Farhani
Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

EVPeriscope: Extended Perception across Aerial and Ground Vehicles with Event-based Propeller Tracking

Reliable relative localization between aerial and ground robots is a key requirement for tightly coordinated heterogeneous teams. This can be difficult to do using conventional frame-based cameras and fiducial markers because they are sensitive to motion blur, lighting variations, and payload constraints. This paper presents EVPeriscope, an event-based perception system that enables detection, localization and control of a quadrotor using an upward-facing event camera on a ground robot by detecting the high-frequency visual signature of its propellers. This system allows the quadrotor to function as an extended perception system for the ground robot when onboard sensors exhibit degradation or occlusion. We demonstrate the capabilities of this marsupial ground-aerial system via experiments in challenging field conditions with wind speeds of up to 15 mph, in both daylight and at night. We show that the system supports localization and closed-loop navigation through dense foliage where the ground robot's sensors are occluded. Our control system for the quadrotor operates at 200 Hz entirely with onboard sensing and computation. More details and experiment videos can be found on the project page: https://ongdexter.github.io/evperiscope.
Dexter Ong, Vijay Kumar, Pratik Chaudhari
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Geometry of Divergence: Tracking Hidden-State Trajectories for Adaptive Multi-Turn Reasoning

LLM agents need to sustain goal-consistent reasoning across long multi-turn interactions under strict resource constraints. However, as the multi-turn context accumulates, it can destabilize the underlying LLM's internal representation of task-relevant information from earlier turns, blurring the boundary between constructive reasoning and representation drift. We formulate multi-turn reasoning as a hidden-state trajectory of the underlying LLM that is characterized via two complementary signals: temporal curvature that captures the directional consistency of turn-to-turn updates, and variance slope which measures the expansion or contraction of the exploration space. Across four tasks and three underlying LLMs, we observed that these geometric signals distinguish between correct and incorrect episodes prior to completion. We further decompose each episode into three-action chains formed from four actions (Read, Write, Respond, Transfer) and show that separability is action-dependent, with different signals distinguishing various chain patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that trajectory geometry can identify critical turns in the reasoning process, increasing task success rates on ττ-Bench from 24.1% to 39.6% while reducing token cost by 11.2%.
Jie Liang, Zhengxin Yu, Hamid Nasiri +1
Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

Drift Calibration in Geometric Eye Tracking Systems

Geometric eye trackers can provide the spatial accuracy required for gaze-based interaction and multimodal studies, but their measurements remain sensitive to residual session-specific calibration error. Research on correcting this error is difficult to compare because methods are typically evaluated with different devices, target layouts, and error definitions. We present a calibration-focused dataset containing 163 trials from 12 participants, with separate 18-point fitting and 32-point test grids, and use it to evaluate global, local, and composite correction functions under a common spatial-extrapolation protocol. We further introduce a lightweight neural refiner that combines ranked predictions from complementary calibrators. On this controlled dataset, post-vendor correction reduces the mean angular error from 1.53∘1.53^\circ to 1.03∘1.03^\circ with the strongest classical composite and to 0.96∘0.96^\circ with the refiner. In a closed-loop gaze task, lower residual error is associated with higher performance across four online correction conditions. These results provide a reproducible data-quality benchmark for using gaze as a behavioral signal in interactive modeling.
Jiaqi Liu, Zixuan Wang, Yuhong Zhang +4
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

Tracking the Best Strategy in an Extensive-Form Game

We consider the extensive-form bandit problem where on each trial the learner plays an extensive-form game against an oblivious adversary. We focus on the notion of switching regret, which measures the expected performance of the learner against that of any switching sequence of mixed strategies in retrospect. Our algorithm takes a parameter ρ>0ρ>0 and achieves a switching regret of O~((1/ρ+ρK)HAT)\tilde{\mathcal{O}}((1/ρ+ρK)\sqrt{H A T}) where KK is the number of switches in the comparator sequence, HH is the maximum number of the learner's information sets that can be traversed during a play of the game and AA is the number of actions that the learner can possibly take. Our algorithm is extremely efficient, taking a per trial time of only O(HB)\mathcal{O}(H B) where BB is the maximum number of actions available to the learner at any of its information sets.
Stephen Pasteris, Rahul Savani, Theodore Turocy
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

Dynamic Distribution-Aware Uncertainty Tracking in Vision-Language Representation Learning

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) aims to measure the reliability of model predictions, serving as a critical safeguard for deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in safety-critical scenarios. Post-hoc approaches are widely adopted due to their lightweight nature, mapping the outputs of VLMs to uncertainty measures through learnable modules or inductive summarization. However, Post-hoc approaches remain inherently confined to fitting the failure patterns of the source domain, ignoring the dynamic nature of test distributions. To address this challenge, we propose a Dynamic Distribution-Aware Uncertainty Quantification framework (DDA-UQ) that shifts the paradigm from static mapping to a dynamic distribution-aware process. During training, we leverage a Gaussian Mixture Model to model the VVLMs'embedding space and extract distributional evidence, thereby dynamically deriving uncertainty estimates. During inference, the design dynamically responds to changes in the data distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Ao Zhou, Zhiwei Jiang, Zifeng Cheng +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Interpretable Fuzzy Inference for UAV Target Tracking Using Bounding-Box Geometry

Vision-based guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) toward unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) supports cooperative aerial--ground robotics, but reliable continuous yaw estimation from onboard vision remains challenging because of sensing uncertainty, limited computation, and the need for interpretable control. Existing deep-learning and geometric-reconstruction approaches often require large datasets, external localization, or complex modeling assumptions, reducing transparency and deployment suitability on resource-constrained platforms. We present an interpretable fuzzy-inference framework that generates continuous yaw commands from low-dimensional features extracted from YOLO boxes: target centroid location, area, and aspect ratio. No explicit geometric modeling is required. A Mamdani fuzzy system serves as an interpretable baseline using a shoulder--triangle--shoulder input partition. It is followed by a first-order Takagi--Sugeno model with three antecedent membership terms per input, whose parameters are derived from training-set quantiles, yielding a compact 27-rule structure. Evaluation uses 6{,}169 labeled samples from a VICON motion-capture environment. Across five randomized train--test splits, the Takagi--Sugeno model achieves a test-set mean absolute error of 0.140∘±0.003∘0.140^\circ \pm 0.003^\circ, a root mean squared error of 0.200∘±0.008∘0.200^\circ \pm 0.008^\circ, and a maximum absolute error of 1.254∘±0.121∘1.254^\circ \pm 0.121^\circ. Within-threshold accuracies are 99.67699.676% \pm 0.270% for ±1∘\pm1^\circ and 100.000100.000% \pm 0.000% for both ±3∘\pm3^\circ and ±5∘\pm5^\circ. Directional consistency between image-plane horizontal displacement and predicted yaw sign reaches 90.25490.254% \pm 0.612%. These results show that the framework is transparent, data-efficient, computationally lightweight, and suitable for real-time vision-based UAV guidance toward mobile ground targets.
Reza Ahmari, Ahmad Mohammadi, Vahid Hemmati +5
Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

From Forest to Future Capital: Tracking Land Cover Change in Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) from 2021 to 2026 with PlanetScope Imagery

Indonesia's relocation of its political and administrative capital from Jakarta to Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) has been framed around a Forest City vision, yet rapid construction within the Core Government Area (KIPP) raises concerns over land conversion, vegetation loss, and carbon stock decline. This study applies remote sensing techniques to systematically assess land use and vegetation cover change in KIPP from 2021 to 2026 using PlanetScope SuperDove satellite imagery. Cloud-free mosaics were prepared and analysed through spectral indices, including the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalised Difference Red Edge (NDRE), and Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI), alongside supervised land use and land cover (LULC) classification using a Support Vector Machine algorithm. Results show substantial environmental transformation, with mean NDVI declined by 17.1%, total carbon stock decreased by 0.28%, developed land expanded by 672%, and total vegetation declined by 18.1%. Vegetation loss was most extensive between 2023 and 2024, although a temporary recovery in NDVI and carbon stock occurred from 2024 to 2025 as active clearing slowed and development shifted towards already-cleared land. Overall, the findings demonstrate that remote sensing provides an effective approach for monitoring the environmental impacts of large-scale urban development, while highlighting the need for higher-resolution, hyperspectral, and SAR-based methods to improve detection of construction stages and plantation-related land cover changes.
Clarissa Rui Min Ong, Elizabeth Tee Inn Loo, Kenneth Woon Hao Soh +3
Jul 29, 2026cs.CR

MemSecBench: Tracking Agent Memory Poisoning from Persistence to Consequence and Repair

Memory systems allow agents to retain and reuse information from past interactions, but they can also let malicious content persist. A malicious instruction crafted by an attacker may be stored in long-term memory, recalled much later, and quietly shape a real action. Recent benchmarks increasingly examine agent memory security, yet few trace the same malicious semantics across persistence, downstream consequences, and selective repair under diverse memory-backend comparisons. To address this gap, we introduce MemSecBench, a task-grounded benchmark for the lifecycle security of agent memory systems. It contains 310 cases drawn from 48 realistic contexts across code and science, daily life, and office work. Each case follows a controlled Write--Execute--Forget protocol in an isolated runtime under an exact agent configuration, defined by an agent harness, a memory backend, and an LLM backend. Evidence-based adjudication combines a deterministic write check, checkpoint-specific judge-model evaluations, and programmatic gates across seven lifecycle checkpoints. The experimental design spans a 24-configuration matrix of two agent harnesses, four memory backends, and three LLM backends. Across all 24 configurations, malicious memory persists in 84.2% of all cases, and the full Write--Execute chain succeeds in 50.3%. Among successfully poisoned cases, 59.6% complete the full Execute chain, while 56.1% achieve selective repair.Compared with matched Native configurations, the largest absolute differences are 16.1 percentage points for end-to-end attack success and 41.3 percentage points for selective repair. These descriptive contrasts indicate that the evaluated memory system stacks differ in lifecycle security, both in the propagation of malicious memory and in selective repair after successful memory poisoning.
Xuanze Chen, Xukang Xie, Wentao Fu +3
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline

Detecting UAVs in air spaces has become increasingly important due to UAVs widespread availability and easy usage. However, due to their small size, they are typically difficult to detect at a sufficient range. For the training of optimized detection algorithms, datasets have been published, covering optical sensing methods ranging from infrared to regular RGB to event-sensor-based. However, these datasets often fail to reflect realistic counter-UAV scenarios, lacking critical factors such as camera ego-motion, extremely small target scales, and diverse lens configurations, and introduce compression artefacts on the frame images. To address this gap, we introduce SkyEV, an open-source dataset featuring highly synchronized uncompressed RGB and event-based data. SkyEV distinguishes itself by capturing complex real-world conditions, including significant camera motion and varied optical setups, which are essential for testing the fundamental trade-off between Field of View and detection range. Furthermore, we provide a unified data loader and establish an experimental baseline using a multi-modal architecture, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy in detecting challenging, small-scale targets.
Jakub Mandula, Sebastian Heusinger, Julian Moosmann +2
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

Still image and spatial-temporal tomato data enabling detection, segmentation, tracking, and video-instance segmentation using strong and weak labels

In this manuscript we release two datasets for visual sensing of tomato plants grown in commercial-like settings and acquired using a robot. The first is BUTom21 which consists of still images and manual annotations. The second is BUTom-ST21 which consists of video-based data and semi-automated annotations through AI-based methods, referred to as pseudo-labels. In both cases, we provide pixel-level labels for the ripeness of the fruit. The aim is to provide the research community a challenging set of real-world imagery to explore methods to sense and estimate the state of tomato plants and their fruit, which is an important horticultural crop. Importantly, the spatial-temporal dataset provides individual fruit count and ripeness information enabling researchers to push the boundaries of field-based phenotyping.
Michael Halstead, Esra Guclu, Mohamed Farag +7