Action
-
Whole-Body Motion Guided Reference Generation for Uncertainty-Aware Compliant Assistance
2026-10-22 14:01:21Muyuan Ma, Long Cheng, Lijun Han, Haotian Zhai, Xinpan Meng, Xiuze Xia, Houcheng Li, Zeyu LiuAbstract
Exoskeletons have shown great potential for augmenting human physical capabilities, yet generating reliable assistance remains challenging because human motion patterns and interaction requirements vary substantially in practice. To address this problem, a dual-loop assistance strategy is proposed to couple multimodal exoskeleton trajectory generation with variable admittance control, where trajectory variance links the outer-loop generator and the inner-loop controller. The generator synthesizes future exoskeleton trajectories through denoising, primarily using whole-body human motion and exoskeleton proprioception, with task descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues. To reduce cross-modal representation mismatch, a three-stage training pipeline is introduced to progressively optimize the human motion encoder, the exoskeleton proprioception encoder, and the trajectory generator. In the inner loop, multiple future trajectories are sampled from the generator to estimate the trajectory mean and variance. The mean is used as the control reference, while the variance provides an uncertainty measure for prediction reliability. This measure is further incorporated into a stiffness regulation law, enabling compliant assistance with input-to-state stability under bounded lumped interaction input. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces muscle activation levels compared with standard baselines, while also decreasing users' metabolic energy expenditure relative to the unassisted condition.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31302
PDF
-
On the Behavioral Traits of LLM Agents
2026-10-22 14:01:08Haokai Zhao, Jie Gao, Yunze Xiao, Xintao Wang, Weihao Xuan, Aditya Joshi, Mark Dredze, Jen-tse HuangAbstract
Users increasingly describe different AI agents as distinct colleagues to work with. AI personality research aims to quantify such impressions by attributing human- like "traits" to agents. However, existing measures fall short: models' self-reports (S-data) diverge from their actual behavior, while informant ratings from LLM judges (I-data) are costly to scale and cover few everyday scenarios. In this paper, we propose A-B-D to infer traits bottom-up from behavioral data (B-data), namely how agents act on their environment and communicate with users, as recorded in existing trajectories. From 345,667 real-world trajectories spanning 80 models, 12 tasks, and 50 harnesses, we extract 318 candidate features that capture both the actions an agent takes at each step (functional) and the language accompanying them (linguistic). We retain only features that show instance-level stability, cross-task consistency, and model discriminability. Factor analysis of the remaining 79 features uncovers six stable, model-attributable factors, two functional and four linguistic. For example, Claude-Sonnet-4.6 and Kimi-K3 exhibit the most planfulness, whereas GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 are the least energetic. Moreover, we quantify the "knowledge-action gap" in the wild: these factors correlate only weakly with self-reported Big Five scores, even for conceptually matched pairs such as extraversion and energetic (r = 0.07, p = 0.58). Our work offers a new lens for understanding AI personality, with implications for users, developers, and researchers from both computer science and social science.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32776
PDF
-
PiHand: Latent Hand-Object Interaction Priors for Physics-Based Policy Learning
2026-10-22 13:59:19Niklas Berndt, Xianghui Xie, Enes Duran, Yixiao Wang, Gerard Pons-MollAbstract
Synthesizing physically grounded dexterous hand-object interactions is important for VR/AR, gaming, and robotics, yet remains challenging because subtle contact dynamics, diverse object geometries, and target trajectories must be jointly respected while maintaining natural grasps. Existing methods either track mocap trajectories with limited transfer to novel objects, or rely on hand-only generative priors that fail to capture coupled hand-object motion, sacrificing contact fidelity and sample efficiency. To tackle these challenges, we introduce PiHand, a Physically grounded Interaction-aware Hand motion synthesis framework. PiHand first trains expert policies that track mocap demonstrations in simulation, distills them into a unified hand-object interaction prior using a goal-conditioned VAE, and finally solve diverse dexterous manipulation tasks through bounded residual exploration in its latent space. With only a single reward and no complex curriculum training, this yields general tabletop manipulation policies that generalize to unseen objects and trajectories on GRAB and DexYCB. The same prior transfers to object catching and bimanual handover, two tasks that are rarely seen in its training data. Across all tasks, PiHand consistently outperforms baselines in all metrics. We will release the processed data and model checkpoints.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31299
PDF
-
Retrieval-Augmented Online Textual Memory for Episodic Memory Video Question Answering
2026-10-22 13:49:30Raffaele Cali, Giuseppe Lando, Rosario Forte, Antonino FurnariAbstract
Long egocentric videos pose a central challenge for multimodal language models: the visual stream must be compressed into a memory representation that can be searched efficiently while still preserving the evidence needed for question answering. Building on an online textual-memory framework in which first-person videos are converted into temporally grounded captions, this work systematically studies the role of retrieval in episodic-memory video question answering. We evaluate how different retrieval units, query formulations, context budgets, and reranking strategies affect multiple-choice answering on QAEgo4D-Closed, isolating retrieval as the main variable while keeping the underlying generated memory fixed. Our best configuration, Parent, matches fine-grained caption subchunks, then provides their full parent captions to the reasoner. It achieves 56.4 % accuracy, matching strong full-memory and retrieval baselines while exposing only a small fraction of the textual memory at question time. More importantly, our analysis shows that better temporal coverage does not necessarily translate into better answers: increasing the retrieval budget improves temporal Hit@K and Recall@K, but can reduce accuracy by introducing visually plausible distractors and uncertain caption evidence. These findings suggest that retrieval-augmented egocentric memory should not be optimized only for evidence recall, but also for the reliability, specificity, and answer-discriminative value of the retrieved context. The study motivates more structured episodic memories that move beyond raw caption retrieval toward evidence-aware representations for long-form egocentric reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31284
PDF
-
Learning Robot Behavior Priors from Non-Robotic Synthetic Data
2026-10-22 13:43:47Mateusz Odrowaz-Sypniewski, Michael Amir, Jasmine Bayrooti, Ajay Shankar, Amanda ProrokAbstract
Real robot data, rich across tasks and morphologies, is often treated as the bottleneck for training robot learning models, including embodied foundation models that aim for zero-shot physical transfer. In this paper, we investigate the degree to which such models can acquire necessary structure using data from systems without embodiment. To this end, we test if inexpensive, procedurally generated synthetic data can yield useful priors before a model observes any real-world behavior. We study this through robot action prediction, a natural pretraining objective and a direct test of whether structure learned from arbitrary synthetic tasks transfers to embodied settings. We introduce three data generation pipelines that model mathematical abstractions of robotic control, and use them as pretraining priors for a Transformer. We demonstrate that a model trained purely on this non-robotic data attains non-trivial zero-shot prediction performance on unseen physical robot tasks via an in-context learning mechanism, and that our specialized control priors notably improve upon generic causal priors. We also compare against a compute-matched baseline trained on real robot data, and find that it outperforms our model but only on the datasets it was trained on. These findings suggest that procedurally generated, mathematical abstractions can yield useful robotic priors, offering a potential complement to expensive embodied data collection.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31275
PDF
-
AgentMonopoly: Behavioral Patterns and Persona Control in LLM Agents
2026-10-22 13:30:52Changshun Wu, Mengyu Li, Mathis Marsault, Xiaowei Huang, Chih-Hong ChengAbstract
How do LLM agents' strategies differ, and how much can instructions to adopt a persona change their behavior over a game? We study these questions with AgentMonopoly, an environment where agents communicate, buy and trade properties, and make decisions that affect later turns. We compare models from four families, each at two sizes, in games with identical models, different sizes of the same family, or different families. We also assign one agent a persona, a description of how it should behave, intended to change a tendency observed in games without that persona. The tested models differ in how often they trade, waive rent, and manage cash and properties. Larger models do not consistently win more games. Persona instructions change the words agents use and some of their actions, but the changes do not always match the role across all decisions. These results show why persona following should be assessed through actions and outcomes as well as language. As our findings are conditional on the tested checkpoints, prompts, and five seeds per configuration, the open-source nature of AgentMonopoly provides the experimental infrastructure for further extending these comparisons. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29330
PDF
-
Inside-JEPA: From Prediction to Relational Grounding in Latent World Models
2026-10-22 12:43:03Hossein Resani, Javen Qinfeng ShiAbstract
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models in latent space, enabling efficient planning but leaving their states opaque. We introduce Inside-JEPA, which places relational channels for ordered entity pairs inside the JEPA latent state and shows that an inverse-dynamics loss can ground these channels without relation labels when its head reads them, either alone or as part of the full state. On Something-Something V2, latent prediction alone performs no better than a random relation head, while inverse-dynamics supervision that recovers actions from channel changes improves relational AUROC by .065-.103 across ten settings with annotated boxes, by .081 on RH20T robot episodes with held-out tasks, and by .050-.061 across five relations using off-the-shelf detection and tracking. An inverse head on entity latents decodes actions more accurately but barely improves relational grounding; shuffled labels, two label-free objectives, and action labels on only 5% of the pairs also fail to ground the channels. Given an action, predicted relational changes approach the quality of observed future relations (AUROC .599 vs .621). For one-step relational goals, a supervised readout of the 16 channels ranks the correct action among the top five of 65 in 43% of cases, compared with 24% for prediction-only latents and 17% for a frequency prior.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31194
PDF
-
RaSFNet: Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
2026-10-22 12:35:29Chuang ChenAbstract
LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of 3D perception for autonomous driving and robotics. Projection-based methods map 3D point clouds into 2D representations for feature extraction using 2D networks. However, aggregating multiple points during projection can obscure geometric differences within each frustum, while local feature extraction limits the modeling of spatial relationships across scanning regions. Moreover, proximity in the projected representation does not necessarily imply proximity in 3D space, and interactions between point and projected features may mix features from different ranges, reducing semantic discriminability. To address these challenges, we propose the Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network (RaSFNet), which incorporates point cloud geometry and LiDAR scanning characteristics into projection-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, the Ray-Aligned Geometric Distribution Encoding (RAGDE) module characterizes point distributions within each frustum using a ray-aligned coordinate system. To model spatial context, a Scan-Topology-Aware Mamba (STAM) block organizes frustum features according to the LiDAR azimuth sampling pattern and captures long-range dependencies across scanning regions. In addition, a Range-Constrained Point-Frustum Fusion (RCPFF) mechanism uses shared range information to guide feature exchange between point and frustum representations while maintaining spatial correspondence. RaSFNet achieves mIoU scores of 70.2% and 77.7% on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes validation sets, respectively, indicating competitive segmentation performance compared with the evaluated methods.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31186
PDF
-
Prompting Strategy Effects Depend on the Judge: A Multilingual Study of LLM-as-a-Judge Robustness
Abstract
LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation is increasingly applied to multilingual tasks, yet prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Role Conditioning are recommended based solely on English benchmarks. Whether their effectiveness transfers across judge models and languages remains unknown: prompt-sensitivity studies are largely English-centric, while existing multilingual judge studies fix the prompt template. In this work, we address this gap by measuring this interaction through a benchmark of 9 prompting strategies, 4 open-weight judges, 27 languages, and 4 tasks across 13 datasets, yielding over 1M pointwise scores on gold-reference outputs, validated against human judgments. We find that prompting strategies are not transferable: the choice of the judge model dominates the choice of prompting strategy, strategy effects reverse direction across judges, and stability degrades in low-resource languages, where these effects are concealed by aggregate reporting. These findings show that prompting effects in multilingual evaluation are conditioned on the judge, task, and language. Consequently, prompting strategies should be validated for the intended evaluation setting, and cross-study comparisons should account for both judge and prompt configuration.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31172
PDF
-
Memory before Goal: Role of Pre-History Memory for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
2026-10-22 12:24:25Chenyuan Chen, Ran Ding, Lechen Zhang, Zewen He, Yoshihiko NakamuraAbstract
Humanoid loco-manipulation in dynamic scenes is non-Markovian: cues vanish as objects change or are hidden, or leave the view as the robot turns and walks, yet whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies see only the present. We present WholeBodyMem, an object-guided perceptual memory that keeps the pre-history of object events seen before the robot acts on its goal. SAM3 tracks the task objects, and their events causally select key frames within an adaptive budget, which the action expert reads by cross-attention together with object tokens encoding appearance, geometry and time. We also contribute HuMeGo, a humanoid memory benchmark with six simulated and six real-world Unitree G1 tasks. Keeping the right frames rather than more frames, WholeBodyMem surpasses memoryless and uniform-memory baselines, raising its base policy's success from 29.1% to 72.6% in simulation and from 36.7% to 88.3% on the real robot, while also improving the standard SIMPLE tasks (70.2% to 86.9%).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31166
PDF
-
HiSTEVE 1.0: Harnessing Human-Interface VLA Agents for Open-World Games
2026-10-22 12:17:45Zecong Tang, Zian Guan, Yuncheng Guo, Zhanqiu Zhang, Yiwen Guo, Bo DaiAbstract
Building virtual embodied agents that operate in open-ended games like human players is a long-standing goal requiring both long-horizon autonomy and reliable native-interface control. As a procedurally generated open world, Minecraft provides a natural testbed for studying the integration of these capabilities. Existing agents typically provide either native visuomotor control without long-horizon autonomy or high-level planning executed through environment APIs or predefined skills. To bridge this gap, we propose HiSTEVE, a hierarchical VLA agent with a capability-aware agent harness. At the orchestration level, we equip the harness with structured memory for tracking progress and a VLM planner for selecting subtasks within the VLA's capabilities. To reliably determine subtask completion, we further introduce a policy-coupled task completion state detector that conditions on VLA policy context to signal candidate completion. At the control level, a single VLA executes all subtasks with vision-only perception and native keyboard-and-mouse actions. To mitigate interference between heterogeneous GUI and non-GUI interactions, we introduce regime-specific RMSNorm branches and separate mouse-movement token embeddings. We also train the VLA through world knowledge injection, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with environment feedback to improve reliability and recovery. HiSTEVE achieves state-of-the-art atomic-task performance, scoring 85.0% on MineStudio Bench and a 37.4% average success rate on OpenHA, while also completing long-horizon tasks such as crafting an iron pickaxe from scratch like human players.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31162
PDF
-
Navigating human-robot interaction challenges in private and residential aged care homes
2026-10-22 12:07:31David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Mohammad Ali Armin, Akila Pemasiri, Harshala Gammulle, Tharindu Fernando, David Silvera-Tawil, Simon DenmanAbstract
This chapter explores how robotic systems and ambient intelligence can enhance care for older adults in residential aged care (RAC) homes and private homes. Although these settings differ, we frame both as extreme and challenging environments for human-robot interaction (HRI), characterised by cluttered and dynamic layouts, diverse resident needs, and limited on-site technical support. We review embodied and non-embodied systems that assist with daily living, safety monitoring, and social engagement, highlighting hybrid deployments where robots complement fixed and wearable sensors. To ensure these technologies are usable and effective, design considerations consider the cognitive, physical, and social needs of older adults. Interaction design prioritises accessibility for older adults with low digital literacy, using robust but simple voice interfaces, small sets of non-verbal cues, accessible screen-based companions, and safe object handovers. Privacy, trust, and acceptability are addressed via practical strategies such as on-device inference, data minimisation, visible consent controls, and transparent data handling aligned with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and privacy regulation. Evaluation emphasises real-world metrics including false alarms per day, time to recover from faults, staff workload, and long-term system reliability. We close by outlining open research challenges and future directions for scalable, regulation-ready deployments that support aging with dignity, safety, and independence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31149
PDF
-
Delta N-gram: Forward-Only Continual Writing into a Language Model's Native N-gram Memory
Abstract
Our previous analysis found that a model's native hashed N-gram table is where continual updates disturb the base least, but its writes needed backpropagation and changed the pretrained table. We present Delta N-gram, a forward-only write path into that table. The pretrained table T^0 is never modified. Evidence is written into a sparse patch \Delta on the rows it addresses: a 4.1M-parameter writer emits a target and a gate per (position, hash head) event, and a block-averaged delta rule keeps each row a convex combination of its old value and the gated targets. The writer is trained offline on raw text with the pretraining objective; at use time writing takes forward passes only, and clearing \Delta restores the original model. A 0.6B prototype trained to answer questions keeps 16/16 facts after a second write; online gradient writes keep 2--4/16. We study two writers: a plain writer that encodes evidence with the T^0-only model, and a delta writer that reads its current memory while encoding. On Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, the plain writer's memory is document-specific: on 64 held-out news events it lowers continuation NLL by 0.068 nats/token against empty memory and by 0.024 against another document's memory, and 0.063 and 0.013 after 16 intervening articles. The delta writer's memory is more document-specific and keeps more of it under distraction (70% vs 54%). Over 35,000 writes on our previous seven-task chain both writers stay stable and the delta writer drifts less (layer-2 math drift 176% vs 188%); later accuracy changes by -0.26/-0.52pp (-7.29pp for gradient updates) and small-k_i drift is 17.9/17.5% (39.2%). Acquisition is negative, and general-input drift reaches 32.8% (20.75%): format rows read by every example grow to 4--12 times their pretrained norm. Zeroing eight such rows removes over 98% of layer-2 drift on math inputs, together with their NLL gain.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31125
PDF
-
RGraph-Eval: Task-Grounded Scene Graphs for Evaluating Robot Video Generation
2026-10-22 11:39:01Aleksandr Lazarev, Sofia Zimina, Roman Kuznetsov, Tatiana Zemskova, Iaroslav Koshelev, Dmitry YudinAbstract
Generated robot videos can look convincing while depicting the wrong interac- tion: a different object is moved, a grasp disappears, or a placement ends out- side its destination. We introduce RGraph-Eval, a reference-based framework that makes these discrepancies explicit through task-grounded temporal scene graphs. Unlike approaches that construct separate evidence representations for different evaluation dimensions, we organize task entities, interactions, and motion within a unified, interpretable scene graph representation. A foundation-model pipeline identifies manipulation roles, grounds persistent object masks, infers and verifies state transitions and action intervals, and reconstructs manipulated- object motion in three dimensions. Applying this representation to a generated video and a reference demonstration supports an interpretable RGraph-Eval score with visible-object, relation-change, and 3D path-shape components. We also introduce ShareRobot-SG, a collection of 1,000 manipulation scenes from ten ShareRobot sources annotated with the multimodal representation. Our eval- uation separates graph-generation quality from agreement with human video judgments, and includes comparisons with adapted SVG2 and SG-Ego, a bench- mark of three video generators. The framework connects robot-video assessment to the observable entities and interactions underlying a task, while making the graph annotations reusable beyond evaluation. Code will be publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31121
PDF
-
Through a PRISM, Clearly: Step-Sequence Reasoning for Mistake Recognition in Procedural Videos
2026-10-22 11:32:37Olga Loginova, Oleksandr Bezrukov, Frank KellerAbstract
Procedural mistake recognition requires identifying deviations from valid multi-step activities. We study post-completion recognition from videos with benchmark-provided step boundaries. We introduce PRISM (Procedural mistake Recognition via Interpretable Semantic Modeling), which grounds video segments in language and maps their descriptions to procedural states using a lightweight hidden Markov model trained on correct executions. Reference alignment and semantic checks identify errors in step content and order. To support evaluation across heterogeneous benchmarks, we map dataset-specific annotations to four edit-based error types: insertion, deletion, substitution, and transposition. Across three benchmarks, we compare gold and VLM-generated descriptions in raw, semantic-role, and action-object forms. Decoder controls show consistent gains from the trained local decoder over nearest-candidate matching, with additional, dataset-dependent benefits from sequence decoding. Semantic role labeling improves Any-F1 in all six matched grounded comparisons, although the gains vary across datasets and do not translate into uniform improvements under separate configuration selection. These results establish language grounding as an effective interface for explicit procedural mistake reasoning and characterize the contributions of representation and decoding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31117
PDF
-
Learning What to Ask for Tomorrow: Active Preference Acquisition for Long-Term Personalized Web Agents
2026-10-22 11:16:24Yiqi Wang, Zizhi Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Yiqun Duan, Mingkai Zheng, Taotao CaiAbstract
Web agents increasingly serve the same user across repeated online tasks such as booking travel, shopping, and scheduling, so their long-term usefulness depends on how well they know the user's preferences. Passive memory and personalization methods cannot obtain preferences the user never reveals, and clarification methods that value a question by its benefit to the current task overlook the benefit of reusing the answer in later tasks. We study Active Preference Acquisition (APA): which missing preferences are worth the cost of asking? We define the Prospective Personalization Value (PPV) of a missing preference as its expected cumulative utility gain over future tasks minus the effort and disclosure-risk cost of asking, and select questions under a per-interaction budget. We characterize when cumulative reuse justifies acquisition despite insufficient single-task benefit, and evaluate this regime with an initial-profile diagnostic. APA computes the counterfactual gain of each candidate preference on public task prototypes with the agent's own task solver and aggregates it by the expected reuse of each task family. We evaluate it on ActiveWebPref, a controlled longitudinal benchmark with hidden but queryable user profiles and exact task utilities. At a horizon of 20 tasks, 34.4% of budget-feasible valuable missing preferences are amortization-dependent; APA acquires 80.3% of them, whereas current-task value of information acquires 5.1%. Under per-user asking-cost caps matched to APA's realized expenditure, APA achieves higher net utility than four heuristic selection baselines. In our cost setting, asking about every unknown preference yields lower net utility than not asking, while APA recovers 84.2% of its utility gain with 27.6% of its questions. The value of acquiring a user preference should account for its reuse across future tasks, not only its benefit to the task at hand.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31107
PDF
-
I$^2$-KAN: Interpretable Intra- and Inter-Modal Multi-Pathway Representation Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
2026-10-22 10:57:20Xiaoting Xie, Feng Qiao, Xianwei Zhang, Hailong Chen, Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge, Yujun LiAbstract
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to infer sentiment by integrating linguistic, acoustic, and visual information. However, many fusion methods integrate modality-specific representations and cross-modal interactions into joint representations, making it difficult to determine whether predictive utility arises from a modality itself or from its interactions with others. More fundamentally, a modality's standalone predictive utility may not faithfully reflect its interaction-conditioned predictive utility. To address this issue, we propose I$^2$-KAN, an interpretable multi-pathway framework that explicitly maintains intra-modal and pairwise inter-modal information in separate structural pathways. Each pathway is refined by a Task-Decoupled Linear-Gated Denoising Bottleneck (TDL-GDB) to learn compact and task-relevant representations, followed by structured Kolmogorov-Arnold Network fusion that retains explicit pathway associations and supports multi-level interpretation. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS v2 demonstrate strong overall performance. Ablation and interpretability analyses consistently show across the three benchmarks that low standalone predictive utility does not necessarily imply low interaction-conditioned predictive utility: a modality that appears weak in isolation can remain informative through pairwise interactions. These findings highlight the interaction-dependent nature of multimodal utility and suggest that modality utility should be characterized from both standalone and interaction-conditioned perspectives.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31087
PDF
-
A General-Purpose Dual-Path Interaction Framework for Multi-View Medical Image Segmentation: Alleviating Data Volume Dependency in Small-Sample Regimes
2026-10-22 10:43:50Shuhuan Wang, Yuanyuan Cui, Pengju Wang, Huimin Guo, Ling Yue, Yin Gu, Yanchao Zhang, Wei Feng, Yunhe Liu, Wei Qian, Mingjun Xu, Shuang Liu, He MaAbstract
The performance of medical image segmentation depends on a large amount of annotated data, and most segmentation models experience a significant drop in performance in low-sample-size scenarios. Existing semi-supervised and weakly supervised methods rely on specific network architectures, while traditional multi-view-assisted segmentation methods require strictly paired samples, which limits their clinical applications. To address these issues, we propose DPIF, a general-purpose plug-and-play dual-path interaction framework compatible with arbitrary encoder-decoder segmentation networks, which leverages cross-view anatomical complementarity to reduce annotation reliance. DPIF first performs Sinkhorn optimal transport-based cross-view distribution alignment to establish global semantic correspondence without sample-level pairing. It then adopts conditional mutual information-guided feature decoupling to enable bidirectional knowledge transfer only within the shared semantic space, suppressing view-specific noise. Finally, persistent homology-based topological regularization encodes anatomical invariants as unsupervised priors to mitigate overfitting. Experiments were conducted using 24 baseline models on a private multicenter echocardiography dataset and two public datasets. The results show that DPIF-enhanced models outperform single-view baseline models when trained on comparable amounts of data. Notably, most dual-path variants trained on 40\% - 60\% of the data achieve performance comparable to that of single-view models trained on the full dataset. This demonstrates that DPIF provides a general-purpose and scalable solution for data-scarce multi-view medical image segmentation problems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31065
PDF
-
AstroBench: Benchmarking Free-Floating Capture and Space Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-22 10:42:38Zizhe Wang (Astroup Lab, Beijing, China), Jia Deng (Astroup Lab, Beijing, China), Xin Lu (Astroup Lab, Beijing, China), Zehao Jia (Astroup Lab, Beijing, China), Yi Huang (Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Research Institute), Yao Zhu (Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Research Institute)Abstract
Capturing a loose object inside a spacecraft requires a robot to approach a target that can translate and rotate, and whose motion changes when contact is made. These conditions motivate evaluation beyond manipulation of supported objects. We introduce AstroBench, an open benchmark for free-floating capture and space robotic manipulation with a fixed-base arm. The task suite combines four initial-motion tracks with sample-storage operations based on MELFI hardware and cap and captive-screw servicing based on the Robotic Refueling Mission. The two workcells provide nine task definitions and 29 task-target combinations. A metadata-filtered Objaverse inventory supplies 8,414 object instances for asset expansion, alongside five cabin visual contexts and versioned task instructions. We report two acquisition-focused experiments using existing checkpoints. A frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ DROID joint-position policy captures 2 of 200 static targets and 4 of 200 moving targets across twenty object identities. A cube-specific ACT policy captures 8 of 10 static targets and 6 of 10 moving targets in a separate experiment. Each experiment retains its recorded observation, action and capture configuration. The results document difficult direct transfer for the tested generalist checkpoint and successful task-specific capture behavior, while identifying concrete settings for studying motion-aware perception and contact-sensitive control. Code, task definitions and editable workcell assets are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31064
PDF
-
Multimodal Progress-Residual Fusion for Anticipating Navigation Retreat in Robotic Flexible Endoscopy
2026-10-22 10:04:45Chi Kit Ng, Tianchun Wu, Jiatan Sun, Yuming Sun, Jianru Zhang, Hongliang RenAbstract
Flexible robotic endoscopes provide access through tortuous anatomy, where friction, deformation, and wall interaction separate commanded insertion from useful distal progress. Operators interpret this mismatch and retreat to recover a navigable configuration. Recognizing the approach to that decision requires relating motor intent to distal response and the local visual scene. We introduce Multimodal Progress-Residual Fusion (MPRF), a causal model that anticipates operator retreat from commands, electromagnetic (EM) tracking, and endoscopic video. A nominal-progress model predicts the response expected in normal or successful navigation; a temporal predictor combines its EM residual with all three observed modalities. In a 150-episode colon-phantom collection, MPRF achieves 0.580 +/- 0.007 AUPRC across three seeds, compared with 0.511 for the strongest reduced-modality control. Complete multimodal histories provide the principal ranking advantage, while the residual adds an explicit intent-response representation with a small, uncertain increment over raw fusion. Analysis of frozen alarms relates warning timing to the behavioral label and explains the increase in event recall under a longer matching window. These results establish a basis for behavioral assistance during operator-controlled navigation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31028
PDF
