arXiv Computer Vision

Online Adaptation of Visual Odometry Frontends with Image-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a visual odometry frontend that automatically and continuously adapts its parameters using an image-conditioned reinforcement learning policy. The policy selects key tuning values—FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold—based on a lightweight image embedding and frontend statistics, with a privileged critic aiding training. Trained on synthetic data, the approach transfers zero‑shot to real-world benchmarks, improving the tracking‑computation trade‑off by up to 8% in accuracy and 57% in runtime compared to static configurations.

arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

VLD: Visual Learned Distance as an Interface for Reinforcement Learning Navigation

The paper introduces Visual Learned Distance (VLD), a framework that separates perception from policy learning for image-goal navigation. VLD trains a self-supervised distance-to-goal predictor on thousands of hours of video, then uses a reinforcement learning policy trained in simulation with a learned noise model (GeoNoise) to mimic the predictor’s errors. At deployment, the policy uses VLD predictions zero‑shot, achieving high success rates in simulated environments and on a physical robot without retraining.

By Lazar Milikic, Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Persistent Robot World Models: Stabilizing Multi-Step Rollouts via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a reinforcement learning post‑training scheme that trains robot world models on their own autoregressive rollouts, using a contrastive RL objective adapted from diffusion models. It also proposes a training protocol that compares multiple variable‑length futures, a multi‑view visual fidelity reward, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art rollout fidelity on the DROID dataset, outperforming baselines on LPIPS, SSIM, and human preference tests.

By Jai Bardhan, Patrik Drozdik, Josef Sivic, Vladimir Petrik
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation

The paper proposes a reward-based policy that relies only on rewards and actions, enabling zero‑shot transfer between source and target environments with entirely different observation spaces. Experiments on Pointmass, Cartpole, 2D Car Racing, and the Stretch robot in Habitat‑Sim show that the policy can adapt to new visual styles or 3D renderings without additional samples. Additionally, the reward policy can guide the training of an observation‑based policy in the target environment.

By Morgan Byrd, Maks Sorokin, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

TerraTransfer++: Demonstration-Free End-to-End Planner

TerraTransfer++ demonstrates a demonstration‑free, end‑to‑end autonomous driving framework that leverages self‑play in vectorized simulators to pretrain a policy. The method distills self‑play rollouts into a flow‑matching trajectory teacher and trains lightweight adapters on a frozen vision backbone, using action KL divergence, a batch‑relational low‑rank loss, and trajectory‑matching loss. The resulting closed‑loop policy surpasses all published imitation‑based methods on the HUGSim benchmark, while the planner achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on NAVSIM navhard and navtest without any human demonstrations.

By Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Saarth Bonde, Grantland Hall, Chen Tang, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 15

VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Action

arXiv:2610.20604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-action models aim to turn visual anticipation into driving decisions, yet typically train action experts on trajectory representations defined in...

By Ao Liang, Youquan Liu, Mingxiao Li, Wei Chow, Lingdong Kong, Yue Liao, Dongyue Lu, Yu Yang, Wei Yin, Runnan Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Robostral Navigate

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 Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn