Active Sensing

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Overview

Active sensing studies how robots and other agents can select observations or sensing actions instead of relying on fixed, continuous measurements. Common approaches use Bayesian information gain, uncertainty-guided view selection, partially observable decision processes, and reinforcement learning to plan camera, tactile, acoustic, or other sensor actions. Applications range from robotic exploration and manipulation to medical imaging, environmental monitoring, and scientific measurement, often under limits on energy, time, or interaction. A central challenge is that reducing uncertainty does not always improve task success: methods must account for feasibility, latency, model error, and risk, and evaluate both evidence gained and downstream outcomes.

Latest papers

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61 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. When Magnitude Suffices: Reconstructing Time-Domain-Gated Microwave Signals Without Phase on a Thoracic Phantom

    Oct 16, 2026Maciej Cichoń, Patrycja Gołaś, Maksymilian Bartosik +3Active Sensing

    Department of Solid State Physics, Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics, University of Łódź, Pomorska 149/153, 90-236 Łódź, Poland · Polish Mother’s Memorial Hospital Research Institute, Rzgowska 281/289, 93-338 Łódź, Poland

  2. ActiveReg: Information-Driven Active Regional Probing for Partial-to-Full Bone Registration

    Oct 7, 2026Tiancheng Li, Yingyu Wang, Peter Walker +2Medical Image RegistrationActive Sensing

    Robotics Institute, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia · School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom · Concord Repatriation General Hospital, New South Wales, Australia

  3. Pathwise Information Certificates for Decentralized Adaptive Sensing

    Oct 7, 2026Theodoros TsiligkaridisAdaptive SensingActive Sensing

    MIT Lincoln Laboratory

  4. Active Mapping of Underwater Litter Using Camera-Sonar Fusion

    Sep 30, 2026David Rete, Patrick Boros, Lucian BusoniuActive SensingUnderwater Robotics

    Department of Automation Technical University of Cluj-Napoca Romania

  5. CADeT: Causal-Aware Deformation Transmission for Indirect Robotic Manipulation of Soft Tissue

    Sep 29, 2026Junlei Hu, Dominic Jones, Pietro ValdastriDeformable Object ManipulationActive Sensing

    STORM Lab, Institute of Autonomous Systems and Sensing (IRASS), School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

  6. GPARA: Graph-Posterior-Aligned Refinement and Active Acquisition for Grounding Diffusion Priors

    Sep 28, 2026Wangqian Chen, Hao Wang, Yumeng Zhang +3Surrogate ModelingActive Sensing

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

  7. DA-GRD: Decision-Aware Grasp-Relevant Disambiguation for tactile recovery under perception-to-execution mismatches

    Sep 24, 2026Haoran Wang, Yuteng Sun, Yuanjie Li +6Robotic GraspingActive Sensing

    Michael · Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

  8. AnomaSense: Anomaly-based Sensor Activation for Fine-Grained Human Activity Recognition

    Sep 24, 2026Xue Wang, Yang ZhangHuman Activity RecognitionWearable Sensing

    University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

  9. Risk-Aware Online Conformal State Probing

    Sep 22, 2026Pietro Talli, Petar Popovski, Osvaldo SimeoneAI Agent ReliabilityConformal Prediction

    Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems, Northeastern University London · Connectivity Section, Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University

  10. Certified Task-Conditioned Active Observability

    Sep 22, 2026Linzhe Zhang, Changming XuActive SensingState Abstraction

    Graduate School, Northeastern University.

  11. VISTA: An Attention-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Architecture for Space Situational Awareness Sensor Tasking

    Sep 20, 2026Miguel Leiva-Vélez, Adalberto Claudio Quiros, Nicolas Gaston Rozado +2Active SensingSpace Situational Awareness

    ETSIAE-School of Aeronautics, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain · Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain · Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

  12. Task-Specified Active Metrological Inspection with Measurement-Steered VLA Manipulation and Deterministic Evidence Gating

    Sep 13, 2026Zhiling Chen, Jingzhan Ge, Ruimin Chen +3Robotic InspectionIndustrial Inspection

    University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA · U.S. Army DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC), Warren, MI, USA

  13. Rethinking Learned Occupancy in Autonomous Active Mapping with Observation-Gated Filtering

    Sep 8, 2026Jiahui Zhang, Bonian Han, Gongbo Liang +1Space RoboticsRobotics

    Boise State University · Texas A&M University–San Antonio

  14. Diagnosing and Dynamically Filtering Occupancy World Models for Active Mapping

    Sep 6, 2026Jiahui Zhang, Gongbo Liang, Yu ZhangNext-Best-View PlanningWorld Models for Robotics

    Boise State University · Texas A&M University–San Antonio

  15. Active sensing to characterize the heterogeneity of plant stress

    Aug 27, 2026Ayman Laaroussi, Peter Hanappe, David ColliauxPlant PhenotypingAgricultural Robotics

    Paris Research, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Paris, France

  16. A comparison between ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB and Wi-Fi radar for in-bedroom human activity monitoring and sleep interruption detection

    Aug 20, 2026Anton Lambrecht, Reda El Hail, Xianjun Jiao +5Human Activity RecognitionWi-Fi Sensing

    IDLab, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University-imec, iGent Tower, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 126, B-9052 Ghent, Belgium. · Department of Computer Science, Leuven AI, KU Leuven, B-2440 Geel, Belgium · Flanders Make, MPRO, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium +2

  17. Deep Probabilistic Indoor Gas Source Localization via Physical Dependency-Guided Sequential Inference

    Aug 17, 2026Seunghwan Kim, Hyungjin Kim, Junhee Lee +1Physics-Informed MLActive Sensing

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea

  18. FUSE: Active Functional Affordance Grounding through Adaptive Semantic-Geometric Evidence Acquisition

    Aug 13, 2026Zhou Chen, Sathyanarayanan N. AakurNext-Best-View PlanningActive Sensing

    CSSE Department Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849

  19. Let it Cook: Learning to Wait in Sequential Decision Making

    Aug 11, 2026Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Dinesh Jayaraman +1Sequential Decision MakingLearning to Defer

    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA

  20. mmRadarTwin: A Measurement-Calibrated Signal-Level Digital Twin Platform for Indoor mmWave Radar

    Jul 30, 2026Jianyi Zhou, Chenghao Zhang, Yanli Li +1Millimeter-Wave RadarmmWave Radar Sensing

    The University of Sydney · Sydney, NSW, Australia

  21. Conformalized Rate-Adaptive Sensing

    Jul 29, 2026Jiawei Yang, Yao ZhangImage ReconstructionComputational Imaging

    Department of Statistics and Data Science National University of Singapore

  22. Topology-Agnostic Mesh Reconstruction of Deformable Objects from Sparse Touch

    Jul 15, 2026Everest Yang3D ReconstructionDeformable Shape Reconstruction

    Brown University

  23. Active Noise Floor Estimation for Reliability-Optimal POMDPs: A Value-of-Noise-Information Approach

    Jul 13, 2026Hyung-Jin YoonValue of InformationActive Sensing

    Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN 37135, USA

  24. Delay-Aware Active Triangulation with Uncertainty-Driven Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Counter-UAS

    Jul 7, 2026Seungwook Lee, David Hyunchul ShimAge of InformationActive Sensing

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea

  25. Certified World Models as Sensing Clocks: Drift-Aware Deadlines for Active Perception

    Jul 1, 2026Hongbo WangActive PerceptionActive Sensing

  26. Geometry-Aware Cross-Height Channel Knowledge Map Prediction for UAV-Assisted Communications With Uncertainty-Guided 3D Sensing

    Jul 1, 2026Zhihan Zeng, Amir Hussain, Yue Xiu +4Active SensingWireless Communications

    National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu 611731, China · SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Centre of AI, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia · School of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast, Moreton Bay Campus, Petrie, QLD 4502, Australia +3

  27. Active Sensing for RIS-Aided Tracking and Power Control: A Hybrid Neuroevolution and Supervised Learning Approach

    Jun 30, 2026George Stamatelis, Hui Chen, Henk Henk Wymeersch +1Reconfigurable Intelligent SurfacesActive Sensing

    Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis Ilissia, 16122 Athens, Greece · Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 58 Gothenburg, Sweden

  28. Active Sensing and Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization for Robust Target Identification

    Jun 21, 2026Farbod Siahkali, Mengxue Hou, Vijay GuptaConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Optimization

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA · Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA

  29. A Hybrid Model-Based and Model-Free Framework for Active Multi-View Viewpoint Optimization in Sonar Target Recognition

    Jun 13, 2026Yongkyoon Park, Jane ShinNext-Best-View PlanningPartially Observable RL

    University of Florida Gainesville, FL, United States of America

  30. Multi-UAV Active Sensing with Information Gain-based Planning and Belief Fusion

    Jun 9, 2026S. Habibi, L. MarquesInformative Path PlanningActive Sensing

    Institute of Systems and Robotics University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal