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Sim-to-real transfer has made substantial progress, but can still produce controllers that remain stable and functional on hardware while suffering from degraded tracking accuracy due to residual dynamics mismatch. Correcting these errors typically requires identifying the underlying system dynamics, adapting the control policy, or returning to simulation for additional training and finetuning, all of which can require substantial data and computation. We propose OSRAM (Online Sim-to-Real Adaptation via Closed-Loop System Modeling), a framework that instead adapts the reference commands provided to an existing controller. OSRAM treats the deployed robot and its policy as a unified closed-loop dynamical system and learns its task-level command-response behavior directly from tracking observations. A closed-loop dynamics model is meta-trained across randomized dynamics in simulation and rapidly finetuned after deployment using limited real-world interaction. The adapted model is then used to optimize future reference commands while leaving the underlying control policy unchanged. We evaluate OSRAM on bipedal velocity tracking and loco-manipulation in simulation and on hardware. Results show that closed-loop modeling improves prediction and tracking accuracy under unseen dynamics, while online reference adaptation reduces residual sim-to-real tracking errors across different control objectives and hardware configurations. These results demonstrate that adapting the behavior of the robot-policy closed loop provides a practical alternative to finetuning the policy or identifying the full physical dynamics for sim-to-real transfer. More information can be found at http://generalroboticslab.com/OSRAM.

Continuous target sensing by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is constrained by limited flight endurance, motivating the transfer of tracking responsibility between cooperating UAVs. Such a handoff requires the receiver to identify the same physical target currently tracked by the sender despite differences in viewpoint, scale, and target appearance. Existing approaches based on global target localization or appearance-based cross-view association are limited by positioning uncertainty or ambiguous visual features. This paper presents Perspective Alignment & Tracking Handoff (\textbf{PATH}), a platform-agnostic, geometry-assisted sensing and verification framework for target handoff between two moving UAVs. The sender reconstructs the tracked target as a metric 3D point using RGB-D sensing, while the receiver estimates its relative pose from a fiducial observation and projects the transmitted target point into its own image as a spatial prior for target acquisition. The receiver-generated candidate is then returned to the sender and verified through a cross-view Mutual Agreement Handshake before tracking responsibility is transferred. Real-world UAV experiments show mean relative-position and target-position errors of 0.047m and 0.030m, respectively. Under visually ambiguous conditions, PATH achieves 96.0% frame-level receiver-side target acquisition accuracy, with 2.0% false-positive and 2.0% false-negative rates. A sensor-error sensitivity analysis shows that relative-pose uncertainty is the dominant contributor to receiver-view projection error. The implementation operates at video rate with compact inter-UAV communication below 16kB/s at 60Hz, demonstrating the feasibility of lightweight geometry-assisted target handoff on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

In real-world applications, pedestrian trajectory prediction models rely on inputs from detection and tracking systems. Prior trajectory prediction benchmarks either contain relatively sparse pedestrian interactions, assume perfect tracking inputs, or rely on overhead viewpoints that minimize occlusion and perspective distortion, limiting evaluation in realistic dense-crowd scenarios. We present CrowdTraj, a benchmark for pedestrian trajectory prediction in natural dense crowd scenes. Unlike previous datasets, CrowdTraj supports end-to-end evaluation from detection through tracking to trajectory prediction under severe occlusion in CCTV views. It also captures diverse, natural pedestrian behaviours, including abrupt directional changes rarely observed in existing benchmarks. CrowdTraj includes five diverse scenes, with an average of 1,146 unique pedestrians per scene, maximum frame-level densities ranging from 114 to 372 pedestrians, and over 3.2 million annotated head bounding boxes. CrowdTraj provides pixel and real-world coordinates via per-scene homography matrices for physically meaningful analysis. Our experimental results show that tracking accuracy (IDF1) drops to 0.68 to 0.70 in the densest scenes, compared with approximately 0.90 in less crowded scenes. Trajectory prediction training also becomes substantially more computationally expensive in dense scenes, with training times increasing by up to 8 times. These findings show that CrowdTraj exposes limitations in current trajectory prediction pipelines that remain hidden on existing sparse-crowd benchmarks, particularly in robustness to tracking noise and computational scalability.

Optimization theory is a widely used tool for intelligent decision-making. While classical optimization deals with fixed, time-invariant objective functions, many modern applications operate in dynamic environments where data arrive sequentially, and the learning objective evolves over time, often under decentralized data and communication constraints. Motivated by these trends, we study decentralized optimization from streaming data through a structured time-varying formulation in which the global objective is a temporally weighted average of losses observed across the network. We analyze multi-iteration decentralized first-order methods, including decentralized gradient descent. For strongly convex and smooth losses, we develop guarantees for the Euclidean-norm \emph{tracking error} through a contraction-mapping viewpoint. The resulting bounds decompose the tracking error into a fixed-point tracking component and a bias term induced by decentralization and data heterogeneity. We specialize our analysis to uniform and exponentially discounted weights, as well as their finite-memory \emph{windowed} counterparts. The bounds explicitly characterize the roles of the temporal weighting rule, per-step iteration budget, step size, and network connectivity. Uniform weighting yields a vanishing fixed-point tracking contribution of order $\mathcal O(1/t)$, whereas discounted and windowed strategies generally induce non-vanishing tracking floors governed by the discount factor and effective memory, respectively. In all cases, decentralization induces an additional non-zero bias floor under a constant step size. Numerical experiments illustrate the predicted trends.

This paper presents a scalable lateral control framework for robust path tracking of single-body and articulated autonomous vehicles at high speeds. A clothoid-based controller is extended with three key adaptations: 1) an integrated tangential check and Frechet distance method for optimized lookahead and oscillation mitigation; 2) real-time trajectory segment classification for dynamic adjustment of the lookahead search range; and 3) a dual-adaptive, rate-controlled lookahead mechanism responsive to cross-track error and upcoming path geometry. To support different vehicle configurations, the framework also incorporates flexible tracking point selection and curvature-to-steering lookup tables, enabling control of points such as the tractor rear axle, hitch point, or trailer-related locations without changing the core control architecture. The controller is evaluated using high-fidelity TruckSim and Simulink simulations for both standalone and articulated vehicles across dual lane changes and winding-road scenarios. Results demonstrate stable high-speed path tracking, reduced oscillations, effective lookahead adaptation, low cross-track errors, and acceptable lateral acceleration across different vehicle configurations. The results support the use of a unified lateral control architecture that can scale from single-body to articulated autonomous vehicles.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations among multiple entities across extended contexts while maintaining consistency across predicted triples. Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities in information extraction, their predictions are typically generated independently for each candidate triple and may violate fundamental relational constraints such as transitivity, symmetry, and functional uniqueness, leading to contradictory and unreliable outputs. We propose CONSISTRE, a unified consistency-aware framework for DocRE that addresses this limitation through two complementary tracks. The first operates at inference time for black-box LLMs, combining constraint-aware prompting, constraint-based verification, and iterative self-reflection to refine predictions without task-specific fine-tuning. The second injects consistency knowledge into smaller open-source models via a knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning pipeline: reasoning traces from a powerful teacher are distilled into a student via supervised fine-tuning, followed by GRPO alignment using a composite reward that jointly optimizes extraction performance and relational consistency. Together, the two tracks cover both API-accessible and locally deployable scenarios under a unified consistency formulation. Experiments on DocRED show that both tracks outperform their baselines, with the inference-time track achieving competitive F1 using off-the-shelf black-box LLMs and the training-time track substantially narrowing the gap between 7--8B open-source models and state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs at a fraction of their inference cost. Ablation studies confirm that explicit consistency modeling mitigates relational contradictions and enhances the reliability of LLM-based DocRE across both deployment paradigms.

Reinforcement learning can produce robust humanoid controllers, but each new task is typically trained as a separate policy with its own reward design and training process. Motion imitation provides an alternative source of motor competence by training policies to track retargeted human motions, yet the resulting controllers remain reference trackers and are not directly usable as task policies. We propose a three-stage pipeline that turns motion-imitation skills into a reusable hybrid motion prior (HMP) for humanoid locomotion. First, an expert policy is trained to imitate retargeted human motion-capture clips. Second, the expert is distilled into a frozen architecture composed of a proprioceptive encoder, a residual vector-quantized (RVQ) codebook, and an action decoder. Third, task-level policies are trained to solve locomotion tasks by selecting discrete codebook entries while the HMP remains frozen. We evaluate the method on velocity tracking, point-goal navigation, and fall-recovery velocity tracking in simulation, and deploy the velocity-tracking policy on a real Unitree G1 robot. The distillation process preserves the tracking behavior of the expert, while the resulting HMP can be reused without retraining as the action interface for different downstream locomotion policies. The learned HMP reveals an interpretable codebook structure in which the number of active RVQ stages modulates the available gait patterns. We further show that training the codebook with the rotation trick improves latent organization and reduces downstream falls compared with a standard straight-through estimator.

Global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) offers advantages over incremental methods in terms of efficiency and error distribution. However, the task of translation averaging remains challenging. Many existing methods rely solely on relative translations or feature tracks, which either degrade under collinear camera motion or are susceptible to outliers. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid explicit translation averaging framework that incorporates both relative translations and feature tracks. Specifically, we first refine the relative translations using global camera rotations and remove globally inconsistent relative translations. Next, we employ convex distance-based objective functions to estimate the initial camera positions and 3D points, followed by refinement using a non-bilinear angle-based objective function. Furthermore, since camera rotations are fixed during translation averaging, inaccurate camera rotations can severely limit the accuracy of camera positions. To address this issue, we then robustly refine both camera rotations and camera positions with selected feature tracks through bounded angle-based refinement and subsequent reprojection-based bundle adjustment. In this step, feature tracks are selected to maintain a balanced spatial distribution and improve optimization efficiency. Finally, we perform a complete bundle adjustment using all reliable feature tracks to refine the camera parameters and 3D points. Extensive experiments on various sequential and unordered real-world datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy, robustness, and scalability of our approach, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency.

Real-world target speaker extraction (TSE) remains challenging because target speech, interference, and enrollment are recorded under mismatched acoustic conditions with reverberation, noise, and irregular conversational overlap. This paper describes the SonicAGI submission to the REAL-TSE Challenge (IEEE SLT 2026). We take a data-centric approach that combines fully simulated mixtures from clean speech with real meeting overlaps, and use a frozen offline enhancer to provide a denoised mirror of real targets for auxiliary supervision. For the online track, we introduce SwiftNet-Lookahead, which inserts a single bounded-lookahead module before a strictly causal iterative separator and keeps the total system latency at 96 ms. For the offline track, we use a frame-level enrollment cross-attention USEF-TFGridNet with a magnitude-domain fusion stage that trades off perceptual quality and speaker fidelity. In the official evaluation, SwiftNet-Lookahead ranks second in Track1 and USEF-TFGridNet ranks fifth in Track2, both exceeding the challenge baselines. These results suggest that real-data-oriented training and track-specific modeling are effective for conversational TSE.

This paper presents the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2026 Grand Challenge on Cross-Scenario Defect Detection and Fine-Grained Severity Grading for High-Precision Manufacturing. The challenge is motivated by two key limitations of existing industrial defect inspection systems: (1) current deep learning-based methods often suffer significant performance degradation when deployed in unseen production scenarios, and (2) most benchmarks neglect severity-aware assessment, which is critical for risk control and yield optimization. To address these limitations, we design two complementary tracks: Track 1 (Cross-Scenario Defect Detection) targets accurate defect detection, localization, and classification across diverse unseen production environments; Track 2 (Fine-Grained Severity Grading) requires assigning each detected defect an industry-standard severity level, including Acceptable, Marginal NG, NG, and Gross NG. We construct a large-scale industrial dataset of high-resolution microscopic images spanning seven representative defect categories, comprising over 3,800 images with pixel-level instance annotations for Track 1 and over 2,600 images with severity-grade labels for Track 2. The challenge attracted 86 registered participants with 130 submissions; during the final testing phase, 21 teams submitted results and 12 teams provided models with technical reports. The resulting benchmark, together with the diverse and effective solutions contributed by participating teams, sets a new standard for industrial defect analysis research.

This paper presents an information-gain-guided reinforcement-learning sensor-selection framework for single-vessel tracking in heterogeneous maritime sensor networks. The proposed approach is motivated by information-theoretic sensor management: instead of activating all sensors or repeatedly performing computationally expensive online expected-information-gain evaluation, a learned policy selects one tracking-relevant sensor at each decision epoch. A Bayesian sequential Monte Carlo tracker estimates the vessel state from noisy measurements and provides a belief representation for scheduling under nonlinear and non-Gaussian conditions. A Proximal Policy Optimization agent selects one of five sensors in a georeferenced simulation of the CMMI Smart Marina testbed at Ayia Napa Marina, Cyprus. The policy is trained on the testbed's actual five-sensor configuration. The agent observes belief-state, detection-history, coverage, sensor-geometry, and realized-information-gain features. The reward is defined as a realized-information-gain term gated by an observability mask. Final-test simulations compare the proposed framework with random single-sensor selection, always-on sensing using all sensors simultaneously, and the expected-information-gain sensor-selection baseline proposed in our previous work. Results show that the learned policy achieves tracking performance close to always-on sensing while activating only one sensor per decision time step and avoiding the computationally expensive online entropy search required by expected-information-gain selection. Additional zero-shot evaluation without retraining on ten moderately perturbed versions of actual layout configuration showed broadly stable tracking, with any increase in positional tracking error remaining below 1 meter across all perturbations.

Microblogging platforms generate massive amounts of short, noisy, and dispersed user content, making automatic keyphrase extraction (AKE) an important but challenging task. Prior studies have used eye-tracking signals to improve microblog-based AKE because such signals reflect readers' attention to salient words. However, eye tracking alone is limited by physiological, acquisition, and feature-decoding constraints. To address this issue, we investigate whether electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can complement eye-tracking signals for AKE. Using the ZuCo cognitive language processing corpus, we select 8 EEG features and 17 eye-tracking features and incorporate them into microblog-based AKE models. To reduce possible distortion of cognitive signals by model structures, we inject these features into the input of the soft-attention layer and the query vectors of the self-attention layer. We then evaluate different combinations of cognitive signals across AKE models. The results show that cognitive signals produced during reading consistently improve AKE performance, regardless of feature combinations and model architectures. EEG features bring the largest gains, while combining EEG and eye-tracking features yields performance between the two individual signal types, suggesting partial complementarity but also possible redundancy or noise. These findings indicate that EEG signals provide useful cognitive evidence for microblog-based AKE and that multimodal cognitive signals deserve further investigation.

Code language models need repository-level context to resolve imports, APIs, and project conventions. Existing methods inject this knowledge as long inputs (retrieved through RAG or dependency analysis) or through per-repository fine-tuning and LoRA -- costly at repository scale and brittle to evolving codebases. We introduce Code2LoRA, a hypernetwork framework that generates repository-specific LoRA adapters, effectively injecting repository knowledge with zero inference-time token overhead. Code2LoRA supports two usage scenarios: Code2LoRA-Static converts a single repository snapshot into an adapter, suitable for comprehension of stable codebases; while Code2LoRA-Evo maintains an adapter backed by a GRU hidden state updated per code diff, suitable for active development of evolving codebases. To evaluate Code2LoRA against parameter-efficient fine-tuning baselines, we build RepoPeftBench, a benchmark of 604 Python repositories with two tracks: a static track with 40K training and 12K test assertion-completion tasks, and an evolution track with 215K commit-derived training and 87K commit-derived test tasks. On the static track, Code2LoRA-Static achieves 63.8% cross-repo and 66.2% in-repo exact match, matching the per-repository LoRA upper bound; on the evolution track, Code2LoRA-Evo achieves 60.3% cross-repo exact match (+5.2 pp over a single shared LoRA). Code2LoRA's code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code2lora-6857; the model checkpoints and RepoPeftBench datasets can be found at https://huggingface.co/code2lora.

Despite Bengali being the sixth most spoken language in the world, no prior work has systematically evaluated hallucination in large language models (LLMs) for Bengali. We introduce BenHalluEval, a fine-grained hallucination evaluation framework for Bengali covering four tasks: Generative Question Answering (GQA), Bangla-English Code-Mixed QA, Summarization, and Reasoning. We construct 12,000 hallucinated candidates using GPT-5.4 across twelve task-specific hallucination types, drawn from three existing Bengali datasets, and evaluate seven LLMs spanning reasoning-oriented, multilingual, and Bengali-centric categories under a dual-track protocol that independently measures false-positive rate on ground-truth instances (Track A) and hallucination detection rate on hallucinated candidates (Track B). To jointly penalise both failure modes and prevent inflated scores from uniform response bias, we propose BenHalluScore, a dual-track calibration metric that ranges from 7.72% to 55.42% across models and tasks, revealing substantial variation in hallucination calibration. Chain-of-thought prompting, applied as a mitigation strategy, shifts response distributions without consistently improving hallucination discrimination. BenHalluEval establishes the first dedicated hallucination benchmark for Bengali and highlights the inadequacy of single-track and prompting-only evaluation approaches for low-resource language settings. The dataset and code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BanglaHalluEval-EB77.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for robotic manipulation, yet most existing policies operate reactively by directly regressing actions from current observations, without explicitly modeling future dynamics. This limits their ability to generalize under out-of-distribution perturbations. To address this issue, we propose ELAN4D, an embodiment-centric, 4D-aware training framework that enhances VLA policies with future robot keypoint tracks as predictive spatio-temporal supervision. Using only forward kinematics from proprioceptive states, we derive 3D displacement tracks of robot keypoints, such as joints and the end-effector, with negligible preprocess cost. These tracks provide metric and compact supervision without requiring external trackers or reconstruction. A plug-and-play auxiliary branch with a lightweight track decoder injects this 4D signal into the action expert while preserving the pretrained vision-language backbone through gradient isolation. The track decoder is discarded during inference, leaving the base policy interface unchanged. Extensive experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ELAN4D consistently improves over strong VLA baselines, achieving the best overall performance and substantial gains under out-of-distribution perturbations, including camera, background, and layout shifts. These results highlight the effectiveness of embodiment-centric 4D supervision for building more robust and generalizable manipulation policies.

Multi-hop question answering (QA) remains a significant challenge in the biomedical domain, requiring systems to integrate information across multiple sources to answer complex questions. To address this problem, the BioCreative IX MedHopQA shared task was designed to benchmark in multi-hop reasoning for large language models (LLMs). We developed a novel dataset of 1,000 challenging QA pairs spanning diseases, genes, and chemicals, with particular emphasis on rare diseases. Each question was constructed to require two-hop reasoning through the integration of information from two distinct Wikipedia pages. The challenge attracted 48 submissions from 13 teams. Systems were evaluated using both surface string comparison and conceptual accuracy (MedCPT score). The results showed a substantial performance gap between baseline LLMs and enhanced systems. The top-ranked submission achieved an 89.30% F1 score on the MedCPT metric and an 87.30% exact match (EM) score, compared with 67.40% and 60.20%, respectively, for the zero-shot baseline. A central finding of the challenge was that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and related retrieval-based strategies were critical for strong performance. In addition, concept-level evaluation improved answer assessment when correct responses differed in surface form. The MedHopQA dataset is publicly available to support continued progress in this important area. Challenge materials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/bionlp/medhopqa and benchmark https://www.codabench.org/competitions/7609/

Light field (LF) image super-resolution benefits from Epipolar Plane Images (EPIs), whose line slopes explicitly encode disparity. However, existing Transformer-based LF SR methods mainly attend to horizontal and vertical EPIs, leaving diagonal epipolar geometry underexplored. We present GTF, an omnidirectional EPI Transformer that explicitly models horizontal, vertical, 45-degree, and 135-degree EPIs within a unified reconstruction framework. GTF combines directional EPI processing, MacPI-based prior injection, adaptive directional fusion, and a topology-preserving feed-forward network to better exploit LF geometry. For the NTIRE 2026 fidelity tracks, we use GTF as the main model, while a lightweight GTF-Tiny variant targets the efficiency track. On five standard LF SR benchmarks covering both real-captured and synthetic scenes, GTF reaches 32.78 dB without inference-time enhancement, and stronger inference settings with EPSW and test-time augmentation further improve performance. Under the NTIRE 2026 efficiency constraint, GTF-Tiny attains 32.57 dB with only 0.915M parameters and 19.81 GFLOPs. In the NTIRE 2026 Light Field Image Super-Resolution Challenge, our submissions rank 3rd on Track 1 and Track 3 and 4th on Track 2. Architecture-evolution, channel-width, and inference analyses further support the effectiveness of diagonal EPI modeling, directional fusion, and the lightweight design.

This report presents the results and findings of the first edition of the Short-Films 20K (SF20K) Competition, held in conjunction with the SLoMO Workshop at ICCV 2025. The competition is designed to advance story-level video understanding beyond short-clip action recognition, introducing an open-ended video question-answering task built on a corpus of amateur short films. This setup ensures that models must rely on multimodal understanding rather than memorization of popular movies. Evaluation is conducted using the SF20K-Test benchmark (95 movies, 979 question-answer pairs) and scored via LLM-QA-Eval, an automated judge based on GPT-4.1-nano. The competition attracted 22 teams and 286 submissions across two tracks: a Main Track with unrestricted model size and a Special Track limited to models under 8 billion parameters. The winning team achieved 65.7% accuracy on the Main Track and 48.7% on the Special Track, against a human performance ceiling of 91.7%. Our analysis reveals several key findings: narrative-aware, shot-level processing consistently outperforms uniform frame sampling; well-designed multi-stage pipelines using smaller models can match or exceed end-to-end inference with models over 30x larger; and subtitle quality is a dominant factor in performance. These results highlight that the primary bottleneck in long-form video QA lies in information selection and reasoning structure rather than raw model capacity, and that a substantial gap remains between current methods and human-level narrative comprehension.

This report summarizes the objectives, datasets, and top-performing methodologies of the 2026 Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild (PVUW) Challenge, hosted at CVPR 2026, which evaluates state-of-the-art models under highly unconstrained conditions. To provide a comprehensive assessment, the 2026 edition features three specialized tracks: the MOSE track for tracking objects within densely cluttered and severely occluded scenarios; the MeViS-Text track for localizing targets via motion-focused linguistic expressions; and the newly inaugurated MeViS-Audio track, which pioneers acoustic-driven object segmentation. By introducing previously unreleased challenging data and analyzing the cutting-edge, multimodal solutions submitted by participants, this report highlights the community's latest technical advancements and charts promising future directions for robust video scene comprehension.

Humanoid robots are promising to acquire various skills by imitating human behaviors. However, existing algorithms are only capable of tracking smooth, low-speed human motions, even with delicate reward and curriculum design. This paper presents a physics-based humanoid control framework, aiming to master highly-dynamic human behaviors such as Kungfu and dancing through multi-steps motion processing and adaptive motion tracking. For motion processing, we design a pipeline to extract, filter out, correct, and retarget motions, while ensuring compliance with physical constraints to the maximum extent. For motion imitation, we formulate a bi-level optimization problem to dynamically adjust the tracking accuracy tolerance based on the current tracking error, creating an adaptive curriculum mechanism. We further construct an asymmetric actor-critic framework for policy training. In experiments, we train whole-body control policies to imitate a set of highly-dynamic motions. Our method achieves significantly lower tracking errors than existing approaches and is successfully deployed on the Unitree G1 robot, demonstrating stable and expressive behaviors. The project page is https://kungfubot.github.io.

Long-shot windsurfing video combines small targets, large camera pans, prolonged overlaps, and rapidly changing backgrounds. The desired output is not a generic MOT trace but a separate, stable rider-relative video for each surfer; one false identity merge can invalidate an otherwise useful result. We present an offline analysis system that detects surfers, forms conservative local tracklets, links them globally with camera-compensated motion and a foreground-masked sail-color descriptor, and uses two pose keypoints on the rig to drive a rider-relative virtual camera. The tracking stage is evaluated on 21 manually reconstructed development videos containing 41,004 retained observations. On this fixed-observation protocol, the production system achieves 0.957 pairwise precision, 0.918 recall, and 0.937 F1, compared with 0.792 F1 for OC-SORT and 0.828 for BoT-SORT. Compared with OC-SORT, it reduces fragmentation excess from 845 to 42, but nine of its 95 output tracks mix rider identities and these errors affect seven of the 21 videos.

Biological visual systems achieve continuous, low-latency motion perception by processing sparse, asynchronous spiking signals, enabling real-time tracking under strict energy constraints. Event-based cameras, inspired by the mammalian retina, replicate this efficiency by capturing only local brightness changes as asynchronous events, offering a natural substrate for spiking neural networks (SNNs) to parallelise computation and adapt to fast-changing scenes. Pinball provides a controlled yet dynamic testbed, requiring precise motion estimation and fast reaction to a small, rapidly moving target. This work presents a fully spiking, real-time perception-to-action pipeline for closed-loop pinball gameplay. A dynamic vision sensor observes a small, fast-moving ball, and a network of spiking Time-Difference Encoders on the SpiNNaker neuromorphic platform jointly estimates its position, speed, and direction. The system is characterised across receptive field size, accumulation window, and angular tuning width for real-time operation, and benchmarked in closed loop against human players across two flipper regimes of increasing physical realism. It achieves a hit rate of 56.1%, nearly double the human average, reacting within 21.7 ms (5 ms network latency) and consuming an estimated 148 μW using fewer than 25k neurons, among the fastest and most energy-efficient event-based closed-loop demonstrators benchmarked. Under more realistic flipper dynamics, tuning a single interpretable policy parameter reproduces the full spectrum of human play styles, from cautious to aggressive, with no change to the perception pipeline. A physical demonstrator, tracking a real ball and actuating real flippers in closed loop, confirms the principle operates beyond simulation. Its fully spiking, learning-free design offers a compact, energy-efficient example of real-time neuromorphic perception-to-action.

Precise multi-camera tracking traditionally relies on rigorous 3D site calibration, yet this requirement is often operationally impossible in large-scale deployments. Privacy regulations frequently prohibit recording video for offline calibration; limited bandwidth precludes synchronizing high-resolution streams from hundreds of cameras; and covering immense physical sites with calibration targets is logistically infeasible. We present a multi-camera homography calibration system designed to overcome these barriers through "on-the-fly" geometric refinement. Starting from coarse manual homographies, we introduce a centroid-based projection optimization (PO) that continuously aligns the ground-plane geometry using live detection streams. Because PO operates asynchronously on already-transmitted, lightweight metadata, it adds zero computational latency to the real-time tracker. This allows the system to adapt automatically to camera movements or environmental changes without human intervention. This optimized geometry feeds a multi-camera bird's-eye-view (BEV) tracker that fuses detections and unifies trajectories across zones. Crucially, by operating strictly on live anonymous metadata, our solution ensures a privacy-safe, zero-overhead, and resilient tracking pipeline that maintains global consistency in dynamic environments where static, recorded-video calibration is impossible.

Autonomous excavator control is challenged by coupled kinematics, actuation lag, and uncertainty. We propose imitation learning and adaptive Cartesian tracking (IL-ACT), a novel motion control framework for a 30-ton-class excavator. An anchored, 14-input imitation policy pretrained on operator demonstrations generates nominal joint rates; adaptive Cartesian feedback and gated gain/bias estimation correct these commands before a stopping-distance governor constrains joint-reference generation. Simscape evaluation covers 100 sequential goals and spiral, figure-eight, and rounded-raster tracking, including 88 additional runs across three training seeds, two initializations, and speeds, under hydraulic response and sensing conditions. Compared with Teacher+ACT, IL-ACT completes all goals with shorter duration and lower terminal errors under both response conditions. Telemetry-initialized IL-ACT lowers RMSE in all 24 figure-eight and rounded-raster seed comparisons and lowers additional-load spiral mean RMSE by approximately 29%. Original spiral RMSE also improves over IL-only and PID. Under a shared sensor-noise realization, telemetry-initialized IL-ACT achieves 27.67% lower mean RMSE than Teacher+ACT; enabling estimation reduces mean RMSE by $22.44\%$ relative to the frozen estimator. Pretrained-weight effects remain mixed, and the original teacher comparison exhibits a spiral RMSE--maximum-error tradeoff. Analysis establishes bounded adaptive states and Cartesian feedback, with reference admissibility conditional on governor feasibility.

3D single object tracking (SOT) in LiDAR point clouds is essential for autonomous systems, but remains challenging under sparse and incomplete observations. In such cases, different target points provide highly uneven constraints on the object center, causing some point-to-center votes to be substantially less reliable than others. Existing point-based trackers typically aggregate these hypotheses without explicitly modeling their reliability, allowing inaccurate votes to contaminate proposal clustering and degrade localization accuracy. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{SAVTrack}, a motion-aware tracking framework with \textbf{Selective Vote Aggregation (SAV)}. SAVTrack estimates the reliability of each candidate vote from both local seed features and inter-frame motion context, and removes low-confidence hypotheses before proposal clustering. This pre-aggregation gating prevents unreliable hypotheses from affecting cluster formation while introducing only modest computational overhead. SAVTrack achieves competitive performance on KITTI and nuScenes, reaching 68.4/87.4 and 58.44/69.82 Success/Precision, respectively, while running at 82 FPS. It retains fewer than one-sixth of the candidate votes used by dense aggregation and remains particularly effective under sparse target observations.

Machine learning models process large amounts of data, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used technique to reduce the dimensionality of the data and extract useful features. In practice, datasets often change over time (data drift) and/or arrive one sample at a time (streaming data), making it infeasible to process the entire dataset at once in batch mode. Real-world data also often contains nonlinear patterns, which traditional PCA cannot extract. Kernel PCA addresses this by implicitly mapping samples into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Raw data also often contains outliers, which can have an outsized effect on the estimated subspace unless the algorithm is made robust. However, existing online robust kernel PCA algorithms are designed to converge to a subspace that is assumed to be fixed, and gradient-descent-based updates lose their effectiveness at tracking further changes once this initial alignment is achieved. This paper introduces a rotation-based update mechanism, which updates the subspace estimate by rotating it toward each new incoming feature vector in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, rather than relying on gradient descent alone. We present two complementary rotation strategies, and show that the extent of rotation can be moderated by a robust influence function to mitigate the effect of outliers. Through experiments on synthetic streaming data with a known ground-truth subspace, we show that per-sample rotations converge faster than gradient descent alone, demonstrating an effective mechanism for dynamically tracking a nonlinear subspace in streaming data.

Longitudinal characterization of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions remains constrained by the lack of frameworks capable of establishing consistent instance-level correspondences across time. Conventional segmentation approaches produce semantic lesion masks at each visit and therefore fail to capture the complex instance temporal patterns associated with lesion appearance, disappearance, splitting, or merging. This study presents a comparative evaluation of five strategies for automated tracking of spinal cord MS lesions in longitudinal MRI data from a multi-site cohort. The investigated strategies rely either on deformable registration or on a spinal anatomical reference system, and encompass overlap-based matching, coordinate-based Hungarian algorithm, gradient-boosted classification, and Siamese model classification. Tracking accuracy is quantified using instance-level true positives, false positives, and false negatives, allowing to assess the presence of one-to-many and many-to-one associations. Results show best performance for the registration-based overlap method. This study provides the first systematic analysis of lesion-instance correspondence in the spinal cord and outlines the strengths and limitations of registration-based and registration-free paradigms for longitudinal MS assessment. The code is available at http://github.com/ivadomed/longitudinal-sc-ms-lesion-tracking .

Moving-object perception must decide which image regions correspond to real motion and keep every instance identified over time. Methods that read motion from appearance, optical flow, or estimated trajectories lose that evidence under poor illumination, adverse weather, reflections, and occlusion. Radar is a natural remedy because it measures radial velocity directly instead of inferring it from photometric correspondence. However, existing benchmarks do not jointly provide radar measurements, dense moving-instance masks, and temporally consistent identities for surveillance. We therefore introduce RGBTR-Motion, a synchronized and calibrated fixed-camera benchmark that pairs RGB, thermal, and radar streams with dense instance masks and temporally consistent identities across diverse surveillance scenes. We also develop SAM-Radar, an RGB, thermal, and radar-based segmentation and tracking framework built on SAM 3. SAM-Radar's radar-aware detector fuses calibrated RGBT features with radar returns that are grounded at their projected image locations, and motion supervision, implemented as foreground classification of those projected returns, teaches the detector to reject clutter without any text prompt. The tracker associates accepted radar returns with individual trajectories and uses them as physical evidence that a visually degraded target remains present. This allows it to bridge short periods of low visibility or occlusion and reconnect a reappearing target to its existing identity instead of starting a new track. SAM-Radar attains 0.7027 IoU and 0.8090 F1-50, and raises MOTA, HOTA, and IDF1 by 0.2977, 0.1603, and 0.2857 over the strongest competing values.

Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.

This paper presents a parameter-dependent linear matrix inequality (LMI) framework for trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots subject to severe multiplicative wheel slip on variable-terrain surfaces. The sampled convex formulation, augmented with grid-to-continuum residual certification, simultaneously establishes semi-global differential input-to-state stability, a prescribed exponential decay rate, regional pole placement, and a gain-bounded feedback proxy for actuator-limited operation. A central contribution is an explicit upper bound on the additive disturbance induced by bounded multiplicative slip in the Kanayama error coordinates, bridging the physical slip mechanism and the convex synthesis paradigm. The auxiliary gain matrix and inverse storage metric are parameterized affinely in the reference velocities, while the storage metric inherits nonlinear dependence through pointwise matrix inversion. Stability is established via a cascade analysis combining variational contraction, forward invariance, slip-induced disturbance bounds, and dissipation-based trajectory reconstruction. Numerical validation compares three controllers across six reference trajectories, six disturbance classes, and a 60-second variable-terrain test featuring six severe slip patches with bidirectional slip ratios reaching +/-50%, replicated on two geometries. Supplementary studies address Gaussian sensor noise, compound stress-testing, and embedded-platform computational feasibility. Across 100 Monte-Carlo runs the proposed controller achieves complete trajectory containment within the certified envelope. On the variable-terrain scenario, peak tracking error is reduced by 12% against the fixed-gain LMI baseline and 49% against the manual baseline, with the constant-gain baseline infeasible at the prescribed decay rate.