Daily Papers

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

The advancement of remote sensing technology has improved the spatial resolution of satellite imagery, facilitating more detailed visual representations for diverse interpretations. However, existing methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities across varied applications. While some contemporary foundation models demonstrate potential, they are hindered by insufficient cross-task adaptability and primarily process low-resolution imagery of restricted sizes, thus failing to fully exploit high-resolution data or leverage comprehensive large-scene semantics. Crucially, remote sensing imagery differs fundamentally from natural images, as key foreground targets (eg., maritime objects, artificial structures) often occupy minimal spatial proportions (~1%) and exhibit sparse distributions. Efficiently modeling cross-task generalizable knowledge from lengthy 2D tokens (~100,000) poses a significant challenge yet remains critical for remote sensing image understanding. Motivated by the selective attention mechanisms inherent to the human visual system, we propose DynamicVis, a dynamic visual perception foundation model for remote sensing imagery. The framework integrates a novel dynamic region perception backbone based on the selective state space model, which strategically balances localized detail extraction with global contextual integration, enabling computationally efficient encoding of large-scale data while maintaining architectural scalability. To enhance cross-task knowledge transferring, we introduce a multi-instance learning paradigm utilizing meta-embedding representations, trained on million-scale region-level annotations. Evaluations across nine downstream tasks demonstrate the model's versatility. DynamicVis achieves multi-level feature modeling with exceptional efficiency, processing (2048x2048) pixels with 97 ms latency (6% of ViT's) and 833 MB GPU memory (3% of ViT's).

Due to the depth degradation effect in residual connections, many efficient Vision Transformers models that rely on stacking layers for information exchange often fail to form sufficient information mixing, leading to unnatural visual perception. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose Aggregated Attention, a biomimetic design-based token mixer that simulates biological foveal vision and continuous eye movement while enabling each token on the feature map to have a global perception. Furthermore, we incorporate learnable tokens that interact with conventional queries and keys, which further diversifies the generation of affinity matrices beyond merely relying on the similarity between queries and keys. Our approach does not rely on stacking for information exchange, thus effectively avoiding depth degradation and achieving natural visual perception. Additionally, we propose Convolutional GLU, a channel mixer that bridges the gap between GLU and SE mechanism, which empowers each token to have channel attention based on its nearest neighbor image features, enhancing local modeling capability and model robustness. We combine aggregated attention and convolutional GLU to create a new visual backbone called TransNeXt. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TransNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model sizes. At a resolution of 224^2, TransNeXt-Tiny attains an ImageNet accuracy of 84.0%, surpassing ConvNeXt-B with 69% fewer parameters. Our TransNeXt-Base achieves an ImageNet accuracy of 86.2% and an ImageNet-A accuracy of 61.6% at a resolution of 384^2, a COCO object detection mAP of 57.1, and an ADE20K semantic segmentation mIoU of 54.7.

Programming robot behavior in a complex world faces challenges on multiple levels, from dextrous low-level skills to high-level planning and reasoning. Recent pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning ability in few-shot robotic planning. However, it remains challenging to ground LLMs in multimodal sensory input and continuous action output, while enabling a robot to interact with its environment and acquire novel information as its policies unfold. We develop a robot interaction scenario with a partially observable state, which necessitates a robot to decide on a range of epistemic actions in order to sample sensory information among multiple modalities, before being able to execute the task correctly. An interactive perception framework is therefore proposed with an LLM as its backbone, whose ability is exploited to instruct epistemic actions and to reason over the resulting multimodal sensations (vision, sound, haptics, proprioception), as well as to plan an entire task execution based on the interactively acquired information. Our study demonstrates that LLMs can provide high-level planning and reasoning skills and control interactive robot behavior in a multimodal environment, while multimodal modules with the context of the environmental state help ground the LLMs and extend their processing ability. The project website can be found at https://matcha-model.github.io{blue{https://matcha-model.github.io/}}.

Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with 3D-related tasks such as spatial cognition and physical understanding, which are crucial for real-world applications like robotics and embodied agents. We attribute this to a modality gap between the 3D tasks and the 2D training of VLM, which led to inefficient retrieval of 3D information from 2D input. To bridge this gap, we introduce SandboxVLM, a simple yet effective framework that leverages abstract bounding boxes to encode geometric structure and physical kinematics for VLM. Specifically, we design a 3D Sandbox reconstruction and perception pipeline comprising four stages: generating multi-view priors with abstract control, proxy elevation, multi-view voting and clustering, and 3D-aware reasoning. Evaluated in zero-shot settings across multiple benchmarks and VLM backbones, our approach consistently improves spatial intelligence, achieving an 8.3\% gain on SAT Real compared with baseline methods for instance. These results demonstrate that equipping VLMs with a 3D abstraction substantially enhances their 3D reasoning ability without additional training, suggesting new possibilities for general-purpose embodied intelligence.

Multi-modality fusion and multi-task learning are becoming trendy in 3D autonomous driving scenario, considering robust prediction and computation budget. However, naively extending the existing framework to the domain of multi-modality multi-task learning remains ineffective and even poisonous due to the notorious modality bias and task conflict. Previous works manually coordinate the learning framework with empirical knowledge, which may lead to sub-optima. To mitigate the issue, we propose a novel yet simple multi-level gradient calibration learning framework across tasks and modalities during optimization. Specifically, the gradients, produced by the task heads and used to update the shared backbone, will be calibrated at the backbone's last layer to alleviate the task conflict. Before the calibrated gradients are further propagated to the modality branches of the backbone, their magnitudes will be calibrated again to the same level, ensuring the downstream tasks pay balanced attention to different modalities. Experiments on large-scale benchmark nuScenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, eg, an absolute 14.4% mIoU improvement on map segmentation and 1.4% mAP improvement on 3D detection, advancing the application of 3D autonomous driving in the domain of multi-modality fusion and multi-task learning. We also discuss the links between modalities and tasks.

Depth-aware video panoptic segmentation is a promising approach to camera based scene understanding. However, the current state-of-the-art methods require costly video annotations and use a complex training pipeline compared to their image-based equivalents. In this paper, we present a new approach titled Unified Perception that achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring video-based training. Our method employs a simple two-stage cascaded tracking algorithm that (re)uses object embeddings computed in an image-based network. Experimental results on the Cityscapes-DVPS dataset demonstrate that our method achieves an overall DVPQ of 57.1, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our tracking strategies are effective for long-term object association on KITTI-STEP, achieving an STQ of 59.1 which exceeded the performance of state-of-the-art methods that employ the same backbone network. Code is available at: https://tue-mps.github.io/unipercept

In this work, we introduce a self-supervised feature representation learning framework DreamTeacher that utilizes generative networks for pre-training downstream image backbones. We propose to distill knowledge from a trained generative model into standard image backbones that have been well engineered for specific perception tasks. We investigate two types of knowledge distillation: 1) distilling learned generative features onto target image backbones as an alternative to pretraining these backbones on large labeled datasets such as ImageNet, and 2) distilling labels obtained from generative networks with task heads onto logits of target backbones. We perform extensive analyses on multiple generative models, dense prediction benchmarks, and several pre-training regimes. We empirically find that our DreamTeacher significantly outperforms existing self-supervised representation learning approaches across the board. Unsupervised ImageNet pre-training with DreamTeacher leads to significant improvements over ImageNet classification pre-training on downstream datasets, showcasing generative models, and diffusion generative models specifically, as a promising approach to representation learning on large, diverse datasets without requiring manual annotation.

Human visual recognition system shows astonishing capability of compressing visual information into a set of tokens containing rich representations without label supervision. One critical driving principle behind it is perceptual grouping. Despite being widely used in computer vision in the early 2010s, it remains a mystery whether perceptual grouping can be leveraged to derive a neural visual recognition backbone that generates as powerful representations. In this paper, we propose the Perceptual Group Tokenizer, a model that entirely relies on grouping operations to extract visual features and perform self-supervised representation learning, where a series of grouping operations are used to iteratively hypothesize the context for pixels or superpixels to refine feature representations. We show that the proposed model can achieve competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art vision architectures, and inherits desirable properties including adaptive computation without re-training, and interpretability. Specifically, Perceptual Group Tokenizer achieves 80.3% on ImageNet-1K self-supervised learning benchmark with linear probe evaluation, marking a new progress under this paradigm.

This work presents the network architecture EVP (Enhanced Visual Perception). EVP builds on the previous work VPD which paved the way to use the Stable Diffusion network for computer vision tasks. We propose two major enhancements. First, we develop the Inverse Multi-Attentive Feature Refinement (IMAFR) module which enhances feature learning capabilities by aggregating spatial information from higher pyramid levels. Second, we propose a novel image-text alignment module for improved feature extraction of the Stable Diffusion backbone. The resulting architecture is suitable for a wide variety of tasks and we demonstrate its performance in the context of single-image depth estimation with a specialized decoder using classification-based bins and referring segmentation with an off-the-shelf decoder. Comprehensive experiments conducted on established datasets show that EVP achieves state-of-the-art results in single-image depth estimation for indoor (NYU Depth v2, 11.8% RMSE improvement over VPD) and outdoor (KITTI) environments, as well as referring segmentation (RefCOCO, 2.53 IoU improvement over ReLA). The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/EVP.

Diffusion models are generative models with impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities and have spurred a new wave of creative methods for classical machine learning tasks. However, the best way to harness the perceptual knowledge of these generative models for visual tasks is still an open question. Specifically, it is unclear how to use the prompting interface when applying diffusion backbones to vision tasks. We find that automatically generated captions can improve text-image alignment and significantly enhance a model's cross-attention maps, leading to better perceptual performance. Our approach improves upon the current SOTA in diffusion-based semantic segmentation on ADE20K and the current overall SOTA in depth estimation on NYUv2. Furthermore, our method generalizes to the cross-domain setting; we use model personalization and caption modifications to align our model to the target domain and find improvements over unaligned baselines. Our object detection model, trained on Pascal VOC, achieves SOTA results on Watercolor2K. Our segmentation method, trained on Cityscapes, achieves SOTA results on Dark Zurich-val and Nighttime Driving. Project page: https://www.vision.caltech.edu/tadp/

Perception is crucial in the realm of autonomous driving systems, where bird's eye view (BEV)-based architectures have recently reached state-of-the-art performance. The desirability of self-supervised representation learning stems from the expensive and laborious process of annotating 2D and 3D data. Although previous research has investigated pretraining methods for both LiDAR and camera-based 3D object detection, a unified pretraining framework for multimodal BEV perception is missing. In this study, we introduce CALICO, a novel framework that applies contrastive objectives to both LiDAR and camera backbones. Specifically, CALICO incorporates two stages: point-region contrast (PRC) and region-aware distillation (RAD). PRC better balances the region- and scene-level representation learning on the LiDAR modality and offers significant performance improvement compared to existing methods. RAD effectively achieves contrastive distillation on our self-trained teacher model. CALICO's efficacy is substantiated by extensive evaluations on 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks, where it delivers significant performance improvements. Notably, CALICO outperforms the baseline method by 10.5% and 8.6% on NDS and mAP. Moreover, CALICO boosts the robustness of multimodal 3D object detection against adversarial attacks and corruption. Additionally, our framework can be tailored to different backbones and heads, positioning it as a promising approach for multimodal BEV perception.

Beyond high-fidelity image synthesis, diffusion models have recently exhibited promising results in dense visual perception tasks. However, most existing work treats diffusion models as a standalone component for perception tasks, employing them either solely for off-the-shelf data augmentation or as mere feature extractors. In contrast to these isolated and thus sub-optimal efforts, we introduce a unified, versatile, diffusion-based framework, Diff-2-in-1, that can simultaneously handle both multi-modal data generation and dense visual perception, through a unique exploitation of the diffusion-denoising process. Within this framework, we further enhance discriminative visual perception via multi-modal generation, by utilizing the denoising network to create multi-modal data that mirror the distribution of the original training set. Importantly, Diff-2-in-1 optimizes the utilization of the created diverse and faithful data by leveraging a novel self-improving learning mechanism. Comprehensive experimental evaluations validate the effectiveness of our framework, showcasing consistent performance improvements across various discriminative backbones and high-quality multi-modal data generation characterized by both realism and usefulness.

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the new trend of generative models and have demonstrated a powerful ability of conditional synthesis. Among those, text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image-text pairs are highly controllable by customizable prompts. Unlike the unconditional generative models that focus on low-level attributes and details, text-to-image diffusion models contain more high-level knowledge thanks to the vision-language pre-training. In this paper, we propose VPD (Visual Perception with a pre-trained Diffusion model), a new framework that exploits the semantic information of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model in visual perception tasks. Instead of using the pre-trained denoising autoencoder in a diffusion-based pipeline, we simply use it as a backbone and aim to study how to take full advantage of the learned knowledge. Specifically, we prompt the denoising decoder with proper textual inputs and refine the text features with an adapter, leading to a better alignment to the pre-trained stage and making the visual contents interact with the text prompts. We also propose to utilize the cross-attention maps between the visual features and the text features to provide explicit guidance. Compared with other pre-training methods, we show that vision-language pre-trained diffusion models can be faster adapted to downstream visual perception tasks using the proposed VPD. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation, referring image segmentation and depth estimation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Notably, VPD attains 0.254 RMSE on NYUv2 depth estimation and 73.3% oIoU on RefCOCO-val referring image segmentation, establishing new records on these two benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/wl-zhao/VPD

Although multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities across diverse domains, their application in generating fine-grained 3D perception and prediction outputs in autonomous driving remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose DrivePI, a novel spatial-aware 4D MLLM that serves as a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that is also compatible with vision-action (VA) models. Our method jointly performs spatial understanding, 3D perception (i.e., 3D occupancy), prediction (i.e., occupancy flow), and planning (i.e., action outputs) in parallel through end-to-end optimization. To obtain both precise geometric information and rich visual appearance, our approach integrates point clouds, multi-view images, and language instructions within a unified MLLM architecture. We further develop a data engine to generate text-occupancy and text-flow QA pairs for 4D spatial understanding. Remarkably, with only a 0.5B Qwen2.5 model as MLLM backbone, DrivePI as a single unified model matches or exceeds both existing VLA models and specialized VA models. Specifically, compared to VLA models, DrivePI outperforms OpenDriveVLA-7B by 2.5% mean accuracy on nuScenes-QA and reduces collision rate by 70% over ORION (from 0.37% to 0.11%) on nuScenes. Against specialized VA models, DrivePI surpasses FB-OCC by 10.3 RayIoU for 3D occupancy on OpenOcc, reduces the mAVE from 0.591 to 0.509 for occupancy flow on OpenOcc, and achieves 32% lower L2 error than VAD (from 0.72m to 0.49m) for planning on nuScenes. Code will be available at https://github.com/happinesslz/DrivePI

Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in three-dimensional space. However, existing camera encoding methods often rely on simplified pinhole assumptions, restricting generalization across the diverse intrinsics and lens distortions in real-world cameras. We introduce Relative Ray Encoding, a geometry-consistent representation that unifies complete camera information, including 6-DoF poses, intrinsics, and lens distortions. To evaluate its capability under diverse controllability demands, we adopt camera-controlled text-to-video generation as a testbed task. Within this setting, we further identify pitch and roll as two components effective for Absolute Orientation Encoding, enabling full control over the initial camera orientation. Together, these designs form UCPE (Unified Camera Positional Encoding), which integrates into a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer through a lightweight spatial attention adapter, adding less than 1% trainable parameters while achieving state-of-the-art camera controllability and visual fidelity. To facilitate systematic training and evaluation, we construct a large video dataset covering a wide range of camera motions and lens types. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCPE in camera-controllable video generation and highlight its potential as a general camera representation for Transformers across future multi-view, video, and 3D tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE.

Jointly processing information from multiple sensors is crucial to achieving accurate and robust perception for reliable autonomous driving systems. However, current 3D perception research follows a modality-specific paradigm, leading to additional computation overheads and inefficient collaboration between different sensor data. In this paper, we present an efficient multi-modal backbone for outdoor 3D perception named UniTR, which processes a variety of modalities with unified modeling and shared parameters. Unlike previous works, UniTR introduces a modality-agnostic transformer encoder to handle these view-discrepant sensor data for parallel modal-wise representation learning and automatic cross-modal interaction without additional fusion steps. More importantly, to make full use of these complementary sensor types, we present a novel multi-modal integration strategy by both considering semantic-abundant 2D perspective and geometry-aware 3D sparse neighborhood relations. UniTR is also a fundamentally task-agnostic backbone that naturally supports different 3D perception tasks. It sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark, achieving +1.1 NDS higher for 3D object detection and +12.0 higher mIoU for BEV map segmentation with lower inference latency. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/UniTR .

Modern computer vision is converging on a closed loop in which perception, reasoning and generation mutually reinforce each other. However, this loop remains incomplete: the top-down influence of high-level reasoning on the foundational learning of low-level perceptual features is not yet underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a new paradigm for pretraining foundation models in downstream domains. We introduce Visual insTruction Pretraining (ViTP), a novel approach that directly leverages reasoning to enhance perception. ViTP embeds a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone within a Vision-Language Model and pretrains it end-to-end using a rich corpus of visual instruction data curated from target downstream domains. ViTP is powered by our proposed Visual Robustness Learning (VRL), which compels the ViT to learn robust and domain-relevant features from a sparse set of visual tokens. Extensive experiments on 16 challenging remote sensing and medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that ViTP establishes new state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of downstream tasks. The code is available at github.com/zcablii/ViTP.

New era has unlocked exciting possibilities for extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle 3D vision-language tasks. However, most existing 3D multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) rely on compressing holistic 3D scene information or segmenting independent objects to perform these tasks, which limits their spatial awareness due to insufficient representation of the richness inherent in 3D scenes. To overcome these limitations, we propose Spatial 3D-LLM, a 3D MLLM specifically designed to enhance spatial awareness for 3D vision-language tasks by enriching the spatial embeddings of 3D scenes. Spatial 3D-LLM integrates an LLM backbone with a progressive spatial awareness scheme that progressively captures spatial information as the perception field expands, generating location-enriched 3D scene embeddings to serve as visual prompts. Furthermore, we introduce two novel tasks: 3D object distance measurement and 3D layout editing, and construct a 3D instruction dataset, MODEL, to evaluate the model's spatial awareness capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that Spatial 3D-LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of 3D vision-language tasks, revealing the improvements stemmed from our progressive spatial awareness scheme of mining more profound spatial information. Our code is available at https://github.com/bjshuyuan/Spatial-3D-LLM.

Top-down attention plays a crucial role in the human vision system, wherein the brain initially obtains a rough overview of a scene to discover salient cues (i.e., overview first), followed by a more careful finer-grained examination (i.e., look closely next). However, modern ConvNets remain confined to a pyramid structure that successively downsamples the feature map for receptive field expansion, neglecting this crucial biomimetic principle. We present OverLoCK, the first pure ConvNet backbone architecture that explicitly incorporates a top-down attention mechanism. Unlike pyramid backbone networks, our design features a branched architecture with three synergistic sub-networks: 1) a Base-Net that encodes low/mid-level features; 2) a lightweight Overview-Net that generates dynamic top-down attention through coarse global context modeling (i.e., overview first); and 3) a robust Focus-Net that performs finer-grained perception guided by top-down attention (i.e., look closely next). To fully unleash the power of top-down attention, we further propose a novel context-mixing dynamic convolution (ContMix) that effectively models long-range dependencies while preserving inherent local inductive biases even when the input resolution increases, addressing critical limitations in existing convolutions. Our OverLoCK exhibits a notable performance improvement over existing methods. For instance, OverLoCK-T achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 84.2%, significantly surpassing ConvNeXt-B while using only around one-third of the FLOPs/parameters. On object detection, our OverLoCK-S clearly surpasses MogaNet-B by 1% in AP^b. On semantic segmentation, our OverLoCK-T remarkably improves UniRepLKNet-T by 1.7% in mIoU. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/OverLoCK.

Computer-using agents have shown strong potential to boost human productivity and enable new application forms across platforms. While recent advances have led to usable applications, existing benchmarks fail to account for the internal task heterogeneity and the corresponding agent capabilities, as well as their alignment with actual user demands-hindering both targeted capability development and the reliable transition of research progress into practical deployment. To bridge the gap, we present OS-MAP, a benchmark for daily computer-using automation that organizes its 416 realistic tasks across 15 applications along two key dimensions: a five-level taxonomy of automation and a generalization scope derived from a real-world user demand hierarchy. To enable fine-grained analysis of required capabilities and alignment with real-world scenarios, OS-MAP evaluates agents along two dimensions: automation level across a five-level taxonomy, and generalization scope across a demand hierarchy. This design captures varying levels of required agent autonomy and generalization, forming a performance-generalization evaluation matrix for structured and comprehensive assessment. Experiments show that even State-of-the-Art agents with VLM backbones struggle with higher-level tasks involving perception, reasoning, and coordination-highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of current strengths and limitations to drive the future progress in computer-using agents research and deployment. All code, environments, baselines, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/OS-Copilot/OS-Map.

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods have found significant success by exploring essential properties of videos, e.g. speed, temporal order, etc. This work exploits an essential yet under-explored property of videos, the video continuity, to obtain supervision signals for self-supervised representation learning. Specifically, we formulate three novel continuity-related pretext tasks, i.e. continuity justification, discontinuity localization, and missing section approximation, that jointly supervise a shared backbone for video representation learning. This self-supervision approach, termed as Continuity Perception Network (CPNet), solves the three tasks altogether and encourages the backbone network to learn local and long-ranged motion and context representations. It outperforms prior arts on multiple downstream tasks, such as action recognition, video retrieval, and action localization. Additionally, the video continuity can be complementary to other coarse-grained video properties for representation learning, and integrating the proposed pretext task to prior arts can yield much performance gains.

Robotic vision applications often necessitate a wide range of visual perception tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and identification. While there have been substantial advances in these individual tasks, integrating specialized models into a unified vision pipeline presents significant engineering challenges and costs. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as novel backbones for various downstream tasks. We argue that leveraging the pre-training capabilities of MLLMs enables the creation of a simplified framework, thus mitigating the need for task-specific encoders. Specifically, the large-scale pretrained knowledge in MLLMs allows for easier fine-tuning to downstream robotic vision tasks and yields superior performance. We introduce the RoboLLM framework, equipped with a BEiT-3 backbone, to address all visual perception tasks in the ARMBench challenge-a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset about real-world warehouse scenarios. RoboLLM not only outperforms existing baselines but also substantially reduces the engineering burden associated with model selection and tuning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/longkukuhi/armbench.

As autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistance systems have entered wider deployment, there is an increased interest in building robust perception systems using radars. Radar-based systems are lower cost and more robust to adverse weather conditions than their LiDAR-based counterparts; however the point clouds produced are typically noisy and sparse by comparison. In order to combat these challenges, recent research has focused on consuming the raw radar data, instead of the final radar point cloud. We build on this line of work and demonstrate that by bringing elements of the signal processing pipeline into our network and then pre-training on the signal processing task, we are able to achieve state of the art detection performance on the RADIal dataset. Our method uses expensive offline signal processing algorithms to pseudo-label data and trains a network to distill this information into a fast convolutional backbone, which can then be finetuned for perception tasks. Extensive experiment results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide step-level supervision that improves the reliability of reasoning in large language models. While PRMs have been extensively studied in text-based domains, their extension to Vision Language Models (VLMs) remains limited. Existing Vision-Language PRMs (VL-PRMs) rely on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for data construction, which can often produce noisy supervision signals and limit generalization across tasks. In this work, we aim to elucidate the design space of VL-PRMs by exploring diverse strategies for dataset construction, training, and test-time scaling. First, we introduce a hybrid data synthesis framework that combines MCTS with judgments from a strong VLM, producing more accurate step-level labels. Second, we propose perception-focused supervision, enabling our PRM to explicitly detect errors at the visual grounding stage of reasoning. Third, we systematically evaluate multiple test-time scaling strategies, showing that our PRMs can reliably guide VLMs toward more accurate solutions. Our experiments covering five diverse multimodal benchmarks (MMMU, PuzzleVQA, AlgoPuzzleVQA, MathVista, and MathVision) reveal several key insights: (i) VL-PRMs when used as Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) during test-time scaling (TTS) can outperform VL-PRM guided process step selection, (ii) smaller VL-PRMs can match or even surpass larger ones in detecting process errors, (iii) VL-PRMs uncover latent reasoning abilities in stronger VLM backbones, (iv) perception-level supervision leads to significant gains in test-time scaling, and (v) TTS performance of different policies improve on advanced math reasoning datasets despite not training VL-PRMs on such datasets. We hope our work will motivate further research and support the advancement of VLMs.

Tabular data is the most abundant data type in the world, powering systems in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and beyond. As tabular datasets grow and span multiple related targets, there is an increasing need to exploit shared task information for improved multitask generalization. Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful way to improve generalization and efficiency, yet most existing work focuses narrowly on large-scale recommendation systems, leaving its potential in broader tabular domains largely underexplored. Also, existing MTL approaches for tabular data predominantly rely on multi-layer perceptron-based backbones, which struggle to capture complex feature interactions and often fail to scale when data is abundant, a limitation that transformer architectures have overcome in other domains. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiTab-Net, the first multitask transformer architecture specifically designed for large tabular data. MultiTab-Net employs a novel multitask masked-attention mechanism that dynamically models feature-feature dependencies while mitigating task competition. Through extensive experiments, we show that MultiTab-Net consistently achieves higher multitask gain than existing MTL architectures and single-task transformers across diverse domains including large-scale recommendation data, census-like socioeconomic data, and physics datasets, spanning a wide range of task counts, task types, and feature modalities. In addition, we contribute MultiTab-Bench, a generalized multitask synthetic dataset generator that enables systematic evaluation of multitask dynamics by tuning task count, task correlations, and relative task complexity. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Armanfard-Lab/MultiTab.

Recently, it has been shown that for offline deep reinforcement learning (DRL), pre-training Decision Transformer with a large language corpus can improve downstream performance (Reid et al., 2022). A natural question to ask is whether this performance gain can only be achieved with language pre-training, or can be achieved with simpler pre-training schemes which do not involve language. In this paper, we first show that language is not essential for improved performance, and indeed pre-training with synthetic IID data for a small number of updates can match the performance gains from pre-training with a large language corpus; moreover, pre-training with data generated by a one-step Markov chain can further improve the performance. Inspired by these experimental results, we then consider pre-training Conservative Q-Learning (CQL), a popular offline DRL algorithm, which is Q-learning-based and typically employs a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) backbone. Surprisingly, pre-training with simple synthetic data for a small number of updates can also improve CQL, providing consistent performance improvement on D4RL Gym locomotion datasets. The results of this paper not only illustrate the importance of pre-training for offline DRL but also show that the pre-training data can be synthetic and generated with remarkably simple mechanisms.