Dzmitry Tsetserukou

Jeffrin Sam, Dzmitry Tsetserukou

Fine-tuning a vision-language-action model (VLA-JEPA) on a single GPU should be simple: load a pretrained checkpoint, run training, deploy. There is a hidden danger. Run the same fine-tuning code thirteen times -- same data, same architecture, different random seed -- and twelve runs produce a robot succeeding 91--94% of the time, while one run silently degrades to 65.2%: a 29 pp gap with no error message, no warning, and no way to predict which seed will fail. We call this the seed lottery. We trace the cause to output collapse: the action predictor quietly learns to produce nearly identical outputs regardless of what the robot sees. Existing weight-level methods (L2, EWC) are structurally blind to this collapse -- they penalize weight changes, but collapse occurs in directions weights can move freely without affecting outputs, a gap we formalize via the Jacobian null-space. Across 7 methods x up to 13 seeds x 3 LIBERO benchmarks, three output-level regularizers -- VICReg (n=12 seeds), Dropout (n=4), and a halved learning rate (n=5) -- each eliminate every catastrophic seed (0/21 combined collapses vs. 1/13 Baseline; F(12,11)=28.7, p<0.001), while weight-level methods (L2, EWC) preserve the lottery. The simplest fix is changing one number in your optimizer config.

Ivan Valuev, Iana Zhura, Valerii Serpiva et al.

Autonomous UAV navigation is conventionally solved by pipelines that separate perception, mapping, and planning into distinct stages, which propagates errors, accumulates latency, and requires environment-specific retuning. End-to-end generative models remove these interfaces by mapping raw observations directly to trajectories, but inherit a subtle failure mode: trained on clean data, they cannot recognise when an observation is unreliable, and treat degraded regions such as glass, mirrors, and overexposed surfaces as valid evidence for planning. We present a reliability-aware diffusion planner for 3D UAV navigation. It conditions trajectory generation on the observation together with a scene-level reliability heatmap that marks where perception cannot be trusted, produced by a lightweight network that distils the open-vocabulary reasoning of a vision-language model within the real-time planning budget. To generalise to unseen environments without retraining, we steer the denoising process with a differentiable two-stage ESDF cost that treats physical obstacles from depth and virtual obstacles from highly unreliable regions on equal footing. In simulation and on a real quadrotor, our planner produces markedly safer trajectories than a state-of-the-art diffusion baseline, reducing the obstacle-violation rate from 40.3% to 9.6% and raising the mean reliability of traversed regions from 0.588 to 0.925. Ablating the reliability term alone drops mean reliability from 0.898 to 0.783, confirming it as the decisive component, while distillation runs the framework up to 2 times faster than the full vision-language model.

MoniJesu James, Marcelino Julio Fernando, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera et al.

End-to-end navigation policies trained on large simulation corpora degrade sharply when transferred to out-of-distribution scenes, categories, or goal modalities. Modular pipelines such as Modular GOAT are bottlenecked by closed-set object detection recall, while 3D snapshot-memory systems (e.g. 3D-Mem) accumulate dense, view-dependent representations that are heavy to maintain. We present AnyGoal, a training-free multi-robot architecture that places a Vision-Language Model (VLM) at the core of frontier-based exploration and coordinates agents through a shared 2D Gaussian Bayesian Value Map (BVM). The BVM maintains a per-pixel (mu, sigma^2) posterior over goal relevance, updated via precision-weighted fusion of VLM scores through a depth-cone mask, and is never reset between subtasks, yielding lifelong evidence accumulation. Frontiers are ranked by a convex blend of a VLM-as-judge softmax and a Bayesian UCB term on the BVM. A greedy allocator with spatial-separation penalty and commitment hysteresis distributes frontiers across agents without a centralized controller. On the full GOAT-Bench val unseen split (360 episodes, 2,669 subtasks), our dual-agent system achieves 52.4% Subtask SR at 12.7% SPL--state of the art under the strict physical regime (discrete 0.25 m steps, no teleportation, 42 deg HFOV) and a +27.5 pp improvement over Modular GOAT (24.9%). Single-agent AnyGoal achieves 41.9% Subtask SR, showing gains arise from the decision architecture. A four-way perception ablation shows that open-vocabulary detectors shift the dominant failure mode from exploration to goal verification.

Chidera Agbasiere, Mikhail Sannikov, Faith Ogunwoye et al.

Reconstructing dense 3D scenes from sparse LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving, where latent diffusion models offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches rely on object-level autoencoders that collapse into unstable global representations at outdoor scale and suffer from ground truth data corrupted by odometry drift that systematically degrades supervision quality. Furthermore, multi-step diffusion inference incurs prohibitive latency for real-time deployment. We propose a novel multi-token Gaussian VAE with cross-attention pooling for stable scene-scale LiDAR compression, combined with an anchor-based ICP ground truth refinement pipeline that eliminates drift-induced noise from training supervision. Together, these components enable a scaffold-free single-step diffusion completion model that achieves an approximately 16x reduction in squared Chamfer distance on SemanticKITTI seq. 08 (0.396 m^2 to 0.024 m^2), surpasses LiDiff and ScoreLiDAR by 17-19% and 10-11%, respectively, and operates at 25-143x lower inference latency. Our results demonstrate that data quality dominates model design in this regime and that multi-token latent spaces provide a stable first stage for latent diffusion-based scene completion.