Daily Papers

Precise reconstruction and manipulation of the crumpled cloths is challenging due to the high dimensionality of cloth models, as well as the limited observation at self-occluded regions. We leverage the recent progress in the field of single-view human reconstruction to template-based reconstruct crumpled cloths from their top-view depth observations only, with our proposed sim-real registration protocols. In contrast to previous implicit cloth representations, our reconstruction mesh explicitly describes the positions and visibilities of the entire cloth mesh vertices, enabling more efficient dual-arm and single-arm target-oriented manipulations. Experiments demonstrate that our TRTM system can be applied to daily cloths that have similar topologies as our template mesh, but with different shapes, sizes, patterns, and physical properties. Videos, datasets, pre-trained models, and code can be downloaded from our project website: https://wenbwa.github.io/TRTM/ .

Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.

Real-to-sim conversion for robotic interaction with objects remains labor-intensive because it requires more than visual reconstruction: a streamlined real2sim process must recover scene geometries and object states, infer physical parameters, and assemble actors, objects, cameras, poses, and trajectories into a runnable physical simulation. Today this process still depends on manual tuning of visual foundation models, mesh cleanup, coordinate-frame alignment, and brittle workflow glue across visual perception tools and simulators. We introduce Agentic Real2Sim, a framework for generalized physical world modeling with vision-language agents, converting a real-world recording of object-robot interaction into a simulatable episodic twin which preserves observations, geometries, robot interactions, and object states. We evaluate Agentic Real2Sim on rigid-object manipulation, deformable-object interaction, and humanoid motion scenes, spanning domains that are usually handled by separate Real2Sim pipelines, marking a first step toward scalable conversion. The framework's agentic decisions can be driven by an open-weight VLM backend at a small fraction of the cost of frontier models, while attaining comparable conversion success rate. We aim to use the resulting real-world-aligned twins for downstream robotics tasks, specifically policy learning and evaluation. The project site is available at https://agentic-real2sim.github.io/.

Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics. Traditional methods like Domain Randomization often fail to capture fine-grained dynamics, limiting their effectiveness for precise control tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that dynamically adjusts simulation environment parameters online using in-context learning. By leveraging past interaction histories as context, our method adapts the simulation environment dynamics to real-world dynamics without requiring gradient updates, resulting in faster and more accurate alignment between simulated and real-world performance. We validate our approach across two tasks: object scooping and table air hockey. In the sim-to-sim evaluations, our method significantly outperforms the baselines on environment parameter estimation by 80% and 42% in the object scooping and table air hockey setups, respectively. Furthermore, our method achieves at least 70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer on object scooping across three different objects. By incorporating historical interaction data, our approach delivers efficient and smooth system identification, advancing the deployment of robots in dynamic real-world scenarios. Demos are available on our project page: https://sim2real-capture.github.io/

We present MobileGym, a browser-hosted, lightweight, fully controllable environment for everyday mobile use, targeting interaction fidelity without replicating proprietary backends. It enables two capabilities previously out of reach for everyday apps: verifiable outcome signals through deterministic state-based judging over structured JSON state, and scalable online RL through low-cost parallel rollouts. The full environment state is captured, configured, forked, and compared as structured JSON, and a single server can host hundreds of parallel instances, with about 400 MB memory per instance and about 3 s cold start. A layered state model and a declarative task-definition framework keep state programmability and task creation practical at scale, and a single programmatic judging mechanism delivers both deterministic evaluation verdicts and dense RL rewards. The accompanying MobileGym-Bench provides 416 parameterized task templates, including 256 test and 160 train templates, over 28 apps, with deterministic judges and a structured AnswerSheet protocol that avoids free-text matching failures. In a Sim-to-Real case study, GRPO on Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct gains +12.8 percentage points on the 256-task test set, and on a 59-task real-device signal subset, real-device execution retains 95.1% of the simulation-side training gain. Project page: https://mobilegym.github.io.

We present the first unified, modular, open-source 3DGS-based simulation framework for Real2Sim2Real robot learning. It features a holistic Real2Sim pipeline that synthesizes hyper-realistic geometry and appearance of complex real-world scenarios, paving the way for analyzing and bridging the Sim2Real gap. Powered by Gaussian Splatting and MuJoCo, Discoverse enables massively parallel simulation of multiple sensor modalities and accurate physics, with inclusive supports for existing 3D assets, robot models, and ROS plugins, empowering large-scale robot learning and complex robotic benchmarks. Through extensive experiments on imitation learning, Discoverse demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot Sim2Real transfer performance compared to existing simulators. For code and demos: https://air-discoverse.github.io/.

Industrial visual sim-to-real is often described as transferring from synthetic images to real images, but industrial deployment usually involves a broader mismatch between available evidence and required decisions. A system may be built from CAD renderings, simulated RGB-D observations, normal reference images, synthetic defects, pretrained feature spaces, or language prompts, yet deployed under different sensors, lighting, materials, fixtures, calibration, production variation, and rare defect modes. This review reframes industrial visual sim-to-real as a domain-gap problem organized by prior availability. We distinguish CAD-available settings, where explicit object geometry can support rendering, calibration, pose estimation, segmentation, and test-time geometric verification; CAD-unavailable settings, where geometry is replaced by normal-reference appearance, feature distributions, teacher-student residuals, synthetic anomaly assumptions, foundation features, or vision-language priors; and boundary-prior settings, where approximate models, templates, reference views, or semantic correspondences preserve only part of the CAD role. This framing connects CAD-based detection and 6D pose-estimation literature with industrial anomaly and surface-inspection literature that is usually reviewed separately. To make the taxonomy concrete, we use empirical anchors on T-LESS/BOP, MVTec AD, and VisA. The anchors show that CAD render count alone does not close transfer; source-distribution design, detector capacity, and small real calibration can matter more. They also show that CAD at test time creates a distinct verification channel through mask, pose, and depth consistency, whereas CAD-unavailable inspection relies on calibrated normality and feature deviation. The review therefore argues against a single cross-task leaderboard and instead asks what prior grounds the deployment decision.

We present Agent-to-Sim (ATS), a framework for learning interactive behavior models of 3D agents from casual longitudinal video collections. Different from prior works that rely on marker-based tracking and multiview cameras, ATS learns natural behaviors of animal and human agents non-invasively through video observations recorded over a long time-span (e.g., a month) in a single environment. Modeling 3D behavior of an agent requires persistent 3D tracking (e.g., knowing which point corresponds to which) over a long time period. To obtain such data, we develop a coarse-to-fine registration method that tracks the agent and the camera over time through a canonical 3D space, resulting in a complete and persistent spacetime 4D representation. We then train a generative model of agent behaviors using paired data of perception and motion of an agent queried from the 4D reconstruction. ATS enables real-to-sim transfer from video recordings of an agent to an interactive behavior simulator. We demonstrate results on pets (e.g., cat, dog, bunny) and human given monocular RGBD videos captured by a smartphone.

Cross-modal optical-SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) registration is a bottleneck for disaster-response via remote sensing, yet modern image matchers are developed and benchmarked almost exclusively on natural-image domains. We evaluate twenty-four pretrained matcher families--in a zero-shot setting with no fine-tuning or domain adaptation on satellite or SAR data--on SpaceNet9 and two additional cross-modal benchmarks under a deterministic protocol with tiled large-image inference, robust geometric filtering, and tie-point-grounded metrics. Our results reveal asymmetric transfer--matchers with explicit cross-modal training do not uniformly outperform those without it. While XoFTR (trained for visible-thermal matching) and RoMa achieve the lowest reported mean error at 3.0 px on the labeled SpaceNet9 training scenes, RoMa achieves this without any cross-modal training, and MatchAnything-ELoFTR (3.4 px)--trained on synthetic cross-modal pairs--matches closely, suggesting (as a working hypothesis) that foundation-model features (DINOv2) may contribute to modality invariance that partially substitutes for explicit cross-modal supervision. 3D-reconstruction matchers (MASt3R, DUSt3R), which are not designed for traditional 2D image matching, are highly protocol-sensitive and remain fragile under default settings. Deployment protocol choices (geometry model, tile size, inlier gating) shift accuracy by up to 33times for a single matcher, sometimes exceeding the effect of swapping matchers entirely within the evaluated sweep--affine geometry alone reduces mean error from 12.34 to 9.74 px. These findings inform both practical deployment of existing matchers and future matcher design for cross-modal satellite registration.

Real-world deployment of embodied agents requires active exploration, visual grounding, and interactive intent disambiguation. However, existing frameworks often rely on privileged simulator states or assume complete instructions, bypassing realistic deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we present REAL, an agentic framework for open-world mobile manipulation. REAL establishes sim-to-real-consistent environment APIs without oracle perception and integrates a simulated user to enable human-in-the-loop interaction. Within this environment, we design diverse task compositions to drive data collection, supervised fine-tuning, and online reinforcement learning, systematically optimizing agent performance. To comprehensively evaluate this approach, we introduce REAL-Bench, a benchmark spanning 241 tasks across active exploration, visual distraction, articulated manipulation, and interactive disambiguation. Experimental results demonstrate that our trained agent outperforms leading commercial closed-source VLMs on interactive tasks with a 56.9% success rate. Further empirical analysis reveals that our hierarchical training pipeline successfully aligns the model's tool-use capabilities while maintaining robust open-vocabulary reasoning under extended exploration horizons. Finally, we deploy and evaluate our framework on a physical dual-arm mobile robot, where it achieves a 78.3% end-to-end success rate over 60 real-world episodes. These physical trials demonstrate robust zero-shot transferability to unseen household scenarios, validating that our sim-to-real-consistent design successfully bridges the reality gap for long-horizon mobile manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/InternRobotics/REAL.

Simulating object dynamics from real-world perception shows great promise for digital twins and robotic manipulation but often demands labor-intensive measurements and expertise. We present a fully automated Real2Sim pipeline that generates simulation-ready assets for real-world objects through robotic interaction. Using only a robot's joint torque sensors and an external camera, the pipeline identifies visual geometry, collision geometry, and physical properties such as inertial parameters. Our approach introduces a general method for extracting high-quality, object-centric meshes from photometric reconstruction techniques (e.g., NeRF, Gaussian Splatting) by employing alpha-transparent training while explicitly distinguishing foreground occlusions from background subtraction. We validate the full pipeline through extensive experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse objects. By eliminating the need for manual intervention or environment modifications, our pipeline can be integrated directly into existing pick-and-place setups, enabling scalable and efficient dataset creation. Project page (with code and data): https://scalable-real2sim.github.io/.

Machine learning has facilitated significant advancements across various robotics domains, including navigation, locomotion, and manipulation. Many such achievements have been driven by the extensive use of simulation as a critical tool for training and testing robotic systems prior to their deployment in real-world environments. However, simulations consist of abstractions and approximations that inevitably introduce discrepancies between simulated and real environments, known as the reality gap. These discrepancies significantly hinder the successful transfer of systems from simulation to the real world. Closing this gap remains one of the most pressing challenges in robotics. Recent advances in sim-to-real transfer have demonstrated promising results across various platforms, including locomotion, navigation, and manipulation. By leveraging techniques such as domain randomization, real-to-sim transfer, state and action abstractions, and sim-real co-training, many works have overcome the reality gap. However, challenges persist, and a deeper understanding of the reality gap's root causes and solutions is necessary. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the sim-to-real landscape, highlighting the causes, solutions, and evaluation metrics for the reality gap and sim-to-real transfer.

A practical approach to learning robot skills, often termed sim2real, is to train control policies in simulation and then deploy them on a real robot. Popular techniques to improve the sim2real transfer build on domain randomization (DR) -- training the policy on a diverse set of randomly generated domains with the hope of better generalization to the real world. Due to the large number of hyper-parameters in both the policy learning and DR algorithms, one often ends up with a large number of trained policies, where choosing the best policy among them demands costly evaluation on the real robot. In this work we ask - can we rank the policies without running them in the real world? Our main idea is that a predefined set of real world data can be used to evaluate all policies, using out-of-distribution detection (OOD) techniques. In a sense, this approach can be seen as a `unit test' to evaluate policies before any real world execution. However, we find that by itself, the OOD score can be inaccurate and very sensitive to the particular OOD method. Our main contribution is a simple-yet-effective policy score that combines OOD with an evaluation in simulation. We show that our score - VSDR - can significantly improve the accuracy of policy ranking without requiring additional real world data. We evaluate the effectiveness of VSDR on sim2real transfer in a robotic grasping task with image inputs. We extensively evaluate different DR parameters and OOD methods, and show that VSDR improves policy selection across the board. More importantly, our method achieves significantly better ranking, and uses significantly less data compared to baselines. Project website is available at https://sites.google.com/view/vsdr/home.

Synthetic data (SIM) drawn from simulators have emerged as a popular alternative for training models where acquiring annotated real-world images is difficult. However, transferring models trained on synthetic images to real-world applications can be challenging due to appearance disparities. A commonly employed solution to counter this SIM2REAL gap is unsupervised domain adaptation, where models are trained using labeled SIM data and unlabeled REAL data. Mispredictions made by such SIM2REAL adapted models are often associated with miscalibration - stemming from overconfident predictions on real data. In this paper, we introduce AUGCAL, a simple training-time patch for unsupervised adaptation that improves SIM2REAL adapted models by - (1) reducing overall miscalibration, (2) reducing overconfidence in incorrect predictions and (3) improving confidence score reliability by better guiding misclassification detection - all while retaining or improving SIM2REAL performance. Given a base SIM2REAL adaptation algorithm, at training time, AUGCAL involves replacing vanilla SIM images with strongly augmented views (AUG intervention) and additionally optimizing for a training time calibration loss on augmented SIM predictions (CAL intervention). We motivate AUGCAL using a brief analytical justification of how to reduce miscalibration on unlabeled REAL data. Through our experiments, we empirically show the efficacy of AUGCAL across multiple adaptation methods, backbones, tasks and shifts.

Navigation and manipulation are core capabilities in Embodied AI, yet training agents with these capabilities in the real world faces high costs and time complexity. Therefore, sim-to-real transfer has emerged as a key approach, yet the sim-to-real gap persists. This survey examines how physics simulators address this gap by analyzing their properties overlooked in previous surveys. We also analyze their features for navigation and manipulation tasks, along with hardware requirements. Additionally, we offer a resource with benchmark datasets, metrics, simulation platforms, and cutting-edge methods-such as world models and geometric equivariance-to help researchers select suitable tools while accounting for hardware constraints.

The default strategy for training single-view Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) follows the fully supervised route using large-scale datasets of synthetic 3D assets or multi-view captures. Although these resources simplify the training procedure, they are hard to scale up beyond the existing datasets and they are not necessarily representative of the real distribution of object shapes. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce Real3D, the first LRM system that can be trained using single-view real-world images. Real3D introduces a novel self-training framework that can benefit from both the existing synthetic data and diverse single-view real images. We propose two unsupervised losses that allow us to supervise LRMs at the pixel- and semantic-level, even for training examples without ground-truth 3D or novel views. To further improve performance and scale up the image data, we develop an automatic data curation approach to collect high-quality examples from in-the-wild images. Our experiments show that Real3D consistently outperforms prior work in four diverse evaluation settings that include real and synthetic data, as well as both in-domain and out-of-domain shapes. Code and model can be found here: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/Real3D/

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, communication protocols and algorithms are essential for cooperation and collaboration between UAVs. Simulation provides a cost-effective solution for prototyping, debugging, and analyzing protocols and algorithms, avoiding the prohibitive expenses of field experiments. In this paper, we present ``UavNetSim-v1'', an open-source Python-based simulation platform designed for rapid development, testing, and evaluating the protocols and algorithms in UAV networks. ``UavNetSim-v1'' provides most of the functionalities developers may need, including routing/medium access control (MAC) protocols, topology control algorithms and mobility/energy models, while maintaining ease of use. Furthermore, the platform supports comprehensive performance evaluation and features an interactive visualization interface for in-depth algorithm analysis. In short, ``UavNetSim-v1'' lends itself to both rapid prototyping and educational purposes, and can serve as a lightweight yet powerful alternative to mature network simulators for UAV communication research.

Virtual Reality (VR) bares promise of social interactions that can feel more immersive than other media. Key to this is the ability to accurately animate a photorealistic avatar of one's likeness while wearing a VR headset. Although high quality registration of person-specific avatars to headset-mounted camera (HMC) images is possible in an offline setting, the performance of generic realtime models are significantly degraded. Online registration is also challenging due to oblique camera views and differences in modality. In this work, we first show that the domain gap between the avatar and headset-camera images is one of the primary sources of difficulty, where a transformer-based architecture achieves high accuracy on domain-consistent data, but degrades when the domain-gap is re-introduced. Building on this finding, we develop a system design that decouples the problem into two parts: 1) an iterative refinement module that takes in-domain inputs, and 2) a generic avatar-guided image-to-image style transfer module that is conditioned on current estimation of expression and head pose. These two modules reinforce each other, as image style transfer becomes easier when close-to-ground-truth examples are shown, and better domain-gap removal helps registration. Our system produces high-quality results efficiently, obviating the need for costly offline registration to generate personalized labels. We validate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach through extensive experiments on a commodity headset, demonstrating significant improvements over direct regression methods as well as offline registration.

Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.

Simulators are indispensable for research in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots and drones. Despite significant progress in various simulation aspects, such as graphical realism, an evident gap persists between the virtual and real-world environments. Since the ultimate goal is to deploy the autonomous systems in the real world, closing the sim2real gap is of utmost importance. In this paper, we employ a state-of-the-art approach to enhance the photorealism of simulated data, aligning them with the visual characteristics of real-world datasets. Based on this, we developed CARLA2Real, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool (plug-in) for the widely used and open-source CARLA simulator. This tool enhances the output of CARLA in near real-time, achieving a frame rate of 13 FPS, translating it to the visual style and realism of real-world datasets such as Cityscapes, KITTI, and Mapillary Vistas. By employing the proposed tool, we generated synthetic datasets from both the simulator and the enhancement model outputs, including their corresponding ground truth annotations for tasks related to autonomous driving. Then, we performed a number of experiments to evaluate the impact of the proposed approach on feature extraction and semantic segmentation methods when trained on the enhanced synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the sim2real gap is significant and can indeed be reduced by the introduced approach.

Video game engines have been an important source for generating large volumes of visual synthetic datasets for training and evaluating computer vision algorithms that are to be deployed in the real world. While the visual fidelity of modern game engines has been significantly improved with technologies such as ray-tracing, a notable sim2real appearance gap between the synthetic and the real-world images still remains, which limits the utilization of synthetic datasets in real-world applications. In this letter, we investigate the ability of a state-of-the-art image generation and editing diffusion model (FLUX.2-4B Klein) to enhance the photorealism of synthetic datasets and compare its performance against a traditional image-to-image translation model (REGEN). Furthermore, we propose a hybrid approach that combines the strong geometry and material transformations of diffusion-based methods with the distribution-matching capabilities of image-to-image translation techniques. Through experiments, it is demonstrated that REGEN outperforms FLUX.2-4B Klein and that by combining both FLUX.2-4B Klein and REGEN models, better visual realism can be achieved compared to using each model individually, while maintaining semantic consistency. The code is available at: https://github.com/stefanos50/Hybrid-Sim2Real

3D data simulation aims to bridge the gap between simulated and real-captured 3D data, which is a fundamental problem for real-world 3D visual tasks. Most 3D data simulation methods inject predefined physical priors but struggle to capture the full complexity of real data. An optimal approach involves learning an implicit mapping from synthetic to realistic data in a data-driven manner, but progress in this solution has met stagnation in recent studies. This work explores a new solution path of data-driven 3D simulation, called Stable-Sim2Real, based on a novel two-stage depth diffusion model. The initial stage finetunes Stable-Diffusion to generate the residual between the real and synthetic paired depth, producing a stable but coarse depth, where some local regions may deviate from realistic patterns. To enhance this, both the synthetic and initial output depth are fed into a second-stage diffusion, where diffusion loss is adjusted to prioritize these distinct areas identified by a 3D discriminator. We provide a new benchmark scheme to evaluate 3D data simulation methods. Extensive experiments show that training the network with the 3D simulated data derived from our method significantly enhances performance in real-world 3D visual tasks. Moreover, the evaluation demonstrates the high similarity between our 3D simulated data and real-captured patterns. Project page: https://mutianxu.github.io/stable-sim2real/.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) collaborative perception is crucial for autonomous driving. However, achieving high-precision V2X perception requires a significant amount of annotated real-world data, which can always be expensive and hard to acquire. Simulated data have raised much attention since they can be massively produced at an extremely low cost. Nevertheless, the significant domain gap between simulated and real-world data, including differences in sensor type, reflectance patterns, and road surroundings, often leads to poor performance of models trained on simulated data when evaluated on real-world data. In addition, there remains a domain gap between real-world collaborative agents, e.g. different types of sensors may be installed on autonomous vehicles and roadside infrastructures with different extrinsics, further increasing the difficulty of sim2real generalization. To take full advantage of simulated data, we present a new unsupervised sim2real domain adaptation method for V2X collaborative detection named Decoupled Unsupervised Sim2Real Adaptation (DUSA). Our new method decouples the V2X collaborative sim2real domain adaptation problem into two sub-problems: sim2real adaptation and inter-agent adaptation. For sim2real adaptation, we design a Location-adaptive Sim2Real Adapter (LSA) module to adaptively aggregate features from critical locations of the feature map and align the features between simulated data and real-world data via a sim/real discriminator on the aggregated global feature. For inter-agent adaptation, we further devise a Confidence-aware Inter-agent Adapter (CIA) module to align the fine-grained features from heterogeneous agents under the guidance of agent-wise confidence maps. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DUSA approach on unsupervised sim2real adaptation from the simulated V2XSet dataset to the real-world DAIR-V2X-C dataset.

The DARPA Transfer from Imprecise and Abstract Models to Autonomous Technologies (TIAMAT) program aims to address rapid and robust transfer of autonomy technologies across dynamic and complex environments, goals, and platforms. Existing methods for simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) transfer often rely on high-fidelity simulations and struggle with broad adaptation, particularly in time-sensitive scenarios. Although many approaches have shown incredible performance at specific tasks, most techniques fall short when posed with unforeseen, complex, and dynamic real-world scenarios due to the inherent limitations of simulation. In contrast to current research that aims to bridge the gap between simulation environments and the real world through increasingly sophisticated simulations and a combination of methods typically assuming a small sim-to-real gap -- such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, imitation learning, meta-learning, policy distillation, and dynamic optimization -- TIAMAT takes a different approach by instead emphasizing transfer and adaptation of the autonomy stack directly to real-world environments by utilizing a breadth of low(er)-fidelity simulations to create broadly effective sim-to-real transfers. By abstractly learning from multiple simulation environments in reference to their shared semantics, TIAMAT's approaches aim to achieve abstract-to-real transfer for effective and rapid real-world adaptation. Furthermore, this program endeavors to improve the overall autonomy pipeline by addressing the inherent challenges in translating simulated behaviors into effective real-world performance.

Evaluating the performance of autonomous vehicle planning algorithms necessitates simulating long-tail safety-critical traffic scenarios. However, traditional methods for generating such scenarios often fall short in terms of controllability and realism; they also neglect the dynamics of agent interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce SAFE-SIM, a novel diffusion-based controllable closed-loop safety-critical simulation framework. Our approach yields two distinct advantages: 1) generating realistic long-tail safety-critical scenarios that closely reflect real-world conditions, and 2) providing controllable adversarial behavior for more comprehensive and interactive evaluations. We develop a novel approach to simulate safety-critical scenarios through an adversarial term in the denoising process of diffusion models, which allows an adversarial agent to challenge a planner with plausible maneuvers while all agents in the scene exhibit reactive and realistic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose novel guidance objectives and a partial diffusion process that enables users to control key aspects of the scenarios, such as the collision type and aggressiveness of the adversarial agent, while maintaining the realism of the behavior. We validate our framework empirically using the nuScenes and nuPlan datasets across multiple planners, demonstrating improvements in both realism and controllability. These findings affirm that diffusion models provide a robust and versatile foundation for safety-critical, interactive traffic simulation, extending their utility across the broader autonomous driving landscape. Project website: https://safe-sim.github.io/.

Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components form Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP), a scalable data augmentation pipeline for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking first on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results show that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale E2E training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.

As NLP evaluation shifts from static benchmarks to multi-turn interactive settings, LLM-based simulators have become widely used as user proxies, serving two roles: generating user turns and providing evaluation signals. Yet, these simulations are frequently assumed to be faithful to real human behaviors, often without rigorous verification. We formalize the Sim2Real gap in user simulation and present the first study running the full τ-bench protocol with real humans (451 participants, 165 tasks), benchmarking 31 LLM simulators across proprietary, open-source, and specialized families using the User-Sim Index (USI), a metric we introduce to quantify how well LLM simulators resemble real user interactive behaviors and feedback. Behaviorally, LLM simulators are excessively cooperative, stylistically uniform, and lack realistic frustration or ambiguity, creating an "easy mode" that inflates agent success rates above the human baseline. In evaluations, real humans provide nuanced judgments across eight quality dimensions while simulated users produce uniformly more positive feedback; rule-based rewards are failing to capture rich feedback signals generated by human users. Overall, higher general model capability does not necessarily yield more faithful user simulation. These findings highlight the importance of human validation when using LLM-based user simulators in the agent development cycle and motivate improved models for user simulation.

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) has become an important technique for optical super-resolution imaging because it allows a doubling of image resolution at speeds compatible for live-cell imaging. However, the reconstruction of SIM images is often slow and prone to artefacts. Here we propose a versatile reconstruction method, ML-SIM, which makes use of machine learning. The model is an end-to-end deep residual neural network that is trained on a simulated data set to be free of common SIM artefacts. ML-SIM is thus robust to noise and irregularities in the illumination patterns of the raw SIM input frames. The reconstruction method is widely applicable and does not require the acquisition of experimental training data. Since the training data are generated from simulations of the SIM process on images from generic libraries the method can be efficiently adapted to specific experimental SIM implementations. The reconstruction quality enabled by our method is compared with traditional SIM reconstruction methods, and we demonstrate advantages in terms of noise, reconstruction fidelity and contrast for both simulated and experimental inputs. In addition, reconstruction of one SIM frame typically only takes ~100ms to perform on PCs with modern Nvidia graphics cards, making the technique compatible with real-time imaging. The full implementation and the trained networks are available at http://ML-SIM.com.

Recent advancements in behavior cloning have enabled robots to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, accurately assessing training performance remains challenging, particularly for real-world applications, as behavior cloning losses often correlate poorly with actual task success. Consequently, researchers resort to success rate metrics derived from costly and time-consuming real-world evaluations, making the identification of optimal policies and detection of overfitting or underfitting impractical. To address these issues, we propose real-is-sim, a novel behavior cloning framework that incorporates a dynamic digital twin (based on Embodied Gaussians) throughout the entire policy development pipeline: data collection, training, and deployment. By continuously aligning the simulated world with the physical world, demonstrations can be collected in the real world with states extracted from the simulator. The simulator enables flexible state representations by rendering image inputs from any viewpoint or extracting low-level state information from objects embodied within the scene. During training, policies can be directly evaluated within the simulator in an offline and highly parallelizable manner. Finally, during deployment, policies are run within the simulator where the real robot directly tracks the simulated robot's joints, effectively decoupling policy execution from real hardware and mitigating traditional domain-transfer challenges. We validate real-is-sim on the PushT manipulation task, demonstrating strong correlation between success rates obtained in the simulator and real-world evaluations. Videos of our system can be found at https://realissim.rai-inst.com.

Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.

With the continuous advancement of image generation technology, advanced models such as GPT-Image-1 and Qwen-Image have achieved remarkable text-to-image consistency and world knowledge However, these models still fall short in photorealistic image generation. Even on simple T2I tasks, they tend to produce " fake" images with distinct AI artifacts, often characterized by "overly smooth skin" and "oily facial sheens". To recapture the original goal of "indistinguishable-from-reality" generation, we propose RealGen, a photorealistic text-to-image framework. RealGen integrates an LLM component for prompt optimization and a diffusion model for realistic image generation. Inspired by adversarial generation, RealGen introduces a "Detector Reward" mechanism, which quantifies artifacts and assesses realism using both semantic-level and feature-level synthetic image detectors. We leverage this reward signal with the GRPO algorithm to optimize the entire generation pipeline, significantly enhancing image realism and detail. Furthermore, we propose RealBench, an automated evaluation benchmark employing Detector-Scoring and Arena-Scoring. It enables human-free photorealism assessment, yielding results that are more accurate and aligned with real user experience. Experiments demonstrate that RealGen significantly outperforms general models like GPT-Image-1 and Qwen-Image, as well as specialized photorealistic models like FLUX-Krea, in terms of realism, detail, and aesthetics. The code is available at https://github.com/yejy53/RealGen.

Autonomously trained agents that are supposed to play video games reasonably well rely either on fast simulation speeds or heavy parallelization across thousands of machines running concurrently. This work explores a third way that is established in robotics, namely sim-to-real transfer, or if the game is considered a simulation itself, sim-to-sim transfer. In the case of Rocket League, we demonstrate that single behaviors of goalies and strikers can be successfully learned using Deep Reinforcement Learning in the simulation environment and transferred back to the original game. Although the implemented training simulation is to some extent inaccurate, the goalkeeping agent saves nearly 100% of its faced shots once transferred, while the striking agent scores in about 75% of cases. Therefore, the trained agent is robust enough and able to generalize to the target domain of Rocket League.

We introduce RealPlay, a neural network-based real-world game engine that enables interactive video generation from user control signals. Unlike prior works focused on game-style visuals, RealPlay aims to produce photorealistic, temporally consistent video sequences that resemble real-world footage. It operates in an interactive loop: users observe a generated scene, issue a control command, and receive a short video chunk in response. To enable such realistic and responsive generation, we address key challenges including iterative chunk-wise prediction for low-latency feedback, temporal consistency across iterations, and accurate control response. RealPlay is trained on a combination of labeled game data and unlabeled real-world videos, without requiring real-world action annotations. Notably, we observe two forms of generalization: (1) control transfer-RealPlay effectively maps control signals from virtual to real-world scenarios; and (2) entity transfer-although training labels originate solely from a car racing game, RealPlay generalizes to control diverse real-world entities, including bicycles and pedestrians, beyond vehicles. Project page can be found: https://wenqsun.github.io/RealPlay/

The scalability of robotic learning is fundamentally bottlenecked by the significant cost and labor of real-world data collection. While simulated data offers a scalable alternative, it often fails to generalize to the real world due to significant gaps in visual appearance, physical properties, and object interactions. To address this, we propose RoboSimGS, a novel Real2Sim2Real framework that converts multi-view real-world images into scalable, high-fidelity, and physically interactive simulation environments for robotic manipulation. Our approach reconstructs scenes using a hybrid representation: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) captures the photorealistic appearance of the environment, while mesh primitives for interactive objects ensure accurate physics simulation. Crucially, we pioneer the use of a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) to automate the creation of physically plausible, articulated assets. The MLLM analyzes visual data to infer not only physical properties (e.g., density, stiffness) but also complex kinematic structures (e.g., hinges, sliding rails) of objects. We demonstrate that policies trained entirely on data generated by RoboSimGS achieve successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across a diverse set of real-world manipulation tasks. Furthermore, data from RoboSimGS significantly enhances the performance and generalization capabilities of SOTA methods. Our results validate RoboSimGS as a powerful and scalable solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap.

Real-world Super-Resolution (Real-SR) methods focus on dealing with diverse real-world images and have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The key idea is to use a complex and high-order degradation model to mimic real-world degradations. Although they have achieved impressive results in various scenarios, they are faced with the obstacle of evaluation. Currently, these methods are only assessed by their average performance on a small set of degradation cases randomly selected from a large space, which fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of their overall performance and often yields inconsistent and potentially misleading results. To overcome the limitation in evaluation, we propose SEAL, a framework for systematic evaluation of real-SR. In particular, we cluster the extensive degradation space to create a set of representative degradation cases, which serves as a comprehensive test set. Next, we propose a coarse-to-fine evaluation protocol to measure the distributed and relative performance of real-SR methods on the test set. The protocol incorporates two new metrics: acceptance rate (AR) and relative performance ratio (RPR), derived from acceptance and excellence lines. Under SEAL, we benchmark existing real-SR methods, obtain new observations and insights into their performance, and develop a new strong baseline. We consider SEAL as the first step towards creating a comprehensive real-SR evaluation platform, which can promote the development of real-SR. The source code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/SEAL

We often aim to generate images that are both photorealistic and 3D-consistent, adhering to precise geometry, material, and viewpoint controls. Typically, this is achieved by fine-tuning an image generator, pre-trained on billions of real images, using renders of synthetic 3D assets, where annotations for control signals are available. While this approach can learn the desired controls, it often compromises the realism of the images due to domain gap between photographs and renders. We observe that this issue largely arises from the model learning an unintended association between the presence of control signals and the synthetic appearance of the images. To address this, we introduce Realiz3D, a lightweight framework for training diffusion models, that decouples controls and visual domain. The key idea is to explicitly learn visual domain, real or synthetic, separately from other control signals by introducing a co-variate that, fed into small residual adapters, shifts the domain. Then, the generator can be trained to gain controllability, without fitting to specific visual domain. In this way, the model can be guided to produce realistic images even when controls are applied. We enhance control transferability to the real domain by leveraging insights about roles of different layers and denoising steps in diffusion-based generators, informing new training and inference strategies that further mitigate the gap. We demonstrate the advantages of Realiz3D in tasks as text-to-multiview generation and texturing from 3D inputs, producing outputs that are 3D-consistent and photorealistic.

AI pentesting agents are increasingly credible as offensive security systems, but current benchmarks still provide limited guidance on which will perform best in real-world targets. Existing evaluation protocols assess and optimize for predefined goals such as capture-the-flag, remote code execution, exploit reproduction, or trajectory similarity, in simplified or narrow settings. These tools are valuable for measuring bounded capabilities, yet they do not adequately capture the complexity, open-ended exploration, and strategic decision-making required in realistic pentesting. In this paper, we present a practical evaluation protocol that shifts assessment from task completion to validated vulnerability discovery, allowing evaluation in sufficiently complex targets spanning multiple attack surfaces and vulnerability classes. The protocol combines structured ground-truth with LLM-based semantic matching to identify vulnerabilities, bipartite resolution to score findings under realistic ambiguity, continuous ground-truth maintenance, repeated and cumulative evaluation of stochastic agents, efficiency metrics, and reduced-suite selection for sustainable experimentation. This protocol extends the state of the art by enabling a more realistic, operationally informative comparison of AI pentesting agents. To enable reproducibility, we also release expert-annotated ground truth and code for the proposed evaluation protocol: https://github.com/ethiack/ethibench.

The security context used in 5G authentication is generated during the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) procedure and stored in both the user equipment (UE) and the network sides for the subsequent fast registration procedure. Given its importance, it is imperative to formally analyze the security mechanism of the security context. The security context in the UE can be stored in the Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) card or in the baseband chip. In this work, we present a comprehensive and formal verification of the fast registration procedure based on the security context under the two scenarios in ProVerif. Our analysis identifies two vulnerabilities, including one that has not been reported before. Specifically, the security context stored in the USIM card can be read illegally, and the validity checking mechanism of the security context in the baseband chip can be bypassed. Moreover, these vulnerabilities also apply to 4G networks. As a consequence, an attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to register to the network with the victim's identity and then launch other attacks, including one-tap authentication bypass leading to privacy disclosure, location spoofing, etc. To ensure that these attacks are indeed realizable in practice, we have responsibly confirmed them through experimentation in three operators. Our analysis reveals that these vulnerabilities stem from design flaws of the standard and unsafe practices by operators. We finally propose several potential countermeasures to prevent these attacks. We have reported our findings to the GSMA and received a coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) number CVD-2022-0057.

Human videos offer a scalable way to train robot manipulation policies, but lack the action labels needed by standard imitation learning algorithms. Existing cross-embodiment approaches try to map human motion to robot actions, but often fail when the embodiments differ significantly. We propose X-Sim, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that uses object motion as a dense and transferable signal for learning robot policies. X-Sim starts by reconstructing a photorealistic simulation from an RGBD human video and tracking object trajectories to define object-centric rewards. These rewards are used to train a reinforcement learning (RL) policy in simulation. The learned policy is then distilled into an image-conditioned diffusion policy using synthetic rollouts rendered with varied viewpoints and lighting. To transfer to the real world, X-Sim introduces an online domain adaptation technique that aligns real and simulated observations during deployment. Importantly, X-Sim does not require any robot teleoperation data. We evaluate it across 5 manipulation tasks in 2 environments and show that it: (1) improves task progress by 30% on average over hand-tracking and sim-to-real baselines, (2) matches behavior cloning with 10x less data collection time, and (3) generalizes to new camera viewpoints and test-time changes. Code and videos are available at https://portal-cornell.github.io/X-Sim/.

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which treats simulation as a static source of demonstrations and does not exploit large-scale closed-loop interaction. Consequently, real-world gains and generalization are often limited. In this paper, we propose an \textit{RL}-based sim-real \textit{Co}-training (RL-Co) framework that leverages interactive simulation while preserving real-world capabilities. Our method follows a generic two-stage design: we first warm-start the policy with SFT on a mixture of real and simulated demonstrations, then fine-tune it with reinforcement learning in simulation while adding an auxiliary supervised loss on real-world data to anchor the policy and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our framework on four real-world tabletop manipulation tasks using two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and π_{0.5}, and observe consistent improvements over real-only fine-tuning and SFT-based co-training, including +24% real-world success on OpenVLA and +20% on π_{0.5}. Beyond higher success rates, RL co-training yields stronger generalization to unseen task variations and substantially improved real-world data efficiency, providing a practical and scalable pathway for leveraging simulation to enhance real-robot deployment.

Training and evaluating robot policies in the real world is costly and difficult to scale. We introduce SimFoundry, a modular and automated system for zero-shot real-to-sim scene construction from a video. SimFoundry generates sim-ready digital twins and supports object, scene, and task editing, enabling the automated generation of diverse digital cousins: affordance-preserving variations of reconstructed real-world scenes. Policies trained on SimFoundry data transfer zero-shot to challenging real tasks involving multi-step manipulation, articulated object interaction, and bimanual interaction, and its digital cousins (variations of the original scene, objects, and tasks) facilitate generalization to new real-world conditions. Across 7 manipulation tasks and 5 policy architectures, SimFoundry simulation evaluations strongly predict real-world performance, with mean Pearson correlation 0.911 and mean maximum ranking violation 0.018. When evaluating sim-trained policies zero-shot in the real world, policies trained with object, scene, and task cousins in simulation show average task success rate improvements of 17%, 21%, and 40%, respectively. Additional details at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/simfoundry/ .

We present a visual localization system that learns to estimate camera poses in the real world with the help of synthetic data. Despite significant progress in recent years, most learning-based approaches to visual localization target at a single domain and require a dense database of geo-tagged images to function well. To mitigate the data scarcity issue and improve the scalability of the neural localization models, we introduce TOPO-DataGen, a versatile synthetic data generation tool that traverses smoothly between the real and virtual world, hinged on the geographic camera viewpoint. New large-scale sim-to-real benchmark datasets are proposed to showcase and evaluate the utility of the said synthetic data. Our experiments reveal that synthetic data generically enhances the neural network performance on real data. Furthermore, we introduce CrossLoc, a cross-modal visual representation learning approach to pose estimation that makes full use of the scene coordinate ground truth via self-supervision. Without any extra data, CrossLoc significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves substantially higher real-data sample efficiency. Our code and datasets are all available at https://crossloc.github.io/.

Recent advancements in camera-trajectory-guided image-to-video generation offer higher precision and better support for complex camera control compared to text-based approaches. However, they also introduce significant usability challenges, as users often struggle to provide precise camera parameters when working with arbitrary real-world images without knowledge of their depth nor scene scale. To address these real-world application issues, we propose RealCam-I2V, a novel diffusion-based video generation framework that integrates monocular metric depth estimation to establish 3D scene reconstruction in a preprocessing step. During training, the reconstructed 3D scene enables scaling camera parameters from relative to absolute values, ensuring compatibility and scale consistency across diverse real-world images. In inference, RealCam-I2V offers an intuitive interface where users can precisely draw camera trajectories by dragging within the 3D scene. To further enhance precise camera control and scene consistency, we propose scene-constrained noise shaping, which shapes high-level noise and also allows the framework to maintain dynamic, coherent video generation in lower noise stages. RealCam-I2V achieves significant improvements in controllability and video quality on the RealEstate10K and out-of-domain images. We further enables applications like camera-controlled looping video generation and generative frame interpolation. We will release our absolute-scale annotation, codes, and all checkpoints. Please see dynamic results in https://zgctroy.github.io/RealCam-I2V.

Realistic image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reproduce perceptually realistic image details from a low-quality input. The commonly used adversarial training based Real-ISR methods often introduce unnatural visual artifacts and fail to generate realistic textures for natural scene images. The recently developed generative stable diffusion models provide a potential solution to Real-ISR with pre-learned strong image priors. However, the existing methods along this line either fail to keep faithful pixel-wise image structures or resort to extra skipped connections to reproduce details, which requires additional training in image space and limits their extension to other related tasks in latent space such as image stylization. In this work, we propose a pixel-aware stable diffusion (PASD) network to achieve robust Real-ISR as well as personalized stylization. In specific, a pixel-aware cross attention module is introduced to enable diffusion models perceiving image local structures in pixel-wise level, while a degradation removal module is used to extract degradation insensitive features to guide the diffusion process together with image high level information. By simply replacing the base diffusion model with a personalized one, our method can generate diverse stylized images without the need to collect pairwise training data. PASD can be easily integrated into existing diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion. Experiments on Real-ISR and personalized stylization demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The source code and models can be found at https://github.com/yangxy/PASD.

Creating accurate, physical simulations directly from real-world robot motion holds great value for safe, scalable, and affordable robot learning, yet remains exceptionally challenging. Real robot data suffers from occlusions, noisy camera poses, dynamic scene elements, which hinder the creation of geometrically accurate and photorealistic digital twins of unseen objects. We introduce a novel real-to-sim framework tackling all these challenges at once. Our key insight is a hybrid scene representation merging the photorealistic rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting with explicit object meshes suitable for physics simulation within a single representation. We propose an end-to-end optimization pipeline that leverages differentiable rendering and differentiable physics within MuJoCo to jointly refine all scene components - from object geometry and appearance to robot poses and physical parameters - directly from raw and imprecise robot trajectories. This unified optimization allows us to simultaneously achieve high-fidelity object mesh reconstruction, generate photorealistic novel views, and perform annotation-free robot pose calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulation and on challenging real-world sequences using an ALOHA 2 bi-manual manipulator, enabling more practical and robust real-to-simulation pipelines.

While Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) excel at synthesizing high-fidelity videos, enabling precise camera and scene control remains challenging. Existing methods predominantly rely on implicit diffusion priors to generate unobserved regions, inevitably leading to structural collapse during high-dynamic movements or complex occlusions. To address this challenge, we propose Real2SAM2Real, a framework that leverages 3D lifting models (e.g., SAM3D) to extract an explicitly editable 3D cache, serving as a robust geometric scaffold for the VDM. By capturing the entire 3D volume of foreground entities rather than just their visible shells, this cache injects holistic spatial priors into the VDM, providing dependable 3D-aware guidance for complex scene dynamics. To effectively leverage this 3D guidance while preserving pre-trained priors, we design a Soft Spatial-Aligned Injection mechanism alongside a minimally invasive fine-tuning strategy tailored for VDMs. Furthermore, we employ masked normal maps as a cross-modal bridge to construct a 3D-free data curation and perturbation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Real2SAM2Real enables precise, decoupled control over both camera trajectories and multi-entity motions. By utilizing the complementary context from generative 3D caches, our framework overcomes typical breakdowns caused by over-reliance on diffusion priors, maintaining exceptional spatiotemporal consistency under large camera shifts and severe occlusions. Crucially, by decoupling geometry from appearance, our VDM-tailored 3D cache eradicates perspective ambiguities caused by structural holes and erroneous facades, as well as misleading cues from reflections and refractions. Project website is available at https://jiayi-wu-leo.github.io/real2sam2real

We introduce REAL, a benchmark and framework for multi-turn agent evaluations on deterministic simulations of real-world websites. REAL comprises high-fidelity, deterministic replicas of 11 widely-used websites across domains such as e-commerce, travel, communication, and professional networking. We also release a benchmark consisting of 112 practical tasks that mirror everyday complex user interactions requiring both accurate information retrieval and state-changing actions. All interactions occur within this fully controlled setting, eliminating safety risks and enabling robust, reproducible evaluation of agent capability and reliability. Our novel evaluation framework combines programmatic checks of website state for action-based tasks with rubric-guided LLM-based judgments for information retrieval. The framework supports both open-source and proprietary agent systems through a flexible evaluation harness that accommodates black-box commands within browser environments, allowing research labs to test agentic systems without modification. Our empirical results show that frontier language models achieve at most a 41% success rate on REAL, highlighting critical gaps in autonomous web navigation and task completion capabilities. Our framework supports easy integration of new tasks, reproducible evaluation, and scalable post-training data generation, marking a significant step forward in evaluating and advancing agent capabilities.

Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to learn useful policies for a given task. For many applications of field robotics online exploration is prohibitively expensive and dangerous, this is especially true in fixed-wing aerial robotics. To address these challenges we offer an intermediary solution for learning in field robotics. We investigate the use of dissimilar platform vehicle for learning and offer a procedure to mimic the behavior of one vehicle with another. We specifically consider the problem of training fixed-wing aircraft, an expensive and dangerous vehicle type, using a multi-rotor host platform. Using a Model Predictive Control approach, we design a controller capable of mimicking another vehicles behavior in both simulation and the real-world.

This paper deals with the problem of informative path planning for a UAV deployed for precision agriculture applications. First, we observe that the ``fear of missing out'' data lead to uniform, conservative scanning policies over the whole agricultural field. Consequently, employing a non-uniform scanning approach can mitigate the expenditure of time in areas with minimal or negligible real value, while ensuring heightened precision in information-dense regions. Turning to the available informative path planning methodologies, we discern that certain methods entail intensive computational requirements, while others necessitate training on an ideal world simulator. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an active sensing coverage path planning approach, named OverFOMO, that regulates the speed of the UAV in accordance with both the relative quantity of the identified classes, i.e. crops and weeds, and the confidence level of such detections. To identify these instances, a robust Deep Learning segmentation model is deployed. The computational needs of the proposed algorithm are independent of the size of the agricultural field, rendering its applicability on modern UAVs quite straightforward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with a simu-realistic pipeline, combining data from real UAV missions and the high-fidelity dynamics of AirSim simulator, showcasing its performance improvements over the established state of affairs for this type of missions. An open-source implementation of the algorithm and the evaluation pipeline is also available: https://github.com/emmarapt/OverFOMO.

Multi-view 3D reconstruction methods remain highly sensitive to photometric inconsistencies arising from camera optical characteristics and variations in image signal processing (ISP). Existing mitigation strategies such as per-frame latent variables or affine color corrections lack physical grounding and generalize poorly to novel views. We propose the Physically-Plausible ISP (PPISP) correction module, which disentangles camera-intrinsic and capture-dependent effects through physically based and interpretable transformations. A dedicated PPISP controller, trained on the input views, predicts ISP parameters for novel viewpoints, analogous to auto exposure and auto white balance in real cameras. This design enables realistic and fair evaluation on novel views without access to ground-truth images. PPISP achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, while providing intuitive control and supporting the integration of metadata when available. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nv-tlabs/ppisp

Recent text-to-video (T2V) technology advancements, as demonstrated by models such as Gen2, Pika, and Sora, have significantly broadened its applicability and popularity. Despite these strides, evaluating these models poses substantial challenges. Primarily, due to the limitations inherent in automatic metrics, manual evaluation is often considered a superior method for assessing T2V generation. However, existing manual evaluation protocols face reproducibility, reliability, and practicality issues. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Text-to-Video Human Evaluation (T2VHE) protocol, a comprehensive and standardized protocol for T2V models. The T2VHE protocol includes well-defined metrics, thorough annotator training, and an effective dynamic evaluation module. Experimental results demonstrate that this protocol not only ensures high-quality annotations but can also reduce evaluation costs by nearly 50%. We will open-source the entire setup of the T2VHE protocol, including the complete protocol workflow, the dynamic evaluation component details, and the annotation interface code. This will help communities establish more sophisticated human assessment protocols.

Visual recognition models are prone to learning spurious correlations induced by a biased training set where certain conditions B (\eg, Indoors) are over-represented in certain classes Y (\eg, Big Dogs). Synthetic data from off-the-shelf large-scale generative models offers a promising direction to mitigate this issue by augmenting underrepresented subgroups in the real dataset. However, by using a mixed distribution of real and synthetic data, we introduce another source of bias due to distributional differences between synthetic and real data (\eg synthetic artifacts). As we will show, prior work's approach for using synthetic data to resolve the model's bias toward B do not correct the model's bias toward the pair (B, G), where G denotes whether the sample is real or synthetic. Thus, the model could simply learn signals based on the pair (B, G) (\eg, Synthetic Indoors) to make predictions about Y (\eg, Big Dogs). To address this issue, we propose a simple, easy-to-implement, two-step training pipeline that we call From Fake to Real (FFR). The first step of FFR pre-trains a model on balanced synthetic data to learn robust representations across subgroups. In the second step, FFR fine-tunes the model on real data using ERM or common loss-based bias mitigation methods. By training on real and synthetic data separately, FFR does not expose the model to the statistical differences between real and synthetic data and thus avoids the issue of bias toward the pair (B, G). Our experiments show that FFR improves worst group accuracy over the state-of-the-art by up to 20\% over three datasets. Code available: https://github.com/mqraitem/From-Fake-to-Real

Existing evaluation paradigms for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) face critical limitations. Real-world evaluation is often challenging due to safety concerns and a lack of reproducibility, whereas closed-loop simulation can face insufficient realism or high computational costs. Open-loop evaluation, while being efficient and data-driven, relies on metrics that generally overlook compounding errors. In this paper, we propose pseudo-simulation, a novel paradigm that addresses these limitations. Pseudo-simulation operates on real datasets, similar to open-loop evaluation, but augments them with synthetic observations generated prior to evaluation using 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to approximate potential future states the AV might encounter by generating a diverse set of observations that vary in position, heading, and speed. Our method then assigns a higher importance to synthetic observations that best match the AV's likely behavior using a novel proximity-based weighting scheme. This enables evaluating error recovery and the mitigation of causal confusion, as in closed-loop benchmarks, without requiring sequential interactive simulation. We show that pseudo-simulation is better correlated with closed-loop simulations (R^2=0.8) than the best existing open-loop approach (R^2=0.7). We also establish a public leaderboard for the community to benchmark new methodologies with pseudo-simulation. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

Digital entities such as AI agents and humanoid robots increasingly operate alongside real humans, yet their identity infrastructure is based on credentials rather than embodied biometric identity. We introduce Biometric Identity Provisioning (BIP), a new problem and solution framework that addresses: given an enrollment gallery of real human identities, provision virtual identities that are non-colliding with every enrolled identity, maintain sufficient inter-class separability, and are realizable as high-fidelity face images. The key geometric insight is that real face identities occupy a low-dimensional subspace of the embedding hypersphere, leaving no residual subspace for virtual identities. Hence, virtual identities must instead be allocated as unclaimed gaps within the real face manifold itself. BIP is therefore a constrained packing problem: available gaps vastly exceed any foreseeable enrollment scale, and provisioned identities remain non-colliding even as new real identities are subsequently enrolled. Grounded in this geometry, our repulsion-based allocation is not bounded by any fixed provisioning count; we demonstrate 10M non-colliding virtual identity embeddings against a gallery of 360K real identities. Realizing these embeddings as face images requires a generator that operates outside the training distribution of real face images; we introduce GapGen, a gap-aware generator trained with a curriculum that progressively extends synthesis into non-colliding regions, validated at 1M photorealistic virtual face images. We further construct v-LFW, a virtual counterpart to LFW face dataset, with protocols for virtual face verification, cross-reality matching, real-vs-virtual detection, and unified recognition and detection.

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) is an optical super-resolution technique that enables live-cell imaging beyond the diffraction limit. Reconstruction of SIM data is prone to artefacts, which becomes problematic when imaging highly dynamic samples because previous methods rely on the assumption that samples are static. We propose a new transformer-based reconstruction method, VSR-SIM, that uses shifted 3-dimensional window multi-head attention in addition to channel attention mechanism to tackle the problem of video super-resolution (VSR) in SIM. The attention mechanisms are found to capture motion in sequences without the need for common motion estimation techniques such as optical flow. We take an approach to training the network that relies solely on simulated data using videos of natural scenery with a model for SIM image formation. We demonstrate a use case enabled by VSR-SIM referred to as rolling SIM imaging, which increases temporal resolution in SIM by a factor of 9. Our method can be applied to any SIM setup enabling precise recordings of dynamic processes in biomedical research with high temporal resolution.

Virtual 3D meetings offer the potential to enhance copresence, increase engagement and thus improve effectiveness of remote meetings compared to standard 2D video calls. However, representing people in 3D meetings remains a challenge; existing solutions achieve high quality by using complex hardware, making use of fixed appearance via enrolment, or by inverting a pre-trained generative model. These approaches lead to constraints that are unwelcome and ill-fitting for videoconferencing applications. We present the first method to predict 3D Gaussian reconstructions in real time from a single 2D webcam feed, where the 3D representation is not only live and realistic, but also authentic to the input video. By conditioning the 3D representation on each video frame independently, our reconstruction faithfully recreates the input video from the captured viewpoint (a property we call authenticity), while generalizing realistically to novel viewpoints. Additionally, we introduce a stability loss to obtain reconstructions that are temporally stable on video sequences. We show that our method delivers state-of-the-art accuracy in visual quality and stability metrics compared to existing methods, and demonstrate our approach in live one-to-one 3D meetings using only a standard 2D camera and display. This demonstrates that our approach can allow anyone to communicate volumetrically, via a method for 3D videoconferencing that is not only highly accessible, but also realistic and authentic.

The robotics field is evolving towards data-driven, end-to-end learning, inspired by multimodal large models. However, reliance on expensive real-world data limits progress. Simulators offer cost-effective alternatives, but the gap between simulation and reality challenges effective policy transfer. This paper introduces TwinAligner, a novel Real2Sim2Real system that addresses both visual and dynamic gaps. The visual alignment module achieves pixel-level alignment through SDF reconstruction and editable 3DGS rendering, while the dynamic alignment module ensures dynamic consistency by identifying rigid physics from robot-object interaction. TwinAligner improves robot learning by providing scalable data collection and establishing a trustworthy iterative cycle, accelerating algorithm development. Quantitative evaluations highlight TwinAligner's strong capabilities in visual and dynamic real-to-sim alignment. This system enables policies trained in simulation to achieve strong zero-shot generalization to the real world. The high consistency between real-world and simulated policy performance underscores TwinAligner's potential to advance scalable robot learning. Code and data will be released on https://twin-aligner.github.io

The main challenge in learning image-conditioned robotic policies is acquiring a visual representation conducive to low-level control. Due to the high dimensionality of the image space, learning a good visual representation requires a considerable amount of visual data. However, when learning in the real world, data is expensive. Sim2Real is a promising paradigm for overcoming data scarcity in the real-world target domain by using a simulator to collect large amounts of cheap data closely related to the target task. However, it is difficult to transfer an image-conditioned policy from sim to real when the domains are very visually dissimilar. To bridge the sim2real visual gap, we propose using natural language descriptions of images as a unifying signal across domains that captures the underlying task-relevant semantics. Our key insight is that if two image observations from different domains are labeled with similar language, the policy should predict similar action distributions for both images. We demonstrate that training the image encoder to predict the language description or the distance between descriptions of a sim or real image serves as a useful, data-efficient pretraining step that helps learn a domain-invariant image representation. We can then use this image encoder as the backbone of an IL policy trained simultaneously on a large amount of simulated and a handful of real demonstrations. Our approach outperforms widely used prior sim2real methods and strong vision-language pretraining baselines like CLIP and R3M by 25 to 40%.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising approach to solve complex control tasks by learning policies through interactions with the environment. However, the training of DRL policies requires large amounts of training experiences, making it impractical to learn the policy directly on physical systems. Sim-to-real approaches leverage simulations to pretrain DRL policies and then deploy them in the real world. Unfortunately, the direct real-world deployment of pretrained policies usually suffers from performance deterioration due to the different dynamics, known as the reality gap. Recent sim-to-real methods, such as domain randomization and domain adaptation, focus on improving the robustness of the pretrained agents. Nevertheless, the simulation-trained policies often need to be tuned with real-world data to reach optimal performance, which is challenging due to the high cost of real-world samples. This work proposes a distributed cloud-edge architecture to train DRL agents in the real world in real-time. In the architecture, the inference and training are assigned to the edge and cloud, separating the real-time control loop from the computationally expensive training loop. To overcome the reality gap, our architecture exploits sim-to-real transfer strategies to continue the training of simulation-pretrained agents on a physical system. We demonstrate its applicability on a physical inverted-pendulum control system, analyzing critical parameters. The real-world experiments show that our architecture can adapt the pretrained DRL agents to unseen dynamics consistently and efficiently.

Simulation-to-reality translation must bridge the appearance gap between synthetic and real domains while preserving structural and semantic consistency. Conditioning-based methods achieve spatial alignment but introduce computationally expensive control modules. Paired-data methods achieve realism but rely on complex synthesis pipelines, often altering scene geometry and semantics. Training-free editing methods avoid both constraints but lack a learned appearance prior, limiting their perceptual quality. Recently proposed phase-preserving diffusion presents a promising alternative, but Fourier-domain formulations are constrained by global spectral coupling. This coupling induces spatial artifacts such as ringing and boundary leakage, thereby degrading structural and semantic consistency. We introduce Wavelet Phase Diffusion, which addresses this through two components. First, we operate in the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Packet Transform domain, whose localized wavelet packets enable spatially adaptive phase injection without global spectral interference. Second, Low-Frequency Randomization (LFR) replaces the low-frequency packet, decoupling the model from the synthetic illumination prior and enabling in-distribution real-world appearance. Both components train on unpaired open-domain data, and introduce negligible inference overhead. The spatial locality further enables instance-level translation, where individual objects or regions are translated to photorealistic appearance independently while the surrounding scene remains untranslated. On vKITTI to KITTI image translation, ours outperforms prior methods in realism and semantic consistency while maintaining competitive structural alignment. For CARLA video translation, ours approaches the realism of paired-data methods while reducing VLM planner ADE and FDE by 5.4% and 5.1%, respectively.

One-shot 3D talking portrait generation aims to reconstruct a 3D avatar from an unseen image, and then animate it with a reference video or audio to generate a talking portrait video. The existing methods fail to simultaneously achieve the goals of accurate 3D avatar reconstruction and stable talking face animation. Besides, while the existing works mainly focus on synthesizing the head part, it is also vital to generate natural torso and background segments to obtain a realistic talking portrait video. To address these limitations, we present Real3D-Potrait, a framework that (1) improves the one-shot 3D reconstruction power with a large image-to-plane model that distills 3D prior knowledge from a 3D face generative model; (2) facilitates accurate motion-conditioned animation with an efficient motion adapter; (3) synthesizes realistic video with natural torso movement and switchable background using a head-torso-background super-resolution model; and (4) supports one-shot audio-driven talking face generation with a generalizable audio-to-motion model. Extensive experiments show that Real3D-Portrait generalizes well to unseen identities and generates more realistic talking portrait videos compared to previous methods. Video samples and source code are available at https://real3dportrait.github.io .

A Mamba state-space model trained only for next-step prediction appears to recover Granger-causal structure through a simple readout S = |W_{out} W_{in}|, with early experiments suggesting the phenomenon generalized across architectures and benefited from interventional data at p < 10^{-5}. We package the protocol used to test that claim -- standardized synthetic generators (VAR/Lorenz/CauseMe-style), three intervention semantics (do(X=c), soft-noise, random-forcing), edge-provenance cards on three real datasets, and size-matched control arms -- as a reusable falsification benchmark, and walk the claim through it in five stages. The method-level claim does not survive: (i) a plain linear bottleneck does as well or better; (ii) tuned Lasso beats the bottleneck on synthetic CauseMe-style benchmarks, and on Lorenz-96 (the only real benchmark with unambiguous ground truth) classical PCMCI and Granger lead a tight cluster in which the bottleneck trails; (iii) the headline intervention advantage is roughly 60% a sample-size confound, and the residual disappears under standard do(X=c) interventions, surviving only under a non-standard random-forcing scheme; (iv) even that residual reproduces, with a larger effect, in classical bivariate Granger -- the effect is method-agnostic. What survives is a narrow characterization result; the benchmark is the lasting artifact, and each stage above is one of its control arms.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) powers modern engineering, yet producing high-quality parts still demands substantial expert effort. Many AI systems tackle CAD reverse engineering, but most are single-pass and miss fine geometric details. In contrast, human engineers compare the input shape with the reconstruction and iteratively modify the design based on remaining discrepancies. Agent-based methods mimic this loop with frozen VLMs, but weak 3D grounding of current foundation models limits reliability and efficiency. We introduce CADReasoner, a model trained to iteratively refine its prediction using geometric discrepancy between the input and the predicted shape. The model outputs a runnable CadQuery Python program whose rendered mesh is fed back at the next step. CADReasoner fuses multi-view renders and point clouds as complementary modalities. To bridge the realism gap, we propose a scan-simulation protocol applied during both training and evaluation. Across DeepCAD, Fusion 360, and MCB benchmarks, CADReasoner attains state-of-the-art results on clean and scan-sim tracks.

The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.

Realistic surgical simulation plays a crucial role in training novice surgeons and in the development of autonomous agents. World models can scale such simulation environments to realistic and diverse procedures by predicting future patient states conditioned on current observations and surgical actions. However, current state-of-the-art approaches often fail to satisfy key criteria required for clinical applicability, including visual realism, physically grounded interactions, and the ability to simulate scenarios beyond the training distribution. Hence, we introduce SWoMo, a neuro-symbolic world model for cataract surgery simulation that decouples motion generation from visual realism. The symbolic component, consisting of a rule-based simulator and scene graph representations, models motion dynamics and tool-tissue interactions, while a diffusion model produces realistic visual appearance, including textures and tissue deformations. We propose an inverse pairing strategy that reconstructs real surgical videos in the simulator to obtain paired simulated and real videos, which are then used to train our video diffusion model for the reverse objective of sim-to-real translation. Our experiments show both qualitative and quantitative improvements over prior work. We demonstrate that our simulator further satisfies the key criteria, including generalisation to unseen interaction geometries, improvements in downstream phase detection, and unsupervised video style transfer. The code, data, and model weights are available at: https://ssharvienkumar.github.io/SWoMo/

Human manipulation videos are a convenient and intuitive source for robot learning. However, directly transferring human dexterity to robots remains challenging due to perception errors and embodiment gap. To address this, we introduce Video2Sim2Real, a full-stack framework for autonomous skill acquisition from a single human manipulation video. Our framework first uses off-the-shelf foundation models to reconstruct a simulator-ready digital twin and extract robot and object motion priors. Rather than treating the extracted robot motion as a reliable reference throughout execution, our key idea is to recover and leverage the most fundamental sources of supervision from the demonstrated skill: We identify object-centric keyframes to optimize the corresponding robot configurations using object information from the simulator, and use these configurations as anchors that refine the robot motion such that it ultimately has the desired impact on the environment. To bridge the remaining sim-to-real gap, we introduce a sim-to-real strategy that decouples robustness to noisy and incomplete perception from variations in hand-object interaction dynamics. Specifically, we learn to recalibrate robot configurations from noisy real-world point clouds via IL, and leverage residual RL to perform local finger-level adaptations to ensure for robust and effective interactions. Finally, a collision-aware motion planning module enables spatial generalization to novel object configurations. Across several everyday manipulation tasks, Video2Sim2Real improves simulated task success, safety, and trajectory coherence over numerous baselines, and achieves better sim-to-real transfer than existing techniques. These results demonstrate a promising path toward autonomous dexterous skill acquisition from human videos.

Traditional rendering pipelines rely on complex assets, accurate materials and lighting, and substantial computational resources to produce realistic imagery, yet they still face challenges in scalability and realism for populated dynamic scenes. We present C2R (Coarse-to-Real), a generative rendering framework that synthesizes real-style urban crowd videos from coarse 3D simulations. Our approach uses coarse 3D renderings to explicitly control scene layout, camera motion, and human trajectories, while a learned neural renderer generates realistic appearance, lighting, and fine-scale dynamics guided by text prompts. To overcome the lack of paired training data between coarse simulations and real videos, we adopt a two-stage synthetic-real domain-hedging strategy that first learns a strong generative prior from large-scale real footage, and then introduces controllability by using a small amount of paired synthetic coarse-to-fine data to anchor shared implicit spatio-temporal features across domains. The resulting system supports coarse-to-fine control, generalizes across diverse CG and game inputs, and produces temporally consistent, controllable, and realistic urban scene videos from minimal 3D input. We will release the model and project webpage at https://gonzalognogales.github.io/coarse2real/.

We introduce RealX3D, a real-capture benchmark for multi-view visual restoration and 3D reconstruction under diverse physical degradations. RealX3D groups corruptions into four families, including illumination, scattering, occlusion, and blurring, and captures each at multiple severity levels using a unified acquisition protocol that yields pixel-aligned LQ/GT views. Each scene includes high-resolution capture, RAW images, and dense laser scans, from which we derive world-scale meshes and metric depth. Benchmarking a broad range of optimization-based and feed-forward methods shows substantial degradation in reconstruction quality under physical corruptions, underscoring the fragility of current multi-view pipelines in real-world challenging environments.

Recovering real-world scenes as interactive simulation environments can enable generalizable robot learning and reproducible policy evaluation. However, constructing scenes that are both physically stable and visually faithful remains slow and expensive. In this work, we present RoboSnap, a real-to-sim framework that turns a single RGB image into a simulation-ready scene. The key idea is a layered design that separates the physics-critical interaction area from the surrounding visual context: collision-aware foreground assets are refined for stable robot interaction, while a 3D Gaussian splatting visual layer preserves faithful background appearance under novel views. Experiments on DROID scenes and real-robot tasks show that RoboSnap achieves reliable trajectory replay in the recovered scenes, supports task-specific synthetic data generation for policy training, and yields meaningful sim-real correlation for policy evaluation. To further support real-to-sim research, we introduce DROID-Sim, a real-to-sim companion dataset constructed from 564 real-world scenes in DROID. Extensive experiments suggest that the value of real-to-sim methods lies not only in high-fidelity visual reconstruction, but in turning real environments into reusable infrastructure for robot learning and evaluation.

AI agents increasingly call tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and delegate to other agents via Agent-to-Agent (A2A), yet neither protocol verifies agent identity. A scan of approximately 2,000 MCP servers found all lacked authentication. In our survey, we did not identify a prior implemented protocol that jointly combines public-key verifiable delegation, holder-side attenuation, expressive chained policy, transport bindings across MCP/A2A/HTTP, and provenance-oriented completion records. We introduce Invocation-Bound Capability Tokens (IBCTs), a primitive that fuses identity, attenuated authorization, and provenance binding into a single append-only token chain. IBCTs operate in two wire formats: compact mode (a signed JWT for single-hop cases) and chained mode (a Biscuit token with Datalog policies for multi-hop delegation). We provide reference implementations in Python and Rust with full cross-language interoperability. Compact mode verification takes 0.049ms (Rust) and 0.189ms (Python), with 0.22ms overhead over no-auth in real MCP-over-HTTP deployment. In a real multi-agent deployment with Gemini 2.5 Flash, AIP adds 2.35ms of overhead (0.086% of total end-to-end latency). Adversarial evaluation across 600 attack attempts shows 100% rejection rate, with two attack categories (delegation depth violation and audit evasion through empty context) uniquely caught by AIP's chained delegation model that neither unsigned nor plain JWT deployments detect.

We present SImProv - a scalable image provenance framework to match a query image back to a trusted database of originals and identify possible manipulations on the query. SImProv consists of three stages: a scalable search stage for retrieving top-k most similar images; a re-ranking and near-duplicated detection stage for identifying the original among the candidates; and finally a manipulation detection and visualization stage for localizing regions within the query that may have been manipulated to differ from the original. SImProv is robust to benign image transformations that commonly occur during online redistribution, such as artifacts due to noise and recompression degradation, as well as out-of-place transformations due to image padding, warping, and changes in size and shape. Robustness towards out-of-place transformations is achieved via the end-to-end training of a differentiable warping module within the comparator architecture. We demonstrate effective retrieval and manipulation detection over a dataset of 100 million images.

The rapid development of the AI agent communication protocols, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), Agora, and Agent Network Protocol (ANP), is reshaping how AI agents communicate with tools, services, and each other. While these protocols support scalable multi-agent interaction and cross-organizational interoperability, their security principles remain understudied, and standardized threat modeling is limited; no protocol-centric risk assessment framework has been established yet. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of four emerging AI agent communication protocols. First, we develop a structured threat modeling analysis that examines protocol architectures, trust assumptions, interaction patterns, and lifecycle behaviors to identify protocol-specific and cross-protocol risk surfaces. Second, we introduce a qualitative risk assessment framework that identifies twelve protocol-level risks and evaluates security posture across the creation, operation, and update phases through systematic assessment of likelihood, impact, and overall protocol risk, with implications for secure deployment and future standardization. Third, we provide a measurement-driven case study on MCP that formalizes the risk of missing mandatory validation/attestation for executable components as a falsifiable security claim by quantifying wrong-provider tool execution under multi-server composition across representative resolver policies. Collectively, our results highlight key design-induced risk surfaces and provide actionable guidance for secure deployment and future standardization of agent communication ecosystems.

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) offers synoptic visibility for traffic monitoring, yet scalable deployment is hindered by trajectory fragmentation, where vehicle identity persistence is lost across multi-UAV Fields of View (FOV). While state-of-the-art frameworks excel in optimizing local trajectory extraction and stability for single-drone imagery, they often function as isolated data silos that generate disjointed trajectories, thereby precluding network-level analysis such as Origin-Destination estimation. This paper presents a real-time Multi-Camera Multi-Vehicle Tracking (MCMT) system designed to handle global identity persistence. Addressing the visual ambiguity and computational cost of appearance-based Re-Identification (Re-ID) in nadir views, we introduce a lightweight Topology-Based Spatiotemporal Handover mechanism. We implement a high-throughput parallel pipeline leveraging YOLO11 and ByteTrack to process concurrent 4K streams. Our core contribution is a deterministic queue-based matching algorithm that utilizes geometric overlaps and virtual lane discretization to predictively manage identity handover via FIFO queues. Experimental results on complex urban environments, including intersections and merging traffic, demonstrate a Handover Success Rate (HOSR) of 99.8% in continuous traffic flows, significantly outperforming Re-ID baselines (74.1%) while validating edge deployment feasibility. The source code is available at https://github.com/JYe9/multi-camera-multi-vehicle-tracking-system.

Achieving fully autonomous driving systems requires learning rational decisions in a wide span of scenarios, including safety-critical and out-of-distribution ones. However, such cases are underrepresented in real-world corpus collected by human experts. To complement for the lack of data diversity, we introduce a novel and scalable simulation framework capable of synthesizing massive unseen states upon existing driving logs. Our pipeline utilizes advanced neural rendering with a reactive environment to generate high-fidelity multi-view observations controlled by the perturbed ego trajectory. Furthermore, we develop a pseudo-expert trajectory generation mechanism for these newly simulated states to provide action supervision. Upon the synthesized data, we find that a simple co-training strategy on both real-world and simulated samples can lead to significant improvements in both robustness and generalization for various planning methods on challenging real-world benchmarks, up to +6.8 EPDMS on navhard and +2.9 on navtest. More importantly, such policy improvement scales smoothly by increasing simulation data only, even without extra real-world data streaming in. We further reveal several crucial findings of such a sim-real learning system, which we term SimScale, including the design of pseudo-experts and the scaling properties for different policy architectures. Our simulation data and code would be released.

Embodied AI research is undergoing a shift toward vision-centric perceptual paradigms. While massively parallel simulators have catalyzed breakthroughs in proprioception-based locomotion, their potential remains largely untapped for vision-informed tasks due to the prohibitive computational overhead of large-scale photorealistic rendering. Furthermore, the creation of simulation-ready 3D assets heavily relies on labor-intensive manual modeling, while the significant sim-to-real physical gap hinders the transfer of contact-rich manipulation policies. To address these bottlenecks, we propose GS-Playground, a multi-modal simulation framework designed to accelerate end-to-end perceptual learning. We develop a novel high-performance parallel physics engine, specifically designed to integrate with a batch 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering pipeline to ensure high-fidelity synchronization. Our system achieves a breakthrough throughput of 10^4 FPS at 640x480 resolution, significantly lowering the barrier for large-scale visual RL. Additionally, we introduce an automated Real2Sim workflow that reconstructs photorealistic, physically consistent, and memory-efficient environments, streamlining the generation of complex simulation-ready scenes. Extensive experiments on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation demonstrate that GS-Playground effectively bridges the perceptual and physical gaps across diverse embodied tasks. Project homepage: https://gsplayground.github.io.

Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing the system's limits, but all use cases share a key requirement: reliability. A simulation agent should behave as intended by the designer, minimizing unintended actions like collisions that can compromise the signal-to-noise ratio of analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at this link. We open-source both the pre-trained agents and the complete code base. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.

Long-term user engagement (LTE) optimization in sequential recommender systems (SRS) is shown to be suited by reinforcement learning (RL) which finds a policy to maximize long-term rewards. Meanwhile, RL has its shortcomings, particularly requiring a large number of online samples for exploration, which is risky in real-world applications. One of the appealing ways to avoid the risk is to build a simulator and learn the optimal recommendation policy in the simulator. In LTE optimization, the simulator is to simulate multiple users' daily feedback for given recommendations. However, building a user simulator with no reality-gap, i.e., can predict user's feedback exactly, is unrealistic because the users' reaction patterns are complex and historical logs for each user are limited, which might mislead the simulator-based recommendation policy. In this paper, we present a practical simulator-based recommender policy training approach, Simulation-to-Recommendation (Sim2Rec) to handle the reality-gap problem for LTE optimization. Specifically, Sim2Rec introduces a simulator set to generate various possibilities of user behavior patterns, then trains an environment-parameter extractor to recognize users' behavior patterns in the simulators. Finally, a context-aware policy is trained to make the optimal decisions on all of the variants of the users based on the inferred environment-parameters. The policy is transferable to unseen environments (e.g., the real world) directly as it has learned to recognize all various user behavior patterns and to make the correct decisions based on the inferred environment-parameters. Experiments are conducted in synthetic environments and a real-world large-scale ride-hailing platform, DidiChuxing. The results show that Sim2Rec achieves significant performance improvement, and produces robust recommendations in unseen environments.

It is difficult to precisely annotate object instances and their semantics in 3D space, and as such, synthetic data are extensively used for these tasks, e.g., category-level 6D object pose and size estimation. However, the easy annotations in synthetic domains bring the downside effect of synthetic-to-real (Sim2Real) domain gap. In this work, we aim to address this issue in the task setting of Sim2Real, unsupervised domain adaptation for category-level 6D object pose and size estimation. We propose a method that is built upon a novel Deep Prior Deformation Network, shortened as DPDN. DPDN learns to deform features of categorical shape priors to match those of object observations, and is thus able to establish deep correspondence in the feature space for direct regression of object poses and sizes. To reduce the Sim2Real domain gap, we formulate a novel self-supervised objective upon DPDN via consistency learning; more specifically, we apply two rigid transformations to each object observation in parallel, and feed them into DPDN respectively to yield dual sets of predictions; on top of the parallel learning, an inter-consistency term is employed to keep cross consistency between dual predictions for improving the sensitivity of DPDN to pose changes, while individual intra-consistency ones are used to enforce self-adaptation within each learning itself. We train DPDN on both training sets of the synthetic CAMERA25 and real-world REAL275 datasets; our results outperform the existing methods on REAL275 test set under both the unsupervised and supervised settings. Ablation studies also verify the efficacy of our designs. Our code is released publicly at https://github.com/JiehongLin/Self-DPDN.

While LLM/VLM-powered AI agents have advanced rapidly in math, coding, and computer use, their applications in complex physical and social environments remain challenging. Building agents that can survive and thrive in the real world (for example, by autonomously earning income or running a business) requires massive-scale interaction, reasoning, training, and evaluation across diverse embodied scenarios. However, existing world simulators for such development fall short: they often rely on limited hand-crafted environments, simulate simplified game-like physics and social rules, and lack native support for LLM/VLM agents. We introduce SimWorld, a new simulator built on Unreal Engine 5, designed for developing and evaluating LLM/VLM agents in rich, real-world-like settings. SimWorld offers three core capabilities: (1) realistic, open-ended world simulation, including accurate physical and social dynamics and language-driven procedural environment generation; (2) a rich interface for LLM/VLM agents, with multimodal world inputs and open-vocabulary actions at varying levels of abstraction; and (3) diverse and extensible physical and social reasoning scenarios that are easily customizable by users. We demonstrate SimWorld by deploying frontier LLM agents (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Claude-3.5, and DeepSeek-Prover-V2) on long-horizon multi-agent delivery tasks involving strategic cooperation and competition. The results reveal distinct reasoning patterns and limitations across models. We open-source SimWorld and hope it becomes a foundational platform for advancing real-world agent intelligence across disciplines: https://simworld.org.

Drone detection has benefited from improvements in deep neural networks, but like many other applications, suffers from the availability of accurate data for training. Synthetic data provides a potential for low-cost data generation and has been shown to improve data availability and quality. However, models trained on synthetic datasets need to prove their ability to perform on real-world data, known as the problem of sim-to-real transferability. Here, we present a drone detection Faster-RCNN model trained on a purely synthetic dataset that transfers to real-world data. We found that it achieves an AP_50 of 97.0% when evaluated on the MAV-Vid - a real dataset of flying drones - compared with 97.8% for an equivalent model trained on real-world data. Our results show that using synthetic data for drone detection has the potential to reduce data collection costs and improve labelling quality. These findings could be a starting point for more elaborate synthetic drone datasets. For example, realistic recreations of specific scenarios could de-risk the dataset generation of safety-critical applications such as the detection of drones at airports. Further, synthetic data may enable reliable drone detection systems, which could benefit other areas, such as unmanned traffic management systems. The code is available https://github.com/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection alongside the datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection.

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data samples. Motivated by this, we explore the procedurally synthetic 3D data generation paradigm to equip individuals with the full capability of creating large-scale annotated photogrammetry point clouds. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic aerial photogrammetry point clouds generation pipeline that takes full advantage of open geospatial data sources and off-the-shelf commercial packages. Unlike generating synthetic data in virtual games, where the simulated data usually have limited gaming environments created by artists, the proposed pipeline simulates the reconstruction process of the real environment by following the same UAV flight pattern on different synthetic terrain shapes and building densities, which ensure similar quality, noise pattern, and diversity with real data. In addition, the precise semantic and instance annotations can be generated fully automatically, avoiding the expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. Based on the proposed pipeline, we present a richly-annotated synthetic 3D aerial photogrammetry point cloud dataset, termed STPLS3D, with more than 16 km^2 of landscapes and up to 18 fine-grained semantic categories. For verification purposes, we also provide a parallel dataset collected from four areas in the real environment. Extensive experiments conducted on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and quality of the proposed synthetic dataset.

As multi-agent AI systems grow in complexity, the protocols connecting them constrain their capabilities. Current protocols such as A2A and MCP do not expose model-level properties as first-class primitives, ignoring properties fundamental to effective delegation: model identity, reasoning profile, quality calibration, and cost characteristics. We present the LLM Delegate Protocol (LDP), an AI-native communication protocol introducing five mechanisms: (1) rich delegate identity cards with quality hints and reasoning profiles; (2) progressive payload modes with negotiation and fallback; (3) governed sessions with persistent context; (4) structured provenance tracking confidence and verification status; (5) trust domains enforcing security boundaries at the protocol level. We implement LDP as a plugin for the JamJet agent runtime and evaluate against A2A and random baselines using local Ollama models and LLM-as-judge evaluation. Identity-aware routing achieves ~12x lower latency on easy tasks through delegate specialization, though it does not improve aggregate quality in our small delegate pool; semantic frame payloads reduce token count by 37% (p=0.031) with no observed quality loss; governed sessions eliminate 39% token overhead at 10 rounds; and noisy provenance degrades synthesis quality below the no-provenance baseline, arguing that confidence metadata is harmful without verification. Simulated analyses show architectural advantages in attack detection (96% vs. 6%) and failure recovery (100% vs. 35% completion). This paper contributes a protocol design, reference implementation, and initial evidence that AI-native protocol primitives enable more efficient and governable delegation.

Synthetic simulation data and real-world human data provide scalable alternatives to circumvent the prohibitive costs of robot data collection. However, these sources suffer from the sim-to-real visual gap and the human-to-robot embodiment gap, respectively, which limits the policy's generalization to real-world scenarios. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation offers the robot action that human data lacks, while human data provides the real-world observation that simulation struggles to render. Motivated by this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training framework to simultaneously extract kinematic prior from simulated robot actions and visual prior from real-world human observations. Based on the two complementary priors, we achieve data-efficient and generalizable robotic manipulation in real-world tasks. Empirically, SimHum outperforms the baseline by up to 40% under the same data collection budget, and achieves a 62.5% OOD success with only 80 real data, outperforming the real only baseline by 7.1times. Videos and additional information can be found at https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human{project website}.

Recent machine learning papers often report 1-2 percentage point improvements from a single run on a benchmark. These gains are highly sensitive to random seeds, data ordering, and implementation details, yet are rarely accompanied by uncertainty estimates or significance tests. It is therefore unclear when a reported +1-2% reflects a real algorithmic advance versus noise. We revisit this problem under realistic compute budgets, where only a few runs are affordable. We propose a simple, PC-friendly evaluation protocol based on paired multi-seed runs, bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap confidence intervals, and a sign-flip permutation test on per-seed deltas. The protocol is intentionally conservative and is meant as a guardrail against over-claiming. We instantiate it on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10N, and AG News using synthetic no-improvement, small-gain, and medium-gain scenarios. Single runs and unpaired t-tests often suggest significant gains for 0.6-2.0 point improvements, especially on text. With only three seeds, our paired protocol never declares significance in these settings. We argue that such conservative evaluation is a safer default for small gains under tight budgets.

This position paper argues that the field of LLM agents requires a unified, telecom-inspired communication protocol to ensure safety, interoperability, and scalability, especially within the context of Next Generation (NextG) networks. Current ad-hoc communication methods are creating a fragmented ecosystem, reminiscent of the early "protocol wars" in networking, which stifles innovation and poses significant risks. Drawing inspiration from the layered, standardized protocols that underpin modern telecommunications, we propose the LLM-Agent Communication Protocol (LACP). LACP establishes a three-layer architecture designed to ensure semantic clarity in communication, transactional integrity for complex tasks, and robust, built-in security. In this position paper, we argue that adopting a principled, universal protocol is not merely beneficial but essential for realizing the potential of distributed AI. Such a standard is critical for ensuring that multi-agent systems can operate safely and reliably in the complex, real-time applications envisioned for 6G and beyond.

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.

The manual design of scenarios for Air Traffic Control (ATC) training is a demanding and time-consuming bottleneck that limits the diversity of simulations available to controllers. To address this, we introduce a novel, end-to-end approach, AirTrafficGen, that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate and control the generation of complex ATC scenarios. Our method uses a purpose-built, graph-based representation to encode sector topology (including airspace geometry, routes, and fixes) into a format LLMs can process. Through rigorous benchmarking, we show that state-of-the-art models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o3 can generate high-traffic scenarios whilst maintaining operational realism. Our engineered prompting enables fine-grained control over interaction presence, type, and location. Initial findings suggest these models are also capable of iterative refinement, correcting flawed scenarios based on simple textual feedback. This approach provides a scalable alternative to manual scenario design, addressing the need for a greater volume and variety of ATC training and validation simulations. More broadly, this work showcases the potential of LLMs for complex planning in safety-critical domains.

Sim2real for robotic manipulation is difficult due to the challenges of simulating complex contacts and generating realistic task distributions. To tackle the latter problem, we introduce ManipGen, which leverages a new class of policies for sim2real transfer: local policies. Locality enables a variety of appealing properties including invariances to absolute robot and object pose, skill ordering, and global scene configuration. We combine these policies with foundation models for vision, language and motion planning and demonstrate SOTA zero-shot performance of our method to Robosuite benchmark tasks in simulation (97%). We transfer our local policies from simulation to reality and observe they can solve unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages with significant pose, object and scene configuration variation. ManipGen outperforms SOTA approaches such as SayCan, OpenVLA, LLMTrajGen and VoxPoser across 50 real-world manipulation tasks by 36%, 76%, 62% and 60% respectively. Video results at https://mihdalal.github.io/manipgen/

Scaling robot learning requires vast and diverse datasets. Yet the prevailing data collection paradigm-human teleoperation-remains costly and constrained by manual effort and physical robot access. We introduce Real2Render2Real (R2R2R), a novel approach for generating robot training data without relying on object dynamics simulation or teleoperation of robot hardware. The input is a smartphone-captured scan of one or more objects and a single video of a human demonstration. R2R2R renders thousands of high visual fidelity robot-agnostic demonstrations by reconstructing detailed 3D object geometry and appearance, and tracking 6-DoF object motion. R2R2R uses 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to enable flexible asset generation and trajectory synthesis for both rigid and articulated objects, converting these representations to meshes to maintain compatibility with scalable rendering engines like IsaacLab but with collision modeling off. Robot demonstration data generated by R2R2R integrates directly with models that operate on robot proprioceptive states and image observations, such as vision-language-action models (VLA) and imitation learning policies. Physical experiments suggest that models trained on R2R2R data from a single human demonstration can match the performance of models trained on 150 human teleoperation demonstrations. Project page: https://real2render2real.com

State-of-the-art video generation models produce remarkable photorealism, but they lack the precise control required to align generated content with specific scene requirements. Furthermore, without an underlying explicit geometry, these models cannot guarantee 3D consistency. Conversely, 3D engines offer granular control over every scene element and provide native 3D consistency by design, yet their output often remains trapped in the "uncanny valley". Bridging this sim-to-real gap requires both structural precision, where the output must exactly preserve the geometry and dynamics of the input, and global semantic transformation, where materials, lighting, and textures must be holistically transformed to achieve photorealism. We present RealMaster, a method that leverages video diffusion models to lift rendered video into photorealistic video while maintaining full alignment with the output of the 3D engine. To train this model, we generate a paired dataset via an anchor-based propagation strategy, where the first and last frames are enhanced for realism and propagated across the intermediate frames using geometric conditioning cues. We then train an IC-LoRA on these paired videos to distill the high-quality outputs of the pipeline into a model that generalizes beyond the pipeline's constraints, handling objects and characters that appear mid-sequence and enabling inference without requiring anchor frames. Evaluated on complex GTA-V sequences, RealMaster significantly outperforms existing video editing baselines, improving photorealism while preserving the geometry, dynamics, and identity specified by the original 3D control.

Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been able to control complex systems with impressive fidelity and agility in simulation but the simulation-to-reality transfer often brings a hard-to-bridge reality gap. Moreover, RL is commonly plagued by prohibitively long training times. In this work, we propose a novel asymmetric actor-critic-based architecture coupled with a highly reliable RL-based training paradigm for end-to-end quadrotor control. We show how curriculum learning and a highly optimized simulator enhance sample complexity and lead to fast training times. To precisely discuss the challenges related to low-level/end-to-end multirotor control, we also introduce a taxonomy that classifies the existing levels of control abstractions as well as non-linearities and domain parameters. Our framework enables Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) transfer for direct RPM control after only 18 seconds of training on a consumer-grade laptop as well as its deployment on microcontrollers to control a multirotor under real-time guarantees. Finally, our solution exhibits competitive performance in trajectory tracking, as demonstrated through various experimental comparisons with existing state-of-the-art control solutions using a real Crazyflie nano quadrotor. We open source the code including a very fast multirotor dynamics simulator that can simulate about 5 months of flight per second on a laptop GPU. The fast training times and deployment to a cheap, off-the-shelf quadrotor lower the barriers to entry and help democratize the research and development of these systems.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) defines a schema bound execution model for agent-tool interaction, enabling modular computer vision workflows without retraining. To our knowledge, this is the first protocol level, deployment scale audit of MCP in vision systems, identifying systemic weaknesses in schema semantics, interoperability, and runtime coordination. We analyze 91 publicly registered vision centric MCP servers, annotated along nine dimensions of compositional fidelity, and develop an executable benchmark with validators to detect and categorize protocol violations. The audit reveals high prevalence of schema format divergence, missing runtime schema validation, undeclared coordinate conventions, and reliance on untracked bridging scripts. Validator based testing quantifies these failures, with schema format checks flagging misalignments in 78.0 percent of systems, coordinate convention checks detecting spatial reference errors in 24.6 percent, and memory scope checks issuing an average of 33.8 warnings per 100 executions. Security probes show that dynamic and multi agent workflows exhibit elevated risks of privilege escalation and untyped tool connections. The proposed benchmark and validator suite, implemented in a controlled testbed and to be released on GitHub, establishes a reproducible framework for measuring and improving the reliability and security of compositional vision workflows.

This paper addresses the challenges of registering two rigid semantic scene graphs, an essential capability when an autonomous agent needs to register its map against a remote agent, or against a prior map. The hand-crafted descriptors in classical semantic-aided registration, or the ground-truth annotation reliance in learning-based scene graph registration, impede their application in practical real-world environments. To address the challenges, we design a scene graph network to encode multiple modalities of semantic nodes: open-set semantic feature, local topology with spatial awareness, and shape feature. These modalities are fused to create compact semantic node features. The matching layers then search for correspondences in a coarse-to-fine manner. In the back-end, we employ a robust pose estimator to decide transformation according to the correspondences. We manage to maintain a sparse and hierarchical scene representation. Our approach demands fewer GPU resources and fewer communication bandwidth in multi-agent tasks. Moreover, we design a new data generation approach using vision foundation models and a semantic mapping module to reconstruct semantic scene graphs. It differs significantly from previous works, which rely on ground-truth semantic annotations to generate data. We validate our method in a two-agent SLAM benchmark. It significantly outperforms the hand-crafted baseline in terms of registration success rate. Compared to visual loop closure networks, our method achieves a slightly higher registration recall while requiring only 52 KB of communication bandwidth for each query frame. Code available at: http://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/SG-Reg{http://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/SG-Reg}.

Agent communication protocols are becoming critical infrastructure for large language model (LLM) systems that must use tools, coordinate with other agents, and operate across heterogeneous environments. This work presents a human-inspired perspective on this emerging landscape by organizing agent communication into three layers: communication, syntactic, and semantic. Under this framework, we systematically analyze 18 representative protocols and compare how they support reliable transport, structured interaction, and meaning-level coordination. Our analysis shows a clear imbalance in current protocol design. Most protocols provide increasingly mature support for transport, streaming, schema definition, and lifecycle management, but offer limited protocol-level mechanisms for clarification, context alignment, and verification. As a result, semantic responsibilities are often pushed into prompts, wrappers, or application-specific orchestration logic, creating hidden interoperability and maintenance costs. To make this gap actionable, we further identify major forms of technical debt in today's protocol ecosystem and distill practical guidance for selecting protocols under different deployment settings. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for interoperable, secure, and semantically robust agent ecosystems that move beyond message passing toward shared understanding.

We propose an efficient framework, called Simple Swap (SimSwap), aiming for generalized and high fidelity face swapping. In contrast to previous approaches that either lack the ability to generalize to arbitrary identity or fail to preserve attributes like facial expression and gaze direction, our framework is capable of transferring the identity of an arbitrary source face into an arbitrary target face while preserving the attributes of the target face. We overcome the above defects in the following two ways. First, we present the ID Injection Module (IIM) which transfers the identity information of the source face into the target face at feature level. By using this module, we extend the architecture of an identity-specific face swapping algorithm to a framework for arbitrary face swapping. Second, we propose the Weak Feature Matching Loss which efficiently helps our framework to preserve the facial attributes in an implicit way. Extensive experiments on wild faces demonstrate that our SimSwap is able to achieve competitive identity performance while preserving attributes better than previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is already available on github: https://github.com/neuralchen/SimSwap.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a de facto standard for integrating Large Language Models with external tools, yet no formal security analysis of the protocol specification exists. We present the first rigorous security analysis of MCP's architectural design, identifying three fundamental protocol-level vulnerabilities: (1) absence of capability attestation allowing servers to claim arbitrary permissions, (2) bidirectional sampling without origin authentication enabling server-side prompt injection, and (3) implicit trust propagation in multi-server configurations. We implement MCPBench, a novel framework bridging existing agent security benchmarks to MCP-compliant infrastructure, enabling direct measurement of protocol-specific attack surfaces. Through controlled experiments on 847 attack scenarios across five MCP server implementations, we demonstrate that MCP's architectural choices amplify attack success rates by 23--41\% compared to equivalent non-MCP integrations. We propose MCPSec, a backward-compatible protocol extension adding capability attestation and message authentication, reducing attack success rates from 52.8\% to 12.4\% with median latency overhead of 8.3ms per message. Our findings establish that MCP's security weaknesses are architectural rather than implementation-specific, requiring protocol-level remediation.

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

We have witnessed remarkable advances in LLM reasoning capabilities with the advent of DeepSeek-R1. However, much of this progress has been fueled by the abundance of internet question-answer (QA) pairs, a major bottleneck going forward, since such data is limited in scale and concentrated mainly in domains like mathematics. In contrast, other sciences such as physics lack large-scale QA datasets to effectively train reasoning-capable models. In this work, we show that physics simulators can serve as a powerful alternative source of supervision for training LLMs for physical reasoning. We generate random scenes in physics engines, create synthetic question-answer pairs from simulated interactions, and train LLMs using reinforcement learning on this synthetic data. Our models exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to real-world physics benchmarks: for example, training solely on synthetic simulated data improves performance on IPhO (International Physics Olympiad) problems by 5-10 percentage points across model sizes. These results demonstrate that physics simulators can act as scalable data generators, enabling LLMs to acquire deep physical reasoning skills beyond the limitations of internet-scale QA data. Code available at: https://sim2reason.github.io/.

We study the challenging problem of releasing a robot in a previously unseen environment, and having it follow unconstrained natural language navigation instructions. Recent work on the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has achieved significant progress in simulation. To assess the implications of this work for robotics, we transfer a VLN agent trained in simulation to a physical robot. To bridge the gap between the high-level discrete action space learned by the VLN agent, and the robot's low-level continuous action space, we propose a subgoal model to identify nearby waypoints, and use domain randomization to mitigate visual domain differences. For accurate sim and real comparisons in parallel environments, we annotate a 325m2 office space with 1.3km of navigation instructions, and create a digitized replica in simulation. We find that sim-to-real transfer to an environment not seen in training is successful if an occupancy map and navigation graph can be collected and annotated in advance (success rate of 46.8% vs. 55.9% in sim), but much more challenging in the hardest setting with no prior mapping at all (success rate of 22.5%).

The rapid advancement of Embodied AI has led to an increasing demand for large-scale, high-quality real-world data. However, collecting such embodied data remains costly and inefficient. As a result, simulation environments have become a crucial surrogate for training robot policies. Yet, the significant Real2Sim2Real gap remains a critical bottleneck, particularly in terms of physical dynamics and visual appearance. To address this challenge, we propose EmbodieDreamer, a novel framework that reduces the Real2Sim2Real gap from both the physics and appearance perspectives. Specifically, we propose PhysAligner, a differentiable physics module designed to reduce the Real2Sim physical gap. It jointly optimizes robot-specific parameters such as control gains and friction coefficients to better align simulated dynamics with real-world observations. In addition, we introduce VisAligner, which incorporates a conditional video diffusion model to bridge the Sim2Real appearance gap by translating low-fidelity simulated renderings into photorealistic videos conditioned on simulation states, enabling high-fidelity visual transfer. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EmbodieDreamer. The proposed PhysAligner reduces physical parameter estimation error by 3.74% compared to simulated annealing methods while improving optimization speed by 89.91\%. Moreover, training robot policies in the generated photorealistic environment leads to a 29.17% improvement in the average task success rate across real-world tasks after reinforcement learning. Code, model and data will be publicly available.

Controllable character animation is an emerging task that generates character videos controlled by pose sequences from given character images. Although character consistency has made significant progress via reference UNet, another crucial factor, pose control, has not been well studied by existing methods yet, resulting in several issues: 1) The generation may fail when the input pose sequence is corrupted. 2) The hands generated using the DWPose sequence are blurry and unrealistic. 3) The generated video will be shaky if the pose sequence is not smooth enough. In this paper, we present RealisDance to handle all the above issues. RealisDance adaptively leverages three types of poses, avoiding failed generation caused by corrupted pose sequences. Among these pose types, HaMeR provides accurate 3D and depth information of hands, enabling RealisDance to generate realistic hands even for complex gestures. Besides using temporal attention in the main UNet, RealisDance also inserts temporal attention into the pose guidance network, smoothing the video from the pose condition aspect. Moreover, we introduce pose shuffle augmentation during training to further improve generation robustness and video smoothness. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of RealisDance over other existing methods, especially in hand quality.

The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.

Embodied navigation aims to build agents that interpret multimodal goals, reason in 3D space, and reach target destinations reliably in the real world. However, progress remains constrained by the lack of scalable, high-fidelity, and physically grounded interactive environments. Although real-world scanned datasets offer visual realism, they are limited by scale. In contrast, synthetic simulators scale more easily but often exhibit large sim-to-real gaps. We introduce Image2Sim, a real-time neural simulation framework that constructs high-quality interactive environments from posed RGB-D image sequences. The central idea is to decouple 3D spatial anchoring from photorealistic observation synthesis. For scene construction, Image2Sim uses a feed-forward feature Gaussian model that lifts posed RGB-D observations into a 3D feature-Gaussian representation in a single pass. For rendering, we propose a Geometry-Aware One-Step Pixel Flow model that transforms sparse and noisy Gaussian projections into high-quality panoramic RGB-D observations. Image2Sim also serves as a fully automated embodied data engine that generates high-fidelity observations, executable actions, and diverse navigation instructions at scale. It converts large collections of videos and images into nearly 20K interactive scenes and synthesizes more than 10 million navigation training samples. Navigation models trained entirely in these neural environments achieve strong improvements on major benchmarks and transfer effectively to real-world zero-shot settings. These results suggest that scalable neural simulation can serve as a practical training substrate for embodied navigation at scale.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as promising tools for advancing autonomous driving (AD) research, offering scalable closed-loop simulation and data augmentation capabilities. However, to trust the results achieved in simulation, one needs to ensure that AD systems perceive real and rendered data in the same way. Although the performance of rendering methods is increasing, many scenarios will remain inherently challenging to reconstruct faithfully. To this end, we propose a novel perspective for addressing the real-to-simulated data gap. Rather than solely focusing on improving rendering fidelity, we explore simple yet effective methods to enhance perception model robustness to NeRF artifacts without compromising performance on real data. Moreover, we conduct the first large-scale investigation into the real-to-simulated data gap in an AD setting using a state-of-the-art neural rendering technique. Specifically, we evaluate object detectors and an online mapping model on real and simulated data, and study the effects of different fine-tuning strategies.Our results show notable improvements in model robustness to simulated data, even improving real-world performance in some cases. Last, we delve into the correlation between the real-to-simulated gap and image reconstruction metrics, identifying FID and LPIPS as strong indicators. See https://research.zenseact.com/publications/closing-real2sim-gap for our project page.

Most recent real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods employ pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to synthesize the high-quality image either from random Gaussian noise, which yields realistic results but is slow due to iterative denoising, or directly from the input low-quality image, which is efficient but at the price of lower output quality. These approaches train ControlNet or LoRA modules while keeping the pre-trained model fixed, which often introduces over-enhanced artifacts and hallucinations, suffering from the robustness to inputs of varying degradations. Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models, such as pre-trained Infinity, can provide strong T2I generation capabilities while offering superior efficiency by using the bitwise next-scale prediction strategy. Building upon next-scale prediction, we introduce a robust Real-ISR framework, namely Next-Scale Autoregressive Modeling (NSARM). Specifically, we train NSARM in two stages: a transformation network is first trained to map the input low-quality image to preliminary scales, followed by an end-to-end full-model fine-tuning. Such a comprehensive fine-tuning enhances the robustness of NSARM in Real-ISR tasks without compromising its generative capability. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that as a pure AR model, NSARM achieves superior visual results over existing Real-ISR methods while maintaining a fast inference speed. Most importantly, it demonstrates much higher robustness to the quality of input images, showing stronger generalization performance. Project page: https://github.com/Xiangtaokong/NSARM

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into agentic systems that reason, plan, and operate external tools. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a key enabler of this transition, offering a standardized interface for connecting LLMs with heterogeneous tools and services. Yet MCP's openness and multi-server workflows introduce new safety risks that existing benchmarks fail to capture, as they focus on isolated attacks or lack real-world coverage. We present MCP-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark built on real MCP servers that supports realistic multi-turn evaluation across five domains: browser automation, financial analysis, location navigation, repository management, and web search. It incorporates a unified taxonomy of 20 MCP attack types spanning server, host, and user sides, and includes tasks requiring multi-step reasoning and cross-server coordination under uncertainty. Using MCP-SafetyBench, we systematically evaluate leading open- and closed-source LLMs, revealing that all models remain vulnerable to MCP attacks, with a notable safety-utility trade-off. Our results highlight the urgent need for stronger defenses and establish MCP-SafetyBench as a foundation for diagnosing and mitigating safety risks in real-world MCP deployments.

Biological protocols are fundamental to reproducible and safe life science research. While LLMs excel on general tasks, their systematic evaluation on these highly specialized, accuracy-critical, and inherently procedural texts remains limited. In this work, we present BioProBench, the first large-scale, integrated multi-task benchmark for biological protocol understanding and reasoning. While limited benchmarks have touched upon specific aspects like protocol QA, BioProBench provides a comprehensive suite of five core tasks: Protocol Question Answering, Step Ordering, Error Correction, Protocol Generation, and Protocol Reasoning, enabling a holistic evaluation of LLMs on procedural biological texts. Built upon 27K original protocols, it yields nearly 556K high-quality structured instances. We evaluate 12 mainstream open/closed-source LLMs on BioProBench. Experimental results reveal that while top models preform well on surface understanding tasks, struggle significantly with deep reasoning and structured generation tasks like ordering and generation. Furthermore, model comparisons reveal diverse performance: certain open-source models approach closed-source levels on some tasks, yet bio-specific small models lag behind general LLMs, indicating limitations on complex procedural content. Overall, our findings underscore that procedural reasoning within biological protocols represents a significant challenge for current LLMs. BioProBench serves as a standardized framework to diagnose these specific limitations and guide the development of AI systems better equipped for safely automating complex scientific procedures. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/bioprotocolbench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/GreatCaptainNemo/BioProBench.

Agent benchmarks should reflect what users actually ask deployed agents to do, yet existing benchmarks often miss key realism properties of real developer-agent sessions. We introduce RealClawBench, a live benchmark framework built from real OpenClaw sessions to capture the distribution, diversity, and real-world difficulty of deployed agent use. Real user requests are challenging to benchmark because they often depend on local execution environments, involve implicit or underspecified intent, and require nontrivial verification. RealClawBench addresses these challenges with two core mechanisms: reconstructed execution environments and deterministic verifiable scorers, which together convert real sessions into reproducible, automatically scored tasks. The resulting release contains 281 executable tasks sampled from a much larger real-session pool while preserving the source distribution, with maximum final-vs-source Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.0448. Evaluating 14 contemporary models shows that the best system solves only 65.8% of tasks, revealing substantial headroom on realistic developer-agent workloads. By turning real deployed sessions into controlled evaluation instances, RealClawBench provides a practical path toward benchmarks that better measure agent capability in actual use. Code is available at:https://anonymous.4open.science/r/real-claw-bench-582B.

Accurate Point Cloud Registration (PCR) is an important task in 3D data processing, involving the estimation of a rigid transformation between two point clouds. While deep-learning methods have addressed key limitations of traditional non-learning approaches, such as sensitivity to noise, outliers, occlusion, and initialization, they are developed and evaluated on clean, dense, synthetic datasets (limiting their generalizability to real-world industrial scenarios). This paper introduces R3PM-Net, a lightweight, global-aware, object-level point matching network designed to bridge this gap by prioritizing both generalizability and real-time efficiency. To support this transition, two datasets, Sioux-Cranfield and Sioux-Scans, are proposed. They provide an evaluation ground for registering imperfect photogrammetric and event-camera scans to digital CAD models, and have been made publicly available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that R3PM-Net achieves competitive accuracy with unmatched speed. On ModelNet40, it reaches a perfect fitness score of 1 and inlier RMSE of 0.029 cm in only 0.007s, approximately 7 times faster than the state-of-the-art method RegTR. This performance carries over to the Sioux-Cranfield dataset, maintaining a fitness of 1 and inlier RMSE of 0.030 cm with similarly low latency. Furthermore, on the highly challenging Sioux-Scans dataset, R3PM-Net successfully resolves edge cases in under 50 ms. These results confirm that R3PM-Net offers a robust, high-speed solution for critical industrial applications, where precision and real-time performance are indispensable. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/YasiiKB/R3PM-Net.

The automatic generation of Verilog code using Large Language Models (LLMs) has garnered significant interest in hardware design automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in Verilog generation fall short in replicating real-world design workflows due to their designs' simplicity, inadequate design specifications, and less rigorous verification environments. To address these limitations, we present RealBench, the first benchmark aiming at real-world IP-level Verilog generation tasks. RealBench features complex, structured, real-world open-source IP designs, multi-modal and formatted design specifications, and rigorous verification environments, including 100% line coverage testbenches and a formal checker. It supports both module-level and system-level tasks, enabling comprehensive assessments of LLM capabilities. Evaluations on various LLMs and agents reveal that even one of the best-performing LLMs, o1-preview, achieves only a 13.3% pass@1 on module-level tasks and 0% on system-level tasks, highlighting the need for stronger Verilog generation models in the future. The benchmark is open-sourced at https://github.com/IPRC-DIP/RealBench.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated its potential in reconstructing scenes from unposed images. However, optimization-based 3DGS methods struggle with sparse views due to limited prior knowledge. Meanwhile, feed-forward Gaussian approaches are constrained by input formats, making it challenging to incorporate more input views. To address these challenges, we propose RegGS, a 3D Gaussian registration-based framework for reconstructing unposed sparse views. RegGS aligns local 3D Gaussians generated by a feed-forward network into a globally consistent 3D Gaussian representation. Technically, we implement an entropy-regularized Sinkhorn algorithm to efficiently solve the optimal transport Mixture 2-Wasserstein (MW_2) distance, which serves as an alignment metric for Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) in Sim(3) space. Furthermore, we design a joint 3DGS registration module that integrates the MW_2 distance, photometric consistency, and depth geometry. This enables a coarse-to-fine registration process while accurately estimating camera poses and aligning the scene. Experiments on the RE10K and ACID datasets demonstrate that RegGS effectively registers local Gaussians with high fidelity, achieving precise pose estimation and high-quality novel-view synthesis. Project page: https://3dagentworld.github.io/reggs/.

Large language model powered autonomous agents demand robust, standardized protocols to integrate tools, share contextual data, and coordinate tasks across heterogeneous systems. Ad-hoc integrations are difficult to scale, secure, and generalize across domains. This survey examines four emerging agent communication protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP), each addressing interoperability in deployment contexts. MCP provides a JSON-RPC client-server interface for secure tool invocation and typed data exchange. ACP defines a general-purpose communication protocol over RESTful HTTP, supporting MIME-typed multipart messages and synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Its lightweight and runtime-independent design enables scalable agent invocation, while features like session management, message routing, and integration with role-based and decentralized identifiers (DIDs). A2A enables peer-to-peer task delegation using capability-based Agent Cards, supporting secure and scalable collaboration across enterprise agent workflows. ANP supports open network agent discovery and secure collaboration using W3C decentralized identifiers DIDs and JSON-LD graphs. The protocols are compared across multiple dimensions, including interaction modes, discovery mechanisms, communication patterns, and security models. Based on the comparative analysis, a phased adoption roadmap is proposed: beginning with MCP for tool access, followed by ACP for structured, multimodal messaging session-aware interaction and both online and offline agent discovery across scalable, HTTP-based deployments A2A for collaborative task execution, and extending to ANP for decentralized agent marketplaces. This work provides a comprehensive foundation for designing secure, interoperable, and scalable ecosystems of LLM-powered agents.

Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel ρ-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed ho-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed ρ-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can generalize across diverse manipulation tasks, but their imitation-learning-based policies remain brittle in precise physical interactions due to compounding execution errors; Can a reinforcement learning policy trained purely in simulation improve the robustness of real-world VLAs zero-shot? Residual RL, which learns a corrective policy on top of a frozen VLA, offers a natural framework, but existing approaches face a fundamental sim-to-real dilemma: privileged-state methods require lossy distillation for deployment; image-based methods suffer from the visual domain gap; and real-world RL is costly and unsafe. We propose an object-centric residual RL framework that refines VLA actions using object poses, enabling a compact observation space that transfers consistently between simulation and reality. To align the two domains, we additionally replay the same teleoperation demonstrations in simulation to train a sim counterpart of the real-world VLA. The residual RL policy is trained only in simulation with pose noise injection and dropout, and transfers zero-shot to the real robot. Across five manipulation tasks on a real Franka Research 3 (FR3) robot, our method improves the success rate from 42% to 76% zero-shot, and the improved rollouts can be further reused to retrain the base VLA for self-improvement without additional teleoperation. Project page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/object-centric-residual-rl/

Simulating realistic behaviors of traffic agents is pivotal for efficiently validating the safety of autonomous driving systems. Existing data-driven simulators primarily use an encoder-decoder architecture to encode the historical trajectories before decoding the future. However, the heterogeneity between encoders and decoders complicates the models, and the manual separation of historical and future trajectories leads to low data utilization. Given these limitations, we propose BehaviorGPT, a homogeneous and fully autoregressive Transformer designed to simulate the sequential behavior of multiple agents. Crucially, our approach discards the traditional separation between "history" and "future" by modeling each time step as the "current" one for motion generation, leading to a simpler, more parameter- and data-efficient agent simulator. We further introduce the Next-Patch Prediction Paradigm (NP3) to mitigate the negative effects of autoregressive modeling, in which models are trained to reason at the patch level of trajectories and capture long-range spatial-temporal interactions. Despite having merely 3M model parameters, BehaviorGPT won first place in the 2024 Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge with a realism score of 0.7473 and a minADE score of 1.4147, demonstrating its exceptional performance in traffic agent simulation.

Functional grasping is essential for humans to perform specific tasks, such as grasping scissors by the finger holes to cut materials or by the blade to safely hand them over. Enabling dexterous robot hands with functional grasping capabilities is crucial for their deployment to accomplish diverse real-world tasks. Recent research in dexterous grasping, however, often focuses on power grasps while overlooking task- and object-specific functional grasping poses. In this paper, we introduce FunGrasp, a system that enables functional dexterous grasping across various robot hands and performs one-shot transfer to unseen objects. Given a single RGBD image of functional human grasping, our system estimates the hand pose and transfers it to different robotic hands via a human-to-robot (H2R) grasp retargeting module. Guided by the retargeted grasping poses, a policy is trained through reinforcement learning in simulation for dynamic grasping control. To achieve robust sim-to-real transfer, we employ several techniques including privileged learning, system identification, domain randomization, and gravity compensation. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our system enables diverse functional grasping of unseen objects using single RGBD images, and can be successfully deployed across various dexterous robot hands. The significance of the components is validated through comprehensive ablation studies. Project page: https://hly-123.github.io/FunGrasp/ .

Recent advancements in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies have enabled autonomous vehicles to share sensing information to see through occlusions, greatly boosting the perception capability. However, there are no real-world datasets to facilitate the real V2X cooperative perception research -- existing datasets either only support Vehicle-to-Infrastructure cooperation or Vehicle-to-Vehicle cooperation. In this paper, we present V2X-Real, a large-scale dataset that includes a mixture of multiple vehicles and smart infrastructure to facilitate the V2X cooperative perception development with multi-modality sensing data. Our V2X-Real is collected using two connected automated vehicles and two smart infrastructure, which are all equipped with multi-modal sensors including LiDAR sensors and multi-view cameras. The whole dataset contains 33K LiDAR frames and 171K camera data with over 1.2M annotated bounding boxes of 10 categories in very challenging urban scenarios. According to the collaboration mode and ego perspective, we derive four types of datasets for Vehicle-Centric, Infrastructure-Centric, Vehicle-to-Vehicle, and Infrastructure-to-Infrastructure cooperative perception. Comprehensive multi-class multi-agent benchmarks of SOTA cooperative perception methods are provided. The V2X-Real dataset and codebase are available at https://mobility-lab.seas.ucla.edu/v2x-real.

Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains challenging, particularly for robots equipped with multi-fingered dexterous hands characterized by complex, high-dimensional action spaces. Moreover, existing approaches often struggle to produce policies capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce HERMES, a human-to-robot learning framework for mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation. First, HERMES formulates a unified reinforcement learning approach capable of seamlessly transforming heterogeneous human hand motions from multiple sources into physically plausible robotic behaviors. Subsequently, to mitigate the sim2real gap, we devise an end-to-end, depth image-based sim2real transfer method for improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, to enable autonomous operation in varied and unstructured environments, we augment the navigation foundation model with a closed-loop Perspective-n-Point (PnP) localization mechanism, ensuring precise alignment of visual goals and effectively bridging autonomous navigation and dexterous manipulation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HERMES consistently exhibits generalizable behaviors across diverse, in-the-wild scenarios, successfully performing numerous complex mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks. Project Page:https://gemcollector.github.io/HERMES/.

Preparing high-fidelity logical magic states is crucial for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Among prior attempts to reduce the substantial cost of magic state preparation, magic state cultivation (MSC), a recently proposed protocol for preparing T states without magic state distillation, achieves state-of-the-art efficiency. Inspired by this work, we propose a new MSC procedure that would produce a logical T state on a rotated surface code at a further reduced cost. For our MSC protocol, we define a new code family, the RP^2 code, by putting the rotated surface code on RP^2 (a two-dimensional manifold), as well as two self-dual CSS codes named SRP-3 and SRP-5 respectively. Small RP^2 codes are used to hold logical information and checked by syndrome extraction (SE) circuits. We design fast morphing circuits that enable switching between a distance 3 (5) RP^2 code and an SRP-3 (SRP-5) code on which we can efficiently check the correctness of the logical state. To preserve the high accuracy of the cultivated logical T state, we design an efficient and easy-to-decode expansion stage that grows a small RP^2 code to a large rotated surface code in one round. Our MSC protocol utilizes non-local connectivity, available on both neutral atom array and ion trap platforms. According to our Monte Carlo sampling results, our MSC protocol requires about an order of magnitude smaller space-time volume to reach a target logical error rate around 10^{-9} compared to the original MSC protocol.

Camera-controlled video-to-video (V2V) generation enables dynamic viewpoint synthesis from monocular footage, holding immense potential for interactive filmmaking and live broadcasting. However, existing implicit synthesis methods fundamentally rely on non-causal, full-sequence processing and rigid prefix-style temporal concatenation. This architectural paradigm mandates bidirectional attention, resulting in prohibitive computational latency, quadratic complexity scaling, and inherent incompatibility with real-time streaming or variable-length inputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RealCam, a novel autoregressive framework for interactive, real-time camera-controlled V2V generation. We first design a high-fidelity teacher model grounded in a Cross-frame In-context Learning paradigm. By interleaving source and target frames into synchronized contextual pairs, our design inherently enables length-agnostic generalization and naturally facilitates causal adaptation, breaking the rigid prefix bottleneck. We then distill this teacher into a few-step causal student via Self-Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling efficient, on-the-fly streaming synthesis. Furthermore, to mitigate severe loop inconsistency in closed-loop trajectories, we propose Loop-Closed Data Augmentation (LoopAug), a novel paradigm that synthesizes globally consistent loop sequences from existing multiview datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealCam achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity and temporal consistency while enabling truly interactive camera control with orders-of-magnitude faster inference than existing paradigms. Our project page is at https://xyc-fly.github.io/RealCam/.