Sparse
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MSGAT: Multi-Head Spiking Graph Attention with Similarity-Space Fusion for Image-Text Retrieval
2026-10-08 08:56:27Xintao Zong, Wenxuan Liu, Jianhao Ding, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun HuangAbstract
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient computing paradigm through sparse event-driven computation, showing great potential for efficient multimodal learning. However, applying SNNs to high-level multimodal tasks, such as image-text retrieval (ITR), remains challenging, since sparse spike representations make it difficult to capture semantic structures required for cross-modal alignment. Existing spiking ITR methods rely on local alignment and additional soft-label supervision during training, while lacking awareness of structural and multi-granularity relationships. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-head Spiking Graph Attention Network (\textbf{MSGAT}) for structural modeling and equip it with dynamic attention heads to capture complementary relational patterns and enable spike-driven graph reasoning and aggregation. However, within a two-branch multi-granularity fusion framework, the fine-grained spike representations generated by MSGAT are sparse and discrete, whereas the global representations are continuous, making conventional feature-level fusion susceptible to interference across heterogeneous representations. Therefore, we introduce \textbf{Sim-Fuse}, a similarity-space fusion alignment strategy integrating coarse- and fine-grained matching relations while avoiding direct fusion of heterogeneous representations. Experiments on Flickr30K and MSCOCO show our method outperforms ANN methods under matched settings and existing SNN retrieval baselines. Moreover, with only two time steps, our SNN achieves comparable or superior performance to its ANN counterpart while reducing theoretical module-level energy by 55\%. The code is provided in the Supplementary Materials.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11526
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The Operator Mismatch Problem: Deploying BEV Perception with Portable GPU Compute
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Modern autonomous driving systems rely on bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models that fuse camera and LiDAR inputs to detect objects in 3D space. These models are accurate, but they cannot be deployed through standard inference runtimes. The reason is an operator mismatch between dense convolutions (which runtimes handle well), sparse 3D convolutions (which runtimes cannot represent), and geometric scatter operations (which runtimes have no vocabulary for). Today, every sparse convolution library is CUDA-only and PyTorch-coupled, locking BEV deployment to a single vendor's hardware and a single execution framework. We present BEVPIPE, a framework for deploying multimodal BEV perception pipelines using portable GPU compute APIs and integrating them with production inference runtimes. BEVPIPE partitions the model into runtime-managed dense subgraphs and three external operator extensions (voxelizer, sparse encoder, BEV projector), connected through a shared GPU memory space. BEVPIPE achieves a 19.5x end-to-end speedup over conventional deployments while retaining 98.5% of reference mAP. We also showcase that BEVPIPE is portable across different GPU backends.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11504
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Fed-GRPO: Reward-Signal-Driven Federated Group Relative Policy Optimization
2026-10-08 08:40:41Pengxin Guo, Shuang Zeng, Zonggen Li, Weiying Zheng, Mengting Liu, Liangqiong QuAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities when fine-tuned with reinforcement learning (RL), particularly through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing GRPO methods assume centralized access to training data, which may not hold in practice due to privacy or regulatory constraints. To this end, we propose Fed-GRPO, a federated GRPO training framework that addresses these privacy constraints by enabling collaborative reasoning training without sharing raw data, which leverages the reward statistics naturally produced during GRPO training as zero-cost signals to guide aggregation, local training, and communication. Fed-GRPO contains three reward-signal-driven mechanisms: (i) \emph{signal-weighted aggregation} that weights clients by their reward standard deviation, prioritizing clients with stronger learning signals; (ii) \emph{global reward calibration} that re-weights per-prompt objectives based on the local-global reward gap, steering each client toward its relative weaknesses; and (iii) \emph{adaptive sparse communication} that allocates bandwidth based on the informativeness of each client's update. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that Fed-GRPO achieves the best performance among all federated methods, clearly outperforms FedAvg and approaches centralized training performance, while losslessly reducing communication by $32\times$ and supporting up to $621\times$ compression under tight bandwidth budgets with only graceful accuracy degradation. Our code is available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11502
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GROB: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Public-Trace Investigation of Candidate Agentic Activity
2026-10-08 08:17:45Chiara Bonfanti, Cataldo BasileAbstract
We present GROB, a multi-agent architecture for investigating candidate autonomous-agent activity through public Internet traces when privileged telemetry is unavailable. The system performs controlled, read-only collection of public traces and preserves selected observations for later resolution. In a frozen September 2026 corpus, several collected traces became more informative as additional public evidence emerged. The strongest result concerns Census-labelled identifiers captured on 9 September. Public revision records later resolved these identifiers to specific Census requests from 16 - 17 June. Other results show weaker links between traces collected by GROB and evidence reconstructed or reported later. These links vary in strength, and only some can be tied to specific public records. The results show that sparse public traces can remain useful even before their significance is fully understood. Such evidence can support later reconstruction, but public traces alone do not establish organizational attribution. Execution identity presents a separate problem, as continuity of agent identity remains an active research question for autonomous language-model agents.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11467
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Generative Adversarial Loops
2026-10-08 08:11:37Kislay Aditya Oj, Nidhi Jain, Sri Surya Varma Datla, Priyanka Jayaswal, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Aditya DesaiAbstract
AI research progress can be viewed as the interaction between two processes: benchmark creation and method discovery. Historically, both were driven by human intelligence. However, recent advances in AI have accelerated automated method discovery, while automated benchmark creation has received comparatively less attention. To enable self-advancing systems, we propose Generative Adversarial Loop (GAL), a generator-discriminator framework alternating between two agentic searches: (1) a discriminator that generates adversarial data to expose weaknesses in current systems, and (2) a generator that discovers algorithms to overcome them. We apply this framework to approximation algorithms for efficient inference. Unlike existing auto research systems, which primarily focus on algorithm discovery, GAL introduces a discriminator agent that automates goalpost setting by continually searching for weaknesses in the current algorithm. We demonstrate adversarial data generation across four tasks: KV compression, sparse video generation, sparse attention, and context extension, where the discriminator identifies weaknesses in state of the art techniques. We further show that GAL enables autonomous improvement, with newly discovered algorithms improving not only on adversarially generated data, but also on established benchmarks. Specifically, GAL improves CompactorPress on KV compression with Qwen3-4B at 4x, raising performance on the discriminator dataset from 0.35 to 0.97, while also outperforming RULER-HARD (+0.77 pts). For context extension, GAL boosts Dual Chunk Attention from 0.20 to 0.90 on the discriminator dataset, while yielding gains on standard benchmarks(ScienceFiction (+6 pts) and PG19 32K (-0.33 PPL)). GAL thus provides a path toward autonomous goalpost setting and algorithmic improvement, where AI systems continually discover their own weaknesses and develop methods to overcome them.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11458
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BioBigBird: A Sparse Attention Model for Long-Range Dependency Processing in Biomedical Text
2026-10-08 07:54:12Roshan Balaji, Pavan Kumar S, Vasudev Gupta, Sreejith N, Keerthana Sridhar, Nirav BhattAbstract
While domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded vast biomedical knowledge, their limited context windows often hinder a deep understanding of nuanced relationships within and across texts. To address this limitation, we introduce BioBigBird, a bidirectional language model pre-trained on extensive biomedical literature and clinical data, specifically designed to handle long-range dependencies. BioBigBird leverages a sparse attention mechanism to process sequences up to 4096 tokens, and its training incorporates a multi-stage process to mitigate noise from the large-scale pre-training corpus. We further enhance its performance by employing a multi-task learning (MTL) framework that jointly optimizes for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. Comprehensive evaluations on the BLURB benchmark reveal that our MTL-enhanced BioBigBird achieves highly competitive results against state-of-the-art models. Our work contributes an effective methodology for developing powerful, long-context language models for specialized domains, demonstrating the value of extended sequence processing for complex text analysis. Our models are publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11430
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WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Models
2026-10-08 07:33:59Kai Ding, Yang He, Ruijie Quan, Yi YangAbstract
World Action Models (WAMs) enable generalist robot manipulation by conditioning an action expert on representations from a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). In closed-loop control, the video DiT runs at every chunk to encode the current observation into layerwise key-value (KV) pairs that the action expert queries. This prefill dominates the per-chunk computational cost, yet existing training-free accelerations leave it fully dense. We present WAM-Cache, a training-free framework that retains layerwise key-value representations across chunks and recomputes only a sparse refresh set of tokens. Crucially, we find that the intuitive heuristic of refreshing visually drifted tokens plateaus far below the dense baseline, even with an oracle predicting ground-truth KV drift. Downstream action accuracy is instead governed by where the action expert attends, not by what moved. WAM-Cache therefore selects the refresh set by uniting the action expert's cross-attention with visual latent surprise, complemented by a strict age bound that suppresses compounding error. On Fast-WAM, WAM-Cache cuts video DiT prefill FLOPs by 32-42% across RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO, and real-world experiments, while staying within 0.7-1.8 percentage points of the dense policy in simulation and 2.5 points on a real robot.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11401
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FlyMark: Training-Free Invisible Watermarking of 3D Gaussian Splatting via a Fruit Fly Connectome
2026-10-08 06:56:53Ziyuan Luo, Haoliang Li, Renjie WanAbstract
A trained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene ships as a portable parameter array that can be copied, pruned, requantized, or repackaged outside its training pipeline, so ownership evidence is most useful when it lives in the released parameters and remains checkable long after the embedding tooling is gone. Existing 3DGS watermarks typically tie embedding or extraction to scene optimization, a learned decoder, or rendered views, so the evidence survives only as long as a second trained artifact does. FlyMark instead writes a keyed message into the parameters a 3DGS file already stores. Its carrier directions are derived from the photoreceptors of a published connectome, a citable versioned artifact that fixes the geometry exhaustively and leaves nothing to tune per scene. A virtual observer reads cone-wise apparent luminance along a scene-normalized orbit from stored centers, colors, and opacities; a keyed dithered quantization-index-modulation code replicates each message bit across these observations; and one sparse bounded least-squares solve realizes the targets through achromatic shifts of existing degree-zero colors under a hard per-channel linear-RGB bound. All geometry and higher-order appearance parameters are preserved bit-identically, and extraction needs only cone queries, rounding, and majority voting. Under a model-domain threat model on synthetic and real scenes, FlyMark attains high clean bit accuracy and visual fidelity while cleanly separating matched from wrong keys.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11364
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DivMoE: Fine-Grained MoE Upcycling via Cross-Domain Expert Composition
2026-10-08 06:23:01Yuxuan Lou, Kai Yang, Geng Zhang, Yong Liu, Yang YouAbstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become essential for scaling large language models, with recent work demonstrating the benefits of fine-grained expert designs. Training such models from scratch is expensive, and sparse upcycling from pre-trained dense models is an attractive alternative. However, we identify a structural pathology of fine-grained upcycling: when fine-grained experts are derived from a single source model, naive routing collapses and downstream accuracy drops to near-random (e.g., on Qwen3-1.7B, Drop-Upcycling-fine-grained reaches only 23.2% average accuracy across 15 benchmarks, essentially matching from-scratch training at 22.2%, while the same method's coarse-grained variant reaches 50.2%). We propose DivMoE, the first framework achieving fine-grained MoE Upcycling with structurally-balanced routing. DivMoE introduces domain-specialized fine-grained expert initialization, deriving experts from dense models that have undergone domain-adaptive continual pre-training, and diversity-constrained routing, a hard structural constraint guaranteeing that each token activates experts from distinct domain groups. Across two base models and 15 benchmarks, DivMoE consistently outperforms six upcycling baselines (55.6% vs. 51.6% for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B) and strictly improves over the dense base model on every benchmark after Stage 2 continual pre-training -- closing the regression gap that has plagued prior fine-grained upcycling. After supervised fine-tuning on a public reasoning mixture, our 12B-parameter DivMoE model matches Moonlight-MoE (16B) at 64.5% average accuracy while outperforming a controlled NVIDIA-Upcycling baseline by 6.1 percentage points.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11317
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iCATS: Fast Video Generation via Interaction-Aware Sparse Attention and Timestep-Adaptive Sparsity
2026-10-08 06:09:04Chengfeng Han, Baole Ai, Xianlu Bian, Jie Yao, Zilong Huang, Ang Wang, Dandan DingAbstract
Training-free sparse attention offers a practical acceleration solution to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) via reducing computations without fine-tuning. It typically involves estimating the importance of query-key regions and deriving sparse masks to compute only the important candidates, which inevitably introduces approximation errors that may degrade generation quality. To better balance the efficiency-quality trade-off, we propose iCATS, integrating improved importance estimation and sparse mask construction with an efficient hardware execution strategy. Specifically, for importance estimation, unlike previous works that perform independent clustering over query and key tokens based on feature similarity to estimate attention scores, iCATS demonstrates that clustering based on query-key dot-product interactions is more accurate and further reformulates this objective as a simple quadratic form for low-cost computation. For sparse mask construction, instead of using a fixed top-p rule, we observe that tolerance to sparse approximation errors varies across denoising timesteps and therefore introduce an SNR-guided sparsity schedule to adjust sparsity dynamically, leading to higher accuracy. Finally, for hardware execution, we devise a tail-merging strategy to reduce padding overhead caused by irregular cluster sizes, improving GPU kernel utilization. Extensive experiments show that iCATS achieves $2.03\times$ acceleration with 31.017 dB PSNR on HunyuanVideo-T2V-13B and $1.55\times$ acceleration with 29.301 dB PSNR on Wan2.1-T2V-14B, delivering a state-of-the-art efficiency-quality trade-off.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11302
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TAP3D: Thermal-Assisted 3D Human Point Clouds
2026-10-08 04:42:25Xie Zhang, Chengxiao Li, Xuan Liu, Chenshu WuAbstract
Human body point clouds are a versatile representation for AI-enabled human sensing. However, existing methods using LiDAR, radar, and depth cameras suffer from inherent drawbacks in high cost, sparse reconstruction, and privacy concerns, etc. In this paper, we exploit low-cost thermal arrays and present TAP3D, the first system to reconstruct 3D human point clouds from body heat signatures, offering significant advantages in cost, density, human sensitivity, and privacy. To overcome major challenges in depth estimation, thermal interference, and multi-person separation, we propose a novel physics-informed design, which integrates a forward thermal physics model with two distinct modules: multi-primitive estimation for self-supervised joint recovery of depth and other thermal properties, and geometric perspective fusion for suppressing interference and disentangling multiple people. We implement TAP3D using a single commodity thermal array sensor and build a large-scale dataset (160K samples, 8 environments, 11 users) for evaluation. TAP3D achieves remarkable accuracy for dense point cloud generation, enabling downstream tasks like fall detection (91.46%), indoor tracking (21.86 cm MAE), and human mesh recovery (4.87 cm error). By transforming body heat into point clouds for the first time, TAP3D pioneers a new paradigm for privacy-first, fully passive human sensing for many applications. TAP3D is open-sourced at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11241
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GATOR: Generative and Agentic 3D Object Reconstruction From Casual Images
2026-10-08 04:13:04Qirui Wu, Stan Birchfield, Hesam Rabeti, Angel X. Chang, Bowen WenAbstract
Reconstructing complete, scene-aligned 3D objects from casual images requires integrating sparse, uncertain observations and inferring surfaces hidden by occlusions. We present GATOR, a generative and agentic framework that recovers textured object assets and their scene-relative pose from one or more images. Our local modality mixer couples patch-aligned RGB, target-mask, and pointmap features before cross-view reasoning, preserving scene context while distinguishing the target from its surroundings. Text-guided semantic conditioning complements these spatial cues with category names and object captions through stage-specific adapters for structure, geometry, and appearance generation. The generated asset initializes a multimodal agent, providing instance-specific geometry and pose for targeted structural and texture refinement through an observation-guided edit-render-review loop. Across synthetic objects, cluttered tabletops, and indoor scenes, GATOR achieves strong geometric and appearance fidelity while recovering scene-relative pose from sparse observations. Time-budget comparisons and scene-level simulation further demonstrate the reconstruction efficiency and simulation readiness. Project page: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11215
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TKCAM: Text and Keyframe to Camera Trajectory Generation
2026-10-08 02:20:16Haozhe Yang, Zhiyang Dou, Zekai Gu, Cheng Lin, Wenping Wang, Yuan Liu, Taku KomuraAbstract
Generating high-quality and controllable camera motion is essential for AI-assisted cinematography, video synthesis, and 3D scene understanding. We introduce TKCAM, a Text- and Keyframe-conditioned CAMera-motion synthesis framework based on generative masked modeling. We represent camera dynamics using a 12-dimensional kinematic feature comprising position, velocity, and a continuous rotation representation and discretize them into hierarchical motion tokens via a Residual Vector Quantizer (RVQ). A two-stage masked transformer architecture then learns to reconstruct and refine these tokens, utilizing explicit self- and cross-attention modules for multimodal conditioning. A central feature of our framework is sparse visual keyframe conditioning: users can provide free-form text prompts together with RGB observations at selected timestamps, which provide temporally localized visual guidance for generating coherent in-between trajectories. Furthermore, to advance evaluation standards, we curate RealEstate10K-Cap, a large-scale text-camera dataset, and establish a cross-domain benchmark with a Universal CLaTr Evaluator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TKCAM surpasses recent state-of-the-art baselines on Fréchet distance (FID), text-motion matching scores, and retrieval metrics (R@K), while additional analyses evaluate temporal smoothness and cross-domain generalization. Code is available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11105
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Transforming Image Editors into Video Editors
2026-10-08 00:43:09Feng Wang, Zijie Li, Ceyuan Yang, Alan Yuille, Peng WangAbstract
Recent image editing systems have achieved impressive semantic understanding, visual fidelity, and instruction-following ability, while video editing remains substantially more difficult and costly. In this paper, we present a simple alternative to end-to-end video editing: instead of training a monolithic video editor, we transform a strong image editor into a video editor through anchor-based generation. Our key insight is that video editing can be decomposed into two subproblems: editing a sparse set of keyframes and propagating those edits across time. Based on this observation, we propose Anchor-based Video Editing (AVE), a two-stage framework in which a powerful image editor first performs composed editing on selected keyframes, and a motion-guided image-to-video diffusion model then generates the final video by treating the edited keyframes as fixed anchors. This design directly inherits the strengths of modern image editors while avoiding expensive end-to-end video editing training. Experiments on IVEBench and VIE-Bench show that AVE achieves strong performance in instruction following, temporal consistency, and content fidelity. Further ablations reveal that final video editing quality is strongly correlated with the quality of the image editor, suggesting that future progress in video editing may come from stronger image editing foundations and lightweight transfer to video. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11037
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Sparse-GS2Mesh: 3D Gaussian Splatting Guided by Novel Stereo Views and 2DGS for Sparse View Surface Reconstruction
2026-10-07 23:56:57Younghyun Noh, Minje Kim, Tae-Kyun KimAbstract
Surface reconstruction under sparse-view settings remains challenging due to limited geometric cues. Volume rendering methods based on signed distance functions often produce over-smoothed surfaces, while 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), though time-efficient, suffers from incomplete geometry due to the lack of reliable depth supervision and the limitation of being optimized only from given input views. In this paper, we present Sparse-GS2Mesh, a stereo-aware framework for surface reconstruction from sparse views. While 3DGS and stereo matching have been leveraged for surface reconstruction under dense view settings, we extend them to operate effectively under sparse view conditions by first initializing 3DGS using epipolar depth priors to mitigate the 3DGS overfitting problem, followed by our three key components: (I) adaptive baseline selection, (II) fine-tuning with a stereo matching network, and (III) 2D/3D co-regularized fine-tuning. Given a warmed-up 3DGS initialized with epipolar depth, the adaptive baseline selection automatically determines a baseline to synthesize for each sparse view. We then fine-tune 3DGS by backpropagating depth-refining gradients from the stereo matching network, effectively specializing the 3DGS for stereo matching. The 2D/3D co-regularization further helps obtain stable reconstruction, addressing weak geometric cues in close stereo views. Sparse-GS2Mesh achieves a 15\% improvement over state-of-the-art methods in little-overlap settings and comparable results in large-overlap settings. Codes will be publicly available.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04203
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Less from More: Reinforcing Sparse Video Reasoning from Dense References
2026-10-07 20:51:59Wenfang Sun, Yingjun Du, Cees G. M. SnoekAbstract
Video-language models commonly assume that more temporal observations lead to more reliable reasoning. We question this assumption and argue that the key challenge is not merely processing more video frames efficiently, but learning to reason reliably under limited temporal evidence. We propose SAVER, a dense-to-sparse post-training framework that uses dense video views as training-time references for sparse-frame inference. During reinforcement post-training, paired dense and sparse views are optimized with grounding rewards and a reliability-gated reference reward, encouraging sparse view predictions to preserve task-relevant temporal evidence. Notably, SAVER is trained only on 1,250 randomly sampled temporal grounding examples, without using any video question answering annotations. Across three temporal grounding benchmarks and six video question-answering benchmarks, SAVER consistently improves performance across frame budgets. In particular, SAVER can match or surpass dense-frame Qwen3.5 baselines while using substantially fewer frames. These results show that temporal grounding can serve as an effective evidence-localization proxy for learning sparse video reasoning that transfers to broader video understanding tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10893
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Sparse Attention Is Matrix Approximation, Not Choosing from a Bag of Values
2026-10-07 20:17:13Fang Wan, Xufeng Liu, Fan Li, Yi LiuAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many domains, but their efficiency is limited by the quadratic cost of attention with respect to prompt length. Sparse attention reduces this cost by retaining only a small fraction of query-key interactions to approximate the full attention matrix. However, existing methods are trapped in a mathematically wrong view: they simply keep large scalar entries or high-mass regions of the attention matrix. This treats the attention matrix as a bag of values, ignoring that it is used as a structured matrix whose entries jointly determine the attention output through multiplication with value vectors. We argue that this is the core conceptual issue: sparse attention should be formulated as matrix approximation, not as blindly choosing the largest values from a bag of entries. Based on this view, we propose Matrix Approximation Sparse Attention (MASA). MASA replaces raw attention-mass ranking with a closed-form score that measures how much each sparse unit reduces matrix-product approximation error. As a theory-grounded plug-in correction, MASA can be added to existing sparse attention frameworks without changing their sparse kernels or budgets. Extensive experiments across multiple sparse attention methods, benchmarks, and LLM backbones show consistent accuracy gains, supporting both MASA and the matrix-approximation view of sparse attention.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10871
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Disentangling Linguistic and Paralinguistic Information with Routed Sparse Autoencoders
2026-10-07 20:10:07Beimnet Bekele Guta, Xiaoyu Yang, Guangzhi Sun, Philip C. WoodlandAbstract
Self-supervised speech encoders contain linguistic and paralinguistic information in a shared, entangled representation space. We combine a TopK sparse autoencoder with route-specific supervision and cross-factor adversaries. Across frozen SPEAR and WavLM encoders, independent probes show factor-specific retention and suppression: linguistic information remains stronger in the linguistic route, while paralinguistic factors, including speaker identity, emotion, and prosody, are retained in the paralinguistic route and substantially reduced in the linguistic route. The route organisation learned on LibriSpeech persists on MSP-Podcast without representation-side retraining. Feature-space route interventions further transfer the swapped factor while largely preserving the information carried by the unchanged route. These results show consistent route-selective separation across encoders, corpora, independent probes, and representation-level interventions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10865
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RoboPrompt: Intuitive Robot Policy Steering with Sparse Human Input
2026-10-07 17:58:53Yanwen Zou, Chenyang Shi, Guoxuan Xu, Wenye Yu, Wendi Chen, Ye Pan, Cewu Lu, Chuan WenAbstract
End-to-end robot policies trained through imitation learning remain constrained by limited data diversity, making reliable zero-shot deployment in real-world settings challenging. Shared-autonomy methods enable human correction through teleoperation, but specialized hardware and operator training hinder deployment at scale. Other approaches incorporate human guidance as additional policy inputs, often requiring architectural changes and dedicated training for steerability, which limits their applicability across policies. We present RoboPrompt, a general-purpose, lightweight robot policy steering system that enables users to guide policy behavior through intuitive, sparse inputs, including drawn traces, target points, and coarse directional instructions. RoboPrompt decouples human-intention translation from the underlying policy: a reusable module converts human guidance into action drafts, which are refined through the diffusion or flow-matching dynamics of the base policy. By controlling action generation in noise space, RoboPrompt balances human intent with the policy prior without modifying the base policy architecture or fine-tuning it for steerability. Experiments demonstrate effective steering across Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, and FastWAM. We further use steered rollouts for online policy improvement through DAgger. After 2-3 rounds of iteration, average success rates increase by 15.5\% for $\pi_{0.5}$ across three tasks and by 21.3\% across three policies(Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, FastWAM) on the Insert Bread task, while average human intervention counts decrease by 44.0\% (2.86 to 1.60) and 81.9\% (2.60 to 0.47), respectively.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10534
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MultiFly: A Real-World Multimodal Aerial Dataset with Annotation-Efficient Label Transfer and Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency
2026-10-07 16:31:00Markus Gross, Andreas Greiner, Taehyoung Kim, Sivasubiramaniam Subbiah, Toma\v{z} Coti\v{c}, Sai Bharadwaj Matha, Conrad Christoph, Oussema Dhaouadi, Simon Zieher, Surya Vijaya Kumar, Gordon Elger, Henri Mee{\ss}, Olaf Wysocki, Paul Spannaus, Daniel CremersAbstract
We introduce MultiFly, a real-world, low-altitude UAV dataset for semantic perception across RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and radar modalities. MultiFly provides 17,272 synchronized samples from four suburban scenes with frame-wise annotations for 15 semantic classes, together with calibration and GNSS-RTK/IMU measurements. To avoid costly and inconsistent modality-specific annotation, we propagate labels from only 115 manually annotated RGB images through shared geometric representations to all four modalities. This approach generates semantic labels for 17,157 additional RGB images, 17,272 thermal images, 840M LiDAR points, and 3.4M radar points. Transferred annotations achieve 89.93% average agreement with held-out manual annotations, and 90.94% average semantic consistency across all six modality pairs. We further establish semantic segmentation benchmarks for all four modalities, revealing distinct architectural behavior for dense LiDAR and sparse radar data. Taken together, MultiFly provides a scalable foundation for multimodal aerial perception and, to the best of our knowledge, the first public real-world low-altitude aerial benchmark that combines consistent frame-wise semantic annotations for RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and radar. Data at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10359
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