robotic vision engineers

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles must detect objects faster than a frame camera delivers images. Event cameras record brightness changes with microsecond resolution, so RGB--event detectors can decide between frames, at an operating frequency, the rate of decisions, far above the frame rate. As this rate rises, each decision receives a sparser event window, and the reliability of the events relative to the frame varies over the scene and over time. Existing detectors weight the sensors per sample and encode the frame at the reduced event resolution. Reliability-supervised routing assigns a fusion weight to every location and supervises it with targets from the losses of two single-modality classifiers used only in training, moving loss-based supervision of fusion weights from whole samples to individual locations. Asymmetric-resolution fusion lets the frame carry the decision where the events fail: it encodes the frame at native resolution and pools every feature level onto the event grid, reusing all pretrained weights. On the DSEC-Det dataset, routing halves the accuracy loss from 20 to 180 Hz, from 6.3 to 3.1 mAP, and lowers it in every seed. The resulting detector, ERA-Det, sets a new state of the art at 63.2 mAP, 3.7 mAP above FlexEvent, leads at every operating frequency, and at 180 Hz is more accurate than FlexEvent at 20 Hz. On two DAVIS346 datasets, the router lowers the frame weight at night and in low light and raises it when the events vanish. ERA-Det upgrades released FlexEvent weights in 5,000 iterations on one GPU.

Abstract: We present RoboCloth, a dataset of 500 real cloth materials captured under flexible, calibrated camera and lighting configurations, where both are robotically controlled during acquisition. Each material is imaged in approximately 580 high-dynamic range frames spanning a wide view-light hemisphere; camera poses are refined via structure-from-motion and aligned to the robot frame, yielding per-material sparse surface geometry and structured per-point reflectance observations ready for neural material training. We demonstrate the value of this data through a two-stage neural reconstruction pipeline: Stage 1 trains a shared MLP decoder on our corpus to learn cloth material priors; Stage 2 then freezes the decoder and fits a dense 2048x2048 latent texture to each target material. Evaluating on held-out materials from our own dataset and on the independent UBO2014 benchmark, we show that a decoder trained on our captures outperforms decoders trained on existing measured reflectance datasets and analytic PBR fitting, transferring to unseen acquisition systems without modification. The dataset, calibration files, observation tensors, and train/test splits are released under CC BY 4.0 on the Hugging Face Hub.

Abstract: Visual token compression lowers the inference cost of vision--language models by representing images with fewer tokens. However, most existing methods compress visual tokens to a reduced set, leaving the amount of visual evidence represented by each token and its original spatial context implicit. Therefore, the compressed representation does not explicitly encode how much visual information each representative carries or where it lies in the original image. This limitation arises even after a single reduction and becomes more pronounced when compression is repeated across decoder layers. To address this issue, we propose CoViST, a training-free framework that represents a compressed image as a composable visual state. Specifically, the state combines representative features with original positions, effective contribution weights, and reusable selection metadata. CoViST constructs this state through coverage-guided selection and conservation-based contribution composition, and explicitly incorporates its contribution and positional information into decoder attention. Each component of the state retains its interpretation under successive reductions, enabling the same formulation to support both fixed compression before prefill and progressive compression within the decoder. Experimental results on seven LLaVA-1.5-7B benchmarks show that CoViST-Fixed retains 99.9\%, 99.5\%, and 98.1\% of uncompressed performance at 192, 128, and 64 tokens, respectively, and CoViST-Pro retains 99.8\%, 99.9\%, and 99.1\% at the corresponding layer-average budgets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods under their respective budget settings. Code will be released publicly.