Trajectory

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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693 papers

Latest in Trajectory

Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

x-Prediction Is All You Need:Training-Free Accelerated Generation via Endpoint Decodability

Diffusion and flow matching models generate high-quality samples, but their ODE samplers often need tens to hundreds of neural function evaluations (NFEs). This remains a practical challenge for released checkpoints, since many accelerators require additional design choices and training cost through retraining, distillation, or trajectory redesign. We investigate a different route based on xx-prediction. During sampling, standard affine probability paths already expose x0x_0 information: an intermediate state and its path velocity determine a principled estimate of the clean sample. We formalize this property as \textbf{endpoint decodability} and show that the decoder is the minimum-MSE estimator E[x0∣xt]\mathbb{E}[x_0\mid x_t] under the usual ℓ2\ell_2 objective. This yields \textbf{Truncated Jump Sampling} (TJS): stop the ODE at an early-exit time t∗t^* and return the decoded x0x_0. TJS requires no retraining, distillation, or architecture change. Across SDXL, SD3.5M, Z-Image-Turbo, and three class-conditional benchmarks, it reduces NFEs by 20--70% with near-matched quality. The analysis also shows why endpoint prediction can work without straightening the trajectory, providing inference acceleration without trajectory redesign.
Xin Peng, Ang Gao
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Steering Optimisation Trajectories in Diffusion Representation Learning

We study why diffusion autoencoders can achieve similar image quality while learning substantially different latent structures. We trace this behaviour to optimisation dynamics; we analyse curves of image reconstruction against latent representation quality, revealing trajectories that organise around two distinct regimes early in training. Models in the reconstruction regime prioritise image fidelity early, whereas those in the disentanglement regime improve reconstruction and disentanglement more gradually. We hypothesise that this behaviour can be influenced by targeting shortcut pathways in the diffusion U-Net and controlling early noise-level exposure, thereby shaping the reconstruction-disentanglement trade-off during training. To steer optimisation toward stronger representations, we introduce SteeringDRL, combining gated residual U-Nets with a simple noise-level exposure curriculum for training. Across disentanglement benchmarks, SteeringDRL improves representation quality and reduces seed sensitivity. Our method further extends to spatial disentanglement in object-centric learning, improving segmentation quality on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Rajat Rasal, Avinash Kori, Tian Xia +1
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Green for Go, Red for No: Visual Grounding via Semantic Segmentation for VLA Navigation Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robot navigation from natural language and visual goals, but remain susceptible to perceptual distractions and ambiguous scene interpretations. This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of visual grounding for VLA navigation policies. We propose a real-time segmentation-based grounding method that highlights traversable areas in green and non-traversable areas in red using SegFormer. Two variants are evaluated: observation-only segmentation and joint observation-goal augmentation. Using OmniVLA on the Grand Tour dataset, we show that visual grounding reduces the mean waypoint error by 27-44% at the farthest waypoint, depending on the instruction length. The benefits are greater for long instructions than for short instructions, and grounding provides little improvement for image goals. Normalized error analysis indicates that grounding primarily acts as a trajectory length regularizer, reducing the predicted path length by 30% without improving per-unit-distance reasoning. Our results indicate that visual grounding offers a simple, computationally inexpensive method to improve VLA navigation without model retraining, although it cannot compensate for missing training signals in out-of-distribution instructions.
Adrian Szvoren, Dimitrios Kanoulas, Nilufer Tuptuk
Jul 6, 2026cs.AI

STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for training Large Language Model (LLM) agents on long-horizon tasks. However, sparse and delayed rewards often lead to trajectory neglect, in which agents lose focus on the task goal and interaction history at intermediate steps. Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence and therefore provide unreliable estimates of decision reliability. To address this issue, we propose normalized entropy, which measures confidence deviations relative to an agent's average behavior under a given state, thereby strengthening the association between low-quality actions and trajectory neglect. Building on this insight, we introduce Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), a hierarchical group-based RL framework. STAPO leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a joint mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty, enhancing trajectory awareness while preserving training stability. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA demonstrate that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect, validating its effectiveness and robustness for agentic tasks.
Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao +8
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Graph Representation Learning of Longitudinal Medical Imaging Trajectories for Treatment Response Prediction

In patients with breast cancer, pathological complete response (pCR) has been established as a clinically meaningful surrogate marker for long-term outcomes. While commonly treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT), effective treatment decision-making remains challenging, as therapeutic response can vary substantially across patients, calling for predictive models capable of accurately estimating individualized treatment response. To address this, we propose an imaging-based 3D spatio-temporal framework for treatment response prediction that integrates a state-of-the-art graph neural network with relational modeling of temporal interactions across timepoints alongside three novel complementary self-supervised treatment trajectory representation learning objectives. Experiments across a cohort of 585 patients from the public ISPY-2 dataset demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms both vision and self-supervised learning baselines across several classification metrics. Alongside establishing a breast cancer pCR prediction benchmark, we include a principled ablation of our method and further introduce and empirically assess the impact of the available number of DCE-MRI timepoints per patient trajectory and the inclusion of inter-scan time-differences. Overall, our study substantiates the utility of clinically meaningful longitudinal medical imagaging modeling for predicting NACT-induced pCR. We will publicly share our code repository and a user-friendly PyPI library for dataset curation upon publication, effectively promoting reproducible open-source research.
Johannes Kiechle, Richard Osuala, Daniel M. Lang +5
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

TGRIP: A Text-Guided Approach to Vehicle Instance Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Bird's-Eye View (BEV) end-to-end instance prediction has emerged as a robust paradigm for autonomous driving perception, effectively mitigating the error propagation inherent in traditional modular pipelines. However, current state-of-the-art approaches rely predominantly on geometric supervision, such as occupancy regression and optical flow, effectively treating scene agents as generic moving obstacles. This absence of explicit semantic awareness imposes limitations on the capacity of the model to solve ambiguities in complex scenarios, particularly those where object-specific behavior is essential for accurate forecasting (e.g. overtaking, intersections). In this paper, we introduce Text-Guided Representation for Instance Prediction (TGRIP), a novel framework that bridges this gap by injecting rich semantic priors into the instance prediction loop. The proposed teacher-student pipeline employs Vision-Language Foundation Models to generate dense, semantic-enhanced BEV maps from multi-camera images. These maps serve as auxiliary supervision during training, guiding the network to learn spatio-temporal representations that are not only geometrically consistent but also semantically discriminative. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to unify semantic guidance with the temporal task of future instance prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that TGRIP surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in nuScenes, validating the hypothesis that semantic enrichment is a fundamental element for robust, end-to-end motion prediction. Code is available on https://github.com/miguelag99/TGRIP.
Miguel Antunes-García, Santiago Montiel-Marín, Fabio Sánchez-García +3
Jul 6, 2026stat.ML

Wasserstein Residuals: Learning Gradient Flows from Population Dynamics

Reconstructing population dynamics is a central problem in the physical and data sciences. Often, the dynamics are modeled as a Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF): a curve of distributions driven by an energy functional. Though there are multiple mathematical characterizations of a WGF, the dominant algorithmic approach relies on the Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto (JKO) scheme. JKO-based methods are inflexible to time discretisation and require solving costly optimal transport problems. We take a residual approach, enforcing the continuity equations via a non-negative loss function whose minimum is the WGF. Combined with a data-fitting divergence, this gives a single global objective. This perspective unifies several existing methods and leads to a new particle-based method, stitching, that is simulation-free and robust to large gaps between observations. We demonstrate that the stitching method achieves state-of-the-art performance across trajectory inference benchmarks. For code see github.com/BasisResearch/wasserstein-residuals.
Markus Heinonen, Yair Shenfeld, Ricardo Baptista +4
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

PixelPilot: Scalable Vision-Language-Action Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs), which leverage the advanced reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), show promising generalization in complex autonomous driving scenarios. Existing VLAs typically predict and optimize 3D trajectories from 2D images. While intuitive, this 2D-to-3D prediction is inherently entangled with camera parameters, leading to limited data scalability across heterogeneous driving datasets. Moreover, directly optimizing in 3D space induces severe convergence to trivial solutions, where VLAs rely on ego-status rather than visual scene understanding. To address these issues, we propose PixelPilot, a novel VLA featuring a decoupled planning and lifting paradigm. In the planning phase, PixelPilot reformulates scene understanding and trajectory prediction as sensor-agnostic 2D-to-2D tasks in the image plane, thereby facilitating scalable training across diverse datasets. The planned 2D trajectories are then deterministically lifted to 3D only during inference, ensuring the full exploitation of visual cues and generalization across different vehicles. To realize this paradigm, we propose a knowledge-instilled policy learning strategy that applies dense, intermediate rewards via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to enforce a rigorous causal chain from visual perception to spatial planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelPilot achieves state-of-the-art performance in both open-loop and closed-loop settings, validating its superior scalability and visual reasoning capabilities.
Pin Tang, Guoqing Wang, Xiangxuan Ren +4
Jul 5, 2026cs.CL

Spinning Straw into Gold: Relabeling LLM Agent Trajectories in Hindsight for Successful Demonstrations

Large language model agents operate in partially observable, long-horizon settings where obtaining supervision remains a major bottleneck. We address this by utilizing a source of supervision overlooked in existing post-training methods: unintended yet successful goals embedded within agent rollouts. Specifically, we introduce Hindsight Supervised Learning (HSL), where an auxiliary LLM reviews each completed trajectory and relabels it with all of the natural-language goals the agent actually achieved. HSL then pairs the trajectory with its relabeled goals and uses these pairs for additional fine-tuning. To mitigate suboptimality in the relabeled data, we propose two learning techniques for HSL, irrelevant-action masking and sample reweighting. Our experiments show that HSL is flexible and compatible with existing post-training pipelines. It improves both SFT and DPO, with larger gains on long-horizon tasks with more diverse goal spaces. Moreover, HSL is sample-efficient: on ALFWorld, it surpasses baselines trained on the full dataset while using only one quarter of the ground-truth demonstrations.
Zichao Li, Gang Wu, Zichao Wang +5
Jul 4, 2026q-bio.QM

Trajectory Inference of Human Aging from Cross-Sectional DNA Methylation Data

DNA methylation (DNAm) serves as one of the most robust molecular biomarkers of biological aging. While conventional epigenetic clocks accurately predict chronological age from high-dimensional CpG profiles, they treat aging as a static regression task, meaning they can only output a single score rather than simulating how an entire profile continuously changes over time. To reconstruct these continuous dynamics, we frame lifelong human epigenetic aging as a trajectory inference problem across discrete age snapshots derived from widely available cross-sectional data. We introduce a two-stage computational pipeline: first, an age-regularized Variational Autoencoder (VAE) maps high-dimensional CpG profiles onto a chronologically ordered latent manifold while preserving a generative decoder bridge back to the original methylation space. Second, we model the continuous movement across this latent space via Regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport (RUOT) that unifies deterministic drift, random diffusion, and non-conservative mass changes. By resolving this RUOT formulation using the DeepRUOT framework, our model fluidly accommodates population-level density shifts like survivorship bias and cellular attrition without requiring rigid biological priors. Evaluated on a large-scale, 80-year pan-tissue dataset, our model demonstrates robust distribution interpolation and uncovers a prominent late-life surge in the learned growth field that mathematically captures the variance expansion driven by stochastic epigenetic drift. Finally, by decoding continuous latent paths back to individual CpG sites, we reconstruct and empirically verify distinct biological aging archetypes, offering a rigorous, generative paradigm for simulating human molecular aging.
Chandan Gupta, Syed Haider, Pietro Liò
Jul 3, 2026cs.SD

Trajectory Variance: An Unsupervised Measure of Developmental Vocal Plasticity in Birdsong

How much does a vocalization change over the course of development? We propose trajectory variance, a per-vocalization plasticity score that answers this question without type labels. A displacement model learns to predict age-conditioned shifts in autoencoder latent space; the variance of its predictions across target ages quantifies how much each vocalization would change if produced at different developmental stages. Evaluated on three zebra finches (183K-274K vocalizations, 40-101 days post-hatch), trajectory variance separates learned song syllables from innate calls (Cohen's d = 0.29-0.57, AUC = 0.58-0.67, after controlling for duration), while no nonparametric baseline achieves consistent separation. Trajectory variance also correlates with spectral flatness across all three birds (r = -0.48 to -0.75): more plastic vocalizations tend to have more tonal, structured spectra.
Kanghwi Lee
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

Handwriting Trajectory Recovery with Diffusion Models

Recovering online pen trajectories from offline handwriting images, often referred to as handwriting trajectory recovery (stroke recovery), is an offline-to-online conversion task with applications in stroke-level editing and forensic analysis. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first diffusion-model-based framework for this task. Our method formulates trajectory recovery as image-conditioned generation and uses a denoising diffusion model to sample pen trajectories consistent with the observed ink trace. Through extensive quantitative evaluations on CASIA-OLHWDB (1.0-1.1), we verify that the proposed approach enables accurate recovery even for complex multi-stroke characters, substantially improving both temporal similarity (DTW/LDTW) and shape fidelity (AIoU) over representative prior methods such as PEN-Net and Cross-VAE. We further show that the model captures general stroke-order tendencies and generalizes to classes unseen during training, exemplified by cross-script transfer: a model trained on Chinese characters can recover reasonable stroke orders for Latin letters to some extent.
Hiroki Nagamatsu, Shoji Toyota, Seiichi Uchida
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

GDPR-Aware Trajectory Sharing for ISAC-Assisted Robot Navigation: A Case Study on FID-Constrained Collision Prediction

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables intelligent wireless infrastructure but raises growing regulatory concern as fine-grained personal trajectory histories become a byproduct of sensing. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Articles 5(1)(c) and 5(1)(f) require that personal data be limited to what is necessary and protected through appropriate technical measures against unauthorised reconstruction. This paper addresses both requirements through a Fisher information density (FID)-constrained trajectory sharing scheme for robot collision avoidance, where sensing estimates are perturbed according to local information content before sharing. Experiments on real pedestrian traces show that FID-controlled sharing achieves a strictly better privacy-utility tradeoff than fixed-error perturbation: at matched missed-conflict rates, reconstruction leakage and sustained exposure lengths are consistently lower, establishing information-aware perturbation as a principled technical measure aligned with GDPR data minimisation and integrity requirements.
Zexin Fang, Bin Han, Donglin Wang +2
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

AnchorVLA: Bridging Discrete Decisions and Continuous Trajectories for Vision-Language-Action Planning

Autonomous driving planning requires translating navigation intent, traffic rules, dynamic interactions, and language instructions into executable continuous trajectories. Vision-Language-Action models have been introduced into driving planning to improve long-tail generalization, commonsense reasoning, high-level semantic understanding, and explainability. However, existing VLA planners mainly follow planning-head-based trajectory prediction or full-trajectory autoregressive generation. The former only weakly constrains continuous trajectory generation with VLA reasoning, while the latter relies on long sequences of low-information-density coordinate tokens, making semantic-action alignment difficult and leading to discretization errors and inefficient inference. To address these limitations, we propose AnchorVLA, a hierarchical decision-anchored VLA planning framework that uses trajectory-pattern anchors as an explicit interface between high-level VLA reasoning and continuous trajectory execution. Specifically, Decision-as-Anchor Representation represents behavior-level driving decisions with anchor tokens, each encoding an entire local motion pattern rather than a single coordinate point. Decision-Anchored Residual Flow then generates fine-grained continuous trajectories in the selected anchor-defined residual space, capturing multi-modal execution refinements after high-level decision making. By reasoning over compact and semantically meaningful anchors instead of autoregressively generating waypoint sequences, AnchorVLA preserves LLM-based decision making while improving inference efficiency, semantic-action alignment, and continuous generation flexibility. Experiments on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark show that AnchorVLA achieves a state-of-the-art Success Rate of 77.28 and a competitive Driving Score of 89.92.
Qi Liu, Yabei Li, Hongsong Wang +2
Jul 3, 2026cs.LG

Anticipatory Reinforcement Learning for Trajectory Tracking

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in industrial control often suffers from lag and overshoot due to purely reactive control based on the current tracking error. To achieve anticipatory control without high computational overhead, we introduce a predictive formulation that augments the DRL state space with target velocities and future reference horizons. Evaluating eight configurations using proximal policy optimization (PPO) on a 1-degree-of-freedom (1-DoF) helicopter testbed, simulation results showed a 9-fold error reduction, lowering the mean absolute deviation from 2.73° to 0.31°. However, zero-shot transfer to physical hardware revealed a sim-to-real gap. Interestingly, a simpler configuration using a single, further look-ahead horizon matched the real-world top performance of the most complex model (1.11°). Overall, evaluating various combinations of prediction horizons and target velocities demonstrated that highly granular predictive data is not necessarily required for physical transfer.
Georg Schäfer, Jakob Rehrl, Stefan Huber +1
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

SWIFT: A Small-World Interaction Framework for Flow-Aware Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Accurate trajectory prediction in autonomous driving hinges on modeling dynamic and context-dependent interactions among traffic agents. However, most existing approaches are purely data-driven and lack structural priors, which limits their generalization under distribution shifts. In this work, interaction modeling is revisited through the structure and dynamics of traffic networks, and SWIFT (Small-World Interaction Framework for Trajectory prediction) is proposed as a unified framework that integrates small-world networks with traffic flow theory. SWIFT introduces structural inductive biases via a Small-World Interaction Network that captures both local and global dependencies, and a Flow Regime Encoder that adapts the interaction structure to scene-level traffic states. Interaction reasoning is further enhanced through a multi-relational graph module that explicitly encodes direct and higher-order agent relationships. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, nuScenes, MoCAD, and NGSIM, show that SWIFT consistently outperforms strong baselines in prediction accuracy across diverse traffic regimes. Beyond accuracy, SWIFT exhibits improved generalization to unseen locations and regimes, robustness under noisy observations, and strong performance with limited training data, supporting the effectiveness of its structure-aware design.
Chengyue Wang, Bin Rao, Haicheng Liao +3
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

Continuous-Time Gaussian Belief Trees for Motion Planning

We address sampling-based motion planning for continuous-time stochastic systems under process and measurement uncertainty, with probabilistic guarantees on safety and performance. The robot dynamics are modeled as a continuous-time linear stochastic differential equation, while sensor measurements arrive at discrete time instants. We derive an offline hybrid belief propagation model in which the belief evolves according to continuous-time ODEs between measurements and undergoes discrete Kalman filter update jumps at measurement times. To ensure safety, we introduce a belief-barrier-function-based safety checker for segment-level probabilistic verification. This enables the planner to certify safety over entire continuous trajectory segments and detect inter-sample chance-constraint violations that are missed by conventional node-based checks. Together, these components provide a principled framework for sampling-based belief planning that accounts for both continuous-time uncertainty propagation and continuous-time safety requirements. We integrate the method with RRT and SST planners and evaluate it across multiple benchmark environments. The results show that the proposed method achieves high success rates and robust enforcement of chance constraints, including in narrow-passage scenarios where discrete-time counterparts fail due to missed inter-sample unsafe behavior.
Rayan Mazouz, Qi Heng Ho, Zachary N. Sunberg +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

A Dynamic Scene Interaction Reasoning Framework for Scene-level Lane-Change Intention and Trajectory Prediction of Multiple Interacting Vehicles

Safe motion planning in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles requires an accurate understanding of how the surrounding traffic scene is likely to evolve. However, many existing lane-change prediction methods remain centered on a single target vehicle, while multi-agent forecasting approaches often describe scene evolution only through future positions and provide limited explicit information about the maneuver associated with each vehicle. This study proposes a dynamic scene graph attention framework that predicts the lane-change intention and future trajectory of every relevant vehicle within a local traffic scene. The scene is represented as a time-varying interaction graph in which vehicles are modeled as nodes and their spatial and kinematic relationships are encoded through explicit edge features. Temporal graph-attention message passing captures evolving inter-vehicle dependencies and pre-maneuver cues, while an intention-guided decoder links each predicted maneuver to its corresponding future motion. A scene-level consistency objective further encourages compatible multi-vehicle futures. Experiments on the NGSIM I-80, NGSIM US-101, and highD datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines. DSiGAT achieves intention prediction accuracies of 90.12% and 90.97% on NGSIM I-80 and US-101, respectively, and reduces trajectory RMSE by up to 52.94% relative to the strongest baseline. It also produces lower inter-agent collision rates and joint displacement errors, indicating more coherent scene-level predictions. Ablation, sensitivity, robustness, and qualitative analyses further validate the contribution of the proposed components and the effectiveness of the scene-focused formulation.
Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Blessing Agyei Kyem, Eugene Denteh +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Finite-Lag Operator Geometry of Recurrent Representations

Recurrent representations are trajectories, but representation geometry is often measured from static snapshots. We develop finite-lag operator geometry for recurrent hidden states from observed source-successor pairs (Xt,Xt+Δ)(X_t,X_{t+Δ}). The primitive is the conditional transport law QΔ(dy∣x)Q_Δ(dy\mid x), estimated by a dense Gaussian source-smoothing operator. From this directed finite-lag law we derive a source-centered transport tensor GΔG_Δ, which decomposes exactly into conditional spread and coherent displacement, and an antisymmetric coordinate circulation WΔρW_Δ^ρ, which summarizes directed lagged flow. We prove affine covariance with explicit metric dependence of scalar summaries, dense estimator stability on bounded trajectory clouds, and a finite-lag separation result showing that source-centered transport detects deterministic recurrent motion not recorded by infinitesimal carre-du-champ geometry. A linear-Gaussian closed form calibrates the quantities in terms of the update AΔA_Δ, source covariance, and innovation covariance. Controlled experiments validate the decomposition, circulation, covariance, and stability predictions. In performance matched repeat-copy networks, the framework reveals architecture dependent differences in total transport scale and coherent displacement trace, while coherent displacement fraction is metric and resolution dependent.
Kanishka Reddy
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

KathaTrace: Diagnosing Semantic Trajectory Collapse in Generated Visual Narratives

Visual narratives are central to storyboards, comics, children's media, and film previsualization, where viewers understand stories from images alone. Recent generators such as StoryDiffusion produce coherent sequences, but visual coherence does not guarantee that source-story transition meaning remains recoverable. Existing benchmarks assess visual quality, content faithfulness, and scene coherence, but miss a critical failure mode: storyboards where scenes appear visually coherent while the semantic link between scenes disappears. We introduce KathaTrace, a generator-agnostic protocol for diagnosing semantic trajectory collapse, defined as the loss of transition meaning needed to understand how one scene follows another. KathaTrace evaluates transitions under three evidence conditions: text-only, image-only, and text-plus-image, and filters ambiguous items. We contribute KathaBench-25K, with 5,000 narratives from classical collections including Aesop, Panchatantra, and Kathasaritasagara, 20,000 transitions, and 28,712 recoverability questions. We define Semantic Trajectory Gap, or STG, as text-only minus image-only recoverability, measuring transition meaning lost during visualization. Human validation yields Fleiss' kappa = 0.845. Experiments across state-of-the-art generators show substantial STG of 23.5 +/- 1.3. Semantic Compass, an actionability probe, uses KathaTrace signals for post-generation repair and improves storyboard selection.
Jamuna S. Murthy, Amin Karimi Monsefi, Rajiv Ramnath
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

SD-RouteFusion: Ego-Trajectory Prediction with SD-Map Route Conditioning

This paper presents SD-RouteFusion, a deployable end-to-end ego-trajectory prediction method that fuses a front-facing camera, vehicle kinematics, and a navigation route derived from a Standard Definition (SD) map. Unlike approaches that rely on High Definition (HD) map geometry, SD-RouteFusion aligns the learning objective with scalable and production-ready SD-map route inputs, enabling route-aware prediction without requiring HD-map infrastructure. First, we demonstrate that SD-map route prior provides a powerful long-horizon semantic prior. Through a comprehensive study on a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 480k driving scenarios across 10 European countries and the U.S., we quantify the value of SD-route conditioning: incorporating SD-map routes yields a 10.5% ADE improvement over an image-and-kinematics baseline, while our full fusion strategy achieves a 16.9% ADE reduction given a prediction horizon of 8 seconds. The fusion strategy consists of a dual-hypothesis design paired with a gated classifier, to ensure robustness under route corruption and visual uncertainty. Finally, to support broader evaluation, we release an SD-route generation toolkit that enables SD-route-conditioned ego-trajectory prediction on all datasets containing ego pose and future trajectories. Together, SD-RouteFusion establishes a practical path toward robust, route-aware ego-trajectory prediction at scale.
Sviatoslav Voloshyn, Bruno K. W. Martens, Wangxin Liu +2
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Towards Metric-Agnostic Trajectory Forecasting

Accurate trajectory forecasting of surrounding traffic participants is a core capability for autonomous driving, enabling vehicles to anticipate behavior and plan safe maneuvers. We observe that current state-of-the-art forecasting models on Argoverse 2 and the Waymo Open Motion Dataset tailor their training objectives to the different benchmark metrics. Because these metrics encourage conflicting behavior, we propose a paradigm change for trajectory forecasting: training models with metric-agnostic probabilistic objectives and treating metric optimization as a downstream task applied to the predictive distribution. Concretely, we introduce Trajectory Distribution Evaluation (TraDiE) policies, metric-specific policies that map a predictive distribution to the set of KK trajectories and confidences required by trajectory forecasting metrics. We evaluate this framework by introducing DONUT-NLL, which adapts the training objective of the state-of-the-art trajectory forecasting model DONUT to directly optimize the predictive distribution. Using our policies, DONUT-NLL achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics of the Waymo motion prediction benchmark.
Markus Knoche, Daan de Geus, Bastian Leibe
Jul 1, 2026cs.HC

SenseWalk: Agent-Based Semantic Trajectory Simulation Powered by Large Language Models in Zoned Environments

Semantic trajectory analysis has recently emerged as an approach for modeling human movement by capturing implicit patterns and behaviors through semantic information (e.g., visitors' profiles and goals) beyond raw spatial paths to better understand why people move in certain ways. However, analyzing semantic trajectories in real-world scenarios remains challenging, as collecting high-quality data is costly and often lacks rich semantic information. Meanwhile, existing simulation tools require substantial technical expertise, which makes them difficult for practitioners to adopt. To address these limitations, the paper proposes SenseWalk{SenseWalk}, an interactive system that supports simulating semantic trajectories by LLM-powered agents. We develop a simulation workflow that combines LLMs and the social force model to balance physical plausibility and semantic coherence. A user-friendly interface is designed to facilitate users in customizing the simulation configuration and analyzing simulation outputs. We also conduct a quantitative experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of our simulation workflow, and a user study (n=12) to assess the usefulness and efficiency of our system.
Ziyue Lin, Xinhang Xie, Kangyi Wang +1
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Linguistic Relative Policy Optimization for Video Anomaly Reasoning

Video anomaly detection (VAD) with multimodal large language models has shown strong potential, yet most existing methods still depend on large-scale annotations or expert-designed priors, limiting their ability to acquire anomaly knowledge with as little human intervention as possible. To address this, we propose Linguistic Relative Policy Optimization (LRPO), which distills group-relative semantic advantages from multiple reasoning trajectories into a linguistically expressed anomaly experience prior, and adapts the model by injecting this prior into the context to steer its output distribution without any parameter updates. LRPO builds two complementary experience representations: general experience captures transferable anomaly preferences across scenarios, while scenario experience models context-dependent anomaly rules for targeted refinement. To further improve the learned experience, we introduce an anomaly alignment reward that guides trajectory optimization to match human risk preferences and reinforce temporally grounded reasoning. Extensive experiments on XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, and UBnormal demonstrate that LRPO significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under tuning-free settings.
Jiaxu Leng, Jiankang Zheng, Mengjingcheng Mo +4
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

DriveVer: Lightweight Trajectory Evaluator as Test-Time Verifier for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models often encounter performance bottlenecks, as training-time scaling leads to high computational costs and diminishing marginal returns. Existing planners typically adopt a one-shot generation paradigm, lacking secondary validation and active correction mechanisms to detect and revise suboptimal or unsafe trajectories during inference. To address this issue, we propose DriveVer, a lightweight, plug-and-play Test-Time Verifier that leverages the test-time scaling paradigm to enable autonomous driving systems to validate and refine trajectories without costly and heavy training. We construct a dedicated trajectory dataset based on the NAVSIM benchmark through condition-driven clustering and balanced sampling according to ego-vehicle states and navigation commands. Employing a dual-head architecture, DriveVer efficiently fuses candidate trajectories with multi-view visual representations and ego-vehicle kinematic features to simultaneously predict a safety confidence score and an absolute geometric refinement vector. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that DriveVer significantly improves the performance of base planning models. Notably, as an extremely compact model with only 34M parameters, DriveVer introduces minimal computational overhead, achieving competitive results while maintaining real-time inference efficiency.
Chong He, Yuechen Luo, Fang Li +2
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

ELMP: Efficient Learning for Motion Planning via Analytical Policy Gradients

Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) enable fast reactive motion generation, but adapting them to new environments typically requires recollecting large expert datasets, which is computationally prohibitive. We propose ELMP, a framework for data-efficient adaptation via self-supervised fine-tuning. Rather than generating additional expert trajectories with expensive global planners, ELMP directly optimizes the policy through a differentiable kinematic layer using dense collision, target-reaching, and smoothness objectives. This replaces expert data generation with rapid problem sampling, reducing per-sample adaptation cost by roughly two orders of magnitude. To further support robust generalization across changing kinematic chains, we introduce a mechanism to explicitly encode tool geometry via point clouds. Benchmarked against classical and neural baselines, ELMP achieves an 84.8% average success rate with orders-of-magnitude lower cold-start latency than classical methods. In unseen environments, self-supervised fine-tuning improves success rate from 57.3% (zero-shot) to 89.8%, removing the data collection bottleneck. Our approach maintains millisecond-level inference latency and is validated on a physical Franka Emika Panda robot.
Yixiao Li, Tifanny Portela, Jordis Herrmann +2
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

SLIM-RL: Risk-Budgeted Random-Masking RL for Diffusion LLMs Without Trajectory Slicing

Reinforcement learning for diffusion large language models (dLLMs) has largely moved to trajectory-aware methods. The current state of the art, TraceRL, holds that random masking is mismatched with the model's inference trajectory, and it reconstructs that trajectory during training by slicing each rollout into up to K/s trajectory-aligned training samples, a cost that grows with the block size K. We show that this mismatch can be mitigated without reconstructing the trajectory. Our method, SLIM-RL, bounds the commit risk of each rollout step with a tau-budget decoder, reducing aggregate commit risk in the training data. During optimization, SLIM-RL trains on these risk-controlled rollouts with a trace-free random-masking objective that adapts variance-reduction tools, combining sequence-level importance sampling, deterministic quadrature over masking levels under a mean-preserving, monotonically decreasing per-block mask schedule that we introduce. On SDAR-4B, SLIM-RL matches TraceRL's best MATH500 accuracy on only 0.46x its training samples at block size 16, improving over TraceRL by 6.32% on MATH500 and 11.05% on GSM8K under matched dynamic sampling. At block size 4, the 4B SLIM-RL surpasses the larger LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B dLLMs on math, exceeding LLaDA-8B by 10.76% on MATH500 while staying below the autoregressive Qwen2.5-7B. On code, it improves over TraceRL by 4.20% on MBPP and 3.65% on HumanEval. The tau-budget decoder transfers training-free across LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR. The source code is available at https://github.com/laolaorkkkkk/SLIM-RL .
Ruikang Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Han Gao +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

PriorEye: Geospatial Visual Priors for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Most end-to-end autonomous driving methods rely solely on instantaneous sensor observations, limiting them to reactive behavior without the anticipatory foresight human drivers employ through prior experience. We introduce geospatial visual priors, street-level visual context anchored to the intended driving route, providing visual-spatial foresight independent of real-time sensors. We propose a memory augmentation module featuring a dual-memory architecture and an adaptive memory gate, which can be easily integrated into existing end-to-end approaches. This design pairs a contextual memory for retrieved priors with a persistent fallback memory, and dynamically regulates the influence of memories based on current state compatibility. Evaluated on the NAVSIM-v2 benchmark, our approach consistently improves performance across diverse end-to-end baselines. Furthermore, because these priors are independent of onboard sensors, our method inherently improves robustness against sensor corruption, while the dual-memory design ensures safe fallback when the retrieved priors themselves become unreliable. Our project page is available at https://ori-mrg.github.io/PriorEye.
Kyuhwan Yeon, Benjamin Ramtoula, Daniele De Martini
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

DynFly: Dynamic-Aware Continuous Trajectory Generation for UAV Vision-Language Navigation in Urban Environments

Recent advances in multimodal large models have significantly improved UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) by enhancing high-level perception and reasoning. However, existing methods mainly focus on predicting discrete actions, local targets, or sparse waypoints, while the continuous transition from navigation intent to executable UAV motion remains weakly modeled. This motion-interface gap limits the continuity, stability, and executability of generated UAV trajectories. To address this gap, we propose DynFly, a dynamic-aware continuous trajectory generation framework that bridges high-level navigation reasoning and executable UAV motion. DynFly bridges high-level navigation intent and continuous UAV motion through a lightweight trajectory generation layer. Specifically, it represents expert trajectories in B-spline control-point space and employs a Spline-DiT generator to learn conditional trajectory generation via flow matching. Furthermore, we introduce UAV-oriented dynamic-aware supervision over position, finite-difference velocity, finite-difference acceleration, heading consistency, and local target alignment, enabling the generated trajectories to better satisfy UAV motion characteristics. And our trajectory generation framework can also be integrated with an existing UAV-VLN framework while preserving its original visual-language reasoning pipeline. Extensive experiments on the OpenUAV UAV-VLN benchmark show that DynFly improves both navigation performance and trajectory quality. On the Test Unseen Full split, DynFly improves the strongest baseline by 4.69 NDTW, 2.40 SDTW, 2.14 SR points and 4.87 OSR points, while reducing NE by 4.51 m.
Wen Jiang, Hanfang Liang, Li Wang +9
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Learning from Failure: Inference-Time Self-Improvement for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents, which leverage multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to operate computers and complete tasks, have attracted significant attention for their utility and versatility. A major challenge in developing these agents is collecting large-scale, high-quality trajectories. The standard approach generates synthetic data through a self-improving loop: an agent is placed in a verifiable environment and iteratively fine-tuned on its successful trajectories. Despite its effectiveness, this paradigm exploits only successful trajectories and discards the failed ones, even though failures carry rich information about a model's weaknesses. In this work, we explore a complementary failure-driven self-improvement loop, a data-centric paradigm that turns failed trajectories into agent improvements. Specifically, we employ an LLM to diagnose failure modes, propose inference-time solutions, and generate code patches -- lightly verified by humans -- that upgrade the agent. We validate this approach with the state-of-the-art OpenCUA-72B model on the OSWorld benchmark, improving the success rate from 42.3% to 48.9%, a gain of 6.6 percentage points, without any additional training cost and with only modest inference overhead. Our results demonstrate that failure-driven self-improvement is a viable complement to success-based pipelines, enabling more efficient agent improvement.
Xueqiao Sun, Xiaohan Wang, Ludwig Schmidt +2
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Learning Gaussian Graphical Models from a Glauber Trajectory Without Mixing

We study the task of learning the structure of a dd-sparse Gaussian graphical model on nn variables from a single trajectory of Glauber dynamics. Beyond algorithmic considerations, many applications present temporally correlated observations rather than i.i.d.\ samples. In the classical i.i.d.\ setting, under comparably general sparsity and minimum edge-strength assumptions, sublinear-in-nn sample guarantees are known, but achieving them in polynomial-time remains open. Motivated in part by this gap, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that recovers the conditional-independence graph from a single Glauber trajectory, with a trajectory-length guarantee that does not depend on the mixing time. Technically, our algorithm has three components. First, we estimate the conditional variances and rescale the trajectory to reduce to the unit-diagonal case, without changing the underlying graph. Second, we design a local edge test that extracts adjacency information from short update windows by isolating pairwise influence. Third, we aggregate these local statistics using a robust median-based estimator, and prove accuracy despite temporal dependence arising from a single trajectory.
Eric Shen, Tony Wu, Mahbod Majid +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Agentic-Ideation: Sample Efficient Agentic Trajectories Synthesis for Scientific Ideation Agents

Ideation plays a pivotal role in scientific discovery. Recent LLM, especially AI Scientist systems, show promising potential for automated ideation. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on pre-defined agentic workflows. This constraint severely limits the flexibility required to navigate the vast search space of scientific literature and the complex action space of research reasoning. Recently, training Agentic LLMs has emerged as a promising direction, offering flexible reasoning frameworks and the capability for autonomous tool utilization. However, there remains a non-trivial challenge: applying previous agentic data synthesis methods to scientific ideation suffers from prohibitively high data synthesis cost. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic-Ideation, a novel framework comprising an automated trajectory synthesis pipeline and a specialized agentic LLM trained for scientific ideation. Specifically, we first define a comprehensive tool space incorporating three external tools and three cognitive tools. Then we introduce an Oracle-Guided Data Synthesis strategy. By leveraging a reference idea as oracle guidance, this approach steers the multi-agent system to efficiently reconstruct the logical reasoning and tool invocation paths, transforming aimless trial-and-error into directed trajectory generation. Finally, we train the agent on these synthesized trajectories, employing a masking strategy on tool execution results. This ensures the model focuses on decision-making logic without interference from external feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA workflow-based baseline by \textbf{11.91%} in overall quality. Furthermore, our approach improves the sample efficiency of high-quality data synthesis by \textbf{over 10×\times}.
Keyu Zhao, Lingyan Kong, Fengli Xu +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Towards Inclusive Mobility Modeling: Characterizing and Evaluating Elderly Trajectory Patterns in Urban Systems

The rapid advance of smart cities increasingly depends on trajectory data mining, yet underrepresented demographic groups, particularly the elderly, are often sparsely represented in public mobility datasets. This underrepresentation can introduce systematic bias into mobility modeling and downstream urban planning. Using the 2016-2020 Jersey City subset of the Citi Bike System Data, this study quantitatively examines how the absence of underrepresented subgroups' mobility signatures affects mobility modeling, using synthetic trajectory generation as a case study. The analysis reveals that elderly riders exhibit a structurally distinct mobility signature, including localized activity spaces (958 m vs. 1,189 m for young riders), lower mobility entropy (1.82 vs. 4.15), and asymmetric off-peak temporal patterns. To demonstrate that relying on majority-dominated training data yields biased synthetic outcomes, we further evaluate both a first-order Markov chain and a Qwen3-4B model fine-tuned with QLoRA across three demographic training settings: the full population, young riders only, and elderly riders only. Results show that models trained on majority-dominated populations systematically misrepresent elderly mobility behavior, particularly for spatial mobility metrics. The Markov model trained on the full population overestimates elderly step length by 4.5% and dwell time by 8.9%, whereas the elderly-specific model achieves substantially lower errors across most metrics. Comparisons between the Markov and LLM-based frameworks further show that higher-capability models do not necessarily improve subgroup-level fidelity under limited demographic data. These findings underscore the importance of demographic representation in mobility modeling and its downstream applications for underrepresented populations.
Zhengxuan Wang, Haohan He, Mengying Zhou
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

Diffusion-based 4D Trajectory Prediction and Distributed Control for UAV Swarms

Accurate 4D trajectory prediction and closed-loop tracking are essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms to achieve safe and efficient operations in complex low-altitude environments such as urban airspaces, industrial sites, and indoor facilities. However, this task remains challenging due to intrinsic nonlinearity of UAV swarm dynamics and strict real-time constraints of swarm formation control. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that couples coarse-to-fine trajectory forecasting with uncertainty-aware Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC). Our approach features two key innovations: 1) a dimension-decoupled trajectory prediction module that reduces computational complexity by forecasting axis-wise motion, and 2) a diffusion-based residual dynamics refinement module that captures temporally correlated dynamic uncertainties. These refined predictions are then integrated into a DNMPC loop to ensure formation stability. We also introduce a synchronized multi-scenario 4D UAV swarm dataset spanning six representative airspace scenarios. The dataset contains over \textbf{7,900} frames of synchronized three-UAV trajectories with frame-level annotations of speed intention and target sector. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing trajectory tracking error by up to \textbf{10-15%} and achieving sub-\textbf{0.07,m} average tracking error in complex urban and industrial environments, while maintaining real-time inference speeds of 34 FPS (sub-30 ms latency) suitable for agile flight.
Tianshun Li, Hongliang Lu, Haoang Li +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

MIRTH: Mutual-Information Reasoning with Temporal Hubs for Vision-Language-Action Agents

VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wise prediction to maximize control throughput. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO simulation benchmark and a real-world LeRobot platform demonstrate that MIRTH achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. The codes and collected datasets are released at http://github.com/kiva12138/mirth.
Hao Sun, Yu Song, Shiyu Teng +2
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

What Probing Reveals about Autonomous Driving: Linking Internal Prediction Errors to Ego Planning

Large-scale datasets and fast simulators have enabled improvements in driving policies that appear safe and robust, yet strong performance in nominal scenarios can still mask flawed reasoning and unsafe heuristics. Summary scores from closed-loop simulators do not give significant insight into the policy, making it difficult to determine whether they truly predict the motion of surrounding vehicles, how the ego vehicle generates future plans, or whether they merely rely on brittle heuristics that happen to succeed in nominal scenarios. To better understand the limits and weaknesses of driving policies, we focus on probing for forms of prediction, i.e., where surrounding vehicles will move next, and planning, i.e., understanding how to generate safe trajectories. We focus on these two capabilities because they reflect behaviors expected of effective driving policies, and use their presence or absence to assess policy quality across data-driven behavior cloning and simulation-driven reinforcement learning policies. To evaluate the presence of these capabilities, we investigate them as a function of scale, asking whether the closed-loop gains from larger datasets and longer simulation training reflect stronger prediction and planning or merely better behavioral heuristics. We use linear probing and targeted perturbations in both imitation learning and reinforcement learning models to track when these internal signals emerge, plateau, or fail. Despite good closed-loop performance, policies often fail to form timely surrounding-vehicle predictions during near-collision events, revealing a limitation in the predictive signals available for ego planning. Finally, causal intervention shows that correcting mistaken predictions improves ego planning toward safer trajectories.
Hyeonchang Jeon, Kyungbeom Kim, Eugene Vinitsky +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Predictable GRPO: A Closed-Form Model of Training Dynamics

We develop a first-principles reduced-order model of these dynamics. Under a single mean-field assumption that summarizes the policy by its expected reward, we reduce the GRPO update to a stochastically-forced damped oscillator whose mass, damping, and stiffness are fixed in closed form by the optimizer hyperparameters together with a single measured curvature scale -- momentum supplies the inertia, off-policy lag erodes the damping, and the group size enters, to leading order, as a noise temperature. The reduction has three consequences. First, it subsumes the empirical single-exponential saturation law as its overdamped limit, recasting the fitted plateau, timescale, and size exponent as the fixed point, inverse stiffness, and curvature-scaling exponent of the underlying potential, and adding, through the retained inertial term, the slow-start phase the single exponential cannot represent. Second, it yields predictions tied to independently measurable quantities rather than fitted ones: group-size invariance of the deterministic trajectory with a 1/G1/G stationary fluctuation, a sharp stability threshold in the refresh interval, and an overdamped-to-oscillatory transition. Third, it furnishes diagnostics that separate failure modes a reward curve alone conflates -- reward hacking, advantage degeneracy, policy concentration, and dynamical instability. Across three models and two group sizes, the closed-form trajectory fits training reward to R2≥0.91R^2 \geq 0.91 and the mean trajectory is group-size invariant to leading order -- on both the reward curve and out-of-distribution transfer to eight math benchmarks -- while the within-group reward spread retains a residual GG-dependence that the leading-order temperature picture does not capture.
Rajat Ghosh, Datta Nimmaturi, Aryan Singhal +4
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

Unveiling Transferability in Trajectory Prediction via Latent Scene Embeddings

The growing availability of trajectory datasets has fueled major advances in data-driven motion prediction. Yet, models trained on one dataset often fail to generalize beyond their training domain as a result of differences in scene layouts, agent behaviors, and sensing conditions. A framework that learns latent representations of datasets and quantifies their similarity using distributional metrics is presented. This large-scale study covers 24 major datasets, including the most widely used motion-prediction benchmarks, and shows that the resulting transferability scores strongly correlate with cross-dataset model performance. The results provide practical guidance for dataset selection, pretraining, and large-scale foundation models for motion prediction, paving the way toward more generalizable and robust predictive systems.
Theodor Westny, David Axelsson, Björn Olofsson +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.CR

Forensic Trajectory Signatures for Agent Memory Poisoning Detection

We discover a behavioral invariant in LLM agents under persistent memory poisoning: in architectures where routing information is retrieved through observable memory-tool invocations, successful attacks require calling memory_recall_fact before email_send_email, a transition that non-exfiltrating sessions rarely exhibit. Under the evaluated architecture, this invariant follows from the attack's information-retrieval dependency rather than being merely an empirical correlation, and suppressing it breaks the attack. A simple rule exploiting this invariant alone achieves AUC = 0.9563. A Random Forest classifier over 19 trajectory features refines it to AUC = 0.9904 (BCa 95% CI [0.987, 0.993], N=10,000 resamples), demonstrating that the attack imprints on multiple independent behavioral channels. The signature is overdetermined: removing all recall-related features (half the feature set) leaves AUC unchanged at 0.990, confirming that memory poisoning induces a distributed trajectory signature rather than a single observable anomaly. Cross-model hold-out on 9 models (7B-120B parameters) confirms AUC = 1.000 on 6/9 hold-out splits, with all three exceptions mechanistically explained. The invariant generalizes to frontier models (GPT-4.1, GPT-4o) without retraining. A strictly prefix-only variant achieves AUC = 0.934, suggesting that real-time blocking is feasible with moderate degradation. The boundary is forensically useful: prompt-injection attacks that bypass memory produce a distinct trajectory (score = 0.541), enabling incident responders to distinguish memory-channel attacks from prompt-injection attacks using tool-call logs alone.
Jun Wen Leong
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

OWMDrive: Causality-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving via 4D Occupancy World Model

Autonomous driving systems are steadily moving toward end-to-end paradigms to mitigate the limited adaptability of rule-based pipelines in complex traffic environments. However, most existing learning-based methods still make decisions from static representations of the current scene, without explicit future rollouts or modeling of the temporal causal dynamics in traffic interactions. This limitation often results in unstable or overly conservative planning under high-uncertainty conditions, such as occlusions and unexpected events. To overcome these challenges, we introduce OWMDrive, a generative end-to-end driving framework built upon an Occupancy World Model for multi-step 3D occupancy forecasting, which serves as a conditional prior to guide diffusion-based planning. Conditioned on both current observations and predicted future states, the planner iteratively refines trajectory candidates to generate a reinforced driving trajectory. By explicitly modeling scene evolution over future horizons, OWMDrive captures key spatiotemporal causal dependencies, which leads to more foresighted and robust trajectory generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OWMDrive significantly improves planning reliability and safety, especially in challenging and partially observable driving scenarios.
Junjie Cheng, Ruiqi Song, Ye Wu +3
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

Walking in the Implicit: Interactive World Exploration via Neural Scene Representation

Interactive video generation systems for camera-controlled world exploration roll out growing sequences of latent video frames, entangling state transition with high-frequency observation synthesis. We propose Walking in the Implicit, a scene-centric paradigm that changes the rollout variable from frame latents to a fixed-length, renderable implicit state, termed Neural Implicit Scene (NIS). This factorizes interactive generation into stochastic transition of a compact scene state and deterministic pose-conditioned rendering given the sampled state. We instantiate this paradigm as NeuWorld: a transformer VAE learns locally anchored NIS from sparse posed frames, and a diffusion transformer evolves NIS conditioned on future camera trajectories and geometry-aware retrieved history. By reusing the VAE encoder as a unified conditioner, NeuWorld maps camera, reference-image, and history cues into the same NIS modality, avoiding external heterogeneous encoders. Trained from scratch on public posed-view data without pretrained video backbones or auxiliary 3D reconstructors, NeuWorld achieves strong long-horizon consistency with favorable inference efficiency.
Zhiqi Li, Chengrui Dong, Zhenhua Du +6
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

LWDrive: Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Vision-Language Model Planning for Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning. However, trajectories directly generated by VLMs often encode only coarse driving intentions and remain insufficient for geometrically accurate, future-aware, and multi-view-grounded planning. To address these limitations, we develop the Layer-Wise World-Model-Guided Driving framework (LWDrive). LWDrive is a VLM planning framework that refines coarse trajectories through layer-wise world-model guidance. Instead of treating the VLM output as the final trajectory, LWDrive uses it as an intent-aware coarse plan, expands a diverse candidate space around it, and progressively refines the candidates through a Foresight Cascade Planner (FCP). Specifically, we introduce future-frame generation supervision to encourage the VLM to learn forward-looking scene representations, thereby injecting planning-relevant predictive dynamics into its internal hidden states. Built upon these world-model-supervised representations, FCP exploits VLM features across multiple layers and integrates historical temporal states, Action-Query representations, and current-frame multi-view Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features to refine candidate trajectories in a coarse-to-fine manner. This design enables progressive correction of spatial positions and motion trends while grounding trajectory refinement with multi-view scene cues and preserving the high-level driving intention produced by the large model. Finally, a score head evaluates the refined candidates and selects the best trajectory as the final planning output. Experiments show that LWDrive achieves a score of 92.0 on the NAVSIM benchmark and 89.6 on NAVSIM-v2. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Chen Yang, Yuhao Wei, Ze Xu +6
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

STEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning

Real-world robot learning increasingly relies on heterogeneous data, but demonstrations and rollouts often mix useful progress with stalls, corrections, and suboptimal behavior. Effective policy learning therefore requires frame-level advantages that distinguish reliable local progress from failures and regressions. We propose Self-supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling (STEAM), a label-free method that learns such advantages from expert demonstrations. STEAM trains an ensemble of temporal-offset predictors on frame pairs within expert trajectories, using the normalized temporal offset between two frames as a self-supervised signal. Each predictor maps a frame pair to a distribution over temporal offsets, which is converted into a scalar advantage. STEAM then takes the minimum advantage across the ensemble to score mixed-quality rollout data conservatively. Across real-world bimanual towel folding, chip checkout, cola restocking, and single-arm pick-and-place tasks, STEAM identifies stalls, failures, and recoveries. When combined with CFGRL, STEAM further improves policy success rate by 59%, 54.3%, 23% and 16.2% over baselines, respectively.
Zhihao Liu, Qiuyi Gu, Yitao Wang +16
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

VISTA-DZ: Visual Semantic Trajectory Adaptation for Personalized Dilemma Zone Prediction

Driver decision making in the dilemma zone at signalized intersections is safety critical, as vehicles approaching a yellow signal must decide whether to stop or proceed within limited time and distance margins. Accurate prediction of both stop-go decisions and decision timing is important for adaptive signal control, advanced driver assistance systems, and human-centered intelligent transportation applications. However, dilemma zone behavior is strongly driver dependent. Similar approach trajectories may lead to different decisions across drivers because of differences in risk preference, braking habit, and decision threshold. Existing personalized models often rely on handcrafted scalar descriptors, which provide useful but limited summaries of individual behavior. This paper proposes VISTA-DZ, a semantic-profile-conditioned framework for personalized stop-go and decision-time prediction. Historical trajectories are converted into visual representations, interpreted by a vision-language model to generate behavioral profiles, and encoded as semantic embeddings to condition a dual-output prediction network. The final model combines a bidirectional GRU encoder, driver-conditioned multi-head cross-attention, and Feature-wise Linear Modulation for temporal evidence selection and feature adaptation. Experiments on the SDZ dataset and a newly collected FDZ dataset show that VISTA-DZ outperforms trajectory-only and handcrafted personalization baselines, achieving 93.26% in-domain simulation accuracy and 90.22% mean accuracy across 20 held-out simulation drivers. Cross-domain results further show feasible zero-shot simulation-to-real transfer and better real-world generalization when simulation data are combined with limited field data.
Chuheng Wei, Ziye Qin, Ziran Wang +1
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Interventional Flow Matching: Prospective Dose-Response Forecasting with Velocity-Field Jacobian Regularization

Predicting a patient's physiological trajectory under a planned treatment sequence is a prospective interventional problem, not standard time-series extrapolation. We study this problem in glucose management, where insulin and carbohydrate records are policy-dependent: future drivers are coupled to patient state, behavior, and clinical decision rules, so observational forecasting accuracy alone does not guarantee correct responses to planned interventions. We introduce Interventional Flow Matching (IFM), a continuous-time generative framework for physiologically constrained prospective forecasting. IFM conditions a flow-matching velocity field on patient history and planned future drivers in a bounded latent glucose space. Rather than embedding strict mechanistic glucose--insulin ODE equations or enforcing causality through rollout-based simulations, IFM uses a solver-free regularization: it penalizes the Jacobian of the instantaneous velocity field with respect to smoothed treatment drivers. This imposes signed, dose-bounded local sensitivities directly on the learned dynamics: insulin lowers glucose, carbohydrates raise it, and both responses remain within plausible ranges. On a simulated UVA/Padova type 1 diabetes cohort, IFM achieves the strongest balance between observed-driver RMSE and interventional response metrics. Across experiments, it consistently produces physiologically correct responses to both insulin and carbohydrate drivers while maintaining high directional, and ranking consistency.
Amirreza Dolatpour Fathkouhi, Justin Lee, Heman Shakeri
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Trajectory Matching: Reflow with Marginal Distribution Alignment

Diffusion and continuous-flow generative models achieve high-quality generation, and their deterministic sampling can be formulated as solving learned ODE dynamics. However, accurate ODE discretization often requires many steps, making efficient few-step generation a key challenge. Among acceleration strategies, reflow-based distillation simplifies teacher ODE trajectories so that a student model can approximate the teacher transport with fewer steps. We identify a theoretical limitation of this paradigm, namely that trajectory matching can under-determine the distribution induced by the student model. In particular, two student models can attain the same trajectory-matching loss while inducing different endpoint marginal distributions, which may lead to different generation quality. To address this limitation, we introduce a marginal-alignment regularizer that penalizes the discrepancy between the student-induced marginal and the corresponding teacher marginal at the endpoint of each distillation interval. The regularizer is computed by tracking log-density changes along the ODE induced by the student model and evaluating scores from the frozen teacher model, without requiring auxiliary trainable networks or adversarial optimization. The resulting framework applies uniformly to the reflow family, including vanilla reflow and piecewise reflow. We further prove a telescoping total-variation bound showing that local marginal alignment controls the final-time discrepancy between the student-induced and teacher-induced distributions. Experiments on benchmark backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for few-step generation.
Chen Wang, Peiran Yun, Pan Xie +1
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

DTI: Dynamic Trajectory Initialization for Generative Face Video Super-Resolution

As the most perceptually powerful Face Video Super-Resolution (FVSR) method, existing works in Generative FVSR (GFVSR) mainly exploit the generative prior of pretrained diffusion models. However, viewed as full generation, they suffer from fixed sampling and expensive inference costs if without large-scale auxiliary training. Furthermore, an excessive pursuit of generic perceptual metrics often results in low fidelity. To address these issues, we present Dynamic Trajectory Initialization (DTI) paradigm for GFVSR, which reformulates GFVSR as an input-driven directional restoration. With a novel enhancement-and-injection conditioning mechanism for pretrained DiT backbone, fidelity of our model has been significantly improved without compromising perceptual quality. To dynamically set the starting sampling point, we propose a Discriminative Guide (DG) trained via objective Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) alignment. With only minor model adaptation and fine-tuning, our method achieves a SOTA overall performance across diverse metrics and benchmarks. An analysis of relationship between actual comprehensive quality and common metrics is also conducted, which demonstrates the perception-distortion trade-off and that the LPIPS is the most convincing metric in our case.
Yingwei Tang, Chen Yan, Wendi Liu +2
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Invariant Reasoning Directions in Latent Trajectories of Language Models

Latent reasoning models perform multi-step inference directly in hidden-state space, yet the structure of these latent reasoning trajectories remains poorly understood. We show that contrastive refinement signals between stronger and weaker reasoning trajectories exhibit a highly concentrated low-rank structure, while unconstrained latent updates remain sensitive to paraphrases, checkpoint choice, and trajectory perturbations. These observations suggest that latent reasoning trajectories contain stable invariant directions mixed with unstable instance-specific variation. We introduce \textbf{Trajectory-Invariant Latent Refinement (TILR)}, a training-free intervention framework for identifying and manipulating stable reasoning directions in latent space. TILR first learns a low-rank invariant subspace from contrastive trajectory differences across inputs, then constrains latent interventions to this subspace while suppressing poorly aligned updates through an adaptive alignment gate. Across six reasoning benchmarks, we find that a small number of latent directions explain most variation between strong and weak reasoning trajectories. Interventions on these directions causally improve reasoning consistency and reduce trajectory instability under paraphrases and perturbations. TILR improves answer consistency under paraphrase by ~10% and reduces latent trajectory variance by up to 50%50\% while preserving reasoning accuracy. These results support a geometric view of latent reasoning in which transferable reasoning behavior emerges from stable low-dimensional structure within hidden-state trajectories.
Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Manan Roy Choudhury, Utkarsh Byahut +3
Jun 28, 2026cs.RO

On the Identifiability of Aided Inertial Navigation Under Measurement Delays: A Geometric Approach

In aided inertial navigation, measurements from different sensors are often subject to unknown relative time delays. Consider a single aiding sensor whose measurements have an unknown but constant delay relative to the inertial-measurement data stream. We study the identifiability of the delay and the initial navigation state that parameterizes the trajectory. Identifiability depends on both the temporal structure of the aiding measurements and the form of the trajectory itself. Our geometric analysis shows that, for a larger class of uninformative (i.e., degenerate) trajectories than has previously been reported, the delayed measurement model admits a continuous symmetry that prevents unique delay-and-state recovery.
Jonathan Kelly
Jun 27, 2026cs.RO

Keypose Exploration: Efficient Automatic Trajectory Labelling and Cross-Embodiment Policy Transfer

Keypose-based manipulation decomposes tasks into critical waypoints to simplify policy learning for long-horizon tasks, but existing approaches rely on task-specific heuristics or manual annotation to extract keyposes from demonstrations. We present an automatic trajectory labelling pipeline for grasp-related tasks. This pipeline combines vision-language models (VLMs) for semantic event detection with classical trajectory analysis for precise temporal alignment, requiring VLM inference only on one single demo among repeating ones per task. Using the labelled data, we train a keypose-guided Diffusion Policy (DP) that exploits keypose conditioning to intervene demonstration distributions. We explore the possibility to apply this property for cross-embodiment transfer: candidate keyposes are sampled and filtered via a reachability map, steering the policy toward kinematically feasible keyposes for the target robot. As a preliminary feasibility study, experiments on two robomimic tasks show that the labelled data produces policies matching a standard DP baseline, and that reachability-filtered keypose conditioning may benefit zero-shot transfer on the multimodal insertion task when feasible candidates are available.
Yupu Lu, Hang Xu, Yizhou Chen +1
Jun 27, 2026cs.AI

TrajRS: Towards Certified Robustness in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

The robustness of trajectory prediction models is crucial for developing safe autonomous driving systems. Adversarial attacks on trajectory prediction can significantly impair the accuracy of predicted trajectories, leading to hazardous driving behaviors. While heuristic defense strategies have been implemented to enhance the robustness of trajectory prediction models, these measures often fail against more sophisticated, targeted adversarial attacks. Hence, there is a pressing need to establish verifiable safety assurances for trajectory prediction models. In this paper, we extend the traditional Randomized Smoothing framework to "TrajRS", which provides a certified robust radius for smoothed trajectory predictors. We clarify and expand the formal definitions of robustness in trajectory prediction and tailor the practical TrajRS scheme specifically to "robustness for the optimal prediction" and "robustness for all possible predictions". An extensive set of experiments demonstrates that TrajRS effectively achieves robustness certification for all smoothed pedestrian trajectory predictors in this work.
Liang Zhang, Gaojie Jin, Yao Shi +4
Jun 26, 2026cs.AI

Search for Truth from Reasoning: A Dynamic Representation Editing Framework for Steering LLM Trajectories

Current approaches to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, such as Chain-of-Thought and "Wait" prompts, primarily encourage models to think more, yet often fail to guide them toward Truth. While Representation Editing (RepE) offers a intrinsic control, its application to dynamic reasoning trajectories remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by investigating the geometry of truth within unfolding reasoning chains. We uncover three critical insights: (1) Truth is encoded at the sentence level and is entangled with latent reasoning patterns; (2) Effective intervention follows an Uncertainty Principle and a Decay Effect, requiring localization to early, high-entropy forks; (3) Naive steering vectors suffer from noise, risking collateral damage to correct trajectories. Based on these findings, we propose DynaSteer, a dynamic RepE framework. DynaSteer employs pattern clustering to disentangle reasoning manifolds and utilizes Fisher-LDA to project purified truth. By dynamically monitoring lookahead entropy, it selectively steers and rolls back trajectories only when necessary. Comprehensive experimental results on several MATH benchmark verify the effectiveness of DynaSteer, and experiments on out-of-domain coding tasks further confirm its generalization ability. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tianlwang/DynaSteer.
Tianlong Wang, Yuhang Wang, Weibin Liao +5
Jun 26, 2026cs.RO

Swarm sign language: motion-based communication between drones

In stealth-constrained swarm robotics, visual communication provides a critical alternative to active radio transmissions, which might be jammed. This research investigates motion-based communication for non-active information exchange, utilizing modular, dynamically feasible planar trajectories as visual cues. On the receiver drone end, a pose estimator tracks the transmitting drone's pose, feeding it into our custom 3DTrajDecoder. The decoder is designed to classify and segment the spatiotemporal sequence while simultaneously regressing its size and normal vector. To robustly train the decoder on both communicative and non-communicative trajectories, we developed a configurable online procedural generation pipeline. We validate our system through real-world testing and simulation to define its operating domain, supported by an extensive ablation study detailing our architectural choices and system limitations.
Thomas Rey, Julien Moras, Alexandre Eudes +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

PlanRL: A Trajectory Planning Architecture for Reinforcement Learning-based Driving Experts

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prominent framework for developing driving experts in autonomous vehicles. However, most existing RL-based experts are designed to output direct control commands (e.g., throttle, steering), which suffer from a lack of interpretability, high spatial complexity in learning road geometries, and poor compatibility with modern end-to-end planning architectures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel trajectory planning architecture for RL driving experts that integrates an RL policy with a polynomial-based trajectory planner. By employing a Frenet-frame coordinate system, our method simplifies complex road geometries into a curvilinear framework, offering a structured coordinate prior that facilitates policy learning. Furthermore, we incorporate a kinematic feasibility check into the planning stage to ensure that generated trajectories remain within the vehicle's physical limits, effectively mitigating cumulative tracking errors typically found in planning-based systems. We evaluate our approach on key CARLA benchmarks, where it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art control-based RL experts. On the CARLA Offline Leaderboard v1 and NoCrash benchmarks, our method improves the driving score by 5% and 11%, respectively, and increases the success rate by 8% and 19%.
Joonhee Lim, Yongjae Lee, Jangho Shin +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

ResilPhase: Plug-and-Play Phase Mapping and Noise-Resilient Macro-Trajectory Extrapolation for Diffusion Acceleration

The adoption of powerful diffusion models is hindered by their significant inference latency. Recent ``cache-then-forecast'' schemes alleviate this issue by accelerating DiTs using derivative-based polynomials, but they suffer from severe quality degradation at high acceleration ratios. Our analysis reveals its root cause: the discrete extrapolation performed on representations that are misaligned with the continuous diffusion trajectory and are numerically unstable. Thus, accelerated DiTs suffer from accumulated spatial errors, noisy derivative amplification, and high-order instability. We therefore reformulate accelerated inference as stable macro-trajectory extrapolation in ordinary differential equation (ODE) space. Instead of predicting intermediate features, we align forecasting with the model's Global Drift (GD), i.e., the end-to-end state evolution, thereby eliminating feature inconsistency and memory overhead. However, even this smooth macro-trajectory remains vulnerable to the derivative fallacy: its higher-order temporal derivatives are intrinsically noisy. Thus, we introduce a derivative-free barycentric Lagrange extrapolator to effectively bypass derivative instability and approximation error. We further propose a bounded Phase Mapping that regularizes the extrapolation domain, suppressing oscillatory error growth. These elements collectively constitute ResilPhase, a noise-resilient acceleration framework. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and HunyuanVideo demonstrate state-of-the-art fidelity under aggressive acceleration ratios.
Qicheng Zhao, Yu Li, Qi Sun +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

LAMP: Lane-Aligned Motion Primitives for Feasible Trajectory Prediction

Motion forecasting is essential for autonomous driving systems to enable safe decision-making and planning in complex driving scenarios. While existing predictors excel at minimizing standard displacement errors, they often overlook the adherence to lane topology of multimodal predictions, particularly for lower-probability modes. Consequently, predicted trajectories may violate physical and logical constraints, making the prediction set unreliable for safety-critical planning. In this paper, we propose LAMP (Lane-Aligned Motion Primitives), a topology-aware forecasting framework that anchors multimodal prediction to structured motion primitives aligned with lane topology. Specifically, we use a VQ-VAE to learn shape-aware motion primitives as discrete intention queries, capturing spatiotemporal patterns beyond endpoint-based intentions. We further introduce a feasibility-aware intention selector trained with a lane-topology prior for filtering unreachable intention queries, guiding the decoder to prioritize topology-consistent intentions while preserving behavioral diversity. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 dataset demonstrate that LAMP achieves prediction accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art baselines while outperforming them in feasibility and diversity metrics.
Sangjin Han, Hoseong Jung, Jeongtae Her +2
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

OSC2Runner: OpenSCENARIO 2.x Compliant High-Fidelity AV Simulation in CARLA

Scenario-Based Testing predominantly relies on the legacy ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.x XML standard because existing continuous simulation frameworks lack native execution support for the recently matured v2.x Domain-Specific Language (DSL). Adapting legacy interpreters to evaluate v2.x logic introduces spatiotemporal drift, asynchronous event latencies, and artificial kinematic snapping. Addressing this execution gap, OSC2Runner introduces the first orchestration framework capable of natively mapping the OpenSCENARIO v2.x DSL to CARLA. The framework achieves this by formalizing scenario translation as a compilation pipeline through a multi-pass transpiler architecture. Bypassing static trajectory playback, the architecture synthesizes type-safe Abstract Syntax Trees directly into dynamic deterministic behavior trees (py_trees) natively mapped to CARLA's atomic APIs. Empirical validation in highly concurrent adversarial case studies demonstrates tick-by-tick determinism, exact spatial trigger evaluation, and 100.0 ms cross-actor blackboard synchronization. Kinematic analysis proves the strict adherence to continuous environmental boundaries. This architecture transitions Scenario-Based Testing from approximate behavioral interpretation to mathematically rigorous execution, establishing the deterministic backend required for co-simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and automated LLM-driven generation pipelines.
Thoshitha Gamage, Lasanthi Gamage
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Rethinking Training & Inference for Forecasting: Linking Winner-Take-All back to GMMs

Trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving has advanced rapidly, yet representative models often produce uninformative posteriors over forecast modes, causing problems for mode pruning. We trace this to a modeling-training mismatch: forecasters are typically modeled as conditional Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) but trained with a winner-take-all (WTA) loss that assigns each sample to its nearest mode. We argue that this K-means-like hard assignment (one-hot), while preventing mode collapse, is the source of uninformative mode probabilities: it over-segments the trajectory space, ignores relatedness among nearby modes, and yields assignment instability under small perturbations. Guided by this lens, we introduce two post-hoc treatments: (1) test-time posterior-weighted merging that aggregates nearby candidate trajectories; and (2) a one-step expectation-maximization (EM) update that replaces hard labels with soft responsibilities, sharing probability mass across neighboring modes. Across several WTA-trained architectures, these lightweight steps produce more informative, faithfully ranked mode posteriors and strengthen final forecasts on popular displacement metrics -- without retraining. Our analysis unifies recent design choices through a GMM-vs-K-means perspective and offers principled, practical corrections that better align training objectives with inference.
Qiyuan Wu, Katie Z Luo, Bharath Hariharan +2
Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

TaskNPoint: How to Teach Your Humanoid to Hit a Backhand in Minutes

How do we learn to hit a tennis backhand? Not from a thousand hours of tennis tournaments on TV - we work with a coach and practice. We argue this is also the right recipe for teaching dynamic skills to humanoid robots. This follows from a structural property of dynamic skills: the outcome is decided by a short, crucial portion of the trajectory - for a backhand, the ~20cm of racket travel around ball contact. Getting this interaction window right requires coordinating the whole motion, so that control, physics, and morphology act in concert. Learning thus reduces to mastering a handful of distinct actions and, for each, practicing until the window comes out right. To this end, we introduce TaskNPoint, a training protocol which makes the coach-learner division of labor explicit. The human coach contributes four inputs: a discrete set of skills (e.g. different shots), one demonstration per skill, identification of the interaction window, and the goal. Learning in a physically realistic simulation environment fills in each action trajectory and provides robustness to unmodeled events. Crucially, randomized target sampling during training lets a single demonstration generalize zero-shot to unseen goal locations. We test this approach on a Unitree G1 humanoid that hits forehands and backhands against balls thrown by a human, kicks incoming soccer balls, and picks and places boxes from novel locations. We find that learning is successful from short human video demonstrations and under an hour of training on a single GPU, with no per-task reward tuning.
Blake Werner, Ilona Demler, Pietro Perona +1
Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

DeformGen: Dynamics-Based Topology Augmentation for Deformable Manipulation Policy Learning

Demonstration augmentation is proposed for cost-efficient data acquisition, but existing methods are fundamentally limited in deformable manipulation due to two challenges: (1) the state space is high-dimensional with physics-induced constraints, making valid configurations impossible to reach via low-dimensional pose perturbations; and (2) trajectory transfer is non-equivariant, as material points no longer move rigidly together under deformation. We present DeformGen, a dynamics-based augmentation framework that achieves topological diversity for deformable objects. For the state challenge, DeformGen expands the valid state distribution by applying localized physical disturbances and forward-simulating the dynamics to obtain topology-coherent, physically plausible deformable states. For the trajectory challenge, DeformGen transfers source manipulation trajectories via deformation-field warping, which lifts per-particle displacements into a continuous spatial function to adapt the end-effector trajectory consistently with the deformed geometry. In this way, our method jointly augments the state distribution and its associated manipulation behavior. Experiments on high-fidelity deformable manipulation benchmarks show that DeformGen generally improves policy learning compared with training on the original demonstrations alone and with rigid-style augmentation baselines.
Zili Lin, Wenyao Zhang, Yuyang Zhang +9