Towards the Vision-Sound-Language-Action Paradigm: The HEAR Framework for Sound-Centric Manipulation

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate audio, they typically treat sound as static pre-execution prompts or focus exclusively on human speech. This leaves a significant gap in real-time, sound-centric manipulation where fleeting environmental acoustics provide critical state verification during task execution. Consequently, key sounds are easily missed due to low-frequency updates or system latency. This problem is exacerbated by action chunking with open-loop execution, which creates a Blind Execution Interval where acoustic events are lost between discrete audio observation windows. Recognizing the necessity of continuous auditory awareness, we formalize Vision-Sound-Language-Action (VSLA) as a continuous control paradigm conditioned on vision, streaming audio, language, and proprioception under delayed decision loops. As an instantiation, we introduce HEAR, a VSLA framework integrating four components: (i) a streaming Historizer to maintain a compact, causal audio context across execution gaps; (ii) an Envisioner adapted from omni foundation models to reason over multi-sensory inputs; (iii) an Advancer, formulated as an audio world model, to learn temporal dynamics by predicting near-future audio codes; and (iv) a flow-matching Realizer policy to generate smooth action chunks. To address the scarcity of pretraining data and evaluations for VSLA, we construct OpenX-Sound for pretraining, alongside HEAR-Bench, the first sound-centric manipulation benchmark with strict causal timing rules. Our results suggest that robust sound-centric manipulation necessitates causal persistence and explicit temporal learning. This framework provides a practical step toward multi-sensory foundation models for embodied agents, enabling robots to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Code and videos are available at https://hear.irmv.top.

RegFormer++: An Efficient Large-Scale 3D LiDAR Point Registration Network with Projection-Aware 2D Transformer

Although point cloud registration has achieved remarkable advances in object-level and indoor scenes, large-scale LiDAR registration methods has been rarely explored before. Challenges mainly arise from the huge point scale, complex point distribution, and numerous outliers within outdoor LiDAR scans. In addition, most existing registration works generally adopt a two-stage paradigm: They first find correspondences by extracting discriminative local descriptors and then leverage robust estimators (e.g. RANSAC) to filter outliers, which are highly dependent on well-designed descriptors and post-processing choices. To address these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end differential transformer network, termed RegFormer++, for large-scale point cloud alignment without requiring any further post-processing. Specifically, a hierarchical projection-aware 2D transformer with linear complexity is proposed to project raw LiDAR points onto a cylindrical surface and extract global point features, which can improve resilience to outliers due to long-range dependencies. Because we fill original 3D coordinates into 2D projected positions, our designed transformer can benefit from both high efficiency in 2D processing and accuracy from 3D geometric information. Furthermore, to effectively reduce wrong point matching, a Bijective Association Transformer (BAT) is designed, combining both cross attention and all-to-all point gathering. To improve training stability and robustness, a feature-transformed optimal transport module is also designed for regressing the final pose transformation. Extensive experiments on KITTI, NuScenes, and Argoverse datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

OTPL-VIO: Robust Visual-Inertial Odometry with Optimal Transport Line Association and Adaptive Uncertainty

Robust stereo visual-inertial odometry (VIO) remains challenging in low-texture scenes and under abrupt illumination changes, where point features become sparse and unstable, leading to ambiguous association and under-constrained estimation. Line structures offer complementary geometric cues, yet many efficient point-line systems still rely on point-guided line association, which can break down when point support is weak and may lead to biased constraints. We present a stereo point-line VIO system in which line segments are equipped with dedicated deep descriptors and matched using an entropy-regularized optimal transport formulation, enabling globally consistent correspondences under ambiguity, outliers, and partial observations. The proposed descriptor is training-free and is computed by sampling and pooling network feature maps. To improve estimation stability, we analyze the impact of line measurement noise and introduce reliability-adaptive weighting to regulate the influence of line constraints during optimization. Experiments on EuRoC and UMA-VI, together with real-world deployments in low-texture and illumination-challenging environments, demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over representative baselines while maintaining real-time performance.

Graph-Loc: Robust Graph-Based LiDAR Pose Tracking with Compact Structural Map Priors under Low Observability and Occlusion

Map-based LiDAR pose tracking is essential for long-term autonomous operation, where onboard map priors need be compact for scalable storage and fast retrieval, while online observations are often partial, repetitive, and heavily occluded. We propose Graph-Loc, a graph-based localization framework that tracks the platform pose against compact structural map priors represented as a lightweight point-line graph. Such priors can be constructed from heterogeneous sources commonly available in practice, including polygon outlines vectorized from occupancy/grid maps and CAD/model/floor-plan layouts. For each incoming LiDAR scan, Graph-Loc extracts sparse point and line primitives to form an observation graph, retrieves a pose-conditioned visible subgraph via LiDAR ray simulation, and performs scan-to-map association through unbalanced optimal transport with a local graph-context regularizer. The unbalanced formulation relaxes mass conservation, improving robustness to missing, spurious, and fragmented structures under occlusion. To enhance stability in low-observability segments, we estimate information anisotropy from the refinement normal matrix and defer updates along weakly constrained directions until sufficient constraints reappear. Experiments on public benchmarks, controlled stress tests, and real-world deployments demonstrate accurate and stable tracking with KB-level priors from heterogeneous map sources, including under geometrically degenerate and sustained occlusion and in the presence of gradual scene changes.

ReCCur: A Recursive Corner-Case Curation Framework for Robust Vision-Language Understanding in Open and Edge Scenarios

Corner cases are rare or extreme scenarios that drive real-world failures, but they are difficult to curate at scale: web data are noisy, labels are brittle, and edge deployments preclude large retraining. We present ReCCur (Recursive Corner-Case Curation), a low-compute framework that converts noisy web imagery into auditable fine-grained labels via a multi-agent recursive pipeline. First, large-scale data acquisition and filtering expands a domain vocabulary with a vision-language model (VLM), crawls the web, and enforces tri-modal (image, description, keyword) consistency with light human spot checks to yield refined candidates. Next, mixture-of-experts knowledge distillation uses complementary encoders (e.g., CLIP, DINOv2, BEiT) for kNN voting with dual-confidence activation and uncertainty sampling, converging to a high-precision set. Finally, region-evidence VLM adversarial labeling pairs a proposer (multi-granularity regions and semantic cues) with a validator (global and local chained consistency) to produce explainable labels and close the loop. On realistic corner-case scenarios (e.g., flooded-car inspection), ReCCur runs on consumer-grade GPUs, steadily improves purity and separability, and requires minimal human supervision, providing a practical substrate for downstream training and evaluation under resource constraints. Code and dataset will be released.

Guided Diffusion-based Generation of Adversarial Objects for Real-World Monocular Depth Estimation Attacks

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) serves as a core perception module in autonomous driving systems, but it remains highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. Errors in depth estimation may propagate through downstream decision making and influence overall traffic safety. Existing physical attacks primarily rely on texture-based patches, which impose strict placement constraints and exhibit limited realism, thereby reducing their effectiveness in complex driving environments. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces a training-free generative adversarial attack framework that generates naturalistic, scene-consistent adversarial objects via a diffusion-based conditional generation process. The framework incorporates a Salient Region Selection module that identifies regions most influential to MDE and a Jacobian Vector Product Guidance mechanism that steers adversarial gradients toward update directions supported by the pre-trained diffusion model. This formulation enables the generation of physically plausible adversarial objects capable of inducing substantial adversarial depth shifts. Extensive digital and physical experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing attacks in effectiveness, stealthiness, and physical deployability, underscoring its strong practical implications for autonomous driving safety assessment.

GaussianDWM: 3D Gaussian Driving World Model for Unified Scene Understanding and Multi-Modal Generation

Driving World Models (DWMs) have been developing rapidly with the advances of generative models. However, existing DWMs lack 3D scene understanding capabilities and can only generate content conditioned on input data, without the ability to interpret or reason about the driving environment. Moreover, current approaches represent 3D spatial information with point cloud or BEV features do not accurately align textual information with the underlying 3D scene. To address these limitations, we propose a novel unified DWM framework based on 3D Gaussian scene representation, which enables both 3D scene understanding and multi-modal scene generation, while also enabling contextual enrichment for understanding and generation tasks. Our approach directly aligns textual information with the 3D scene by embedding rich linguistic features into each Gaussian primitive, thereby achieving early modality alignment. In addition, we design a novel task-aware language-guided sampling strategy that removes redundant 3D Gaussians and injects accurate and compact 3D tokens into LLM. Furthermore, we design a dual-condition multi-modal generation model, where the information captured by our vision-language model is leveraged as a high-level language condition in combination with a low-level image condition, jointly guiding the multi-modal generation process. We conduct comprehensive studies on the nuScenes, and NuInteract datasets to validate the effectiveness of our framework. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. We will release the code publicly on GitHub https://github.com/dtc111111/GaussianDWM.

Reloc-VGGT: Visual Re-localization with Geometry Grounded Transformer

Visual localization has traditionally been formulated as a pair-wise pose regression problem. Existing approaches mainly estimate relative poses between two images and employ a late-fusion strategy to obtain absolute pose estimates. However, the late motion average is often insufficient for effectively integrating spatial information, and its accuracy degrades in complex environments. In this paper, we present the first visual localization framework that performs multi-view spatial integration through an early-fusion mechanism, enabling robust operation in both structured and unstructured environments. Our framework is built upon the VGGT backbone, which encodes multi-view 3D geometry, and we introduce a pose tokenizer and projection module to more effectively exploit spatial relationships from multiple database views. Furthermore, we propose a novel sparse mask attention strategy that reduces computational cost by avoiding the quadratic complexity of global attention, thereby enabling real-time performance at scale. Trained on approximately eight million posed image pairs, Reloc-VGGT demonstrates strong accuracy and remarkable generalization ability. Extensive experiments across diverse public datasets consistently validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, delivering high-quality camera pose estimates in real time while maintaining robustness to unseen environments. Our code and models will be publicly released upon acceptance.https://github.com/dtc111111/Reloc-VGGT.

UniPR-3D: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition with Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has been traditionally formulated as a single-image retrieval task. Using multiple views offers clear advantages, yet this setting remains relatively underexplored and existing methods often struggle to generalize across diverse environments. In this work we introduce UniPR-3D, the first VPR architecture that effectively integrates information from multiple views. UniPR-3D builds on a VGGT backbone capable of encoding multi-view 3D representations, which we adapt by designing feature aggregators and fine-tune for the place recognition task. To construct our descriptor, we jointly leverage the 3D tokens and intermediate 2D tokens produced by VGGT. Based on their distinct characteristics, we design dedicated aggregation modules for 2D and 3D features, allowing our descriptor to capture fine-grained texture cues while also reasoning across viewpoints. To further enhance generalization, we incorporate both single- and multi-frame aggregation schemes, along with a variable-length sequence retrieval strategy. Our experiments show that UniPR-3D sets a new state of the art, outperforming both single- and multi-view baselines and highlighting the effectiveness of geometry-grounded tokens for VPR. Our code and models will be made publicly available on Github https://github.com/dtc111111/UniPR-3D.

OmniDrive-R1: Reinforcement-driven Interleaved Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought for Trustworthy Vision-Language Autonomous Driving

The deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving (AD) is critically hindered by reliability failures, most notably object hallucination. This failure stems from their reliance on ungrounded, text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning.While existing multi-modal CoT approaches attempt mitigation, they suffer from two fundamental flaws: (1) decoupled perception and reasoning stages that prevent end-to-end joint optimization, and (2) reliance on expensive, dense localization labels.Thus we introduce OmniDrive-R1, an end-to-end VLM framework designed for autonomous driving, which unifies perception and reasoning through an interleaved Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (iMCoT) mechanism. Our core innovation is an Reinforcement-driven visual grounding capability, enabling the model to autonomously direct its attention and "zoom in" on critical regions for fine-grained analysis. This capability is enabled by our pure two-stage reinforcement learning training pipeline and Clip-GRPO algorithm. Crucially, Clip-GRPO introduces an annotation-free, process-based grounding reward. This reward not only eliminates the need for dense labels but also circumvents the instability of external tool calls by enforcing real-time cross-modal consistency between the visual focus and the textual reasoning. Extensive experiments on DriveLMM-o1 demonstrate our model's significant improvements. Compared to the baseline Qwen2.5VL-7B, OmniDrive-R1 improves the overall reasoning score from 51.77% to 80.35%, and the final answer accuracy from 37.81% to 73.62%.