Discussion | Link

Discussion | Link

arXiv:2609.21022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by combining semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language models with expressive action-generation policies. Diffusion-based action generators are particularly effective for modeling temporally coherent action chunks, but these chunks are typically executed open-loop after inference. This limits responsiveness when objects move, contacts change, or the scene evolves during execution. We propose VLA-Feedback, a two-timescale architecture that combines low-frequency diffusion planning with high-frequency visual feedback. Rather than fully denoising an action chunk before execution, VLA-Feedback retains its final denoising step as a lightweight fe…

arXiv:2609.21015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improvements to Visual-Inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VI-SLAM) for low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are critical for transitioning advanced marine robotics from specialized labs to broader research and hobbyist applications. While high-end AUVs typically rely on expensive sensor suites - such as Doppler Velocity Logs (DVLs) and Ultra-Short Baseline (USBL) systems - this work demonstrates that robust, high-quality navigation is achievable using a sub-$10, 000(USD) platform equipped only with inexpensive consumer-grade sensors. By leveraging a similarly priced, open-source AUV, we evaluate the performance of stereo cameras, Micro-electromechanical System (MEMS)-based IMUs, and depth sensors in a fully unconstrain…

arXiv:2609.21008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporary obstacles that may block a robot's planned route create a sequential navigation problem: a robot must decide whether to wait for a blockage to clear, reroute, or acquire more information about the obstacle before acting. We formulate graph navigation among temporary obstacles as a partially observable semi-Markov decision process and introduce SPARROW, a belief-space planner built on Partially Observable Monte Carlo Planning (POMCP). SPARROW searches over traversal, observation, and finite-duration waiting actions while maintaining a particle belief over latent obstacle classes and clearance times. Class-conditioned survival models are learned online from both clearance observations and right-censored encounters where the robot rer…

arXiv:2609.21005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created a growing need for robust, jamming-resistant counter-UAV systems for perimeter defense. This paper presents \textbf{SCOUT} (Spatial Computation for Optimized UAV Tracking), a ROS-integrated onboard perception and control framework for real-time aerial defense against incoming UAVs. SCOUT performs visual detection, target association, track filtering, and control command generation directly onboard the defender UAV, without relying on external sensing infrastructure or ground-station computation. To provide stable control inputs, the perception pipeline combines TensorRT-accelerated drone detection with ByteTrack-based association and a lightweight track-reten…

arXiv:2609.21000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spinning frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have been gaining popularity in autonomous vehicle perception on account of their robustness to adverse weather conditions and 360{\deg} field of view. Recently, scanning radars have also been shown capable of generating per-azimuth Doppler velocity. In this paper, we investigate whether these Doppler velocity measurements improve spinning radar vehicle detection and tracking performance. For detection, we estimate the ego motion and use it to undo the Doppler range distortion of the radar image before passing it to a network. For tracking, we propose a new way to estimate a per-vehicle velocity and use it as a prior for the tracker's motion model. Since Doppler-enabled spinning rada…

arXiv:2609.20983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Terrain assessment is a critical capability for off-road mobile robots, enabling safe and reliable navigation through unstructured and geometrically complex environments. Conventional geometry-based terrain assessment is fast to compute but often overly conservative in unstructured environments. We present PIVOT: a Physically Informed Vision-Language Off-Road Traversability navigation system that augments conventional geometry-based planning with vision-language-model (VLM)-based semantic reasoning for field robots. To physically ground this assessment, we quantify how strongly the VLM's predicted traversal energy cost, robot vibration, and wheel slip correlate with real-world measurements and introduce a unified traversability score that we…

arXiv:2609.20980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on visual perception limits robustness in contact-rich environments, where critical physical interaction states may not be visually observable. Existing tactile-enhanced VLA methods improve physical grounding using observed tactile feedback, but most remain largely reactive rather than explicitly modeling how contact may evolve. Therefore, we propose ForeTac-VLA, a forecasting-based tactile-vision-language fusion model that predicts future tactile states to guide action generation. Specifically, ForeTac-VLA encodes recent tactile observations into temporal representations and integrates them with vision-language features thro…

arXiv:2609.20970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many physical properties relevant to robotic manipulation are hidden from vision. A sealed object, for example, may reveal little about its center of mass (COM) or internal contents until it is lifted, shaken, or otherwise dynamically perturbed. This study shows that such interactions can enable a new modality of robotic perception and learning, in which interaction-induced dynamic responses are used to infer object physics that is inaccessible to conventional sensing. We implement this idea using an origami-inspired soft robotic arm that functions as a physical reservoir computer. After grasping an object, the arm is excited by a fixed shaking input at its base, and the resulting ringdown response is recorded through either camera tracking…

arXiv:2609.20965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Close-proximity pipeline inspection is challenging for standard drones due to high hovering power consumption, airflow sensitivity, and propeller wash interference with gas sensing. To address this, we present AeRove, a compact bimodal aerial-terrestrial robot. AeRove uses its propeller guards as wheels to roll along pipes and employs a spring-loaded bistable mechanism to reconfigure between ground and flight modes in 200 ms without continuous actuator power to maintain either state. The converging propeller-guard geometry also improves measured thrust efficiency. By reserving flight for obstacle hopping and using ground rolling for continuous traversal, current draw is reduced 14x compared to continuous flight (0.7 A vs. 10 A), extending es…

arXiv:2609.20892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closed-loop visual servoing requires predictions that indicate whether an action reduces task error, not only whether the action is plausible. We call this gap the prediction-control mismatch and introduce WM-VS, a target-centric progress-aligned world-model framework for closed-loop visual servoing. Offline target-region DINOv2 correspondences define a signed four-dimensional servo coordinate for translation, scale, and in-plane rotation. Stage 1 aligns action-conditioned latent transitions with this coordinate; Stage 2 freezes the world model and trains a reactive joint-velocity policy with action imitation, consequence supervision, and short imagined rollouts that favor error contraction. Deployment is RGB-only and reactive, without onlin…

arXiv:2609.21219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot localization is an ongoing challenge that demands mapping and positioning systems that are tolerant to viewpoint change. Event cameras are attracting increasing interest and adoption in robotics; however, dealing with viewpoint variance is an under-investigated problem in existing event-based localizers. In addition, event-based datasets that emphasize viewpoint variance for challenging localization situations are scarce. Here, we introduce an event-based visual place recognition (VPR) system that performs robustly under viewpoint changes. We converted five large-scale geo-tagged datasets, conventionally used to train frame-based localization systems, into synthetic event streams using Image-to-Event (I2E) conversion, and used them to…

arXiv:2609.21207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Procedural anomaly detection in bimanual assembly requires judging each hand action against the execution so far. A corrective action may look unusual in isolation, while a visually plausible action can violate the order of the procedure. We present HACT, a transition model over predicted per-hand events. A role-preserving history keeps the concurrent responsibilities of both hands, and a marked temporal point process assigns each observed transition a semantic and temporal surprisal. A supervised evidence head and a two-state filter convert these surprisals into per-hand anomaly posteriors. A recovery-aware protocol on predicted events and participant-disjoint folds reports the recovery false-positive rate at an operating point selected on…

arXiv:2609.21199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manga is a comic drawn by black and white paints gaining popularity around the world. Onomatopoeia in Manga specifically appeals to the audience with its unique visual styles, which convey sound, motion, and emotion. Visual onomatopoeia translation requires the clean replacement of Japanese onomatopoeia with onomatopoeia in the other language while preserving their visual style. Existing approaches often produce residual artifacts or style inconsistency when removing the Japanese onomatopoeia and rendering stylized English onomatopoeia. To approach these problems, we present OnomatoBridge, a filtering pipeline for visual onomatopoeia translation. We evaluate OnomatoBridge from Japanese to English on the Manga109 onomatopoeia dataset and comp…

arXiv:2609.21176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the challenges of dynamic scene synthesis from sparse-view videos. Existing methods employ geometric priors, adaptive optimization, or density-control strategies to improve 4D Gaussian modeling under sparse observations. However, they cannot fundamentally resolve the ill-posed problem caused by insufficient observations and missing scene information. Moreover, sparse-view 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) often suffers from poor geometric initialization: with only a few input views, COLMAP typically reconstructs sparse and incomplete point clouds, leaving large scene regions without sufficient Gaussian support and making them difficult to recover through subsequent optimization. To address these limitations, we propose a nove…

arXiv:2609.21095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present MarsFM, an image-conditioned latent flow-matching model for local Martian relief estimation from single-band HiRISE RED orthoimagery. The method combines a pretrained generative prior with stereo-derived geometric supervision and a differentiable Lunar--Lambert shading objective. Relief, normal, gradient, curvature, and ordinal terms constrain complementary aspects of terrain structure, while a positive-affine-invariant image comparison constrains rendered appearance. An evaluation comprising 2024 gathered patch records per integration-step count yields mean affine-aligned RMSE between 0.0935 and 0.0957 in normalized signed-log relief space for one to twenty Euler steps. These scores measure agreement with VAE-reconstructed refere…

arXiv:2609.21018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent visual document retrieval (VDR) systems such as ColPali use multi-vector page embeddings, in which patch-level vectors enable fine-grained evidence matching but incur substantial index storage and MaxSim scoring overhead. Post-hoc merging offers a practical route to efficient VDR by reducing this cost without retraining the retriever, but its uniform reconstruction objectives are poorly aligned with the sparse, non-uniform patch usage induced by late-interaction retrieval. Under aggressive compression, this misalignment can preserve rarely used patches while concentrating retrieval activity on too few retained representatives. To address this misalignment, we propose Marginal-Guided Compression with Optimal Transport (MAGIC), a traini…

arXiv:2609.21012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artistic style classification is usually studied on complete artworks, where models can exploit global composition, spatial organisation, and iconographic structure. In archaeological settings, however, artworks often survive only as fragmented remains, forcing recognition from incomplete, irregular, and context-limited visual evidence. We study fresco-fragment style classification using a progressive transformer-based framework. Starting from a ViT-B/16 baseline, we introduce foreground-guided masking to suppress background-only tokens, inpainting-based geometric regularisation to align irregular fragment supports with the ViT patch grid, and a supervised contrastive objective that operates on predictive distributions through a Kullback-Lei…

arXiv:2609.20975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordable dust monitoring remains a pressing need for the cattle feedlot industry, yet camera-based PM estimation, despite its growing body of research in urban air quality settings, has not been evaluated under the extended concentration ranges characteristic of intensive livestock operations. This study developed an image-based approach using contrast panel features and machine learning to estimate PM10 concentrations in a commercial cattle feedlot, where hourly average PM10 ranged from 250 to 1,000 ug/m^-3 and instantaneous concentrations reached 5,000 to 20,000 ug/m^-3. Grayscale images were captured during the evening dust peak period, and features including panel contrast, black and white panel pixel values, and overall image brightne…

arXiv:2609.20962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of harmful internet memes poses a significant societal threat, yet their automated classification remains a formidable algorithmic challenge due to the nuanced, multimodal nature of their content. To address this, we introduce MemeTAG, a novel dual-objective framework that pioneers a keyword-aware approach to meme classification. Our core innovation is a two-part semantic guidance mechanism: first, we leverage a pretrained Vision-Language Model to generate a set of descriptive keywords, that capture the high-level semantics. Second, we introduce the Aggregated Tag Inference Network (ATIN), an attention-based module that distills these keywords into a single, rich semantic embedding. This embedding serves as a target for a n…

arXiv:2609.20869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TAPe+ML v3, a compact computer vision system based on TAPe (Theory of Active Perception), a structured representation that encodes relations among perceptual elements before recognition. Instead of operating directly on pixel tensors, the system uses a shared TAPe representation and a modular recognition architecture for image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. TAPe+ML v3 combines background and contour processing, local object localization, prototype-based classification, and a coordinator for specialized submodels. Across the reported experiments, it uses fewer than 100,000 parameters. On COCO object detection, it obtains 84.7 mAP50 and 65.3 mAP50-95. On COCO instance segmentation, it obtains 80.7 mask…

arXiv:2609.20833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the Transsion Speech Team submission to Task 1 of the MLC-SLM 2026 Challenge, which focuses on speaker-attributed transcription for multilingual conversational speech. We propose a cascaded framework consisting of three components: a speaker diarization module, a long-form multilingual ASR module, and a speaker-transcription fusion module. The diarization module is built upon DiariZen and produces speaker-homogeneous segments through local speaker activity estimation and global speaker clustering. The ASR module is based on Qwen3-Omni and generates multilingual transcriptions, while an external CTC-based alignment model provides precise word- and character-level timestamps. Finally, the fusion module combines diarization…

arXiv:2609.20832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce TatBLiMP, the first benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs for Tatar (tt, ISO 639-3 tat), a Qypchaq Turkic language written in Cyrillic. To our knowledge it is the first grammaticality evaluation for Tatar language models of any kind, since even the 101-language MultiBLiMP does not include Tatar. TatBLiMP covers 16 morphosyntactic phenomena in 1248 sentence pairs. Each pair differs by a single morpheme, one grammatical and one ungrammatical. A model passes a pair when it assigns higher probability to the grammatical member. Scoring compares probabilities the model already assigns, so the benchmark needs no text generation and no parser, and it runs on base models and on mid-training checkpoints. TatBLiMP adapts the phenomenon inv…

arXiv:2609.20831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study when limiting what a language model can see improves learning. We compare standard CoT, the more general learner that reads the full trace, with recursive language models, which restricts itself by solving each subtask in an isolated context. In-distribution, this generality comes for free: CoT can efficiently simulate the recursive rule, so the IID generalization guarantee changes only by a constant factor, and recursion does not offer much. But out of domain, CoT can fit training by relying on context outside the current subtask, i.e. a shortcut that breaks once those tokens change; recursive context isolation rules out this failure mode. Even though CoT's class still covers the recursive rule, simplicity bias picks the shortcut o…

arXiv:2609.20830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Revision-capable generation is appealing because it can insert or revise earlier content, but many non-autoregressive and edit-based approaches obtain this flexibility through repeated sequence-level computation. We propose Reviser, a decoder-only Transformer that generates a response as a sequence of cursor-relative actions on a mutable canvas. At each step, Reviser predicts exactly one action token: INSERT(token), MOVE($\Delta$), or STOP, and is autoregressive over edit-history actions rather than final text order. This design enables genuinely non-monotonic generation while preserving a simple next-action interface. On a continuation benchmark, Reviser is strongly preferred to SEDD and MDLM in our arena evaluations, and trajectory statist…

arXiv:2609.20829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grant reviewers must apply detailed criteria to application forms, budgets, and supporting documents while producing assessments that colleagues can inspect. We present SAGE, Schema-Guided Aspect-Based Grant Evaluation, a system that translates a grant rubric into structured checks and links its judgements to evidence from the application package. We evaluate SAGE in two stages on 35 nonprofit grant applications. A post-factum comparison with 105 reviews from the original competition shows fair ordinal agreement (kappa = 0.29). The foundation then conducted a criterion-level re-review after inspecting SAGE, producing 202 assessments. In this assisted round, SAGE reached kappa = 0.58 and outperformed a one-prompt-per-criterion baseline (kappa…

arXiv:2609.20828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ASR systems optimised for Word Error Rate (WER) often miss named entities and filled pauses in accented conversational English, both critical for language-learning feedback. We present a three-stage pipeline for speakers from India, Indonesia, and Latin America: (1) heuristic SQL filters curating entity-rich training data at 2.8x the entity density of random sampling, (2) regional LoRA adapters fine-tuned on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B producing both verbatim and corrected transcripts in a single forward pass, and (3) a six-category error taxonomy validated by an LLM-based judge (83.8% agreement, 210 human-labelled samples). The pipeline achieves 80-85% entity recall (up from 53-55%), 76-86% filler recall (up from <5%), and 6-10% WER across 6k test utte…

arXiv:2609.20827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hospital discharge education is an interactive teaching task: a clinician adapts a discharge plan to a patient's literacy, recall, and personality. Existing LLM evaluations target static or artifact-generation tasks and do not measure patient understanding under open-ended dialogue. We introduce DischargeBench, a persona-grounded simulation in which a candidate LLM educator conducts a multi-turn session with a Virtual Patient, while an Education Monitor Agent regulates patient realism without modifying the educator, protecting the evaluation signal. We curate MIMIC-IV-Ext-DischargeBench, 477 cases over 24 ICD chapters with persona axes (personality, education level, health literacy, past-medical-history recall) for stratified analysis. Each…

arXiv:2609.20826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current radiology report generation (RRG) models usually produce descriptive reports based on a single examination or only the most recent prior examination, limiting their ability to perform accurate and meaningful longitudinal comparisons and detect subtle interval changes. Although recent approaches have begun to incorporate multiple prior examinations, they usually aggregate a fixed-length history without explicitly modeling the role-dependent relevance of each prior examination before fusion. To address this, we propose TALON, a Temporally Aware LONgitudinal RRG framework that adaptively integrates variable-length patient histories. The underlying Dual-Channel Temporal Fusion Module (DCTFM) compares the current examination with each pri…