Classical image correspondence is solved at the level of sparse keypoints or dense pixels, but the systems that consume these matches - object-level mapping, topological navigation, scene-graph maintenance - reason about whole objects. Recent work narrows this gap by matchng directly at the level of instance segments: a class-agnostic segmenter partitions each image, and per-segment descriptors are obtained by pooling features from large 3D foundation models over the masks.
arXiv:2607. 20785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently.
By Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
arXiv:2608. 07579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The AI City Challenge 2026 Track 1 evaluates multi-camera 3D perception in large indoor warehouses under a synthetic-to-real (Sim2Real) setting; depth is available only for training and validation, so inference is RGB-only.
By Abdullah Naeem, Anav Katwal, Ayon Dey, Noman Khan, Md Tamjidul Hoque
arXiv:2607. 16314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models, especially based on JEPA architectures, have been shown to learn robust dynamics of various environments.
By Usman M. Khan
Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation.
arXiv:2607. 02561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Consumer depth sensors such as the LiDAR scanner on recent iPhones provide metric range, but their useful range is short and their returns are sparse.
By Jinwen Wen
arXiv:2607. 09825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation policies rely on pre-trained vision models that give either a global scene embedding or a dense patch grid.
By Yi Li (TU Darmstadt), Alexandre Chapin (LIRIS), Liming Chen (LIRIS), Jan Peters (TU Darmstadt), Alap Kshirsagar (IIT Delhi, ADU)
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs.
arXiv:2603. 25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations.
By Maeva Guerrier, Karthik Soma, Jana Pavlasek, Giovanni Beltrame
arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.
By Zecheng Yin, Benedict Jun Ma
arXiv:2606. 24472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras -- a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images.
By Yue Peng, Yongzhe Zhao, Artur Habuda, Khuyen Pham, Yanheng Zhu, Tran Nguyen Le, Fares Abu-Dakka, Li Guo
arXiv:2603. 03953v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe visual navigation is critical for indoor mobile robots operating in cluttered environments.
By Jaewon Lee, Jaeseok Heo, Gunmin Lee, Howoong Jun, Jeongwoo Oh, Songhwai Oh