arXiv subjects

Mulin Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Mulin Yu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From VLM Planners to Robotic Agents: Self-Evolving Harnesses for History-Dependent Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong performance across embodied manipulation tasks by unifying visual understanding, language conditioning, and action generation. However, long-horizon tasks can involve non-Markovian dependencies: successful decisions may require retaining task progress and past interaction outcomes, while partial observability and execution errors compound over time. Existing work has begun to address these challenges by augmenting foundation-model policies with memory and by introducing hierarchical architectures that separate high-level planning from low-level execution. We organize the high-level VLM as a robotic agent through an editable harness to maintain task context and improve planning through execution experience. We instantiate this approach as SERA (Self-Evolving Robotic Agent), with a fixed VLA executor providing low-level control. The harness maintains and updates task context using observations and execution feedback to guide subsequent planning. Self-evolution uses environment rollouts to propose and evaluate harness revisions, with the selected configuration fixed before held-out testing. On RoboMME, SERA achieves 51.38% overall success with autonomous selection, compared with 44.38% without self-evolution. Our exploration suggests that agentic planning is a promising direction for history-dependent robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Physical AI: Concepts, Techniques, and Challenges

In recent years, physical artificial intelligence (physical AI) has experienced rapid development, capturing significant attention in academia and industry. However, the field has yet to reach consensus on its definition, technical landscape, and core challenges. To address this gap, this monograph seeks to define physical AI, present its technical landscape, and examine each key technical subfield in depth. In doing so, it establishes a unified framework for Physical AI: artificial systems that perceive, model, and act upon the physical world through continuous feedback under real-world constraints. Further, this monograph distinguishes physical AI from conventional digital AI, embodied AI, cyber-physical systems, and digital twins. It develops the foundations of physical AI across physics, control, cognition, learning, and reasoning. It reviews key methodologies, including multimodal perception, physical data and simulation, world models, embodied foundation models, motor-control systems, multi-agent coordination, and hardware-software co-design. Furthermore, it examines applications spanning robotics, manufacturing, infrastructure, scientific experimentation, and autonomous services. Particular attention is given to sim-to-real transfer, reliability, real-time execution, evaluation, safety, governance, and long-term deployment. By connecting perception, prediction, decision-making, action, and adaptation in a closed loop, this monograph identifies the technical challenges and research directions required to advance from narrow automation toward more generalizable physical AI and, ultimately, physical artificial general intelligence (Physical AGI).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MIRAGE: Metric Inference and Reliability-Aware Gaussian Estimation from Feed-Forward Vision

Feed-forward 3D priors enable high-quality reconstruction from image streams but often lack reliable metric scale and suffer from long-term trajectory drift. In contrast, LiDAR--inertial estimation provides metrically accurate motion but lacks the image-space consistency needed for high-fidelity reconstruction. We propose $MIRAGE$, which anchors feed-forward visual geometry to LiDAR--IMU metric motion and regulates online pose corrections according to correspondence support and cross-modal agreement, jointly enabling accurate metric pose estimation and high-fidelity Gaussian reconstruction. Experiments on Oxford Spires, M2DGR and INS show that MIRAGE achieves accurate metric trajectory estimation, outperforming COLMAP, a widely used but computationally expensive reference for vision-only benchmarks. Motivated by the scarcity of long-horizon monocular benchmarks for large-scale indoor reconstruction, we further build a multimodal data-collection platform and use MIRAGE to establish accurate 6-DoF reference trajectories for a new vision-only benchmark. We benchmark recent monocular large-scale reconstruction methods on this dataset, providing a systematic evaluation of their performance in long-horizon indoor scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GeoVerse: World-Consistent Novel View Synthesis in Geometric Latent Space

Novel view synthesis from sparse images must reconcile faithful reconstruction of observed regions with plausible completion of unseen content, while maintaining world consistency across viewpoints. Existing geometry-based methods preserve observed scene structure but often struggle to complete unseen regions, whereas video generative models offer rich appearance priors but accumulate inconsistencies during sequential view generation. We propose GeoVerse, a framework that synthesizes world-consistent novel views by performing generation within the geometric latent space of a pretrained 3D foundation model and injecting appearance priors from a video generative model. Specifically, GeoVerse extracts multilevel features from Wan2.2 VACE and injects them into the geometric latent diffusion model via a ControlNet-style adapter, incorporating video-learned appearance priors to enhance structural completion. To enforce cross-view coherence, a global spatial memory continuously aggregates observed and synthesized content, reprojecting target-aligned guidance to anchor subsequent predictions to a shared scene representation. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate improved visual quality and geometric consistency, with a 2.23 dB higher PSNR on DL3DV and 32.4% lower ATE on Mip-NeRF360 compared to GLD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Real2Gym: Building Gyms from Videos, Bringing Skills to Robots

Real-world videos provide rich demonstrations of manipulation, but turning them into reusable robot skills requires visually aligned environments, executable physical interactions, and mechanisms for learning from experience. We introduce Real2Gym, an agentic Real2Sim2Real framework that turns human and robot demonstrations into interactive simulation gyms and brings skills acquired in simulation to physical robots. The Real2Sim module reconstructs editable scenes, aligns objects and cameras with the input, validates demonstrated or retargeted actions through native physics execution, and generates task-conditioned variations with action-feasibility checks. Within these environments, the agent generates executable code for manipulation stages, observes their outcomes, and distills successful attempts and failures into reusable task procedures, object-relative motions, and recovery strategies. Through a shared perception-and-control interface, these skills guide subsequent execution in simulation and on real robots, with motions adapted to current observations and no updates to the underlying model weights. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Real2Gym enables high-fidelity simulation environment reconstruction, outperforming GPT-6 Astra Direct Mode by 16.7% in success rate with approximately 74.9% fewer policy-execution tokens across these environments, while exceeding it by 33.3% in physical robot execution success rate across four tasks on a real Franka robot.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

InfiniHand: Streaming World-Space Hand Motion Estimation from Egocentric Video

World-space hand motion estimation from egocentric video requires recovering 3D articulated hand geometry while tracking camera egomotion. Existing approaches heavily rely on cascading independent hand pose estimators and SLAM systems, resulting in error accumulation, complex pipelines, and severe computational overhead. To address these limitations, we present InfiniHand, an end-to-end streaming feed-forward framework that jointly estimates MANO parameters, camera trajectories, and hand locations directly from uncalibrated egocentric video. InfiniHand integrates persistent spatiotemporal memory with hand-centered visual features, explicitly coupling camera motion with local hand geometry within a unified architecture. We train InfiniHand in two progressive stages by first learning robust camera-space hand priors and then extending to streaming world-space reconstruction. To support this process, we aggregate a pretraining corpus of approximately 5,000 hours of egocentric data across multiple public datasets. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that InfiniHand outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on in-domain benchmarks, achieving a 21.4% reduction in ARCTIC PA-p compared to ViDiHand while substantially mitigating world-space drift. Furthermore, InfiniHand generalizes robustly to in-the-wild videos and operates at 11.19 FPS, delivering more than twice the throughput of HaWoR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

InternW0-$Δ$: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model visual dynamics and action generation for generalist robot manipulation. A central challenge is to integrate priors from large-scale pretrained models---including visual dynamics, scene semantics, geometry, and motion---into a unified framework for robot action generation. We introduce InternW0-$Δ$, a unified WAM pretrained on a heterogeneous corpus that outperforms prior methods across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. InternW0-$Δ$ combines pretrained visual dynamics, scene-level semantics, 4D geometric and motion priors, and action generation within a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) framework. A pretrained video expert and an action expert interact under semantic guidance from a frozen VLM, while a pretrained 4D foundation model injects geometric and motion priors through training-only distillation. We further introduce Causal Imprint, which learns future-relevant scene changes from training-only future supervision and provides predictive representations directly to the action expert without future-video rollout at inference. For large-scale joint training, we construct a heterogeneous corpus of robot demonstrations, UMI data, egocentric human demonstrations, and Ego2Robot data, curated and aligned under a common state-action representation. The resulting corpus contains over 20K hours of processed training data, to our knowledge the largest open-source corpus of its kind. We pretrain InternW0-$Δ$ on this corpus and demonstrate strong performance across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. We will open source the training code, model weights, infrastructure, data-processing pipeline, and processed data where licenses permit. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/InternW0-Delta/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

AquaFlow: A Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Underwater Streaming Reconstruction

Recent monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) streaming reconstruction methods have achieved impressive performance by balancing reconstruction quality and efficiency. However, extending these frameworks to underwater scenes remains challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as light attenuation and scattering, which degrades camera pose tracking and distorts scene geometry. To address these challenges, we propose AquaFlow, a monocular Gaussian Splatting streaming reconstruction framework for efficient and high-fidelity underwater reconstruction. Specifically, AquaFlow fine-tunes a 3D vision foundation model on large-scale underwater data for robust pose and pointmap estimation, and introduces a medium-guided incremental Gaussian initialization strategy for streaming mapping. Furthermore, we develop a streaming-compatible hybrid scene representation that integrates structured, distance-conditioned neural Gaussians with a physics-inspired optical model to compensate for underwater image formation effects, enabling accurate scene reconstruction. We evaluate AquaFlow on a comprehensive dataset of 62 diverse underwater trajectories, collected from both public benchmarks and in-the-wild web videos across various scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AquaFlow achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering performance, reducing average localization error by 13.2% and improving PSNR by 4.74 dB compared to WaterSplat-SLAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RealVDeblur: One-Step Diffusion for Generalizable Real-World Video Deblurring

Real-world video deblurring remains challenging due to diverse motion patterns, complex degradations, and the scarcity of realistic training data, yet robust restoration is critical for downstream pipelines such as mobile imaging and 3D reconstruction. This work presents \textbf{RealVDeblur}, an efficient generative framework designed to improve in-the-wild robustness under diverse real capture conditions. First, a large-scale, physically grounded blur synthesis pipeline is constructed from scene-level 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) assets and high-frame-rate videos, providing realistic training data covering both camera-induced and object-motion blur. Second, a video diffusion prior is leveraged for restoration; to better accommodate frame-dependent blur variations, temporal compression in the VAE is disabled and a frame-wise encoding scheme is adopted. For practical deployment on long videos, multi-step diffusion sampling is distilled into an efficient one-step generator, and a training-free Temporal Window Mask stabilizes inference beyond the training horizon with constant memory usage. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate strong perceptual quality, semantic fidelity, and temporal consistency on unseen videos, as well as improved robustness in downstream 3D reconstruction under severe motion blur. Project page: https://rbjin.github.io/RealVDeblur

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SoMA: A Real-to-Sim Neural Simulator for Robotic Soft-body Manipulation

Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined physics or data-driven dynamics without robot-conditioned control, limiting accuracy, stability, and generalization. This paper presents SoMA, a 3D Gaussian Splat simulator for soft-body manipulation. SoMA couples deformable dynamics, environmental forces, and robot joint actions in a unified latent neural space for end-to-end real-to-sim simulation. Modeling interactions over learned Gaussian splats enables controllable, stable long-horizon manipulation and generalization beyond observed trajectories without predefined physical models. SoMA improves resimulation accuracy and generalization on real-world robot manipulation by 20%, enabling stable simulation of complex tasks such as long-horizon cloth folding.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

A Definition and Roadmap for World Models

World models -- internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment -- have become one of the most actively debated concepts in AI. From model-based reinforcement learning and video generation to embodied robotics and ultimately, physical AI, researchers across AI subfields are building systems that they call "world models", yet there is no consensus on what a world model fundamentally is, what it should predict, or how it should be built. This perspective article provides a scientific definition of world models, discussions of their key technical aspects, and a staged roadmap for developing effective world models.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AsyncEvGS: Asynchronous Event-Assisted Gaussian Splatting for Handheld Motion-Blurred Scenes

3D reconstruction methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve impressive photorealism but fail when input images suffer from severe motion blur. While event cameras provide high-temporal-resolution motion cues, existing event-assisted approaches rely on low-resolution sensors and strict synchronization, limiting their practicality for handheld 3D capture on common devices, such as smartphones. We introduce a flexible, high-resolution asynchronous RGB-Event dual-camera system and a corresponding reconstruction framework. Our approach first reconstructs sharp images from the event data and then employs a cross-domain pose estimation module based on the Visual Geometry Transformer (VGGT) to obtain robust initialization for 3DGS. During optimization, we employ a structure-driven event loss and view-specific consistency regularizers to mitigate the ill-posed behavior of traditional event losses and deblurring losses, ensuring both stable and high-fidelity reconstruction. We further contribute AsyncEv-Deblur, a new high-resolution RGB-Event dataset captured with our asynchronous system. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both our challenging dataset and existing benchmarks, substantially improving reconstruction robustness under severe motion blur. Project page: https://openimaginglab.github.io/AsyncEvGS/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EAG-PT: Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing for Diffuse Indoor Scene Reconstruction and Editing

Recent radiance-field-based reconstruction methods, such as NeRF and 3DGS, achieve high visual fidelity for indoor scenes, but often break down under scene editing due to baked illumination and the lack of explicit light transport. In contrast, inverse path tracing methods based on mesh representations enforce correct light transport but require highly accurate geometry, making them difficult to apply robustly to real indoor scenes. We present Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing (EAG-PT), a method for physically based reconstruction and rendering of indoor scenes using a unified 2D Gaussian representation, targeting editable diffuse global illumination. Our approach consists of three key ideas: (1) representing indoor scenes with 2D Gaussians as a transport-friendly geometric proxy that avoids explicit mesh reconstruction; (2) explicitly separating emissive and non-emissive components during reconstruction to support editing; and (3) decoupling reconstruction from final rendering by using efficient single-bounce optimization and high-quality multi-bounce path tracing, respectively. Experiments on synthetic and real indoor scenes show that EAG-PT produces more natural and physically consistent edited renderings than radiance-field reconstructions, while preserving finer geometric detail and avoiding mesh-induced artifacts compared with mesh-based inverse path tracing. These results highlight the potential of our approach for applications such as interior design, XR content creation, and embodied AI.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

AnyRecon: Arbitrary-View 3D Reconstruction with Video Diffusion Model

Sparse-view 3D reconstruction is essential for modeling scenes from casual captures, but remain challenging for non-generative reconstruction. Existing diffusion-based approaches mitigates this issues by synthesizing novel views, but they often condition on only one or two capture frames, which restricts geometric consistency and limits scalability to large or diverse scenes. We propose AnyRecon, a scalable framework for reconstruction from arbitrary and unordered sparse inputs that preserves explicit geometric control while supporting flexible conditioning cardinality. To support long-range conditioning, our method constructs a persistent global scene memory via a prepended capture view cache, and removes temporal compression to maintain frame-level correspondence under large viewpoint changes. Beyond better generative model, we also find that the interplay between generation and reconstruction is crucial for large-scale 3D scenes. Thus, we introduce a geometry-aware conditioning strategy that couples generation and reconstruction through an explicit 3D geometric memory and geometry-driven capture-view retrieval. To ensure efficiency, we combine 4-step diffusion distillation with context-window sparse attention to reduce quadratic complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate robust and scalable reconstruction across irregular inputs, large viewpoint gaps, and long trajectories.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SIM1: Physics-Aligned Simulator as Zero-Shot Data Scaler in Deformable Worlds

Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from the cost of real-world data acquisition, prevailing sim-to-real pipelines remain rooted in rigid-body abstractions, producing mismatched geometry, fragile soft dynamics, and motion primitives poorly suited for cloth interaction. We posit that simulation fails not for being synthetic, but for being ungrounded. To address this, we introduce SIM1, a physics-aligned real-to-sim-to-real data engine that grounds simulation in the physical world. Given limited demonstrations, the system digitizes scenes into metric-consistent twins, calibrates deformable dynamics through elastic modeling, and expands behaviors via diffusion-based trajectory generation with quality filtering. This pipeline transforms sparse observations into scaled synthetic supervision with near-demonstration fidelity. Experiments show that policies trained on purely synthetic data achieve parity with real-data baselines at a 1:15 equivalence ratio, while delivering 90% zero-shot success and 50% generalization gains in real-world deployment. These results validate physics-aligned simulation as scalable supervision for deformable manipulation and a practical pathway for data-efficient policy learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

M^3: Dense Matching Meets Multi-View Foundation Models for Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM

Streaming reconstruction from uncalibrated monocular video remains challenging, as it requires both high-precision pose estimation and computationally efficient online refinement in dynamic environments. While coupling 3D foundation models with SLAM frameworks is a promising paradigm, a critical bottleneck persists: most multi-view foundation models estimate poses in a feed-forward manner, yielding pixel-level correspondences that lack the requisite precision for rigorous geometric optimization. To address this, we present M^3, which augments the Multi-view foundation model with a dedicated Matching head to facilitate fine-grained dense correspondences and integrates it into a robust Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM. M^3 further enhances tracking stability by incorporating dynamic area suppression and cross-inference intrinsic alignment. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in both pose estimation and scene reconstruction. Notably, M^3 reduces ATE RMSE by 64.3% compared to VGGT-SLAM 2.0 and outperforms ARTDECO by 2.11 dB in PSNR on the ScanNet++ dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PLANING: A Loosely Coupled Triangle-Gaussian Framework for Streaming 3D Reconstruction

Streaming reconstruction from monocular image sequences remains challenging, as existing methods typically favor either high-quality rendering or accurate geometry, but rarely both. We present PLANING, an efficient on-the-fly reconstruction framework built on a hybrid representation that loosely couples explicit geometric primitives with neural Gaussians, enabling geometry and appearance to be modeled in a decoupled manner. This decoupling supports an online initialization and optimization strategy that separates geometry and appearance updates, yielding stable streaming reconstruction with substantially reduced structural redundancy. PLANING improves dense mesh Chamfer-L2 by 18.52% over PGSR, surpasses ARTDECO by 1.31 dB PSNR, and reconstructs ScanNetV2 scenes in under 100 seconds, over 5x faster than 2D Gaussian Splatting, while matching the quality of offline per-scene optimization. Beyond reconstruction quality, the structural clarity and computational efficiency of PLANING make it well suited for a broad range of downstream applications, such as enabling large-scale scene modeling and simulation-ready environments for embodied AI. Project page: https://city-super.github.io/PLANING/ .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TrajVG: 3D Trajectory-Coupled Visual Geometry Learning

Feed-forward multi-frame 3D reconstruction models often degrade on videos with object motion. Global-reference becomes ambiguous under multiple motions, while the local pointmap relies heavily on estimated relative poses and can drift, causing cross-frame misalignment and duplicated structures. We propose TrajVG, a reconstruction framework that makes cross-frame 3D correspondence an explicit prediction by estimating camera-coordinate 3D trajectories. We couple sparse trajectories, per-frame local point maps, and relative camera poses with geometric consistency objectives: (i) bidirectional trajectory-pointmap consistency with controlled gradient flow, and (ii) a pose consistency objective driven by static track anchors that suppresses gradients from dynamic regions. To scale training to in-the-wild videos where 3D trajectory labels are scarce, we reformulate the same coupling constraints into self-supervised objectives using only pseudo 2D tracks, enabling unified training with mixed supervision. Extensive experiments across 3D tracking, pose estimation, pointmap reconstruction, and video depth show that TrajVG surpasses the current feedforward performance baseline.

cs.CV↗