Patrick Li

Wufei Ma, Chloe Wang, Siyi Chen et al.

While self-supervised pretraining has reduced vision systems' reliance on synthetic data, simulation remains an indispensable tool for closed-loop optimization and rigorous out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation. However, modern simulation platforms often present steep technical barriers, requiring extensive expertise in computer graphics and game development. In this work, we present LychSim, a highly controllable and interactive simulation framework built upon Unreal Engine 5 to bridge this gap. LychSim is built around three key designs: (1) a streamlined Python API that abstracts away underlying engine complexities; (2) a procedural data pipeline capable of generating diverse, high-fidelity environments with varying out-of-distribution (OOD) visual challenges, paired with rich 2D and 3D ground truths; and (3) a native integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that transforms the simulator into a dynamic, closed-loop playground for reasoning agentic LLMs. We further annotate scene-level procedural rules and object-level pose alignments to enable semantically aligned 3D ground truths and automated scene modification. We demonstrate LychSim's capability across multiple downstream applications, including serving as a synthetic data engine, powering reinforcement learning-based adversarial examiners, and facilitating interactive, language-driven scene layout generation. To benefit the broader vision community, LychSim will be made publicly available, including full source code and various data annotations.

Aayush Gupta, Daniel Bessonov, Patrick Li

Search and rescue missions and surveillance require finding targets in a large area. These tasks often use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with cameras to detect and move towards a target. However, common UAV approaches make two simplifying assumptions. First, they assume that observations made from different heights are deterministically correct. In practice, observations are noisy, with the noise increasing as the height used for observations increases. Second, they assume that a motion command executes correctly, which may not happen due to wind and other environmental factors. To address these, we propose a sequential algorithm that determines actions in real time based on observations, using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Our formulation handles both observations and motion uncertainty and errors. We run offline simulations and learn a policy. This policy is run on a UAV to find the target efficiently. We employ a novel compact formulation to represent the coordinates of the drone relative to the target coordinates. Our POMDP policy finds the target up to 3.4 times faster when compared to a heuristic policy.