Carl Zeiss Meditec AG
Abstract:Cross-view geo-spatial learning consists of two important tasks: Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL) and Cross-View Image Synthesis (CVIS), both of which rely on establishing geometric correspondences between ground and aerial views. Recent Geometric Foundation Models (GFMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in extracting generalizable 3D geometric features from images, but their potential in cross-view geo-spatial tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we present Geo^2, a unified framework that leverages Geometric priors from GFMs (e.g., VGGT) to jointly perform geo-spatial tasks, CVGL and bidirectional CVIS. Despite the 3D reconstruction ability of GFMs, directly applying them to CVGL and CVIS remains challenging due to the large viewpoint gap between ground and aerial imagery. We propose GeoMap, which embeds ground and aerial features into a shared 3D-aware latent space, effectively reducing cross-view discrepancies for localization. This shared latent space naturally bridges cross-view image synthesis in both directions. To exploit this, we propose GeoFlow, a flow-matching model conditioned on geometry-aware latent embeddings. We further introduce a consistency loss to enforce latent alignment between the two synthesis directions, ensuring bidirectional coherence. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including CVUSA, CVACT, and VIGOR, demonstrate that Geo^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both localization and synthesis, highlighting the effectiveness of 3D geometric priors for cross-view geo-spatial learning.
Abstract:Accurate and fast localization is vital for safe autonomous navigation in GPS-denied areas. Fine-Grained Cross-View Geolocalization (FG-CVG) aims to estimate the precise 2-Degree-of-Freedom (2-DoF) location of a ground image relative to a satellite image. However, current methods force a difficult trade-off, with high-accuracy models being slow for real-time use. In this paper, we introduce GeoFlow, a new approach that offers a lightweight and highly efficient framework that breaks this accuracy-speed trade-off. Our technique learns a direct probabilistic mapping, predicting the displacement (in distance and direction) required to correct any given location hypothesis. This is complemented by our novel inference algorithm, Iterative Refinement Sampling (IRS). Instead of trusting a single prediction, IRS refines a population of hypotheses, allowing them to iteratively 'flow' from random starting points to a robust, converged consensus. Even its iterative nature, this approach offers flexible inference-time scaling, allowing a direct trade-off between performance and computation without any re-training. Experiments on the KITTI and VIGOR datasets show that GeoFlow achieves state-of-the-art efficiency, running at real-time speeds of 29 FPS while maintaining competitive localization accuracy. This work opens a new path for the development of practical real-time geolocalization systems.
Abstract:Learning generalizable and robust behavior cloning policies requires large volumes of high-quality robotics data. While human demonstrations (e.g., through teleoperation) serve as the standard source for expert behaviors, acquiring such data at scale in the real world is prohibitively expensive. This paper introduces ExpertGen, a framework that automates expert policy learning in simulation to enable scalable sim-to-real transfer. ExpertGen first initializes a behavior prior using a diffusion policy trained on imperfect demonstrations, which may be synthesized by large language models or provided by humans. Reinforcement learning is then used to steer this prior toward high task success by optimizing the diffusion model's initial noise while keep original policy frozen. By keeping the pretrained diffusion policy frozen, ExpertGen regularizes exploration to remain within safe, human-like behavior manifolds, while also enabling effective learning with only sparse rewards. Empirical evaluations on challenging manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ExpertGen reliably produces high-quality expert policies with no reward engineering. On industrial assembly tasks, ExpertGen achieves a 90.5% overall success rate, while on long-horizon manipulation tasks it attains 85% overall success, outperforming all baseline methods. The resulting policies exhibit dexterous control and remain robust across diverse initial configurations and failure states. To validate sim-to-real transfer, the learned state-based expert policies are further distilled into visuomotor policies via DAgger and successfully deployed on real robotic hardware.
Abstract:What happens when a pretrained generative robot policy is provided a constant initial noise as input, rather than repeatedly sampling it from a Gaussian? We demonstrate that the performance of a pretrained, frozen diffusion or flow matching policy can be improved with respect to a downstream reward by swapping the sampling of initial noise from the prior distribution (typically isotropic Gaussian) with a well-chosen, constant initial noise input -- a golden ticket. We propose a search method to find golden tickets using Monte-Carlo policy evaluation that keeps the pretrained policy frozen, does not train any new networks, and is applicable to all diffusion/flow matching policies (and therefore many VLAs). Our approach to policy improvement makes no assumptions beyond being able to inject initial noise into the policy and calculate (sparse) task rewards of episode rollouts, making it deployable with no additional infrastructure or models. Our method improves the performance of policies in 38 out of 43 tasks across simulated and real-world robot manipulation benchmarks, with relative improvements in success rate by up to 58% for some simulated tasks, and 60% within 50 search episodes for real-world tasks. We also show unique benefits of golden tickets for multi-task settings: the diversity of behaviors from different tickets naturally defines a Pareto frontier for balancing different objectives (e.g., speed, success rates); in VLAs, we find that a golden ticket optimized for one task can also boost performance in other related tasks. We release a codebase with pretrained policies and golden tickets for simulation benchmarks using VLAs, diffusion policies, and flow matching policies.
Abstract:GLM-OCR is an efficient 0.9B-parameter compact multimodal model designed for real-world document understanding. It combines a 0.4B-parameter CogViT visual encoder with a 0.5B-parameter GLM language decoder, achieving a strong balance between computational efficiency and recognition performance. To address the inefficiency of standard autoregressive decoding in deterministic OCR tasks, GLM-OCR introduces a Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) mechanism that predicts multiple tokens per step, significantly improving decoding throughput while keeping memory overhead low through shared parameters. At the system level, a two-stage pipeline is adopted: PP-DocLayout-V3 first performs layout analysis, followed by parallel region-level recognition. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks and industrial scenarios show that GLM-OCR achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in document parsing, text and formula transcription, table structure recovery, and key information extraction. Its compact architecture and structured generation make it suitable for both resource-constrained edge deployment and large-scale production systems.
Abstract:4D millimeter-wave radar has emerged as a promising sensing modality for autonomous driving due to its robustness and affordability. However, its sparse and weak geometric cues make reliable instance activation difficult, limiting the effectiveness of existing radar-camera fusion paradigms. BEV-level fusion offers global scene understanding but suffers from weak instance focus, while perspective-level fusion captures instance details but lacks holistic context. To address these limitations, we propose SIFormer, a scene-instance aware transformer for 3D object detection using 4D radar and camera. SIFormer first suppresses background noise during view transformation through segmentation- and depth-guided localization. It then introduces a cross-view activation mechanism that injects 2D instance cues into BEV space, enabling reliable instance awareness under weak radar geometry. Finally, a transformer-based fusion module aggregates complementary image semantics and radar geometry for robust perception. As a result, with the aim of enhancing instance awareness, SIFormer bridges the gap between the two paradigms, combining their complementary strengths to address inherent sparse nature of radar and improve detection accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that SIFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on View-of-Delft, TJ4DRadSet and NuScenes datasets. Source code is available at github.com/shawnnnkb/SIFormer.
Abstract:4D radar measurements offer an affordable and weather-robust solution for 3D perception. However, the inherent sparsity and noise of radar point clouds present significant challenges for accurate 3D object detection, underscoring the need for effective and robust point clouds densification. Despite recent progress, existing densification methods often fail to address the extreme sparsity of 4D radar point clouds and exhibit limited robustness when processing scenes with a small number of points. In this paper, we propose SD4R, a novel framework that transforms sparse radar point clouds into dense representations. SD4R begins by utilizing a foreground point generator (FPG) to mitigate noise propagation and produce densified point clouds. Subsequently, a logit-query encoder (LQE) enhances conventional pillarization, resulting in robust feature representations. Through these innovations, our SD4R demonstrates strong capability in both noise reduction and foreground point densification. Extensive experiments conducted on the publicly available View-of-Delft dataset demonstrate that SD4R achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/lancelot0805/SD4R.
Abstract:We present GLM-5, a next-generation foundation model designed to transition the paradigm of vibe coding to agentic engineering. Building upon the agentic, reasoning, and coding (ARC) capabilities of its predecessor, GLM-5 adopts DSA to significantly reduce training and inference costs while maintaining long-context fidelity. To advance model alignment and autonomy, we implement a new asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that drastically improves post-training efficiency by decoupling generation from training. Furthermore, we propose novel asynchronous agent RL algorithms that further improve RL quality, enabling the model to learn from complex, long-horizon interactions more effectively. Through these innovations, GLM-5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on major open benchmarks. Most critically, GLM-5 demonstrates unprecedented capability in real-world coding tasks, surpassing previous baselines in handling end-to-end software engineering challenges. Code, models, and more information are available at https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-5.
Abstract:Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high-quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort. We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible: 1) ViPR, a novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement; 2) ViPR-Eureka, a reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling; 3) ViPR-RL, a hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards. We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our project website is at https://anytask.rai-inst.com .
Abstract:We introduce MoLingo, a text-to-motion (T2M) model that generates realistic, lifelike human motion by denoising in a continuous latent space. Recent works perform latent space diffusion, either on the whole latent at once or auto-regressively over multiple latents. In this paper, we study how to make diffusion on continuous motion latents work best. We focus on two questions: (1) how to build a semantically aligned latent space so diffusion becomes more effective, and (2) how to best inject text conditioning so the motion follows the description closely. We propose a semantic-aligned motion encoder trained with frame-level text labels so that latents with similar text meaning stay close, which makes the latent space more diffusion-friendly. We also compare single-token conditioning with a multi-token cross-attention scheme and find that cross-attention gives better motion realism and text-motion alignment. With semantically aligned latents, auto-regressive generation, and cross-attention text conditioning, our model sets a new state of the art in human motion generation on standard metrics and in a user study. We will release our code and models for further research and downstream usage.