Ψ-Map: Panoptic Surface Integrated Mapping Enables Real2Sim Transfer

Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction is essential for advanced robotics perception and simulation. However, existing methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often struggle to simultaneously achieve geometric accuracy, coherent panoptic understanding, and real-time inference frequency in large-scale scenes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that integrates geometric reinforcement, end-to-end panoptic learning, and efficient rendering. First, to ensure physical realism in large-scale environments, we leverage LiDAR data to construct plane-constrained multimodal Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and employ 2D Gaussian surfels as the map representation, enabling high-precision surface alignment and continuous geometric supervision. Building upon this, to overcome the error accumulation and cumbersome cross-frame association inherent in traditional multi-stage panoptic segmentation pipelines, we design a query-guided end-to-end learning architecture. By utilizing a local cross-attention mechanism within the view frustum, the system lifts 2D mask features directly into 3D space, achieving globally consistent panoptic understanding. Finally, addressing the computational bottlenecks caused by high-dimensional semantic features, we introduce Precise Tile Intersection and a Top-K Hard Selection strategy to optimize the rendering pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves superior geometric and panoptic reconstruction quality in large-scale scenes while maintaining an inference rate exceeding 40 FPS, meeting the real-time requirements of robotic control loops.

Fast-SegSim: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Robotics in Simulation

Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction is crucial for advanced robotics and simulation. However, existing 3D reconstruction methods, such as NeRF or Gaussian Splatting variants, often struggle to achieve the real-time inference frequency required by robotic control loops. Existing methods incur prohibitive latency when processing the high-dimensional features required for robust open-vocabulary segmentation. We propose Fast-SegSim, a novel, simple, and end-to-end framework built upon 2D Gaussian Splatting, designed to realize real-time, high-fidelity, and 3D-consistent open-vocabulary segmentation reconstruction. Our core contribution is a highly optimized rendering pipeline that specifically addresses the computational bottleneck of high-channel segmentation feature accumulation. We introduce two key optimizations: Precise Tile Intersection to reduce rasterization redundancy, and a novel Top-K Hard Selection strategy. This strategy leverages the geometric sparsity inherent in the 2D Gaussian representation to greatly simplify feature accumulation and alleviate bandwidth limitations, achieving render rates exceeding 40 FPS. Fast-SegSim provides critical value in robotic applications: it serves both as a high-frequency sensor input for simulation platforms like Gazebo, and its 3D-consistent outputs provide essential multi-view 'ground truth' labels for fine-tuning downstream perception tasks. We demonstrate this utility by using the generated labels to fine-tune the perception module in object goal navigation, successfully doubling the navigation success rate. Our superior rendering speed and practical utility underscore Fast-SegSim's potential to bridge the sim-to-real gap.

IntentReact: Guiding Reactive Object-Centric Navigation via Topological Intent

Object-goal visual navigation requires robots to reason over semantic structure and act effectively under partial observability. Recent approaches based on object-level topological maps enable long-horizon navigation without dense geometric reconstruction, but their execution remains limited by the gap between global topological guidance and local perception-driven control. In particular, local decisions are made solely from the current egocentric observation, without access to information beyond the robot's field of view. As a result, the robot may persist along its current heading even when initially oriented away from the goal, moving toward directions that do not decrease the global topological distance. In this work, we propose IntentReact, an intent-conditioned object-centric navigation framework that introduces a compact interface between global topological planning and reactive object-centric control. Our approach encodes global topological guidance as a low-dimensional directional signal, termed intent, which conditions a learned waypoint prediction policy to bias navigation toward topologically consistent progression. This design enables the robot to promptly reorient when local observations are misleading, guiding motion toward directions that decrease global topological distance while preserving the reactivity and robustness of object-centric control. We evaluate the proposed framework through extensive experiments, demonstrating improved navigation success and execution quality compared to prior object-centric navigation methods.

Direction Matters: Learning Force Direction Enables Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Manipulation

Sim-to-real transfer for contact-rich manipulation remains challenging due to the inherent discrepancy in contact dynamics. While existing methods often rely on costly real-world data or utilize blind compliance through fixed controllers, we propose a framework that leverages expert-designed controller logic for transfer. Inspired by the success of privileged supervision in kinematic tasks, we employ a human-designed finite state machine based position/force controller in simulation to provide privileged guidance. The resulting policy is trained to predict the end-effector pose, contact state, and crucially the desired contact force direction. Unlike force magnitudes, which are highly sensitive to simulation inaccuracies, force directions encode high-level task geometry and remain robust across the sim-to-real gap. At deployment, these predictions configure a force-aware admittance controller. By combining the policy's directional intent with a constant, low-cost manually tuned force magnitude, the system generates adaptive, task-aligned compliance. This tuning is lightweight, typically requiring only a single scalar per contact state. We provide theoretical analysis for stability and robustness to disturbances. Experiments on four real-world tasks, i.e., microwave opening, peg-in-hole, whiteboard wiping, and door opening, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines in both success rate and robustness. Videos are available at: https://yifei-y.github.io/project-pages/DirectionMatters/.

ETP-R1: Evolving Topological Planning with Reinforcement Fine-tuning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to navigate towards target in continuous environments, following natural language instructions. While current graph-based methods offer an efficient, structured approach by abstracting the environment into a topological map and simplifying the action space to waypoint selection, they lag behind methods based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in leveraging large-scale data and advanced training paradigms. In this paper, we try to bridge this gap by introducing ETP-R1, a framework that applies the paradigm of scaling up data and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) to a graph-based VLN-CE model. To build a strong foundation, we first construct a high-quality, large-scale pretraining dataset using the Gemini API. This dataset consists of diverse, low-hallucination instructions for topological trajectories, providing rich supervision for our graph-based policy to map language to topological paths. This foundation is further strengthened by unifying data from both R2R and RxR tasks for joint pretraining. Building on this, we introduce a three-stage training paradigm, which culminates in the first application of closed-loop, online RFT to a graph-based VLN-CE model, powered by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is highly effective, establishing new state-of-the-art performance across all major metrics on both the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Cepillar/ETP-R1.

Seeing to Act, Prompting to Specify: A Bayesian Factorization of Vision Language Action Policy

The pursuit of out-of-distribution generalization in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is often hindered by catastrophic forgetting of the Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone during fine-tuning. While co-training with external reasoning data helps, it requires experienced tuning and data-related overhead. Beyond such external dependencies, we identify an intrinsic cause within VLA datasets: modality imbalance, where language diversity is much lower than visual and action diversity. This imbalance biases the model toward visual shortcuts and language forgetting. To address this, we introduce BayesVLA, a Bayesian factorization that decomposes the policy into a visual-action prior, supporting seeing-to-act, and a language-conditioned likelihood, enabling prompt-to-specify. This inherently preserves generalization and promotes instruction following. We further incorporate pre- and post-contact phases to better leverage pre-trained foundation models. Information-theoretic analysis formally validates our effectiveness in mitigating shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show superior generalization to unseen instructions, objects, and environments compared to existing methods. Project page is available at: https://xukechun.github.io/papers/BayesVLA.

Neural Ranging Inertial Odometry

Ultra-wideband (UWB) has shown promising potential in GPS-denied localization thanks to its lightweight and drift-free characteristics, while the accuracy is limited in real scenarios due to its sensitivity to sensor arrangement and non-Gaussian pattern induced by multi-path or multi-signal interference, which commonly occurs in many typical applications like long tunnels. We introduce a novel neural fusion framework for ranging inertial odometry which involves a graph attention UWB network and a recurrent neural inertial network. Our graph net learns scene-relevant ranging patterns and adapts to any number of anchors or tags, realizing accurate positioning without calibration. Additionally, the integration of least squares and the incorporation of nominal frame enhance overall performance and scalability. The effectiveness and robustness of our methods are validated through extensive experiments on both public and self-collected datasets, spanning indoor, outdoor, and tunnel environments. The results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed IR-ULSG in handling challenging conditions, including scenarios outside the convex envelope and cases where only a single anchor is available.

Mr. Virgil: Learning Multi-robot Visual-range Relative Localization

Ultra-wideband (UWB)-vision fusion localization has achieved extensive applications in the domain of multi-agent relative localization. The challenging matching problem between robots and visual detection renders existing methods highly dependent on identity-encoded hardware or delicate tuning algorithms. Overconfident yet erroneous matches may bring about irreversible damage to the localization system. To address this issue, we introduce Mr. Virgil, an end-to-end learning multi-robot visual-range relative localization framework, consisting of a graph neural network for data association between UWB rangings and visual detections, and a differentiable pose graph optimization (PGO) back-end. The graph-based front-end supplies robust matching results, accurate initial position predictions, and credible uncertainty estimates, which are subsequently integrated into the PGO back-end to elevate the accuracy of the final pose estimation. Additionally, a decentralized system is implemented for real-world applications. Experiments spanning varying robot numbers, simulation and real-world, occlusion and non-occlusion conditions showcase the stability and exactitude under various scenes compared to conventional methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/HiOnes/Mr-Virgil.

BEV-ODOM2: Enhanced BEV-based Monocular Visual Odometry with PV-BEV Fusion and Dense Flow Supervision for Ground Robots

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation offers a metric-scaled planar workspace, facilitating the simplification of 6-DoF ego-motion to a more robust 3-DoF model for monocular visual odometry (MVO) in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing BEV methods suffer from sparse supervision signals and information loss during perspective-to-BEV projection. We present BEV-ODOM2, an enhanced framework addressing both limitations without additional annotations. Our approach introduces: (1) dense BEV optical flow supervision constructed from 3-DoF pose ground truth for pixel-level guidance; (2) PV-BEV fusion that computes correlation volumes before projection to preserve 6-DoF motion cues while maintaining scale consistency. The framework employs three supervision levels derived solely from pose data: dense BEV flow, 5-DoF for the PV branch, and final 3-DoF output. Enhanced rotation sampling further balances diverse motion patterns in training. Extensive evaluation on KITTI, NCLT, Oxford, and our newly collected ZJH-VO multi-scale dataset demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving 40 improvement in RTE compared to previous BEV methods. The ZJH-VO dataset, covering diverse ground vehicle scenarios from underground parking to outdoor plazas, is publicly available to facilitate future research.

Toward Embodiment Equivariant Vision-Language-Action Policy

Vision-language-action policies learn manipulation skills across tasks, environments and embodiments through large-scale pre-training. However, their ability to generalize to novel robot configurations remains limited. Most approaches emphasize model size, dataset scale and diversity while paying less attention to the design of action spaces. This leads to the configuration generalization problem, which requires costly adaptation. We address this challenge by formulating cross-embodiment pre-training as designing policies equivariant to embodiment configuration transformations. Building on this principle, we propose a framework that (i) establishes a embodiment equivariance theory for action space and policy design, (ii) introduces an action decoder that enforces configuration equivariance, and (iii) incorporates a geometry-aware network architecture to enhance embodiment-agnostic spatial reasoning. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach improves pre-training effectiveness and enables efficient fine-tuning on novel robot embodiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/hhcaz/e2vla