This work addresses the problem of active 3D mapping, where an agent must find an efficient trajectory to exhaustively reconstruct a new scene. Previous approaches mainly predict the next best view near the agent's location, which is prone to getting stuck in local areas. Additionally, existing indoor datasets are insufficient due to limited geometric complexity and inaccurate ground truth meshes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel dataset AiMDoom with a map generator for the Doom video game, enabling to better benchmark active 3D mapping in diverse indoor environments. Moreover, we propose a new method we call next-best-path (NBP), which predicts long-term goals rather than focusing solely on short-sighted views. The model jointly predicts accumulated surface coverage gains for long-term goals and obstacle maps, allowing it to efficiently plan optimal paths with a unified model. By leveraging online data collection, data augmentation and curriculum learning, NBP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the existing MP3D dataset and our AiMDoom dataset, achieving more efficient mapping in indoor environments of varying complexity. Autonomous 3D mapping of new scenes holds substantial importance for vision, robotics, and graphics communities, with applications including digital twins. In this paper, we focus on the problem of active 3D mapping, where the goal is for an agent to find the shortest possible trajectory to scan the entire surface of a new scene using a depth sensor.

Scaling inference compute in large language models (LLMs) through repeated sampling consistently increases the coverage (fraction of problems solved) as the number of samples increases. We conjecture that this observed improvement is partially due to the answer distribution of standard evaluation benchmarks, which is skewed towards a relatively small set of common answers. To test this conjecture, we define a baseline that enumerates answers according to their prevalence in the training set. Experiments spanning two domains -- mathematical reasoning and factual knowledge -- reveal that this baseline outperforms repeated model sampling for some LLMs, while the coverage for others is on par with that of a mixture strategy that obtains $k$ answers by using only $10$ model samples and similarly guessing the remaining $k-10$ attempts via enumeration. Our baseline enables a more accurate measurement of how much repeated sampling improves coverage in such settings beyond prompt-agnostic guessing.

Abstract--Library-based methods are known to be very effective for fast motion planning by adapting an experience retrieved from a precomputed library. This article presents CoverLib, a principled approach for constructing and utilizing such a library. CoverLib iteratively adds an experience-classifier-pair to the library, where each classifier corresponds to an adaptable region of the experience within the problem space. This iterative process is an active procedure, as it selects the next experience based on its ability to effectively cover the uncovered region. During the query phase, these classifiers are utilized to select an experience that is expected to be adaptable for a given problem. Experimental results demonstrate that CoverLib effectively mitigates the trade-off between plannability and speed observed in global (e.g. As a result, it achieves both fast planning and high success rates over the problem domain. Similarly, in home service OTION planning has been studied from two ends of the spectrum: global and local methods. Global robotics, although the tasks are diverse, the tasks that act as methods, such as sampling-based motion planners (SBMP) bottlenecks are often known in advance (e.g., reaching into a like Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) [1] and Rapidly-exploring narrow container). Random Tree (RRT) [2], are expected to find a solution if one exists, given enough time. However, these methods often A promising approach to this end is to use a library of require long and varying amount of computational time to experiences [5]-[10] reviewed in Section II-A.

We introduce a method that simultaneously learns to explore new large environments and to reconstruct them in 3D from color images only. This is closely related to the Next Best View problem (NBV), where one has to identify where to move the camera next to improve the coverage of an unknown scene. However, most of the current NBV methods rely on depth sensors, need 3D supervision and/or do not scale to large scenes. Our method requires only a color camera and no 3D supervision. It simultaneously learns in a self-supervised fashion to predict a "volume occupancy field" from color images and, from this field, to predict the NBV. Thanks to this approach, our method performs well on new scenes as it is not biased towards any training 3D data. We demonstrate this on a recent dataset made of various 3D scenes and show it performs even better than recent methods requiring a depth sensor, which is not a realistic assumption for outdoor scenes captured with a flying drone.

Next Best View computation (NBV) is a long-standing problem in robotics, and consists in identifying the next most informative sensor position(s) for reconstructing a 3D object or scene efficiently and accurately. Like most current methods, we consider NBV prediction from a depth sensor like Lidar systems. Learning-based methods relying on a volumetric representation of the scene are suitable for path planning, but have lower accuracy than methods using a surface-based representation. However, the latter do not scale well with the size of the scene and constrain the camera to a small number of poses. To obtain the advantages of both representations, we show that we can maximize surface metrics by Monte Carlo integration over a volumetric representation. In particular, we propose an approach, SCONE, that relies on two neural modules: The first module predicts occupancy probability in the entire volume of the scene. Given any new camera pose, the second module samples points in the scene based on their occupancy probability and leverages a self-attention mechanism to predict the visibility of the samples. Finally, we integrate the visibility to evaluate the gain in surface coverage for the new camera pose. NBV is selected as the pose that maximizes the gain in total surface coverage. Our method scales to large scenes and handles free camera motion: It takes as input an arbitrarily large point cloud gathered by a depth sensor as well as camera poses to predict NBV. We demonstrate our approach on a novel dataset made of large and complex 3D scenes.