We present MulTTiPop, a dataset of pop music segments and their associated multitrack MIDI recordings for the evaluation of automatic music transcription models. MulTTiPop contains 572 segments of popular music totaling 3.5 hours of audio, and contains songs from diverse genres and decades from the 1930s to 2000s. To collect this dataset, we perform metadata-based matching on song segments from the Lakh MIDI and TheoryTab datasets, manually identify an anchor beat between the audio and MIDI, then use beat tracking on the audio and warp the MIDI to match its tempo and timing. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic music transcription models on MulTTiPop and find substantial room for improvement, with the best model achieving 38% Onset F1. More details and sound examples of MulTTiPop are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08756
Keypoint tracking alone is insufficient for object interaction tasks such as sitting on a chair, wiping a board, or pushing furniture, where the robot can reach the correct pose without making meaningful physical contact with the object. We present CONTACTMIMIC, a learning framework that tracks explicit partlevel binary contact commands alongside keypoint trajectories. CONTACTMIMIC is made possible through the use of contact-following rewards and a trajectory augmentation scheme aimed at breaking the correlations between keypoint trajectories and contact labels. The resulting policy successfully decouples contact behavior from keypoint geometry, and achieves precise physical contact as well as contact-controllability (produce or suppress contact during deployment as desired). Simulation experiments across 10 diverse human-object interaction motions confirm that CONTACTMIMIC exhibits contact controllability that enables it to complete manipulation tasks without task-specific rewards, while also outperforming keypoint-only trackers on contact-relevant tasks. Ablations confirm the necessity of the proposed trajectory augmentation scheme and sim2real deployment validates contact controllability in the real world across 5 different motions. Video results are available on this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08742
Multi-object tracking (MOT) has achieved strong performance on benchmarks dominated by short video sequences. However, such datasets do not adequately evaluate long-term identity preservation, where objects must be tracked consistently over extended durations. We introduce WaspMOT, a benchmark designed to address this gap through long-duration tracking of Trichogramma wasps in controlled ecological experiments. The dataset contains 10 sequences of approximately 12,000 frames each (over 8 minutes at 25 FPS), with dense MOTChallenge annotations and oracle detections to isolate association performance. Unlike existing benchmarks, WaspMOT forms a closed-set tracking scenario where all individuals remain present throughout the sequence, requiring consistent identity assignment across thousands of frames despite abrupt jumps, occlusions, and highly similar appearance. We establish a benchmark by evaluating five tracking-by-detection methods, including ByteTrack, BoT-SORT, C-BIoU, OC-SORT, and McByte, under a unified protocol. Results show that all methods suffer from significant trajectory fragmentation, highlighting the difficulty of long-term identity preservation even with perfect detections. A simple spatial tracklet stitching baseline consistently improves performance, indicating that substantial gains remain possible. WaspMOT provides a new benchmark for studying long-term association and reveals limitations of current tracking approaches that are not observable on conventional datasets. The benchmark will be made publicly available at the project repository: this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08729
Modern Video Object Segmentation (VOS) involves tracking and segmenting user-specified targets. While recent approaches have achieved remarkable performance in single-target scenarios, extending them to multi-target settings typically involves replicating the single-target processing for each individual object, resulting in reduced frame rates (FPS) with unbounded latency as target count increases. Built upon Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), we propose SAM-MT, which addresses this by transforming the model into an interactive framework for real-time Multi-Target video segmentation. SAM-MT uses explicit queries to represent different individual targets, in parallel with a shared representation for global context. It employs decoupled masked attention to keep individual identities distinct from cross-target interference, and sparse memory for stable temporal evolution, along with specialized strategies for occlusion handling and overlap prevention. SAM-MT successfully decouples latency from the number of targets, achieving real-time speed on par with single-target baselines (>36 FPS for 10 targets) while maintaining SAM2's robust video segmentation performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08688
The recently established 'Out of Sight, Not out of Mind' (OSNOM) task for egocentric videos focuses on tracking objects that are moved by the camera wearer, online, maintaining knowledge of instance locations throughout the video even when they leave the field of view or become heavily occluded. In this paper, we propose the first learning-based solution to the OSNOM task: Whareformer, a transformer-based model with two components: an updatable memory of established tracks and a track assignment module that associates observations with existing tracks in a feed-forward manner. Whareformer jointly reasons over evolving object appearance (what) and updated 3D location (where), and employs a dedicated New Track token to reason about novel objects. Thanks to its design choices of using relative distances and evolving track representations, Whareformer is trained on a small set of 56 videos but achieves SOTA performance on 260 long test videos from three datasets: EPIC-KITCHENS-100 (unseen videos), IT3DEgo, and HD-EPIC, with significant absolute improvements over prior work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08537
Large-scale and diverse datasets are needed to train AI models to take real-time decisions for autonomous vehicles (AVs), an intelligent transportation system (ITS) application. Pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction are critical models used in AVs, requiring datasets involving diverse pedestrian images. Unrestricted access to these datasets imposes serious security risks, like identity theft and pedestrian tracking. The challenge is to apply privacy preservation procedures while maintaining the image attributes needed to train the models. Existing privacy methods may preserve the pedestrian's privacy, but degrade the image usability, which hinders the models' effectiveness. This work's focus is to implement a five-stage pipeline to protect pedestrians' privacy through face swapping while keeping the essential facial attributes intact. It should be tailored to satisfy the privacy needs of the Egy-DRiVeS dataset. Moreover, Roop and Ghost-v2 face-swapping models are evaluated. Provenly, Roop outperforms Ghost-v2 in various aspects, as will be discussed. Consequently, Roop is the face-swapping model to be used in the pipeline to strike the balance between pedestrian privacy via identity concealment and data usability via facial attribute preservation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08402
Background and Objective: Quantitative analysis of cell dynamics is central to modern biological research, providing critical insights into immune cell interactions, disease progression, and drug mechanisms. Automated cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy remains challenging due to noise, morphological variations, overlapping cells, and dynamic events such as divisions and fusions. Methods: We present ARGUS, a framework for Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions. ARGUS combines adaptive cell detection, dense Farneback optical-flow prediction, frame-to-frame linear assignment, and a sequence-level tracklet-refinement step that reconnects trajectory fragments across short temporal gaps. Results: On publicly available Cell Tracking Challenge datasets, ARGUS achieved detection accuracy of 0.905-0.971 and tracking accuracy of 0.897-0.964, with runtimes within 1 minute (5-6 seconds for 3 frames). Conclusions: ARGUS is a modular, interpretable framework that can be adapted to different imaging modalities and biological applications without training data or GPU infrastructure. The implementation is publicly available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08297
On the recent EyeBench benchmark, predicting reading comprehension from eye movements exposes a stark gap: text-aware models using pretrained language models reach 56--63% AUROC, while gaze-only models operate at chance. We ask how far a gaze-only model can be pushed by lightweight, language-model-free conditioning. Building on the EyeBench AhnCNN baseline, LEXIC-Base, we propose two mechanisms to inject three precomputed word-level difficulty signals, GPT-2 surprisal, word frequency, and word length, into the per-fixation input: direct concatenation, LEXIC-Concat, and a residual mechanism, LEXIC-Res, where a small head predicts typical-reader gaze response and the encoder is conditioned on the deviation. On the OneStop reading comprehension task, with K=5 seed-ensemble training across ten folds, both mechanisms produce statistically consistent AUROC gains on Unseen Text, +1.8 to +2.2 percentage points, Wilcoxon p <= 0.065. LEXIC-Concat additionally lifts Unseen Reader by +2.9 percentage points, p = 0.010. We trace an architectural boundary in LEXIC-Res on Unseen Reader, +1.8 percentage points, p = 0.19, to the prediction head being calibrated to training readers, transferring imperfectly to out-of-distribution readers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08152
We present a general neurosymbolic reasoning and learning methodology based on a modular integration of answer set programming with an energy based model substrate. Key contributions are: (1) supporting joint optimisation in the continuous latent space through explicit ASP-based declarative semantics fully incorporating background knowledge, constraints, non-monotonic inference; and (2) advancing recent works at the interface of answer sets, probabilistic logic, and answer set modulo theories by providing a generalised model and practical platform for ASP-centric robust, end-to-end training for applications in dynamic domains (e.g., involving perception and interaction). We provide a practical implementation, and demonstrate basic use and application (with MNIST), and evaluate with the visual question-answering benchmark Clevr and the multi-object tracking benchmark MOT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08136
Research software collaborations span meetings, informal chats, pull requests, and GitHub issues. A decision surfaced in a Slack thread, refined in a meeting, and implemented in a pull request can lose its original rationale across these artifacts, leaving domain researchers and research software engineers with divergent mental models of project intent, ownership, and scientific assumptions. We argue that alignment in research software engineering is a continuous lifecycle problem, and that agentic AI can support stakeholder alignment and project-state tracking without replacing human decision-making. We present Aleena, an open-source lifecycle alignment agent that uses GitHub as a shared collaboration surface, transforming multi-modal stakeholder interactions into structured project records that surface risks, track open questions, and preserve decision continuity. Grounded in university-based research software engineering center experiences, this paper presents the motivating problem, system design, prototype, and illustrative lifecycle scenarios for Aleena.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08043
Grasping in unstructured environments requires handling objects with widely different mechanical properties, from soft and deformable items to rigid everyday objects. Most existing approaches address these categories separately and often rely on tactile sensing, object-specific models, or specialized grippers. In this paper, we present a unified monocular vision-based grasping framework that targets both soft and rigid objects within a single control pipeline, using only RGB input and a position-controlled gripper. The proposed system combines open-vocabulary object detection, image segmentation, boundary-aware point assignment, real-time point tracking, and monocular depth estimation to recover object motion and geometry from visual observations. A key component of the framework is a language-based stiffness estimation model that infers an object's expected compliance from its semantic description and provides an object-level prior for selecting the grasping strategy before contact. For deformable objects, grasp adaptation is governed by a Procrustes-based dissimilarity measure computed from tracked keypoints, which acts as a visual proxy for deformation. For rigid objects, the gripper width is regulated through the scaling of tracked point distances. We validate the proposed method in real-world pick-and-place experiments on a Franka Emika Research 3 arm using objects with substantially different mechanical properties, including lettuce, fresh mozzarella cheese, croissants, paper towels, and hard plastic bottles. Results demonstrate that the framework achieves stable grasping across both soft and rigid objects using visual feedback alone, highlighting a practical, sensor-efficient, and generalizable approach for food handling and household manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07897
Humanoid robots can extend human presence to remote, constrained, or hazardous environments, but existing teleoperation interfaces often require physically demanding motion tracking or cognitively demanding low-level control. This paper presents an immersive teleoperation framework that integrates voice-controlled locomotion, VR-based manipulation, and bidirectional social interaction for whole-body humanoid control. Using Apple Vision Pro, the operator receives egocentric visual feedback, issues natural-language locomotion commands, and teleoperates the robot's arms and dexterous hands through wrist and finger tracking. An LLM-assisted voice-control module converts spoken instructions into high-level locomotion commands, while the manipulation module retargets human hand motions to the robot through inverse kinematics and PD control. The system also records multimodal data, including egocentric RGB observations, voice/text commands, joint states, hand motions, and eye-gaze signals, supporting future imitation learning and autonomy. We evaluate the framework on a Unitree H1 humanoid equipped with dexterous hands in manipulation and social interaction tasks. Results show that novice users can successfully operate the system after brief familiarization, achieving 80\% success in object manipulation and 70\% success in a social cube-passing task. These results demonstrate the potential of immersive, language-assisted teleoperation as an accessible interface for humanoid interaction, remote assistance, and multimodal data collection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07430
In embodied intelligence systems, the motion controller serves as the critical bridge between semantic reasoning and physical execution. Humanoid control has progressed rapidly through large-scale human motion-capture data and motion-tracking paradigm. However, producing quadruped robots motion corpora with scalability and physical feasibility faces more fundamental obstacles: animal motion data is scarce, and cross-embodiment retargeting remains fragile. We present ABot-C0, a generalist motion-control system for quadruped robots that establishes three complementary behavior foundations: a scalable multi-source motion-data pipeline, robust policy learning across motion tracking, locomotion, and scene interaction, and a unified deployment stack for reliable real-world operation. Fundamentally, we construct a data pyramid through conditional video-generation synthesis, annotated motion capture, teleoperation and human design, producing 16,074 physically feasible motion clips as the data foundation for various motion learning demands. We then train a Flow-Matching generalist policy that demonstrates for the first time quadruped motion tracking scaling law that its performance improves consistently as training scales up, with zero-shot capability to track unseen motions. Then, we push a step further for robust all-terrain traversal locomotion by adopting a three-stage privileged-to-perceptive framework with temporal LiDAR memory and terrain-predictive supervision. Collectively, these components form a motion generalist that coordinates multi-policy execution, smooth behavior transitions, energy-efficient control, and safety mechanisms for real-world deployment. Extensive experiments on urban-terrain autonomous navigation and companion-style multimodal interaction demonstrate that quadruped robots move beyond single-function demos toward product-level behavioral intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07370
Video object segmentation (VOS) is a fundamental task in video understanding, requiring accurate delineation and consistent tracking of objects across frames. While supervised methods achieve strong performance, they rely on densely annotated datasets that are costly to obtain and have limited domain coverage. Self-supervised learning offers a promising alternative by removing the need for manual labels; however, existing approaches often struggle to jointly maintain spatial accuracy and temporal coherence, particularly in unconstrained multi-object scenarios. Many rely on optical flow, synthetic motion cues, or task-specific pretraining, limiting scalability and generalisation. We propose a self-supervised framework, Cross-Temporal Consistency and Clustering, that learns mid-level, part-aware representations by combining attention-guided token selection with lightweight temporal clustering. Instead of operating at the pixel or whole-object level, the method aligns soft part assignments across time using a saliency-weighted symmetric consistency objective. The framework leverages a frozen transformer backbone with lightweight modules for adaptive token selection and multi-offset temporal alignment, enabling efficient scaling across resolutions and motion patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07230
Vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic AI have shown strong performance on semantic visual tasks, but it remains unclear whether they can handle the physics and inverse problems that underlie computational imaging. We present ImagingBench, a benchmark of 20 computational imaging tasks spanning five categories: ray and wave optics, image signal processing, inverse reconstruction, computational sensing, and calibration. ImagingBench evaluates three complementary settings: Expert, fixed expert-guided inverse reconstruction; Planner, planner-guided inverse reconstruction; and Forward, forward-system simulation for consistency checking. We benchmark leading proprietary and open-source image-centric multimodal systems, including Gemini, GPT, and Qwen, and compare them with representative task-specific non-agentic baselines. Across tasks, agentic models remain consistently weaker than specialized methods, especially on computational sensing problems such as lensless imaging, event-based reconstruction, time-of-flight imaging, and holography. Planner guidance provides only modest and inconsistent gains over the fixed-prompt Expert baseline. Although the models often generate visually plausible outputs, their reference-based fidelity remains poor, revealing a substantial gap between semantic visual competence and physically grounded imaging performance. ImagingBench provides a unified testbed for measuring this gap and tracking progress in agentic AI for computational imaging.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07189
Underwater robots often operate near delicate targets where high-power thrusters resuspend sediments and induce turbulence, degrading image quality at the sensor input. Conventional controllers optimize vehicle-centric objectives, such as tracking and stability, without accounting for the impact of actuation on sensing. We address this actuation-to-perception coupling by exploiting redundancy in over-actuated platforms. For an eight-thruster ROV, multiple thrust allocations can yield the same motion; we search this null space to minimize predicted disturbance in a task-relevant target region while enforcing motion constraints. Our method uses a control-oriented thruster-wake proxy derived from actuator-disk theory with directional attenuation and validated by PIV ($R^2 = 0.99$ near the wake axis; $R^2 > 0.82$ in the primary wake region), together with a real-time redundancy-resolving allocator running at 10 Hz (45 ms/solve). Across 440 trials, the approach reduces target-region particle velocity by 67% ($p < 0.001$), improves 3D reconstruction RMSE by 55% versus a disturbance-unaware baseline ($1.9 \pm 0.4$ mm vs. $4.3 \pm 1.8$ mm), and achieves a 98.5% reconstruction success rate. The framework supports autonomous scanning, which is quantitatively evaluated, and operator-assisted inspection, which is demonstrated in the supplementary materials.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07139
Anticipating human motion from an egocentric perspective is fundamental for proactive assistance in AR/VR, human-robot collaboration, and embodied AI. While recent works incorporate language as a semantic prior to reduce the ill-posed nature of egocentric forecasting, they largely neglect the 3D spatial and semantic context that governs how motion unfolds, and treat pose and language prediction as separate inference streams. We introduce Ego3DLM, built on two core principles: accurate motion forecasting requires explicit spatial and semantic understanding of the 3D environment, and pose and language must be predicted holistically in a single pass, since motion is inherently tied to the semantic interpretation of actions being performed. Given three-point tracking, 3D scene features, and egocentric video, Ego3DLM simultaneously decodes past pose, future pose, past narration, and future narration in a single autoregressive pass, grounding predicted poses and descriptions in one another to enforce cross-modal and temporal consistency. We adopt a three-stage training scheme: (1) spatial-semantic scene awareness pretraining; (2) holistic instruction tuning over all four outputs in a single pass; and (3) GRPO-based reinforcement finetuning with intra- and inter-modal rewards that directly optimize pose-language fidelity. Experiments on the Nymeria benchmark demonstrate that Ego3DLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across future motion prediction, past motion tracking, and motion description, showing that 3D scene grounding and holistic cross-modal prediction yield physically plausible and semantically coherent motion forecasts. The project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07001
Robust dynamic object detection and tracking are essential for enabling robots to operate safely and effectively alongside humans in complex environments such as construction sites. While LiDAR-based SLAM and occupancy grid methods offer viable solutions for detecting and tracking motion, many state-of-the-art 3D vision approaches rely heavily on pre-trained neural networks and require additional post-processing to identify moving objects. Sensor fusion techniques, combining the precision of LiDAR with the semantic richness of RGB imagery, offer a promising alternative. In this work, we present a novel framework that enhances a quadruped robot equipped with a LiDAR sensor and an upward-facing fisheye camera for real-time dynamic object detection and tracking. After identifying moving objects within a registered point cloud, our method assigns semantic labels by projecting 3D coordinates onto a 2D cylindrical panorama, aligning with real-time image-based detections for observation update of the Kalman filter. The proposed system demonstrates high precision, simplicity, and robustness, particularly in handling objects transitioning between dynamic and static states, thus it is well-suited for deployment in real-world construction environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06896
Soft robots have attracted significant attention in applications such as medical intervention, rehabilitation, and robotic manipulation due to their inherent compliance, flexibility, and high degrees of freedom. Modular soft robots (MSRs), composed of multiple interconnected segments, represent an emerging class of robotic systems with highly deformable and reconfigurable structures capable of performing complex tasks. However, designing controllers for MSRs remains challenging due to their nonlinear dynamics, modeling complexity, and hyper-redundant nature. Existing approaches typically require controllers to be retrained from scratch whenever the robot morphology changes. In this work, we address these challenges through a continual learning inspired control framework capable of incrementally adapting to changes in robot morphology while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Specifically, the proposed framework enables the controller to sequentially learn new MSR configurations without forgetting previously learned ones. In addition, for MSRs with fixed configurations, the same framework can be employed in a distributed manner to learn module-specific dynamics, enabling localized control and improved precision. The proposed approach is validated through closed-loop trajectory tracking experiments in simulation using a tendon-driven soft robot, as well as on a real-world three-module pneumatic soft robotic arm. Furthermore, we demonstrate the adaptive capabilities of the framework through a reaching experiment in which the controller selectively activates only the necessary modules to reach a virtual target position, thereby reducing computational overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06740
Human-human collaboration is a fundamental aspect of everyday life, essential to success in a wide range of goal-directed activities from household tasks to professional teamwork. While much research has focused on modeling coordination and task execution, the cognitive processes that support such collaboration, particularly Theory of Mind (the ability to infer the mental states of others), remain difficult to study in natural settings. To address this gap, we introduce a novel egocentric and exocentric video dataset capturing real-world collaboration in cooking scenarios. The dataset integrates multi-perspective video, high-quality audio, gaze tracking, and 3D scene and object scans, with annotations for shared attention to objects, social cues and interactions between agents, as well as agent-object interactions. We establish benchmarks for Joint Attention Estimation, Socially Conditioned Object Interaction Anticipation, and Collaborative Handover Prediction, enabling research on multimodal perception, proactive assistance, and collaborative planning. By providing temporally aligned, richly annotated multimodal data, CoMind facilitates the development and evaluation of AI systems capable of modeling complex social interactions and reasoning about human behaviors in collaborative environments. Our dataset and benchmarks are made available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06691