Robotics and embodied AI

Manipulation, locomotion, sim-to-real transfer and autonomous driving: learning systems that have to survive physics.

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arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

CEDAR: Automata as Verifiable Interfaces for Language-Guided Embodied Action

CEDAR is a counterexample-guided framework that translates natural-language instructions for embodied agents into regular languages over environment event traces, represented as deterministic finite automata. By using a language model for semantic judgments and execution traces for correction, CEDAR turns constraints into executable finite-state objects, enabling the intersection of learned skills with additional specifications. In Minecraft experiments, CEDAR preserves temporal and spatial constraints better than a program-generating baseline and reduces cumulative LLM queries by reusing learned skills.

By Lekai Chen, Alvaro Velasquez, Ashutosh Trivedi
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

How Far Can 5,500 Hours of Driving Take You? A Scaling Law Analysis of Video Diffusion Models

The paper investigates how scaling video diffusion models affects performance on autonomous driving data, training models ranging from 1 M to 9 B parameters on up to 5,500 hours of driving footage. Validation loss follows predictable power‑law trends with both model size and training exposure, showing that longer training yields faster loss reduction than increasing model size, though larger models still achieve lower asymptotic loss. Guided by these findings, the authors train a 9 B‑parameter model that becomes the largest video diffusion model trained from scratch on driving data and sets a new open‑source state‑of‑the‑art on the nuScenes benchmark.

By Victor Besnier, Anh-Quan Cao, Elias Ramzi, Spyros Gidaris, Tuan-Hung Vu, Andrei Bursuc, Eloi Zablocki, Matthieu Cord
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

uScenes: A Multimodal RGB and 3D Sonar Dataset for Underwater Robot Perception

uScenes is a new multimodal dataset for underwater robot perception that provides synchronized 3D multibeam sonar point clouds and RGB imagery. It comprises 110 scenes with 95,834 observations, totaling 277.6 minutes of data collected during multiple field sessions. The dataset aims to support research in underwater sensor fusion, cross‑modal representation learning, and 3D scene understanding.

By Trung Tien Dong, Zhenqi Wu, Aditya Penumarti, Zi-Hao Zhang, Micaiah Bartlett, Jane Shin, Xiaomin Lin
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

A-PAIR: A Benchmark and Identity-Consistent Grounding Framework for Air-Ground Cross-View Referring Person Detection

arXiv:2608.27997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air-ground cross-view referring person detection is a necessary component in the language-to-perception-to-control chain of collective embodied intelli...

By Zhoupeng Guo, Xinjie Yao, Yunqi Zhu, Zhihe Fan, Siqi Zhao, Jianjun Chen, Yichen Dong, Yan Fan, Pengfei Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Deflickering Vision-Based Occupancy Networks through Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Correlation

The paper introduces OccLinker, a lightweight plugin for vision‑based occupancy networks that reduces flickering by efficiently merging historical static and motion cues with current features via a dual cross‑attention mechanism. It generates correction components to refine base network predictions and proposes a new temporal consistency metric to quantify flickering. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that OccLinker improves performance with minimal computational overhead while effectively diminishing flickering artifacts.

By Fengcheng Yu, Haoran Xu, Canming Xia, Ziyang Zong, Guang Tan
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Synthetic Linguistic Agency: How an Embodied Mortal Agent Learns Linguistic Affordances through Consequential Social Experience

The paper introduces Synthetic Linguistic Agency (SLA), a framework that defines linguistic agency in terms of embodiment, participation, and precariousness. It presents two studies: one that operationalizes SLA criteria and identifies existing systems, and another that builds an Embodied Mortal Agent (EMA) using mortality‑grounded reinforcement learning. Experiments show the EMA’s linguistic choices depend on its body and social history, influence partner behavior, and adapt over time, demonstrating SLA in an artificial agent.

By Sixin Chen, Taizhou Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Iron: Intent-Aligned and Retrospective Dual Learning Framework for Enhancing Generalist Virtual Agents

Iron is a new framework for training generalist virtual agents that aligns low‑level actions with high‑level intents using a stepwise cycle‑consistent reward. It also repurposes failed trajectories through a hindsight reproduction mechanism to improve learning efficiency and task diversity. Experiments show Iron‑trained agents outperform those trained with three times more data, achieving a 25.06% relative improvement on unseen web tasks and better performance on complex tasks.

By Jiahe Ying, Wendong Bu, Kaihang Pan, Bingchen Miao, Siyu Chen, Wen Wang, Xueming Jiang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

OceanGym: A Benchmark Environment for Underwater Embodied Agents

OceanGym is the first comprehensive benchmark for underwater embodied agents, featuring eight realistic task domains and a unified agent framework powered by Multi‑modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). It challenges agents to process optical and sonar data, navigate complex environments, and achieve long‑horizon goals amid low visibility and dynamic currents. Experiments show significant performance gaps between current MLLM agents and human experts, underscoring the difficulty of perception, planning, and adaptability in ocean settings.

By Yida Xue, Mingjun Mao, Xiangyuan Ru, Yuqi Zhu, Baochang Ren, Shuofei Qiao, Mengru Wang, Shumin Deng, Xinyu An, Ningyu Zhang, Ying Chen, Huajun Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

When the City Teaches the Car: Label-Free 3D Perception from Infrastructure

The paper proposes a label‑free 3D perception framework where roadside units (RSUs) act as unsupervised teachers for self‑driving cars. RSUs learn local 3D detectors from unlabeled data and broadcast predictions to passing vehicles, which use these as pseudo‑labels to train an ego‑centric detector. In a CARLA simulation, the method achieves 82.3% AP for vehicle detection, approaching a fully supervised upper bound of 94.4%, and demonstrates scalability and complementarity with existing ego‑centric approaches.

By Zhen Xu, Jinsu Yoo, Cristian Bautista, Zanming Huang, Tai-Yu Pan, Zhenzhen Liu, Katie Z Luo, Mark Campbell, Bharath Hariharan, Wei-Lun Chao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Targeted Routing Hijacking in Federated RAG

The paper exposes a new vulnerability in Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FedRAG) called Routing Hijacking, where a malicious client forges its semantic profile to attract target queries despite lacking relevant data. Experiments across three FedRAG routing architectures show that this attack consistently misroutes queries, causing downstream failures such as missing evidence, poisoning, incorrect answers, hallucinations, and sycophantic behavior. The authors propose a trust‑aware post‑routing framework that reweights clients based on evidence feedback, which effectively suppresses persistent hijacking and transfers to a learned neural router.

By Junjie Mu, Qiongxiu Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

CNeo-Bench: Diagnosing Large Language Models on Chinese Neologisms

CNeo-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 4,759 Chinese neologisms, each with reference definitions and categorized by linguistic mechanisms such as phonetic substitution and visual character decomposition. The benchmark includes a two-tier evaluation framework that tests whether models can describe a neologism and whether they can manipulate its underlying mechanism. Evaluation of 18 large language models shows that most perform poorly on definition generation (below 40%) and exhibit a recognition‑manipulation gap, often paraphrasing rather than restoring the original form; few‑shot prompting helps but does not fully resolve the errors.

By Kaiyan Zhao, Zhongtao Miao, Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Reasoning models do not yet follow their reasoning in autonomous driving: The KITScenes LongTail Dataset

The paper introduces the KITScenes LongTail dataset, a curated collection of rare driving scenarios designed to evaluate how well reasoning models in autonomous driving follow their own reasoning. The authors find that many current models frequently diverge between the actions they state in their reasoning chains and the actions they actually execute, a phenomenon they term incoherence. They show that when the reasoning and execution disagree, the reasoning is often correct, and enforcing coherence via a kinematic model can improve motion planning, indicating that coherent action based on stated reasoning is essential for trustworthy autonomous driving.

By Royden Wagner, Omer Sahin Tas, Jaime Villa, Felix Hauser, Yinzhe Shen, Marlon Steiner, Dominik Strutz, Carlos Fernandez, Quentin Delfosse, Christoph Weinhuber, Christian Kinzig, Guillermo S. Gutierrez-Cabello, Hendrik K\"onigshof, Fabian Immel, Richard Schwarzkopf, Nils Alexander Rack, Kevin R\"osch, Kaiwen Wang, Jan-Hendrik Pauls, Martin Lauer, Igor Gilitschenski, Holger Caesar, Christoph Stiller
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

SUFLECA: Scaling Up Feature Learning for CAD-to-image Alignment

SUFLECA is a weakly supervised framework that improves zero‑shot CAD‑to‑image alignment by scaling geometry‑grounded feature learning using Normalized Object Coordinates across up to 12 real and synthetic datasets. It introduces a geometrically consistent matching algorithm that reliably establishes CAD‑to‑image correspondences, enabling accurate, sub‑second alignment without iterative pose refinement. On the ScanNet25k benchmark, SUFLECA achieves 32.8%/42.6% category/instance accuracy, outperforming the strongest zero‑shot baseline by 9.7/12.5 percentage points and surpassing existing pose‑supervised methods for the first time.

By Saad Ejaz, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas, Javier Civera, Holger Voos, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Can Tainted Pixels Expose Deepfake Videos?

The paper introduces TaintedPixels, a proactive video‑protection technique that embeds subtle, structured perturbations into the blue channel of facial regions. These perturbations remain invisible in the original video but become noticeable after black‑box manipulation, thereby flagging deepfakes. Experiments on three off‑the‑shelf manipulation tools and two detectors show that TaintedPixels achieves the highest forgery detection rate while keeping visual distortion minimal (LPIPS = 0.0042), and a human study confirms that protected videos are rarely suspected, whereas forgeries from protected sources are identified as fake far more often than those from unprotected sources.

By Juan Hu, Shaojing Fan, Sanjay Saha, Marc Herrera, Terence Sim
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis

The paper introduces the Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 persuasion dimensions grounded in psychological and communication theories, implemented with 55 lexicon- and rule-based sub-features. PI is modular, allowing individual detectors to be swapped while preserving its theoretical framework. Evaluations on four English argumentative datasets show that PI provides a shared, lightweight feature space that captures meaningful predictive signals and reveals consistent dimension-level associations with persuasion outcomes, with variations across topics and stances.

By Liancheng Gong, Zhiyang Wang, Yiwei Xu, Julia Mendelsohn