Dense Video Understanding with Gated Residual Tokenization

High temporal resolution is essential for capturing fine-grained details in video understanding. However, current video large language models (VLLMs) and benchmarks mostly rely on low-frame-rate sampling, such as uniform sampling or keyframe selection, discarding dense temporal information. This compromise avoids the high cost of tokenizing every frame, which otherwise leads to redundant computation and linear token growth as video length increases. While this trade-off works for slowly changing content, it fails for tasks like lecture comprehension, where information appears in nearly every frame and requires precise temporal alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Dense Video Understanding (DVU), which enables high-FPS video comprehension by reducing both tokenization time and token overhead. Existing benchmarks are also limited, as their QA pairs focus on coarse content changes. We therefore propose DIVE (Dense Information Video Evaluation), the first benchmark designed for dense temporal reasoning. To make DVU practical, we present Gated Residual Tokenization (GRT), a two-stage framework: (1) Motion-Compensated Inter-Gated Tokenization uses pixel-level motion estimation to skip static regions during tokenization, achieving sub-linear growth in token count and compute. (2) Semantic-Scene Intra-Tokenization Merging fuses tokens across static regions within a scene, further reducing redundancy while preserving dynamic semantics. Experiments on DIVE show that GRT outperforms larger VLLM baselines and scales positively with FPS. These results highlight the importance of dense temporal information and demonstrate that GRT enables efficient, scalable high-FPS video understanding.

Out-of-Sight Trajectories: Tracking, Fusion, and Prediction

Trajectory prediction is a critical task in computer vision and autonomous systems, playing a key role in autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, and virtual reality. Existing methods often rely on complete and noise-free observational data, overlooking the challenges associated with out-of-sight objects and the inherent noise in sensor data caused by limited camera coverage, obstructions, and the absence of ground truth for denoised trajectories. These limitations pose safety risks and hinder reliable prediction in real-world scenarios. In this extended work, we present advancements in Out-of-Sight Trajectory (OST), a novel task that predicts the noise-free visual trajectories of out-of-sight objects using noisy sensor data. Building on our previous research, we broaden the scope of Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction (OOSTraj) to include pedestrians and vehicles, extending its applicability to autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, and virtual reality. Our enhanced Vision-Positioning Denoising Module leverages camera calibration to establish a vision-positioning mapping, addressing the lack of visual references, while effectively denoising noisy sensor data in an unsupervised manner. Through extensive evaluations on the Vi-Fi and JRDB datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both trajectory denoising and prediction, significantly surpassing previous baselines. Additionally, we introduce comparisons with traditional denoising methods, such as Kalman filtering, and adapt recent trajectory prediction models to our task, providing a comprehensive benchmark. This work represents the first initiative to integrate vision-positioning projection for denoising noisy sensor trajectories of out-of-sight agents, paving the way for future advances. The code and preprocessed datasets are available at github.com/Hai-chao-Zhang/OST

Learning Multi-Stage Pick-and-Place with a Legged Mobile Manipulator

Quadruped-based mobile manipulation presents significant challenges in robotics due to the diversity of required skills, the extended task horizon, and partial observability. After presenting a multi-stage pick-and-place task as a succinct yet sufficiently rich setup that captures key desiderata for quadruped-based mobile manipulation, we propose an approach that can train a visuo-motor policy entirely in simulation, and achieve nearly 80\% success in the real world. The policy efficiently performs search, approach, grasp, transport, and drop into actions, with emerged behaviors such as re-grasping and task chaining. We conduct an extensive set of real-world experiments with ablation studies highlighting key techniques for efficient training and effective sim-to-real transfer. Additional experiments demonstrate deployment across a variety of indoor and outdoor environments. Demo videos and additional resources are available on the project page: https://horizonrobotics.github.io/gail/SLIM.

Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Decoding for LLM-Based Sequential Recommendation

Large language models have been widely applied to sequential recommendation tasks, yet during inference, they continue to rely on decoding strategies developed for natural language processing. This creates a mismatch between text-generation objectives and recommendation next item selection objectives. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing an Uncertainty-aware Semantic Decoding (USD) framework that combines logit-based clustering with adaptive scoring to improve next-item predictions. Our approach clusters items with similar logit vectors into semantic equivalence groups, then redistributes probability mass within these clusters and computes entropy across them to control item scoring and sampling temperature during recommendation inference. Experiments on Amazon Product datasets (six domains) gains of 18.5\% in HR@3, 11.9\% in NDCG@3, and 10.8\% in MRR@3 compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Hyperparameter analysis confirms the optimal parameters among various settings, and experiments on H\&M, and Netflix datasets indicate that the framework can adapt to differing recommendation domains. The experimental results confirm that integrating semantic clustering and uncertainty assessment yields more reliable and accurate recommendations.

Robot Policy Learning with Temporal Optimal Transport Reward

Reward specification is one of the most tricky problems in Reinforcement Learning, which usually requires tedious hand engineering in practice. One promising approach to tackle this challenge is to adopt existing expert video demonstrations for policy learning. Some recent work investigates how to learn robot policies from only a single/few expert video demonstrations. For example, reward labeling via Optimal Transport (OT) has been shown to be an effective strategy to generate a proxy reward by measuring the alignment between the robot trajectory and the expert demonstrations. However, previous work mostly overlooks that the OT reward is invariant to temporal order information, which could bring extra noise to the reward signal. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce the Temporal Optimal Transport (TemporalOT) reward to incorporate temporal order information for learning a more accurate OT-based proxy reward. Extensive experiments on the Meta-world benchmark tasks validate the efficacy of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/fuyw/TemporalOT

Solving Motion Planning Tasks with a Scalable Generative Model

As autonomous driving systems being deployed to millions of vehicles, there is a pressing need of improving the system's scalability, safety and reducing the engineering cost. A realistic, scalable, and practical simulator of the driving world is highly desired. In this paper, we present an efficient solution based on generative models which learns the dynamics of the driving scenes. With this model, we can not only simulate the diverse futures of a given driving scenario but also generate a variety of driving scenarios conditioned on various prompts. Our innovative design allows the model to operate in both full-Autoregressive and partial-Autoregressive modes, significantly improving inference and training speed without sacrificing generative capability. This efficiency makes it ideal for being used as an online reactive environment for reinforcement learning, an evaluator for planning policies, and a high-fidelity simulator for testing. We evaluated our model against two real-world datasets: the Waymo motion dataset and the nuPlan dataset. On the simulation realism and scene generation benchmark, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance. And in the planning benchmarks, our planner outperforms the prior arts. We conclude that the proposed generative model may serve as a foundation for a variety of motion planning tasks, including data generation, simulation, planning, and online training. Source code is public at https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/GUMP/

FuRL: Visual-Language Models as Fuzzy Rewards for Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained visual-language models (VLM) for online Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, we focus on sparse reward tasks with pre-defined textual task descriptions. We first identify the problem of reward misalignment when applying VLM as a reward in RL tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a lightweight fine-tuning method, named Fuzzy VLM reward-aided RL (FuRL), based on reward alignment and relay RL. Specifically, we enhance the performance of SAC/DrQ baseline agents on sparse reward tasks by fine-tuning VLM representations and using relay RL to avoid local minima. Extensive experiments on the Meta-world benchmark tasks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. Code is available at: {\footnotesize\url{https://github.com/fuyw/FuRL}}.

OOSTraj: Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction With Vision-Positioning Denoising

Trajectory prediction is fundamental in computer vision and autonomous driving, particularly for understanding pedestrian behavior and enabling proactive decision-making. Existing approaches in this field often assume precise and complete observational data, neglecting the challenges associated with out-of-view objects and the noise inherent in sensor data due to limited camera range, physical obstructions, and the absence of ground truth for denoised sensor data. Such oversights are critical safety concerns, as they can result in missing essential, non-visible objects. To bridge this gap, we present a novel method for out-of-sight trajectory prediction that leverages a vision-positioning technique. Our approach denoises noisy sensor observations in an unsupervised manner and precisely maps sensor-based trajectories of out-of-sight objects into visual trajectories. This method has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in out-of-sight noisy sensor trajectory denoising and prediction on the Vi-Fi and JRDB datasets. By enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy and addressing the challenges of out-of-sight objects, our work significantly contributes to improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving in complex environments. Our work represents the first initiative towards Out-Of-Sight Trajectory prediction (OOSTraj), setting a new benchmark for future research. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Hai-chao-Zhang/OOSTraj}.

Layout Sequence Prediction From Noisy Mobile Modality

Trajectory prediction plays a vital role in understanding pedestrian movement for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Current trajectory prediction models depend on long, complete, and accurately observed sequences from visual modalities. Nevertheless, real-world situations often involve obstructed cameras, missed objects, or objects out of sight due to environmental factors, leading to incomplete or noisy trajectories. To overcome these limitations, we propose LTrajDiff, a novel approach that treats objects obstructed or out of sight as equally important as those with fully visible trajectories. LTrajDiff utilizes sensor data from mobile phones to surmount out-of-sight constraints, albeit introducing new challenges such as modality fusion, noisy data, and the absence of spatial layout and object size information. We employ a denoising diffusion model to predict precise layout sequences from noisy mobile data using a coarse-to-fine diffusion strategy, incorporating the RMS, Siamese Masked Encoding Module, and MFM. Our model predicts layout sequences by implicitly inferring object size and projection status from a single reference timestamp or significantly obstructed sequences. Achieving SOTA results in randomly obstructed experiments and extremely short input experiments, our model illustrates the effectiveness of leveraging noisy mobile data. In summary, our approach offers a promising solution to the challenges faced by layout sequence and trajectory prediction models in real-world settings, paving the way for utilizing sensor data from mobile phones to accurately predict pedestrian bounding box trajectories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses severely obstructed and extremely short layout sequences by combining vision with noisy mobile modality, making it the pioneering work in the field of layout sequence trajectory prediction.

Camouflaged Image Synthesis Is All You Need to Boost Camouflaged Detection

Camouflaged objects that blend into natural scenes pose significant challenges for deep-learning models to detect and synthesize. While camouflaged object detection is a crucial task in computer vision with diverse real-world applications, this research topic has been constrained by limited data availability. We propose a framework for synthesizing camouflage data to enhance the detection of camouflaged objects in natural scenes. Our approach employs a generative model to produce realistic camouflage images, which can be used to train existing object detection models. Specifically, we use a camouflage environment generator supervised by a camouflage distribution classifier to synthesize the camouflage images, which are then fed into our generator to expand the dataset. Our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art method on three datasets (COD10k, CAMO, and CHAMELEON), demonstrating its effectiveness in improving camouflaged object detection. This approach can serve as a plug-and-play data generation and augmentation module for existing camouflaged object detection tasks and provides a novel way to introduce more diversity and distributions into current camouflage datasets.