Mapping

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Period ending 2026-09-21

14 new papers

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Period ending 2026-09-14

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213 papers

Latest in Mapping

Apr 23, 2026cs.SI

XFlowMap: Cross-Scale Generalization and Mapping of Massive Origin-Destination Data

Mapping large origin-destination (OD) datasets remains challenging because flow maps become cluttered, meaningful patterns occur at multiple spatial scales, and existing flow-mapping approaches frequently rely on predefined aggregation units or manual generalization. This paper presents XFlowMap, a framework for the cross-scale generalization and mapping of massive OD data. Specifically, the framework integrates cross-scale flow pattern (cluster) detection, automated flow map generalization, and a new cartographic representation for analyzing and visualizing complex origin-destination flow structures. The approach detects salient flow patterns at their appropriate origin and destination scales, extracts high-level structures, and generates a new flow map representation that supports holistic interpretation of complex origin-destination flow patterns. A scan-statistic-based procedure is developed to evaluate and generalize cross-scale flow clusters. The detected clusters are then visualized using a novel flow symbol that integrates location, direction, strength, and OD scales in a single representation. The framework supports both area-based and point-based OD data, is robust to sparse and noisy datasets, and enables comparative mapping of stratified flow data. Experiments with synthetic data and U.S. migration data demonstrate that the method effectively extracts meaningful cross-scale flow patterns and produces clear, information-rich flow maps for large mobility datasets, supporting both static presentation and interactive exploration.
Diansheng Guo, Hai Jin
Apr 22, 2026cs.RO

A Hough transform approach to safety-aware scalar field mapping using Gaussian Processes

This paper presents a framework for mapping unknown scalar fields using a sensor-equipped autonomous robot operating in unsafe environments. The unsafe regions are defined as regions of high-intensity, where the field value exceeds a predefined safety threshold. For safe and efficient mapping of the scalar field, the sensor-equipped robot must avoid high-intensity regions during the measurement process. In this paper, the scalar field is modeled as a sample from a Gaussian process (GP), which enables Bayesian inference and provides closed-form expressions for both the predictive mean and the uncertainty. Concurrently, the spatial structure of the high-intensity regions is estimated in real-time using the Hough transform (HT), leveraging the evolving GP posterior. A safe sampling strategy is then employed to guide the robot towards safe measurement locations, using probabilistic safety guarantees on the evolving GP posterior. The estimated high-intensity regions also facilitate the design of safe motion plans for the robot. The effectiveness of the approach is verified through two numerical simulation studies and an indoor experiment for mapping a light-intensity field using a wheeled mobile robot.
Muzaffar Qureshi, Trivikram Satharasi, Tochukwu E. Ogri +2
Apr 22, 2026eess.SY

Personalized electric vehicle energy consumption estimation framework that integrates driver behavior with map data

This paper presents a personalized Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) energy consumption estimation framework that integrates map-based contextual features with driver-specific velocity prediction and physics-based energy consumption modeling. The system combines route selection, detailed road feature processing, a rule-based reference velocity generator, a PID controller-based vehicle dynamics simulator, and a Bidirectional LSTM model trained to reproduce individual driving behavior. The predicted individual-specific velocity profiles are coupled with a quasi-steady backward energy consumption model to compute tractive power, regenerative braking, and State-of-Charge (SOC) evolution. Evaluation across urban, freeway, and hilly routes demonstrates that the proposed approach captures key driver behavioral patterns such as deceleration at intersections, speed-limit tracking, and road grade-dependent responses, while producing accurate power and SOC trajectories. The results highlight the effectiveness of combining learned driver behavior with map-based context and physics-based energy consumption modeling to produce accurate, personalized BEV SOC depletion profiles.
Sreechakra Vasudeva Raju Rachavelpula, Sangwhan Cha
Apr 21, 2026cs.RO

SL(C)AMma: Simultaneous Localisation, (Calibration) and Mapping With a Magnetometer Array

Indoor localisation techniques suffer from attenuated Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and from the accumulation of unbounded drift by integration of proprioceptive sensors. Magnetic field-based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) reduces drift through loop closures by revisiting previously seen locations, but extended exploration of unseen areas remains challenging. Recently, magnetometer arrays have demonstrated significant benefits over single magnetometers, as they can directly estimate the odometry. However, inconsistencies between magnetometer measurements negatively affect odometry estimates and complicate loop closure detection. We propose two filtering algorithms: The first focuses on magnetic field-based SLAM using a magnetometer array (SLAMma). The second extends this to jointly estimate the magnetometer calibration parameters (SLCAMma). We demonstrate, using Monte Carlo simulations, that the calibration parameters can be accurately estimated when there is sufficient orientation excitation, and that magnetometers achieve inter-sensor measurement consistency regardless of the type of motion. Experimental validation on ten datasets confirms these results, and we demonstrate that in cases where single magnetometer SLAM fails, SLAMma and SLCAMma provide good trajectory estimates with, more than 80% drift reduction compared to integration of proprioceptive sensors.
Thomas Edridge, Manon Kok
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Paparazzo: Active Mapping of Moving 3D Objects

Current 3D mapping pipelines generally assume static environments, which limits their ability to accurately capture and reconstruct moving objects. To address this limitation, we introduce the novel task of active mapping of moving objects, in which a mapping agent must plan its trajectory while compensating for the object's motion. Our approach, Paparazzo, provides a learning-free solution that robustly predicts the target's trajectory and identifies the most informative viewpoints from which to observe it, to plan its own path. We also contribute a comprehensive benchmark designed for this new task. Through extensive experiments, we show that Paparazzo significantly improves 3D reconstruction completeness and accuracy compared to several strong baselines, marking an important step toward dynamic scene understanding. Project page: https://davidea97.github.io/paparazzo-page/
Davide Allegro, Shiyao Li, Stefano Ghidoni +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

GOLD-BEV: GrOund and aeriaL Data for Dense Semantic BEV Mapping of Dynamic Scenes

Understanding road scenes in a geometrically consistent, scene-centric representation is crucial for planning and mapping. We present GOLD-BEV, a framework that learns dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic environment maps-including dynamic agents-from ego-centric sensors, using time-synchronized aerial imagery as supervision only during training. BEV-aligned aerial crops provide an intuitive target space, enabling dense semantic annotation with minimal manual effort and avoiding the ambiguity of ego-only BEV labeling. Crucially, strict aerial-ground synchronization allows overhead observations to supervise moving traffic participants and mitigates the temporal inconsistencies inherent to non-synchronized overhead sources. To obtain scalable dense targets, we generate BEV pseudo-labels using domain-adapted aerial teachers, and jointly train BEV segmentation with optional pseudo-aerial BEV reconstruction for interpretability. Finally, we extend beyond aerial coverage by learning to synthesize pseudo-aerial BEV images from ego sensors, which support lightweight human annotation and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling on unlabeled drives.
Joshua Niemeijer, Alaa Eddine Ben Zekri, Reza Bahmanyar +3
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

OptiMVMap: Offline Vectorized Map Construction via Optimal Multi-vehicle Perspectives

Offline vectorized maps constitute critical infrastructure for high-precision autonomous driving and mapping services. Existing approaches rely predominantly on single ego-vehicle trajectories, which fundamentally suffer from viewpoint insufficiency: while memory-based methods extend observation time by aggregating ego-trajectory frames, they lack the spatial diversity needed to reveal occluded regions. Incorporating views from surrounding vehicles offers complementary perspectives, yet naive fusion introduces three key challenges: computational cost from large candidate pools, redundancy from near-collinear viewpoints, and noise from pose errors and occlusion artifacts. We present OptiMVMap, which reformulates multi-vehicle mapping as a select-then-fuse problem to address these challenges systematically. An Optimal Vehicle Selection (OVS) module strategically identifies a compact subset of helpers that maximally reduce ego-centric uncertainty in occluded regions, addressing computation and redundancy challenges. Cross-Vehicle Attention (CVA) and Semantic-aware Noise Filter (SNF) then perform pose-tolerant alignment and artifact suppression before BEV-level fusion, addressing the noise challenge. This targeted pipeline yields more complete and topologically faithful maps with substantially fewer views than indiscriminate aggregation. On nuScenes and Argoverse2, OptiMVMap improves MapTRv2 by +10.5 mAP and +9.3 mAP, respectively, and surpasses memory-augmented baselines MVMap and HRMapNet by +6.2 mAP and +3.8 mAP on nuScenes. These results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided selection of helper vehicles is essential for efficient and accurate multi-vehicle vectorized mapping. The code is released at https://github.com/DanZeDong/OptiMVMap.
Zedong Dan, Zijie Wang, Wei Zhang +6
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

OT on the Map: Quantifying Domain Shifts in Geographic Space

In computer vision and machine learning for geographic data, out-of-domain generalization is a pervasive challenge, arising from uneven global data coverage and distribution shifts across geographic regions. Though models are frequently trained in one region and deployed in another, there is no principled method for determining when this cross-region adaptation will be successful. A well-defined notion of distance between distributions can effectively quantify how different a new target domain is compared to the domains used for model training, which in turn could support model training and deployment decisions. In this paper, we propose a strategy for computing distances between geospatial domains that leverages geographic information with Optimal Transport methods (GeoSpOT). In our experiments, GeoSpOT distances emerge as effective predictors of cross-domain transfer difficulty. We further demonstrate that embeddings from pretrained location encoders provide information comparable to image/text embeddings, despite relying solely on longitude-latitude pairs as input. This allows users to get an approximation of out-of-domain performance for geospatial models, even when the exact downstream task is unknown, or no task-specific data is available. Building on these findings, we show that GeoSpOT distances can preemptively guide data selection and enable predictive tools to analyze regions where a model is likely to underperform.
Haoran Zhang, Livia Betti, Konstantin Klemmer +2
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

MapSR: Prompt-Driven Land Cover Map Super-Resolution via Vision Foundation Models

High-resolution (HR) land-cover mapping is often constrained by the high cost of dense HR annotations. We revisit this problem from the perspective of map super-resolution, which enhances coarse low-resolution (LR) land-cover products into HR maps at the resolution of the input imagery. Existing weakly supervised methods can leverage LR labels, but they typically use them to retrain dense predictors with substantial computational cost. We propose MapSR, a prompt-driven framework that decouples supervision from model training. MapSR uses LR labels once to extract class prompts from frozen vision foundation model features through a lightweight linear probe, after which HR mapping proceeds via training-free metric inference and graph-based prediction refinement. Specifically, class prompts are estimated by aggregating high-confidence HR features identified by the linear probe, and HR predictions are obtained by cosine-similarity matching followed by graph-based propagation for spatial refinement. Experiments on the Chesapeake Bay dataset show that MapSR achieves 59.64% mIoU without any HR labels, remaining competitive with the strongest weakly supervised baseline and surpassing a fully supervised baseline. Notably, MapSR reduces trainable parameters by four orders of magnitude and shortens training time from hours to minutes, enabling scalable HR mapping under limited annotation and compute budgets. The code is available at https://github.com/rikirikirikiriki/MapSR.
Ruiqi Wang, Qi Yu, Jie Ma +1
Apr 15, 2026cs.CV

LingBot-Map: Geometric Context Transformer for Streaming 3D Reconstruction

Streaming 3D reconstruction aims to recover 3D information, such as camera poses and point clouds, from a video stream, which necessitates geometric accuracy, temporal consistency, and computational efficiency. Motivated by the principles of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), we introduce LingBot-Map, a feed-forward 3D foundation model for reconstructing scenes from streaming data, built upon a geometric context transformer (GCT) architecture. A defining aspect of LingBot-Map lies in its carefully designed attention mechanism, which integrates an anchor context, a pose-reference window, and a trajectory memory to address coordinate grounding, dense geometric cues, and long-range drift correction, respectively. This design keeps the streaming state compact while retaining rich geometric context, enabling stable efficient inference at around 20 FPS on 518 x 378 resolution inputs over long sequences exceeding 10,000 frames. Extensive evaluations across a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to both existing streaming and iterative optimization-based approaches.
Lin-Zhuo Chen, Jian Gao, Shangzhan Zhang +9
Mar 23, 2026astro-ph.CO

A plug-and-play approach with fast uncertainty quantification for weak lensing mass mapping

Upcoming stage-IV surveys such as Euclid and Rubin will deliver vast amounts of high-precision data, opening new opportunities to constrain cosmological models with unprecedented accuracy. A key step in this process is the reconstruction of the dark matter distribution from noisy weak-lensing shear measurements. Current deep-learning-based mass-mapping methods achieve high reconstruction accuracy, but either require retraining a model for each new observed sky region (limiting practicality) or rely on slow Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Efficient exploitation of future survey data therefore calls for a new method that is accurate, flexible, and fast at inference. In addition, an uncertainty quantification with coverage guarantees is essential for a reliable cosmological parameter estimation. We introduce PnPMass, a plug-and-play approach for weak-lensing mass mapping. The algorithm produces point estimates by alternating between a gradient descent step with a carefully chosen data fidelity term and a denoising step implemented with a single deep-learning model trained on simulated data corrupted by Gaussian white noise. We also propose a fast sampling-free uncertainty quantification scheme based on moment networks, with calibrated error bars obtained through conformal prediction to ensure coverage guarantees. Finally, we benchmark PnPMass against model-driven and data-driven mass-mapping techniques. PnPMass achieves a performance close to that of the currently best deep-learning methods while offering fast inference. It converges in just a few iterations, and it requires only a single training phase, regardless of the noise covariance of the observations. It therefore combines flexibility, efficiency, and reconstruction accuracy while delivering tighter error bars than existing approaches, making it well suited for upcoming weak-lensing surveys.
Hubert Leterme, Andreas Tersenov, Jalal Fadili +1
Mar 21, 2026cs.CR

T-MAP: Red-Teaming LLM Agents with Trajectory-aware Evolutionary Search

While prior red-teaming efforts have focused on eliciting harmful text outputs from large language models (LLMs), such approaches fail to capture agent-specific vulnerabilities that emerge through multi-step tool execution, particularly in rapidly growing ecosystems such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). To address this gap, we propose a trajectory-aware evolutionary search method, T-MAP, which leverages execution trajectories to guide the discovery of adversarial prompts. Our approach enables the automatic generation of attacks that not only bypass safety guardrails but also reliably realize harmful objectives through actual tool interactions. Empirical evaluations across diverse MCP environments demonstrate that T-MAP substantially outperforms baselines in attack realization rate (ARR) and remains effective against frontier models, including GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, Qwen3.5, and GLM-5, thereby revealing previously underexplored vulnerabilities in autonomous LLM agents. Code is available at https://github.com/pwnhyo/T-MAP.
Hyomin Lee, Sangwoo Park, Yumin Choi +3
Mar 11, 2026stat.ML

Trustworthy Predictive Distributions for Tail Events with Semiparametric Diagnostic Transport Maps

Machine learning forecast systems are moving beyond point predictions to full predictive distributions for future outcomes y conditional on complex inputs x. However, these distributions are often locally miscalibrated, especially for high-stakes tail events where accurate uncertainty quantification is most needed to establish trust in models. Local miscalibration occurs because training data often lack examples of low-frequency events. The goal of this paper is to describe a simple, yet flexible framework that, at deployment, produces interpretable diagnostics and a robust correction mechanism of predictive distributions when train examples are limited. With this goal in mind, we introduce a semiparametric version of the Local Amortized Diagnostic and Reshaping (LADaR) framework that posits a covariate-dependent parametric model for a diagnostic transport map regressed nonparametrically on inputs to describe how to correct tail probabilities across the feature space to match calibration data. These maps provide the user with local, real-time diagnostics and a reshaped predictive distribution that can be related back to physical processes in the input space. We apply these semiparametric diagnostic transport maps to short-term tropical cyclone intensity forecasting to detect evolutionary modes linked to local miscalibration in the National Hurricane Center's forecasts and improve predictions for severe weather hazards.
Elizabeth Cucuzzella, Rafael Izbicki, Ann B. Lee
Feb 6, 2026cs.CL

SHINE: A Scalable In-Context Hypernetwork for Mapping Context to LoRA in a Single Pass

We propose SHINE (Scalable Hyper In-context NEtwork), a scalable hypernetwork that can map diverse meaningful contexts into high-quality LoRA adapters for large language models (LLMs). By reusing the frozen LLM's own parameters in an in-context hypernetwork design and introducing architectural innovations, SHINE overcomes key limitations of prior hypernetworks and achieves strong expressive power with a relatively small number of parameters. We introduce a pretraining and instruction fine-tuning pipeline, and train our hypernetwork to generate high quality LoRA adapters from diverse meaningful contexts in a single forward pass. It updates LLM parameters without any fine-tuning, and immediately enables complex question answering tasks related to the context without directly accessing the context, effectively transforming in-context knowledge to in-parameter knowledge in one pass. Our work achieves outstanding results on various tasks, greatly saves time, computation and memory costs compared to SFT-based LLM adaptation, and shows great potential for scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/SHINE
Yewei Liu, Xiyuan Wang, Yansheng Mao +3
Jan 29, 2026cs.CV

FlexMap: Robust HD Map Construction under Flexible Camera Configurations

High-definition (HD) maps provide essential semantic information about road structures for autonomous driving, but existing HD map construction methods typically require calibrated multi-camera rigs and explicit 2D-to-BEV transformations. Such pipelines degrade when camera views are missing or pose estimates are inaccurate, limiting their use across heterogeneous fleet configurations. We introduce FlexMap, a vectorized HD mapping framework that adapts to varying camera configurations without architectural changes or per-configuration retraining and does not require camera parameters as model input. FlexMap replaces explicit geometric projection with a geometry foundation model that encodes cross-view 3D structure. A spatial-temporal enhancement module then separates cross-view spatial reasoning from temporal aggregation, while a camera-aware decoder uses the token produced for each input view to adapt its attention without camera poses. Experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 show that FlexMap outperforms pose-dependent baselines using estimated poses and maintains comparable accuracy across all evaluated camera configurations, including those with missing views.
Run Wang, Chaoyi Zhou, Amir Salarpour +5
Jan 17, 2026cs.CL

Mapping the maturation of TCM as an adjuvant to radiotherapy

The integration of complementary medicine into oncology represents a paradigm shift that has seen to increasing adoption of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as an adjuvant to radiotherapy. About twenty-five years since the formal institutionalization of integrated oncology, it is opportune to synthesize the trajectory of evidence for TCM as an adjuvant to radiotherapy. Here we conduct a large-scale analysis of 69,745 publications (2000 - 2025), emerging a cyclical evolution defined by coordinated expansion and contraction in publication output, international collaboration, and funding commitments that mirrors a define-ideate-test pattern. Using a theme modeling workflow designed to determine a stable thematic structure of the field, we identify five dominant thematic axes - cancer types, supportive care, clinical endpoints, mechanisms, and methodology - that signal a focus on patient well-being, scientific rigor and mechanistic exploration. Cross-theme integration of TCM is patient-centered and systems-oriented. Together with the emergent cycles of evolution, the thematic structure demonstrates progressive specialization and potential defragmentation of the field or saturation of existing research agenda. The analysis points to a field that has matured its current research agenda and is likely at the cusp of something new. Additionally, the field exhibits positive reporting of findings that is homogeneous across publication types, thematic areas, and the cycles of evolution suggesting a system-wide positive reporting bias agnostic to structural drivers.
P. Bilha Githinji, Aikaterini Melliou, Xi Yuan +8
Dec 19, 2025cs.CV

SERA-H: Super-Resolution of Sentinel Time Series for Fine-Scale Canopy Height Mapping

High-resolution mapping of canopy height is essential for forest management and biodiversity monitoring. Although recent studies have led to the advent of deep learning methods using satellite imagery to predict height maps, these approaches often face a trade-off between data accessibility and spatial resolution. To overcome these limitations, we present SERA-H, an end-to-end model combining a super-resolution module (EDSR) and temporal attention encoding (UTAE). Trained under the supervision of high-density LiDAR-derived Canopy Height Models (CHM), our model generates 2.5 m resolution height maps from freely available Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 (10 m) time series data. Evaluated against an open-source benchmark dataset in France, SERA-H, with a MAE of 2.6 m and R2 of 0.82, not only outperforms standard Sentinel-1/2 baselines but also approaches the accuracy of methods based on commercial very high-resolution imagery (e.g., SPOT-6/7), while relying solely on freely available data. These results demonstrate that combining high-resolution ALS supervision with the spatio-temporal information embedded in Sentinel time series enables the reconstruction of spatial detail finer than the native resolution of the input imagery. By approaching the accuracy of costly commercial imagery, SERA-H opens the possibility of mapping temperate forests using publicly available data with high revisit frequency.
Thomas Boudras, Martin Schwartz, Rasmus Fensholt +6
Dec 10, 2025cs.RO

Super4DR: 4D Radar-centric Self-supervised Odometry and Gaussian-based Map Optimization

Conventional odometry and mapping methods using visual or LiDAR data often struggle under poor illumination and adverse weather conditions. Although 4D radar is suited for such environments, its sparse and noisy point clouds hinder accurate odometry estimation, while the radar maps suffer from obscure and incomplete structures. Thus, we propose Super4DR, a 4D radar-centric framework for learning-based odometry estimation and gaussian-based map optimization. First, we design a cluster-aware odometry network that incorporates object-level cues from the clustered radar points for inter-frame matching, alongside a hierarchical self-supervision mechanism to overcome outliers through spatio-temporal consistency, knowledge transfer, and feature contrast. Second, we propose using 3D gaussians as an intermediate representation, coupled with a radar-specific growth strategy, selective separation, and multi-view regularization, to recover blurry map areas and those undetected based on image texture. Experiments show that Super4DR achieves a 67% performance gain over prior self-supervised methods, nearly matches supervised odometry, and narrows the map quality disparity with LiDAR while enabling multi-modal image rendering.
Zhiheng Li, Weihua Wang, Qiang Shen +2
Nov 14, 2025cs.CV

Hi-DREAM: Brain-Inspired Hierarchical Diffusion for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction via ROI Encoder and VisuAl Mapping

Reconstructing natural images from fMRI requires bridging neural activity with both the structural and semantic representations used by modern generative models. Existing diffusion-based decoders often condition on a single global fMRI embedding, which limits their ability to exploit the hierarchical organization of the visual cortex and makes the contribution of different visual areas difficult to inspect. We propose Hi-DREAM, a brain-inspired hierarchical diffusion framework that structures fMRI conditioning according to early, middle, and late visual Regions of Interest (ROI) streams. A ROI adapter converts these streams into a multi-scale cortical pyramid, and a lightweight ROI-conditioned ControlNet injects the resulting anatomy-aware priors into matched U-Net depths during denoising. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) show that Hi-DREAM achieves state-of-the-art high-level semantic reconstruction while retaining strong low-level structure. Further ablation and attribution analyses show that the proposed hierarchy-aware conditioning is effective, and that different ROI streams provide complementary, inspectable contributions to reconstruction.
Guowei Zhang, Yun Zhao, Kai Sun +4
Nov 3, 2025cs.RO

TurboMap: GPU-Accelerated Local Mapping for Visual SLAM

In real-time Visual SLAM systems, local mapping must operate under strict latency constraints, as delays degrade map quality and increase the risk of tracking failure. GPU parallelization offers a promising way to reduce latency. However, parallelizing local mapping is challenging due to synchronized shared-state updates and the overhead of transferring large map data structures to the GPU. This paper presents TurboMap, a GPU-parallelized and CPU-optimized local mapping backend that holistically addresses these challenges. We restructure Map Point Creation to enable parallel Keypoint Correspondence Search on the GPU, redesign and parallelize Map Point Fusion, optimize Redundant Keyframe Culling on the CPU, and integrate a fast GPU-based Local Bundle Adjustment solver. To minimize data transfer and synchronization costs, we introduce persistent GPU-resident keyframe storage. Experiments on the EuRoC and TUM-VI datasets show average local mapping speedups of 1.3x and 1.6x, respectively, while preserving accuracy.
Parsa Hosseininejad, Kimia Khabiri, Shishir Gopinath +3
Oct 21, 2025cs.RO

OREN: Octree Residual Network for Real-Time Euclidean Signed Distance Mapping

Reconstructing signed distance functions (SDFs) from point cloud data benefits many robot autonomy capabilities, including localization, mapping, motion planning, and control. Methods that support online and large-scale SDF reconstruction often rely on discrete volumetric data structures, which affects the continuity and differentiability of the SDF estimates. Neural network methods have demonstrated high-fidelity differentiable SDF reconstruction but they tend to be less efficient, experience catastrophic forgetting and memory limitations in large environments, and are often restricted to truncated SDF. This work proposes OREN, a hybrid method that combines an explicit prior from octree interpolation with an implicit residual from neural network regression. Our method achieves non-truncated (Euclidean) SDF reconstruction with computational and memory efficiency comparable to volumetric methods and differentiability and accuracy comparable to neural network methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OREN outperforms the state of the art in terms of accuracy and efficiency, providing a scalable solution for downstream tasks in robotics and computer vision.
Zhirui Dai, Qihao Qian, Tianxing Fan +1
Sep 18, 2025cs.CV

MapAnything: Evaluating Monocular Metric Depth Models for 3D Urban Asset Localization

City administrations increasingly rely on comprehensive databases and digital twins of city assets, such as traffic signs and trees, as well as incidents such as graffiti or road damage, to maintain an effective overview of urban conditions. Digitization has increased the demand for continuously updated spatial datasets, yet current data acquisition and maintenance processes still involve considerable manual effort, posing significant scalability challenges. This paper introduces MapAnything, a systematic evaluation pipeline that automates the spatial mapping of urban objects and incidents from a single monocular image. By leveraging advanced Metric Depth Estimation models, MapAnything accurately calculates object geocoordinates, converting 2D image data into valuable 3D spatial information. The methodology integrates the estimated camera-to-object distance with geometric principles and known camera specifications. We present a detailed validation of the framework, comparing its distance-estimation accuracy against high-precision LiDAR point clouds in complex urban environments. Our evaluation provides a granular analysis of spatial performance across various distance intervals and semantic areas, such as roads and vegetation. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's practical efficacy through specific use cases, including mapping traffic signs and road pavement damage, and provide recommendations for its integration into automated urban inventory systems.
Miriam Louise Carnot, Jonas Kunze, Erik Quinten Fastermann +3
Aug 8, 2025cs.RO

VLEM: Real-Time 3D Vision-Language Embedding Mapping

Semantic scene understanding in robotics requires representations that are both metric-accurate and queryable via natural language in real-time. While recent Vision-Language Models enable powerful 2D image-text alignment, their integration into real-time 3D mapping systems remains challenging due to their requirements on ground truth poses, computational cost, and memory constraints. We present VLEM (Vision-Language Embedding Mapping), a real-time framework for integrating pixel-aligned 2D vision-language embeddings from various backends into a globally consistent, metric-accurate 3D representation, requiring only a raw RGB-D stream. Compared to ConceptFusion, Open-Fusion, and RayFronts, VLEM provides better open-set segmentation performance and a more compact representation. We further demonstrate VLEM's versatility in interactive real-time robotic manipulation tasks and mobile mapping scenarios.
Christian Rauch, Björn Ellensohn, Linus Nwankwo +2
Jun 2, 2025cs.AI

MAGIK: Mapping to Analogous Goals via Imagination-enabled Knowledge Transfer

Humans excel at analogical reasoning - applying knowledge from one task to a related one with minimal relearning. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically require extensive retraining even when new tasks share structural similarities with previously learned ones. In this work, we propose MAGIK, a novel framework that enables RL agents to transfer knowledge to analogous tasks without interacting with the target environment. Our approach leverages an imagination mechanism to map entities in the target task to their analogues in the source domain, allowing the agent to reuse its original policy. Experiments on custom MiniGrid and MuJoCo tasks show that MAGIK achieves effective zero-shot transfer using only a small number of human-labelled examples. We compare our approach to related baselines and highlight how it offers a novel and effective mechanism for knowledge transfer via imagination-based analogy mapping.
Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu Rana
Mar 4, 2025cs.CV

L2G-Map: Local-to-Global Mapping via Hierarchical Diffusion Refinement and Elliptical Bayesian Fusion

Offline high-definition maps provide essential geometric and topological priors for autonomous driving systems. Pure-vision solutions have become the predominant paradigm for offline mapping due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability. However, local-to-global mapping under visual conditions confronts two fundamental challenges: single-shot local observations are susceptible to viewpoint variation and environmental interference, leading to geometric deviations, while multi-source local information exhibits heterogeneous confidence, rendering globally consistent aggregation difficult. To address these, this paper proposes L2G-Map, a framework comprising hierarchical prior diffusion refinement and elliptical space Bayesian fusion. The former jointly embeds temporal context and centerline priors to guide structure completion and topology recovery during denoising, alleviating the information incompleteness inherent in pure-vision settings. The latter incorporates an adaptive weighting strategy driven by elliptical distance propagation, enabling probabilistically optimal aggregation of multi-source information under the Bayesian posterior update paradigm. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of L2G-Map. The proposed refinement component yields consistent local map accuracy improvements across different datasets. Under sensor-degraded conditions, a 3.27% mIoU gain is achieved. Furthermore, the adaptive fusion component significantly enhances the accuracy of global maps. The fused global map can be flexibly embedded into different online map models, yielding an 18.26% mIoU improvement in semantic map construction and a 20.00% enhancement in vectorized map construction, demonstrating the overall advantages of the proposed closed-loop pipeline. Source code will be available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/L2G-Map.
Siyu Li, Xinying Hong, Fei Teng +5
Nov 13, 2024cs.RO

Voxeland: Probabilistic Instance-Aware Semantic Mapping with Evidence-based Uncertainty Quantification

Robots in human-centered environments require accurate scene understanding to perform high-level tasks effectively. This understanding can be achieved through instance-aware semantic mapping, which involves reconstructing elements at the level of individual instances. Neural networks, the de facto solution for scene understanding, still face limitations such as overconfident incorrect predictions with out-of-distribution objects or generating inaccurate masks. Placing excessive reliance on these predictions makes the reconstruction susceptible to errors, reducing the robustness of the resulting maps and hampering robot operation. In this work, we propose Voxeland, a probabilistic framework for incrementally building instance-aware semantic maps. Inspired by the Theory of Evidence, Voxeland treats neural network predictions as \textit{subjective opinions} regarding map instances at both geometric and semantic levels. These opinions are aggregated over time to form evidence, and are formalized through a probabilistic model. This enables us to quantify uncertainty in the reconstruction process, facilitating the identification of map areas requiring improvement (e.g. reobservation or reclassification). As a possible strategy to exploit this uncertainty quantification, we incorporate a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to perform semantic level disambiguation for instances with high uncertainty. Results from the standard benchmarking on the publicly available SceneNN dataset demonstrate that Voxeland outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the benefits of incorporating and leveraging both instance- and semantic-level uncertainties to enhance reconstruction robustness. This is further validated through qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on the real-world ScanNet dataset.
Jose-Luis Matez-Bandera, Pepe Ojeda, Javier Monroy +2
Oct 7, 2024cs.RO

2Fast-2Lamaa: Large-Scale Lidar-Inertial Localization and Mapping with Continuous Distance Fields

This paper introduces 2Fast-2Lamaa, a lidar-inertial state estimation framework for odometry, mapping, and localization. Its first key component is the optimization-based undistortion of lidar scans, which uses continuous IMU preintegration to model the system's pose at every lidar point timestamp. The continuous trajectory over 100-200ms is parameterized only by the initial scan conditions (linear velocity and gravity orientation) and IMU biases, yielding eleven state variables. These are estimated by minimizing point-to-line and point-to-plane distances between lidar-extracted features without relying on previous estimates, resulting in a prior-less motion-distortion correction strategy. Because the method performs local state estimation, it directly provides scan-to-scan odometry. To maintain geometric consistency over longer periods, undistorted scans are used for scan-to-map registration. The map representation employs Gaussian Processes to form a continuous distance field, enabling point-to-surface distance queries anywhere in space. Poses of the undistorted scans are refined by minimizing these distances through non-linear least-squares optimization. For odometry and mapping, the map is built incrementally in real time; for pure localization, existing maps are reused. The incremental map construction also includes mechanisms for removing dynamic objects. We benchmark 2Fast-2Lamaa on over 750km of public and self-collected datasets from both automotive and handheld systems. The framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse and challenging scenarios, reaching odometry and localization errors as low as 0.22% and 0.06 m, respectively. The real-time implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/clegenti/2fast2lamaa.
Cedric Le Gentil, Raphael Falque, Daniil Lisus +1
Jul 12, 2024cs.RO

Open-Vocabulary Object-Goal Navigation by Generalizing Semantic Mapping with Dense CLIP

Object-oriented embodied navigation tasks require agents to locate specific objects, either defined by category or images, in unseen environments. While recent methods have made progress in extending closed-set models to open-vocabulary scenarios with foundation models, they typically rely on training-free large language models (LLMs) or finetuning with end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL). However, they face challenges in efficiency (e.g., the overhead and cost of LLM inference) and limited generalization from intensive RL training. In this paper, we propose OVExp, a training-efficient framework for open-vocabulary exploration. We make the first effort to demonstrate the generalization capabilities of semantic map-based goal prediction networks using Dense CLIP models. A major challenge is that preserving both precise point-wise object locations and generalizable visual representations in the semantic map leads to unaffordable training costs. To address this, we design a Cross-Modal Transfer on Semantic Mapping strategy which adapts an intriguing text-only training and transfer to multi-model semantic mapping and goals in test-time. Despite relying on text-based spatial layouts with limited objects, OVExp demonstrates robust generalization to unseentargets on established ObjectNav benchmarks.
Meng Wei, Chenyang Wan, Tai Wang +6
Date pendingphysics.med-ph

PRIME-SVR: Physics-infoRmed Implicit Multi-Echo Slice-to-Volume Reconstruction for Fetal T2 mapping

Slice-to-volume reconstruction (SVR) is the standard method for obtaining high-resolution (HR) 3D fetal brain volumes from motion-corrupted 2D MRI slice stacks acquired in multiple orientations. Existing SVR methods are optimized and validated only for clinical-range echo times (TEs), limiting their use at non-clinical TEs and making them incompatible with quantitative T2 mapping, a protocol- and center-independent biomarker of fetal brain maturation requiring HR reconstructions across multiple TEs. We present PRIME-SVR, the first implicit neural representation (INR) framework for joint HR reconstruction from multi-echo MRI. A single fully connected network models a continuous function from spatial coordinates to signal intensities across TEs, while a second network estimates slice-specific acquisition degradations. Cross-TE coherence is enforced via a Bloch equation-derived regularization penalizing deviations from expected T2 decay, with adaptive weighting that strengthens coupling for degraded stacks. The method is fully self-supervised. We validate PRIME-SVR on 39 in vivo fetal acquisitions (13 subjects x 3 TEs) from two centers, two vendors, and two field strengths (1.5 T and 0.55 T). Compared to state-of-the-art SVR, PRIME-SVR improves reconstruction sharpness by 47%, anatomical accuracy by 30%, and cross-TE structural consistency by 14%. It enables reconstruction at late TEs previously inaccessible to SVR, yielding the first 0.8 mm isotropic T2 maps at 0.55 T and the first T2 maps derived from INR-based SVR. PRIME-SVR also accelerates quantitative imaging by reducing the data needed for multi-TE reconstruction, cutting acquisition from 15 to 10 minutes while keeping T2 accuracy within 1.7% in white and deep gray matter, or to 5 minutes with a mean T2 error of 2.3% for high-quality acquisitions.
Busra Bulut, Maik Dannecker, Thomas Sanchez +14
Date pendingcs.RO

Visual-SLAM for the detection of hidden tomatoes in greenhouses by Hierarchical Localization and GLOMAP for robotized harvesting

Advanced crop monitoring inside greenhouses is becoming one of the primary objectives of research centers. High-performance sensors, such as LiDAR or stereo cameras, have traditionally been employed for this purpose, though these often have a high cost. This work proposes a Visual-SLAM system using a monocular camera, which is significantly more cost-effective and specifically tailored for agricultural applications, such as mapping tomato crops in a greenhouse. Tests were carried out on a real tomato bunch, located in the Agroconnect experimental greenhouse. A ROS 2 Humble node was developed to run on the robot in order to capture images of these crops, which were then stored for offline processing. To generate a 3D mapped model for the crop in the greenhouse, the GLOMAP mapper, based on Structure-From-Motion, was integrated with the Hierarchical Localization toolbox. This initial mapping is a foundation for future, more advanced algorithms to analyze growth patterns, and optimize agricultural management. The system leverages a hierarchical localization paradigm based on a coarse-to-fine strategy: it first performs global retrieval to generate location hypotheses, then combines local features within the identified candidate regions. The results show a correct identification of the tomato cluster, correctly characterising the tomato that is occluded and inaccessible by classical vision technologies. The reconstructed 3D model was further validated against manual ground-truth measurements of fruit size, centroid position, and orientation, confirming the geometric accuracy of the proposed low-cost monocular pipeline.
Fernando Cañadas-Aránega, José C. Moreno, José L. Blanco-Claraco +1
Date pendingcs.AI

ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Maps

Practical uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models must decide, from a single generation, whether a specific answer should be trusted. Existing methods either sample multiple generations, read only output-token probabilities, or reduce the model's internal computation to a single hidden state. We introduce ActMap, a white-box representation that compresses the generation-time hidden-state trajectory (every layer, every generated token) into a fixed 12×32×12812\times32\times128 tensor of temporal-statistic channels that preserves structure across transformer depth and pooled hidden coordinates. The map is captured during the generation pass with no measurable overhead, has a fixed shape across model depths and hidden sizes, and occupies 96 KiB: a compact artifact that can be retained for audit-relevant generations and probed directly, with occlusion analysis localizing the classifier's signal to mid-depth regions of the map. A lightweight classifier, instantiated as a compact Vision Transformer, reads an estimated correctness probability from each map in a fraction of a millisecond; capacity-matched MLPs perform comparably, indicating the representation itself carries the result. Trained and evaluated in-domain on short-answer QA, direct-answer math, and summarization factuality with three instruction-tuned 7-8B models, ActMap consistently outperforms sampling, token-probability, attention, and embedding baselines, and matches ACT-ViT, a detector trained on dense activation tensors 67×67\times larger, at essentially the same mean AUROC with lower calibration error on ten of twelve pairs. The resulting score supports abstention, routing, and selective verification from a single generation, making it a practical primitive for scalable oversight of deployed models.
Jacopo Dardini (University of Bologna), Roberta Calegari (University of Bologna)
Date pendingcs.HC

From Information to Delegation: Mapping Human-AI Financial Decision Making

As AI increasingly participates in human decision making, understanding how decision-making authority is distributed between humans and AI has become a fundamental behavioural question. We introduce a behavioural measurement framework combining intent and delegated decision authority to quantify what consumers seek from AI and how much decision-making authority they assign to it. Applied to 1.5 million real-world ChatGPT and Gemini interactions from 6,304 users in the United States and India, we find that financial services are already a substantial AI use case. Consumers overwhelmingly use AI to retrieve information and shape financial judgement, while delegation of financial execution remains rare. By shifting attention from conversation topics to delegated decision authority, this work establishes a behavioural baseline for measuring the transition to increasingly agentic AI.
Iman Munire Bilal, Yingcan Carol Wang, Ajan Raj +5