Recent studies have shown promising results on utilizing large pre-trained image-language models for video question answering.

This involves introducing specific prompts such as "in

Recent studies have shown promising results on utilizing large pre-trained image-language models for video question answering. While these image-language models can efficiently bootstrap the representation learning of video-language models, they typically concatenate uniformly sampled video frames as visual inputs without explicit language-aware, temporal modeling. When only a portion of a video input is relevant to the language query, such uniform frame sampling can often lead to missing important visual cues. Although humans often find a video moment to focus on and rewind the moment to answer questions, training a query-aware video moment localizer often requires expensive annotations and high computational costs. To address this issue, we propose Self-Chained Video Localization-Answering (SeViLA), a novel framework that leverages a single image-language model (BLIP-2) to tackle both temporal keyframe localization and question answering on videos.

We present VIGS-SLAM, a visual-inertial 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that achieves robust real-time tracking and high-fidelity reconstruction. Although recent 3DGS-based SLAM methods achieve dense and photoreal-istic mapping, their purely visual design degrades under motion blur, low texture, and exposure variations. Our method tightly couples visual and inertial cues within a unified optimization framework, jointly refining camera poses, depths, and IMU states. It features robust IMU initialization, time-varying bias modeling, and loop closure with consistent Gaussian updates. Experiments on four challenging datasets demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Reasoning-centric video object segmentation is an inherently complex task: the query often refers to dynamics, causality, and temporal interactions, rather than static appearances. Yet existing solutions generally collapse these factors into simplified reasoning with latent embeddings, rendering the reasoning chain opaque and essentially intractable. We therefore adopt an explicit decomposition perspective and introduce ReVSeg, which executes reasoning as sequential decisions in the native interface of pretrained vision language models (VLMs). Rather than folding all reasoning into a single-step prediction, ReVSeg executes three explicit operations -- semantics interpretation, temporal evidence selection, and spatial grounding -- aligning pretrained capabilities. We further employ reinforcement learning to optimize the multi-step reasoning chain, enabling the model to self-refine its decision quality from outcome-driven signals. Experimental results demonstrate that ReVSeg attains state-of-the-art performances on standard video object segmentation benchmarks and yields interpretable reasoning trajectories. Project page is available at https://clementine24.github.io/ReVSeg/ .

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for teaching robots complex behaviors without reward engineering. However, its effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: the reliance on extensive human input and the inherent difficulties in resolving query ambiguity and credit assignment during reward learning. In this paper, we introduce PRIMT, a PbRL framework designed to overcome these challenges by leveraging foundation models (FMs) for multimodal synthetic feedback and trajectory synthesis. Unlike prior approaches that rely on single-modality FM evaluations, PRIMT employs a hierarchical neuro-symbolic fusion strategy, integrating the complementary strengths of large language models and vision-language models in evaluating robot behaviors for more reliable and comprehensive feedback. PRIMT also incorporates foresight trajectory generation, which reduces early-stage query ambiguity by warm-starting the trajectory buffer with bootstrapped samples, and hindsight trajectory augmentation, which enables counterfactual reasoning with a causal auxiliary loss to improve credit assignment. We evaluate PRIMT on 2 locomotion and 6 manipulation tasks on various benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over FM-based and scripted baselines.

Abstract--Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis with real-time rendering capabilities. However, integrating 3DGS with SLAM systems faces a fundamental scalability limitation: methods are constrained by GPU memory capacity, restricting reconstruction to small-scale environments. We present DiskChunGS, a scalable 3DGS SLAM system that overcomes this bottleneck through an out-of-core approach that partitions scenes into spatial chunks and maintains only active regions in GPU memory while storing inactive areas on disk. Our architecture integrates seamlessly with existing SLAM frameworks for pose estimation and loop closure, enabling globally consistent reconstruction at scale. Our method uniquely completes all 11 KITTI sequences without memory failures while achieving superior visual quality, demonstrating that algorithmic innovation can overcome the memory constraints that have limited previous 3DGS SLAM methods. ECENT advances in neural representations for 3D scene reconstruction have revolutionized novel view synthesis, with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) [1] emerging as an exceptionally efficient and high-quality approach. Unlike volume-based methods [2]-[4] that struggle with rendering speed due to expensive ray marching, 3DGS provides real-time rendering capabilities while maintaining impressive visual fidelity.

Monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) aims to estimate a robot's pose while simultaneously reconstructing an unknown 3D scene using a single camera. While existing monocular SLAM systems generate detailed 3D geometry through dense scene representations, they are computationally expensive due to the need for iterative optimization. To address this challenge, MASt3R-SLAM utilizes learned 3D reconstruction priors, enabling more efficient and accurate estimation of both 3D structures and camera poses. However, MASt3R-SLAM is limited to single-agent operation. In this paper, we extend MASt3R-SLAM to introduce the first multi-agent monocular dense SLAM system. Each agent performs local SLAM using a 3D reconstruction prior, and their individual maps are fused into a globally consistent map through a loop-closure-based map fusion mechanism. Our approach improves computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining similar mapping accuracy when evaluated on real-world datasets.

IEEE Member, Helsinki, Finland Abstract-- An autonomous robotic nut tightening system for a serial manipulator equipped with a parallel gripper is proposed. The system features a hierarchical motion-primitive-based planner and a control-switching scheme that alternates between force and position control. Extensive simulations demonstrate the system's robustness to variance in initial conditions. Additionally, the proposed controller tightens threaded screws 14% faster than the baseline while applying 40 times less contact force on manipulands. For the benefit of the research community, the system's implementation is open-sourced. The robotics research community is working towards autonomous robotic systems that could multiply the productivity of every individual and organisation. Presently versatility of the planet's best manipulator (a human's hand controlled by human's mind & reflex [1]) is unparalleled by any autonomous robotic system.