Whole-Body Coordination for Dynamic Object Grasping with Legged Manipulators

Quadrupedal robots with manipulators offer strong mobility and adaptability for grasping in unstructured, dynamic environments through coordinated whole-body control. However, existing research has predominantly focused on static-object grasping, neglecting the challenges posed by dynamic targets and thus limiting applicability in dynamic scenarios such as logistics sorting and human-robot collaboration. To address this, we introduce DQ-Bench, a new benchmark that systematically evaluates dynamic grasping across varying object motions, velocities, heights, object types, and terrain complexities, along with comprehensive evaluation metrics. Building upon this benchmark, we propose DQ-Net, a compact teacher-student framework designed to infer grasp configurations from limited perceptual cues. During training, the teacher network leverages privileged information to holistically model both the static geometric properties and dynamic motion characteristics of the target, and integrates a grasp fusion module to deliver robust guidance for motion planning. Concurrently, we design a lightweight student network that performs dual-viewpoint temporal modeling using only the target mask, depth map, and proprioceptive state, enabling closed-loop action outputs without reliance on privileged data. Extensive experiments on DQ-Bench demonstrate that DQ-Net achieves robust dynamic objects grasping across multiple task settings, substantially outperforming baseline methods in both success rate and responsiveness.

Emotion Recognition from Skeleton Data: A Comprehensive Survey

Emotion recognition through body movements has emerged as a compelling and privacy-preserving alternative to traditional methods that rely on facial expressions or physiological signals. Recent advancements in 3D skeleton acquisition technologies and pose estimation algorithms have significantly enhanced the feasibility of emotion recognition based on full-body motion. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic review of skeleton-based emotion recognition techniques. First, we introduce psychological models of emotion and examine the relationship between bodily movements and emotional expression. Next, we summarize publicly available datasets, highlighting the differences in data acquisition methods and emotion labeling strategies. We then categorize existing methods into posture-based and gait-based approaches, analyzing them from both data-driven and technical perspectives. In particular, we propose a unified taxonomy that encompasses four primary technical paradigms: Traditional approaches, Feat2Net, FeatFusionNet, and End2EndNet. Representative works within each category are reviewed and compared, with benchmarking results across commonly used datasets. Finally, we explore the extended applications of emotion recognition in mental health assessment, such as detecting depression and autism, and discuss the open challenges and future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.

Exploring Audio Cues for Enhanced Test-Time Video Model Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to boost the generalization capability of a trained model by conducting self-/unsupervised learning during the testing phase. While most existing TTA methods for video primarily utilize visual supervisory signals, they often overlook the potential contribution of inherent audio data. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach that incorporates audio information into video TTA. Our method capitalizes on the rich semantic content of audio to generate audio-assisted pseudo-labels, a new concept in the context of video TTA. Specifically, we propose an audio-to-video label mapping method by first employing pre-trained audio models to classify audio signals extracted from videos and then mapping the audio-based predictions to video label spaces through large language models, thereby establishing a connection between the audio categories and video labels. To effectively leverage the generated pseudo-labels, we present a flexible adaptation cycle that determines the optimal number of adaptation iterations for each sample, based on changes in loss and consistency across different views. This enables a customized adaptation process for each sample. Experimental results on two widely used datasets (UCF101-C and Kinetics-Sounds-C), as well as on two newly constructed audio-video TTA datasets (AVE-C and AVMIT-C) with various corruption types, demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Our method consistently improves adaptation performance across different video classification models and represents a significant step forward in integrating audio information into video TTA. Code: https://github.com/keikeiqi/Audio-Assisted-TTA.

Learning to Generate Gradients for Test-Time Adaptation via Test-Time Training Layers

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to fine-tune a trained model online using unlabeled testing data to adapt to new environments or out-of-distribution data, demonstrating broad application potential in real-world scenarios. However, in this optimization process, unsupervised learning objectives like entropy minimization frequently encounter noisy learning signals. These signals produce unreliable gradients, which hinder the model ability to converge to an optimal solution quickly and introduce significant instability into the optimization process. In this paper, we seek to resolve these issues from the perspective of optimizer design. Unlike prior TTA using manually designed optimizers like SGD, we employ a learning-to-optimize approach to automatically learn an optimizer, called Meta Gradient Generator (MGG). Specifically, we aim for MGG to effectively utilize historical gradient information during the online optimization process to optimize the current model. To this end, in MGG, we design a lightweight and efficient sequence modeling layer -- gradient memory layer. It exploits a self-supervised reconstruction loss to compress historical gradient information into network parameters, thereby enabling better memorization ability over a long-term adaptation process. We only need a small number of unlabeled samples to pre-train MGG, and then the trained MGG can be deployed to process unseen samples. Promising results on ImageNet-C, R, Sketch, and A indicate that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art methods with fewer updates, less data, and significantly shorter adaptation iterations. Compared with a previous SOTA method SAR, we achieve 7.4% accuracy improvement and 4.2 times faster adaptation speed on ImageNet-C.

Efficient Language-instructed Skill Acquisition via Reward-Policy Co-Evolution

The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to design reward functions for real-world tasks, especially for high-dimensional robotic control, due to complex relationships among joints and tasks. Recent advancements large language models (LLMs) enable automatic reward function design. However, approaches evaluate reward functions by re-training policies from scratch placing an undue burden on the reward function, expecting it to be effective throughout the whole policy improvement process. We argue for a more practical strategy in robotic autonomy, focusing on refining existing policies with policy-dependent reward functions rather than a universal one. To this end, we propose a novel reward-policy co-evolution framework where the reward function and the learned policy benefit from each other's progressive on-the-fly improvements, resulting in more efficient and higher-performing skill acquisition. Specifically, the reward evolution process translates the robot's previous best reward function, descriptions of tasks and environment into text inputs. These inputs are used to query LLMs to generate a dynamic amount of reward function candidates, ensuring continuous improvement at each round of evolution. For policy evolution, our method generates new policy populations by hybridizing historically optimal and random policies. Through an improved Bayesian optimization, our approach efficiently and robustly identifies the most capable and plastic reward-policy combination, which then proceeds to the next round of co-evolution. Despite using less data, our approach demonstrates an average normalized improvement of 95.3% across various high-dimensional robotic skill learning tasks.

Towards Long Video Understanding via Fine-detailed Video Story Generation

Long video understanding has become a critical task in computer vision, driving advancements across numerous applications from surveillance to content retrieval. Existing video understanding methods suffer from two challenges when dealing with long video understanding: intricate long-context relationship modeling and interference from redundancy. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Fine-Detailed Video Story generation (FDVS), which interprets long videos into detailed textual representations. Specifically, to achieve fine-grained modeling of long-temporal content, we propose a Bottom-up Video Interpretation Mechanism that progressively interprets video content from clips to video. To avoid interference from redundant information in videos, we introduce a Semantic Redundancy Reduction mechanism that removes redundancy at both the visual and textual levels. Our method transforms long videos into hierarchical textual representations that contain multi-granularity information of the video. With these representations, FDVS is applicable to various tasks without any fine-tuning. We evaluate the proposed method across eight datasets spanning three tasks. The performance demonstrates the effectiveness and versatility of our method.

Video2Reward: Generating Reward Function from Videos for Legged Robot Behavior Learning

Learning behavior in legged robots presents a significant challenge due to its inherent instability and complex constraints. Recent research has proposed the use of a large language model (LLM) to generate reward functions in reinforcement learning, thereby replacing the need for manually designed rewards by experts. However, this approach, which relies on textual descriptions to define learning objectives, fails to achieve controllable and precise behavior learning with clear directionality. In this paper, we introduce a new video2reward method, which directly generates reward functions from videos depicting the behaviors to be mimicked and learned. Specifically, we first process videos containing the target behaviors, converting the motion information of individuals in the videos into keypoint trajectories represented as coordinates through a video2text transforming module. These trajectories are then fed into an LLM to generate the reward function, which in turn is used to train the policy. To enhance the quality of the reward function, we develop a video-assisted iterative reward refinement scheme that visually assesses the learned behaviors and provides textual feedback to the LLM. This feedback guides the LLM to continually refine the reward function, ultimately facilitating more efficient behavior learning. Experimental results on tasks involving bipedal and quadrupedal robot motion control demonstrate that our method surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art LLM-based reward generation methods by over 37.6% in terms of human normalized score. More importantly, by switching video inputs, we find our method can rapidly learn diverse motion behaviors such as walking and running.

Benchmarking the Robustness of Temporal Action Detection Models Against Temporal Corruptions

Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to locate action positions and recognize action categories in long-term untrimmed videos. Although many methods have achieved promising results, their robustness has not been thoroughly studied. In practice, we observe that temporal information in videos can be occasionally corrupted, such as missing or blurred frames. Interestingly, existing methods often incur a significant performance drop even if only one frame is affected. To formally evaluate the robustness, we establish two temporal corruption robustness benchmarks, namely THUMOS14-C and ActivityNet-v1.3-C. In this paper, we extensively analyze the robustness of seven leading TAD methods and obtain some interesting findings: 1) Existing methods are particularly vulnerable to temporal corruptions, and end-to-end methods are often more susceptible than those with a pre-trained feature extractor; 2) Vulnerability mainly comes from localization error rather than classification error; 3) When corruptions occur in the middle of an action instance, TAD models tend to yield the largest performance drop. Besides building a benchmark, we further develop a simple but effective robust training method to defend against temporal corruptions, through the FrameDrop augmentation and Temporal-Robust Consistency loss. Remarkably, our approach not only improves robustness but also yields promising improvements on clean data. We believe that this study will serve as a benchmark for future research in robust video analysis. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/Alvin-Zeng/temporal-robustness-benchmark.

DCIR: Dynamic Consistency Intrinsic Reward for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Learning optimal behavior policy for each agent in multi-agent systems is an essential yet difficult problem. Despite fruitful progress in multi-agent reinforcement learning, the challenge of addressing the dynamics of whether two agents should exhibit consistent behaviors is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a new approach that enables agents to learn whether their behaviors should be consistent with that of other agents by utilizing intrinsic rewards to learn the optimal policy for each agent. We begin by defining behavior consistency as the divergence in output actions between two agents when provided with the same observation. Subsequently, we introduce dynamic consistency intrinsic reward (DCIR) to stimulate agents to be aware of others' behaviors and determine whether to be consistent with them. Lastly, we devise a dynamic scale network (DSN) that provides learnable scale factors for the agent at every time step to dynamically ascertain whether to award consistent behavior and the magnitude of rewards. We evaluate DCIR in multiple environments including Multi-agent Particle, Google Research Football and StarCraft II Micromanagement, demonstrating its efficacy.

$A^2$Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Models

We study the task of zero-shot vision-and-language navigation (ZS-VLN), a practical yet challenging problem in which an agent learns to navigate following a path described by language instructions without requiring any path-instruction annotation data. Normally, the instructions have complex grammatical structures and often contain various action descriptions (e.g., "proceed beyond", "depart from"). How to correctly understand and execute these action demands is a critical problem, and the absence of annotated data makes it even more challenging. Note that a well-educated human being can easily understand path instructions without the need for any special training. In this paper, we propose an action-aware zero-shot VLN method ($A^2$Nav) by exploiting the vision-and-language ability of foundation models. Specifically, the proposed method consists of an instruction parser and an action-aware navigation policy. The instruction parser utilizes the advanced reasoning ability of large language models (e.g., GPT-3) to decompose complex navigation instructions into a sequence of action-specific object navigation sub-tasks. Each sub-task requires the agent to localize the object and navigate to a specific goal position according to the associated action demand. To accomplish these sub-tasks, an action-aware navigation policy is learned from freely collected action-specific datasets that reveal distinct characteristics of each action demand. We use the learned navigation policy for executing sub-tasks sequentially to follow the navigation instruction. Extensive experiments show $A^2$Nav achieves promising ZS-VLN performance and even surpasses the supervised learning methods on R2R-Habitat and RxR-Habitat datasets.