Autonomous
-
NavGPT-3: Harnessing Context in a Hierarchical Navigation Runtime
2026-10-07 18:45:56Gengze Zhou, Yicong Hong, Jiazhao Zhang, Xunyi Zhao, Jian Zhou, Zixing Lei, Zun Wang, Chongyang Zhao, Xionghui Chen, Stephen Gould, Anton van den Hengel, Qi WuAbstract
Language models trained with long-horizon agentic reinforcement learning can generalize knowledge through reasoning, express precise actions, and pursue goals over many steps, raising the ceiling on what an embodied agent can understand and decide. Physical interaction, however, remains the domain of action policies, which provide dense, low-latency control. We present NavGPT-3, a harness that connects the two models, with an OS-like runtime built above it: reasoning, acting, and monitoring run as threads with their own context, tools, and permissions, while the runtime schedules them and decides which thread controls the robot's motion, so that the robot can react to sudden real-world events through interruption and thread switching. Beneath it, our action policy NavGPT VLA, trained on 19.28M examples, allocates visual tokens using codec allocation, in proportion to scene change; its 8B model alone reaches 74.51 SR on R2R-CE and leads RxR-CE with 78.19 SR. With the complete harness, NavGPT-3 sets the state of the art on R2R-CE (81.51 SR) and, for the first time, brings an autonomous agent to human level: on RxR-CE it matches human followers in success (90.43 vs. 90.4 SR) and path fidelity (78.47 vs. 77.7 nDTW) at 1 min 22 s per episode, versus roughly 3 min for a human. We comprehensively ablate the harness design and the interaction between the two models, showing how tools and the action policy shape the path from language-model reasoning to physical control: when NavGPT VLA executes the route, the reasoning loop shortens and the system's minimum reaction time falls from 3-19 s per language-model decision to 0.5-1 s per action-policy step (1-2 Hz). These results show that designing this embodied interface is central to connecting frontier language-model intelligence with low-level physical control. We will release all models, code, and evaluation records.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10787
PDF
-
Unsupervised Maneuver-Aware Acoustic Fault Detection for Autonomous Drones
2026-10-07 17:55:09Ali M Ali, Ziyi Tang, Nurdaulet Nazarbay, Hashim A. HashimAbstract
This paper presents a maneuver-aware acoustic fault detection framework for autonomous drones that integrates Noise2Noise-inspired deep learning denoising with maneuver-conditioned reconstruction. A key practical constraint motivating this work is that labeled faulty-flight data are difficult and potentially unsafe to collect; the proposed framework therefore follows an unsupervised learning paradigm in which only nominal flight recordings are required for training. In flight environments, acoustic signals acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles are subject to variability arising both from environmental noise and from structured, maneuver-dependent aerodynamic effects. To address these challenges simultaneously, a two-stage learning architecture is developed. In the first stage, a Noise2Noise-inspired denoising model attenuates stochastic acoustic noise while preserving fault-relevant spectral-temporal structures, without requiring clean reference signals. In the second stage, a maneuver-Conditioned Convolutional AutoEncoder (maneuver-CCAE) is trained using maneuver-related labels including drone type and flight direction to model nominal acoustic behavior under varying operating conditions. Fault detection is subsequently performed using reconstruction error as an anomaly score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed maneuver-aware conditioning raises the area under the ROC curve (AUC) from $\AUCaeOnly$ (unconditioned baseline) to $\AUCfull$ (full model), validating the critical role of maneuver-dependent modeling. The complete framework is deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super embedded platform within a ROS2 pipeline, achieving an end-to-end fault detection latency of approximately $20\,\text{ms}$ per audio segment with a TensorRT half-precision (FP16) backend, confirming real-time viability for onboard UAV health monitoring.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10517
PDF
-
Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
2026-10-07 16:47:17Xingtai Gui, Yucheng Zhou, Dongqian Guo, Jiahao Gong, Feiyang Tan, Jianbing ShenAbstract
Vision-language-action~(VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, existing VLA models still suffer from a fundamental mismatch: driving actions require precise 3D geometric cues, while visual-language understanding and reasoning are largely conducted in a 2D semantic space. In this paper, we propose GeoCoTDrive, an explicit geometric chain-of-thought framework that grounds geometry in a planning-oriented manner. GeoCoTDrive follows a think with 2D first, drive with dedicated 3D priors paradigm. It first grounds 2D regions corresponding to decision-critical cues, and then retrieves localized 3D priors by sampling features from a geometric foundation model within the grounded regions. These localized geometric features are interleaved into the autoregressive context to support the trajectory generation. To supervise this process, we introduce planning-relevant grounding, a new region-level grounding task that focuses on local spatial cues directly affecting ego planning decisions, and construct the PlanningGrounding dataset to endow VLAs with planning-oriented grounding capability. Experiments across multiple end-to-end autonomous driving benchmarks show that GeoCoTDrive consistently improves safety-critical planning performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the explicit geometric chain-of-thought process for VLA-based planning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10390
PDF
-
RoboQuest: Generalist Physical Agents that Search, Inspect and Test
2026-10-07 16:46:45Liu Renhang, Navonil Majumder, Tej Deep Pala, Soujanya PoriaAbstract
Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have made them capable generalist physical agents for a range of manipulation tasks. However, successful operation in an unfamiliar environment may require an agent to seek task-relevant information through interaction when it is absent from the observations: it may need to determine where a relevant object is, inspect an unobserved property, or discover the effect of an unfamiliar tool. We thus introduce RoboQuest, a benchmark for goal-directed embodied exploration, where agents must actively acquire task-relevant information through physical interaction, use the resulting evidence to adapt subsequent actions, and autonomously decide when to commit to task completion. RoboQuest comprises ten mobile manipulation tasks centered on three forms of uncertainty: search, manipulation-based inspection, and interactive testing. We evaluate five frontier multimodal agents through a common visuomotor interface, as well as a $\pi_{0.5}$ policy fine-tuned on the full-episode demonstrations we release. The best agent succeeds in only 23\% of the episodes, and the fine-tuned policy almost never succeeds. Isolated tests of the execution skills the tasks are built from, with the hidden information supplied, show that the agents can carry out most of the required actions, and our failure analysis attributes only a minority of the failures to execution. Our failure analysis further finds that the agents often stop exploring too early as they make decisions before observing the required evidence for task completion. We also find that agents rarely prevent or repair the disturbances caused by their exploration. Moreover, learning by trial and error remains difficult for most models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10388
PDF
-
Video2World: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Interactive World Modeling from Embodied Videos
2026-10-07 16:40:14Jinzhou Tang, Zijun Zhang, Jing Yang, Yuchen Yan, Kun Zhou, Lingjun Mao, Ruobing Han, Jinglin Cao, Wenpeng Xu, Lukun He, Minghao Fu, Fan Feng, Biwei HuangAbstract
Building interactive simulators from real-world observations is a promising way to scale embodied data, but current pipelines still rely heavily on manual environment construction and calibration. We study whether frontier foundation models and coding agents can automate this process end to end. We formulate \emph{autonomous video-to-simulation} as a software engineering task in which an agent observes an embodied video, constructs the corresponding simulated environment and robot behavior, and iteratively refines the result through execution feedback. To evaluate this capability, we introduce \textbf{Video2World}, a benchmark comprising 222 reconstruction instances derived from 189 robot and human demonstration videos. Video2World measures reconstructed worlds along geometric fidelity, dynamic fidelity, and functional correctness, capturing spatial perception, physical reasoning, and executable interaction. Evaluating 9 frontier coding-agent systems reveals a sharp improvement in Task success beginning with Claude Opus 5, rising from below 5\% to over 15\%, while substantial gaps to human-assisted reconstruction remain. We further find that worlds that look better could work worse: better visual fidelity does not always lead to higher task success. This echoes the broader gap between perceptual realism and factual correctness observed in generative models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04432
PDF
-
A Probabilistic Perspective on Wasserstein-Based Evidential Uncertainty for Out-of-Distribution Segmentation
2026-10-07 14:03:45Arnold Brosch, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Michael Felsberg, Kira MaagAbstract
Semantic segmentation networks operate on a fixed set of classes and therefore fail when out-of-distribution (OOD) objects appear during deployment, a critical limitation for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Reliably identifying OOD objects requires well-calibrated epistemic uncertainty, yet common softmax-based confidence scores remain overconfident, while Bayesian alternatives such as Monte Carlo dropout or deep ensembles require costly repeated forward passes. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) offers an efficient alternative by modeling class probabilities as a Dirichlet distribution learned from a single deterministic forward pass. Existing EDL formulations rely on Euclidean objectives that push predictions towards the simplex vertices, encouraging overconfidence rather than preserving uncertainty for unfamiliar inputs. We instead employ Wasserstein-based objectives, which respect the geometry of the probability simplex, and study the influence of the Wasserstein order on segmentation accuracy and OOD detection within a unified evidential framework. We evaluate this framework on a convolutional (DeepLabV3+) and a transformer-based (SegFormer) architecture on the SegmentMeIfYouCan benchmark, including LostAndFound, RoadObstacle21, RoadAnomaly21, and Fishyscapes. Our results show the optimal Wasserstein order is architecture-dependent: second-order objectives dominate on the convolutional backbone, third-order objectives on the transformer backbone, and our framework surpasses comparable baselines on most metrics, with a single deterministic forward pass.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10116
PDF
-
Temporal Residual Bottleneck for Robust Asynchronous Collaborative Perception
2026-10-07 13:49:32Melih Yazgan, Ahmed Abouelazm, J. Marius Z\"ollnerAbstract
Collaborative perception extends the sensing range of autonomous vehicles, but its performance degrades when shared features arrive stale or incomplete. Most latency-robust methods compensate delayed collaborator features through flow-guided alignment or direct feature transport. In this work, we formulate asynchronous collaborative perception as temporal residual prediction. Our Temporal Residual Bottleneck keeps a deterministic pose-warped collaborator feature as a conservative anchor and uses a $\Delta t$-conditioned xLSTM to extract residual temporal evidence from the available history. A detector-facing residual bottleneck then applies only gated, regularized corrections before ego-side fusion, reducing the risk of overwriting reliable static structure when temporal correspondence is uncertain. Experiments on DAIR-V2X and OPV2V show that our method is especially effective under severe fixed/irregular delays and packet drops. On DAIR-V2X, the reported checkpoint trades a small amount of synchronized peak accuracy for better robustness under stronger communication degradation. Controlled diagnostics further indicate that direct feature transport has oracle headroom but can become unreliable when deployed without accurate correspondence. These results support temporal residual fusion as a practical alternative for asynchronous and incomplete collaborative perception. Code will be publicly released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10090
PDF
-
Constrained-Action AI Remediation for SIEM/XDR via a NeMo-Guardrails Proxy
2026-10-07 12:00:51Georgios Koutidis, Nikolaos Kekatos, Tom Nianios, Alexios LekidisAbstract
Security Operations Centers (SOCs) for information technology and operational technology share one incident-response problem: a flood of correlated alerts and too few analysts. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as reasoning engines that triage alerts and, in autonomous deployments, issue commands that block IPs, kill processes, or quarantine files on production hosts. This coupling introduces a new risk: a single adversarial alert can become a remote code path through the LLM's reasoning, leading it to recommend an action the SOC then executes. We present a constrained-action architecture with two coordinated layers: (i) a SIEM/XDR control plane that grounds remediation in correlated host events and confines the LLM's output to a closed intent vocabulary whose templated commands are executed by thin endpoint agents, backstopped by an argument validator; and (ii) a NeMo-Guardrails proxy that wraps the SOC-analyst LLM with input- and output-rail policies, evaluated out-of-the-box against a SOC-specific adversarial corpus we release. The stock proxy lifts injection recall from 25.0% to 94.5% at a 0.1% false-positive rate, and a live red-team exercise confirms that the closed intent vocabulary and argument validator contain the observed LLM failure modes before any command crosses the trust boundary. As an architectural fit (not yet a measured operational-technology deployment), the constrained-action property suits critical-infrastructure settings where a wrong remediation has physical, not merely operational, consequences. The loop is best run human-in-the-loop or delayed: the measured rail latency keeps inline control out of scope.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09906
PDF
-
Agent4RE: A Self-Refining Multi-agent Framework for End-to-End Software Requirements Engineering and Benchmarking
2026-10-07 11:23:11Yongjian Tang, Linhan Li, Thomas RunklerAbstract
Existing LLM-based approaches for software Requirements Engineering (RE) typically rely on basic prompting strategies or rudimentary agent collaboration, under-utilizing the full potential of multi-agent systems. Meanwhile, available datasets focus on isolated subtasks, such as requirements extraction, classification, and completeness detection, leaving the absence of an end-to-end RE benchmark that spans from requirements elicitation to generation. We present Agent4RE - a self-refining multi-agent RE system that orchestrates specialized agents and incorporates two iterative improvement loops. To support evaluation, we construct RE-E2E - a real-world dataset built from human-written requirement specifications, enabling end-to-end assessment of RE workflows. Building on this foundation, we further propose two enhanced Agent4RE versions that incorporate either autonomous self-refinement or structured human feedback, and analyze their strengths and limitations across different scenarios. Evaluation on 8 Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates that all three Agent4RE variants consistently outperform a domain-context-augmented prompting baseline by average 8% in text-based metrics. The two enhanced variants achieve the highest LLM-as-a-judge and human ratings, surpassing two RE baselines by approximately 0.8 points on a four-point scale. This consistent performance establishes Agent4RE as a practical end-to-end RE solution for industrial environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10628
PDF
-
Judging in Latent Space: Efficient Generative Reward Modeling via Semantics-Preserving Compression
2026-10-07 10:05:06Mingqing Yuan (Soochow University), Xiaobo Liang (Soochow University), Junwei Yang (University of Cambridge), Ziwei Chen (Chalmers University of Technology), Zeren Zhang (Peking University), Hejin Wang (Tsinghua University), Yubin Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science,Technology), Juntao Li (Soochow University)Abstract
Reward modeling often requires jointly representing and reasoning over multiple evaluation criteria, yet verbalizing this process token by token can incur substantial inference cost. Recent work on latent reasoning suggests that continuous states may support this computation more compactly. We introduce LatentGRM, a latent evaluation framework built on semantic chunking, compression, and reconstruction. By using the structure of rubric-guided evaluations to guide compression, LatentGRM learns compact continuous trajectories that support autonomous pairwise judgments without generating textual assessments. A separate interpreter reconstructs evaluation text from these trajectories, providing an offline view of the information retained under compression. Under matched training data and backbones, LatentGRM achieves competitive aggregate preference accuracy relative to explicit Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) judges at both 4B and 8B scales. Across four benchmark domains, LatentGRM-8B compresses evaluation trajectories by 8.9--9.2x and reduces total judge inference time by 6.1--7.0x at vote@5. Controlled rubric interventions show that criterion-dependent preference information is carried through the latent sequence. Together, these results demonstrate that continuous latent evaluation can substantially reduce inference cost while preserving competitive judgment quality.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09788
PDF
-
UltraWorld: Learning Interactive Ultrasound World Models from Untracked Clinical Videos with Acoustic Sampling Map
2026-10-07 10:02:28Keke Yang, Erqi Wang, Sainan Guan, Hongliang RenAbstract
World models can enable autonomous ultrasound scanning by predicting the outcomes of probe motions from local observations. Learning this action--observation relationship typically relies on synchronized video--pose pairs, which are costly to collect at scale and largely unavailable in routine clinical recordings. Reliable action following further requires modeling ultrasound's cross-sectional sampling geometry. We present UltraWorld, a self-distillation recipe that transfers priors from clinical ultrasound videos into interactive world models without real action annotations. Starting from clinical videos, we adapt a video foundation model into an ultrasound generator conditioned on reference images and anatomical masks. Anatomical masks sampled along programmable trajectories through 3D anatomy provide spatial guidance for synthesizing action--video pairs. We then use these synthetic pairs to self-distill the generator into a world model that predicts future observations from local observations and actions, without requiring anatomical masks or other 3D assets at inference time. To further improve action following, we introduce the Acoustic Sampling Map (AsMap), which represents probe poses and imaging settings as pixel-wise 3D sampling positions, beam directions, and depths. Experiments demonstrate improved prediction fidelity and action following. Across nine simulated closed-loop local planning episodes, UltraWorld reduces the mean final distance to the goal and orientation error by 29\% and 38\%, respectively, compared with visual servoing. Project Page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09785
PDF
-
End-to-End Autonomous Generation of Human Assembly Plans
2026-10-07 10:01:01Faustin Arion von Arx, Millicent Schlafly, Mark D. FugeAbstract
Turning a CAD design into an assembly plan is still largely done by hand, requiring engineers to reason about geometric feasibility, tool access, stability, and the ergonomics of human assembly. In this work, we encode long-established design for assembly (DfA) principles into a contained, end-to-end approach for generating assembly plans. Our approach takes only a mesh assembly and produces either a step-by-step assembly manual or a structured failure report, requiring no joint metadata, fastener annotations, or additional information. Four major components of a manufacturing plan are addressed autonomously: an assembly tool list, the assembly sequence and subassemblies, an assembly manual, and design feedback for improving assemblability. For determining the sequence plan, we systematically disassemble the object in a physics simulator and apply a cost function that encodes DfA principles. Manual generation, tool labelling, and assembly feedback rely primarily on multimodal large language models. Compared with a baseline that always removes the outermost part first from Tian et al., DfA-aware sequence planning reduces simulated assembly time, measured with a robot-arm assembly-time proxy, by 35% on 136 assemblies of 5 to 30 parts. The correct tool is selected for 88.6% of assembly steps. A vision-language model judge compares the generated manuals against ablated variants, identifying which page elements carry the information a reader needs. The presented approach and open-source code are available for use by engineers or AI agents looking to rapidly accelerate the creation of manufacturing plans for a given product design.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09781
PDF
-
On-Demand Robotic Assembly via Differentiable Geometric Part Repair
2026-10-07 09:57:40Millicent Schlafly, Fabio Schaub, Diogo Costa Pais, Luca Lelli, Janne Dvorak, Claire Colmont, Sven Marti, Mark D. FugeAbstract
Transitioning from a digital design to a robotic assembly process currently requires months of expert manual tuning to reconcile part geometries with robotic constraints. This paper presents an end-to-end, autonomous pipeline for the design and physical construction of bespoke wooden assemblies. A generative AI agent translates user prompts into initial 3D geometries, balancing the visual fidelity of the design with select physical constraints. The assemblability of the design is further improved by a gradient-based repair stage that backpropagates through a graph attention network surrogate to adjust component geometries. In addition to correcting for disjointed and overlapping components, we demonstrate hardware-specific corrections, differentiably optimizing the geometry of components to enable robot screwdriving for 86.7% of 60 novel natural language inputs, significantly outperforming prior work by a factor of ten. For ten of the structures, we physically demonstrate assemblability with two UR5e robots. This work marks a meaningful step toward on-demand robotic manufacturing, enabling the rapid production of customized, low-volume goods.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09777
PDF
-
Beyond Policy Support: Interaction Constrained Offline Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
2026-10-07 09:48:53Mahmoud Selim, Cristina Cipriani, Karl Henrik JohanssonAbstract
Offline reinforcement learning enables reward-driven policy improvement from fixed datasets without requiring online exploration, making it particularly attractive in safety-critical domains. A central challenge, however, is distribution shift: policy optimization may favor actions that are weakly supported by the offline data, rendering value estimates unreliable. Existing approaches primarily control this shift in the policy's own action space. In interactive environments such as autonomous driving, this can be insufficient: a candidate ego trajectory may remain well supported under the marginal behavior distribution while being poorly supported jointly with the surrounding-agent behavior observed in the logged interaction. We refer to this degradation in interaction support as \emph{interaction distribution shift} (IDS), and introduce \emph{Interaction-Constrained Drive Policy} (ICDP), an offline reinforcement learning framework that explicitly controls interaction-level distribution shift. Starting from the joint data distribution over ego and surrounding-agent futures, we show that joint-support degradation decomposes exactly into an ego-support component and a residual interaction-support component. We recover the latter through contrastive density-ratio estimation, isolating interaction compatibility without explicit joint-density modeling, surrounding-agent prediction, or rollouts in reactive simulators or learned world models during policy optimization. Closed-loop evaluations on nuPlan, Interplan and real-world truck experiments show that ICDP suppresses high-value yet interaction-unsupported trajectory selections and improves performance in interaction-critical driving scenarios. Project webpage: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09763
PDF
-
Do Better Visual Representations Always Lead to Better End-to-End Autonomous Driving?
2026-10-07 08:54:13Zihao Zhang, Haochen Tian, Tianyu Li, Changhui Jing, Jingliang He, Naisheng Ye, Ziyuan Pu, Zhenjie YangAbstract
Visual foundation models (VFMs) are increasingly integrated into end-to-end autonomous driving for their powerful representations, yet it remains unclear when these representations improve driving performance. To investigate this question, we introduce ViRA, a planner-agnostic visual representation alignment framework that keeps the planner architecture and inference cost unchanged. Our study reveals three findings: (1) VFM-guided visual representations consistently improve driving performance across diverse end-to-end planners, with gains extending to zero-shot closed-loop evaluation. (2) The choice of VFM target matters for planning performance, and alignment to a different VFM can further benefit planners with pre-trained VFM encoders. (3) Auxiliary perception supervision reduces sensitivity to VFM target selection, narrowing the EPDMS spread across five targets from 2.7 to 0.5 points and potentially compensating for less effective VFM targets. Guided by these findings, we develop ViRA-Diffusion, a diffusion-based planner trained without auxiliary perception supervision, which achieves 92.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navtest, outperforming recent methods in our comparison by at least 1.9 points. The results motivate jointly considering target selection and planner supervision when integrating VFMs into end-to-end autonomous driving. The results and demo are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09695
PDF
-
NAViLoss: An Underwater Navigation-Aware Dual-Residual Objective for Physics-Consistent Learning
Abstract
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) commonly rely on inertial navigation systems (INS) aided by Doppler velocity logs (DVLs) for reliable underwater navigation. Accurate DVL velocity estimation is therefore essential for successful operation. Recent learning-based methods have demonstrated improved DVL velocity estimation, particularly under degraded measurement conditions. However, their training objectives typically rely on conventional regression losses that are highly sensitive to large residuals and corrupted observations. Additionally, they do not explicitly account for the physical consistency and measurement uncertainty associated with the underlying sensing process. To address these limitations, this paper introduces navigation-aware loss (NAViLoss), a robust and uncertainty-aware objective function for learning-based AUV velocity estimation. NAViLoss jointly penalizes the velocity-estimation residual in the navigation-state domain and the beam-consistency residual in the DVL measurement domain. Its bounded formulation limits the influence of large residuals, while an adaptive mechanism regulates the uncertainty in beam geometry. Furthermore, NAViLoss is integrated with a DeepONet architecture to form a novel NAVi-DeepONet model for seamless estimation of an underwater vehicle's velocity. Lastly, our model is evaluated using approximately 10,000m of semi-synthetic AUV experimental data collected during multiple real-world sea trials. Experimental results demonstrate a 44% improvement in velocity-estimation accuracy compared with conventional and learning-based baselines. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of navigation-aware and uncertainty-adaptive loss design for robust learning-based underwater velocity estimation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09690
PDF
-
MeshSIPP: Efficient Lattice Planning in Dynamic Environment
Abstract
Autonomous navigation in dynamic environments requires computing spatiotemporal trajectories that satisfy non-holonomic motion constraints. When the trajectories of the moving obstacles are predictable or known, a promising approach is to rely on the combination of state lattices constructed from precomputed feasible motion primitives and Safe Interval Path Planning -- a search-based algorithm with strong theoretical guarantees. While this approach yields feasible paths, the rich primitive sets needed for smooth navigation induce a large branching factor, which becomes costly when coupled with time-dependent obstacle intervals. To this end, we present MeshSIPP, an efficient planner that removes the computational bottleneck by exploiting the fact that many primitives sweep the same regions and can therefore be validated together. MeshSIPP propagates primitives as spatial bundles, screens them with lightweight bounding-interval checks, and defers the expensive exact departure-time search until a primitive reaches its terminal state. A time-aware pruning rule additionally discards redundant space-time branches early in the search. We prove that the resulting search is complete and optimal. Extensive experiments over more than 6,000 benchmark instances and real-time ROS~2 simulations show that MeshSIPP achieves up to a 3$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art spatiotemporal planners.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09652
PDF
-
Learning Situation-Conditioned Thinking Policies for Long-Term LLM Agents
2026-10-07 07:34:08Hong SuAbstract
Long-running autonomous agents must reuse accumulated reasoning experience without allowing explicit historical memory and LLM context to grow indefinitely. However, existing memory mechanisms mainly retrieve, summarize, or compress past content and do not directly learn when particular kinds of thinking should be activated or discover new thinking knowledge from temporally dispersed experiences. This paper proposes a situation-conditioned thinking memory framework that transforms historical reasoning experience into a lightweight policy for predicting what should be thought about in the current situation, while leaving detailed reasoning to a large language model. Situations may represent temporal or spatiotemporal evolution rather than only current states. Temporary experiences are also periodically analyzed across multiple independent episodes to identify repeated long-range regularities, which are consolidated into new thinking knowledge and further internalized by the lightweight policy. Experiments show that the learned policy achieves 1.000 F1 on temporal-rule generalization, improves DeepSeek reasoning F1 from 0.789 to 0.868, reduces online processing time from 0.3636 ms to 0.0382 ms per query at 30,000 historical situations, and reaches 1.000 relation-discovery F1 and future-thinking accuracy after sufficient repeated cross-experience evidence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09590
PDF
-
Not All Uncertainty Matters: Simulation-in-the-Loop Fast-Slow Reasoning for Decision-Critical Autonomous Driving System
2026-10-07 06:15:44Jiayi Chen, Shuai Wang, Guangxu Zhu, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Chengzhong Xu, Kaibin HuangAbstract
Large vision-language models (VLMs) provide powerful open-world perception and reasoning for autonomous driving, but their high computational cost and inference latency make continuous cloud-side use impractical. This motivates fast--slow collaboration, where efficient onboard modules handle real-time perception and control while cloud models provide high-level reasoning only when needed. The key challenge is deciding when cloud reasoning should influence time-critical driving decisions. Existing methods often rely on perception uncertainty, heuristic triggers, or resource-driven policies, without assessing whether resolving an uncertainty will improve planning. We propose \textbf{SIGMA}, a simulation-in-the-loop framework for task-oriented fast--slow collaboration. SIGMA embeds the planner into uncertainty assessment and evaluates how plausible scene realizations under semantic and geometric uncertainty affect feasible trajectories and planning cost. Based on these outcomes, it estimates the expected reduction in planning cost from resolving uncertainty. We further introduce expected planning gain (EPG), a decision-level metric for cloud invocation, cloud-guidance integration, and request prioritization under deadline and resource constraints. Experiments in CARLA show that SIGMA reduces unnecessary cloud interactions while improving planning, efficiency, and navigation success in static and dynamic obstacle scenarios. Compared with fixed-period collaboration, SIGMA reduces unnecessary cloud interactions by 50\%, improves navigation success by more than 6\%, and cuts finish time by up to 26.2\% in dynamic scenarios.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09520
PDF
-
ActiveLang: Active Open-Vocabulary 3D Mapping with Semantic-Uncertainty-Guided Exploration
2026-10-07 06:15:39Liyan Chen, Hairong Yin, Huangying Zhan, Yi Xu, Raymond A. Yeh, Philippos MordohaiAbstract
As robots increasingly assist humans with diverse tasks, they need both geometric and semantic understanding of their surroundings. Moreover, robots often operate in unfamiliar environments and take on new tasks without knowing the relevant concepts ahead of time. This motivates language-annotated 3D maps that support open-vocabulary scene understanding and human-robot interaction. We introduce ActiveLang, an autonomous system for active open-vocabulary 3D mapping with semantic-uncertainty-guided exploration. ActiveLang performs online language-feature adaptation on a compact dual-Gaussian representation to jointly reconstruct scene geometry, appearance, and open-vocabulary semantics with modest memory overhead. Its planner efficiently selects informative viewpoints, enabling effective mapping with fewer observations and lower computational cost. Experiments on Replica and ScanNet++ demonstrate substantial improvements in 2D and 3D open-vocabulary segmentation over both online and offline baselines, highlighting that actively exploring scenes builds language-annotated 3D maps more efficiently.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09518
PDF
