Non-verbal Real-time Human-AI Interaction in Constrained Robotic Environments

We study the ongoing debate regarding the statistical fidelity of AI-generated data compared to human-generated data in the context of non-verbal communication using full body motion. Concretely, we ask if contemporary generative models move beyond surface mimicry to participate in the silent, but expressive dialogue of body language. We tackle this question by introducing the first framework that generates a natural non-verbal interaction between Human and AI in real-time from 2D body keypoints. Our experiments utilize four lightweight architectures which run at up to 100 FPS on an NVIDIA Orin Nano, effectively closing the perception-action loop needed for natural Human-AI interaction. We trained on 437 human video clips and demonstrated that pretraining on synthetically-generated sequences reduces motion errors significantly, without sacrificing speed. Yet, a measurable reality gap persists. When the best model is evaluated on keypoints extracted from cutting-edge text-to-video systems, such as SORA and VEO, we observe that performance drops on SORA-generated clips. However, it degrades far less on VEO, suggesting that temporal coherence, not image fidelity, drives real-world performance. Our results demonstrate that statistically distinguishable differences persist between Human and AI motion.

Learning on the Fly: Replay-Based Continual Object Perception for Indoor Drones

Autonomous agents such as indoor drones must learn new object classes in real-time while limiting catastrophic forgetting, motivating Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). However, most unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets focus on outdoor scenes and offer limited temporally coherent indoor videos. We introduce an indoor dataset of $14,400$ frames capturing inter-drone and ground vehicle footage, annotated via a semi-automatic workflow with a $98.6\%$ first-pass labeling agreement before final manual verification. Using this dataset, we benchmark 3 replay-based CIL strategies: Experience Replay (ER), Maximally Interfered Retrieval (MIR), and Forgetting-Aware Replay (FAR), using YOLOv11-nano as a resource-efficient detector for deployment-constrained UAV platforms. Under tight memory budgets ($5-10\%$ replay), FAR performs better than the rest, achieving an average accuracy (ACC, $mAP_{50-95}$ across increments) of $82.96\%$ with $5\%$ replay. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) analysis shows attention shifts across classes in mixed scenes, which is associated with reduced localization quality for drones. The experiments further demonstrate that replay-based continual learning can be effectively applied to edge aerial systems. Overall, this work contributes an indoor UAV video dataset with preserved temporal coherence and an evaluation of replay-based CIL under limited replay budgets. Project page: https://spacetime-vision-robotics-laboratory.github.io/learning-on-the-fly-cl

With Great Context Comes Great Prediction Power: Classifying Objects via Geo-Semantic Scene Graphs

Humans effortlessly identify objects by leveraging a rich understanding of the surrounding scene, including spatial relationships, material properties, and the co-occurrence of other objects. In contrast, most computational object recognition systems operate on isolated image regions, devoid of meaning in isolation, thus ignoring this vital contextual information. This paper argues for the critical role of context and introduces a novel framework for contextual object classification. We first construct a Geo-Semantic Contextual Graph (GSCG) from a single monocular image. This rich, structured representation is built by integrating a metric depth estimator with a unified panoptic and material segmentation model. The GSCG encodes objects as nodes with detailed geometric, chromatic, and material attributes, and their spatial relationships as edges. This explicit graph structure makes the model's reasoning process inherently interpretable. We then propose a specialized graph-based classifier that aggregates features from a target object, its immediate neighbors, and the global scene context to predict its class. Through extensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that our context-aware model achieves a classification accuracy of 73.4%, dramatically outperforming context-agnostic versions (as low as 38.4%). Furthermore, our GSCG-based approach significantly surpasses strong baselines, including fine-tuned ResNet models (max 53.5%) and a state-of-the-art multimodal Large Language Model (LLM), Llama 4 Scout, which, even when given the full image alongside a detailed description of objects, maxes out at 42.3%. These results on COCO 2017 train/val splits highlight the superiority of explicitly structured and interpretable context for object recognition tasks.

Learning from Random Subspace Exploration: Generalized Test-Time Augmentation with Self-supervised Distillation

We introduce Generalized Test-Time Augmentation (GTTA), a highly effective method for improving the performance of a trained model, which unlike other existing Test-Time Augmentation approaches from the literature is general enough to be used off-the-shelf for many vision and non-vision tasks, such as classification, regression, image segmentation and object detection. By applying a new general data transformation, that randomly perturbs multiple times the PCA subspace projection of a test input, GTTA forms robust ensembles at test time in which, due to sound statistical properties, the structural and systematic noises in the initial input data is filtered out and final estimator errors are reduced. Different from other existing methods, we also propose a final self-supervised learning stage in which the ensemble output, acting as an unsupervised teacher, is used to train the initial single student model, thus reducing significantly the test time computational cost, at no loss in accuracy. Our tests and comparisons to strong TTA approaches and SoTA models on various vision and non-vision well-known datasets and tasks, such as image classification and segmentation, speech recognition and house price prediction, validate the generality of the proposed GTTA. Furthermore, we also prove its effectiveness on the more specific real-world task of salmon segmentation and detection in low-visibility underwater videos, for which we introduce DeepSalmon, the largest dataset of its kind in the literature.

Closer to Ground Truth: Realistic Shape and Appearance Labeled Data Generation for Unsupervised Underwater Image Segmentation

Solving fish segmentation in underwater videos, a real-world problem of great practical value in marine and aquaculture industry, is a challenging task due to the difficulty of the filming environment, poor visibility and limited existing annotated underwater fish data. In order to overcome these obstacles, we introduce a novel two stage unsupervised segmentation approach that requires no human annotations and combines artificially created and real images. Our method generates challenging synthetic training data, by placing virtual fish in real-world underwater habitats, after performing fish transformations such as Thin Plate Spline shape warping and color Histogram Matching, which realistically integrate synthetic fish into the backgrounds, making the generated images increasingly closer to the real world data with every stage of our approach. While we validate our unsupervised method on the popular DeepFish dataset, obtaining a performance close to a fully-supervised SoTA model, we further show its effectiveness on the specific case of salmon segmentation in underwater videos, for which we introduce DeepSalmon, the largest dataset of its kind in the literature (30 GB). Moreover, on both datasets we prove the capability of our approach to boost the performance of the fully-supervised SoTA model.

A self-supervised cyclic neural-analytic approach for novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction

Generating novel views from recorded videos is crucial for enabling autonomous UAV navigation. Recent advancements in neural rendering have facilitated the rapid development of methods capable of rendering new trajectories. However, these methods often fail to generalize well to regions far from the training data without an optimized flight path, leading to suboptimal reconstructions. We propose a self-supervised cyclic neural-analytic pipeline that combines high-quality neural rendering outputs with precise geometric insights from analytical methods. Our solution improves RGB and mesh reconstructions for novel view synthesis, especially in undersampled areas and regions that are completely different from the training dataset. We use an effective transformer-based architecture for image reconstruction to refine and adapt the synthesis process, enabling effective handling of novel, unseen poses without relying on extensive labeled datasets. Our findings demonstrate substantial improvements in rendering views of novel and also 3D reconstruction, which to the best of our knowledge is a first, setting a new standard for autonomous navigation in complex outdoor environments.

Towards Zero-Shot & Explainable Video Description by Reasoning over Graphs of Events in Space and Time

In the current era of Machine Learning, Transformers have become the de facto approach across a variety of domains, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Transformer-based solutions are the backbone of current state-of-the-art methods for language generation, image and video classification, segmentation, action and object recognition, among many others. Interestingly enough, while these state-of-the-art methods produce impressive results in their respective domains, the problem of understanding the relationship between vision and language is still beyond our reach. In this work, we propose a common ground between vision and language based on events in space and time in an explainable and programmatic way, to connect learning-based vision and language state of the art models and provide a solution to the long standing problem of describing videos in natural language. We validate that our algorithmic approach is able to generate coherent, rich and relevant textual descriptions on videos collected from a variety of datasets, using both standard metrics (e.g. Bleu, ROUGE) and the modern LLM-as-a-Jury approach.

Label up: Learning Pulmonary Embolism Segmentation from Image Level Annotation through Model Explainability

Pulmonary Embolisms (PE) are a leading cause of cardiovascular death. Computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA) stands as the gold standard for diagnosing pulmonary embolisms (PE) and there has been a lot of interest in developing AI-based models for assisting in PE diagnosis. Performance of these algorithms has been hindered by the scarcity of annotated data, especially those with fine-grained delineation of the thromboembolic burden. In this paper we attempt to address this issue by introducing a weakly supervised learning pipeline, that leverages model explainability to generate fine-grained (pixel level) masks for embolisms starting from more coarse-grained (binary, image level) PE annotations. Furthermore, we show that training models using the automatically generated pixel annotations yields good PE localization performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline on the large-scale, multi-center RSPECT augmented dataset for PE detection and localization.

"Vorbeşti Româneşte?" A Recipe to Train Powerful Romanian LLMs with English Instructions

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English; hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds other languages. To our knowledge, we are the first to collect and translate a large collection of texts, instructions, and benchmarks and train, evaluate, and release open-source LLMs tailored for Romanian. We evaluate our methods on four different categories, including academic benchmarks, MT-Bench (manually translated), and a professionally built historical, cultural, and social benchmark adapted to Romanian. We argue for the usefulness and high performance of RoLLMs by obtaining state-of-the-art results across the board. We publicly release all resources (i.e., data, training and evaluation code, models) to support and encourage research on Romanian LLMs while concurrently creating a generalizable recipe, adequate for other low or less-resourced languages.

OpenLLM-Ro -- Technical Report on Open-source Romanian LLMs

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English. Hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds their performance in other languages. This document presents our approach to training and evaluating the first foundational and chat LLM specialized for Romanian.