World models provide a powerful framework for simulating environment dynamics conditioned on actions or instructions, enabling downstream tasks such as action planning or policy learning. Recent approaches leverage world models as learned simulators, but its application to decision-time planning remains computationally prohibitive for real-time control. A key bottleneck lies in latent representations: conventional tokenizers encode each observation into hundreds of tokens, making planning both slow and resource-intensive. To address this, we propose CompACT, a discrete tokenizer that compresses each observation into as few as 8 tokens, drastically reducing computational cost while preserving essential information for planning. An action-conditioned world model that occupies CompACT tokenizer achieves competitive planning performance with orders-of-magnitude faster planning, offering a practical step toward real-world deployment of world models.
Reaching for grasping, and manipulating objects are essential motor functions in everyday life. Decoding human motor intentions is a central challenge for rehabilitation and assistive technologies. This study focuses on predicting intentions by inferring movement direction and target location from multichannel electromyography (EMG) signals, and investigating how spatially and temporally accurate such information can be detected relative to movement onset. We present a computational pipeline that combines data-driven temporal segmentation with classical and deep learning classifiers in order to analyse EMG data recorded during the planning, early execution, and target contact phases of a delayed reaching task. Early intention prediction enables devices to anticipate user actions, improving responsiveness and supporting active motor recovery in adaptive rehabilitation systems. Random Forest achieves $80\%$ accuracy and Convolutional Neural Network $75\%$ accuracy across $25$ spatial targets, each separated by $14^\circ$ azimuth/altitude. Furthermore, a systematic evaluation of EMG channels, feature sets, and temporal windows demonstrates that motor intention can be efficiently decoded even with drastically reduced data. This work sheds light on the temporal and spatial evolution of motor intention, paving the way for anticipatory control in adaptive rehabilitation systems and driving advancements in computational approaches to motor neuroscience.
The landscape of AI coding assistance is undergoing a fundamental shift from complex IDE plugins to versatile, terminal-native agents. Operating directly where developers manage source control, execute builds, and deploy environments, CLI-based agents offer unprecedented autonomy for long-horizon development tasks. In this paper, we present OPENDEV, an open-source, command-line coding agent engineered specifically for this new paradigm. Effective autonomous assistance requires strict safety controls and highly efficient context management to prevent context bloat and reasoning degradation. OPENDEV overcomes these challenges through a compound AI system architecture with workload-specialized model routing, a dual-agent architecture separating planning from execution, lazy tool discovery, and adaptive context compaction that progressively reduces older observations. Furthermore, it employs an automated memory system to accumulate project-specific knowledge across sessions and counteracts instruction fade-out through event-driven system reminders. By enforcing explicit reasoning phases and prioritizing context efficiency, OPENDEV provides a secure, extensible foundation for terminal-first AI assistance, offering a blueprint for robust autonomous software engineering.
Robotic cochlear-implant (CI) insertion requires precise prediction and regulation of contact forces to minimize intracochlear trauma and prevent failure modes such as locking and buckling. Aligned with the integration of advanced medical imaging and robotics for autonomous, precision interventions, this paper presents a unified CT-to-simulation pipeline for contact-aware insertion planning and validation. We develop a low-dimensional, differentiable Cosserat-rod model of the electrode array coupled with frictional contact and pseudo-dynamics regularization to ensure continuous stick-slip transitions. Patient-specific cochlear anatomy is reconstructed from CT imaging and encoded via an analytic parametrization of the scala-tympani lumen, enabling efficient and differentiable contact queries through closest-point projection. Based on a differentiated equilibrium-constraint formulation, we derive an online direction-update law under an RCM-like constraint that suppresses lateral insertion forces while maintaining axial advancement. Simulations and benchtop experiments validate deformation and force trends, demonstrating reduced locking/buckling risk and improved insertion depth. The study highlights how CT-based imaging enhances modeling, planning, and safety capabilities in robot-assisted inner-ear procedures.
Grasping is a fundamental capability for robots to interact with the physical world. Humans, equipped with two hands, autonomously select appropriate grasp strategies based on the shape, size, and weight of objects, enabling robust grasping and subsequent manipulation. In contrast, current robotic grasping remains limited, particularly in multi-strategy settings. Although substantial efforts have targeted parallel-gripper and single-hand grasping, dexterous grasping for bimanual robots remains underexplored, with data being a primary bottleneck. Achieving physically plausible and geometrically conforming grasps that can withstand external wrenches poses significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce UltraDexGrasp, a framework for universal dexterous grasping with bimanual robots. The proposed data-generation pipeline integrates optimization-based grasp synthesis with planning-based demonstration generation, yielding high-quality and diverse trajectories across multiple grasp strategies. With this framework, we curate UltraDexGrasp-20M, a large-scale, multi-strategy grasp dataset comprising 20 million frames across 1,000 objects. Based on UltraDexGrasp-20M, we further develop a simple yet effective grasp policy that takes point clouds as input, aggregates scene features via unidirectional attention, and predicts control commands. Trained exclusively on synthetic data, the policy achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and consistently succeeds on novel objects with varied shapes, sizes, and weights, attaining an average success rate of 81.2% in real-world universal dexterous grasping. To facilitate future research on grasping with bimanual robots, we open-source the data generation pipeline at https://github.com/InternRobotics/UltraDexGrasp.
We introduce WebChain, the largest open-source dataset of human-annotated trajectories on real-world websites, designed to accelerate reproducible research in web agents. It contains 31,725 trajectories and 318k steps, featuring a core Triple Alignment of visual, structural, and action data to provide rich, multi-modal supervision. The data is collected via a scalable pipeline that ensures coverage of complex, high-value tasks often missed by synthetic methods. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a Dual Mid-Training recipe that decouples spatial grounding from planning, achieving state-of-the-art performance on our proposed WebChainBench and other public GUI benchmarks. Our work provides the data and insights necessary to build and rigorously evaluate the next generation of scalable web agents.
Hierarchical policies for language-conditioned manipulation decompose tasks into subgoals, where a high-level planner guides a low-level controller. However, these hierarchical agents often fail because the planner generates subgoals without considering the actual limitations of the controller. Existing solutions attempt to bridge this gap via intermediate modules or shared representations, but they remain limited by their reliance on fixed offline datasets. We propose HD-ExpIt, a framework for iterative fine-tuning of hierarchical diffusion policies via environment feedback. HD-ExpIt organizes training into a self-reinforcing cycle: it utilizes diffusion-based planning to autonomously discover successful behaviors, which are then distilled back into the hierarchical policy. This loop enables both components to improve while implicitly grounding the planner in the controller's actual capabilities without requiring explicit proxy models. Empirically, HD-ExpIt significantly improves hierarchical policies trained solely on offline data, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the long-horizon CALVIN benchmark among methods trained from scratch.
The increasing demand for sustainable textile recycling requires robust automation solutions capable of handling deformable garments and detecting foreign objects in cluttered environments. This work presents a digital twin driven robotic sorting system that integrates grasp prediction, multi modal perception, and semantic reasoning for real world textile classification. A dual arm robotic cell equipped with RGBD sensing, capacitive tactile feedback, and collision-aware motion planning autonomously separates garments from an unsorted basket, transfers them to an inspection zone, and classifies them using state of the art Visual Language Models (VLMs). We benchmark nine VLM s from five model families on a dataset of 223 inspection scenarios comprising shirts, socks, trousers, underwear, foreign objects (including garments outside of the aforementioned classes), and empty scenes. The evaluation assesses per class accuracy, hallucination behavior, and computational performance under practical hardware constraints. Results show that the Qwen model family achieves the highest overall accuracy (up to 87.9 %), with strong foreign object detection performance, while lighter models such as Gemma3 offer competitive speed accuracy trade offs for edge deployment. A digital twin combined with MoveIt enables collision aware path planning and integrates segmented 3D point clouds of inspected garments into the virtual environment for improved manipulation reliability. The presented system demonstrates the feasibility of combining semantic VLM reasoning with conventional grasp detection and digital twin technology for scalable, autonomous textile sorting in realistic industrial settings.
Urban mobility models are essential tools for understanding and forecasting how people and goods move within cities, which is vital for transportation planning. The spatial scale at which urban mobility is analysed is a crucial determinant of the insights gained from any model as it can affect models' performance. It is, therefore, important that urban mobility models should be assessed at appropriate spatial scales to reflect the underlying dynamics. In this study, we systematically evaluate the performance of three popular urban mobility models, namely gravity, radiation, and visitation models across spatial scales. The results show that while the visitation model consistently performs better than its gravity and radiation counterparts, their performance does not differ much when being assessed at some appropriate spatial scale common to all of them. Interestingly, at scales where all models perform badly, the visitation model suffers the most. Furthermore, results based on the conventional admin boundary may not perform so well as compared to distance-based clustering. The cross examination of urban mobility models across spatial scales also reveals the spatial organisation of the urban structure.
Real-time city-scale traffic analytics requires processing 100s-1000s of CCTV streams under strict latency, bandwidth, and compute limits. We present a scalable AI-driven Intelligent Transportation System (AIITS) designed to address multi-dimensional scaling on an edge-cloud fabric. Our platform transforms live multi-camera video feeds into a dynamic traffic graph through a DNN inferencing pipeline, complemented by real-time nowcasting and short-horizon forecasting using Spatio-Temporal GNNs. Using a testbed to validate in a Bengaluru neighborhood, we ingest 100+ RTSP feeds from Raspberry Pis, while Jetson Orin edge accelerators perform high-throughput detection and tracking, producing lightweight flow summaries for cloud-based GNN inference. A capacity-aware scheduler orchestrates load-balancing across heterogeneous devices to sustain real-time performance as stream counts increase. To ensure continuous adaptation, we integrate SAM3 foundation-model assisted labeling and Continuous Federated Learning to update DNN detectors on the edge. Experiments show stable ingestion up to 2000 FPS on Jetson Orins, low-latency aggregation, and accurate and scalable ST-GNN forecasts for up to 1000 streams. A planned live demonstration will scale the full pipeline to 1000 streams, showcasing practical, cross-fabric scalability.
Multi-robot motion planning is a hard problem. We investigate restricted variants of the problem where square robots are allowed to slide over an arbitrary curve to a new position only a constant number of times each. We show that the problem remains NP-hard in most cases, except when the squares have unit size and when the problem is unlabeled, i.e., the location of each square in the target configuration is left unspecified.
Balancing high-level semantic reasoning with low-level reactive control remains a core challenge in visual robotic manipulation. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at cognitive planning, their inference latency precludes real-time execution. Conversely, fast Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often lack the semantic depth required for complex, long-horizon tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce Critic in the Loop, an adaptive hierarchical framework driven by dynamic VLM-Expert scheduling. At its core is a bionic Tri-System architecture comprising a VLM brain for global reasoning, a VLA cerebellum for reactive execution, and a lightweight visual Critic. By continuously monitoring the workspace, the Critic dynamically routes control authority. It sustains rapid closed-loop execution via the VLA for routine subtasks, and adaptively triggers the VLM for replanning upon detecting execution anomalies such as task stagnation or failures. Furthermore, our architecture seamlessly integrates human-inspired rules to intuitively break infinite retry loops. This visually-grounded scheduling minimizes expensive VLM queries, while substantially enhancing system robustness and autonomy in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on challenging, long-horizon manipulation benchmarks reveal that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Digital twins promise to enhance robotic manipulation by maintaining a consistent link between real-world perception and simulation. However, most existing systems struggle with the lack of a unified model, complex dynamic interactions, and the real-to-sim gap, which limits downstream applications such as model predictive control. Thus, we propose GaussTwin, a real-time digital twin that combines position-based dynamics with discrete Cosserat rod formulations for physically grounded simulation, and Gaussian splatting for efficient rendering and visual correction. By anchoring Gaussians to physical primitives and enforcing coherent SE(3) updates driven by photometric error and segmentation masks, GaussTwin achieves stable prediction-correction while preserving physical fidelity. Through experiments in both simulation and on a Franka Research 3 platform, we show that GaussTwin consistently improves tracking accuracy and robustness compared to shape-matching and rigid-only baselines, while also enabling downstream tasks such as push-based planning. These results highlight GaussTwin as a step toward unified, physically meaningful digital twins that can support closed-loop robotic interaction and learning.
Navigation in cluttered environments often requires robots to tolerate contact with movable or deformable objects to maintain efficiency. Existing contact-tolerant motion planning (CTMP) methods rely on indirect spatial representations (e.g., prebuilt map, obstacle set), resulting in inaccuracies and a lack of adaptiveness to environmental uncertainties. To address this issue, we propose a direct contact-tolerant (DCT) planner, which integrates vision-language models (VLMs) into direct point perception and navigation, including two key components. The first one is VLM point cloud partitioner (VPP), which performs contact-tolerance reasoning in image space using VLM, caches inference masks, propagates them across frames using odometry, and projects them onto the current scan to generate a contact-aware point cloud. The second innovation is VPP guided navigation (VGN), which formulates CTMP as a perception-to-control optimization problem under direct contact-aware point cloud constraints, which is further solved by a specialized deep neural network (DNN). We implement DCT in Isaac Sim and a real car-like robot, demonstrating that DCT achieves robust and efficient navigation in cluttered environments with movable obstacles, outperforming representative baselines across diverse metrics. The code is available at: https://github.com/ChrisLeeUM/DCT.
Large language models perform well in short text generation but still struggle with long text generation, particularly under complex constraints. Such tasks involve multiple tightly coupled objectives, including global structural consistency, local semantic coherence, and constraint feasibility, forming a challenging constrained optimization problem. Existing approaches mainly rely on static planning or offline supervision, limiting effective coordination between global and local objectives during generation. To address these challenges, we propose HiFlow, a hierarchical feedback-driven optimization framework for constrained long text generation. HiFlow formulates generation as a two-level optimization process, consisting of a planning layer for global structure and constraint modeling, and a generation layer for conditioned text generation. By incorporating constraint-aware plan screening and closed-loop feedback at both levels, HiFlow enables joint optimization of planning quality and generation behavior, progressively guiding the model toward high-quality, constraint-satisfying outputs. Experiments on multiple backbones confirm HiFlow's effectiveness over baseline methods.
Robust control of complex engineered and biological systems hinges on the integration of feedforward and feedback mechanisms. This is exemplified in neural motor control, where feedforward muscle co-contraction complements sensory-driven feedback corrections to ensure stable behaviors. However, deriving a general continuous-time framework to determine such optimal control policies for partially observable, stochastic, nonlinear, and high-dimensional systems remains a formidable computational challenge. Here, we introduce a framework that extends neighboring optimal control by enabling the feedforward plan to explicitly account for feedback uncertainties and latencies. Using statistical linearization, we transform the stochastic problem into an approximately equivalent deterministic optimization within a tractable, augmented state space that retains critical nonlinearities, offering both mechanistic interpretability and theoretical guarantees on approximation fidelity. We apply this framework to human neuromechanics, demonstrating that muscle co-contraction emerges as an optimal adaptation to task demands, given the characteristics of our sensorimotor system. Our results provide a computational foundation for neuromotor control and a generalizable tool for the control of nonlinear stochastic systems.
As the penetration level of distributed energy resources (DERs) continues to rise, traditional frequency and voltage support from synchronous machines declines. This weakens grid stability and increases the need for fast and adaptive control in a dynamic manner, especially in weak grids. However, most virtual power plants (VPPs) rely on static aggregation and plan based resource allocation strategies. These methods overlook differences in device response times and limit flexibility for ancillary services. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic virtual power plant (DVPP) that coordinates heterogeneous resources across multiple time scales using grid forming control. We first contrast grid following and grid forming converters: grid following designs rely on a phase locked loop which can undermine stability in weak grids, whereas our DVPP applies virtual synchronous generator control at the aggregate level to provide effective inertia and damping. Then, we introduce a dynamic participation factor framework that measures each device s contribution through the frequency active power and voltage reactive power loops. Exploiting device heterogeneity, we adopt a banded allocation strategy: slow resources manage steady state and low frequency regulation; intermediate resources smooth transitions; and fast resources deliver rapid response and high frequency damping. Comparative simulations demonstrate that this coordinated, timescale aware approach enhances stability and ancillary service performance compared to conventional VPPs.
The importance of replication is often discussed and advocated -- not only in the domains of visualization and HCI, but in all scientific areas. When replicating a study, design decisions need to be made with regards which aspects of the original study will remain the same and which will be altered. We present a supporting multi-dimensional design space framework within which such decisions can be identified, categorized, compared and analyzed. The framework treats replication experimental design as a pairwise comparison problem, and represents the design by four practical dimensions defined by three comparison levels. The design space is therefore a framework that can be used for both retrospective characterization and prospective planning. We provide worked examples, and relate our framework to other attempts at describing the scope of replication studies.
The improvement of web agents on current benchmarks raises the question: Do today's agents perform just as well when the web changes? We introduce TimeWarp, a benchmark that emulates the evolving web using containerized environments that vary in UI, design, and layout. TimeWarp consists of three web environments, each with six UI versions spanning different eras of the internet, paired with a set of complex, realistic tasks requiring different forms of web navigation. Our experiments reveal web agents' vulnerability to changes and the limitations of behavior cloning (BC) on single-version trajectories. To address this, we propose TimeTraj, a simple yet effective algorithm that uses plan distillation to collect trajectories across multiple versions. By training agents on teacher rollouts using our BC-variant, we achieve substantial performance gains: $20.4\%\rightarrow37.7\%$ for Qwen-3 4B and $0\%\rightarrow27.0\%$ for Llama-3.1 8B models. We hope our work helps researchers study generalization across web designs and unlock a new paradigm for collecting plans rather than trajectories, thereby improving the robustness of web agents.
Uncertainties arising from localization error, trajectory prediction errors of the moving obstacles and environmental disturbances pose significant challenges to robot's safe navigation. Existing uncertainty-aware planners often approximate polygon-shaped robots and obstacles using simple geometric primitives such as circles or ellipses. Though computationally convenient, these approximations substantially shrink the feasible space, leading to overly conservative trajectories and even planning failure in narrow environments. In addition, many such methods rely on specific assumptions about noise distributions, which may not hold in practice and thus limit their performance guarantees. To address these limitations, we extend the Optimization-Based Collision Avoidance (OBCA) framework to an uncertainty-aware formulation, termed \emph{U-OBCA}. The proposed method explicitly accounts for the collision risk between polygon-shaped robots and obstacles by formulating OBCA-based chance constraints, and hence avoiding geometric simplifications and reducing unnecessary conservatism. These probabilistic constraints are further tightened into deterministic nonlinear constraints under mild distributional assumptions, which can be solved efficiently by standard numerical optimization solvers. The proposed approach is validated through theoretical analysis, numerical simulations and real-world experiments. The results demonstrate that U-OBCA significantly mitigates the conservatism in trajectory planning and achieves higher navigation efficiency compared to existing baseline methods, particularly in narrow and cluttered environments.
Speech production is a complex process spanning neural planning, motor control, muscle activation, and articulatory kinematics. While the acoustic speech signal is the most accessible product of the speech production act, it does not directly reveal its causal neurophysiological substrates. We present the first simultaneous acquisition of real-time (dynamic) MRI, EEG, and surface EMG, capturing several key aspects of the speech production chain: brain signals, muscle activations, and articulatory movements. This multimodal acquisition paradigm presents substantial technical challenges, including MRI-induced electromagnetic interference and myogenic artifacts. To mitigate these, we introduce an artifact suppression pipeline tailored to this tri-modal setting. Once fully developed, this framework is poised to offer an unprecedented window into speech neuroscience and insights leading to brain-computer interface advances.
The Pathfinder of the Type-A satellites in the Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunters (CATCH) space mission is equipped with Micro-Pore Optics (MPOs) and four single-pixel Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs). Due to the lack of position resolution in an individual SDD, we propose a new method based on the cross-arms in the point spread function (PSF) of MPOs to enhance the satellite's capability in identifying contaminating sources and locating target sources. By placing one detector on each of the horizontal and vertical cross-arms on the focal plane, we can use the changes in the relative counts on the cross-arms detectors to deduce the location of the source. Simulated observations demonstrate that, for a target source with a flux of 1 Crab and an exposure time of 200 s, the cross-arms detectors can identify contaminating source with the same flux level at an off-axis angle larger than 8', and improve positioning accuracy to 6'. Furthermore, we extend the simulation study to CATCH Type-A, which plans to use an SDD array. In situations where sources exhibit the same flux of 1 Crab and the exposure time is merely 1 s, a 16x16 SDD array is capable of identifying contaminating source with an off-axis angle greater than 2.4' and can achieve a positioning precision of 1.8'.
Segmentation is crucial for brain gliomas as it delineates the glioma s extent and location, aiding in precise treatment planning and monitoring, thus improving patient outcomes. Accurate segmentation ensures proper identification of the glioma s size and position, transforming images into applicable data for analysis. Classification of brain gliomas is also essential because different types require different treatment approaches. Accurately classifying brain gliomas by size, location, and aggressiveness is essential for personalized prognosis prediction, follow-up care, and monitoring disease progression, ensuring effective diagnosis, treatment, and management. In glioma research, irregular tissues are often observable, but error free and reproducible segmentation is challenging. Many researchers have surveyed brain glioma segmentation, proposing both fully automatic and semi-automatic techniques. The adoption of these methods by radiologists depends on ease of use and supervision, with semi-automatic techniques preferred due to the need for accurate evaluations. This review evaluates effective segmentation and classification techniques post magnetic resonance imaging acquisition, highlighting that convolutional neural network architectures outperform traditional techniques in these tasks.
Artificial intelligence is undergoing a structural transformation marked by the rise of agentic systems capable of open-ended action trajectories, generative representations and outputs, and evolving objectives. These properties introduce structural uncertainty into human-AI teaming (HAT), including uncertainty about behavior trajectories, epistemic grounding, and the stability of governing logics over time. Under such conditions, alignment cannot be secured through agreement on bounded outputs; it must be continuously sustained as plans unfold and priorities shift. We advance Team Situation Awareness (Team SA) theory, grounded in shared perception, comprehension, and projection, as an integrative anchor for this transition. While Team SA remains analytically foundational, its stabilizing logic presumes that shared awareness, once achieved, will support coordinated action through iterative updating. Agentic AI challenges this presumption. Our argument unfolds in two stages: first, we extend Team SA to reconceptualize both human and AI awareness under open-ended agency, including the sensemaking of projection congruence across heterogeneous systems. Second, we interrogate whether the dynamic processes traditionally assumed to stabilize teaming in relational interaction, cognitive learning, and coordination and control continue to function under adaptive autonomy. By distinguishing continuity from tension, we clarify where foundational insights hold and where structural uncertainty introduces strain, and articulate a forward-looking research agenda for HAT. The central challenge of HAT is not whether humans and AI can agree in the moment, but whether they can remain aligned as futures are continuously generated, revised, enacted, and governed over time.
To assist humans in open-world environments, robots must interpret ambiguous instructions to locate desired objects. Foundation model-based approaches excel at multimodal grounding, but they lack a principled mechanism for modeling uncertainty in long-horizon tasks. In contrast, Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a systematic framework for planning under uncertainty but are often limited in supported modalities and rely on restrictive environment assumptions. We introduce LanguagE and Gesture-Guided Object Search in Partially Observable Environments (LEGS-POMDP), a modular POMDP system that integrates language, gesture, and visual observations for open-world object search. Unlike prior work, LEGS-POMDP explicitly models two sources of partial observability: uncertainty over the target object's identity and its spatial location. In simulation, multimodal fusion significantly outperforms unimodal baselines, achieving an average success rate of 89\% across challenging environments and object categories. Finally, we demonstrate the full system on a quadruped mobile manipulator, where real-world experiments qualitatively validate robust multimodal perception and uncertainty reduction under ambiguous instructions.
Multi-image reasoning remains a significant challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). We investigate a previously overlooked phenomenon: during chain-of-thought (CoT) generation, the text-to-image (T2I) attention of reasoning VLMs exhibits diffuse "pulses": sporadic and unfocused attention patterns that fail to concentrate on task-relevant images. We further reveal a systematic positional bias in attention allocation across images. Motivated by these observations, we propose PulseFocus, a training-free, inference-time method that structures CoT reasoning into interleaved plan/focus blocks with soft attention gating. By forcing the model to explicitly plan which image to examine and then gating decode-time attention to the referenced image, PulseFocus sharpens attention focus and yields consistent improvements on multi-image benchmarks like BLINK benchmark (+3.7%) and MuirBench (+1.07%).
This paper presents a novel approach to multi-robot collision avoidance that integrates global path planning with local navigation strategies, utilizing attentive graph neural networks to manage dynamic interactions among agents. We introduce a local navigation model that leverages pre-planned global paths, allowing robots to adhere to optimal routes while dynamically adjusting to environmental changes. The models robustness is enhanced through the introduction of noise during training, resulting in superior performance in complex, dynamic environments. Our approach is evaluated against established baselines, including NH-ORCA, DRL-NAV, and GA3C-CADRL, across various structurally diverse simulated scenarios. The results demonstrate that our model achieves consistently higher success rates, lower collision rates, and more efficient navigation, particularly in challenging scenarios where baseline models struggle. This work offers an advancement in multi-robot navigation, with implications for robust performance in complex, dynamic environments with varying degrees of complexity, such as those encountered in logistics, where adaptability is essential for accommodating unforeseen obstacles and unpredictable changes.
The rapid advancement of high degree-of-freedom (DoF) serial manipulators necessitates the use of swift, sampling-based motion planners for high-dimensional spaces. While sampling-based planners like the Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) are widely used, planning in the manipulator's joint space presents significant challenges due to non-invertible forward kinematics. A single task-space end-effector pose can correspond to multiple configuration-space states, creating a multi-arm bandit problem for the planner. In complex environments, simply choosing the wrong joint space goal can result in suboptimal trajectories or even failure to find a viable plan. To address this planning problem, we propose Many-RRT*: an extension of RRT*-Connect that plans to multiple goals in parallel. By generating multiple IK solutions and growing independent trees from these goal configurations simultaneously alongside a single start tree, Many-RRT* ensures that computational effort is not wasted on suboptimal IK solutions. This approach maintains robust convergence and asymptotic optimality. Experimental evaluations across robot morphologies and diverse obstacle environments demonstrate that Many-RRT* provides higher quality trajectories (44.5% lower cost in the same runtime) with a significantly higher success rate (100% vs. the next best of 1.6%) than previous RRT iterations without compromising on runtime performance.
We introduce Helios, the first 14B video generation model that runs at 19.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU and supports minute-scale generation while matching the quality of a strong baseline. We make breakthroughs along three key dimensions: (1) robustness to long-video drifting without commonly used anti-drifting heuristics such as self-forcing, error-banks, or keyframe sampling; (2) real-time generation without standard acceleration techniques such as KV-cache, sparse/linear attention, or quantization; and (3) training without parallelism or sharding frameworks, enabling image-diffusion-scale batch sizes while fitting up to four 14B models within 80 GB of GPU memory. Specifically, Helios is a 14B autoregressive diffusion model with a unified input representation that natively supports T2V, I2V, and V2V tasks. To mitigate drifting in long-video generation, we characterize typical failure modes and propose simple yet effective training strategies that explicitly simulate drifting during training, while eliminating repetitive motion at its source. For efficiency, we heavily compress the historical and noisy context and reduce the number of sampling steps, yielding computational costs comparable to -- or lower than -- those of 1.3B video generative models. Moreover, we introduce infrastructure-level optimizations that accelerate both inference and training while reducing memory consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Helios consistently outperforms prior methods on both short- and long-video generation. We plan to release the code, base model, and distilled model to support further development by the community.
Reliable navigation in cluttered environments requires perception outputs that are not only accurate but also equipped with uncertainty sets suitable for safe control. An inverse perception contract (IPC) provides such a connection by mapping perceptual estimates to sets that contain the ground truth with high confidence. Existing IPC formulations, however, instantiate uncertainty as a single ellipsoidal set and rely on deterministic trust scores to guide robot motion. Such a representation cannot capture the multi-modal and irregular structure of fine-grained perception errors, often resulting in over-conservative sets and degraded navigation performance. In this work, we introduce Gaussian Mixture-based Inverse Perception Contract (GM-IPC), which extends IPC to represent uncertainty with unions of ellipsoidal confidence sets derived from Gaussian mixture models. This design moves beyond deterministic single-set abstractions, enabling fine-grained, multi-modal, and non-convex error structures to be captured with formal guarantees. A learning framework is presented that trains GM-IPC to account for probabilistic inclusion, distribution matching, and empty-space penalties, ensuring both validity and compactness of the predicted sets. We further show that the resulting uncertainty characterizations can be leveraged in downstream planning frameworks for real-time safe navigation, enabling less conservative and more adaptive robot motion while preserving safety in a probabilistic manner.