Navigational bronchoscopy is critical for pulmonary interventions, yet current platforms depend heavily on pre-operative CT or external sensors, limiting their use in critical care and resource-constrained settings. Vision-only navigation offers a scalable alternative, but conventional visual odometry (VO) struggles with texture-poor airway images, specularities, and the vanishing-point singularities of tubular anatomy, leading to frequent tracking failures and drift. We present a geometry-aware VO framework that explicitly leverages vanishing-point cues from airway lumens. Detected lumens are back-projected to 3D rays, whose weighted fusion yields a stable forward heading even when parallax cues are absent. This heading, together with looming-based velocity estimates, is fused with noisy VO outputs using a bespoke high-gain observer that enforces airway-following priors and rejects drift. We validate the method on ex-vivo mechanically ventilated human lungs with electromagnetic tracking ground truth. Compared to state-of-the-art pipelines (ORB-SLAM2, LoFTR-VO, DPVO), our approach reduces absolute trajectory error by more than 50% and achieves the lowest relative pose error across all test sequences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05162
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) in lifelong deployment requires continuous adaptation to new environments without catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose SLAM, a Structured and Localized Analytic Manifold adaptation framework. Our framework elegantly unifies uncertainty-aware smoothing via Unscented transformation, topological space partitioning through a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and $H_\infty$ robust bound optimization into a singular, unified closed-form analytical recursion. Exhaustive ablation studies demonstrate that while the synergistic combination of uncertainty smoothing and localized mapping (U+G configuration) achieves the state-of-the-art nominal accuracy of 27.5%, the full deployment of the $H_\infty$ bound does not require an architectural split; rather, it introduces a mathematically guaranteed minimax robust bound. This formulation enables the system to seamlessly modulate the intrinsic trade-off between nominal placement precision and worst-case disturbance attenuation through a single regularization parameter.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04764
This paper presents a novel acoustic-visual-inertial odometry solution leveraging a continuous-time trajectory estimation framework for unmanned underwater vehicles. Underwater environments present unique challenges for visual localization and mapping, such as light attenuation, illumination variance, and the presence of particulate matter. This motivates the use of additional sensing modalities and a visual tracking pipeline that is robust to diverse subsea conditions. The proposed system is the first continuous-time trajectory estimation framework based on Gaussian processes to fuse asynchronous measurements from a Doppler velocity log, a stereo camera, and an inertial measurement unit. Additionally, a novel visual frontend is proposed, incorporating learning-based feature extraction and matching that is robust to the specific challenges that subsea environments present. The proposed framework enables seamless integration of additional sensor modalities in continuous-time and is adaptable to different environments without reconfiguration. The proposed system is extensively tested on real-world underwater inspection datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art visual-inertial and acoustic-visual-inertial SLAM algorithms in accuracy, robustness, and trajectory coverage. Notably, the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art despite only forming short-term visual data associations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04615
We present a real-time LiDAR-based framework for Gaussian Splatting SLAM that tightly couples fast G-ICP registration with spherical rasterization-based dense mapping for large-scale sequences. Leveraging LiDAR geometry rather than appearance, we reuse tracking-estimated local covariances to initialize Gaussians with range-aware scales and to derive surface normals for geometry-aware map optimization. We further introduce a covariance-derived geometry score that measures local complexity and drives pruning in planar regions and selective densification in structurally rich areas, while optimized Gaussians and LiDAR-specific confidence cues are fed back to improve tracking robustness. On the Newer College dataset, our method achieves an F-score of 86.78\% using purely online trajectories at real-time speed ($>$20 FPS), and additional experiments on other datasets confirm its stability and scalability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04127
Event-based 3D tracking enables low-latency and high-speed perception, while existing CNN- and Transformer-based trackers struggle to capture long-range spatiotemporal dependencies in sparse, noisy event streams, especially under real-time and efficiency constraints. To address these challenges, we present E-TraMamba, the first Mamba-based framework for 3D feature tracking on event data. This new framework adopts a linear state-space model for efficient long-range modeling and integrates a lightweight affine-transform predictor to maintain stable tracking under motion blur and occlusion. We also design an effective scheme to fuse multi-scale cues -- local spatiotemporal patches, correlation maps, and positional embeddings -- into a unified representation that enables stable and smooth 3D tracking. We construct a large-scale synthetic dataset, named EvD-PointOdyssey, which is generated with monocular rendering and provides synchronized event streams, depth maps, and accurate 3D trajectories for training and evaluating event-based 3D tracking models. Extensive experiments on event-based benchmarks demonstrate that E-TraMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering over $2\times$ longer feature lifetimes under strict accuracy thresholds (e.g., 0.1 m), with higher tracked-feature ratios and lower RMSE than all baselines. These results make E-TraMamba a strong candidate for low-latency visual odometry, real-time SLAM, and interactive robotics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02866
Spoken Question Answering (SQA) remains largely focused on high-resource languages and carefully recorded speech, limiting the reach of speech-LLM methods in low-resource settings. This paper investigates whether text-to-speech (TTS) can provide task-specific training data for Luxembourgish SQA without requiring a large human-recorded QA corpus. Starting from existing text-based QA resources, we translate questions into Luxembourgish, synthesize spoken questions with multiple TTS systems, and pair them with textual answers. We train a parameter-efficient SLAM-style architecture that connects a frozen Whisper encoder to frozen multilingual LLM backends through a learned projector and LoRA adapters. We compare MMS-TTS, Qwen3-TTS, and OmniVoice variants, including single-source corpora of about 48k questions and a 4TTS multi-source mix of approximately 230k questions. Evaluation on LLAMA-LB-Test with two real Luxembourgish speaker conditions shows that multi-source and voice-design-based synthetic training configurations yield the strongest SQA performance. The results also show that no-reference TTS quality scores do not monotonically predict downstream QA performance, indicating that synthetic speech must be evaluated as task-specific training data rather than only as natural-sounding audio.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02763
This paper presents OCD SLAM, a dynamic stereo visual SLAM framework that extends ORB-SLAM2 by jointly addressing dynamic objects and dynamic features in the scene. Usual visual SLAM systems operating in dynamic environments often fail in the presence of moving objects, due to the static-world assumption used in pose estimation and mapping. To address this predicament, we introduce a novel geometric approach based on the discrepancy between disparity and a newly proposed notion called ``cross disparity'', which exploits both temporal and stereo inconsistency to identify dynamic feature points. Complementary to this feature-level motion analysis, OCD SLAM integrates a 3D object detection module (SMOKE) with Kalman filter-based object tracking to perform object-level motion classification, enabling robust separation of static and dynamic scene elements for accurate pose estimation. The proposed approach has been evaluated on various sequences from the KITTI Odometry and KITTI Raw datasets. Results demonstrate that OCD SLAM achieves significant improvement in trajectory accuracy compared to ORB-SLAM2 and several state-of-the-art dynamic SLAM methods. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the cross disparity module in the KITTI Raw dataset and show that this method is able to detect dynamic features that are missed by the 3D object detection scheme alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02005
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled significant progress in dense dynamic Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). Prevailing methods typically discard predefined dynamic objects, ignoring that transiently static objects offer valuable geometric constraints for pose estimation. A recent work attempts to leverage this potential by employing per-pixel uncertainty maps to quantify the magnitude of motion. While this approach enables transiently static objects to enhance pose estimation, it erroneously integrates these objects into the static map, resulting in persistent artifacts. Moreover, its reliance on purely geometric information leads to ambiguous object boundaries in the uncertainty maps. To overcome these limitations, we present DL-SLAM, a monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM system built upon a novel dual-level probabilistic framework. Our method computes dynamic probability maps by combining semantic and geometric information. These pixel-level probabilities are lifted to 3D and aggregated to derive an object-level dynamic probability for each instance. Object-level probability enables the categorical pruning of dynamic Gaussians, resulting in an artifact-free static map. The static map, in turn, provides a geometrically consistent guidance to refine the pixel-wise probabilities, enhancing their reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that DL-SLAM outperforms existing approaches, improving tracking accuracy by up to 13\% while generating high-fidelity semantic maps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01860
Deep-learning features excel in visual matching, yet their practical value in tightly coupled visual-inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM) remains insufficiently characterized. We present DL-VINS-Factory, a unified framework that integrates learned feature extractors (ALIKED, RaCo, SuperPoint, XFeat) with either Lucas--Kanade (LK) optical-flow tracking or LightGlue (LG) descriptor matching. All front-ends share a sliding-window Ceres back-end, with optional AnyLoc DINOv2-VLAD loop closure, and 4-DoF pose-graph optimization. We benchmark the system across the four datasets covering indoor, unstructured outdoor, aggressive-motion, and visually degraded conditions. Results show that learned front-ends are viable for real-time embedded VI-SLAM, but are not universally superior to classical tracking. Relative to the corresponding GFTT+LK baseline, ALIKED+LG reduces EuRoC ATE by $5\%$ in monocular odometry and by $7\%$ in stereo with loop-closure. On NTU-VIRAL, where aggressive aerial motion increases inter-frame viewpoint change, ALIKED+LG stereo reduces loop-closed ATE by $12\%$. In Botanic Garden dataset, optical-flow tracking remains preferable, but learned keypoints still improve over the baseline GFTT, in which SuperPoint+LK reduces grayscale camera ATE by $29\%$, while RaCo+LK reduces RGB camera ATE by $38\%$. On SubT-MRS, learned front-ends display varying degree of improvement based on individual cases. With TensorRT acceleration on a Jetson AGX Orin, all valid configurations run in real time between $29$--$47$ FPS in monocular mode and $18$--$33$ FPS in stereo mode for the EuRoC and NTU-VIRAL datasets. AnyLoc further confirms roughly $2$--$7\times$ more valid loops than BRIEF+DBoW2. The implementation is open-sourced at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01757
Camera pose estimation from image streams is a critical component of spatial world models that integrate perception into planning and decision-making. Nearly all Visual Odometry (VO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (V-SLAM) systems have focused on datasets containing raw, uncompressed videos. Many working systems instead use ubiquitous hardware units to efficiently compress and decode video streams, saving orders of magnitude in storage and bandwidth. However, this lossy compression introduces visual artifacts that hinder the performance of traditional tracking systems. We present VOCA, a causal stereo visual-odometry method that exploits codec information to improve tracking performance. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on causal VO for relative trajectory error, efficiency, and absolute trajectory error on compressed streams. This work highlights the potential of leveraging widely available video codec information for vision tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00189
We introduce PRISM-VO, a novel pure optimization-based sparse photometric visual odometry framework for focused plenoptic cameras. The core of PRISM-VO is a novel photometric plenoptic bundle adjustment which jointly optimizes camera poses and inverse depth values of points in a sliding window. By combining geometric depth from a single plenoptic image with temporal multi-view constraints, PRISM-VO achieves accurate and drift-resilient motion estimation. Through explicit modeling of the plenoptic projection, PRISM-VO provides reliable metric-scale reconstructions, overcoming the scale ambiguity of monocular SLAM algorithms. Importantly, our approach relies solely on a single plenoptic sensor and avoids complex initialization, as depth priors are computed directly from plenoptic imaging. Experiments show that PRISM-VO outperforms the current state-of-the-art plenoptic visual odometry method on indoor and outdoor scenes. The proposed approach rivals other optimization- and learning-based methods while accurately and reliably recovering a metric scale of the scene. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00176
General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer religious questions, but for Islamic content they carry two serious risks: factual fabrication (inventing Qur'anic verses or hadith) and subtle value misalignment. We present Ansari, a deployed, retrieval-grounded Islamic AI assistant that has handled more than 140,000 conversations across 25+ languages since June 2023. Ansari is built around an agentic retrieval loop: a tool-using language model issues searches against authenticated Islamic corpora -- the Qur'an, hadith collections, a multi-volume jurisprudence (fiqh) encyclopedia, and exegetical (tafsir) sources -- and answers only on the basis of what it retrieves, with citations attached for verification. We describe the system's architecture (the agent loop, the retrieval tools, the corpora, and the system prompt that encodes editorial and theological policy), its multi-platform deployment (web, mobile, WhatsApp, and as a Model Context Protocol server and an Agent Skill), and what 140,000 real conversations reveal about how Muslims actually use such a tool. We report results on several complementary evaluations -- zero-shot performance on accredited institutional exams, a human-rated validation during Ramadan, and two independent, externally run benchmarks on which Ansari currently tops the public IslamicMMLU leaderboard ahead of frontier models and is competitive on Islamic legal reasoning (IslamicLegalBench) while strongly resisting false premises -- and draw out lessons that generalize beyond Islam to any faith- or values-sensitive deployment of LLMs: grounding is necessary but not sufficient, the system prompt is a theological as much as a technical artifact, and the absence of community in how models are formed remains a hard gap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20390
Islamic geometric patterns are governed by exact rotational symmetry and strict construction rules. This paper treats these rules as formal geometric knowledge and embeds them in a neural completion framework, rather than leaving them to be learned statistically from data. Given sparse control geometry and a target symmetry order, the system completes the pattern as a vector graph by predicting edges and refinements of bounded curves over a candidate lattice whose edges are organised into rotational orbits under the cyclic group. Symmetry is enforced either by constraining predictions within these orbits or by projecting them onto them during inference. The orbit-tied variant provides a constructive guarantee: for any input and any orbit-level selection rule, it produces exact N-fold symmetry, preserves anchor points, and keeps all refinements within prescribed bounds. These properties are verified numerically. The study focuses on rotational symmetry, and all quantitative results are obtained from procedurally generated graphs inspired by Islamic geometric design rather than from a historical corpus. On clean inputs, enforcing exact validity produces no measurable loss in fidelity. When control geometry is missing, an unstructured decoder loses fidelity and breaks symmetry; retraining on corrupted inputs recovers much of the fidelity but not exact validity. Symmetry-structured inference, by contrast, keeps violations at zero throughout. The results show that augmentation and symmetry structure address distinct failure modes: augmentation improves fidelity under corruption, while symmetry structure guarantees validity. The framework therefore provides a knowledge-constrained, guarantee-backed approach to neural completion for scalable vector ornaments whose validity depends on exact geometric structure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02573
The transmission chains (sanad) of Islamic Hadith literature encode relationships among tens of thousands of historical narrators whose biographical records are dispersed across independently maintained digital databases that share no common identifier. We present a two-phase entity resolution pipeline that links narrator names from the Sanadset 650K corpus - 650,986 Hadith records from 926 books containing 185,216 unique narrator name variants - to two biographical databases: Hadithtransmitters (Hawramani; 100,915 entries) and Muslimscholars (25,247 entries). Phase 1 matches Sanadset names to Hawramani using name-only similarity (Sanadset carries no metadata), yielding 94,628 links (51.1%; HIGH 39,938 / MED 54,690). Phase 2 cross-references Hawramani against Muslimscholars via a weighted multi-signal function combining name similarity, death-year proximity, and reliability grade polarity, yielding 95,573 links (94.7% of Hawramani; HIGH 18,245 / MED 71,546 / LOW 5,782). Chaining the two phases gives Sanadset narrators transitive access to Muslimscholars data. The linked data enable construction of a 185,216-node, 814,093-edge directed transmission graph enriched with cross-source biographical metadata. The annotated link corpora and enriched graph are released as open resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05424
Scaling monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM to kilometer-level outdoor environments poses two tightly coupled challenges: fragile long-term pose tracking and excessive memory overhead during large-scale mapping. In this paper, we propose KiloGS-SLAM, a highly efficient and robust monocular 3DGS-SLAM system that jointly addresses both bottlenecks. Since high-fidelity scene reconstruction fundamentally relies on drift-free camera poses, we first introduce a motion-adaptive hybrid tracking module. This module features a condition-triggered three-tier solving pipeline. It dynamically switches between Essential matrix and PnP models to handle geometric degeneracies. An on-demand foundation model can also be activated to rescue the trajectory from catastrophic drift. To ensure the system can sustain these long trajectories without memory exhaustion, we subsequently design a lifecycle-managed Gaussian mapping strategy. By integrating probabilistic initialization with chunk-based multi-view densification and pruning, this full-pipeline optimization effectively reduces primitive redundancy while preserving high-frequency details. Together, the robust tracking guarantees the geometric foundation required for accurate mapping, while the memory-efficient lifecycle-managed mapping enables large-scale operation. Extensive experiments across three challenging outdoor datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art tracking accuracy and rendering quality, successfully scaling to sequences of over 10,000 frames on a single GPU.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30436
Robotic applications increasingly rely on distributed computational infrastructures that combine embedded devices, edge servers, and cloud resources. This evolution, together with the collaborative nature of robotics projects, has made the development, integration, deployment, and long-term operation of robotic systems significantly more complex. In practice, multi-user robotics software teams face persistent challenges related to dependency isolation, compatibility, reproducibility, efficient sharing of specialized hardware, and deployment across heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we present CSAR (Containerized System Architecture for Robotics), a container-centric architectural framework designed specifically for robotics teams and the edge-cloud continuum. CSAR combines LXC/LXD-based system containerization, ROS 2/DDS-based communication, and a three-layer edge infrastructure to organize computation into hardware-affine, persistent execution environments that remain decoupled from the volatility of experimental workloads. Through its Infrastructure Core, Platform and Multi-User Orchestration, and Compute and Acceleration layers, CSAR provides strong isolation, controlled resource sharing, and topology-aware networking for distributed robotic applications. To demonstrate its validity, we describe a real deployment of CSAR in an academic robotics laboratory and evaluate it through representative use cases involving edge-offloaded 3D SLAM and GPU-accelerated semantic mapping. The results indicate that CSAR simplifies software integration, improves the utilization of shared computational resources, and facilitates safe prototyping, as well as reproducible and collaborative experimentation in robotics teams. The implementation described in this paper, including deployment templates, configuration files, and documentation, is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30293
LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) relies on local geometric quantities such as covariances, correspondences, and surface structures. However, most existing pipelines rely on hand-crafted estimates of local geometry and use them as fixed inputs to LiDAR SLAM, which can make the estimated local geometry noisy and unstable in sparse regions of a point cloud or when using low-resolution LiDAR. To address this issue, this paper introduces a self-supervised framework that learns an explicit symbolic representation of local geometry and uses it to improve LiDAR SLAM recursively. Specifically, each point is represented as a Gaussian distribution, allowing local geometry to be described by a covariance. Without dense geometry labels or ground-truth poses, the framework learns by maximizing the likelihood of local geometry, with self-supervision derived from consistency relations over symbolic geometric representations, including predicted covariances, correspondences, and trajectory from SLAM. The learned geometry is then fed back into LiDAR SLAM, forming a reciprocal loop in which improved geometry enhances localization and mapping, and improved localization provides cleaner supervision for subsequent geometry reasoning. This framework is backend-agnostic and can be plugged into existing LiDAR SLAM pipelines without architectural changes. Experiments on KITTI under varying LiDAR resolutions show that the proposed method improves both odometry and global registration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30166
Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) is one of the most widely adopted approaches for solving Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems. However, PGO approaches are particularly sensitive to outliers, which can substantially degrade the quality of the estimated trajectories. These outliers arise from incorrect place recognition associations caused by perceptual aliasing in the environment. In this paper, we present TACO (short for Test And Check Optimization), a robust optimization framework designed to filter out outliers from PGO systems. Rather than explicitly modeling measurements as inliers or outliers, TACO finds an approximation to the maximally consistent set of measurements incrementally through two complementary components: (i) The test component, namely the Incremental Probabilistic Consensus (IPC) algorithm, evaluates the consistency of each incoming loop closure online. (ii) The check component dubbed Switchable Outlier Sanitization leverages the existing Switchable Constraints to periodically sanitize any inconsistent measurements from the consistent set that IPC may have mistakenly included. We evaluate TACO on 2D SLAM and 3D Visual SLAM datasets against several state-of-the-art methods. The results show robustness comparable to state-of-the-art offline methods while preserving the computational efficiency required for online deployment, achieving a success rate above 90% in 2D and 83% in 3D across outlier rates up to 50%, with mean convergence times of approximately 45 ms and 100 ms, respectively. We release an open-source implementation of our method with this paper.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29851
Real-time monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) fundamentally suffers from scale ambiguity and a lack of geometric self-correction. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity rendering, existing RGB-only systems remain open-loop because depth priors are injected into mapping but refined geometry cannot effectively regulate tracking drift. We present MyGO-Splat, a closed-loop Gaussian SLAM framework that analytically rasterizes Gaussian primitives into pixel-wise depth and surface normals, allowing the map to actively supervise camera pose optimization. To bridge monocular priors and scale consistency, our framework introduces scale-aware adaptive alignment that projects foundation-model depth estimates into the globally optimized Gaussian space, forming a self-correcting cycle for scale feedback. Extensive evaluations show that this closed-loop design improves scale stability and appearance-geometry consistency, achieving performance comparable to RGB-D methods while using only monocular input.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29738
Visual SLAM performance often deteriorates in complex real-world applications. Semantic 3D Gaussian SLAM commonly fuses 2D semantic priors into a persistent 3D map using uniform optimization weights. However, such priors are not equally reliable in online mapping: occlusions, unsupported semantic boundaries, and ambiguous ray geometry can introduce persistent semantic artifacts into the global Gaussian map. We propose VCS-SLAM, a geometry-validated semantic evidence fusion framework for RGB-D 3D Gaussian SLAM. Instead of treating all semantic observations as uniformly valid supervision, VCS-SLAM evaluates their geometric reliability through visibility consistency, surface-supported boundary evidence, and ray-level conflict uncertainty. The resulting reliability-aware objective suppresses occluded semantic updates, reduces unsupported semantic bleeding, and delays premature label assignment in ambiguous regions. Experiments on Replica demonstrate improved semantic consistency, boundary preservation, and reconstruction quality. Results on ScanNet further show that VCS-SLAM maintains competitive tracking performance under real RGB-D inputs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29494