Revisiting Open-Loop Execution in Robotics: Toward Reactive, Higher-Performing Policies

Action chunking --- the practice of predicting a sequence of actions and executing a prefix open-loop --- has emerged as a key enabler of recent progress in imitation learning for robotic manipulation. However, executing long open-loop prefixes reduces reactivity, limiting policies' ability to correct for errors. Further, the mechanisms underlying these performance benefits remain poorly understood: prior works cite mitigating compounding errors, absorbing inference latency, or smoothing motions, but provide limited controlled evidence or guidance for preserving reactivity. In this work, we argue that long open-loop execution primarily helps short-context policies imitate "non-Markovian demonstrations". Across four simulation and two real-world tasks, we show that expert non-Markovianity strongly shapes the relationship between task success and open-loop execution horizon. Further, we investigate the impact of compounding errors --- the prevailing explanation for long open-loop execution in prior work --- and find that while they matter, expert non-Markovianity has a much stronger impact in our experimental setting. Finally, we show that when policies are provided with a sufficiently long context, open-loop execution is no longer beneficial and the most reactive, closed-loop policies perform best. While imitation learning has seen great success using long open-loop execution, our findings motivate long-context, reactive policies as a more principled and performant paradigm.

Gaze-LLE: Gaze Target Estimation via Large-Scale Learned Encoders

We address the problem of gaze target estimation, which aims to predict where a person is looking in a scene. Predicting a person's gaze target requires reasoning both about the person's appearance and the contents of the scene. Prior works have developed increasingly complex, hand-crafted pipelines for gaze target estimation that carefully fuse features from separate scene encoders, head encoders, and auxiliary models for signals like depth and pose. Motivated by the success of general-purpose feature extractors on a variety of visual tasks, we propose Gaze-LLE, a novel transformer framework that streamlines gaze target estimation by leveraging features from a frozen DINOv2 encoder. We extract a single feature representation for the scene, and apply a person-specific positional prompt to decode gaze with a lightweight module. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across several gaze benchmarks and provide extensive analysis to validate our design choices. Our code is available at: http://github.com/fkryan/gazelle .

RoseNNa: A performant, portable library for neural network inference with application to computational fluid dynamics

The rise of neural network-based machine learning ushered in high-level libraries, including TensorFlow and PyTorch, to support their functionality. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) researchers have benefited from this trend and produced powerful neural networks that promise shorter simulation times. For example, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent-based (RNN) architectures can represent sub-grid physical effects, like turbulence. Implementing neural networks in CFD solvers is challenging because the programming languages used for machine learning and CFD are mostly non-overlapping, We present the roseNNa library, which bridges the gap between neural network inference and CFD. RoseNNa is a non-invasive, lightweight (1000 lines), and performant tool for neural network inference, with focus on the smaller networks used to augment PDE solvers, like those of CFD, which are typically written in C/C++ or Fortran. RoseNNa accomplishes this by automatically converting trained models from typical neural network training packages into a high-performance Fortran library with C and Fortran APIs. This reduces the effort needed to access trained neural networks and maintains performance in the PDE solvers that CFD researchers build and rely upon. Results show that RoseNNa reliably outperforms PyTorch (Python) and libtorch (C++) on MLPs and LSTM RNNs with less than 100 hidden layers and 100 neurons per layer, even after removing the overhead cost of API calls. Speedups range from a factor of about 10 and 2 faster than these established libraries for the smaller and larger ends of the neural network size ranges tested.