Optimizing Retrieval Augmented Generation for Object Constraint Language

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is essential for defining precise constraints within Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, manually writing OCL rules is complex and time-consuming. This study explores the optimization of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for automating OCL rule generation, focusing on the impact of different retrieval strategies. We evaluate three retrieval approaches $\unicode{x2013}$ BM25 (lexical-based), BERT-based (semantic retrieval), and SPLADE (sparse-vector retrieval) $\unicode{x2013}$ analyzing their effectiveness in providing relevant context for a large language model. To further assess our approach, we compare and benchmark our retrieval-optimized generation results against PathOCL, a state-of-the-art graph-based method. We directly compare BM25, BERT, and SPLADE retrieval methods with PathOCL to understand how different retrieval methods perform for a unified evaluation framework. Our experimental results, focusing on retrieval-augmented generation, indicate that while retrieval can enhance generation accuracy, its effectiveness depends on the retrieval method and the number of retrieved chunks (k). BM25 underperforms the baseline, whereas semantic approaches (BERT and SPLADE) achieve better results, with SPLADE performing best at lower k values. However, excessive retrieval with high k parameter can lead to retrieving irrelevant chunks which degrades model performance. Our findings highlight the importance of optimizing retrieval configurations to balance context relevance and output consistency. This research provides insights into improving OCL rule generation using RAG and underscores the need for tailoring retrieval.

Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a transformative technological wave that reconfigures industries through its unparalleled capabilities for content creation, reasoning, planning, and multimodal understanding. This revolutionary force offers the most promising path yet toward solving one of engineering's grandest challenges: achieving reliable, fully autonomous driving, particularly the pursuit of Level 5 autonomy. This survey delivers a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the emerging role of GenAI across the autonomous driving stack. We begin by distilling the principles and trade-offs of modern generative modeling, encompassing VAEs, GANs, Diffusion Models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). We then map their frontier applications in image, LiDAR, trajectory, occupancy, video generation as well as LLM-guided reasoning and decision making. We categorize practical applications, such as synthetic data workflows, end-to-end driving strategies, high-fidelity digital twin systems, smart transportation networks, and cross-domain transfer to embodied AI. We identify key obstacles and possibilities such as comprehensive generalization across rare cases, evaluation and safety checks, budget-limited implementation, regulatory compliance, ethical concerns, and environmental effects, while proposing research plans across theoretical assurances, trust metrics, transport integration, and socio-technical influence. By unifying these threads, the survey provides a forward-looking reference for researchers, engineers, and policymakers navigating the convergence of generative AI and advanced autonomous mobility. An actively maintained repository of cited works is available at https://github.com/taco-group/GenAI4AD.

LiDAR-Guided Monocular 3D Object Detection for Long-Range Railway Monitoring

Railway systems, particularly in Germany, require high levels of automation to address legacy infrastructure challenges and increase train traffic safely. A key component of automation is robust long-range perception, essential for early hazard detection, such as obstacles at level crossings or pedestrians on tracks. Unlike automotive systems with braking distances of ~70 meters, trains require perception ranges exceeding 1 km. This paper presents an deep-learning-based approach for long-range 3D object detection tailored for autonomous trains. The method relies solely on monocular images, inspired by the Faraway-Frustum approach, and incorporates LiDAR data during training to improve depth estimation. The proposed pipeline consists of four key modules: (1) a modified YOLOv9 for 2.5D object detection, (2) a depth estimation network, and (3-4) dedicated short- and long-range 3D detection heads. Evaluations on the OSDaR23 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in detecting objects up to 250 meters. Results highlight its potential for railway automation and outline areas for future improvement.

E2E Parking Dataset: An Open Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Parking

End-to-end learning has shown great potential in autonomous parking, yet the lack of publicly available datasets limits reproducibility and benchmarking. While prior work introduced a visual-based parking model and a pipeline for data generation, training, and close-loop test, the dataset itself was not released. To bridge this gap, we create and open-source a high-quality dataset for end-to-end autonomous parking. Using the original model, we achieve an overall success rate of 85.16% with lower average position and orientation errors (0.24 meters and 0.34 degrees).

On Background Bias of Post-Hoc Concept Embeddings in Computer Vision DNNs

The thriving research field of concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (C-XAI) investigates how human-interpretable semantic concepts embed in the latent spaces of deep neural networks (DNNs). Post-hoc approaches therein use a set of examples to specify a concept, and determine its embeddings in DNN latent space using data driven techniques. This proved useful to uncover biases between different target (foreground or concept) classes. However, given that the background is mostly uncontrolled during training, an important question has been left unattended so far: Are/to what extent are state-of-the-art, data-driven post-hoc C-XAI approaches themselves prone to biases with respect to their backgrounds? E.g., wild animals mostly occur against vegetation backgrounds, and they seldom appear on roads. Even simple and robust C-XAI methods might abuse this shortcut for enhanced performance. A dangerous performance degradation of the concept-corner cases of animals on the road could thus remain undiscovered. This work validates and thoroughly confirms that established Net2Vec-based concept segmentation techniques frequently capture background biases, including alarming ones, such as underperformance on road scenes. For the analysis, we compare 3 established techniques from the domain of background randomization on >50 concepts from 2 datasets, and 7 diverse DNN architectures. Our results indicate that even low-cost setups can provide both valuable insight and improved background robustness.

BiSeg-SAM: Weakly-Supervised Post-Processing Framework for Boosting Binary Segmentation in Segment Anything Models

Accurate segmentation of polyps and skin lesions is essential for diagnosing colorectal and skin cancers. While various segmentation methods for polyps and skin lesions using fully supervised deep learning techniques have been developed, the pixel-level annotation of medical images by doctors is both time-consuming and costly. Foundational vision models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have demonstrated superior performance; however, directly applying SAM to medical segmentation may not yield satisfactory results due to the lack of domain-specific medical knowledge. In this paper, we propose BiSeg-SAM, a SAM-guided weakly supervised prompting and boundary refinement network for the segmentation of polyps and skin lesions. Specifically, we fine-tune SAM combined with a CNN module to learn local features. We introduce a WeakBox with two functions: automatically generating box prompts for the SAM model and using our proposed Multi-choice Mask-to-Box (MM2B) transformation for rough mask-to-box conversion, addressing the mismatch between coarse labels and precise predictions. Additionally, we apply scale consistency (SC) loss for prediction scale alignment. Our DetailRefine module enhances boundary precision and segmentation accuracy by refining coarse predictions using a limited amount of ground truth labels. This comprehensive approach enables BiSeg-SAM to achieve excellent multi-task segmentation performance. Our method demonstrates significant superiority over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods when tested on five polyp datasets and one skin cancer dataset.

Data-Agnostic Robotic Long-Horizon Manipulation with Vision-Language-Guided Closed-Loop Feedback

Recent advances in language-conditioned robotic manipulation have leveraged imitation and reinforcement learning to enable robots to execute tasks from human commands. However, these methods often suffer from limited generalization, adaptability, and the lack of large-scale specialized datasets, unlike data-rich domains such as computer vision, making long-horizon task execution challenging. To address these gaps, we introduce DAHLIA, a data-agnostic framework for language-conditioned long-horizon robotic manipulation, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for real-time task planning and execution. DAHLIA employs a dual-tunnel architecture, where an LLM-powered planner collaborates with co-planners to decompose tasks and generate executable plans, while a reporter LLM provides closed-loop feedback, enabling adaptive re-planning and ensuring task recovery from potential failures. Moreover, DAHLIA integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) in task reasoning and temporal abstraction for efficient action execution, enhancing traceability and robustness. Our framework demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-horizon tasks, achieving strong generalization in both simulated and real-world scenarios. Videos and code are available at https://ghiara.github.io/DAHLIA/.

Pretrained Bayesian Non-parametric Knowledge Prior in Robotic Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically learn new tasks from scratch, often disregarding prior knowledge that could accelerate the learning process. While some methods incorporate previously learned skills, they usually rely on a fixed structure, such as a single Gaussian distribution, to define skill priors. This rigid assumption can restrict the diversity and flexibility of skills, particularly in complex, long-horizon tasks. In this work, we introduce a method that models potential primitive skill motions as having non-parametric properties with an unknown number of underlying features. We utilize a Bayesian non-parametric model, specifically Dirichlet Process Mixtures, enhanced with birth and merge heuristics, to pre-train a skill prior that effectively captures the diverse nature of skills. Additionally, the learned skills are explicitly trackable within the prior space, enhancing interpretability and control. By integrating this flexible skill prior into an RL framework, our approach surpasses existing methods in long-horizon manipulation tasks, enabling more efficient skill transfer and task success in complex environments. Our findings show that a richer, non-parametric representation of skill priors significantly improves both the learning and execution of challenging robotic tasks. All data, code, and videos are available at https://ghiara.github.io/HELIOS/.

SharedAssembly: A Data Collection Approach via Shared Tele-Assembly

Assembly is a fundamental skill for robots in both modern manufacturing and service robotics. Existing datasets aim to address the data bottleneck in training general-purpose robot models, falling short of capturing contact-rich assembly tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SharedAssembly, a novel bilateral teleoperation approach with shared autonomy for scalable assembly execution and data collection. User studies demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances both success rates and efficiency, achieving a 97.0% success rate across various sub-millimeter-level assembly tasks. Notably, novice and intermediate users achieve performance comparable to experts using baseline teleoperation methods, significantly enhancing large-scale data collection.

Safe Continual Domain Adaptation after Sim2Real Transfer of Reinforcement Learning Policies in Robotics

Domain randomization has emerged as a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to facilitate the transfer of policies from simulation to real-world robotic applications. Many existing domain randomization approaches have been proposed to improve robustness and sim2real transfer. These approaches rely on wide randomization ranges to compensate for the unknown actual system parameters, leading to robust but inefficient real-world policies. In addition, the policies pretrained in the domain-randomized simulation are fixed after deployment due to the inherent instability of the optimization processes based on RL and the necessity of sampling exploitative but potentially unsafe actions on the real system. This limits the adaptability of the deployed policy to the inevitably changing system parameters or environment dynamics over time. We leverage safe RL and continual learning under domain-randomized simulation to address these limitations and enable safe deployment-time policy adaptation in real-world robot control. The experiments show that our method enables the policy to adapt and fit to the current domain distribution and environment dynamics of the real system while minimizing safety risks and avoiding issues like catastrophic forgetting of the general policy found in randomized simulation during the pretraining phase. Videos and supplementary material are available at https://safe-cda.github.io/.