Mudit Agrawal

Lijun Zhang, Nikhil Chacko, Petter Nilsson et al.

Automated warehouses execute millions of stow operations, where robots place objects into storage bins. For these systems it is valuable to anticipate how a bin will look from the current observations and the planned stow behavior before real execution. We propose FOREST, a stow-intent-conditioned world model that represents bin states as item-aligned instance masks and uses a latent diffusion transformer to predict the post-stow configuration from the observed context. Our evaluation shows that FOREST substantially improves the geometric agreement between predicted and true post-stow layouts compared with heuristic baselines. We further evaluate the predicted post-stow layouts in two downstream tasks, in which replacing the real post-stow masks with FOREST predictions causes only modest performance loss in load-quality assessment and multi-stow reasoning, indicating that our model can provide useful foresight signals for warehouse planning.

Lijun Zhang, Ruinian Xu, Mudit Agrawal

Source-free domain adaptive object detection adapts a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain, typically through teacher-student self-training with pseudo-labels. We revisit this setting when a small, uniformly sampled subset of target images is labeled. We introduce Random-Target Supervised Mixing (RTSM), a simple anchor that incorporates these annotations through a supervised detection loss while leaving the original unlabeled adaptation branch unchanged. Across evaluations spanning four SFDA-OD methods, two object detectors, multiple adaptation tasks, and target-label budgets from 1% to 10%, RTSM consistently improves pure SFDA by 1.7 to 18.3 AP50. We then examine whether the same annotations can provide further gains by steering unlabeled self-training. To this end, we evaluate ten sparse-label feedback plugins covering pseudo-label selection, object completion, and optimization control, which yield limited and method-dependent gains over RTSM. These results reveal a bitter lesson for sparse-label SFDA-OD: simple supervision is hard to beat. RTSM therefore provides a simple yet effective anchor for sparse-label SFDA-OD.

Tianyu Li, Harpreet Sawhney, Minju Jung et al.

Many manipulation tasks require reasoning about free-space affordances: discovering volumes where an extended rigid tool can safely navigate, complementary to surface contact affordances for grasping. Robotic stowing is a canonical instance, where a blade must sweep items aside inside cluttered fabric bins to create insertion space. Production stow systems generate millions of such episodes, but standard approaches with unimodal data infer affordances as SE(3) pose distributions, a geometric question asked in the wrong domain. VulcanVoxel keeps inference spatial: a masked autoencoder over 3D occupancy fields reconstructs blade occupancy conditioned on scene geometry, computing feasibility locally at each voxel and recovering multi-modal predictions from unimodal data. Blade affordances are spatial objects, subsets of 3D space defined by geometric feasibility. Pose parameters carry no structure for reasoning whether unobserved placements are feasible, and standard generative objectives including flow matching faithfully learn the unimodal distribution produced by execution policies and cannot recover geometric alternatives. Trained on 10,000 real warehouse stow episodes without human annotation, VulcanVoxel achieves top-5 coverage of 0.89 versus 0.71 for the best pose-based baseline, with a distilled student providing RGB-to-voxel inference in 30 ms. vs. 1.4 s. for voxel-to-voxel. We have released a dataset of real blade insertion cycles with RGB-D observations and pose trajectories at https://www.armbench.com/blade_insertion. html.