arXiv subjects

Shahram Najam Syed

Publications and source records attributed to Shahram Najam Syed.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Not All Layers Need Tuning: Diagnosing and Directing Adaptation in Vision-Language-Action Models

Fine-tuning a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for a new deployment environment is expensive, yet most methods apply uniform-capacity adapters to every network region as if every region requires equal adjustment. This paper tests that assumption on five architecturally diverse VLAs (OpenVLA-OFT, $π_0$, SmolVLA, DTP, Octo; 93M-7B parameters). Measuring per-region adaptation cost as normalized parameter displacement under region-isolated fine-tuning reveals an adaptation spectrum in which appearance shifts concentrate cost in the vision encoder, instruction shifts in the language backbone, and novel-object shifts in the vision encoder together with the action head, across all five architectures. To exploit this structure, we introduce a pipeline that observes, diagnoses, allocates, and adapts. From ten unlabeled target observations and without fine-tuning, the diagnostic estimates per-region cost by combining reference-free gradient and Monte Carlo Dropout signals with a Centered Kernel Alignment score against a cached source reference; the allocator converts the estimates into variable-rank LoRA adapters under a parameter budget and freezes well-calibrated regions; and standard LoRA fine-tuning trains the resulting adapters. The diagnostic ranks regions within each deployment at a median Spearman of 0.91, and the allocation matches or exceeds uniform LoRA at every budget we tested on LIBERO and CALVIN. On a physical xArm-7, the pipeline matches full fine-tuning under an instruction-wording shift with 0.04% of its trainable parameters, and on five held-out scenes evaluated without retraining it leads every baseline, with 11-23 successes of 30 rollouts against 8-18 for the strongest parameter-efficient baseline at equal or larger budgets and 2-11 for full fine-tuning. These results suggest that adaptation cost in VLAs is structured enough to measure before fine-tuning begins.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Wiggle and Go! System Identification for Zero-Shot Dynamic Rope Manipulation

Many robotic tasks are unforgiving; a single mistake in a dynamic throw can lead to unacceptable delays or unrecoverable failure. We introduce Wiggle and Go!, a two-stage framework for zero-shot rope manipulation: a brief, safe wiggle action is observed to predict descriptive rope parameters, which then conditions a trajectory optimizer for zero-shot goal-conditioned execution. Unlike prior dynamic rope manipulation methods that require large real-world datasets or iterative real-world refinement, our identification module is task-agnostic, supporting diverse manipulation policies without retraining. We achieve a 3.55\,cm average accuracy on 3D target striking in real using rope system parameters in comparison to 15.29\,cm for uninformed baselines, and over 50\% success on multi-objective lobbing and draping tasks. Predicted parameters transfer to unseen motions with 0.95 Pearson correlation between simulated and real rope dynamics, indicating that the identification module generalizes across the task corpus. Project website: https://wiggleandgo.github.io/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pretrained on large-scale robot datasets provide a strong foundation for robot manipulation, their performance can degrade when adapted to new tasks with limited task-specific demonstrations. Retrieval offers a practical way to reuse existing demonstrations for data-efficient adaptation, but existing methods often rely on visual similarity, state-action representations, or task-level language matching. These approaches may overlook the hierarchical structure of long-horizon manipulation tasks, where complete task matches are rare but reusable skills are often abundant. To address this challenge, we propose Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a retrieval framework for data-efficient VLA adaptation. Specifically, HSR first decomposes a target task into candidate skill sequences. It evaluates each plan based on both semantic plausibility and skill reliability estimated from the prior dataset. The selected decomposition is then used for hybrid retrieval. This combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to identify demonstrations that are both semantically relevant and compatible with the target task. Finally, we adapt the policy through a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline, which separates general skill acquisition from task-specific adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and several real-world robot manipulation tasks show that HSR improves the average success rate by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient VLA adaptation. Videos and code are available at https://hoar012.github.io/HSR-Project.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

FAR: Failure-Aware Retry for Test-Time Recovery and Continual Policy Improvement

Robot policies inevitably encounter failures when deployed in real environments. Naive retries often repeat the same mistakes, while many existing recovery methods rely on human intervention. In this paper, we propose Failure-Aware Retry (FAR), a framework that enables robots to learn from previous failures at test time, adapt their behavior accordingly, and eventually complete the task autonomously. FAR combines Failure-Contrastive Preference Adaptation, which constructs preference learning data from failures to steer the policy away from previously unsuccessful behaviors, with lightweight action perturbations during retries to encourage local exploration. We further incorporate successful recovery trajectories into a training loop for continual policy improvement. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks show that FAR substantially improves success rates and robustness, with average gains of 17.6% over the standard diffusion policy in simulation and 11.7% in the real world. In addition, FAR significantly improves data efficiency under both reset and timestep budgets during continual policy improvement by exploiting informative failure cases.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Intercepting the Future: Latent-Space Predictive World Model for Dynamic VLA Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize across static manipulation but fail when objects move during task execution. They map the current observation to an action and assume the scene is stationary between observation and execution, so at any non-trivial object speed the resulting latency exceeds the time available to grasp. We close this gap with AHEAD (Anticipatory Horizon Extrapolation with Adaptive Dynamics), a predict-then-act wrapper that augments a frozen VLA with a motion-aware latent world model. A small world model trained on manipulation video forecasts future patch tokens in the VLA's feature space, conditioned on per-token velocity and acceleration from optical flow. A language-and-motion saliency mask concentrates prediction on task-relevant patches, and the model rolls forward for an adaptive horizon, halting when prediction uncertainty crosses a threshold. The frozen action decoder then receives the predicted future tokens in place of the current ones. AHEAD adds 4.9M parameters to a frozen 7B OpenVLA and reaches 79 to 97% success across 20 dynamic simulation scenarios where the strongest baseline reaches 31 to 58%. On a physical UFactory xArm 7, AHEAD succeeds on 29/30 to 30/30 on three conveyor and rolling-ball tasks, 23/30 on paddle interception, and 19/30 on projectile catching where every baseline scores 0/30.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

ExpReS-VLA: Specializing Vision-Language-Action Models Through Experience Replay and Retrieval

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models like OpenVLA demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization across robotic manipulation tasks but struggle to adapt to specific deployment environments where consistent high performance on a limited set of tasks is more valuable than broad generalization. We present EXPierence replayed, REtrieval augmented, Specialized VLA (ExpReS-VLA), a method that enables rapid on-device adaptation of pre-trained VLAs to target domains while preventing catastrophic forgetting through compressed experience replay and retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach maintains a memory-efficient buffer by storing extracted embeddings from OpenVLA's frozen vision backbone, reducing storage requirements by 97% compared to raw image-action pairs. During deployment, ExpReS-VLA retrieves the $k$ most similar past experiences using cosine similarity to augment training batches, while a prioritized experience replay buffer preserves recently successful trajectories. To leverage failed attempts, we introduce Thresholded Hybrid Contrastive Loss (THCL), enabling the model to learn from both successful and unsuccessful demonstrations. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show improvements from 82.6% to 93.1% on spatial reasoning and 61% to 72.3% on long-horizon tasks over base OpenVLA, with gains across architectures including $π_0$ (+3.2 points) and OpenVLA-OFT (+1.7 points). Physical robot experiments across five tasks demonstrate 98% success on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions, improving from 84.7% and 32% respectively for naive fine-tuning. Adaptation completes in 31 seconds using 12 demonstrations on a single RTX 5090.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SuperPoint-SLAM3: Augmenting ORB-SLAM3 with Deep Features, Adaptive NMS, and Learning-Based Loop Closure

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) must remain accurate under extreme viewpoint, scale and illumination variations. The widely adopted ORB-SLAM3 falters in these regimes because it relies on hand-crafted ORB keypoints. We introduce SuperPoint-SLAM3, a drop-in upgrade that (i) replaces ORB with the self-supervised SuperPoint detector--descriptor, (ii) enforces spatially uniform keypoints via adaptive non-maximal suppression (ANMS), and (iii) integrates a lightweight NetVLAD place-recognition head for learning-based loop closure. On the KITTI Odometry benchmark SuperPoint-SLAM3 reduces mean translational error from 4.15% to 0.34% and mean rotational error from 0.0027 deg/m to 0.0010 deg/m. On the EuRoC MAV dataset it roughly halves both errors across every sequence (e.g., V2\_03: 1.58% -> 0.79%). These gains confirm that fusing modern deep features with a learned loop-closure module markedly improves ORB-SLAM3 accuracy while preserving its real-time operation. Implementation, pretrained weights and reproducibility scripts are available at https://github.com/shahram95/SuperPointSLAM3.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Joint Learning of Depth, Pose, and Local Radiance Field for Large Scale Monocular 3D Reconstruction

Photorealistic 3-D reconstruction from monocular video collapses in large-scale scenes when depth, pose, and radiance are solved in isolation: scale-ambiguous depth yields ghost geometry, long-horizon pose drift corrupts alignment, and a single global NeRF cannot model hundreds of metres of content. We introduce a joint learning framework that couples all three factors and demonstrably overcomes each failure case. Our system begins with a Vision-Transformer (ViT) depth network trained with metric-scale supervision, giving globally consistent depths despite wide field-of-view variations. A multi-scale feature bundle-adjustment (BA) layer refines camera poses directly in feature space--leveraging learned pyramidal descriptors instead of brittle keypoints--to suppress drift on unconstrained trajectories. For scene representation, we deploy an incremental local-radiance-field hierarchy: new hash-grid NeRFs are allocated and frozen on-the-fly when view overlap falls below a threshold, enabling city-block-scale coverage on a single GPU. Evaluated on the Tanks and Temples benchmark, our method reduces Absolute Trajectory Error to 0.001-0.021 m across eight indoor-outdoor sequences--up to 18x lower than BARF and 2x lower than NoPe-NeRF--while maintaining sub-pixel Relative Pose Error. These results demonstrate that metric-scale, drift-free 3-D reconstruction and high-fidelity novel-view synthesis are achievable from a single uncalibrated RGB camera.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Visuo-Acoustic Hand Pose and Contact Estimation

Accurately estimating hand pose and hand-object contact events is essential for robot data-collection, immersive virtual environments, and biomechanical analysis, yet remains challenging due to visual occlusion, subtle contact cues, limitations in vision-only sensing, and the lack of accessible and flexible tactile sensing. We therefore introduce VibeMesh, a novel wearable system that fuses vision with active acoustic sensing for dense, per-vertex hand contact and pose estimation. VibeMesh integrates a bone-conduction speaker and sparse piezoelectric microphones, distributed on a human hand, emitting structured acoustic signals and capturing their propagation to infer changes induced by contact. To interpret these cross-modal signals, we propose a graph-based attention network that processes synchronized audio spectra and RGB-D-derived hand meshes to predict contact with high spatial resolution. We contribute: (i) a lightweight, non-intrusive visuo-acoustic sensing platform; (ii) a cross-modal graph network for joint pose and contact inference; (iii) a dataset of synchronized RGB-D, acoustic, and ground-truth contact annotations across diverse manipulation scenarios; and (iv) empirical results showing that VibeMesh outperforms vision-only baselines in accuracy and robustness, particularly in occluded or static-contact settings.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Learning by Aligning Videos in Time

We present a self-supervised approach for learning video representations using temporal video alignment as a pretext task, while exploiting both frame-level and video-level information. We leverage a novel combination of temporal alignment loss and temporal regularization terms, which can be used as supervision signals for training an encoder network. Specifically, the temporal alignment loss (i.e., Soft-DTW) aims for the minimum cost for temporally aligning videos in the embedding space. However, optimizing solely for this term leads to trivial solutions, particularly, one where all frames get mapped to a small cluster in the embedding space. To overcome this problem, we propose a temporal regularization term (i.e., Contrastive-IDM) which encourages different frames to be mapped to different points in the embedding space. Extensive evaluations on various tasks, including action phase classification, action phase progression, and fine-grained frame retrieval, on three datasets, namely Pouring, Penn Action, and IKEA ASM, show superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art methods for self-supervised representation learning from videos. In addition, our method provides significant performance gain where labeled data is lacking. Our code and labels are available on our research website: https://retrocausal.ai/research/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

A Novel Hybrid Biometric Electronic Voting System: Integrating Finger Print and Face Recognition

A novel hybrid design based electronic voting system is proposed, implemented and analyzed. The proposed system uses two voter verification techniques to give better results in comparison to single identification based systems. Finger print and facial recognition based methods are used for voter identification. Cross verification of a voter during an election process provides better accuracy than single parameter identification method. The facial recognition system uses Viola-Jones algorithm along with rectangular Haar feature selection method for detection and extraction of features to develop a biometric template and for feature extraction during the voting process. Cascaded machine learning based classifiers are used for comparing the features for identity verification using GPCA (Generalized Principle Component Analysis) and K-NN (K-Nearest Neighbor). It is accomplished through comparing the Eigen-vectors of the extracted features with the biometric template pre-stored in the election regulatory body database. The results of the proposed system show that the proposed cascaded design based system performs better than the systems using other classifiers or separate schemes i.e. facial or finger print based schemes. The proposed system will be highly useful for real time applications due to the reason that it has 91% accuracy under nominal light in terms of facial recognition. with bags of paper votes. The central station compiles and publishes the names of winners and losers through television and radio stations. This method is useful only if the whole process is completed in a transparent way. However, there are some drawbacks to this system. These include higher expenses, longer time to complete the voting process, fraudulent practices by the authorities administering elections as well as malpractices by the voters [1]. These challenges result in manipulated election results.

cs.CR↗