Abstract:Because machine learning has significantly improved efficiency and convenience in the society, it's increasingly used to assist or replace human decision-making. However, the data-based pattern makes related algorithms learn and even exacerbate potential bias in samples, resulting in discriminatory decisions against certain unprivileged groups, depriving them of the rights to equal treatment, thus damaging the social well-being and hindering the development of related applications. Therefore, we propose a pre-processing method IFFair based on the influence function. Compared with other fairness optimization approaches, IFFair only uses the influence disparity of training samples on different groups as a guidance to dynamically adjust the sample weights during training without modifying the network structure, data features and decision boundaries. To evaluate the validity of IFFair, we conduct experiments on multiple real-world datasets and metrics. The experimental results show that our approach mitigates bias of multiple accepted metrics in the classification setting, including demographic parity, equalized odds, equality of opportunity and error rate parity without conflicts. It also demonstrates that IFFair achieves better trade-off between multiple utility and fairness metrics compared with previous pre-processing methods.
Abstract:Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over 2000+ hours of extensive training and often struggle to generalize to unfamiliar environments without additional fine-tuning, limiting their practical application in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SocialNav-Map, a novel zero-shot social navigation framework that combines dynamic human trajectory prediction with occupancy mapping, enabling safe and efficient navigation without the need for environment-specific training. Specifically, SocialNav-Map first transforms the task goal position into the constructed map coordinate system. Subsequently, it creates a dynamic occupancy map that incorporates predicted human movements as dynamic obstacles. The framework employs two complementary methods for human trajectory prediction: history prediction and orientation prediction. By integrating these predicted trajectories into the occupancy map, the robot can proactively avoid potential collisions with humans while efficiently navigating to its destination. Extensive experiments on the Social-HM3D and Social-MP3D datasets demonstrate that SocialNav-Map significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL-based methods, which require 2,396 GPU hours of training. Notably, it reduces human collision rates by over 10% without necessitating any training in novel environments. By eliminating the need for environment-specific training, SocialNav-Map achieves superior navigation performance, paving the way for the deployment of social navigation systems in real-world environments characterized by diverse human behaviors. The code is available at: https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SocialNav-Map.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs), leveraging their powerful visual perception and reasoning capabilities, have been widely applied in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) tasks. However, the spatial intelligence capabilities of existing VLMs in UAV scenarios remain largely unexplored, raising concerns about their effectiveness in navigating and interpreting dynamic environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpatialSky-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial intelligence capabilities of VLMs in UAV navigation. Our benchmark comprises two categories-Environmental Perception and Scene Understanding-divided into 13 subcategories, including bounding boxes, color, distance, height, and landing safety analysis, among others. Extensive evaluations of various mainstream open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal unsatisfactory performance in complex UAV navigation scenarios, highlighting significant gaps in their spatial capabilities. To address this challenge, we developed the SpatialSky-Dataset, a comprehensive dataset containing 1M samples with diverse annotations across various scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce Sky-VLM, a specialized VLM designed for UAV spatial reasoning across multiple granularities and contexts. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Sky-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmark tasks, paving the way for the development of VLMs suitable for UAV scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SpatialSKy.
Abstract:Robotic manipulation and navigation are fundamental capabilities of embodied intelligence, enabling effective robot interactions with the physical world. Achieving these capabilities requires a cohesive understanding of the environment, including object recognition to localize target objects, object affordances to identify potential interaction areas and spatial affordances to discern optimal areas for both object placement and robot movement. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level task planning and scene understanding, they often struggle to infer actionable positions for physical interaction, such as functional grasping points and permissible placement regions. This limitation stems from the lack of fine-grained annotations for object and spatial affordances in their training datasets. To tackle this challenge, we introduce RoboAfford++, a generative AI-enhanced dataset for multimodal affordance learning for both robotic manipulation and navigation. Our dataset comprises 869,987 images paired with 2.0 million question answering (QA) annotations, covering three critical tasks: object affordance recognition to identify target objects based on attributes and spatial relationships, object affordance prediction to pinpoint functional parts for manipulation, and spatial affordance localization to identify free space for object placement and robot navigation. Complementing this dataset, we propose RoboAfford-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing affordance-aware prediction in real-world scenarios, featuring 338 meticulously annotated samples across the same three tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal the deficiencies of existing VLMs in affordance learning, while fine-tuning on the RoboAfford++ dataset significantly enhances their ability to reason about object and spatial affordances, validating the dataset's effectiveness.
Abstract:In this report, we describe the technical details of our submission to the IROS 2025 RoboSense Challenge Social Navigation Track. This track focuses on developing RGBD-based perception and navigation systems that enable autonomous agents to navigate safely, efficiently, and socially compliantly in dynamic human-populated indoor environments. The challenge requires agents to operate from an egocentric perspective using only onboard sensors including RGB-D observations and odometry, without access to global maps or privileged information, while maintaining social norm compliance such as safe distances and collision avoidance. Building upon the Falcon model, we introduce a Proactive Risk Perception Module to enhance social navigation performance. Our approach augments Falcon with collision risk understanding that learns to predict distance-based collision risk scores for surrounding humans, which enables the agent to develop more robust spatial awareness and proactive collision avoidance behaviors. The evaluation on the Social-HM3D benchmark demonstrates that our method improves the agent's ability to maintain personal space compliance while navigating toward goals in crowded indoor scenes with dynamic human agents, achieving 2nd place among 16 participating teams in the challenge.
Abstract:Embodied AI development significantly lags behind large foundation models due to three critical challenges: (1) lack of systematic understanding of core capabilities needed for Embodied AI, making research lack clear objectives; (2) absence of unified and standardized evaluation systems, rendering cross-benchmark evaluation infeasible; and (3) underdeveloped automated and scalable acquisition methods for embodied data, creating critical bottlenecks for model scaling. To address these obstacles, we present Embodied Arena, a comprehensive, unified, and evolving evaluation platform for Embodied AI. Our platform establishes a systematic embodied capability taxonomy spanning three levels (perception, reasoning, task execution), seven core capabilities, and 25 fine-grained dimensions, enabling unified evaluation with systematic research objectives. We introduce a standardized evaluation system built upon unified infrastructure supporting flexible integration of 22 diverse benchmarks across three domains (2D/3D Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) and 30+ advanced models from 20+ worldwide institutes. Additionally, we develop a novel LLM-driven automated generation pipeline ensuring scalable embodied evaluation data with continuous evolution for diversity and comprehensiveness. Embodied Arena publishes three real-time leaderboards (Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) with dual perspectives (benchmark view and capability view), providing comprehensive overviews of advanced model capabilities. Especially, we present nine findings summarized from the evaluation results on the leaderboards of Embodied Arena. This helps to establish clear research veins and pinpoint critical research problems, thereby driving forward progress in the field of Embodied AI.
Abstract:Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for embodied intelligence, enabling multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction, as well as continuous spatial decision-making. Nevertheless, current MLLM-based embodied systems face two critical limitations. First, Geometric Adaptability Gap: models trained solely on 2D inputs or with hard-coded 3D geometry injection suffer from either insufficient spatial information or restricted 2D generalization, leading to poor adaptability across tasks with diverse spatial demands. Second, Embodiment Constraint Gap: prior work often neglects the physical constraints and capacities of real robots, resulting in task plans that are theoretically valid but practically infeasible.To address these gaps, we introduce OmniEVA -- an embodied versatile planner that enables advanced embodied reasoning and task planning through two pivotal innovations: (1) a Task-Adaptive 3D Grounding mechanism, which introduces a gated router to perform explicit selective regulation of 3D fusion based on contextual requirements, enabling context-aware 3D grounding for diverse embodied tasks. (2) an Embodiment-Aware Reasoning framework that jointly incorporates task goals and embodiment constraints into the reasoning loop, resulting in planning decisions that are both goal-directed and executable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that OmniEVA not only achieves state-of-the-art general embodied reasoning performance, but also exhibits a strong ability across a wide range of downstream scenarios. Evaluations of a suite of proposed embodied benchmarks, including both primitive and composite tasks, confirm its robust and versatile planning capabilities. Project page: https://omnieva.github.io




Abstract:Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose $NavA^3$, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $NavA^3$ achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete longhorizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available. Project website: https://NavigationA3.github.io/.
Abstract:We introduce RoboBrain 2.0, our latest generation of embodied vision-language foundation models, designed to unify perception, reasoning, and planning for complex embodied tasks in physical environments. It comes in two variants: a lightweight 7B model and a full-scale 32B model, featuring a heterogeneous architecture with a vision encoder and a language model. Despite its compact size, RoboBrain 2.0 achieves strong performance across a wide spectrum of embodied reasoning tasks. On both spatial and temporal benchmarks, the 32B variant achieves leading results, surpassing prior open-source and proprietary models. In particular, it supports key real-world embodied AI capabilities, including spatial understanding (e.g., affordance prediction, spatial referring, trajectory forecasting) and temporal decision-making (e.g., closed-loop interaction, multi-agent long-horizon planning, and scene graph updating). This report details the model architecture, data construction, multi-stage training strategies, infrastructure and practical applications. We hope RoboBrain 2.0 advances embodied AI research and serves as a practical step toward building generalist embodied agents. The code, checkpoint and benchmark are available at https://superrobobrain.github.io.
Abstract:Video content comprehension is essential for various applications, ranging from video analysis to interactive systems. Despite advancements in large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), these models often struggle to capture the nuanced, spatiotemporal details essential for thorough video analysis. To address this gap, we introduce Video-CoT, a groundbreaking dataset designed to enhance spatiotemporal understanding using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methodologies. Video-CoT contains 192,000 fine-grained spa-tiotemporal question-answer pairs and 23,000 high-quality CoT-annotated samples, providing a solid foundation for evaluating spatiotemporal understanding in video comprehension. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive benchmark for assessing these tasks, with each task featuring 750 images and tailored evaluation metrics. Our extensive experiments reveal that current VLMs face significant challenges in achieving satisfactory performance, high-lighting the difficulties of effective spatiotemporal understanding. Overall, the Video-CoT dataset and benchmark open new avenues for research in multimedia understanding and support future innovations in intelligent systems requiring advanced video analysis capabilities. By making these resources publicly available, we aim to encourage further exploration in this critical area. Project website:https://video-cot.github.io/ .