DPGP: A Hybrid 2D-3D Dual Path Potential Ghost Probe Zone Prediction Framework for Safe Autonomous Driving

Modern robots must coexist with humans in dense urban environments. A key challenge is the ghost probe problem, where pedestrians or objects unexpectedly rush into traffic paths. This issue affects both autonomous vehicles and human drivers. Existing works propose vehicle-to-everything (V2X) strategies and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging for ghost probe zone detection. However, most require high computational power or specialized hardware, limiting real-world feasibility. Additionally, many methods do not explicitly address this issue. To tackle this, we propose DPGP, a hybrid 2D-3D fusion framework for ghost probe zone prediction using only a monocular camera during training and inference. With unsupervised depth prediction, we observe ghost probe zones align with depth discontinuities, but different depth representations offer varying robustness. To exploit this, we fuse multiple feature embeddings to improve prediction. To validate our approach, we created a 12K-image dataset annotated with ghost probe zones, carefully sourced and cross-checked for accuracy. Experimental results show our framework outperforms existing methods while remaining cost-effective. To our knowledge, this is the first work extending ghost probe zone prediction beyond vehicles, addressing diverse non-vehicle objects. We will open-source our code and dataset for community benefit.

GauTOAO: Gaussian-based Task-Oriented Affordance of Objects

When your robot grasps an object using dexterous hands or grippers, it should understand the Task-Oriented Affordances of the Object(TOAO), as different tasks often require attention to specific parts of the object. To address this challenge, we propose GauTOAO, a Gaussian-based framework for Task-Oriented Affordance of Objects, which leverages vision-language models in a zero-shot manner to predict affordance-relevant regions of an object, given a natural language query. Our approach introduces a new paradigm: "static camera, moving object," allowing the robot to better observe and understand the object in hand during manipulation. GauTOAO addresses the limitations of existing methods, which often lack effective spatial grouping, by extracting a comprehensive 3D object mask using DINO features. This mask is then used to conditionally query gaussians, producing a refined semantic distribution over the object for the specified task. This approach results in more accurate TOAO extraction, enhancing the robot's understanding of the object and improving task performance. We validate the effectiveness of GauTOAO through real-world experiments, demonstrating its capability to generalize across various tasks.