arXiv subjects

Jun Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Jun Ma.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Toward Real-world Infrared Image Super-Resolution: A Unified Autoregressive Framework and Benchmark Dataset

Infrared image super-resolution (IISR) under real-world conditions is a practically significant yet rarely addressed task. Pioneering works are often trained and evaluated on simulated datasets or neglect the intrinsic differences between infrared and visible imaging. In practice, however, real infrared images are affected by coupled optical and sensing degradations that jointly deteriorate both structural sharpness and thermal fidelity. To address these challenges, we propose Real-IISR, a unified autoregressive framework for real-world IISR that progressively reconstructs fine-grained thermal structures and clear backgrounds in a scale-by-scale manner via thermal-structural guided visual autoregression. Specifically, a Thermal-Structural Guidance module encodes thermal priors to mitigate the mismatch between thermal radiation and structural edges. Since non-uniform degradations typically induce quantization bias, Real-IISR adopts a Condition-Adaptive Codebook that dynamically modulates discrete representations based on degradation-aware thermal priors. Also, a Thermal Order Consistency Loss enforces a monotonic relation between temperature and pixel intensity, ensuring relative brightness order rather than absolute values to maintain physical consistency under spatial misalignment and thermal drift. We build FLIR-IISR, a real-world IISR dataset with paired LR-HR infrared images acquired via automated focus variation and motion-induced blur. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising performance of Real-IISR, providing a unified foundation for real-world IISR and benchmarking. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/JZD151/Real-IISR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking the Practicality of Vision-language-action Model: A Comprehensive Benchmark and An Improved Baseline

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a generalist robotic agent. However, existing VLAs are hindered by excessive parameter scales, prohibitive pre-training requirements, and limited applicability to diverse embodiments. To improve the practicality of VLAs, we propose a comprehensive benchmark and an improved baseline. First, we propose CEBench, a new benchmark spanning diverse embodiments in both simulation and the real world with consideration of domain randomization. We collect 14.4k simulated trajectories and 1.6k real-world expert-curated trajectories to support training on CEBench. Second, using CEBench as our testbed, we study three critical aspects of VLAs' practicality and offer several key findings. Informed by these findings, we introduce LLaVA-VLA, a lightweight yet powerful VLA designed for practical deployment on consumer-grade GPUs. Architecturally, it integrates a compact VLM backbone with multi-view perception, proprioceptive tokenization, and action chunking. To eliminate reliance on costly pre-training, LLaVA-VLA adopts a two-stage training paradigm including post-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, LLaVA-VLA extends the action space to unify navigation and manipulation. Experiments across embodiments demonstrate the capabilities of generalization and versatility of LLaVA-VLA , while real-world mobile manipulation experiments establish it as the first end-to-end VLA model for mobile manipulation. We will open-source all datasets, codes, and checkpoints upon acceptance to foster reproducibility and future research.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

PD-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Model Integrated with Action Chunking via Parallel Decoding

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. The performance of VLA models can be improved by integrating with action chunking, a critical technique for effective control. However, action chunking linearly scales up action dimensions in VLA models with increased chunking sizes. This reduces the inference efficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose PD-VLA, the first parallel decoding framework for VLA models integrated with action chunking. Our framework reformulates autoregressive decoding as a nonlinear system solved by parallel fixed-point iterations. This approach preserves model performance with mathematical guarantees while significantly improving decoding speed. In addition, it enables training-free acceleration without architectural changes, as well as seamless synergy with existing acceleration techniques. Extensive simulations validate that our PD-VLA maintains competitive success rates while achieving 2.52 times execution frequency on manipulators (with 7 degrees of freedom) compared with the fundamental VLA model. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the most effective settings for acceleration. Finally, real-world experiments validate its high applicability across different tasks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Quadruped Collaborative Transportation in Narrow Environments via Safe Reinforcement Learning

Collaborative transportation, where multiple robots collaboratively transport a payload, has garnered significant attention in recent years. While ensuring safe and high-performance inter-robot collaboration is critical for effective task execution, it is difficult to pursue in narrow environments where the feasible region is extremely limited. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for dual-quadruped collaborative transportation via safe reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we model the task as a fully cooperative constrained Markov game, where collision avoidance is formulated as constraints. We introduce a cost-advantage decomposition method that enforces the sum of team constraints to remain below an upper bound, thereby guaranteeing task safety within an RL framework. Furthermore, we propose a constraint allocation method that assigns shared constraints to individual robots to maximize the overall task reward, encouraging autonomous task-assignment among robots, thereby improving collaborative task performance. Simulation and real-time experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance and a higher success rate in dual-quadruped collaborative transportation compared to existing methods.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SpecFuse: A Spectral-Temporal Fusion Predictive Control Framework for UAV Landing on Oscillating Marine Platforms

Autonomous landing of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) on oscillating marine platforms is severely constrained by wave-induced multi-frequency oscillations, wind disturbances, and prediction phase lags in motion prediction. Existing methods either treat platform motion as a general random process or lack explicit modeling of wave spectral characteristics, leading to suboptimal performance under dynamic sea conditions. To address these limitations, we propose SpecFuse: a novel spectral-temporal fusion predictive control framework that integrates frequency-domain wave decomposition with time-domain recursive state estimation for high-precision 6-DoF motion forecasting of Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USVs). The framework explicitly models dominant wave harmonics to mitigate phase lags, refining predictions in real time via IMU data without relying on complex calibration. Additionally, we design a hierarchical control architecture featuring a sampling-based HPO-RRT* algorithm for dynamic trajectory planning under non-convex constraints and a learning-augmented predictive controller that fuses data-driven disturbance compensation with optimization-based execution. Extensive validations (2,000 simulations + 8 lake experiments) show our approach achieves a 3.2 cm prediction error, 4.46 cm landing deviation, 98.7% / 87.5% success rates (simulation / real-world), and 82 ms latency on embedded hardware, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 44%-48% in accuracy. Its robustness to wave-wind coupling disturbances supports critical maritime missions such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring. All code, experimental configurations, and datasets will be released as open-source to facilitate reproducibility.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Occlusion-Aware Consistent Model Predictive Control for Robot Navigation in Occluded Obstacle-Dense Environments

Ensuring safety and motion consistency for robot navigation in occluded, obstacle-dense environments is a critical challenge. In this context, this study presents an occlusion-aware Consistent Model Predictive Control (CMPC) strategy. To account for the occluded obstacles, it incorporates adjustable risk regions that represent their potential future locations. Subsequently, dynamic risk boundary constraints are developed online to enhance safety. Based on these constraints, the CMPC constructs multiple locally optimal trajectory branches (each tailored to different risk regions) to strike a balance between safety and performance. A shared consensus segment is generated to ensure smooth transitions between branches without significant velocity fluctuations, preserving motion consistency. To facilitate high computational efficiency and ensure coordination across local trajectories, we use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the CMPC into manageable sub-problems for parallel solving. The proposed strategy is validated through simulations and real-world experiments on an Ackermann-steering robot platform. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CMPC strategy through comparisons with baseline approaches in occluded, obstacle-dense environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

TraceMem: Weaving Narrative Memory Schemata from User Conversational Traces

Sustaining long-term interactions remains a bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs), as their limited context windows struggle to manage dialogue histories that extend over time. Existing memory systems often treat interactions as disjointed snippets, failing to capture the underlying narrative coherence of the dialogue stream. We propose TraceMem, a cognitively-inspired framework that weaves structured, narrative memory schemata from user conversational traces through a three-stage pipeline: (1) Short-term Memory Processing, which employs a deductive topic segmentation approach to demarcate episode boundaries and extract semantic representation; (2) Synaptic Memory Consolidation, a process that summarizes episodes into episodic memories before distilling them alongside semantics into user-specific traces; and (3) Systems Memory Consolidation, which utilizes two-stage hierarchical clustering to organize these traces into coherent, time-evolving narrative threads under unifying themes. These threads are encapsulated into structured user memory cards, forming narrative memory schemata. For memory utilization, we provide an agentic search mechanism to enhance reasoning process. Evaluation on the LoCoMo benchmark shows that TraceMem achieves state-of-the-art performance with a brain-inspired architecture. Analysis shows that by constructing coherent narratives, it surpasses baselines in multi-hop and temporal reasoning, underscoring its essential role in deep narrative comprehension. Additionally, we provide an open discussion on memory systems, offering our perspectives and future outlook on the field. Our code implementation is available at: https://github.com/YimingShu-teay/TraceMem

cs.CL↗

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↗