A Multi-decoder Neural Tracking Method for Accurately Predicting Speech Intelligibility

Objective: EEG-based methods can predict speech intelligibility, but their accuracy and robustness lag behind behavioral tests, which typically show test-retest differences under 1 dB. We introduce the multi-decoder method to predict speech reception thresholds (SRTs) from EEG recordings, enabling objective assessment for populations unable to perform behavioral tests; such as those with disorders of consciousness or during hearing aid fitting. Approach: The method aggregates data from hundreds of decoders, each trained on different speech features and EEG preprocessing setups to quantify neural tracking (NT) of speech signals. Using data from 39 participants (ages 18-24), we recorded 29 minutes of EEG per person while they listened to speech at six signal-to-noise ratios and a quiet story. NT values were combined into a high-dimensional feature vector per subject, and a support vector regression model was trained to predict SRTs from these vectors. Main Result: Predictions correlated significantly with behavioral SRTs (r = 0.647, p < 0.001; NRMSE = 0.19), with all differences under 1 dB. SHAP analysis showed theta/delta bands and early lags had slightly greater influence. Using pretrained subject-independent decoders reduced required EEG data collection to 15 minutes (3 minutes of story, 12 minutes across six SNR conditions) without losing accuracy.

Model Optimization for Multi-Camera 3D Detection and Tracking

Outside-in multi-camera perception is increasingly important in indoor environments, where networks of static cameras must support multi-target tracking under occlusion and heterogeneous viewpoints. We evaluate Sparse4D, a query-based spatiotemporal 3D detection and tracking framework that fuses multi-view features in a shared world frame and propagates sparse object queries via instance memory. We study reduced input frame rates, post-training quantization (INT8 and FP8), transfer to the WILDTRACK benchmark, and Transformer Engine mixed-precision fine-tuning. To better capture identity stability, we report Average Track Duration (AvgTrackDur), which measures identity persistence in seconds. Sparse4D remains stable under moderate FPS reductions, but below 2 FPS, identity association collapses even when detections are stable. Selective quantization of the backbone and neck offers the best speed-accuracy trade-off, while attention-related modules are consistently sensitive to low precision. On WILDTRACK, low-FPS pretraining yields large zero-shot gains over the base checkpoint, while small-scale fine-tuning provides limited additional benefit. Transformer Engine mixed precision reduces latency and improves camera scalability, but can destabilize identity propagation, motivating stability-aware validation.

Multipath Extended Target Tracking with Labeled Random Finite Sets

High-resolution radar sensors are critical for autonomous systems but pose significant challenges to traditional tracking algorithms due to the generation of multiple measurements per object and the presence of multipath effects. Existing solutions often rely on the point target assumption or treat multipath measurements as clutter, whereas current extended target trackers often lack the capability to maintain trajectory continuity in complex multipath environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the multipath extended target generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (MPET-GLMB) filter. A unified Bayesian framework based on labeled random finite set theory is derived to jointly model target existence, measurement partitioning, and the association between measurements, targets, and propagation paths. This formulation enables simultaneous trajectory estimation for both targets and reflectors without requiring heuristic post-processing. To enhance computational efficiency, a joint prediction and update implementation based on Gibbs sampling is developed. Furthermore, a measurement-driven adaptive birth model is introduced to initialize tracks without prior knowledge of target positions. Experimental results from simulated scenarios and real-world automotive radar data demonstrate that the proposed filter outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior state estimation accuracy and robust trajectory maintenance in dynamic multipath environments.

Co-Design of Rover Wheels and Control using Bayesian Optimization and Rover-Terrain Simulations

While simulation is vital for optimizing robotic systems, the cost of modeling deformable terrain has long limited its use in full-vehicle studies of off-road autonomous mobility. For example, Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations are often confined to single-wheel tests, which obscures coupled wheel-vehicle-controller interactions and prevents joint optimization of mechanical design and control. This paper presents a Bayesian optimization framework that co-designs rover wheel geometry and steering controller parameters using high-fidelity, full-vehicle closed-loop simulations on deformable terrain. Using the efficiency and scalability of a continuum-representation model (CRM) for terramechanics, we evaluate candidate designs on trajectories of varying complexity while towing a fixed load. The optimizer tunes wheel parameters (radius, width, and grouser features) and steering PID gains under a multi-objective formulation that balances traversal speed, tracking error, and energy consumption. We compare two strategies: simultaneous co-optimization of wheel and controller parameters versus a sequential approach that decouples mechanical and control design. We analyze trade-offs in performance and computational cost. Across 3,000 full-vehicle simulations, campaigns finish in five to nine days, versus months with the group's earlier DEM-based workflow. Finally, a preliminary hardware study suggests the simulation-optimized wheel designs preserve relative performance trends on the physical rover. Together, these results show that scalable, high-fidelity simulation can enable practical co-optimization of wheel design and control for off-road vehicles on deformable terrain without relying on prohibitively expensive DEM studies. The simulation infrastructure (scripts and models) is released as open source in a public repository to support reproducibility and further research.

JRDB-Pose3D: A Multi-person 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation Dataset for Robotics

Real-world scenes are inherently crowded. Hence, estimating 3D poses of all nearby humans, tracking their movements over time, and understanding their activities within social and environmental contexts are essential for many applications, such as autonomous driving, robot perception, robot navigation, and human-robot interaction. However, most existing 3D human pose estimation datasets primarily focus on single-person scenes or are collected in controlled laboratory environments, which restricts their relevance to real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce JRDB-Pose3D, which captures multi-human indoor and outdoor environments from a mobile robotic platform. JRDB-Pose3D provides rich 3D human pose annotations for such complex and dynamic scenes, including SMPL-based pose annotations with consistent body-shape parameters and track IDs for each individual over time. JRDB-Pose3D contains, on average, 5-10 human poses per frame, with some scenes featuring up to 35 individuals simultaneously. The proposed dataset presents unique challenges, including frequent occlusions, truncated bodies, and out-of-frame body parts, which closely reflect real-world environments. Moreover, JRDB-Pose3D inherits all available annotations from the JRDB dataset, such as 2D pose, information about social grouping, activities, and interactions, full-scene semantic masks with consistent human- and object-level tracking, and detailed annotations for each individual, such as age, gender, and race, making it a holistic dataset for a wide range of downstream perception and human-centric understanding tasks.

PokeNet: Learning Kinematic Models of Articulated Objects from Human Observations

Articulation modeling enables robots to learn joint parameters of articulated objects for effective manipulation which can then be used downstream for skill learning or planning. Existing approaches often rely on prior knowledge about the objects, such as the number or type of joints. Some of these approaches also fail to recover occluded joints that are only revealed during interaction. Others require large numbers of multi-view images for every object, which is impractical in real-world settings. Furthermore, prior works neglect the order of manipulations, which is essential for many multi-DoF objects where one joint must be operated before another, such as a dishwasher. We introduce PokeNet, an end-to-end framework that estimates articulation models from a single human demonstration without prior object knowledge. Given a sequence of point cloud observations of a human manipulating an unknown object, PokeNet predicts joint parameters, infers manipulation order, and tracks joint states over time. PokeNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, improving joint axis and state estimation accuracy by an average of over 27% across diverse objects, including novel and unseen categories. We demonstrate these gains in both simulation and real-world environments.

GTATrack: Winner Solution to SoccerTrack 2025 with Deep-EIoU and Global Tracklet Association

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in sports is highly challenging due to irregular player motion, uniform appearances, and frequent occlusions. These difficulties are further exacerbated by the geometric distortion and extreme scale variation introduced by static fisheye cameras. In this work, we present GTATrack, a hierarchical tracking framework that win first place in the SoccerTrack Challenge 2025. GTATrack integrates two core components: Deep Expansion IoU (Deep-EIoU) for motion-agnostic online association and Global Tracklet Association (GTA) for trajectory-level refinement. This two-stage design enables both robust short-term matching and long-term identity consistency. Additionally, a pseudo-labeling strategy is used to boost detector recall on small and distorted targets. The synergy between local association and global reasoning effectively addresses identity switches, occlusions, and tracking fragmentation. Our method achieved a winning HOTA score of 0.60 and significantly reduced false positives to 982, demonstrating state-of-the-art accuracy in fisheye-based soccer tracking. Our code is available at https://github.com/ron941/GTATrack-STC2025.

GLAD: Generative Language-Assisted Visual Tracking for Low-Semantic Templates

Vision-language tracking has gained increasing attention in many scenarios. This task simultaneously deals with visual and linguistic information to localize objects in videos. Despite its growing utility, the development of vision-language tracking methods remains in its early stage. Current vision-language trackers usually employ Transformer architectures for interactive integration of template, search, and text features. However, persistent challenges about low-semantic images including prevalent image blurriness, low resolution and so on, may compromise model performance through degraded cross-modal understanding. To solve this problem, language assistance is usually used to deal with the obstacles posed by low-semantic images. However, due to the existing gap between current textual and visual features, direct concatenation and fusion of these features may have limited effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce a pioneering Generative Language-AssisteD tracking model, GLAD, which utilizes diffusion models for the generative multi-modal fusion of text description and template image to bolster compatibility between language and image and enhance template image semantic information. Our approach demonstrates notable improvements over the existing fusion paradigms. Blurry and semantically ambiguous template images can be restored to improve multi-modal features in the generative fusion paradigm. Experiments show that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks and achieves an impressive inference speed. The code and models will be released at: https://github.com/Confetti-lxy/GLAD

Planner-Auditor Twin: Agentic Discharge Planning with FHIR-Based LLM Planning, Guideline Recall, Optional Caching and Self-Improvement

Objective: Large language models (LLMs) show promise for clinical discharge planning, but their use is constrained by hallucination, omissions, and miscalibrated confidence. We introduce a self-improving, cache-optional Planner-Auditor framework that improves safety and reliability by decoupling generation from deterministic validation and targeted replay. Materials and Methods: We implemented an agentic, retrospective, FHIR-native evaluation pipeline using MIMIC-IV-on-FHIR. For each patient, the Planner (LLM) generates a structured discharge action plan with an explicit confidence estimate. The Auditor is a deterministic module that evaluates multi-task coverage, tracks calibration (Brier score, ECE proxies), and monitors action-distribution drift. The framework supports two-tier self-improvement: (i) within-episode regeneration when enabled, and (ii) cross-episode discrepancy buffering with replay for high-confidence, low-coverage cases. Results: While context caching improved performance over baseline, the self-improvement loop was the primary driver of gains, increasing task coverage from 32% to 86%. Calibration improved substantially, with reduced Brier/ECE and fewer high-confidence misses. Discrepancy buffering further corrected persistent high-confidence omissions during replay. Discussion: Feedback-driven regeneration and targeted replay act as effective control mechanisms to reduce omissions and improve confidence reliability in structured clinical planning. Separating an LLM Planner from a rule-based, observational Auditor enables systematic reliability measurement and safer iteration without model retraining. Conclusion: The Planner-Auditor framework offers a practical pathway toward safer automated discharge planning using interoperable FHIR data access and deterministic auditing, supported by reproducible ablations and reliability-focused evaluation.

AI-Driven Three-Dimensional Reconstruction and Quantitative Analysis for Burn Injury Assessment

Accurate, reproducible burn assessment is critical for treatment planning, healing monitoring, and medico-legal documentation, yet conventional visual inspection and 2D photography are subjective and limited for longitudinal comparison. This paper presents an AI-enabled burn assessment and management platform that integrates multi-view photogrammetry, 3D surface reconstruction, and deep learning-based segmentation within a structured clinical workflow. Using standard multi-angle images from consumer-grade cameras, the system reconstructs patient-specific 3D burn surfaces and maps burn regions onto anatomy to compute objective metrics in real-world units, including surface area, TBSA, depth-related geometric proxies, and volumetric change. Successive reconstructions are spatially aligned to quantify healing progression over time, enabling objective tracking of wound contraction and depth reduction. The platform also supports structured patient intake, guided image capture, 3D analysis and visualization, treatment recommendations, and automated report generation. Simulation-based evaluation demonstrates stable reconstructions, consistent metric computation, and clinically plausible longitudinal trends, supporting a scalable, non-invasive approach to objective, geometry-aware burn assessment and decision support in acute and outpatient care.