Hanjing Ye

Jingwen Yu, Hanjing Ye, Jianhao Jiao et al.

Visual loop closure detection is an important module in visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which associates current camera observation with previously visited places. Loop closures correct drifts in trajectory estimation to build a globally consistent map. However, a false loop closure can be fatal, so verification is required as an additional step to ensure robustness by rejecting the false positive loops. Geometric verification has been a well-acknowledged solution that leverages spatial clues provided by local feature matching to find true positives. Existing feature matching methods focus on homography and pose estimation in long-term visual localization, lacking references for geometric verification. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a unified benchmark targeting geometric verification of loop closure detection under long-term conditional variations. Furthermore, we evaluate six representative local feature matching methods (handcrafted and learning-based) under the benchmark, with in-depth analysis for limitations and future directions.

Jiahang Liu, Yunpeng Qi, Jiazhao Zhang et al.

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

Yu Zhan, Hanjing Ye, Hong Zhang

Localizing a person from a moving monocular camera is critical for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). To estimate the 3D human position from a 2D image, existing methods either depend on the geometric assumption of a fixed camera or use a position regression model trained on datasets containing little camera ego-motion. These methods are vulnerable to fierce camera ego-motion, resulting in inaccurate person localization. We consider person localization as a part of a pose estimation problem. By representing a human with a four-point model, our method jointly estimates the 2D camera attitude and the person's 3D location through optimization. Evaluations on both public datasets and real robot experiments demonstrate our method outperforms baselines in person localization accuracy. Our method is further implemented into a person-following system and deployed on an agile quadruped robot.

Yufan Mao, Hanjing Ye, Wenlong Dong et al.

Navigating complex environments requires robots to effectively store observations as memories and leverage them to answer human queries about spatial locations, which is a critical yet underexplored research challenge. While prior work has made progress in constructing robotic memory, few have addressed the principled mechanisms needed for efficient memory retrieval and integration. To bridge this gap, we propose Meta-Memory, a large language model (LLM)-driven agent that constructs a high-density memory representation of the environment. The key innovation of Meta-Memory lies in its capacity to retrieve and integrate relevant memories through joint reasoning over semantic and spatial modalities in response to natural language location queries, thereby empowering robots with robust and accurate spatial reasoning capabilities. To evaluate its performance, we introduce SpaceLocQA, a large-scale dataset encompassing diverse real-world spatial question-answering scenarios. Experimental results show that Meta-Memory significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the SpaceLocQA and the public NaVQA benchmarks. Furthermore, we successfully deployed Meta-Memory on real-world robotic platforms, demonstrating its practical utility in complex environments. Project page: https://itsbaymax.github.io/meta-memory.github.io/ .