Feed-forward transformer models have recently achieved strong performance in multi-view 3D reconstruction, but they still rely primarily on appearance-based attention and often struggle in dynamic scenes with weak geometric cues. In this work, we introduce a motion- and gravity-aware framework under the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm. During training, residual optical flow and gravity direction are provided as privileged signals to guide geometric representation learning; during inference, the model uses standard visual inputs only. We integrate these priors into transformer backbones with lightweight architectural changes, preserving feed-forward efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmarks show consistent gains in reconstruction accuracy and robustness, especially in scenes with dynamic objects, ambiguous structure, and challenging camera motion. Our analysis further shows that the optimal injection stage is backbone-dependent: middle-layer integration is generally preferable for VGGT, while late-stage integration is more effective for {\pi}3. These results suggest that LUPI offers a practical way to inject motion and physical priors into feed-forward 3D reconstruction without increasing test-time complexity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22177
Safe autonomous navigation using monocular vision remains challenging because explicit obstacle states are not directly observable. This letter introduces a visual safety-certification paradigm that uses scale-free, depth-normalized relative motion encoded by monocular optical flow as the representation for collision-risk certification, without reconstructing obstacle position, velocity, geometry, or a metric world model. Unlike conventional optical-flow-based navigation approaches that rely on image motion to shape avoidance behavior, the proposed framework directly encodes collision-cone geometry and safety constraints in this relative-motion representation. An online Concurrent Learning observer estimates the normalized relative velocity and provides a computable estimation-error bound. This uncertainty is propagated into the collision cone through angular inflation and a monocular robot-footprint margin, yielding a Robust Vision-Based Collision Cone Control Barrier Function (RV-C$^3$BF). An optimal-decay CBF quadratic program minimally modifies the nominal control input to enforce the resulting robust safety constraint under the stated assumptions. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments on a TurtleBot3 in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles demonstrate collision avoidance using only monocular vision and onboard proprioception, with the estimation-error bound containing the measured error in $98.3\%$ of simulation samples and the robot achieving collision-free navigation in $93$ of $100$ real-world trials.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21374
Explicit 3D scene representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have recently enabled high-quality, real-time novel view synthesis. However, these methods assume static scenes, limiting realism in the presence of dynamic phenomena ubiquitous in real-world environments. While coherent motion (e.g., humans or vehicles) can be captured and reconstructed, high-frequency effects such as flowing water remain intractable under casual capture conditions, where dense multi-view, high-speed acquisition is not feasible. We present a method to animate water in static 3DGS scenes, enabling visually plausible motion without requiring dynamic capture or physical simulation. Our approach estimates 2D optical flow from reference images or model renderings and lifts it into a consistent 3D Eulerian motion field. We propose a cinemagraph-inspired algorithm that applies this motion field to deform Gaussian primitives, producing temporally seamless looping animations. The resulting representation retains real-time rendering performance, significantly enhances perceptual realism, and preserves free-viewpoint navigation within the scene. We evaluate our method on a newly captured dataset of in-the-wild waterfall scenes and demonstrate clear improvements over prior work in dynamic Gaussian splatting and 3D cinemagraph generation in visual quality and computational efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13860
Vision-based tactile sensors provide rich contact information, but processing high-resolution images can be costly for resource-constrained platforms such as space robots. This work investigates whether a compact representation of tactile motion can classify object rotation across different gravity conditions. Dense optical flow from a simulated GelSight Mini is aggregated over a 7x9 grid into 126 features and used to classify the direction of load-induced rotation under Earth, Mars, Moon, and orbital gravity. Gravity causes a small but significant shift in these features, accounting for 1.6% of their variance (R2 = 0.016). Despite its small magnitude, this shift affects models trained only on Earth data: XGBoost accuracy decreases from 94.4% on Earth to 75.9% in orbit. In contrast, a single model trained across all four gravity domains achieves 96.3% overall accuracy and 95.1%-97.0% across individual domains, without using gravity as an input. The representation can also be reduced to 40 features while retaining 95.7% accuracy, with XGBoost requiring only 0.14 ms per inference. These findings show that Earth-gravity performance alone is insufficient to establish the transferability of tactile perception for space robotic manipulation, highlighting the need to account for gravity-induced domain shifts during training and validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12073
We present a 4D Gaussian Splatting framework for the Sparse-View Track of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Volumetric Video Challenge, which requires dynamic scene reconstruction from only six cameras with wide baselines. To achieve robust dynamic reconstruction under such sparse views, our framework integrates three components. (1) Region-adaptive spatial priors: We use foreground masks to guide Gaussian initialization and mask voting to control densification separately for the dynamic foreground and static background. Background geometry is regularized using monocular depth aligned to metric scale. (2) Motion-consistent temporal priors: We provide supervision at intermediate times through frame interpolation and constrain projected Gaussian motion with estimated optical flow. (3) Generative assistance: We place virtual cameras in the widest angular gaps and restore their rendered images using a diffusion-based model conditioned on camera poses. The restored images are iteratively incorporated into training as pseudo-supervision. On the validation set, our framework improves full-frame PSNR from 25.60 dB for the baseline to 29.75 dB. On the official test benchmark, it achieves 30.04 dB full-frame PSNR and 27.88 dB foreground PSNR, ranking first overall in the Sparse-View Track.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04606
Surgical video generation holds substantial potential for surgical education, simulation, and data augmentation, yet generating surgical videos with realistic and clinically plausible motion remains challenging. Most existing methods rely on auxiliary conditions, such as masks, trajectories, depth, or reference videos, to achieve visually plausible synthesis. Yet, these auxiliary conditions typically require additional manual annotation or specialized acquisition, making it difficult to scale such methods beyond small, curated datasets. This motivates the need for a reference-free architecture capable of generating high-quality surgical video without requiring auxiliary visual conditions at inference time. We propose FLAIR, a Flow-guided LatentAction Injection framework for Reference-free surgical video generation. FLAIR learns action priors from optical flow of real surgical videos, dynamically predicts corresponding latent action representation from an input prompt, and injects it into a frozen base model to generate surgical videos with improved action consistency. We further construct SurgActionClip-30K, the first large-scale surgical vision dataset comprising action-centric segmented clips and structured caption labels, addressing the persistent lack of fine-grained, action-centric surgical datasets. Lastly, we introduce SurgMetrics, the first surgical domain-specific evaluation metrics for quantifying the quality of generated surgical videos, addressing the persistent absence of clinically grounded evaluation standards in this domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLAIR enables generating high-quality surgical videos using text-only inference without auxiliary conditions, and validation in SurgMetrics demonstrates its strength in alignment with human perception compared to traditional metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09800
World Action Models (WAM) improve robot policies by augmenting sparse action supervision with dense future prediction. However, much of the predictable future is dominated by appearance and scene persistence rather than action-dependent dynamics. We observe that several recent WAM designs, including optical flow, motion-centric representations, and latent actions, can be understood from a common perspective in which world supervision becomes more efficient as it contains a higher proportion of action-relevant variation. Based on this insight, we introduce Action Tangent Fields, which reformulate world supervision through a local Taylor expansion of how actions induce changes in future dynamics. We represent future dynamics in Residual-VAE space, where the future latent remains recoverable from the current latent and its residual, and use a strong action-conditioned world model (ACWM) to probe the local correspondence between action variations and residual-world variations. This local first-order structure is distilled into the WAM to guide its denoising supervision toward dynamics that are more tightly coupled to action, rather than merely predictable from appearance. Across LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin, and RoboTwin2.0-Plus, our method consistently improves robustness to lighting, background, camera, layout, and other environmental perturbations. Despite using no large-scale embodied pretraining, it achieves stronger robustness under several distribution shifts than pretrained policies. We further distill multi-step VideoDiT denoising into a single step for efficient inference. Our results suggest that effective WAM supervision should remain information-rich while concentrating its predictive capacity on the directions along which actions change the future.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09734
We propose UniDynamics, a diffusion-based framework for future 4D dynamic scenes (RGB, depth, and optical flow) generation from a single event-RGB pair, without requiring long histories or control priors as in existing methods, while explicitly modeling future motion fields. The core idea is to leverage event streams to offer an alternative motion prior for single-RGB extrapolation, and to enforce geometric and motion constraints throughout generation via multimodal modeling. Specifically, we design an Event Latent Enhancement (ELE) module to align and enhance event latents into diffusion-injectable conditioning features, providing robust initial motion priors and reliable texture/structure cues. We further introduce a Perceptual Dynamics Space (PDS) embedded in the multi-scale U-Net, which decouples and adaptively interacts depth and flow while continuously feeding back constraints to appearance features, improving geometric-motion consistency for physically plausible and spatiotemporally coherent prediction. Experiments on VKitti2 and DSEC demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, producing high-quality, temporally coherent, and 4D-consistent future predictions, especially under challenging high-speed motion blur.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03473
We present the Motion-Aware Audio-Visual Complexity Metric (MAV-C), a reference-free framework for the joint objective estimation of audio-visual complexity. The metric combines entropy-based audio features (temporal, spectral, and spatial) with visual features (Sobel gradient magnitude, chromatic uniqueness, and optical flow) via a parametric fusion stage, producing a continuous joint complexity score CAV (t) [0,1]. We validate MAV-C on two datasets: a controlled synthetic corpus (SYN) of stimuli with known signal characteristics and a naturalistic gameplay corpus (GAM) of 60 clips drawn from the SAFEPLAY-X dataset. On SYN, the metric exhibits strong validity: the audio score CA and visual score CV are each insensitive to changes in the opposite modality (CoV < 0.003), the joint score CAV spans [0.00,0.90] across all parameter combinations, and single-axis feature sweeps produce monotone trajectories (Spearman up to 0.995). On GAM, CV differs significantly across content categories (Kruskal-Wallis p = 0.021) while CA does not, and the two sub-scores are uncorrelated (r = 0.03), confirming they operate on independent signal dimensions. OFAT sensitivity analysis identifies a two-tier parameter hierarchy, with modality balance (wa) and visual regularization (v) as most significant tunable parameters. Full subjective calibration is planned as future work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00754
A vision-language-action (VLA) policy can finish a manipulation task while knocking over objects unrelated to it, so task success alone does not show that the policy is safe to deploy in clutter. We study how to keep a pretrained VLA policy clear of such hazards at run time without retraining it, which requires guarding more of the arm than the end effector, following the hazard as it moves, and sharing onboard compute with the policy. Our training-free shield covers the gripper, wrist, and forearm with five ellipsoids and filters every commanded motion through one barrier program against a keep-out ellipsoid fitted from RGB-D perception at reset. Sparse optical flow then carries that ellipsoid's center along with the hazard, with no repeated detection or refitting. Over six simulated hazard-motion conditions, the shield lowers collision from $65.62\%$ to $27.27\%$ and raises safe-success, task completion without collision, from $29.35\%$ to $50.43\%$. Ablations show that guarding the arm links protects beyond end-effector shielding, and that tracking recovers most of the protection lost when the hazard estimate is frozen at reset. On heterogeneous edge hardware, the five-ellipsoid barrier runs on the CPU in $2.2$~ms at the 99th percentile, and trimming the vision--language prefix and taking fewer flow-matching steps shortens each $\pi_{0.5}$ policy call on the integrated GPU from $343$ to $177.3$~ms. On a physical SO-101 arm across four tasks, the arm touched the hazard in 3 of 16 shielded episodes versus 11 of 16 unshielded ones. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40007
This book presents a code-first introduction to computer vision, spanning classical 2D image processing, classical 3D vision, and deep learning. Organized as 44 short chapters across three parts, the book builds each topic from first principles: image arithmetic and morphology; convolution, pyramids, and frequency-domain filtering; feature detection, optical flow, and stereo; projective geometry, camera calibration, and structure from motion; and the full arc of modern deep learning, from a single neuron through convolutional networks, backpropagation, classic architectures, transfer learning, object detection, and semantic and instance segmentation, concluding with engineering considerations like mixed-precision and parallel training. Every technique is implemented directly in Python and NumPy or PyTorch and checked numerically against the corresponding OpenCV or PyTorch library function, so readers see not just the mathematics but its concrete behavior on real and synthetic data. The material was distilled with AI assistance from freely available online course notes, condensing extensive working code into concise mathematical exposition while preserving verified, reproducible results throughout. It is intended as a self-contained reference for students and practitioners who want to understand computer vision algorithms and their Python implementations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39627
While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in static tasks, they struggle in dynamic environments where objects are in motion (e.g., conveyor belt manipulation). We identify three fundamental limitations hindering current VLAs in these scenarios: the \textbf{perception gap}, where static visual inputs lack temporal motion cues; the \textbf{latency gap}, where inference delays render actions obsolete; and the \textbf{control gap}, caused by the open-loop action chunk execution without real-time adjustment. In this work, we propose \textbf{DSDyn-VLA}, a Slow-Fast \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{S}tream \textbf{Dyn}amic manipulation framework that integrates motion-aware foresighted planning with real-time residual correction. The slow \textbf{Flow-Planner} serves as a macro-planner. By enhancing the VLA with optical flow for temporal perception and a future state awareness mechanism to preemptively offset inference latency, it produces globally consistent, motion-aware action chunks. Complementing this, the fast \textbf{Res-Refiner} employs a lightweight RL policy to inject high-frequency, closed-loop corrections into the planned action chunks based on real-time observations. In addition, we introduce \textbf{DynBench}, a MuJoCo-based benchmark for dynamic object manipulation that comprises nine tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSDyn-VLA reduces the failure rate by over 76\% compared to current SOTA method in high-latency setting on the Kinetix dynamic benchmark, while achieving about 6$\times$ the success rate of PI0.5 in real-world dynamic settings and about 5$\times$ on DynBench. We will open-source all the code and weights.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39198
Accurate dynamic scene reconstruction is important for robotic perception, where temporally consistent representations of dynamic environments are essential. Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models dynamic scenes through deformation fields, and recent methods incorporate motion supervision by aligning rendered Gaussian flow with optical flow. However, we find that such Gaussian-flow-based supervision provides only limited improvements in motion modeling. We identify a fundamental limitation of this supervision paradigm, namely a domain gap between rendered Gaussian flow and optical flow. To address this limitation, we propose a motion supervision framework built on Displacement Flow, which splats per-Gaussian 3D displacements onto the image plane to provide direct and stable optimization signals. We further disentangle scene motion from camera motion via intermediate-view rendering, enabling more reliable motion priors and targeted constraints on deformation and geometry. We also observe a discrepancy between motion fidelity and image-based evaluation, where improved motion awareness does not necessarily translate into better rendered image quality or higher image-based metric scores. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce Deformation-Rendering Consistency (DRC), a motion-aware metric that measures the alignment between predicted deformation and rendering improvement. Experiments on dynamic scene benchmarks show substantial improvements in motion localization and motion--rendering consistency, reaching up to 39% and 6%, respectively, while image-based metrics change by only about 0.1%. These results confirm the observed mismatch between motion fidelity and image-based evaluation, demonstrating the significance of DRC for motion-aware evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36940
The honeybee waggle dance motivates a communication mechanism in which one agent's motion guides the subsequent work of other agents. For aerial robots, realizing this mechanism requires a link from observed movement to a complete message, local task selection, and execution. This paper presents a MuJoCo system for comparing RGB and synthetic event vision within that link. One performer broadcasts six-bit task offers to one to three observers, each of which independently decodes both offers before selecting a task. The RGB receiver extracts trajectories using sparse optical flow; the event receiver uses only local event support and packet timing. Both use a common motion alphabet and explicit null delimiters. Because event silence does not establish target visibility, the event version includes a physical acquisition motion and continuity-qualified null confirmation. In the nominal three-observer case, each version produced 12 complete message receptions, six completed work units, and reassignment after withdrawal of a depleted task. Six paired functional cases produced the same message and work counts; an additional event-stream dropout case preserved inactivity of the affected observer. Replaying 42,060,633 recorded synthetic events reproduced all 12 event-message payloads and completion timestamps. Total nominal mission time was 493.80 s for RGB and 517.40 s for events, with the difference dominated by the event acquisition schedule. These fixed simulation results establish functional feasibility across two receiver implementations, rather than a sensor-performance advantage or hardware validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37464
High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction from al\-ter\-na\-ting-exposure sequences remains challenging, especially in regions with extreme luminance variation. We propose a novel HDR reconstruction framework based on dual-stream registration and accurate pyramid fusion. Given three consecutive frames, our method computes optical flow directly with the central frame, while introducing a complementary midpoint displacement strategy to handle cases with severe overexposition. A pyramid fusion stage then merges the resulting radiance and LDR images into a final HDR output. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31108
Recent advances in text-to-video generation have enabled high-fidelity visual synthesis, yet realistic motion remains challenging. Generated videos may exhibit temporal discontinuities, inconsistent action progression, and structural distortions during complex movements. Even when individual frames appear realistic, the underlying motion may evolve in inconsistent or implausible ways. Standard generative objectives provide limited motion-specific supervision, leaving motion evolution insufficiently constrained. In this paper, we propose MotionSpec, a motion supervision framework centered on Spectral Trajectory Consistency (STC). STC constructs dense anchor-relative motion trajectories and transforms them into motion spectral volumes via a temporal Fourier transform. By aligning the spectral amplitude and phase of predicted and target trajectories, STC constrains both motion strength across temporal frequencies and the temporal organization of motion. To complement this trajectory-level supervision, we introduce Local Flow Consistency (LFC), which aligns consecutive-frame optical flow between predicted and target videos to stabilize local motion transitions. Experiments demonstrate that MotionSpec consistently improves motion consistency, temporal coherence, and plausibility while preserving visual fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28095
Stereo visual SLAM systems built on local descriptors suffer from semantic ambiguity, instance-level confusion, and independently moving objects, each corrupting data association and accumulating as trajectory drift. Prevailing semantic and dynamic SLAM methods address this through binary feature rejection, sacrificing correspondence density for outlier suppression. We contend that contextual implausibility is better expressed as a graded quantity than an exclusion criterion. We present Know-Your-Scene (KYS)-SLAM, a modular extension of ORB-SLAM3 that supplants feature rejection with continuous correspondence modulation. The contribution is the reframing of contextual evidence as correspondence cost, applied within feature matching and leaving the geometric backend unmodified. Each keypoint is augmented with semantic, panoptic, and motion priors fused through a hierarchical compatibility formulation, in which semantic class and instance identity enforce structural plausibility while a zero-shot motion score down-weights features on independently moving objects. That score comes from a training-free module fitting a depth-aware ego-motion model to background optical flow and classifying panoptic segments via self-calibrating, coverage-aware thresholds, so only segments with sufficient motion evidence are penalized and static structure is left unpenalized. Penalizing correspondences rather than discarding them preserves the geometric support bundle adjustment depends on. Under one fixed configuration, no coefficient retuned per sequence or dataset, KYS-SLAM reduces per-sequence ATE RMSE by 17.4% on outdoor KITTI and 27.7% on indoor EuRoC across 21 stereo sequences with no regressions, and by 6.6% on dynamic subsets of KITTI Tracking and 17.8%, up to 31.2%, on Virtual KITTI 2 -- cross-domain transfer across outdoor driving, indoor flight, and synthetic imagery under one set of constants.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27509
General-purpose robot control requires models to understand task intent, identify where to interact, capture how the scene evolves, and generate precise actions. Vision-language-action models provide strong semantic priors but typically do not explicitly model scene dynamics, while world-action models couple visual prediction with control without necessarily exposing the task-relevant semantic and spatial structure needed for fine-grained manipulation. We present MachEmbodied-U0 (ME-U0), a unified embodied foundation model connecting understanding and generation experts through a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Subtask prediction and affordance grounding guide joint visual-dynamics and action generation via flow matching. Visual dynamics encompass future RGB, depth, surface normals, and optical flow, providing complementary supervision for appearance, geometry, and motion. Multi-rate Rotary Position Encoding (MRPE) aligns visual dynamics with fine-grained control. We pretrain ME-U0 on approximately 4,200 hours of curated demonstrations from robotic datasets and egocentric datasets. Using only the supervision natively available in each downstream benchmark, ME-U0 achieves an average score of 17.66 on the RoboDojo simulation benchmark and average success rates of 99.0\% and 82.5\% on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus, respectively. We additionally validate ME-U0 on real-world robotic manipulation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness beyond simulation. Without corresponding downstream supervision, ME-U0 further demonstrates zero-shot subtask prediction, affordance grounding, and visual dynamics on simulated and real-world observations. Overall, ME-U0 combines competitive downstream control performance with transferable task-grounding and visual-dynamics capabilities across simulation and the real world.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25627
In frame interpolation tasks, motion ambiguity in the training set causes models to generate blurry intermediate frames. Moreover, the assumption of uniform motion between frames during inference further leads to inaccuracies in the generated intermediate frames. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Accurate motion estimation algorithm with Bézier Control point, ABC-Inter, for efficient frame Interpolation. Specifically, ABC-Inter designs an Accurate Flow estimation Module (AFM) by decoupling two-frame features and mapping to corresponding coordinates to better estimate the optical flow between the two frames. Furthermore, ABC-Inter eliminates motion ambiguity in the training set by introducing Bézier control points that are computed using the input frames and the intermediate ground-truth (gt) frames. This allows the model to estimate accurate optical flow between two frames during the training process, thereby solving the blurriness problem in the generated intermediate frames during inference. Benefiting from the more accurate flow estimation between two frames, we can introduce additional frames and directly use multiple flows to calculate Bézier control points for modeling non-uniform motion without retraining the model. Simultaneously, to realize the estimation of non-linear motion using only two frames, we also introduce a new Bézier control point estimation module which achieves better motion estimation between the two frames by performing fine-tuning on the model in the second stage. Experimental results demonstrate that our ABC-Inter achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets and exhibits excellent visual perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23408
Dynamic object segmentation and ego-motion estimation are closely coupled problems in autonomous driving, as accurate ego-motion estimation typically requires static scene observations, while identifying static observations requires knowledge of the ego motion. We present Radar-Dot, a radar--RGB framework that exploits radar Doppler measurements to address this coupling. Radar returns are first used to estimate ego velocity through a linear Doppler constraint, with residual-based static/dynamic segmentation and robust estimation used to reduce the influence of moving objects. The estimated motion is then combined with metric depth and dense optical flow to identify image regions whose observed motion is inconsistent with the rigid scene motion. Experiments on 10 nuScenes scenes (part of nuscenes-mini) demonstrate that the resulting geometric pipeline achieves 20.24% dynamic IoU and 33.67% F1-score over 394 frame pairs, while radar-based static-point filtering improves ego-velocity estimation compared with using all radar returns. These results demonstrate the potential of radar as a modality for jointly improving ego-motion estimation and dynamic object segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22857