Semantic occupancy mapping supports embodied perception during exploration and detailed scene understanding afterward, giving rise to two complementary requirements: online incremental mapping for maintaining an up-to-date global map under causal constraints, and offline global map refinement for improving the completed scene representation with additional computation. We present VEOcc++, a unified voxel-centric framework that connects both stages through a persistent sparse voxel feature map. During exploration, the map expands with newly observed regions and integrates aligned local features through reliability-guided updates, while context-aware decoding produces the current semantic occupancy map. After exploration, cached local features are consolidated as complementary evidence and combined with the completed online representation for multi-scale spatial refinement. On EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet, VEOcc++ achieves 67.12\% IoU and 58.40\% mIoU, establishing new state-of-the-art performance for online incremental mapping. With the local predictor fixed, our online mapping pipeline outperforms VEOcc fusion by 3.70 IoU and 3.74 mIoU points, demonstrating substantial gains from the proposed global mapping design. Offline global map refinement further improves the completed map to 67.79% IoU and 59.37% mIoU using only the observations acquired during exploration. Zero-shot deployment on a mobile robot further demonstrates transferability to unseen environments, onboard feasibility, and scalability to large-scale indoor mapping. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27704
Simulation-ready world reconstruction demands physical interactivity beyond visual realism, which existing black-box 3D generation fails to deliver. We present NeoWorld-3, a coding-agent framework that reconstructs interactive 3D worlds from visual observations via tunable, executable programs. At its core, NeoSDK provides the underlying computational engine for low-level geometries, part composition, differentiable parameter refinement, and physics validation. At the same time, NeoMCP exposes these capabilities as structured, tool-callable APIs for vision-language agents to visually inspect, edit code, and iteratively refine programs. Through a hierarchical coordinator-worker architecture, the framework scales seamlessly from standalone articulated objects to complex compositional scenes. Evaluations across object-level and scene-level reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that NeoWorld-3 achieves state-of-the-art geometric fidelity and physical readiness. Crucially, manipulation trajectories planned within our reconstructed twins achieve successful zero-shot execution on a physical dual-arm robot, completing the Real-Sim-Real loop.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27690
In object goal navigation (ObjectNav), an embodied agent must find a target object (e.g., "find a bed") in a previously unseen environment, relying on spatial commonsense such as object co-occurrence. Large Language Models (LLMs) encode this commonsense, but deploying them on robots exposes a trade-off between reasoning quality and efficiency: cloud-based models incur latency and privacy risks, whereas small on-device LLMs are fast but prone to hallucinated spatial judgments. Hybrid reasoning LLMs offer both a fast non-thinking mode and a slow thinking mode, which raises a key question for embodied agents: when is slow thinking worth its cost? We propose CovNav, a training-free framework that answers this question with Conformal Prediction (CP), turning dual-process (System 1 / System 2) inference into an uncertainty-aware decision. Much like recent decision models such as Jev, CovNav casts each spatial query as a structured binary decision rather than free-form generation: a local LLM in fast mode judges whether the target is likely near an observed object, CP converts its token probabilities into a prediction set, and only ambiguous queries are escalated to slow chain-of-thought reasoning. The object-pair formulation keeps calibration tractable and supports open-set objects through off-the-shelf detectors. Experiments on Gibson and HM3D show that CovNav surpasses the strongest zero-shot baseline by 0.8 and 1.7 percentage points in success rate on HM3D v1 and v2, while invoking slow reasoning for only 12.4% of queries and retaining most of the gain of always-on thinking at a fraction of its latency. Real-robot experiments on a TurtleBot 4 further validate the approach. CovNav shows how calibrated uncertainty can decide when an embodied agent should think slowly, offering a principled form of adaptive test-time reasoning for LLM-based robots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27677
Online LiDAR-camera calibration remains a fundamental yet challenging task in the field of robotics. Recently, deep learning-based data-driven approaches have emerged, offering high-precision, targetless calibration capabilities. However, existing methods often suffer from a critical dataset shortcut phenomenon due to the lack of extrinsic diversity in their training data. Networks tend to overfit to fixed nominal extrinsic configurations, leading to severe performance degradation and poor generalization in real-world deployments. To address this limitation, we propose a highly generalizable data generation framework tailored for training LiDAR-camera calibration networks. Our framework leverages existing omnidirectional image datasets annotated with depth ground truth to synthesize multi-modal calibration data under rigorous extrinsic constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the data generated by our pipeline significantly enhances the generalization and robustness of typical learning-based calibration networks. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive real-world evaluations across various camera-LiDAR configurations, validating the zero-shot transfer capability of models trained exclusively on our synthetic data. To facilitate future research and community use, the code for data generation, the pre-trained models, and online benchmark datasets will be made publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27547
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image based on a reference image and modification text. Recent approaches commonly rely on large vision-language models to generate target image captions for retrieval. However, these captions may include redundant semantic details, introducing noise when retrieving the target image and leading to suboptimal retrieval results. To address this issue, we propose Less-is-More CIR, a two-stage training-free framework that combines Concise Retrieval and Critic Re-ranking. In the first stage, concise target-oriented captions are generated that preserve only the most discriminative modification semantics, thereby reducing semantic noise in the retrieval. In the second stage, a critic re-rank module further evaluates the retrieved candidates from the perspectives of modification consistency and reference preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework for the ZS-CIR. Our code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27538
Pretrained Vision-Language Models (PVLMs) achieve strong zero-shot recognition but often suffer performance degradation under target-domain shift. Unsupervised adaptation provides a practical way to improve target-domain performance without labeled data, but it remains challenging because pseudo-labels generated by the model can be unreliable and no labeled validation set is available for model selection or early stopping. We propose a simple framework for unsupervised PVLM adaptation that combines progressive margin-based subset selection with cascaded consistency learning. The subset selection strategy constructs a class-balanced pseudo-labeled set using prediction margins and gradually expands it during training, enabling adaptation to start from reliable supervision anchors before incorporating broader target-domain data. Cascaded consistency learning further exploits unlabeled samples by using temporally smoothed teacher predictions on weakly augmented views to supervise student predictions on strongly augmented views, with confidence filtering to reduce the influence of uncertain pseudo-labels. To preserve the pretrained embedding structure, the framework updates only normalization parameters in the visual encoder and class prototypes initialized from text prompts. Experiments across multiple recognition benchmarks with both CLIP and SigLIP backbones show consistent improvements over zero-shot baselines and competitive performance against recent unsupervised PVLM adaptation methods. These results suggest that progressive pseudo-label selection and teacher-guided consistency provide an effective and lightweight strategy for adapting PVLM classifiers without labeled target data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27515
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning enables skill acquisition by reaching any goal from any state without dense rewards. Model-based methods allow for planning by scaling test-time compute to solve complex tasks. Combining both holds appealing promise for pre-training on suboptimal demonstrations and zero-shot adaptation via goal specification and planning. Yet existing methods assume effective planning requires accurate next-state prediction in pixel or latent space. In this work, we show that value prediction is more useful for planning, whereas accurate state prediction is often unnecessary. Our key insight is that offline goal reaching naturally admits a closed-form Monte Carlo return, enabling value regression to replace temporal-difference bootstrapping. We use this return as the sole supervision for latent world models: imagined latents are trained to predict goal-reaching value rather than match future states, implicitly preventing representation collapse. These planning-oriented representations let imperfect world models imagine on the level sets of value field beyond dataset transitions. We then present VPFlow, a value-predictive planner that pairs the world models with a one-step flow policy and plans in its noise space via evolutionary search. It enables policy improvement with imagined generalized advantage and reduces out-of-distribution queries common in action-space planning. On 30 state and pixel OGBench datasets, VPFlow surpasses model-free baselines by at least 30.3 and 10.1 percentage points in success rate, respectively, and outperforms latent planners LeWorldModel, PLDM, and TD-MPC2. It achieves this despite a latent prediction error orders of magnitude larger than with state prediction, while minimizing this error lowers success rate. This demonstrates that value-predictive representations, not exact state prediction, are what offline planning requires.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27280
Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation in urban environments requires precise pose estimation. Because Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are often unreliable in cities, visual localization serves as a crucial complement. Within this domain, textureless Level-of-Detail (LoD) city models provide a lightweight and privacy-preserving substitute for heavy 3D textured meshes. However, localizing against abstract geometry is challenging. Existing pipelines typically score 2D silhouette overlaps, which can suffer from severe geometric ambiguities. We present MatchCityLoc, a framework that shifts this paradigm to direct feature matching from a noisy 6-DoF pose prior. By extracting surface normals from the query image using a zero-shot foundation model and matching them against rendered LoD normals, we establish explicit 3D-to-2D correspondences. This enables a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) pose solve, which we iteratively refine through a render-and-match loop. Experiments demonstrate strong pose recall and accurate translation and rotation among the evaluated off-the-shelf LoD-based methods with very few renderings. By bridging the modality gap between aerial imagery and texture-free geometry, MatchCityLoc enables accurate localization using lightweight, privacy-preserving city models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27110
EHR foundation models promise scalable clinical prediction across health systems, yet their deployment is constrained by a tokenization bottleneck. The same clinical concept can appear as different ontology codes, local identifiers, synonyms, or free-text descriptions, which standard EHR tokenizers treat as unrelated symbols. A model trained on MIMIC-III with a closed-vocabulary tokenizer can use only 13% of eICU events. We introduce MEDIATOR, a discrete ontology-agnostic tokenizer that maps any clinical concept expressed as text into a shared vector-quantized codebook, turning EHR harmonization into open-vocabulary tokenization without manual mappings or a fixed vocabulary. Trained with synonym supervision and guided by enriched concept descriptions, code co-occurrence, and relation graphs, MEDIATOR collapses equivalent expressions while organizing distinct concepts in a medically meaningful discrete space. Used as the token interface of an EHR Transformer, MEDIATOR improves mean AUPRC over the strongest prior tokenizer by 4.0 points (8% relative) on 20 MIMIC-III tasks and by 8.6 points (29% relative) in zero-shot transfer to 14 eICU tasks, where it uses all events. The transfer gain combines coverage and representation, as MEDIATOR remains the best tokenizer under identical inputs (+1.0 and +1.9 points on operational and subcohort-mortality tasks). Same-encoder controls show that the text encoder drives in-domain accuracy, while the learned objectives of MEDIATOR drive transfer robustness and entity-linking quality. MEDIATOR also enables transferable attribution across hospitals.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27047
A poker agent can make a legal move and still make a strategically poor one. We ask whether compact AI agents can exhibit strategic behavior under hidden information and whether preference optimization can improve beyond static and zero-shot policies. We first evaluate a static baseline and three frozen language models: SmallThinker, Qwen3, and Gemma-3 whose performance varies substantially between exact-game and six-player evaluation. We therefore propose Strategic Preference Optimization with KL-anchored Equilibrium (SPOKE), combining teacher-relative value penalties, policy anchoring, risk constraints, and structured rationale supervision, and compare it with SFT, DPO, GRPO, and GSPO. Across three runs of a SmallThinker-4B-A0.6B policy, SPOKE achieves the lowest mean exploitability in Kuhn (0.213) and Leduc (1.081) and the highest six-max top-1 agreement (0.775), while maintaining teacher KL comparable to SFT (0.522 vs 0.523). These results provide preliminary evidence that strategic preference optimization can improve strategic quality while preserving teacher-consistent behavior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27028
Embodied VLMs can execute increasingly complex manipulation tasks, yet execution errors can leave the environment in states that require replanning for recovery. Existing recovery methods either rely on inference-time mechanisms with fixed policies or learn from failure examples and reference corrections rather than verified action outcomes. To enable recovery learning through verifiable interaction, we introduce the Embodied Replanning for Recovery Environment (ERR-Env), which provides feedback on task progress and execution errors. We further construct ERR-Bench, a benchmark with held-out tasks spanning nominal, intermediate, and error states for evaluating recovery capability and execution reliability. We then propose Action-Grouped Turn-GSPO (AGT-GSPO), an online reinforcement learning method combining turn-level rewards for task progress and error states with action-grouped advantage estimation, and use it to train ERR-VLM, a compact 2B embodied VLM. Evaluation on ERR-Bench reveals a mismatch between task progress and execution reliability across diverse VLMs. AGT-GSPO improves ERR-VLM by 10.25 percentage points in Strict Success Rate for error-free completion and 22.95 percentage points in Recovery Rate, while ablations and zero-shot transfer further validate the effectiveness of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27003
Tibetan speech recognition is usually evaluated with character or syllable error rates because the writing system does not mark word boundaries. These metrics can rank systems differently and respond differently to adaptation failures. We combine character error rate, syllable error rate, and segmented word error rate in one evaluation framework. We use dictionary-based, neural, and language-model-based segmentation and compare their boundaries with expert annotations. We evaluate five ASR architectures on Lhasa Tibetan, then test zero-shot transfer and target-corpus adaptation on five additional corpus subsets. We also vary LoRA rank and training-data size to examine adaptation failure. The results show that a lower character error does not always lead to a lower syllable or segmented-word error. These ranking differences persist across corpora. Metric correlations also weaken in some unsuccessful adaptation settings. Higher LoRA ranks improve syllable and segmented-word scores but remain worse than full fine-tuning in the tested range. A standardized phonological representation provides another view of spelling errors. These findings support evaluation at several linguistic levels and motivate better segmentation and adaptation methods for low-resource ASR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27002
Activation steering for ASR systems is an underexplored technique in improving both ASR performance and demographic fairness. We investigate two forms of activation steering: paired activation subtraction, and supervised optimization. We find the former to be ineffective at ameliorating ASR performance whatsoever, while the latter is quite effective at deriving steering vectors (SVs) that improve at once overall ASR performance and demographic fairness along such diverse axes as gender, age, and dialect. We also explore what types of data---from the most to the least personal---are necessary for calculating or training SVs. First, we show significant performance in performance from training SVs using an eclectic group of speakers from the same dataset. Furthermore, we find that vectors trained using acoustically similar speakers leads to ASR performances that are competitive or superior to vectors trained on the same speaker, or speakers from the same labeled demographic group. This finding shows that we can harness activation steering for few-shot adaptation given access to a speaker's demography, or zero-shot adaptation to unseen speakers without the need for any labels at all.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26994
Differences in hand geometry, joint parameterization, and kinematic topology pose challenges for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp generation. However, spatial relations among links alone are insufficient to fully capture the hand's kinematic topology. We propose DexGraspFlow, a conditional link-level $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ flow-matching framework integrating geometric relations and kinematic topology. The framework encodes local object geometry, link geometry, and current poses. A dual-stream DiT models link--link coordination and link--object interaction, while attention biases derived from kinematic-tree distances provide explicit structural information for modeling evolving geometric interactions. The model jointly learns translational and rotational velocity fields, integrates them to generate link poses, and recovers joint configurations through inverse kinematics. Additionally, inference-time palm-orientation guidance enables controllable grasp generation without retraining. Across three robotic hands and 30 object--hand pairs, DexGraspFlow achieves a 95.33\% average simulation success rate, with an average generation latency, including inverse kinematics, approximately 49\% lower than that of a state-of-the-art baseline. Further experiments demonstrate zero-shot adaptability to seven finger-removal variants and palm-orientation control. A model trained on demonstrations for the deployed hand achieves a 91\% success rate over 100 real-robot grasping trials, supporting the framework's applicability to physical grasp execution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26962
Every robot already carries high-resolution contact sensors: its own joints. Legged robots and humanoids exploit them to walk, run, and track whole-body motions without vision, but there the contacts are large and forceful. Is joint sensing also enough for precise, contact-rich assembly, where the robot must find a millimeter-scale opening, mesh gear teeth, or catch a thread through light contact? We study this question by training blind assembly policies that observe only a short history of joint positions, velocities, and their own actions, without visual, force, torque, or tactile sensing. The poses of both the fixture and the part are unknown to the policy, and the grasp is randomized substantially. The policy must therefore assemble the parts through contact, sensed exclusively through its own proprioception. Trained with reinforcement learning entirely in simulation over randomized parts, grasps, and contacts, such policies learn peg insertion, gear meshing, and nut threading. The peg insertion policy transfers zero-shot to the real world and inserts pegs of different shapes and sizes in 73% of trials. Controlled comparisons with matched visual policies in simulation show that blind policies generalize far better to unseen part shapes and sizes, though they can be slower. Training such policies needs thousands of different assemblies, each simulated with its clearance intact, so we also release an open-source generator that builds them procedurally from exact convex pieces for MuJoCo; it is more accurate and faster than convex decomposition or MuJoCo's signed-distance collision. Videos and interactive simulations are at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23849
Qwen3-TTS reports state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning, but its technical report leaves open how the model should be conditioned, how it behaves outside read speech, and how it fails. We characterise its two cloning interfaces, in-context learning (ICL) and X-Vector, against Chatterbox, XTTS-v2 and F5-TTS on read, meeting, emotional and air-traffic-control (ATC) speech, using eighteen objective measures, an LLM judge, a spoofing countermeasure and a listening test. Neither interface dominates: ICL clones timbre more closely from correctly transcribed references, X-Vector clones timing, and ICL degrades sharply when a short reference transcript is wrong. Domain explains four times more variance than system choice. Qwen3-TTS leads on intelligibility and pitch register but trails on prosody, and the objective measures rank systems differently from listeners. An off-the-shelf countermeasure flags its clones no more often than genuine recordings, and on ATC radio it fails for every system. Code and audio are released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23678
Model-predictive control with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provides a strong zero-shot goal-reaching planner, but it is only effective over short planning horizons. Hierarchical extensions attempt to bridge this gap by learning a macro planner to predict intermediate latent sub-goals to guide the micro planner. In this work, we demonstrate that unconstrained latent sub-goal prediction is fundamentally flawed. A rigorous evaluation reveals that a leading state-of-the-art macro planner routinely emits physically unrealisable sub-goals. To resolve this, we introduce Metro-WM, a hierarchical framework that issues sub-goals by retrieving genuine states from prior experience rather than generating ungrounded latent vectors. Specifically, Metro-WM constructs a graph whose vertices are observed frames from offline expert demonstrations or random-action trajectories, allowing frames from different episodes to be connected and stitched into routes to the goal. Planning over the full graph also makes the system highly robust to execution errors: if the micro planner drifts off course, Metro-WM instantly finds a new optimal path from the current state. Our experiments show that Metro-WM achieves superior long-horizon success rates of up to 37.33 percentage points over the next best hierarchical approach while being up to 10.9 times faster, requiring both 13-56 times less offline compute and fewer tuned hyperparameters. Additional analysis reveals that Metro-WM finds shorter paths than the offline demonstrations, outperforms an oracle relying on the query's own demonstration, and maintains robust performance under extremely sparse dataset conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31868
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is appealing for its potential to scale with unlabeled data, yet existing methods often degrade when trained on diverse scenes. This study finds that, under self-supervision, models tend to encode dataset-specific structural biases rather than transferable scene geometry, leading to cross-domain optimization conflicts. To address this issue, this study proposes the MaSS framework, aiming to make self-supervised depth learning scalable to diverse data. MaSS introduces a dedicated structural representation pathway explicitly decoupled from contextual features, which is guided by a novel scene-structure discrimination objective to learn generalized, layout-aware structural representations for depth decoding. Trained and evaluated on four diverse datasets, both individually and jointly, MaSS substantially outperforms prior self-supervised methods and is the first to consistently benefit from mixed-domain training. Zero-shot evaluation on eight additional datasets further demonstrates its remarkable generalizability, particularly on those entirely out-of-distribution scenes. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23600
Text-to-image diffusion models have advanced video editing. However, existing video editing methods are limited by their high computational overhead and memory consumption. Furthermore, these approaches often sacrifice visual fidelity, leading to temporal inconsistencies and artifacts such as blurring and mosaic-like patterns. To address these dual challenges and strike a balance between computational efficiency and visual fidelity, we propose Edit-Your-Interest, a lightweight, text-driven, zero-shot video editing method. Edit-Your-Interest introduces a Spatio-Temporal Feature Memory bank (SFM) to cache spatial-attention features from previous frames under a fixed memory budget. The SFM maintains a representative candidate pool, reducing the computational overhead of full-sequence spatio-temporal modeling. To query this memory, we propose Feature Most-Similar Propagation (FMP), a similarity-based retrieval rule that propagates relevant cached tokens to the current frame. Together, SFM and FMP form a bounded-memory retrieval-based propagation design that improves temporal consistency while reducing blurring and mosaic-like artifacts. Finally, we introduce a feature-diversity-based SFM update algorithm to keep the memory representative and non-redundant throughout the video sequence. Furthermore, to enable precise object editing, we leverage cross-attention maps to automatically extract masks for the instances of interest. These masks are seamlessly integrated into the diffusion denoising process, enabling fine-grained control over target objects and allowing Edit-Your-Interest to perform highly accurate edits while robustly preserving the background integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Edit-Your-Interest outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and visual fidelity. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13084
Humans manipulate objects within their hands through touch alone with remarkable ease, but for robots, achieving sustained real-world manipulation without vision remains an open challenge. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can generate sophisticated blind manipulation policies in simulation, transferring them to a real dexterous hand remains hindered by continuously changing contacts, motion-induced tactile information drift, and the gap between simulated and physical dynamics. We study this problem through Baoding ball rotation on the Shadow Dexterous Hand Lite, using only proprioception and binary tactile feedback as observations. We achieve successful zero-shot transfer through a combination of a sensor-aligned, coupling-aware embodiment in simulation, tactile calibration, and two novel episodic domain randomisations: slew-rate action limits and STuck-AT Taxels. On the physical hand, the policy achieves sustained blind Baoding rotation, completing 225 consecutive $\mathbf{180^\circ}$ rotations (112.5 full rotations) at $\sim0.36 \;\text{rot/s}$ in a single continuous trial without any vision or object-state information. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of tactile sensing relative to proprioception alone and identify the hand regions where tactile information is most important. This is the strongest reported hardware result for Baoding ball manipulation in both rotation count and speed, irrespective of the sensing modality used. By effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap, our framework sets a new benchmark for sustained tactile-driven dexterous manipulation on physical hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23438