GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

Propagating Sparse Depth via Depth Foundation Model for Out-of-Distribution Depth Completion

Depth completion is a pivotal challenge in computer vision, aiming at reconstructing the dense depth map from a sparse one, typically with a paired RGB image. Existing learning based models rely on carefully prepared but limited data, leading to significant performance degradation in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Recent foundation models have demonstrated exceptional robustness in monocular depth estimation through large-scale training, and using such models to enhance the robustness of depth completion models is a promising solution. In this work, we propose a novel depth completion framework that leverages depth foundation models to attain remarkable robustness without large-scale training. Specifically, we leverage a depth foundation model to extract environmental cues, including structural and semantic context, from RGB images to guide the propagation of sparse depth information into missing regions. We further design a dual-space propagation approach, without any learnable parameters, to effectively propagates sparse depth in both 3D and 2D spaces to maintain geometric structure and local consistency. To refine the intricate structure, we introduce a learnable correction module to progressively adjust the depth prediction towards the real depth. We train our model on the NYUv2 and KITTI datasets as in-distribution datasets and extensively evaluate the framework on 16 other datasets. Our framework performs remarkably well in the OOD scenarios and outperforms existing state-of-the-art depth completion methods. Our models are released in https://github.com/shenglunch/PSD.

JAM: Keypoint-Guided Joint Prediction after Classification-Aware Marginal Proposal for Multi-Agent Interaction

Predicting the future motion of road participants is a critical task in autonomous driving. In this work, we address the challenge of low-quality generation of low-probability modes in multi-agent joint prediction. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-stage multi-agent interactive prediction framework named \textit{keypoint-guided joint prediction after classification-aware marginal proposal} (JAM). The first stage is modeled as a marginal prediction process, which classifies queries by trajectory type to encourage the model to learn all categories of trajectories, providing comprehensive mode information for the joint prediction module. The second stage is modeled as a joint prediction process, which takes the scene context and the marginal proposals from the first stage as inputs to learn the final joint distribution. We explicitly introduce key waypoints to guide the joint prediction module in better capturing and leveraging the critical information from the initial predicted trajectories. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world Waymo Open Motion Dataset interactive prediction benchmark. The results show that our approach achieves competitive performance. In particular, in the framework comparison experiments, the proposed JAM outperforms other prediction frameworks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in interactive trajectory prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/LinFunster/JAM to facilitate future research.

TrackingMiM: Efficient Mamba-in-Mamba Serialization for Real-time UAV Object Tracking

The Vision Transformer (ViT) model has long struggled with the challenge of quadratic complexity, a limitation that becomes especially critical in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking systems, where data must be processed in real time. In this study, we explore the recently proposed State-Space Model, Mamba, leveraging its computational efficiency and capability for long-sequence modeling to effectively process dense image sequences in tracking tasks. First, we highlight the issue of temporal inconsistency in existing Mamba-based methods, specifically the failure to account for temporal continuity in the Mamba scanning mechanism. Secondly, building upon this insight,we propose TrackingMiM, a Mamba-in-Mamba architecture, a minimal-computation burden model for handling image sequence of tracking problem. In our framework, the mamba scan is performed in a nested way while independently process temporal and spatial coherent patch tokens. While the template frame is encoded as query token and utilized for tracking in every scan. Extensive experiments conducted on five UAV tracking benchmarks confirm that the proposed TrackingMiM achieves state-of-the-art precision while offering noticeable higher speed in UAV tracking.

AI Assistants to Enhance and Exploit the PETSc Knowledge Base

Generative AI, especially through large language models (LLMs), is transforming how technical knowledge can be accessed, reused, and extended. PETSc, a widely used numerical library for high-performance scientific computing, has accumulated a rich but fragmented knowledge base over its three decades of development, spanning source code, documentation, mailing lists, GitLab issues, Discord conversations, technical papers, and more. Much of this knowledge remains informal and inaccessible to users and new developers. To activate and utilize this knowledge base more effectively, the PETSc team has begun building an LLM-powered system that combines PETSc content with custom LLM tools -- including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), reranking algorithms, and chatbots -- to assist users, support developers, and propose updates to formal documentation. This paper presents initial experiences designing and evaluating these tools, focusing on system architecture, using RAG and reranking for PETSc-specific information, evaluation methodologies for various LLMs and embedding models, and user interface design. Leveraging the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility resources, we analyze how LLM responses can enhance the development and use of numerical software, with an initial focus on scalable Krylov solvers. Our goal is to establish an extensible framework for knowledge-centered AI in scientific software, enabling scalable support, enriched documentation, and enhanced workflows for research and development. We conclude by outlining directions for expanding this system into a robust, evolving platform that advances software ecosystems to accelerate scientific discovery.

SuperPlace: The Renaissance of Classical Feature Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition in the Era of Foundation Models

Recent visual place recognition (VPR) approaches have leveraged foundation models (FM) and introduced novel aggregation techniques. However, these methods have failed to fully exploit key concepts of FM, such as the effective utilization of extensive training sets, and they have overlooked the potential of classical aggregation methods, such as GeM and NetVLAD. Building on these insights, we revive classical feature aggregation methods and develop more fundamental VPR models, collectively termed SuperPlace. First, we introduce a supervised label alignment method that enables training across various VPR datasets within a unified framework. Second, we propose G$^2$M, a compact feature aggregation method utilizing two GeMs, where one GeM learns the principal components of feature maps along the channel dimension and calibrates the output of the other. Third, we propose the secondary fine-tuning (FT$^2$) strategy for NetVLAD-Linear (NVL). NetVLAD first learns feature vectors in a high-dimensional space and then compresses them into a lower-dimensional space via a single linear layer. Extensive experiments highlight our contributions and demonstrate the superiority of SuperPlace. Specifically, G$^2$M achieves promising results with only one-tenth of the feature dimensions compared to recent methods. Moreover, NVL-FT$^2$ ranks first on the MSLS leaderboard.

EmbodiedPlace: Learning Mixture-of-Features with Embodied Constraints for Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a scene-oriented image retrieval problem in computer vision in which re-ranking based on local features is commonly employed to improve performance. In robotics, VPR is also referred to as Loop Closure Detection, which emphasizes spatial-temporal verification within a sequence. However, designing local features specifically for VPR is impractical, and relying on motion sequences imposes limitations. Inspired by these observations, we propose a novel, simple re-ranking method that refines global features through a Mixture-of-Features (MoF) approach under embodied constraints. First, we analyze the practical feasibility of embodied constraints in VPR and categorize them according to existing datasets, which include GPS tags, sequential timestamps, local feature matching, and self-similarity matrices. We then propose a learning-based MoF weight-computation approach, utilizing a multi-metric loss function. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public datasets with minimal additional computational overhead. For instance, with only 25 KB of additional parameters and a processing time of 10 microseconds per frame, our method achieves a 0.9\% improvement over a DINOv2-based baseline performance on the Pitts-30k test set.

MT-PCR: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer with Spatial Serialization for Hierarchical Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration (PCR) is a fundamental task in 3D computer vision and robotics. Most existing learning-based PCR methods rely on Transformers, which suffer from quadratic computational complexity. This limitation restricts the resolution of point clouds that can be processed, inevitably leading to information loss. In contrast, Mamba-a recently proposed model based on state space models (SSMs)-achieves linear computational complexity while maintaining strong long-range contextual modeling capabilities. However, directly applying Mamba to PCR tasks yields suboptimal performance due to the unordered and irregular nature of point cloud data. To address this challenge, we propose MT-PCR, the first point cloud registration framework that integrates both Mamba and Transformer modules. Specifically, we serialize point cloud features using Z-order space-filling curves to enforce spatial locality, enabling Mamba to better model the geometric structure of the input. Additionally, we remove the order indicator module commonly used in Mamba-based sequence modeling, leads to improved performance in our setting. The serialized features are then processed by an optimized Mamba encoder, followed by a Transformer refinement stage. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MT-PCR outperforms Transformer-based and concurrent state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, significantly reducing while GPU memory usage and FLOPs.

TPT-Bench: A Large-Scale, Long-Term and Robot-Egocentric Dataset for Benchmarking Target Person Tracking

Tracking a target person from robot-egocentric views is crucial for developing autonomous robots that provide continuous personalized assistance or collaboration in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Embodied AI. However, most existing target person tracking (TPT) benchmarks are limited to controlled laboratory environments with few distractions, clean backgrounds, and short-term occlusions. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale dataset designed for TPT in crowded and unstructured environments, demonstrated through a robot-person following task. The dataset is collected by a human pushing a sensor-equipped cart while following a target person, capturing human-like following behavior and emphasizing long-term tracking challenges, including frequent occlusions and the need for re-identification from numerous pedestrians. It includes multi-modal data streams, including odometry, 3D LiDAR, IMU, panoptic, and RGB-D images, along with exhaustively annotated 2D bounding boxes of the target person across 35 sequences, both indoors and outdoors. Using this dataset and visual annotations, we perform extensive experiments with existing TPT methods, offering a thorough analysis of their limitations and suggesting future research directions.

Nexus-Gen: A Unified Model for Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

Unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation abilities through a single framework. Despite their versatility, existing open-source unified models exhibit performance gaps against domain-specific architectures. To bridge this gap, we present Nexus-Gen, a unified model that synergizes the language reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the image synthesis power of diffusion models. To align the embedding space of the LLM and diffusion model, we conduct a dual-phase alignment training process. (1) The autoregressive LLM learns to predict image embeddings conditioned on multimodal inputs, while (2) the vision decoder is trained to reconstruct high-fidelity images from these embeddings. During training the LLM, we identified a critical discrepancy between the autoregressive paradigm's training and inference phases, where error accumulation in continuous embedding space severely degrades generation quality. To avoid this issue, we introduce a prefilled autoregression strategy that prefills input sequence with position-embedded special tokens instead of continuous embeddings. Through dual-phase training, Nexus-Gen has developed the integrated capability to comprehensively address the image understanding, generation and editing tasks. All models, datasets, and codes are published at https://github.com/modelscope/Nexus-Gen.git to facilitate further advancements across the field.