Jiangtao Li

Mengmeng Liu, Hao Cheng, Lin Chen et al.

Trajectory prediction for autonomous driving must continuously reason the motion stochasticity of road agents and comply with scene constraints. Existing methods typically rely on one-stage trajectory prediction models, which condition future trajectories on observed trajectories combined with fused scene information. However, they often struggle with complex scene constraints, such as those encountered at intersections. To this end, we present a novel method, called LAformer. It uses a temporally dense lane-aware estimation module to select only the top highly potential lane segments in an HD map, which effectively and continuously aligns motion dynamics with scene information, reducing the representation requirements for the subsequent attention-based decoder by filtering out irrelevant lane segments. Additionally, unlike one-stage prediction models, LAformer utilizes predictions from the first stage as anchor trajectories and adds a second-stage motion refinement module to further explore temporal consistency across the complete time horizon. Extensive experiments on Argoverse 1 and nuScenes demonstrate that LAformer achieves excellent performance for multimodal trajectory prediction.

Wei Wu, Honglin Chen, Wenhan Cao et al.

Tightly coupled SLAM formulations under mixed-rate sensing often bind temporal processing, local geometric association, estimator formulation, and map-update policy into method-specific designs. Such binding makes it difficult to vary one design choice without re-engineering the rest of the state-estimation process. This paper presents FUSE, a framework for unified state estimation in robotic SLAM systems. FUSE organizes the state-estimation interface around observation ingestion, propagation, update, and state query, and uses this interface to separate temporal processing, residual-ready local geometric association, estimator formulation, and map-update policy. A LiDAR--IMU instantiation is developed to examine the framework under mixed-rate sensing and directional degeneracy, where high-rate inertial propagation, LiDAR-triggered geometric update, residual screening, and degeneracy-aware correction operate through the same interface boundaries. On a 418 m loop-corridor sequence, the instantiation reports a 1.626~m end-to-end trajectory error, corresponding to a 7.9% relative error reduction compared with Faster-LIO, the lowest-error baseline on this sequence. The results support FUSE as a framework for organizing state-estimation design choices and show how the evaluated instantiation regularizes updates along weakly observable directions.

Mengmeng Liu, Jiuming Liu, Yunpeng Zhang et al.

Remarkable advances in recent 2D image and 3D shape generation have induced a significant focus on dynamic 4D content generation. However, previous 4D generation methods commonly struggle to maintain spatial-temporal consistency and adapt poorly to rapid temporal variations, due to the lack of effective spatial-temporal modeling. To address these problems, we propose a novel 4D generation network called 4DSTR, which modulates generative 4D Gaussian Splatting with spatial-temporal rectification. Specifically, temporal correlation across generated 4D sequences is designed to rectify deformable scales and rotations and guarantee temporal consistency. Furthermore, an adaptive spatial densification and pruning strategy is proposed to address significant temporal variations by dynamically adding or deleting Gaussian points with the awareness of their pre-frame movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 4DSTR achieves state-of-the-art performance in video-to-4D generation, excelling in reconstruction quality, spatial-temporal consistency, and adaptation to rapid temporal movements.

Mengmeng Liu, Michael Ying Yang, Jiuming Liu et al.

Visual-LiDAR odometry is a critical component for autonomous system localization, yet achieving high accuracy and strong robustness remains a challenge. Traditional approaches commonly struggle with sensor misalignment, fail to fully leverage temporal information, and require extensive manual tuning to handle diverse sensor configurations. To address these problems, we introduce DVLO4D, a novel visual-LiDAR odometry framework that leverages sparse spatial-temporal fusion to enhance accuracy and robustness. Our approach proposes three key innovations: (1) Sparse Query Fusion, which utilizes sparse LiDAR queries for effective multi-modal data fusion; (2) a Temporal Interaction and Update module that integrates temporally-predicted positions with current frame data, providing better initialization values for pose estimation and enhancing model's robustness against accumulative errors; and (3) a Temporal Clip Training strategy combined with a Collective Average Loss mechanism that aggregates losses across multiple frames, enabling global optimization and reducing the scale drift over long sequences. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Argoverse Odometry dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DVLO4D, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both pose accuracy and robustness. Additionally, our method has high efficiency, with an inference time of 82 ms, possessing the potential for the real-time deployment.

Ziang Zheng, Guojian Zhan, Bin Shuai et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable capability in acquiring robot skills, but learning each new skill still requires substantial data collection for training. The pretrain-and-finetune paradigm offers a promising approach for efficiently adapting to new robot entities and tasks. Inspired by the idea that acquired knowledge can accelerate learning new tasks with the same robot and help a new robot master a trained task, we propose a latent training framework where a transferable latent-to-latent locomotion policy is pretrained alongside diverse task-specific observation encoders and action decoders. This policy in latent space processes encoded latent observations to generate latent actions to be decoded, with the potential to learn general abstract motion skills. To retain essential information for decision-making and control, we introduce a diffusion recovery module that minimizes information reconstruction loss during pretrain stage. During fine-tune stage, the pretrained latent-to-latent locomotion policy remains fixed, while only the lightweight task-specific encoder and decoder are optimized for efficient adaptation. Our method allows a robot to leverage its own prior experience across different tasks as well as the experience of other morphologically diverse robots to accelerate adaptation. We validate our approach through extensive simulations and real-world experiments, demonstrating that the pretrained latent-to-latent locomotion policy effectively generalizes to new robot entities and tasks with improved efficiency.

Yuheng Lei, Yao Lyu, Guojian Zhan et al.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have shown promise in solving sequential decision problems (SDPs) by simplifying them to static optimization problems and searching for the optimal policy parameters in a zeroth-order way. While these methods are highly versatile, they often suffer from high sample complexity due to their ignorance of the underlying temporal structures. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically formulate SDPs as Markov Decision Process (MDP). Although more sample efficient than EAs, RL methods are restricted to differentiable policies and prone to getting stuck in local optima. To address these issues, we propose a novel evolutionary framework Zeroth-Order Actor-Critic (ZOAC). We propose to use step-wise exploration in parameter space and theoretically derive the zeroth-order policy gradient. We further utilize the actor-critic architecture to effectively leverage the Markov property of SDPs and reduce the variance of gradient estimators. In each iteration, ZOAC employs samplers to collect trajectories with parameter space exploration, and alternates between first-order policy evaluation (PEV) and zeroth-order policy improvement (PIM). To evaluate the effectiveness of ZOAC, we apply it to a challenging multi-lane driving task, optimizing the parameters in a rule-based, non-differentiable driving policy that consists of three sub-modules: behavior selection, path planning, and trajectory tracking. We also compare it with gradient-based RL methods on three Gymnasium tasks, optimizing neural network policies with thousands of parameters. Experimental results demonstrate the strong capability of ZOAC in solving SDPs. ZOAC significantly outperforms EAs that treat the problem as static optimization and matches the performance of gradient-based RL methods even without first-order information, in terms of total average return across all tasks.