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 Spatial Reasoning


AudioScene: Integrating Object-Event Audio into 3D Scenes

Yuan, Shuaihang, Wen, Congcong, Shafique, Muhammad, Tzes, Anthony, Fang, Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advances in audio analysis underscore its vast potential for humancomputer interaction, environmental monitoring, and public safety; yet, existing audioonly datasets often lack spatial context. To address this gap, we present two novel audiospatial scene datasets, AudioScanNet and AudioRoboTHOR, designed to explore audioconditioned tasks within 3D environments. By integrating audio clips with spatially aligned 3D scenes, our datasets enable research on how audio signals interact with spatial context. To associate audio events with corresponding spatial information, we leverage the common sense reasoning ability of large language models and supplement them with rigorous human verification, This approach offers greater scalability compared to purely manual annotation while maintaining high standards of accuracy, completeness, and diversity, quantified through inter annotator agreement and performance on two benchmark tasks audio based 3D visual grounding and audio based robotic zeroshot navigation. The results highlight the limitations of current audiocentric methods and underscore the practical challenges and significance of our datasets in advancing audio guided spatial learning.


Persistent Topological Structures and Cohomological Flows as a Mathematical Framework for Brain-Inspired Representation Learning

Girish, Preksha, Mysore, Rachana, U, Mahanthesha, Kumar, Shrey, Prashant, Shipra

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a mathematically rigorous framework for brain-inspired representation learning founded on the interplay between persistent topological structures and cohomological flows. Neural computation is reformulated as the evolution of cochain maps over dynamic simplicial complexes, enabling representations that capture invariants across temporal, spatial, and functional brain states. The proposed architecture integrates algebraic topology with differential geometry to construct cohomological operators that generalize gradient-based learning within a homological landscape. Synthetic data with controlled topological signatures and real neural datasets are jointly analyzed using persistent homology, sheaf cohomology, and spectral Laplacians to quantify stability, continuity, and structural preservation. Empirical results demonstrate that the model achieves superior manifold consistency and noise resilience compared to graph neural and manifold-based deep architectures, establishing a coherent mathematical foundation for topology-driven representation learning.


Distilling Future Temporal Knowledge with Masked Feature Reconstruction for 3D Object Detection

Zheng, Haowen, Zhu, Hu, Deng, Lu, Gu, Weihao, Yang, Yang, Liang, Yanyan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Camera-based temporal 3D object detection has shown impressive results in autonomous driving, with offline models improving accuracy by using future frames. Knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing framework for transferring rich information from offline models to online models. However, existing KD methods overlook future frames, as they mainly focus on spatial feature distillation under strict frame alignment or on temporal relational distillation, thereby making it challenging for online models to effectively learn future knowledge. To this end, we propose a sparse query-based approach, Future Temporal Knowledge Distillation (FTKD), which effectively transfers future frame knowledge from an offline teacher model to an online student model. Specifically, we present a future-aware feature reconstruction strategy to encourage the student model to capture future features without strict frame alignment. In addition, we further introduce future-guided logit distillation to leverage the teacher's stable foreground and background context. FTKD is applied to two high-performing 3D object detection baselines, achieving up to 1.3 mAP and 1.3 NDS gains on the nuScenes dataset, as well as the most accurate velocity estimation, without increasing inference cost.


FRIEDA: Benchmarking Multi-Step Cartographic Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Pyo, Jiyoon, Jiao, Yuankun, Jung, Dongwon, Li, Zekun, Jang, Leeje, Kirsanova, Sofia, Kim, Jina, Lin, Yijun, Liu, Qin, Xie, Junyi, Askari, Hadi, Xu, Nan, Chen, Muhao, Chiang, Yao-Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cartographic reasoning is the skill of interpreting geographic relationships by aligning legends, map scales, compass directions, map texts, and geometries across one or more map images. Although essential as a concrete cognitive capability and for critical tasks such as disaster response and urban planning, it remains largely unevaluated. Building on progress in chart and infographic understanding, recent large vision language model studies on map visual question-answering often treat maps as a special case of charts. In contrast, map VQA demands comprehension of layered symbology (e.g., symbols, geometries, and text labels) as well as spatial relations tied to orientation and distance that often span multiple maps and are not captured by chart-style evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce FRIEDA, a benchmark for testing complex open-ended cartographic reasoning in LVLMs. FRIEDA sources real map images from documents and reports in various domains and geographical areas. Following classifications in Geographic Information System (GIS) literature, FRIEDA targets all three categories of spatial relations: topological (border, equal, intersect, within), metric (distance), and directional (orientation). All questions require multi-step inference, and many require cross-map grounding and reasoning. We evaluate eleven state-of-the-art LVLMs under two settings: (1) the direct setting, where we provide the maps relevant to the question, and (2) the contextual setting, where the model may have to identify the maps relevant to the question before reasoning. Even the strongest models, Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5-Think, achieve only 38.20% and 37.20% accuracy, respectively, far below human performance of 84.87%. These results reveal a persistent gap in multi-step cartographic reasoning, positioning FRIEDA as a rigorous benchmark to drive progress on spatial intelligence in LVLMs.


Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoning

Xu, Huilin, Liu, Zhuoyang, Luomei, Yixiang, Xu, Feng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments using onboard visual observation. This task holds promise for real-world applications such as low-altitude inspection, search-and-rescue, and autonomous aerial delivery. Existing methods often rely on panoramic images, depth inputs, or odometry to support spatial reasoning and action planning. These requirements increase system cost and integration complexity, thus hindering practical deployment for lightweight UAVs. We present a unified aerial VLN framework that operates solely on egocentric monocular RGB observations and natural language instructions. The model formulates navigation as a next-token prediction problem, jointly optimizing spatial perception, trajectory reasoning, and action prediction through prompt-guided multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose a keyframe selection strategy to reduce visual redundancy by retaining semantically informative frames, along with an action merging and label reweighting mechanism that mitigates long-tailed supervision imbalance and facilitates stable multi-task co-training. Extensive experiments on the Aerial VLN benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the challenging monocular RGB-only setting, our model achieves strong results across both seen and unseen environments. It significantly outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art panoramic RGB-D counterparts. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of our task design and architectural choices.


PosA-VLA: Enhancing Action Generation via Pose-Conditioned Anchor Attention

Li, Ziwen, Wang, Xin, Zhang, Hanlue, Chen, Runnan, Lin, Runqi, He, Xiao, Huang, Han, Guo, Yandong, Karray, Fakhri, Liu, Tongliang, Gong, Mingming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on embodied tasks and shown promising potential for real-world applications. However, current VLAs still struggle to produce consistent and precise target-oriented actions, as they often generate redundant or unstable motions along trajectories, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive scenarios.In this work, we attribute these redundant actions to the spatially uniform perception field of existing VLAs, which causes them to be distracted by target-irrelevant objects, especially in complex environments.To address this issue, we propose an efficient PosA-VLA framework that anchors visual attention via pose-conditioned supervision, consistently guiding the model's perception toward task-relevant regions. The pose-conditioned anchor attention mechanism enables the model to better align instruction semantics with actionable visual cues, thereby improving action generation precision and efficiency. Moreover, our framework adopts a lightweight architecture and requires no auxiliary perception modules (e.g., segmentation or grounding networks), ensuring efficient inference. Extensive experiments verify that our method executes embodied tasks with precise and time-efficient behavior across diverse robotic manipulation benchmarks and shows robust generalization in a variety of challenging environments.


Smart Spatial Planning in Egypt: An Algorithm-Driven Approach to Public Service Evaluation in Qena City

Shamroukh, Mohamed, Aziz, Mohamed Alkhuzamy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The availability and sophistication degree of such services are fair measures of progress for any city. In this context, Geographic information systems " GIS " offers solutions that support the decision - making processes regarding management, planning and distribution of services, ultimately improving the standard of living in cities (Aziz, 2007, p. 11). Investigating services planning standards is one of the most relevant issues concerning human progress regarding its proper definition and needs. Planning standards can be reconsidered by studying the variation in the distribution of geographical phenomena and the characteristi cs of geographic areas. More effort should be exerted in defining these standards parallel to the characteristics of each region. Such efforts will facilitate appropriate allocation s of services and accurate definitions of future developmental efforts. The problem of the study is that the planning standards are not suitable for the characteristics of the Egyptian cities, which include more population and intensive daily use of services. The solution to this problem is to create new planning standards that suit the rapidly changing nature of cities, and to generate these criteria current services and their intensity and the built - up areas are going to be used to reflect the characteristics of the city, taking this abroach is a new way to generate such criteria. This study attempts to derive planning standards for public services in the city of Qena that are compatible with the characteristics of the city, the geographical distribution of the population, the built - up area, and the services therein.


Affordance Field Intervention: Enabling VLAs to Escape Memory Traps in Robotic Manipulation

Xu, Siyu, Wang, Zijian, Wang, Yunke, Xia, Chenghao, Huang, Tao, Xu, Chang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great performance in robotic manipulation by mapping visual observations and language instructions directly to actions. However, they remain brittle under distribution shifts: when test scenarios change, VLAs often reproduce memorized trajectories instead of adapting to the updated scene, which is a failure mode we refer to as the "Memory Trap". This limitation stems from the end-to-end design, which lacks explicit 3D spatial reasoning and prevents reliable identification of actionable regions in unfamiliar environments. To compensate for this missing spatial understanding, 3D Spatial Affordance Fields (SAFs) can provide a geometric representation that highlights where interactions are physically feasible, offering explicit cues about regions the robot should approach or avoid. We therefore introduce Affordance Field Intervention (AFI), a lightweight hybrid framework that uses SAFs as an on-demand plug-in to guide VLA behavior. Our system detects memory traps through proprioception, repositions the robot to recent high-affordance regions, and proposes affordance-driven waypoints that anchor VLA-generated actions. A SAF-based scorer then selects trajectories with the highest cumulative affordance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 23.5% across different VLA backbones ($π_{0}$ and $π_{0.5}$) under out-of-distribution scenarios on real-world robotic platforms, and 20.2% on the LIBERO-Pro benchmark, validating its effectiveness in enhancing VLA robustness to distribution shifts.


UniFS: Unified Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction via Frequency-Spatial Fusion

Li, Jialin, Ren, Yiwei, Pan, Kai, Wei, Dong, Cheng, Pujin, Wu, Xian, Tang, Xiaoying

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, Multi-Contrast MR Reconstruction (MCMR) has emerged as a hot research topic that leverages high-quality auxiliary modalities to reconstruct undersampled target modalities of interest. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize across different k-space undersampling patterns, requiring the training of a separate model for each specific pattern, which limits their practical applicability. To address this challenge, we propose UniFS, a Unified Frequency-Spatial Fusion model designed to handle multiple k-space undersampling patterns for MCMR tasks without any need for retraining. UniFS integrates three key modules: a Cross-Modal Frequency Fusion module, an Adaptive Mask-Based Prompt Learning module, and a Dual-Branch Complementary Refinement module. These modules work together to extract domain-invariant features from diverse k-space undersampling patterns while dynamically adapt to their own variations. Another limitation of existing MCMR methods is their tendency to focus solely on spatial information while neglect frequency characteristics, or extract only shallow frequency features, thus failing to fully leverage complementary cross-modal frequency information. To relieve this issue, UniFS introduces an adaptive prompt-guided frequency fusion module for k-space learning, significantly enhancing the model's generalization performance. We evaluate our model on the BraTS and HCP datasets with various k-space undersampling patterns and acceleration factors, including previously unseen patterns, to comprehensively assess UniFS's generalizability. Experimental results across multiple scenarios demonstrate that UniFS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/LIKP0/UniFS.


A Hyperspectral Imaging Guided Robotic Grasping System

Sun, Zheng, Dong, Zhipeng, Wang, Shixiong, Chu, Zhongyi, Chen, Fei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hyperspectral imaging is an advanced technique for precisely identifying and analyzing materials or objects. However, its integration with robotic grasping systems has so far been explored due to the deployment complexities and prohibitive costs. Within this paper, we introduce a novel hyperspectral imaging-guided robotic grasping system. The system consists of PRISM (Polyhedral Reflective Imaging Scanning Mechanism) and the SpectralGrasp framework. PRISM is designed to enable high-precision, distortion-free hyperspectral imaging while simplifying system integration and costs. SpectralGrasp generates robotic grasping strategies by effectively leveraging both the spatial and spectral information from hyperspectral images. The proposed system demonstrates substantial improvements in both textile recognition compared to human performance and sorting success rate compared to RGB-based methods. Additionally, a series of comparative experiments further validates the effectiveness of our system. The study highlights the potential benefits of integrating hyperspectral imaging with robotic grasping systems, showcasing enhanced recognition and grasping capabilities in complex and dynamic environments. The project is available at: https://zainzh.github.io/PRISM.