Conformal Object Detection by Sequential Risk Control

Recent advances in object detectors have led to their adoption for industrial uses. However, their deployment in critical applications is hindered by the inherent lack of reliability of neural networks and the complex structure of object detection models. To address these challenges, we turn to Conformal Prediction, a post-hoc procedure which offers statistical guarantees that are valid for any dataset size, without requiring prior knowledge on the model or data distribution. Our contribution is manifold: first, we formally define the problem of Conformal Object Detection (COD) and introduce a novel method, Sequential Conformal Risk Control (SeqCRC), that extends the statistical guarantees of Conformal Risk Control (CRC) to two sequential tasks with two parameters, as required in the COD setting. Then, we propose loss functions and prediction sets suited to applying CRC to different applications and certification requirements. Finally, we present a conformal toolkit, enabling replication and further exploration of our methods. Using this toolkit, we perform extensive experiments, yielding a benchmark that validates the investigated methods and emphasizes trade-offs and other practical consequences.

TensorTouch: Calibration of Tactile Sensors for High Resolution Stress Tensor and Deformation for Dexterous Manipulation

Advanced dexterous manipulation involving multiple simultaneous contacts across different surfaces, like pinching coins from ground or manipulating intertwined objects, remains challenging for robotic systems. Such tasks exceed the capabilities of vision and proprioception alone, requiring high-resolution tactile sensing with calibrated physical metrics. Raw optical tactile sensor images, while information-rich, lack interpretability and cross-sensor transferability, limiting their real-world utility. TensorTouch addresses this challenge by integrating finite element analysis with deep learning to extract comprehensive contact information from optical tactile sensors, including stress tensors, deformation fields, and force distributions at pixel-level resolution. The TensorTouch framework achieves sub-millimeter position accuracy and precise force estimation while supporting large sensor deformations crucial for manipulating soft objects. Experimental validation demonstrates 90% success in selectively grasping one of two strings based on detected motion, enabling new contact-rich manipulation capabilities previously inaccessible to robotic systems.

Rooms from Motion: Un-posed Indoor 3D Object Detection as Localization and Mapping

We revisit scene-level 3D object detection as the output of an object-centric framework capable of both localization and mapping using 3D oriented boxes as the underlying geometric primitive. While existing 3D object detection approaches operate globally and implicitly rely on the a priori existence of metric camera poses, our method, Rooms from Motion (RfM) operates on a collection of un-posed images. By replacing the standard 2D keypoint-based matcher of structure-from-motion with an object-centric matcher based on image-derived 3D boxes, we estimate metric camera poses, object tracks, and finally produce a global, semantic 3D object map. When a priori pose is available, we can significantly improve map quality through optimization of global 3D boxes against individual observations. RfM shows strong localization performance and subsequently produces maps of higher quality than leading point-based and multi-view 3D object detection methods on CA-1M and ScanNet++, despite these global methods relying on overparameterization through point clouds or dense volumes. Rooms from Motion achieves a general, object-centric representation which not only extends the work of Cubify Anything to full scenes but also allows for inherently sparse localization and parametric mapping proportional to the number of objects in a scene.

Language-guided Learning for Object Detection Tackling Multiple Variations in Aerial Images

Despite recent advancements in computer vision research, object detection in aerial images still suffers from several challenges. One primary challenge to be mitigated is the presence of multiple types of variation in aerial images, for example, illumination and viewpoint changes. These variations result in highly diverse image scenes and drastic alterations in object appearance, so that it becomes more complicated to localize objects from the whole image scene and recognize their categories. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce a novel object detection framework in aerial images, named LANGuage-guided Object detection (LANGO). Upon the proposed language-guided learning, the proposed framework is designed to alleviate the impacts from both scene and instance-level variations. First, we are motivated by the way humans understand the semantics of scenes while perceiving environmental factors in the scenes (e.g., weather). Therefore, we design a visual semantic reasoner that comprehends visual semantics of image scenes by interpreting conditions where the given images were captured. Second, we devise a training objective, named relation learning loss, to deal with instance-level variations, such as viewpoint angle and scale changes. This training objective aims to learn relations in language representations of object categories, with the help of the robust characteristics against such variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and our method obtains noticeable detection performance improvements.

3DFlowAction: Learning Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from 3D Flow World Model

Manipulation has long been a challenging task for robots, while humans can effortlessly perform complex interactions with objects, such as hanging a cup on the mug rack. A key reason is the lack of a large and uniform dataset for teaching robots manipulation skills. Current robot datasets often record robot action in different action spaces within a simple scene. This hinders the robot to learn a unified and robust action representation for different robots within diverse scenes. Observing how humans understand a manipulation task, we find that understanding how the objects should move in the 3D space is a critical clue for guiding actions. This clue is embodiment-agnostic and suitable for both humans and different robots. Motivated by this, we aim to learn a 3D flow world model from both human and robot manipulation data. This model predicts the future movement of the interacting objects in 3D space, guiding action planning for manipulation. Specifically, we synthesize a large-scale 3D optical flow dataset, named ManiFlow-110k, through a moving object auto-detect pipeline. A video diffusion-based world model then learns manipulation physics from these data, generating 3D optical flow trajectories conditioned on language instructions. With the generated 3D object optical flow, we propose a flow-guided rendering mechanism, which renders the predicted final state and leverages GPT-4o to assess whether the predicted flow aligns with the task description. This equips the robot with a closed-loop planning ability. Finally, we consider the predicted 3D optical flow as constraints for an optimization policy to determine a chunk of robot actions for manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks and reliable cross-embodiment adaptation without hardware-specific training.

BemaGANv2: A Tutorial and Comparative Survey of GAN-based Vocoders for Long-Term Audio Generation

This paper presents a tutorial-style survey and implementation guide of BemaGANv2, an advanced GAN-based vocoder designed for high-fidelity and long-term audio generation. Built upon the original BemaGAN architecture, BemaGANv2 incorporates major architectural innovations by replacing traditional ResBlocks in the generator with the Anti-aliased Multi-Periodicity composition (AMP) module, which internally applies the Snake activation function to better model periodic structures. In the discriminator framework, we integrate the Multi-Envelope Discriminator (MED), a novel architecture we originally proposed, to extract rich temporal envelope features crucial for periodicity detection. Coupled with the Multi-Resolution Discriminator (MRD), this combination enables more accurate modeling of long-range dependencies in audio. We systematically evaluate various discriminator configurations, including MSD + MED, MSD + MRD, and MPD + MED + MRD, using objective metrics (FAD, SSIM, PLCC, MCD) and subjective evaluations (MOS, SMOS). This paper also provides a comprehensive tutorial on the model architecture, training methodology, and implementation to promote reproducibility. The code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/dinhoitt/BemaGANv2.

Rex-Thinker: Grounded Object Referring via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Object referring aims to detect all objects in an image that match a given natural language description. We argue that a robust object referring model should be grounded, meaning its predictions should be both explainable and faithful to the visual content. Specifically, it should satisfy two key properties: 1) Verifiable, by producing interpretable reasoning that justifies its predictions and clearly links them to visual evidence; and 2) Trustworthy, by learning to abstain when no object in the image satisfies the given expression. However, most methods treat referring as a direct bounding box prediction task, offering limited interpretability and struggling to reject expressions with no matching object. In this work, we propose Rex-Thinker, a model that formulates object referring as an explicit CoT reasoning task. Given a referring expression, we first identify all candidate object instances corresponding to the referred object category. Rex-Thinker then performs step-by-step reasoning over each candidate to assess whether it matches the given expression, before making a final prediction. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale CoT-style referring dataset named HumanRef-CoT by prompting GPT-4o on the HumanRef dataset. Each reasoning trace follows a structured planning, action, and summarization format, enabling the model to learn decomposed, interpretable reasoning over object candidates. We then train Rex-Thinker in two stages: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase to teach the model how to perform structured reasoning, followed by GRPO-based RL learning to improve accuracy and generalization. Experiments show that our approach outperforms standard baselines in both precision and interpretability on in-domain evaluation, while also demonstrating improved ability to reject hallucinated outputs and strong generalization in out-of-domain settings.

Grounding Beyond Detection: Enhancing Contextual Understanding in Embodied 3D Grounding

Embodied 3D grounding aims to localize target objects described in human instructions from ego-centric viewpoint. Most methods typically follow a two-stage paradigm where a trained 3D detector's optimized backbone parameters are used to initialize a grounding model. In this study, we explore a fundamental question: Does embodied 3D grounding benefit enough from detection? To answer this question, we assess the grounding performance of detection models using predicted boxes filtered by the target category. Surprisingly, these detection models without any instruction-specific training outperform the grounding models explicitly trained with language instructions. This indicates that even category-level embodied 3D grounding may not be well resolved, let alone more fine-grained context-aware grounding. Motivated by this finding, we propose DEGround, which shares DETR queries as object representation for both DEtection and Grounding and enables the grounding to benefit from basic category classification and box detection. Based on this framework, we further introduce a regional activation grounding module that highlights instruction-related regions and a query-wise modulation module that incorporates sentence-level semantic into the query representation, strengthening the context-aware understanding of language instructions. Remarkably, DEGround outperforms state-of-the-art model BIP3D by 7.52\% at overall accuracy on the EmbodiedScan validation set. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/zyn213/DEGround.

Sensor Model Identification via Simultaneous Model Selection and State Variable Determination

We present a method for the unattended gray-box identification of sensor models commonly used by localization algorithms in the field of robotics. The objective is to determine the most likely sensor model for a time series of unknown measurement data, given an extendable catalog of predefined sensor models. Sensor model definitions may require states for rigid-body calibrations and dedicated reference frames to replicate a measurement based on the robot's localization state. A health metric is introduced, which verifies the outcome of the selection process in order to detect false positives and facilitate reliable decision-making. In a second stage, an initial guess for identified calibration states is generated, and the necessity of sensor world reference frames is evaluated. The identified sensor model with its parameter information is then used to parameterize and initialize a state estimation application, thus ensuring a more accurate and robust integration of new sensor elements. This method is helpful for inexperienced users who want to identify the source and type of a measurement, sensor calibrations, or sensor reference frames. It will also be important in the field of modular multi-agent scenarios and modularized robotic platforms that are augmented by sensor modalities during runtime. Overall, this work aims to provide a simplified integration of sensor modalities to downstream applications and circumvent common pitfalls in the usage and development of localization approaches.

FMG-Det: Foundation Model Guided Robust Object Detection

Collecting high quality data for object detection tasks is challenging due to the inherent subjectivity in labeling the boundaries of an object. This makes it difficult to not only collect consistent annotations across a dataset but also to validate them, as no two annotators are likely to label the same object using the exact same coordinates. These challenges are further compounded when object boundaries are partially visible or blurred, which can be the case in many domains. Training on noisy annotations significantly degrades detector performance, rendering them unusable, particularly in few-shot settings, where just a few corrupted annotations can impact model performance. In this work, we propose FMG-Det, a simple, efficient methodology for training models with noisy annotations. More specifically, we propose combining a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework with a pre-processing pipeline that leverages powerful foundation models to correct labels prior to training. This pre-processing pipeline, along with slight modifications to the detector head, results in state-of-the-art performance across a number of datasets, for both standard and few-shot scenarios, while being much simpler and more efficient than other approaches.