Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles necessitates comprehensive simulation of multi-sensor data, encompassing inputs from both cameras and LiDAR sensors, across various dynamic driving scenarios. Neural rendering techniques, which utilize collected raw sensor data to simulate these dynamic environments, have emerged as a leading methodology. While NeRF-based approaches can uniformly represent scenes for rendering data from both camera and LiDAR, they are hindered by slow rendering speeds due to dense sampling. Conversely, Gaussian Splatting-based methods employ Gaussian primitives for scene representation and achieve rapid rendering through rasterization. However, these rasterization-based techniques struggle to accurately model non-linear optical sensors. This limitation restricts their applicability to sensors beyond pinhole cameras. To address these challenges and enable unified representation of dynamic driving scenarios using Gaussian primitives, this study proposes a novel hybrid approach. Our method utilizes rasterization for rendering image data while employing Gaussian ray-tracing for LiDAR data rendering. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. This work presents a unified and efficient solution for realistic simulation of camera and LiDAR data in autonomous driving scenarios using Gaussian primitives, offering significant advancements in both rendering quality and computational efficiency.

In the realm of option pricing, existing models are typically classified into principle-driven methods, such as solving partial differential equations (PDEs) that pricing function satisfies, and data-driven approaches, such as machine learning (ML) techniques that parameterize the pricing function directly. While principle-driven models offer a rigorous theoretical framework, they often rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as asset processes adhering to fixed stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Moreover, they can become computationally intensive, particularly in high-dimensional settings when analytical solutions are not available and thus numerical solutions are needed. In contrast, data-driven models excel in capturing market data trends, but they often lack alignment with core financial principles, raising concerns about interpretability and predictive accuracy, especially when dealing with limited or biased datasets. This work proposes a hybrid approach to address these limitations by integrating the strengths of both principled and data-driven methodologies. Our framework combines the theoretical rigor and interpretability of PDE-based models with the adaptability of machine learning techniques, yielding a more versatile methodology for pricing a broad spectrum of options. We validate our approach across different volatility modeling approaches-both with constant volatility (Black-Scholes) and stochastic volatility (Heston), demonstrating that our proposed framework, Finance-Informed Neural Network (FINN), not only enhances predictive accuracy but also maintains adherence to core financial principles. FINN presents a promising tool for practitioners, offering robust performance across a variety of market conditions.

Automatic detection and prevention of open-set failures are crucial in closed-loop robotic systems. Recent studies often struggle to simultaneously identify unexpected failures reactively after they occur and prevent foreseeable ones proactively. To this end, we propose Code-as-Monitor (CaM), a novel paradigm leveraging the vision-language model (VLM) for both open-set reactive and proactive failure detection. The core of our method is to formulate both tasks as a unified set of spatio-temporal constraint satisfaction problems and use VLM-generated code to evaluate them for real-time monitoring. To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of monitoring, we further introduce constraint elements that abstract constraint-related entities or their parts into compact geometric elements. This approach offers greater generality, simplifies tracking, and facilitates constraint-aware visual programming by leveraging these elements as visual prompts. Experiments show that CaM achieves a 28.7% higher success rate and reduces execution time by 31.8% under severe disturbances compared to baselines across three simulators and a real-world setting. Moreover, CaM can be integrated with open-loop control policies to form closed-loop systems, enabling long-horizon tasks in cluttered scenes with dynamic environments.

Compliance plays a crucial role in manipulation, as it balances between the concurrent control of position and force under uncertainties. Yet compliance is often overlooked by today's visuomotor policies that solely focus on position control. This paper introduces Adaptive Compliance Policy (ACP), a novel framework that learns to dynamically adjust system compliance both spatially and temporally for given manipulation tasks from human demonstrations, improving upon previous approaches that rely on pre-selected compliance parameters or assume uniform constant stiffness. However, computing full compliance parameters from human demonstrations is an ill-defined problem. Instead, we estimate an approximate compliance profile with two useful properties: avoiding large contact forces and encouraging accurate tracking. Our approach enables robots to handle complex contact-rich manipulation tasks and achieves over 50\% performance improvement compared to state-of-the-art visuomotor policy methods. For result videos, see https://adaptive-compliance.github.io/

Telepresence technology aims to provide an immersive virtual presence for remote conference applications, and it is extremely important to synthesize high-quality binaural audio signals for this aim. Because the ambient noise is often inevitable in practical application scenarios, it is highly desired that binaural audio signals without noise can be obtained from microphone-array signals directly. For this purpose, this paper proposes a new end-to-end noise-immune binaural audio synthesis framework from microphone-array signals, abbreviated as Array2BR, and experimental results show that binaural cues can be correctly mapped and noise can be well suppressed simultaneously using the proposed framework. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method achieved better performance in terms of both objective and subjective metric scores.

Audio signals provide rich information for the robot interaction and object properties through contact. These information can surprisingly ease the learning of contact-rich robot manipulation skills, especially when the visual information alone is ambiguous or incomplete. However, the usage of audio data in robot manipulation has been constrained to teleoperated demonstrations collected by either attaching a microphone to the robot or object, which significantly limits its usage in robot learning pipelines. In this work, we introduce ManiWAV: an 'ear-in-hand' data collection device to collect in-the-wild human demonstrations with synchronous audio and visual feedback, and a corresponding policy interface to learn robot manipulation policy directly from the demonstrations. We demonstrate the capabilities of our system through four contact-rich manipulation tasks that require either passively sensing the contact events and modes, or actively sensing the object surface materials and states. In addition, we show that our system can generalize to unseen in-the-wild environments, by learning from diverse in-the-wild human demonstrations. Project website: https://mani-wav.github.io/

The creation of large, diverse, high-quality robot manipulation datasets is an important stepping stone on the path toward more capable and robust robotic manipulation policies. However, creating such datasets is challenging: collecting robot manipulation data in diverse environments poses logistical and safety challenges and requires substantial investments in hardware and human labour. As a result, even the most general robot manipulation policies today are mostly trained on data collected in a small number of environments with limited scene and task diversity. In this work, we introduce DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset), a diverse robot manipulation dataset with 76k demonstration trajectories or 350 hours of interaction data, collected across 564 scenes and 84 tasks by 50 data collectors in North America, Asia, and Europe over the course of 12 months. We demonstrate that training with DROID leads to policies with higher performance and improved generalization ability. We open source the full dataset, policy learning code, and a detailed guide for reproducing our robot hardware setup.

Paper is a cheap, recyclable, and clean material that is often used to make practical tools. Traditional tool design either relies on simulation or physical analysis, which is often inaccurate and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose PaperBot, an approach that directly learns to design and use a tool in the real world using paper without human intervention. We demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of PaperBot on two tool design tasks: 1. learning to fold and throw paper airplanes for maximum travel distance 2. learning to cut paper into grippers that exert maximum gripping force. We present a self-supervised learning framework that learns to perform a sequence of folding, cutting, and dynamic manipulation actions in order to optimize the design and use of a tool. We deploy our system to a real-world two-arm robotic system to solve challenging design tasks that involve aerodynamics (paper airplane) and friction (paper gripper) that are impossible to simulate accurately.

We present Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) -- a data collection and policy learning framework that allows direct skill transfer from in-the-wild human demonstrations to deployable robot policies. UMI employs hand-held grippers coupled with careful interface design to enable portable, low-cost, and information-rich data collection for challenging bimanual and dynamic manipulation demonstrations. To facilitate deployable policy learning, UMI incorporates a carefully designed policy interface with inference-time latency matching and a relative-trajectory action representation. The resulting learned policies are hardware-agnostic and deployable across multiple robot platforms. Equipped with these features, UMI framework unlocks new robot manipulation capabilities, allowing zero-shot generalizable dynamic, bimanual, precise, and long-horizon behaviors, by only changing the training data for each task. We demonstrate UMI's versatility and efficacy with comprehensive real-world experiments, where policies learned via UMI zero-shot generalize to novel environments and objects when trained on diverse human demonstrations. UMI's hardware and software system is open-sourced at https://umi-gripper.github.io.

Controlling continuous-time dynamical systems is generally a two step process: first, identify or model the system dynamics with differential equations, then, minimize the control objectives to achieve optimal control function and optimal state trajectories. However, any inaccuracy in dynamics modeling will lead to sub-optimality in the resulting control function. To address this, we propose a neural ODE based method for controlling unknown dynamical systems, denoted as Neural Control (NC), which combines dynamics identification and optimal control learning using a coupled neural ODE. Through an intriguing interplay between the two neural networks in coupled neural ODE structure, our model concurrently learns system dynamics as well as optimal controls that guides towards target states. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for learning optimal control of unknown dynamical systems.