University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Abstract:Semantic segmentation of aerial point cloud is trapped in a generalization crisis under distinct domain shifts. While test-time adaptation offers a privacy-preserving and computationally efficient way to adapt pre-trained models to unlabeled target-domain data during inference, existing methods, bound to closed-set label assumptions and non-scalable point-wise segmentation pipelines, still struggle with semantic shifts. We ask: can we adapt any given pre-trained aerial point cloud segmentation model to a shifted target domain at the inference phase alone, without additional training, while segmenting target-specific categories beyond the source label space on demand? This paper introduces COSTA, which breaks this limitation by shifting from closed-set point-wise adaptation to cluster-centric open-set semantic propagation. Our core discovery is that, once effectively adapted at test time, the rich feature distribution of aerial point clouds can be distilled into a compact set of well-separated semantic centroids that are transferable across label spaces. COSTA leverages this to reformulate open-set semantic segmentation as a cluster-level propagating process: it first bridges the domain gap through proven test-time adaptation, then groups each batch of target-domain points into a small set of semantic clusters based on the similarity distribution in the adapted feature space, and finally propagates high-confidence pseudo labels obtained from an open-vocabulary vision-language model to all points through cluster-level voting. This cluster-centric paradigm enables test-time adaptation of aerial point clouds under significant domain gaps with mixed semantic shifts. With DALES as the source domain, COSTA enables on-demand segmentation across three aerial point cloud benchmarks with distinct domains and heterogeneous category spaces, achieving up to 70.09% mIoU under this new setting.
Abstract:Closed-track testing plays a fundamental role in the verification and validation of automated driving systems (ADS), particularly for safety-critical scenarios, by enabling reproducible evaluation under controlled conditions. However, most existing approaches still rely on standardized protocols or predefined trajectories, leading to overly scripted interactions and limited ability to reproduce the natural complexity of public-road traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Video2Track, a framework that transfers real-world interactive driving scenarios from videos into steerable adversarial closed-track testing. The framework consists of two tightly coupled modules. The first is a scenario semantic mapping module, which extracts structured semantics from driving videos using a vision-language model and grounds them onto a closed-track topology library via retrieval-augmented generation, thereby identifying compatible map segments and interaction anchors. The second is a dynamic interactive testing module, which conditions on the grounded topology and anchors to generate diverse multi-agent trajectories through a conditional diffusion model, while regulating interaction intensity via a Stackelberg game with a parameterized adversarial objective. Closed-track experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can faithfully reproduce representative real-world interaction scenarios and generate executable scenario variants with controllable risk levels and interaction styles, providing a scalable approach for realistic and steerable ADS validation.
Abstract:Enterprises increasingly seek to query data lakes using natural language via AI-driven tools like semantic operators or deep research agents. However, the latter operates as an opaque black box, hiding its intermediate reasoning and data retrieval steps, and failing to expose controls for managing API costs and execution latency. Meanwhile, the former can be prohibitively expensive for enterprise-scale data lakes. Consequently, analysts using these systems lack the agency to intercept hallucinated premises, verify intermediate results, or correct the system's trajectory. We present Carnot, an interactive execution engine for AI-driven analytics. Carnot compiles natural language requests into physical execution graphs and surfaces them through an interactive notebook interface. Rather than waiting blindly for a final output, users can critique the plan, incrementally execute operators, inspect intermediate data, or directly edit the underlying code or semantic operator instructions. Carnot's query optimizer will optimize the query with respect to cost or latency constraints provided by the user. Our demo will showcase how Carnot helps users achieve efficient and verifiable insights on workloads motivated by real enterprise use cases.
Abstract:We introduce RDVSv2, a large-scale benchmark for RGB-D video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) with dense frame-level annotations. Existing datasets in this emerging field are often limited in scale and annotation quality, while also relying on less geometry-consistent depth cues. To address these limitations, RDVSv2 is built from publicly accessible stereoscopic online videos and contains 249 video sequences with 29,077 annotated frames. It includes depth maps derived from stereoscopic videos, together with frame-wise salient object masks annotated with eye-tracking guidance. Compared with existing datasets, RDVSv2 is much larger in scale and covers more diverse and challenging scenarios. In addition, we establish a strong baseline for RGB-D VSOD based on Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2). Specifically, we employ a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategy to adapt the SAM2 encoder to jointly encode RGB, depth, and optical flow cues. Extensive experiments show that RDVSv2 is substantially more challenging for existing RGB-D VSOD methods. Meanwhile, the proposed baseline achieves state-of-the-art results on RDVSv2 and existing RGB-D VSOD benchmarks. We hope that RDVSv2 and the provided baseline will serve as useful resources for future research on RGB-D VSOD and related multi-modal video understanding tasks. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/ltynick/RDVSv2.
Abstract:Neural surrogates are widely used in scientific machine learning for fast prediction of three-dimensional (3D) thermo-fluid fields. However, generating training data using conventional numerical solvers often incurs substantial computational and storage costs. We propose to train an attention graph neural network by minimizing the finite-volume method (FVM) residuals of the governing equations. These residuals are evaluated directly on the mesh, requiring no labeled data. We evaluate the trained surrogates against computational fluid dynamics (CFD) references and a data-supervised baseline across four scenarios. On the two steady-state benchmarks, the FVM-loss model achieves an all-field normalized root-mean-square error (nRMSE) of 2.3-2.8%. It demonstrates close agreement with the CFD references, including the buoyancy-energy coupling. On the two parametric transient cases, the FVM-loss model outperforms the supervised baseline in terms of accuracy, while avoiding the data-generation cost entirely. These results indicate that the FVM loss can provide a practical training signal for neural surrogates and reduce the model development cost.
Abstract:Robust robotic grasping remains a fundamental challenge for complex real-world applications. Recent advances in large-scale models demonstrate promising capabilities for reasoning in robotic tasks. However, existing benchmarks for grasping primarily focus on isolated, visual-based grasp pose detection, failing to capture the complexity of grasping tasks that require multi-step reasoning and semantic understanding during execution. To address this gap, we propose GCA-Bench, a benchmark featuring challenging \textit{grasping with complex action} scenarios that involve both scene-level reasoning and semantic constraints. GCA-Bench enables the evaluation of recent large foundation models under the same settings. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our new benchmark, we implement a diverse set of baselines, ranging from traditional grasp detection pipelines to end-to-end learning methods. Empirical studies achieve success rates below 70\% on complex grasping scenarios, underscoring critical limitations. In addition, we propose new evaluation metrics, analyze critical failure models, and provide insights to guide the development of more robust and generalizable grasping strategies.
Abstract:Industrial design in fields such as vehicle and aerospace engineering often relies on large-scale numerical simulations to evaluate fluid dynamics performance, which can incur substantial computational costs. Deep neural networks have shown promise in improving simulation efficiency, especially graph neural networks (GNNs), which demonstrate great potential due to their flexibility with unstructured data. However, GNNs face challenges when dealing with tasks involving complex geometries and large-scale meshes. In this paper, we propose the Multi-scale Feature Enhanced Graph Neural Network (ME-GNN) to tackle these challenges. ME-GNN employs a graph neural network with a two-step message-passing mechanism to capture detailed local features effectively. Additionally, it integrates an Attention U-Net with uniform grid discretization, enabling the extraction of both fine and coarse features. The model also utilizes K-hop sampling to construct subgraphs, facilitating efficient training on large datasets while preserving detailed local features. We evaluated ME-GNN on three benchmark datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results: a relative L2 error of 0.0196 for the velocity field and 0.0556 for the surface pressure on ShapeNet-Car, a normalized mean squared error of 0.0033 for the flow field on AirfRANS, and a relative L2 error of 0.1416 for the surface pressure on DrivAerNet.
Abstract:Many manipulation tasks require reasoning about free-space affordances: discovering volumes where an extended rigid tool can safely navigate, complementary to surface contact affordances for grasping. Robotic stowing is a canonical instance, where a blade must sweep items aside inside cluttered fabric bins to create insertion space. Production stow systems generate millions of such episodes, but standard approaches with unimodal data infer affordances as SE(3) pose distributions, a geometric question asked in the wrong domain. VulcanVoxel keeps inference spatial: a masked autoencoder over 3D occupancy fields reconstructs blade occupancy conditioned on scene geometry, computing feasibility locally at each voxel and recovering multi-modal predictions from unimodal data. Blade affordances are spatial objects, subsets of 3D space defined by geometric feasibility. Pose parameters carry no structure for reasoning whether unobserved placements are feasible, and standard generative objectives including flow matching faithfully learn the unimodal distribution produced by execution policies and cannot recover geometric alternatives. Trained on 10,000 real warehouse stow episodes without human annotation, VulcanVoxel achieves top-5 coverage of 0.89 versus 0.71 for the best pose-based baseline, with a distilled student providing RGB-to-voxel inference in 30 ms. vs. 1.4 s. for voxel-to-voxel. We have released a dataset of real blade insertion cycles with RGB-D observations and pose trajectories at https://www.armbench.com/blade_insertion. html.
Abstract:Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.
Abstract:Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: $\href{https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo}{\text{opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo}}$.