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 AI
Aug 28

Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI

The paper "Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI" addresses the lack of clear prompt design in human‑robot interaction using large language models. It proposes a framework and a structured prompt template with eight functional components to specify, bound, and adapt robot behavior. The authors base their guidelines on a review of prior work and on survey data from 27 HRI experts, highlighting issues such as unclear robot personality, the need for user adaptation, and ethical concerns around safety, deception, and governance.

By Ashita Ashok, Franziska Babel, Patrick Holthaus, Rucha Khot, Karla Bransky, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Karsten Berns, Silvia Rossi, Minha Lee, Guy Laban
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

DPA-I2P: Depth-Guided Projective Alignment for Image-to-Point-Cloud Registration in Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces DPA-I2P, a depth-guided projective alignment method for image-to-point-cloud registration in autonomous driving. It employs Ray-Conditioned Metric Depth Encoding and Projection-Consistent Vision Lifting to align depth and visual cues geometrically, and uses Cross-Modal Query Pruning to enhance matching stability. Experiments on KITTI and nuScenes show significant reductions in rotation and translation errors compared to existing implicit baselines.

By Wenxin Zhang, Hang Li, Zhiwei Xu, Qiankun Dong, Gang Wang, Tao Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

SimWAM is a lightweight World-Action Model that uses future‑video prediction only during training to supervise an action expert, enabling end‑to‑end autonomous driving without costly test‑time future imagination. The architecture co‑trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert via joint flow matching, while an isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames. This design allows the video backbone to be swapped and the action expert scaled independently, achieving 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art WAM planners with lower latency and zero‑shot transfer to nuScenes.

By Zongchuang Zhao, Xin Zhou, Tianyang Xu, Zhengyang Sun, Kaixuan Zhou, Yu Wu, Honglin Li, Dingkang Liang, Xiang Bai
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SpatialCrafter: Single Image World Modeling with Generative 3D Proxies

SpatialCrafter introduces a two‑stage framework for single‑image world modeling that first generates a global 3D proxy using a Point‑anchored Sparse Structure Flow module, then refines appearance with a Generative Deferred Refiner built on a video diffusion model. The method incorporates Parallel Geometry Injection and Proxy‑Aware Corruption training to integrate the proxy without disrupting the pretrained generative manifold, and it is evaluated on a newly constructed dataset of 115K scenes. Experiments demonstrate that SpatialCrafter outperforms existing approaches, reducing long‑term drift and maintaining consistency under rapid camera motion and extreme viewpoints.

By Chuan Fang, Lingteng Qiu, Yixun Liang, Rui Chen, Kunming Luo, Zhaohua Zheng, Tongyuan Bai, Feipeng Tian, Zilong Dong, Zihan Zhou, Ping Tan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Think3D: Thinking with Space for Spatial Reasoning

Think3D introduces a framework that endows Vision‑Language Models with interactive 3D chain‑of‑thought reasoning by integrating 3D manipulation tools for active spatial exploration. The approach improves performance on benchmarks such as BLINK Multi‑view, MindCube‑1K, and VSI‑Bench‑Tiny for proprietary models like GPT‑4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, and a reinforcement‑learning variant, Think3D‑RL, enables open‑weight models such as Qwen3‑VL‑4B to autonomously learn effective 3D exploration strategies, yielding tool‑use patterns comparable to stronger models and turning a performance drop on MindCube‑1K into a substantial improvement.

By Zaibin Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Lianjie Jia, Yifan Wang, Zhongbo Zhang, Yijiang Li, Binghao Ran, Fuxi Zhang, Zhuohan Sun, Yizhuang Peng, Zhenfei Yin, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

UniGeo: A Multi-modal Large Language Model for Text-Guided Cross-View Geo-Localization

UniGeo is a multimodal large language model designed for text-guided drone geo‑localization, enabling the identification of target regions in large image galleries from natural‑language descriptions. It integrates geo‑semantic understanding, cross‑view semantic generation, and candidate‑level verification within a shared vision‑language framework, establishing stable correspondences among local scene elements, spatial relations, and language. A multi‑stage training strategy progressively refines geo‑semantic learning, cross‑view mapping, and fine‑grained verification, yielding significant performance gains on GeoText‑1652, with R@10 and mAP improvements of 13.59 and 2.83 percentage points respectively.

By Jiahao Wen, Hang Yu, Zhedong Zheng
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Reconstructing Humans and Objects in Interaction using Large Reconstruction Models

The paper introduces MILO, a framework that uses Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) to reconstruct detailed 3D human‑object interactions from a single image. By treating the LRM mesh as a geometric scaffold, MILO segments it into human and object parts, fits a parametric body model to the human component, and optionally aligns an object template to the object component. The approach achieves higher reconstruction accuracy than existing baselines across multiple benchmarks and interaction scenarios.

By Agniv Chatterjee, Georgios Pavlakos
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

4DSynth: Controllable Procedural World Synthesis for Dynamic Embodied Simulation

4DSynth is a controllable procedural system that transforms natural-language descriptions, blueprint masks, or single photographs into editable 4D environments featuring explicit geometry, animated actors, collision-free trajectories, and physics-ready simulation states. The system unifies animation, camera planning, rendering, and task generation within a single geometry-grounded representation, enabling scalable creation of dynamic embodied simulation scenes. Using 4DSynth, the authors built 4DSynth-Nav, an interactive navigation benchmark that demonstrates the reproducibility and tunability of procedural failures across vision‑language models.

By Zehao Qi, Haochen Luo, Jia-Wang Bian, Zeyu Ma, Shuyang Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Knowledge Distillation Driven Semantic NOMA with GAN Refinement for 6G Robotic Vehicle Networks

The paper introduces KDG‑SemNOMA, a framework for 6G robotic vehicle networks that combines knowledge distillation and generative models to improve semantic communication over uplink non‑orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). It employs a ConvNeXt‑based deep joint source‑channel coding architecture with an enhanced attention feature module for dynamic channel adaptation, and uses an orthogonal teacher model to guide a NOMA student model via two‑stage knowledge distillation. A channel‑conditional GAN further refines the reconstructed images, yielding higher pixel‑level accuracy and perceptual fidelity on the FFHQ‑256 dataset compared to state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Qifei Wang, Zhen Gao, Li Qiao, Ziwei Wan, De Mi, Dapeng Li, Ying Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 28

High-Fidelity Face Content Recovery via Tamper-Resilient Versatile Watermarking

The paper introduces VeriFi, a watermarking framework that protects face images from AI‑generated manipulation. It embeds a compact semantic latent watermark to preserve content, localizes pixel‑level edits without explicit payloads, and simulates realistic deepfake attacks to improve robustness. Experiments on CelebA‑HQ and FFHQ show that VeriFi outperforms existing methods in robustness, localization accuracy, and recovery quality.

By Peipeng Yu, Jinfeng Xie, Chengfu Ou, Xiaoyu Zhou, Jianwei Fei, Yunshu Dai, Zhihua Xia, Chip Hong Chang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

DINOcular: Self-Supervised Visuospatial Representations

DINOcular is a self‑supervised framework that learns joint visuospatial representations from RGB‑D data. It fuses depth‑derived geometric priors with a visual backbone using inter‑patch and intra‑patch techniques, allowing the model to encode both appearance and spatial structure efficiently. The resulting representation improves 3D awareness on multiple geometry benchmarks while staying competitive on standard RGB‑D semantic segmentation tasks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

4DSynth: Controllable Procedural World Synthesis for Dynamic Embodied Simulation

4DSynth is a controllable procedural system that transforms natural-language descriptions, blueprint masks, or single photographs into editable 4D environments featuring explicit geometry, animated actors, collision-free trajectories, and physics-ready simulation states. The system unifies animation, camera planning, rendering, and task generation within a single geometry-grounded representation, enabling scalable creation of diverse, interactive scenes. Using 4DSynth, the authors built 4DSynth-Nav, an interactive navigation benchmark that demonstrates the reproducibility of failures and tunable difficulty across three tiers for vision‑language models.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Decoupling Planning and Control for Instructable Agents

The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples high‑level planning from low‑latency control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them autonomously at high frequency. Experiments across seven embodied environments, including multi‑agent settings, show that this approach outperforms both controller‑only and direct VLM action‑generation methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping in different pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Safety by Design: Realized-Cost Constraints for Contextual Bandits with Continuous Actions

The paper introduces a new approach to safety in contextual bandits with continuous actions by enforcing high‑probability constraints on the realized cost rather than on its expectation. It proposes the High‑Probability Constrained UCB algorithm, which balances optimistic reward exploration with pessimistic safety estimation. The authors provide theoretical regret guarantees for linear models and extend the analysis to general function classes, demonstrating experimentally that realized‑cost constraints significantly reduce safety violations compared to expected‑cost baselines.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Parameter Efficient Continual Learning for Sparse Event-Based Transformers

The paper introduces sLoTh, a parameter‑efficient continual learning framework for sparse event‑based vision transformers. By freezing the backbone and limiting plasticity to low‑rank attention updates (seLoRA) and shared neuronal threshold modulation, sLoTh adapts to new tasks while updating less than 1% of the parameters and avoiding replay buffers. Experiments on CIFAR‑100, Tiny‑ImageNet, ImageNet‑100, and ImageNet‑R show competitive rehearsal‑free performance across up to 100 tasks and achieve roughly 6.5× lower energy consumption than dense vision transformers.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

DPA-I2P: Depth-Guided Projective Alignment for Image-to-Point-Cloud Registration in Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces DPA-I2P, a depth‑guided projective alignment method for image‑to‑point‑cloud registration in autonomous driving. It employs Ray‑Conditioned Metric Depth Encoding and Projection‑Consistent Vision Lifting to align depth and visual cues geometrically, and uses Cross‑Modal Query Pruning to filter unreliable matches during refinement. Experiments on KITTI and nuScenes show significant improvements, reducing rotation and translation errors by up to 55.6% compared to existing implicit baselines.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Fusing Perceptual Vision Experts with Multimodal Large Language Models for Explainable Plant Disease Diagnosis: From Benchmark Imagery to Real-World Robotic Field Validation

The paper introduces the Hybrid Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework (H$^{2}$MAF), which fuses decision-level outputs from EfficientNet-B3 and ConvNeXt-Tiny with semantic arbitration by multimodal large language models Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen3.5 4B to produce explainable plant disease diagnoses. Evaluated on 14,364 images from PlantDoc and two Cornell robotic field datasets, the framework achieves up to 99.3% accuracy, with Gemma improving PlantDoc accuracy from 63.9% to 68.5% and demonstrating low critical‑risk error. The results highlight the potential of MLLM arbitration for reliable, explainable agricultural AI under real‑world field conditions.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Pengyao Xie, Nikolaos D. Tselikas, Lirong Xiang, Manoj Karkee
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving

Latent-CoT-Drive (LCDrive) is a vision‑language‑action model for autonomous driving that replaces natural‑language chain‑of‑thought reasoning with a latent language capturing possible outcomes of driving actions. The model interleaves action‑proposal tokens, aligned with the model’s output actions, and world‑model tokens grounded in a learned latent world model to reason about future outcomes. After a supervised cold‑start using ground‑truth future rollouts, LCDrive is further refined with closed‑loop reinforcement learning, achieving faster inference, higher‑quality trajectories, and greater gains from interactive RL than both non‑reasoning and text‑reasoning baselines on a large‑scale end‑to‑end driving benchmark.

By Shuhan Tan, Kashyap Chitta, Yuxiao Chen, Ran Tian, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Yulong Cao, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Marco Pavone, Boris Ivanovic
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

3DGAA: Realistic and Robust 3D Gaussian-based Adversarial Attack for Autonomous Driving

The paper presents 3DGAA, a fabrication-first framework that generates view-consistent, geometry-preserving adversarial wraps for vehicles using 3D Gaussian splatting optimization. It ensures consistency across viewpoints, illumination, and occlusion while limiting changes to vehicle geometry, producing realistic print-only textures that significantly reduce detection confidence and average precision in simulations and physical tests. Ablation and efficiency studies analyze the impact of physical filtering, augmentation, and shape-consistency regularization, and the method demonstrates robustness against common preprocessing defenses and cross-detector transferability.

By Yixun Zhang, Lizhi Wang, Junjun Zhao, Wending Zhao, Feng Zhou, Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

GRIP: Algorithm-Agnostic Machine Unlearning for Mixture-of-Experts via Geometric Router Constraints

The paper introduces GRIP, an algorithm‑agnostic framework for machine unlearning in Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models. GRIP enforces hard geometric constraints on router updates, projecting gradient changes into the null space of the retain set’s routing matrix to prevent routing manipulation. Two variants—training‑time stochastic projection and post‑training analytical correction—show significant improvements in routing stability, retain accuracy, and resistance to white‑box adversarial recovery across two MoE models.

By Andy Zhu, Rongzhe Wei, Yupu Gu, Pan Li