Trajectory Prediction in Dynamic Object Tracking: A Critical Study

This study provides a detailed analysis of current advancements in dynamic object tracking (DOT) and trajectory prediction (TP) methodologies, including their applications and challenges. It covers various approaches, such as feature-based, segmentation-based, estimation-based, and learning-based methods, evaluating their effectiveness, deployment, and limitations in real-world scenarios. The study highlights the significant impact of these technologies in automotive and autonomous vehicles, surveillance and security, healthcare, and industrial automation, contributing to safety and efficiency. Despite the progress, challenges such as improved generalization, computational efficiency, reduced data dependency, and ethical considerations still exist. The study suggests future research directions to address these challenges, emphasizing the importance of multimodal data integration, semantic information fusion, and developing context-aware systems, along with ethical and privacy-preserving frameworks.

Is an object-centric representation beneficial for robotic manipulation ?

Object-centric representation (OCR) has recently become a subject of interest in the computer vision community for learning a structured representation of images and videos. It has been several times presented as a potential way to improve data-efficiency and generalization capabilities to learn an agent on downstream tasks. However, most existing work only evaluates such models on scene decomposition, without any notion of reasoning over the learned representation. Robotic manipulation tasks generally involve multi-object environments with potential inter-object interaction. We thus argue that they are a very interesting playground to really evaluate the potential of existing object-centric work. To do so, we create several robotic manipulation tasks in simulated environments involving multiple objects (several distractors, the robot, etc.) and a high-level of randomization (object positions, colors, shapes, background, initial positions, etc.). We then evaluate one classical object-centric method across several generalization scenarios and compare its results against several state-of-the-art hollistic representations. Our results exhibit that existing methods are prone to failure in difficult scenarios involving complex scene structures, whereas object-centric methods help overcome these challenges.

Object-Centric Representations Improve Policy Generalization in Robot Manipulation

Visual representations are central to the learning and generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies. While existing methods rely on global or dense features, such representations often entangle task-relevant and irrelevant scene information, limiting robustness under distribution shifts. In this work, we investigate object-centric representations (OCR) as a structured alternative that segments visual input into a finished set of entities, introducing inductive biases that align more naturally with manipulation tasks. We benchmark a range of visual encoders-object-centric, global and dense methods-across a suite of simulated and real-world manipulation tasks ranging from simple to complex, and evaluate their generalization under diverse visual conditions including changes in lighting, texture, and the presence of distractors. Our findings reveal that OCR-based policies outperform dense and global representations in generalization settings, even without task-specific pretraining. These insights suggest that OCR is a promising direction for designing visual systems that generalize effectively in dynamic, real-world robotic environments.

Noise Optimized Conditional Diffusion for Domain Adaptation

Pseudo-labeling is a cornerstone of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), yet the scarcity of High-Confidence Pseudo-Labeled Target Domain Samples (\textbf{hcpl-tds}) often leads to inaccurate cross-domain statistical alignment, causing DA failures. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{N}oise \textbf{O}ptimized \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{D}iffusion for \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{NOCDDA}), which seamlessly integrates the generative capabilities of conditional diffusion models with the decision-making requirements of DA to achieve task-coupled optimization for efficient adaptation. For robust cross-domain consistency, we modify the DA classifier to align with the conditional diffusion classifier within a unified optimization framework, enabling forward training on noise-varying cross-domain samples. Furthermore, we argue that the conventional \( \mathcal{N}(\mathbf{0}, \mathbf{I}) \) initialization in diffusion models often generates class-confused hcpl-tds, compromising discriminative DA. To resolve this, we introduce a class-aware noise optimization strategy that refines sampling regions for reverse class-specific hcpl-tds generation, effectively enhancing cross-domain alignment. Extensive experiments across 5 benchmark datasets and 29 DA tasks demonstrate significant performance gains of \textbf{NOCDDA} over 31 state-of-the-art methods, validating its robustness and effectiveness.

Active Perception for Tactile Sensing: A Task-Agnostic Attention-Based Approach

Humans make extensive use of haptic exploration to map and identify the properties of the objects that we touch. In robotics, active tactile perception has emerged as an important research domain that complements vision for tasks such as object classification, shape reconstruction, and manipulation. This work introduces TAP (Task-agnostic Active Perception) -- a novel framework that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) and transformer-based architectures to address the challenges posed by partially observable environments. TAP integrates Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and CrossQ algorithms within a unified optimization objective, jointly training a perception module and decision-making policy. By design, TAP is completely task-agnostic and can, in principle, generalize to any active perception problem. We evaluate TAP across diverse tasks, including toy examples and realistic applications involving haptic exploration of 3D models from the Tactile MNIST benchmark. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of TAP, achieving high accuracies on the Tactile MNIST haptic digit recognition task and a tactile pose estimation task. These findings underscore the potential of TAP as a versatile and generalizable framework for advancing active tactile perception in robotics.

Iterative Collaboration Network Guided By Reconstruction Prior for Medical Image Super-Resolution

High-resolution medical images can provide more detailed information for better diagnosis. Conventional medical image super-resolution relies on a single task which first performs the extraction of the features and then upscaling based on the features. The features extracted may not be complete for super-resolution. Recent multi-task learning,including reconstruction and super-resolution, is a good solution to obtain additional relevant information. The interaction between the two tasks is often insufficient, which still leads to incomplete and less relevant deep features. To address above limitations, we propose an iterative collaboration network (ICONet) to improve communications between tasks by progressively incorporating reconstruction prior to the super-resolution learning procedure in an iterative collaboration way. It consists of a reconstruction branch, a super-resolution branch, and a SR-Rec fusion module. The reconstruction branch generates the artifact-free image as prior, which is followed by a super-resolution branch for prior knowledge-guided super-resolution. Unlike the widely-used convolutional neural networks for extracting local features and Transformers with quadratic computational complexity for modeling long-range dependencies, we develop a new residual spatial-channel feature learning (RSCFL) module of two branches to efficiently establish feature relationships in spatial and channel dimensions. Moreover, the designed SR-Rec fusion module fuses the reconstruction prior and super-resolution features with each other in an adaptive manner. Our ICONet is built with multi-stage models to iteratively upscale the low-resolution images using steps of 2x and simultaneously interact between two branches in multi-stage supervisions.

iADCPS: Time Series Anomaly Detection for Evolving Cyber-physical Systems via Incremental Meta-learning

Anomaly detection for cyber-physical systems (ADCPS) is crucial in identifying faults and potential attacks by analyzing the time series of sensor measurements and actuator states. However, current methods lack adaptation to data distribution shifts in both temporal and spatial dimensions as cyber-physical systems evolve. To tackle this issue, we propose an incremental meta-learning-based approach, namely iADCPS, which can continuously update the model through limited evolving normal samples to reconcile the distribution gap between evolving and historical time series. Specifically, We first introduce a temporal mixup strategy to align data for data-level generalization which is then combined with the one-class meta-learning approach for model-level generalization. Furthermore, we develop a non-parametric dynamic threshold to adaptively adjust the threshold based on the probability density of the abnormal scores without any anomaly supervision. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the iADCPS using three publicly available datasets PUMP, SWaT, and WADI. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves 99.0%, 93.1%, and 78.7% F1-Score, respectively, which outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) ADCPS method, especially in the context of the evolving CPSs.

HAR-DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixture for Self-Supervised Human Activity Recognition Across Heterogeneous IMU Datasets

Cross-dataset Human Activity Recognition (HAR) suffers from limited model generalization, hindering its practical deployment. To address this critical challenge, inspired by the success of DoReMi in Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a data mixture optimization strategy for pre-training HAR models, aiming to improve the recognition performance across heterogeneous datasets. However, directly applying DoReMi to the HAR field encounters new challenges due to the continuous, multi-channel and intrinsic heterogeneous characteristics of IMU sensor data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework HAR-DoReMi, which introduces a masked reconstruction task based on Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss. By raplacing the discrete language sequence prediction task, which relies on the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) loss, in the original DoReMi framework, the proposed framework is inherently more appropriate for handling the continuous and multi-channel characteristics of IMU data. In addition, HAR-DoReMi integrates the Mahony fusion algorithm into the self-supervised HAR pre-training, aiming to mitigate the heterogeneity of varying sensor orientation. This is achieved by estimating the sensor orientation within each dataset and facilitating alignment with a unified coordinate system, thereby improving the cross-dataset generalization ability of the HAR model. Experimental evaluation on multiple cross-dataset HAR transfer tasks demonstrates that HAR-DoReMi improves the accuracy by an average of 6.51%, compared to the current state-of-the-art method with only approximately 30% to 50% of the data usage. These results confirm the effectiveness of HAR-DoReMi in improving the generalization and data efficiency of pre-training HAR models, underscoring its significant potential to facilitate the practical deployment of HAR technology.

PTMs-TSCIL Pre-Trained Models Based Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) for time series data faces critical challenges in balancing stability against catastrophic forgetting and plasticity for new knowledge acquisition, particularly under real-world constraints where historical data access is restricted. While pre-trained models (PTMs) have shown promise in CIL for vision and NLP domains, their potential in time series class-incremental learning (TSCIL) remains underexplored due to the scarcity of large-scale time series pre-trained models. Prompted by the recent emergence of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) for time series data, we present the first exploration of PTM-based Time Series Class-Incremental Learning (TSCIL). Our approach leverages frozen PTM backbones coupled with incrementally tuning the shared adapter, preserving generalization capabilities while mitigating feature drift through knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we introduce a Feature Drift Compensation Network (DCN), designed with a novel two-stage training strategy to precisely model feature space transformations across incremental tasks. This allows for accurate projection of old class prototypes into the new feature space. By employing DCN-corrected prototypes, we effectively enhance the unified classifier retraining, mitigating model feature drift and alleviating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with our method yielding final accuracy gains of 1.4%-6.1% across all datasets compared to existing PTM-based approaches. Our work establishes a new paradigm for TSCIL, providing insights into stability-plasticity optimization for continual learning systems.

Beyond Batch Learning: Global Awareness Enhanced Domain Adaptation

In domain adaptation (DA), the effectiveness of deep learning-based models is often constrained by batch learning strategies that fail to fully apprehend the global statistical and geometric characteristics of data distributions. Addressing this gap, we introduce 'Global Awareness Enhanced Domain Adaptation' (GAN-DA), a novel approach that transcends traditional batch-based limitations. GAN-DA integrates a unique predefined feature representation (PFR) to facilitate the alignment of cross-domain distributions, thereby achieving a comprehensive global statistical awareness. This representation is innovatively expanded to encompass orthogonal and common feature aspects, which enhances the unification of global manifold structures and refines decision boundaries for more effective DA. Our extensive experiments, encompassing 27 diverse cross-domain image classification tasks, demonstrate GAN-DA's remarkable superiority, outperforming 24 established DA methods by a significant margin. Furthermore, our in-depth analyses shed light on the decision-making processes, revealing insights into the adaptability and efficiency of GAN-DA. This approach not only addresses the limitations of existing DA methodologies but also sets a new benchmark in the realm of domain adaptation, offering broad implications for future research and applications in this field.