arXiv subjects

Jun Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Jun Ma.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

ALORE: Autonomous Large-Object Rearrangement with a Legged Manipulator

Endowing robots with the ability to rearrange various large and heavy objects, such as furniture, can substantially alleviate human workload. However, this task is extremely challenging due to the need to interact with diverse objects and efficiently rearrange multiple objects in complex environments while ensuring collision-free loco-manipulation. In this work, we present ALORE, an autonomous large-object rearrangement system for a legged manipulator that can rearrange various large objects across diverse scenarios. The proposed system is characterized by three main features: (i) a hierarchical reinforcement learning training pipeline for multi-object environment learning, where a high-level object velocity controller is trained on top of a low-level whole-body controller to achieve efficient and stable joint learning across multiple objects; (ii) two key modules, a unified interaction configuration representation and an object velocity estimator, that allow a single policy to regulate planar velocity of diverse objects accurately; and (iii) a task-and-motion planning framework that jointly optimizes object visitation order and object-to-target assignment, improving task efficiency while enabling online replanning. Comparisons against strong baselines show consistent superiority in policy generalization, object-velocity tracking accuracy, and multi-object rearrangement efficiency. Key modules are systematically evaluated, and extensive simulations and real-world experiments are conducted to validate the robustness and effectiveness of the entire system, which successfully completes 8 continuous loops to rearrange 32 chairs over nearly 40 minutes without a single failure, and executes long-distance autonomous rearrangement over an approximately 40 m route. The open-source packages are available at https://zhihaibi.github.io/Alore/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MSWEP V3: Machine Learning-Powered Global Precipitation Estimates at 0.1$^\circ$ Hourly Resolution (1979-Present)

We introduce Version 3 (V3) of the gridded near real-time Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) product -- the first fully global, historical machine learning powered precipitation (P) dataset, developed to meet the growing demand for timely and accurate P estimates amid escalating climate challenges. MSWEP V3 provides hourly data at 0.1$^\circ$ resolution from 1979 to the present, continuously updated with a latency of approximately two hours. Development follows a two-stage process. First, baseline P fields are generated using machine learning model stacks that integrate satellite- and (re)analysis-based P and air-temperature products, along with static variables. The models are trained using hourly and daily observations from 15,959 P gauges worldwide. Second, these baseline P fields are corrected using daily and monthly gauge observations from 57,666 and 86,000 stations globally. To assess MSWEP V3's baseline performance, we evaluated 19 (quasi-) global gridded P products -- including both uncorrected and gauge-based products -- using observations from an independent set of 15,958 gauges excluded from the first training stage. The MSWEP V3 baseline achieved a median daily Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) of 0.69, outperforming all evaluated products. Other uncorrected products achieved median daily KGE values of 0.61 (ERA5), 0.46 (IMERG-L V7), 0.38 (GSMaP V8), and 0.31 (CHIRP). Using leave-one-out cross-validation, the daily gauge correction was found to improve the median daily correlation by 0.09, constrained by the already strong baseline performance. We anticipate that MSWEP V3 -- accessible at www.gloh2o.org/mswep -- will enable more reliable monitoring, forecasting, and management of water-related risks in a variable and changing climate.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

EMSEdit: Efficient Multi-Step Meta-Learning-based Model Editing

Large Language Models (LLMs) power numerous AI applications, yet updating their knowledge remains costly. Model editing provides a lightweight alternative through targeted parameter modifications, with meta-learning-based model editing (MLME) demonstrating strong effectiveness and efficiency. However, we find that MLME struggles in low-data regimes and incurs high training costs due to the use of KL divergence. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{S}$tep $\textbf{Edit (EMSEdit)}$, which leverages multi-step backpropagation (MSBP) to effectively capture gradient-activation mapping patterns within editing samples, performs multi-step edits per sample to enhance editing performance under limited data, and introduces norm-based regularization to preserve unedited knowledge while improving training efficiency. Experiments on two datasets and three LLMs show that EMSEdit consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sequential and batch editing. Moreover, MSBP can be seamlessly integrated into existing approaches to yield additional performance gains. Further experiments on a multi-hop reasoning editing task demonstrate EMSEdit's robustness in handling complex edits, while ablation studies validate the contribution of each design component. Our code is available at https://github.com/xpq-tech/emsedit.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

The SAGES Critical View of Safety Challenge: A Global Benchmark for AI-Assisted Surgical Quality Assessment

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for surgical quality assessment promise to democratize access to expertise, with applications in training, guidance, and accreditation. This study presents the SAGES Critical View of Safety (CVS) Challenge, the first AI competition organized by a surgical society, using the CVS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a universally recommended yet inconsistently performed safety step, as an exemplar of surgical quality assessment. A global collaboration across 54 institutions in 24 countries engaged hundreds of clinicians and engineers to curate 1,000 videos annotated by 20 surgical experts according to a consensus-validated protocol. The challenge addressed key barriers to real-world deployment in surgery, including achieving high performance, capturing uncertainty in subjective assessment, and ensuring robustness to clinical variability. To enable this scale of effort, we developed EndoGlacier, a framework for managing large, heterogeneous surgical video and multi-annotator workflows. Thirteen international teams participated, achieving up to a 17% relative gain in assessment performance, over 80% reduction in calibration error, and a 17% relative improvement in robustness over the state-of-the-art. Analysis of results highlighted methodological trends linked to model performance, providing guidance for future research toward robust, clinically deployable AI for surgical quality assessment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Towards Intelligent Urban Park Development Monitoring: LLM Agents for Multi-Modal Information Fusion and Analysis

As an important part of urbanization, the development monitoring of newly constructed parks is of great significance for evaluating the effect of urban planning and optimizing resource allocation. However, traditional change detection methods based on remote sensing imagery have obvious limitations in high-level and intelligent analysis, and thus are difficult to meet the requirements of current urban planning and management. In face of the growing demand for complex multi-modal data analysis in urban park development monitoring, these methods often fail to provide flexible analysis capabilities for diverse application scenarios. This study proposes a multi-modal LLM agent framework, which aims to make full use of the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLM to meet the challenges in urban park development monitoring. In this framework, a general horizontal and vertical data alignment mechanism is designed to ensure the consistency and effective tracking of multi-modal data. At the same time, a specific toolkit is constructed to alleviate the hallucination issues of LLM due to the lack of domain-specific knowledge. Compared to vanilla GPT-4o and other agents, our approach enables robust multi-modal information fusion and analysis, offering reliable and scalable solutions tailored to the diverse and evolving demands of urban park development monitoring.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Fast and Safe Trajectory Optimization for Mobile Manipulators With Neural Configuration Space Distance Field

Mobile manipulators promise agile, long-horizon behavior by coordinating base and arm motion, yet whole-body trajectory optimization in cluttered, confined spaces remains difficult due to high-dimensional nonconvexity and the need for fast, accurate collision reasoning. Configuration Space Distance Fields (CDF) enable fixed-base manipulators to model collisions directly in configuration space via smooth, implicit distances. This representation holds strong potential to bypass the nonlinear configuration-to-workspace mapping while preserving accurate whole-body geometry and providing optimization-friendly collision costs. Yet, extending this capability to mobile manipulators is hindered by unbounded workspaces and tighter base-arm coupling. We lift this promise to mobile manipulation with Generalized Configuration Space Distance Fields (GCDF), extending CDF to robots with both translational and rotational joints in unbounded workspaces with tighter base-arm coupling. We prove that GCDF preserves Euclidean-like local distance structure and accurately encodes whole-body geometry in configuration space, and develop a data generation and training pipeline that yields continuous neural GCDFs with accurate values and gradients, supporting efficient GPU-batched queries. Building on this representation, we develop a high-performance sequential convex optimization framework centered on GCDF-based collision reasoning. The solver scales to large numbers of implicit constraints through (i) online specification of neural constraints, (ii) sparsity-aware active-set detection with parallel batched evaluation across thousands of constraints, and (iii) incremental constraint management for rapid replanning under scene changes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing Inverse Perspective Mapping for Automatic Vectorized Road Map Generation

In this study, we present a low-cost and unified framework for vectorized road mapping leveraging enhanced inverse perspective mapping (IPM). In this framework, Catmull-Rom splines are utilized to characterize lane lines, and all the other ground markings are depicted using polygons uniformly. The results from instance segmentation serve as references to refine the three-dimensional position of spline control points and polygon corner points. In conjunction with this process, the homography matrix of IPM and vehicle poses are optimized simultaneously. Our proposed framework significantly reduces the mapping errors associated with IPM. It also improves the accuracy of the initial IPM homography matrix and the predicted vehicle poses. Furthermore, it addresses the limitations imposed by the coplanarity assumption in IPM. These enhancements enable IPM to be effectively applied to vectorized road mapping, which serves a cost-effective solution with enhanced accuracy. In addition, our framework generalizes road map elements to include all common ground markings and lane lines. The proposed framework is evaluated in two different practical scenarios, and the test results show that our method can automatically generate high-precision maps with near-centimeter-level accuracy. Importantly, the optimized IPM matrix achieves an accuracy comparable to that of manual calibration, while the accuracy of vehicle poses is also significantly improved.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Induce, Align, Predict: Zero-Shot Stance Detection via Cognitive Inductive Reasoning

Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) seeks to determine the stance of text toward previously unseen targets, a task critical for analyzing dynamic and polarized online discourse with limited labeled data. While large language models (LLMs) offer zero-shot capabilities, prompting-based approaches often fall short in handling complex reasoning and lack robust generalization to novel targets. Meanwhile, LLM-enhanced methods still require substantial labeled data and struggle to move beyond instance-level patterns, limiting their interpretability and adaptability. Inspired by cognitive science, we propose the Cognitive Inductive Reasoning Framework (CIRF), a schema-driven method that bridges linguistic inputs and abstract reasoning via automatic induction and application of cognitive reasoning schemas. CIRF abstracts first-order logic patterns from raw text into multi-relational schema graphs in an unsupervised manner, and leverages a schema-enhanced graph kernel model to align input structures with schema templates for robust, interpretable zero-shot inference. Extensive experiments on SemEval-2016, VAST, and COVID-19-Stance benchmarks demonstrate that CIRF not only establishes new state-of-the-art results, but also achieves comparable performance with just 30% of the labeled data, demonstrating its strong generalization and efficiency in low-resource settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

DualShield: Safe Model Predictive Diffusion via Reachability Analysis for Interactive Autonomous Driving

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful approach for multimodal motion planning in autonomous driving. However, their practical deployment is typically hindered by the inherent difficulty in enforcing vehicle dynamics and a critical reliance on accurate predictions of other agents, making them prone to safety issues under uncertain interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce DualShield, a planning and control framework that leverages Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability value functions in a dual capacity. First, the value functions act as proactive guidance, steering the diffusion denoising process towards safe and dynamically feasible regions. Second, they form a reactive safety shield using control barrier-value functions (CBVFs) to modify the executed actions and ensure safety. This dual mechanism preserves the rich exploration capabilities of diffusion models while providing principled safety assurance under uncertain and even adversarial interactions. Simulations in challenging unprotected U-turn scenarios demonstrate that DualShield significantly improves both safety and task efficiency compared to leading methods from different planning paradigms under uncertainty.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Contingency Planning for Safety-Critical Autonomous Vehicles: A Review and Perspectives

Contingency planning is the architectural capability that enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to anticipate and mitigate discrete, high-impact hazards, such as sensor outages and adversarial interactions. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the field, synthesizing fragmented literature into a unified logic-conditioned hybrid control framework. Within this formalism, we categorize approaches into two distinct paradigms: Reactive Safety, which responds to realized hazards by enforcing safety constraints or executing fail-safe maneuvers; and Proactive Safety, which optimizes for future recourse by branching over potential modal transitions. In addition, we propose a fine-grained taxonomy that partitions the landscape into external contingencies (environmental and interactive hazards) and internal contingencies (system faults). Through a critical comparative analysis, we reveal a fundamental structural divergence: internal faults are predominantly addressed via reactive fail-safe mechanisms, whereas external interaction uncertainties increasingly require proactive branching strategies. Furthermore, we identify a critical methodological divergence: whereas physical hazards are typically managed with formal guarantees, semantic and out-of-distribution anomalies currently rely heavily on empirical validation. We conclude by identifying the open challenges in bridging the gap between theoretical guarantees and practical validation, advocating for hybrid architectures and standardized benchmarking to transition contingency planning from formulation to certifiable real-world deployment.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Residual Distribution in Locate-then-Edit Model Editing

Model editing enables targeted updates to the knowledge of large language models (LLMs) with minimal retraining. Among existing approaches, locate-then-edit methods constitute a prominent paradigm: they first identify critical layers, then compute residuals at the final critical layer based on the target edit, and finally apply least-squares-based multi-layer updates via $\textbf{residual distribution}$. While empirically effective, we identify a counterintuitive failure mode: residual distribution, a core mechanism in these methods, introduces weight shift errors that undermine editing precision. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we show that such errors increase with the distribution distance, batch size, and edit sequence length, ultimately leading to inaccurate or suboptimal edits. To address this, we propose the $\textbf{B}$oundary $\textbf{L}$ayer $\textbf{U}$pdat$\textbf{E (BLUE)}$ strategy to enhance locate-then-edit methods. Sequential batch editing experiments on three LLMs and two datasets demonstrate that BLUE not only delivers an average performance improvement of 35.59\%, significantly advancing the state of the art in model editing, but also enhances the preservation of LLMs' general capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/xpq-tech/BLUE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Toward Real-World High-Precision Image Matting and Segmentation

High-precision scene parsing tasks, including image matting and dichotomous segmentation, aim to accurately predict masks with extremely fine details (such as hair). Most existing methods focus on salient, single foreground objects. While interactive methods allow for target adjustment, their class-agnostic design restricts generalization across different categories. Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality annotation has led to a reliance on inharmonious synthetic data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Foreground Consistent Learning model, dubbed as FCLM, to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a Depth-Aware Distillation strategy where we transfer the depth-related knowledge for better foreground representation. Considering the data dilemma, we term the processing of synthetic data as domain adaptation problem where we propose a domain-invariant learning strategy to focus on foreground learning. To support interactive prediction, we contribute an Object-Oriented Decoder that can receive both visual and language prompts to predict the referring target. Experimental results show that our method quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms SOTA methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Performance to Practice: Knowledge-Distilled Segmentator for On-Premises Clinical Workflows

Deploying medical image segmentation models in routine clinical workflows is often constrained by on-premises infrastructure, where computational resources are fixed and cloud-based inference may be restricted by governance and security policies. While high-capacity models achieve strong segmentation accuracy, their computational demands hinder practical deployment and long-term maintainability in hospital environments. We present a deployment-oriented framework that leverages knowledge distillation to translate a high-performing segmentation model into a scalable family of compact student models, without modifying the inference pipeline. The proposed approach preserves architectural compatibility with existing clinical systems while enabling systematic capacity reduction. The framework is evaluated on a multi-site brain MRI dataset comprising 1,104 3D volumes, with independent testing on 101 curated cases, and is further examined on abdominal CT to assess cross-modality generalizability. Under aggressive parameter reduction (94%), the distilled student model preserves nearly all of the teacher's segmentation accuracy (98.7%), while achieving substantial efficiency gains, including up to a 67% reduction in CPU inference latency without additional deployment overhead. These results demonstrate that knowledge distillation provides a practical and reliable pathway for converting research-grade segmentation models into maintainable, deployment-ready components for on-premises clinical workflows in real-world health systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Online Trajectory Optimization for Arbitrary-Shaped Mobile Robots via Polynomial Separating Hypersurfaces

An emerging class of trajectory optimization methods enforces collision avoidance by jointly optimizing the robot's configuration and a separating hyperplane. However, as linear separators only apply to convex sets, these methods require convex approximations of both the robot and obstacles, which becomes an overly conservative assumption in cluttered and narrow environments. In this work, we unequivocally remove this limitation by introducing nonlinear separating hypersurfaces parameterized by polynomial functions. We first generalize the classical separating hyperplane theorem and prove that any two disjoint bounded closed sets in Euclidean space can be separated by a polynomial hypersurface, serving as the theoretical foundation for nonlinear separation of arbitrary geometries. Building on this result, we formulate a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem that jointly optimizes the robot's trajectory and the coefficients of the separating polynomials, enabling geometry-aware collision avoidance without conservative convex simplifications. The optimization remains efficiently solvable using standard NLP solvers. Simulation and real-world experiments with nonconvex robots demonstrate that our method achieves smooth, collision-free, and agile maneuvers in environments where convex-approximation baselines fail.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

EMP: Enhance Memory in Data Pruning

Recently, large language and vision models have shown strong performance, but due to high pre-training and fine-tuning costs, research has shifted towards faster training via dataset pruning. Previous methods used sample loss as an evaluation criterion, aiming to select the most "difficult" samples for training. However, when the pruning rate increases, the number of times each sample is trained becomes more evenly distributed, which causes many critical or general samples to not be effectively fitted. We refer to this as Low-Frequency Learning (LFL). In other words, LFL prevents the model from remembering most samples. In our work, we decompose the scoring function of LFL, provide a theoretical explanation for the inefficiency of LFL, and propose adding a memory term to the scoring function to enhance the model's memory capability, along with an approximation of this memory term. Similarly, we explore memory in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), marking the first discussion on SSL memory. Using contrastive learning, we derive the memory term both theoretically and experimentally. Finally, we propose Enhance Memory Pruning (EMP), which addresses the issue of insufficient memory under high pruning rates by enhancing the model's memory of data, thereby improving its performance. We evaluated the performance of EMP in tasks such as image classification, natural language understanding, and model pre-training. The results show that EMP can improve model performance under extreme pruning rates. For example, in the CIFAR100-ResNet50 pre-training task, with 70\% pruning, EMP outperforms current methods by 2.2\%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

HATIR: Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent Infrared Video Super-Resolution

Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce HATIR, a Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent InfraRed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FLIR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FLIR T1050sc camera (1024 X 768) spanning 640 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR. Project page: https://github.com/JZ0606/HATIR

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LLM Agent Framework for Intelligent Change Analysis in Urban Environment using Remote Sensing Imagery

Existing change detection methods often lack the versatility to handle diverse real-world queries and the intelligence for comprehensive analysis. This paper presents a general agent framework, integrating Large Language Models (LLM) with vision foundation models to form ChangeGPT. A hierarchical structure is employed to mitigate hallucination. The agent was evaluated on a curated dataset of 140 questions categorized by real-world scenarios, encompassing various question types (e.g., Size, Class, Number) and complexities. The evaluation assessed the agent's tool selection ability (Precision/Recall) and overall query accuracy (Match). ChangeGPT, especially with a GPT-4-turbo backend, demonstrated superior performance, achieving a 90.71 % Match rate. Its strength lies particularly in handling change-related queries requiring multi-step reasoning and robust tool selection. Practical effectiveness was further validated through a real-world urban change monitoring case study in Qianhai Bay, Shenzhen. By providing intelligence, adaptability, and multi-type change analysis, ChangeGPT offers a powerful solution for decision-making in remote sensing applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO↗