Papers for

autonomous vehicle software teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Recurrent models with provable guarantees improve state estimation in robotics

Provable State Estimation with Recurrent Models

Abstract: Estimating the state of a dynamical system from observations is a crucial task in robotics and control. Despite their empirical success, recurrent models often lack formal guarantees on convergence and robustness. We bridge this gap by analyzing these architectures from the perspective of nonlinear observer theory. By framing RNNs as a time-discretization of continuous latent dynamical systems (Neural ODEs), we demonstrate that enforcing a contraction condition on the latent flow guarantees the existence of a smooth, injective map of the true physical state into the latent space. We prove that this architecture acts as a tunable observer: by increasing a single scalar gain that scales the latent vector field, the estimation error can be driven to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero at an exponentially fast rate. We further establish quantitative bounds on the MLP complexity required to decode this latent state, and extend our formal guarantees to the discrete-time residual RNN implementation. We validate the theory on a real mobile robotic task, where a provably contracting model outperforms a vanilla GRU with substantially more stable training. We also report that unconstrained GRUs converge to contracting dynamics on this task, suggesting that contraction is an emergent property of well-trained sequence models.

Fri 6 NovMachine Learning
The gist
Estimating the current condition of moving systems like robots from sensor data is very important but tricky. The authors study how special recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are good at handling sequences, can be designed to reliably track these states with mathematical guarantees. They show that by making the internal model contractive, it will quickly and accurately learn the true state. They also tested this on a real robot and found their method trained more stably and performed better than usual RNNs.
Open → 2611.09217v1

Diffusion driving models adaptively decode scenes for faster and better planning

Scene-Adaptive Readout and Decoding in Diffusion Driving VLAs

Abstract: Diffusion driving vision-language-action models repeatedly execute the backbone at every denoising stage, incurring substantial inference cost, while it remains unclear whether all scenes require the same decoding computation. To distinguish when a trajectory becomes readable from how much further refinement it requires, we analyze trajectory readout across network depth and decoding progress. We identify a depth-decoding dissociation in which late-layer representations already support useful trajectory readout after the first forward sweep, whereas early-layer representations benefit more from continued decoding. We further find that both the preferred readout layer and decoding depth vary across scenes. Based on these observations, we propose a scene-adaptive readout and decoding framework. A scene-conditioned readout MoE adaptively weights and combines trajectory predictions from layer-specific late-layer representations after a single backbone sweep, while an adaptive decoding policy applies additional native refinement only when required by the scene. We evaluate our framework on two diffusion driving VLAs across the Waymo E2E and nuScenes benchmarks. Our method improves validation RFS by up to 0.56 while also improving test performance, and achieves an end-to-end speedup of up to $6.0\times$ on Waymo E2E, while consistently reducing trajectory error on nuScenes. These results demonstrate that scene-level readout and decoding allocation improves planning quality while avoiding unnecessary decoding. Our code is available at https://github.com/sjyu001/SARD

Sun 1 NovComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceRobotics
The gist
Planning the movements of self-driving cars requires models that predict trajectories in complex environments. The authors found that for some scenes, the model can read good trajectories early without extra steps, while others need more refinement. They designed a method that adapts how much computation the model uses based on the scene's complexity, speeding up predictions and improving accuracy. This approach saves time by avoiding unnecessary processing and leads to better planning quality.
Open → 2611.02076v1

Control AI architecture enables real time learning for safe machines

Online Active Learning Architecture for Safety-Critical Control Systems

Abstract: The transition of information-centric artificial intelligence to safety-critical applications is impeded by the limitations of conventional offline-training paradigms in open-world environments. This paper presents Control AI, an architecture for Online Active Learning (OAL) inspired by the continuous Prediction-Evaluation-Correction process of biological intelligence. The framework combines the hierarchical representation capacity of deep neural networks with the real-time error-feedback adaptation of adaptive control. A prediction model maps sensory input into a latent manifold, an optional latent model represents transitions in that space, and a reconstruction model maps the latent state back to observable signals. Residuals between predictions and measurements provide the internal learning signal. Spatial and temporal cross-reconstruction architectures prevent OAL from collapsing to a trivial identity mapping, while coupled, dual, and localized variants shorten error-transmission paths. Localized predictive coding style OAL is implemented through guidance-backpropagation and target-backpropagation architectures, and hybrid and scaled variants support high-dimensional deployment. The paper focuses on the architectural rationale and the progression from a conceptual feedback loop to practical large-scale configurations.

Sun 1 NovComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Safety-critical systems need to learn and adapt as they operate, but traditional AI is often trained before use and can’t adjust well to new situations. The authors present Control AI, a system that learns continuously by comparing its predictions to what actually happens and correcting itself in real time. This approach is inspired by how biological brains keep improving through feedback loops. Their design uses layers of neural networks combined with control theory to avoid simple errors and improve predictive accuracy.
Open → 2611.01907v1

Efficient image generation with continuous label control and fewer steps

Efficient Covariance-Aware Vicinal Latent Diffusion for Continuous Conditional Image Generation

Abstract: Continuous Conditional Generative Modeling (CCGM) aims to synthesize high-dimensional data conditioned on continuously valued scalar labels. However, existing continuous diffusion models face severe data sparsity under imbalanced and long-tailed label distributions, which can lead to visual artifacts and condition inconsistency. Moreover, inference-time classifier-free guidance and dense pixel-space integration introduce substantial sampling overhead, limiting practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose CAViLD, an efficient latent diffusion framework for continuous conditional generation. CAViLD first constructs a purified condition-aware latent space through density-adaptive vicinal learning, auxiliary semantic regularization, and NIQE-guided negative data augmentation. It then internalizes the conditional guidance direction through an EMA teacher, enabling single-branch conditional inference, and introduces covariance-aware progressive distillation for label-dependent probability-flow ODEs, supporting sampling down to four NFEs. Experiments on RC-49, UTKFace, and Steering Angle demonstrate a favorable trade-off among generation fidelity, continuous condition consistency, and sampling efficiency.

Thu 29 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating images based on numbers that change smoothly, like age or angle, is hard when the data used to train the computer is unbalanced or rare for some values. The authors introduce a new method called CAViLD to build a smarter way for the computer to understand and generate images in a smaller, meaningful space. Their approach also speeds up generating images by learning how to guide the process without extra parts and needing fewer steps. Tests show that CAViLD creates better, more consistent images while working faster than some older methods.
Open → 2610.39277v1

Reinforcement learning improves safety by limiting risky decisions

Variational Consequence-Driven Offline Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) typically mitigates distribution shift by imposing divergence constraints on the action distributions of the learned and behavior policies. However, this paradigm cannot ensure the underlying dynamic consistency structure: even minor action deviations can lead to drastically different transitions, inadvertently driving the agent away from the offline dataset. To address this, we explore policy constraints through their induced state-consequence distributions rather than relying on pure action-distribution matching. Nevertheless, directly enforcing such consequence-aware constraints is computationally intractable without access to the true underlying dynamics model. To bypass this issue, we propose Structural Behavior Regularization (StBR), which replaces the intractable objective with a closed-form latent divergence. Structuring this latent space to reflect transition dynamics renders the latent divergence a theoretically bounded surrogate for the true consequence-distribution divergence. By regularizing the learned policy with this latent divergence, StBR adaptively tightens the behavior constraint in dynamics-sensitive regions, effectively preventing deviations outside the offline dataset. Empirically, we demonstrate that StBR achieves superior performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks.

Wed 28 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Offline reinforcement learning can struggle when small changes in actions lead to big changes in outcomes, making it hard for the algorithm to learn effectively from past data. The authors address this by focusing on how actions affect future states, not just matching previous actions. They propose a new method called Structural Behavior Regularization that uses a clever mathematical shortcut to keep the learned policy close to safe behaviors in tricky situations. Their experiments show this approach performs better than existing methods on common offline learning tests.
Open → 2610.38238v1

Differentiable layer improves vehicle control safety and performance

A Differentiable Chassis Safety Layer for Intelligent Vehicle Motion Control

Abstract: Learning-based vehicle motion control requires coordination between diverse task objectives and state-dependent chassis safety constraints. Conventional cascaded architectures may compromise task performance when safety filters modify nominal commands independently of policy learning. This article proposes a differentiable chassis safety layer that modularly integrates task-oriented control with explicit physical constraints. Actuator limits, individual-tire force constraints, and vehicle handling envelopes are incorporated into sequential quadratic programs. Each projected command propagates the predicted vehicle dynamics and updates subsequent constraints, enabling temporal gradient coupling through implicit differentiation. A two-stage learning strategy combines expert imitation with risk-guided supervision and conditional intervention guidance to coordinate nominal control decisions with chassis safety constraints. Closed-loop evaluations under unseen scenarios, emergency maneuvers, and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed method improves safety-performance coordination and exploits vehicle dynamic potential while maintaining handling stability.

Sat 24 OctRobotics
The gist
Keeping self-driving cars safe while making them drive smoothly is tricky because safety rules can clash with the driving goals. The authors created a new way to mix safety rules directly into the car’s driving decisions so the car learns how to be both safe and effective. Their system uses math to make sure commands to the car don’t break physical limits, and it learns in two steps: copying experts and then adjusting to risky situations. Tests show their approach helps cars handle emergencies better while staying stable.
Open → 2610.33476v1

Practical algorithm bridges theory and deep reinforcement learning in hidden state problems

From POMDP Theory to Deep RL with Particle Filters

Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning in partially observable environments requires inferring hidden states, learning latent dynamics, and planning under the resulting belief. Practical algorithms often solve one aspect of the above pipeline while relying on approximations for the others that are often poorly understood, while existing POMDP theory typically analyzes computationally inefficient theoretical algorithms far from modern deep RL practice. To fill this gap, we propose a practical end-to-end algorithm that approximately solves the hidden state filtering problem via sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), updates a latent dynamics model online, and performs approximate online planning for $d$ steps before bootstrapping leaves with a state-value critic (a QMDP approximation). We analyze each approximation and prove an end-to-end regret bound decomposing the error into model estimation error, particle filter error, Monte Carlo rollout error, and a structural bias term induced by the QMDP approximation controllable by the planning depth that we further analyze in various special cases. The resulting guarantee makes explicit how statistical sample size, particle budget, rollout budget, and planning depth affect performance. We instantiate our algorithm in an MPC-based deep RL framework, demonstrating its practicality on a variety of environments. On a POMDP that satisfies our assumptions, each term of the bound decays at its predicted rate. Our results provide a practical and theoretically grounded route for bridging theory and practice within online decision-making in POMDPs.

Tue 20 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Many problems in artificial intelligence involve making decisions without knowing all the facts, which makes learning and planning difficult. The authors propose a new practical method that helps computers guess hidden information, learn how things change, and plan actions better using a mix of smart guessing and deep learning. They also prove how different parts of the method affect overall performance and show that their approach works well in tests. This helps connect complex theoretical ideas to real-world learning algorithms.
Open → 2610.27575v1

CatchUp efficiently reduces visual tokens in large vision models

CatchUp: Depth-Aware Re-Admission of Visual Tokens for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) repeatedly process hundreds of visual tokens across decoder layers, incurring substantial computation and memory costs. Existing inference-time visual token pruning methods often irreversibly remove low-ranked tokens, although the set of visual tokens receiving high query-conditioned attention can change across decoder depth. Recoverable routing preserves skipped tokens for later reconsideration, but re-admits them with stale representations after bypassing intermediate transformations. We further find that replacing stale re-admitted states with their current-depth oracle states from a full-token reference trajectory substantially improves grounding performance. We therefore propose CatchUp, a training-free framework for depth-aware visual-token re-admission. CatchUp repeatedly re-evaluates query-conditioned visual relevance, processes only selected visual tokens through each decoder interval, and preserves deferred tokens for later re-admission. Upon re-admission, CatchUp approximates missed representation evolution using reference-to-current transition signals from semantically and spatially related visual tokens. Across three referring-expression grounding datasets and six multimodal benchmarks, CatchUp achieves the highest average relative retention in both benchmark groups at 64-, 128-, and 192-token budgets. At a 64-token budget with 88.9% fewer active visual tokens, CatchUp retains 92.17% of the full model's performance on average across six multimodal benchmarks while reducing end-to-end latency by 8.0%. Code is available at https://github.com/pej0918/CatchUp

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Large vision-language models look at many parts of an image to understand it, which takes a lot of computing power. Current methods cut down the parts they look at but don’t always reconsider skipped parts fully later, causing missing detail. The authors found a way to reintroduce those skipped parts with updated information during processing, helping keep good results with less work. Their method, CatchUp, picks which image parts to process step-by-step and improves speed while keeping model accuracy high.
Open → 2610.23324v1

Distributional critics improve value estimates with posterior averaging

Posterior-Averaged Bellman Flow Matching for Distributional Critics

Abstract: Distributional critics model the full return distribution, providing richer signals for exploration and risk-sensitive control. Recent work has shown that flow-based critics can model these distributions flexibly and provide effective supervision across flow time for temporal-difference learning. However, unlike standard flow matching with fixed data endpoints, a flow critic is trained on Bellman targets recursively generated by a learned target critic under the current policy. Existing objectives therefore either use noisy single-endpoint supervision or rely on the learned flow itself for additional guidance. Our key observation is that an intermediate bridge state may be compatible with several Bellman endpoints, so its velocity should average their directions under the corresponding posterior. We propose Posterior-Averaged Bellman Flow Matching (PA-BFM), which samples an endpoint pool, infers the closed-form posterior over the latent anchor, and regresses to the posterior-mean velocity. Uniform anchor selection makes this target an exact finite-pool Rao--Blackwellization of the single-endpoint target: for every \(K\), it preserves the population target, cannot increase conditional variance, and its conditional variance scales as \(O(K^{-1})\). The endpoint pool supports conservative updates, while the twin return flows provide critic-disagreement and unsupported-mass diagnostics. Controlled studies show that PA-BFM reduces fixed-query target mean-squared error by \(79.7\%\) and target-induced gradient variance by up to \(98.0\%\), while improving return-distribution fidelity. Across 50 OGBench tasks and four offline-to-online scenarios, PA-BFM achieves higher aggregate performance than Value Flows.

Tue 13 OctMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Estimating all possible outcomes of decisions helps AI learn better and take smarter risks. The authors found that existing methods struggle because they only use one target outcome at a time, which can be noisy or inconsistent. They propose a new way to consider multiple possible future outcomes together, averaging the directions the AI should learn from. This approach reduces error and uncertainty in learning, leading to better and more reliable predictions in many tested tasks.
Open → 2610.17788v1

Visual language helps fix tracking errors in video object segmentation

When Trackers Fail: VLM-Guided Verification and Recovery for Robust Video Object Segmentation

Abstract: Recent trackers built on foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieve strong performance by propagating object masks through memory. However, this strength is also a key source of failure: under occlusion, reappearance, or distractors, an incorrect prediction can enter the tracking loop and be propagated over time, resulting in persistent identity drift. Existing approaches seek to prevent such failures through improved memory and temporal modeling, but once a failure occurs, the tracker has no explicit mechanism to recognize or correct it. We address this gap with Dual-Agent, a failure-aware tracking framework that complements propagation with explicit verification and recovery. We address this gap with Dual-Agent, a failure-aware tracking framework that complements propagation with explicit verification and recovery. A vision-language verification agent first reasons over spatio-temporal context to determine whether the tracker is still following the target. When a failure is detected, a correction agent uses temporal context to recover the target before tracking continues. The correction agent is trained on real SAM3 failures, augmented with targeted identity-switch and distractor perturbations that expose it to challenging ambiguities during recovery. On LVOS-v2 and SecVOS, Dual-Agent improves SAM3 by 1.2 and 2.7 $J\&F$, respectively. Importantly, the proposed framework transfers without retraining to SAM2.1, SeC, and Cutie, as well as to long-term video object tracking benchmarks including LaSOT-ext, TNL2K, and VOT-LT2022. Our results show that explicitly reasoning about when tracking fails and how to recover provides a complementary path to robust tracking beyond improving propagation alone. Project page: valaybundele.github.io/Dual-Agent.

Sun 11 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking objects in videos can go wrong when things block the view or objects look similar, causing the system to lose track of the right target. The authors present Dual-Agent, a method that can recognize when tracking goes wrong and then fix it using a language-assisted verification process. One agent checks if the tracking is still accurate by looking at the scene and language cues, and if a problem is found, a second agent helps recover the correct object before continuing. This approach improves tracking accuracy on several benchmarks and works well even with different tracking systems without retraining.
Open → 2610.15929v1

Render dedicated geometry improves novel view synthesis quality

RDGSplat: Render-Dedicated Geometry for Novel View Synthesis

Abstract: 3D foundation models enable efficient novel view synthesis by carrying a Gaussian head on the representation they already use for reconstruction. However, the views they render fall short of the geometry they recover, because that geometry is estimated under a metric objective and never scored on how it renders. Recent methods alleviate this by updating the backbone weights, but they thereby discard the metric predictions the model was built for and must be repeated for every new backbone. To this end, we propose RDGSplat, a framework that decodes a second geometry dedicated to rendering from a frozen 3D foundation model, leaving its metric predictions intact. In particular, we devise Render-Dedicated Geometry Decoding, which duplicates the pretrained decoders and optimizes the duplicates under photometric supervision alone. Then, a Target-Pose Conditioned Adapter is introduced to reformulate the representation those decoders read, conditioned on the target camera pose rather than the target image. Extensive experiments show that RDGSplat improves novel view synthesis across three feed-forward backbones on four benchmarks, with every pretrained weight frozen. On RE10K, it raises WM2.0 from 20.918 to 24.266\,dB while training 205.5\,M added parameters against a frozen 1.4\,B backbone, and the depth and pose the same model predicts are unchanged.

Tue 6 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating new images of an object from different viewpoints is hard because the 3D shapes used often do not match how the views actually look. The authors propose a way to create a second 3D shape specifically for making better images, without changing the original shape used for measurements. By keeping the first shape unchanged and focusing on this second one, their method improves the quality of new views made from fixed pretrained systems. This lets the original 3D information stay accurate while the rendered images look better.
Open → 2610.09173v1

Wheel based quadruped racing improves with learned residual dynamics

RACER: Residual-Adaptive Closed-Loop Estimation for Sampling-Based Planning in Wheeled-Quadruped Racing

Abstract: We present RACER, a hierarchical control framework for wheel-based quadruped racing that combines an MPPI planner with a learned residual dynamics model and a low-level RL velocity tracker. The planner augments a nominal unicycle kinematic model with a neural residual term to capture the closed-loop tracking behavior of the RL policy. To train this residual model under limited real-world data, we propose Low-Rank Residual Adaptation (LoRRA), a two-stage approach that pre-trains on large-scale simulation data for broad coverage and then fine-tunes on a small real-world dataset with a low-rank constraint. In simulation, we empirically validate our engineering choices by showing (A) Residual dynamics improve the overall performance of our pipeline by capturing the tracking error of RL velocity tracker at high-speed cornering. (B) Residual dynamics trained with both source-domain and target-domain data gives racing performance significantly better than the residual dynamics trained with only target-domain data. (C) Low-rank constraint at target-domain adaptation gives higher success rates and higher performance than full-tune and from-scratch when domain gap in ground coefficient or joint gain increases.

Mon 5 OctRobotics
The gist
Controlling wheeled four-legged robots to race quickly and accurately is hard because their movements are complex and influenced by many factors. The authors created a new control framework called RACER that combines a traditional planning method with a learned model that corrects for tracking errors, plus a low-level controller to follow velocity commands. They developed a way to train this learned correction model efficiently by first using lots of simulated data and then fine-tuning with a small amount of real-world data. Their experiments show that this approach helps the robot handle sharp turns better and perform more reliably across different surfaces.
Open → 2610.07409v1

Fine tuning large language models improves driving video captioning quality

Comparative study of adapting pre-trained models for driving behavior video captioning

Abstract: This report examines and compares some of the many fine tuning and prompting methods existing, applying them within the domain of autonomous driving. The idea is to compare these methods by adapting a Large Language Model (LLM) on a video dataset. LLM's have become extremely good at achieving a good understanding of different forms of data and this study aims to induce a low dimensional understanding of driving situations into our primary test model SpaceTimeGPT. Experiments on BDD-X (Berkeley DeepDrive eXplanation) dataset demonstrate good performance of the full fine tuning framework on some automatic metrics, and in some metrics, it even surpasses the baseline. We also try Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and prompt engineering on VideoLLaVA model and discuss its limitations.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
Understanding what is happening in driving videos is important for autonomous vehicles to explain their actions. This paper looks at different ways to adapt large language models that normally understand text to describe driving scenes from video data. The authors tested methods like full fine tuning, low-rank adaptation, and prompt engineering on specific models and datasets. They found that full fine tuning of their main model performed well and even beat some baseline results on certain metrics. They also explored limitations of other approaches like prompt engineering on another model.
Open → 2609.39542v1

Sparse world action models speed up robot video prediction twice as fast

Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination

Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video models to improve generalization in robot control by jointly predicting future visual states and actions. This capability comes at a substantial inference cost, as dense future-frame tokens are repeatedly processed during denoising. Prior methods address this by token pruning that prioritizes visual fidelity to reduce denoising costs in video diffusion models. However, these methods do not use action relevance to determine which future-frame tokens to retain during joint denoising in WAMs. In this paper, we propose Sparse-WAM, a training-free framework for action-guided sparse imagination that selectively processes future-frame tokens to accelerate WAM inference. We observe substantial overlap in the spatial distribution of attention from action tokens to future-frame tokens (action-to-future attention) between consecutive denoising steps, despite continued updates to the future representations. Motivated by this, we develop Action-Guided Token Selection to retain frame-specific action-relevant regions together with cross-frame context. However, a naive implementation can incur attention-scoring and token-packing overhead that offsets the computational savings from pruning. We therefore introduce Pilot, an efficient engine that reduces sparse inference overhead through lightweight scoring and cross-step reuse of token selections. On LIBERO with FastWAM-Joint and RoboLab-120 with Cosmos 3 Edge, Sparse-WAM achieves inference speedups of approximately $2.0\times$ and $1.8\times$, respectively, over dense eager inference on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, while largely preserving task performance.

Wed 30 SeptRoboticsArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Robot controllers sometimes predict what will happen next in a video to decide their actions. This prediction can be slow because it processes lots of video frames fully. The authors found a way to speed this up by paying attention only to the parts of each video frame that matter most for the robot's future actions. They designed a method to pick these important parts efficiently, reducing the amount of video data processed and making the robot’s predictions nearly twice as fast while keeping performance high.
Open → 2609.38984v1

Signal-routed temperature scaling improves calibration for small data sets

Signal-Routed Temperature Scaling: Low-Capacity Risk-Conditioned Calibration for Small Validation Budgets

Abstract: When a classifier is recalibrated from only a few thousand held-out examples, the capacity of the calibration map becomes a statistical design choice rather than a purely architectural one: a scalar map can underfit structured residual miscalibration, while a highly adaptive map can be hard to estimate reliably from so small a split. We disentangle the calibration objective from adaptive capacity and propose signal-routed temperature scaling (SRTS-BCE), a 10-parameter, argmax-preserving calibrator that cross-fits a correctness-risk score over six logit statistics and fits one top-label-BCE temperature per $K=3$ risk groups, recovering TvA-TS as its $K=1$ limit. On fine-tuned CIFAR-100 / ViT-B/16, SRTS-BCE reduces $\mathrm{ECE}_{15}$ from 1.65 (scalar TvA-TS) to 0.96, matching the higher-capacity SMART+BCE head (0.95) at the full calibration budget. The two regimes separate as the budget shrinks: at $n=250$ SRTS-BCE beats SMART+BCE on all three CIFAR-100 backbones (the seed-to-draw hierarchical interval excludes zero), whereas the flagship comparison against the scalar remains directional. A protocol-frozen Tiny-ImageNet follow-up reproduces the small-budget separation and exhibits a budget-dependent ranking reversal on Swin-T; matched routing and map controls show that the effect is tied neither to the learned router nor to discrete grouping. Together the results identify post-hoc calibrator capacity as a finite-sample design choice whose preferred level shifts with the amount of available calibration data.

Wed 30 SeptMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When computers learn to recognize things, they sometimes get uncertain or overconfident in their guesses. Fixing this uncertainty usually needs a lot of extra examples, which isn’t always possible. The authors designed a simple new method that better adjusts confidence even when only a small number of examples is available. Their method divides data into risk groups and adjusts guesses accordingly, improving accuracy on popular image tasks compared to older methods.
Open → 2609.38936v1

Self supervised rgb thermal tracking improves performance without extra labels

End-to-End Self-Supervised RGB-T Tracking without Modality Misleading

Abstract: RGB-T object tracking leverages the complementary characteristics of visible and thermal infrared modalities to improve robustness under adverse conditions. Existing supervised methods typically rely on costly modality-aligned bounding box annotations, while most self-supervised approaches follow a two-stage pseudo-labeling paradigm, making tracker training sensitive to pseudo-label quality and preventing joint end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose ESMTrack, a fully end-to-end self-supervised RGB-T tracking framework without offline pseudo-label generation or dense frame-level bounding box annotations. Given only the standard initial-frame annotation used in visual tracking, ESMTrack learns discriminative and temporally consistent representations through two complementary objectives: a grounding triplet loss on annotated initial frames and a cross-frame temporal triplet loss on unlabeled search frames, with reliable samples selected by forward-backward consistency. To address modality dominance bias, ESMTrack employs a three-branch architecture consisting of a fusion branch and two unimodal branches for RGB and thermal inputs. We quantify modality contributions using the Average Peak-to-Correlation Energy by measuring response discrepancies between the fusion and unimodal branches. The resulting reliability estimates guide a training-time modality decoupling mechanism that suppresses dominant-modality shortcuts and adaptively weights cross-modal contrastive learning for task-level alignment. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that ESMTrack achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance, strong cross-dataset generalization, and real-time inference speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiShenglana/ESMTrack.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking objects using both regular (RGB) and thermal images helps get better results, especially in tricky conditions. Most methods need lots of labeled data or rely on imperfect labels made beforehand, which can cause problems during training. The authors designed a new method called ESMTrack that learns directly from the initial frame's annotation and unlabeled data in an end-to-end way, without needing extra labels or pre-made guesses. It prevents one type of image from dominating the learning process and adapts to both types of images to improve tracking accuracy.
Open → 2609.37162v1

Trafficimag benchmark tests counterfactual roadside traffic video generation

TrafficImag: A Benchmark for Counterfactual Roadside Traffic Video Generation

Abstract: Existing roadside traffic datasets support perception, forecasting, and visual question answering, but they do not evaluate counterfactual video generation, in which a selected actor is modified and the generated future should remain consistent with road topology and unrelated traffic. We introduce TrafficImag, the first benchmark for counterfactual roadside traffic video generation. TrafficImag combines a large-scale roadside dataset (9,022 annotated images, 7,043 deduplicated video clips, and 31,145 actor-centered history-future samples) with an executable protocol that supports behavior reasoning, intervention-aware image editing, and conditional video generation. Each intervention is represented as an actor-level program describing the target actor, intended behavior, legal route, interaction order, and temporal constraints, enabling a unified evaluation interface across heterogeneous foundation models. TrafficImag evaluates four complementary validity dimensions: initial-state correctness, route and behavior validity, interaction consistency, and non-target preservation, and considers an end-to-end counterfactual successful only when all four are satisfied. Across state-of-the-art foundation models, the strongest reasoner reaches 80.4% macro F1, the complete condition interface raises end-to-end success from 23.3% to 55.0% for the best generator. Oracle studies further show that conditional video execution is the primary remaining bottleneck. TrafficImag provides a reproducible benchmark for evaluating and diagnosing counterfactual traffic video generation beyond perceptual video quality.

Fri 25 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Road cameras capture how traffic moves, but changing one vehicle's actions and predicting what happens next without breaking real-world rules is hard. The authors created TrafficImag, a new test set and method to check how well computer programs can change a car’s behavior in a roadside video and still keep everything nearby looking right and logical. TrafficImag includes many videos with detailed labels and a way to measure if the changes follow road rules and keep other cars unchanged. They found current AI models still struggle to perfectly generate these 'what-if' traffic videos, pointing to areas needing improvement.
Open → 2609.30722v1

Motion planning runs up to 10 times faster with vectorized reparameterization

ReVAMP: Vector-Accelerated Motion Planning for Kinematically-Constrained Systems via Reparameterization

Abstract: Robots often must satisfy one or more constraints during motion planning for real-world tasks. When such constraints reduce the valid configuration space to a measure-zero subset, sampling based planning algorithms require modifications to draw feasible samples. For many common end-effector constraints, parameterizations built on inverse kinematics (IK) provide an alternate formulation where the constraints are satisfied by construction, allowing directly sampling the feasible set. Despite their elegant approach, parameterized planners have remained slower than vector-accelerated implementations of projection-based approaches, leaving their performance ceiling an open question. We explore a new axis of vectorization built upon reparameterizing the planning space through analytic IK. This approach addresses existing inefficiencies in vectorized projection-based planners and exposes new opportunities for parallelism within the planner. We show that the planner can synthesize plans in microseconds to milliseconds for high dimensional systems (up to 20 dimensions), with complex constraints, up to 10x faster than the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we demonstrate how such planning speeds open up avenues for restructuring sequential manipulation pipelines.

Thu 24 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots often have to move while following strict rules about how their arms or tools can be positioned. These rules make the planning very tricky because only a tiny set of movements are allowed. The authors found a new way to re-describe the robot’s possible movements so they can quickly find good paths by doing many calculations at once. Their method lets robots calculate complex movement plans much faster than before, which could make robot tasks more efficient and flexible.
Open → 2609.30213v1

Founref improves depth accuracy and speed using sparse metric anchors

FounRef: Robust, Structure-Preserving, and Fast Metric Refinement of Frozen Monocular Foundation Priors with Sparse Anchors

Abstract: Dense metric depth from cameras is essential to real-world 3D applications, yet achieving accuracy, faithful surface geometry, and fast inference simultaneously remains challenging. Monocular foundation models provide rich, transferable geometric priors but lack reliable metric scale, while depth-completion networks recover metric depth at the cost of geometric fidelity, cross-domain robustness, or speed. We present FounRef, a training-free method that aligns a frozen monocular foundation prior with sparse metric anchors to produce dense metric depth. FounRef is modular by design: its depth prior, anchor source, and refinement solver can each be replaced independently. We instantiate FounRef with MoGe-2 and LiDAR anchors. FounRef validates each anchor against the prior's dense depth prediction, rejecting inconsistencies caused by cross-sensor misalignment that geometry-only filters cannot detect. It then applies global and local metric corrections through a structure-preserving solver, retaining the prior's fine-grained geometry. FounRef requires no task-specific training and operates out of the box across unfamiliar cameras and scenes. On out-of-domain data, it delivers up to 24% lower depth error, 92% lower surface-normal noise, and almost 15x faster inference than DMD3C, a state-of-the-art depth-completion network. By decoupling metric alignment from geometry prediction, FounRef provides an accurate, geometrically faithful, and efficient approach to dense metric depth that can directly benefit from future advances in foundation models and metric sensors.

Thu 24 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Getting accurate 3D depth from single camera images is hard because computers often struggle to know the real size of objects. The authors developed FounRef, a method that improves depth guesses by combining general depth knowledge from AI models with a few real-world distance points from sensors like LiDAR. This approach fixes errors without needing new training and works fast in many situations. It gives better and more reliable 3D measurements for things like robots or cameras looking at new scenes.
Open → 2609.29224v1

Vision language models systematically tested for safer automotive perception

Towards Systematic Qualification of Vision-Language Models for Automotive Perception Systems

Abstract: The field of Artificial Intelligence has been adopted for many application domains. Vision Language Models are one of the recently advanced AI techniques that have been explored to support automotive features such as vehicle perception, and safety assurance. However, such language models are prone to hallucinations, posing a potential threat to the safety of automotive systems that may incorporate them. Within the automotive domain, VLMs could not only hallucinate traffic objects, but could also fail to identify traffic objects that are actually present, which may potentially lead to dangerous situations. Though we have observed a growing body of literature that proposes verification and validation techniques for safe and trustworthy AI, these methods are often studied in isolation, focusing either on run-time or design-time phases. Such isolated techniques could be insufficient in safety-critical, realistic contexts such as automotive perception systems. In this paper, we analyze design-time and run-time verification and validation techniques based on a taxonomy presented by Huang et al. We present an automotive study in which a design-time qualification workflow is proposed to complement run-time monitoring. This workflow combines a fixed safety-relevant ontology-based structured annotation system together with a synonym-based evaluation process to statistically evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs against data from the nuScenes dataset. We observed that the proposed technique enables deterministic and repeatable quantification of the hallucinations VLMs generate in automotive perception-related tasks. The proposed workflow supports model comparison and deployment-oriented engineering decisions within the design-time verification and validation process and will contribute to a holistic verification strategy that strives towards trustworthy automotive perception systems

Tue 22 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionSoftware Engineering
The gist
Vision-language models (VLMs) that combine images and text can help cars understand their surroundings. However, these models sometimes see things that aren’t really there or miss objects that are present, which can be dangerous for driving. The authors study ways to test these models both when they are being designed and while they are running. They create a method that uses a structured system of labels and synonyms to check how often and what types of mistakes the models make on a standard self-driving car dataset. This helps engineers compare models and make safer choices for car perception systems.
Open → 2609.25945v1

Dynamic pedestrian aware navigation improves robot safety and success

DPed-VLN: A Benchmark for Socially Compliant Vision-and-Language Navigation in Dynamic Pedestrian Environments

Abstract: Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has advanced rapidly in static indoor environments, but robots operating in human-populated spaces must ground language while responding to moving pedestrians and social-safety constraints. We present DPed-VLN, a Habitat 3.0 benchmark for dynamic-pedestrian VLN that couples 33,093 navigation episodes with paired global and prior-augmented instructions, ORCA-controlled humanoid pedestrians, socially constrained expert paths, and metrics that jointly assess navigation efficiency and social safety. DPed-VLN separates ordinary goal-oriented route guidance from prior-augmented instructions that expose dynamic-pedestrian cues for controlled analysis. To instantiate the benchmark, we introduce DPet (Dynamic Pedestrian-aware Network), a pedestrian-aware policy network trained with reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We further adapt representative state-of-the-art VLM-based navigation models, including NaVILA and StreamVLN, to DPed-VLN through LoRA fine-tuning. Experiments show that LoRA adaptation improves zero-shot VLM baselines in several success and safety metrics, especially reducing StreamVLN's collision rate. Among the evaluated methods, DPet-RL achieves the highest SR, SPL, and STL.

Fri 18 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots that navigate indoors often avoid obstacles, but walking safely with moving people requires understanding instructions while reacting socially. The authors created a new benchmark and dataset called DPed-VLN that tests robot navigation with moving pedestrians and social rules. They made a new navigation system called DPet that learns to avoid collisions and follow instructions better by watching and practicing. They also improved other robot navigation models to adapt to crowded, moving environments. Their system showed better success in finishing tasks safely compared to others.
Open → 2609.21504v1

Vehicular federated learning improves communication with adaptive gradient sending

FedPGT: Progressive Gradient Transmission for Vehicular Federated Learning over Time-Varying Channels

Abstract: Vehicular federated learning (VFL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative model training for intelligent transportation systems, where communication resource allocation and gradient sparsification techniques have been explored to reduce communication overhead. However, vehicle mobility leads to rapidly varying channel conditions and transmission capacity, rendering predetermined resource allocation and sparsification decisions ineffective. In this paper, we propose FedPGT, a progressive gradient transmission scheme for VFL over time-varying channels, where vehicles progressively transmit high-magnitude gradient entries in response to instantaneous channel conditions. We establish a convergence bound that characterizes the impact of transmitted gradient entries and reveals diminishing-return behavior governed by a power-law decay. Motivated by this result, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem for online decision-making, where the main challenge lies in a cumulatively coupled, non-separable objective. To handle this challenge, we introduce per-slot surrogate transmission variables to decouple the long-term dependence across time slots and convert the original objective into an additive per-slot optimization problem, enabling a Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty approach for online scheduling. We further develop a low-complexity resource allocation algorithm for efficient online implementation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a 3.65% accuracy improvement on the CIFAR-10 image classification task and a 12.66% reduction in average displacement error on the Argoverse trajectory prediction task compared with state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its applicability to diverse learning tasks under highly dynamic vehicular environments.

Wed 16 SeptMachine LearningInformation Theory
The gist
Training AI models in cars without sharing raw data is tricky because cars move fast and wireless connections change suddenly. The authors designed a method that lets cars send the most important learning updates bit by bit, adjusting to how good the connection is at each moment. This approach helps the learning process stay accurate and efficient even when signals are unstable. They tested it on image recognition and vehicle path prediction, showing it works better than previous methods.
Open → 2609.18089v1

Hyperball optimizers match conventional optimizers in scale invariant networks

HyperTransfer: Understanding the Equivalence between Base Optimizer and Hyperball

Abstract: Hyperball optimizers constrain parameter norms and update only their directions, establishing a distinct paradigm for neural network optimization. Although this geometry appears fundamentally different from that of conventional Base Optimizers, which update both parameter norms and directions, we show that the two paradigms are dynamically equivalent for scale-invariant networks. Building on this equivalence, we propose HyperTransfer, which constructs a Hyperball optimizer that reproduces the dynamics of a target Base Optimizer using only its initialization and learning-rate schedule, without running the target optimizer itself. We further derive the inverse mapping and extend the framework to non-scale-invariant networks. Experiments show that both HyperTransfer and the inverse mapping produce loss trajectories nearly identical to those of their targets, suggesting that Hyperball dynamics are governed primarily by the induced effective learning-rate schedule and optimizer state.

Mon 7 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Neural network training can use different methods to update parameters, like changing both the size and direction or just the direction. The authors show that for certain networks where scaling doesn’t matter, these two methods behave the same way during training. They created a way called HyperTransfer to copy the training path of one method using only its starting settings and learning schedule, without running it. Their experiments show that this copying is very precise, and they also extended the idea to networks without the scaling property.
Open → 2609.07017v1