Daily Papers

As embodied agents operate in increasingly complex environments, the ability to perceive, track, and reason about individual object instances over time becomes essential, especially in tasks requiring sequenced interactions with visually similar objects. In these non-Markovian settings, key decision cues are often hidden in object-specific histories rather than the current scene. Without persistent memory of prior interactions (what has been interacted with, where it has been, or how it has changed) visuomotor policies may fail, repeat past actions, or overlook completed ones. To surface this challenge, we introduce LIBERO-Mem, a non-Markovian task suite for stress-testing robotic manipulation under object-level partial observability. It combines short- and long-horizon object tracking with temporally sequenced subgoals, requiring reasoning beyond the current frame. However, vision-language-action (VLA) models often struggle in such settings, with token scaling quickly becoming intractable even for tasks spanning just a few hundred frames. We propose Embodied-SlotSSM, a slot-centric VLA framework built for temporal scalability. It maintains spatio-temporally consistent slot identities and leverages them through two mechanisms: (1) slot-state-space modeling for reconstructing short-term history, and (2) a relational encoder to align the input tokens with action decoding. Together, these components enable temporally grounded, context-aware action prediction. Experiments show Embodied-SlotSSM's baseline performance on LIBERO-Mem and general tasks, offering a scalable solution for non-Markovian reasoning in object-centric robotic policies.

Embodied AI agents that search for objects in large environments such as households often need to make efficient decisions by predicting object locations based on partial information. We pose this as a new type of link prediction problem: link prediction on partially observable dynamic graphs. Our graph is a representation of a scene in which rooms and objects are nodes, and their relationships are encoded in the edges; only parts of the changing graph are known to the agent at each timestep. This partial observability poses a challenge to existing link prediction approaches, which we address. We propose a novel state representation -- Scene Graph Memory (SGM) -- with captures the agent's accumulated set of observations, as well as a neural net architecture called a Node Edge Predictor (NEP) that extracts information from the SGM to search efficiently. We evaluate our method in the Dynamic House Simulator, a new benchmark that creates diverse dynamic graphs following the semantic patterns typically seen at homes, and show that NEP can be trained to predict the locations of objects in a variety of environments with diverse object movement dynamics, outperforming baselines both in terms of new scene adaptability and overall accuracy. The codebase and more can be found at https://www.scenegraphmemory.com.

We present a unified framework for studying the identifiability of representations learned from simultaneously observed views, such as different data modalities. We allow a partially observed setting in which each view constitutes a nonlinear mixture of a subset of underlying latent variables, which can be causally related. We prove that the information shared across all subsets of any number of views can be learned up to a smooth bijection using contrastive learning and a single encoder per view. We also provide graphical criteria indicating which latent variables can be identified through a simple set of rules, which we refer to as identifiability algebra. Our general framework and theoretical results unify and extend several previous works on multi-view nonlinear ICA, disentanglement, and causal representation learning. We experimentally validate our claims on numerical, image, and multi-modal data sets. Further, we demonstrate that the performance of prior methods is recovered in different special cases of our setup. Overall, we find that access to multiple partial views enables us to identify a more fine-grained representation, under the generally milder assumption of partial observability.

AI agents in partially observable environments need to coordinate active sensing with working memory to maintain an evolving perceptual state. However, existing benchmarks struggle to isolate this perceptual-state construction and interpretation capability because they introduce physical and control complexities. We address this with MNIST-PRO, a benchmark that isolates agentic perception by converting MNIST digit recognition into a sequential, glimpse-based search task with lookback constraints. We evaluate ten multimodal models across four memory representations, including raw visual history, textual states, structured metric grid maps, and a consolidated visual canvas. While models excel under full observability, partial observability exposes a clear performance gap. We identify three distinct bottlenecks. First, perceptual-state construction and interpretation present a challenge, as agents struggle to integrate fragmented glimpses. Second, agents often stop exploring before they see the full sequence. Third, models often fail to revise early, incorrect beliefs even when faced with subsequent contradictory evidence. These results show that simply acquiring visual evidence is not enough. Agents must also be able to build and update a reliable perceptual state.

We propose a new partial-observability model for online learning problems where the learner, besides its own loss, also observes some noisy feedback about the other actions, depending on the underlying structure of the problem. We represent this structure by a weighted directed graph, where the edge weights are related to the quality of the feedback shared by the connected nodes. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm that guarantees a regret of O(α^* T) after T rounds, where α^* is a novel graph property that we call the effective independence number. Our algorithm is completely parameter-free and does not require knowledge (or even estimation) of α^*. For the special case of binary edge weights, our setting reduces to the partial-observability models of Mannor and Shamir (2011) and Alon et al. (2013) and our algorithm recovers the near-optimal regret bounds.

Neural implicit representation has attracted attention in 3D reconstruction through various success cases. For further applications such as scene understanding or editing, several works have shown progress towards object compositional reconstruction. Despite their superior performance in observed regions, their performance is still limited in reconstructing objects that are partially observed. To better treat this problem, we introduce category-level neural fields that learn meaningful common 3D information among objects belonging to the same category present in the scene. Our key idea is to subcategorize objects based on their observed shape for better training of the category-level model. Then we take advantage of the neural field to conduct the challenging task of registering partially observed objects by selecting and aligning against representative objects selected by ray-based uncertainty. Experiments on both simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method improves the reconstruction of unobserved parts for several categories.

Learning structured representations of the visual world in terms of objects promises to significantly improve the generalization abilities of current machine learning models. While recent efforts to this end have shown promising empirical progress, a theoretical account of when unsupervised object-centric representation learning is possible is still lacking. Consequently, understanding the reasons for the success of existing object-centric methods as well as designing new theoretically grounded methods remains challenging. In the present work, we analyze when object-centric representations can provably be learned without supervision. To this end, we first introduce two assumptions on the generative process for scenes comprised of several objects, which we call compositionality and irreducibility. Under this generative process, we prove that the ground-truth object representations can be identified by an invertible and compositional inference model, even in the presence of dependencies between objects. We empirically validate our results through experiments on synthetic data. Finally, we provide evidence that our theory holds predictive power for existing object-centric models by showing a close correspondence between models' compositionality and invertibility and their empirical identifiability.

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as d-dimensional vectors, and (2) that the observations are the output of some injective generative function of these latent variables. While these assumptions appear benign, we show that when the observations are of multiple objects, the generative function is no longer injective and disentanglement fails in practice. We can address this failure by combining recent developments in object-centric learning and causal representation learning. By modifying the Slot Attention architecture arXiv:2006.15055, we develop an object-centric architecture that leverages weak supervision from sparse perturbations to disentangle each object's properties. This approach is more data-efficient in the sense that it requires significantly fewer perturbations than a comparable approach that encodes to a Euclidean space and we show that this approach successfully disentangles the properties of a set of objects in a series of simple image-based disentanglement experiments.

Planning under partial observability is an essential capability of autonomous robots. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a powerful framework for planning under partial observability problems, capturing the stochastic effects of actions and the limited information available through noisy observations. POMDP solving could benefit tremendously from massive parallelization of today's hardware, but parallelizing POMDP solvers has been challenging. They rely on interleaving numerical optimization over actions with the estimation of their values, which creates dependencies and synchronization bottlenecks between parallel processes that can quickly offset the benefits of parallelization. In this paper, we propose Vectorized Online POMDP Planner (VOPP), a novel parallel online solver that leverages a recent POMDP formulation that analytically solves part of the optimization component, leaving only the estimation of expectations for numerical computation. VOPP represents all data structures related to planning as a collection of tensors and implements all planning steps as fully vectorized computations over this representation. The result is a massively parallel solver with no dependencies and synchronization bottlenecks between parallel computations. Experimental results indicate that VOPP is at least 20X more efficient in computing near-optimal solutions compared to an existing state-of-the-art parallel online solver.

For a vision-language model (VLM) to understand the physical world, such as cause and effect, a first step is to capture the temporal dynamics of the visual world, for example how the physical states of objects evolve over time (e.g. a whole apple into a sliced apple). Our paper aims to investigate if VLMs pre-trained on web-scale data learn to encode object states, which can be extracted with zero-shot text prompts. We curate an object state recognition dataset ChangeIt-Frames, and evaluate nine open-source VLMs, including models trained with contrastive and generative objectives. We observe that while these state-of-the-art vision-language models can reliably perform object recognition, they consistently fail to accurately distinguish the objects' physical states. Through extensive experiments, we identify three areas for improvements for VLMs to better encode object states, namely the quality of object localization, the architecture to bind concepts to objects, and the objective to learn discriminative visual and language encoders on object states. Data and code are released.

Video segmentation models maintain object identities by carrying instance information across frames. Under prolonged occlusion, reappearance, or interactions between similar instances, however, an unreliable update can overwrite a valid history and cause persistent identity drift. We introduce POSReasoner, a trainable, plug-and-play framework that explicitly decides when an observation should change an object's state. Each persistent state records identity, confidence, and absence history. A sparse state-observation graph supports Propose-Verify reasoning: provisional associations are revisited using object history, predicted presence, and competition among identities. The verified decisions determine whether to retain, update, reactivate, or suppress each state, while a learned gate controls the evidence written back to memory. Only verified transitions update the persistent state used in subsequent frames. POSReasoner uses standard video annotations and keeps the base model frozen, enabling integration with diverse VOS and VIS architectures. Experiments across long-term VOS and VIS benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with the largest gains under occlusion and object reappearance.

Before acting upon an unobservable physical system, an autonomous agent must determine which latent distinctions govern downstream tasks, how many active interventions are necessary to certify them, and when to abstain to prevent catastrophic errors. Classical observability treats state reconstruction as an unconditioned binary predicate, failing when passive observations cannot break latent degeneracies without perturbation, full microscopic inversion is prohibitively costly, and distinguishing task-irrelevant degrees of freedom wastes interaction budgets. We formalize task-conditioned active observability complexity: the minimum worst-case expected interaction cost required to identify task-relevant states under certified error and safe abstention guarantees. We prove that task-predictive equivalence induces the unique minimal sufficient quotient H/!sim_τ, leaving active observability complexity strictly invariant while eliminating superfluous distinctions. In deterministic regimes, this complexity is characterized by an optimal adaptive distinguishing tree and Bellman recursion; in noisy regimes, it obeys a stopped-transcript relative-entropy lower bound and adaptive martingale certificates that compose without independence assumptions. We instantiate a prospective certified observer with staged recovery: a nominal verifier defers candidate compilation, triggering active probing only upon evidence, while a history-measurable score shell prunes hypotheses without sacrificing risk bounds. Stress audits across high-dimensional physical systems and thousands of operational trials demonstrate certified state recovery with zero false acceptances and substantial reductions in sensor reads and model steps.

Learning object-centric representations of multi-object scenes is a promising approach towards machine intelligence, facilitating high-level reasoning and control from visual sensory data. However, current approaches for unsupervised object-centric scene representation are incapable of aggregating information from multiple observations of a scene. As a result, these "single-view" methods form their representations of a 3D scene based only on a single 2D observation (view). Naturally, this leads to several inaccuracies, with these methods falling victim to single-view spatial ambiguities. To address this, we propose The Multi-View and Multi-Object Network (MulMON) -- a method for learning accurate, object-centric representations of multi-object scenes by leveraging multiple views. In order to sidestep the main technical difficulty of the multi-object-multi-view scenario -- maintaining object correspondences across views -- MulMON iteratively updates the latent object representations for a scene over multiple views. To ensure that these iterative updates do indeed aggregate spatial information to form a complete 3D scene understanding, MulMON is asked to predict the appearance of the scene from novel viewpoints during training. Through experiments, we show that MulMON better-resolves spatial ambiguities than single-view methods -- learning more accurate and disentangled object representations -- and also achieves new functionality in predicting object segmentations for novel viewpoints.

We present PartGLEE, a part-level foundation model for locating and identifying both objects and parts in images. Through a unified framework, PartGLEE accomplishes detection, segmentation, and grounding of instances at any granularity in the open world scenario. Specifically, we propose a Q-Former to construct the hierarchical relationship between objects and parts, parsing every object into corresponding semantic parts. By incorporating a large amount of object-level data, the hierarchical relationships can be extended, enabling PartGLEE to recognize a rich variety of parts. We conduct comprehensive studies to validate the effectiveness of our method, PartGLEE achieves the state-of-the-art performance across various part-level tasks and obtain competitive results on object-level tasks. The proposed PartGLEE significantly enhances hierarchical modeling capabilities and part-level perception over our previous GLEE model. Further analysis indicates that the hierarchical cognitive ability of PartGLEE is able to facilitate a detailed comprehension in images for mLLMs. The model and code will be released at https://provencestar.github.io/PartGLEE-Vision/ .

For robotic agents operating in dynamic environments, learning visual state representations from streaming video observations is essential for sequential decision making. Recent self-supervised learning methods have shown strong transferability across vision tasks, but they do not explicitly address what a good visual state should encode. We argue that effective visual states must capture what-is-where by jointly encoding the semantic identities of scene elements and their spatial locations, enabling reliable detection of subtle dynamics across observations. To this end, we propose CroBo, a visual state representation learning framework based on a global-to-local reconstruction objective. Given a reference observation compressed into a compact bottleneck token, CroBo learns to reconstruct heavily masked patches in a local target crop from sparse visible cues, using the global bottleneck token as context. This learning objective encourages the bottleneck token to encode a fine-grained representation of scene-wide semantic entities, including their identities, spatial locations, and configurations. As a result, the learned visual states reveal how scene elements move and interact over time, supporting sequential decision making. We evaluate CroBo on diverse vision-based robot policy learning benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Reconstruction analyses and perceptual straightness experiments further show that the learned representations preserve pixel-level scene composition and encode what-moves-where across observations. Project page available at: https://seokminlee-chris.github.io/CroBo-ProjectPage.

Learning object-centric scene representations is essential for attaining structural understanding and abstraction of complex scenes. Yet, as current approaches for unsupervised object-centric representation learning are built upon either a stationary observer assumption or a static scene assumption, they often: i) suffer single-view spatial ambiguities, or ii) infer incorrectly or inaccurately object representations from dynamic scenes. To address this, we propose Dynamics-aware Multi-Object Network (DyMON), a method that broadens the scope of multi-view object-centric representation learning to dynamic scenes. We train DyMON on multi-view-dynamic-scene data and show that DyMON learns -- without supervision -- to factorize the entangled effects of observer motions and scene object dynamics from a sequence of observations, and constructs scene object spatial representations suitable for rendering at arbitrary times (querying across time) and from arbitrary viewpoints (querying across space). We also show that the factorized scene representations (w.r.t. objects) support querying about a single object by space and time independently.

While learning visuomotor skills in an end-to-end manner is appealing, deep neural networks are often uninterpretable and fail in surprising ways. For robotics tasks, such as autonomous driving, models that explicitly represent objects may be more robust to new scenes and provide intuitive visualizations. We describe a taxonomy of "object-centric" models which leverage both object instances and end-to-end learning. In the Grand Theft Auto V simulator, we show that object-centric models outperform object-agnostic methods in scenes with other vehicles and pedestrians, even with an imperfect detector. We also demonstrate that our architectures perform well on real-world environments by evaluating on the Berkeley DeepDrive Video dataset, where an object-centric model outperforms object-agnostic models in the low-data regimes.

Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules, Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder (IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH.

Virtual sensing techniques allow for inferring signals at new unmonitored locations by exploiting spatio-temporal measurements coming from physical sensors at different locations. However, as the sensor coverage becomes sparse due to costs or other constraints, physical proximity cannot be used to support interpolation. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by leveraging dependencies between the target variable and a set of correlated variables (covariates) that can frequently be associated with each location of interest. From this viewpoint, covariates provide partial observability, and the problem consists of inferring values for unobserved channels by exploiting observations at other locations to learn how such variables can correlate. We introduce a novel graph-based methodology to exploit such relationships and design a graph deep learning architecture, named GgNet, implementing the framework. The proposed approach relies on propagating information over a nested graph structure that is used to learn dependencies between variables as well as locations. GgNet is extensively evaluated under different virtual sensing scenarios, demonstrating higher reconstruction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Object detectors often produce over-confident predictions for objects outside their training categories, leading to so-called out-of-distribution (OoD) hallucinations. Existing approaches for detecting or mitigating such hallucinations typically either construct scoring functions directly over learned object detector representations or modify the object detector itself to suppress hallucination emergence. However, the latent priors implicitly encoded in these representations remain largely unexplored and have not been explicitly decoded for OoD detection. To uncover and exploit these latent priors, we propose Structured Prior Knowledge (SPK), a hallucination-oriented framework that explicitly elicits OoD-relevant priors from pretrained object detectors. Specifically, SPK leverages in-distribution data and hallucination-inducing samples as diagnostic supervision to elicit part-level semantic concepts underlying object detector decision-making, rather than using them merely for rejection or object detector adaptation. The elicited semantic priors are further integrated with geometric and contextual priors to form a compact five-dimensional SPK representation for OoD detection. Extensive experiments across diverse object detector architectures and multiple OoD benchmarks demonstrate that SPK achieves state-of-the-art OoD detection. Our findings reveal that pretrained object detectors already encode substantially richer latent knowledge than is typically exploited for OoD detection. More importantly, this knowledge can be explicitly elicited and organized into a compact, structured, and interpretable knowledge space for prediction reliability analysis. This suggests a promising proactive route for improving object detector reliability by explicitly uncovering and leveraging latent priors. Code and data are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/spk

World models require robust relational understanding to support prediction, reasoning, and control. While object-centric representations provide a useful abstraction, they are not sufficient to capture interaction-dependent dynamics. We therefore propose C-JEPA, a simple and flexible object-centric world model that extends masked joint embedding prediction from image patches to object-centric representations. By applying object-level masking that requires an object's state to be inferred from other objects, C-JEPA induces latent interventions with counterfactual-like effects and prevents shortcut solutions, making interaction reasoning essential. Empirically, C-JEPA leads to consistent gains in visual question answering, with an absolute improvement of about 20\% in counterfactual reasoning compared to the same architecture without object-level masking. On agent control tasks, C-JEPA enables substantially more efficient planning by using only 1\% of the total latent input features required by patch-based world models, while achieving comparable performance. Finally, we provide a formal analysis demonstrating that object-level masking induces a causal inductive bias via latent interventions. Our code is available at https://github.com/galilai-group/cjepa.

Human perception is structured around objects which form the basis for our higher-level cognition and impressive systematic generalization abilities. Yet most work on representation learning focuses on feature learning without even considering multiple objects, or treats segmentation as an (often supervised) preprocessing step. Instead, we argue for the importance of learning to segment and represent objects jointly. We demonstrate that, starting from the simple assumption that a scene is composed of multiple entities, it is possible to learn to segment images into interpretable objects with disentangled representations. Our method learns -- without supervision -- to inpaint occluded parts, and extrapolates to scenes with more objects and to unseen objects with novel feature combinations. We also show that, due to the use of iterative variational inference, our system is able to learn multi-modal posteriors for ambiguous inputs and extends naturally to sequences.

Whether navigating a building, operating a robot, or playing a game, an agent that acts effectively in an environment must first learn an internal model of how that environment works. Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a flexible modeling class for such internal world models, but learning them from observation-action trajectories alone is challenging and typically requires extensive environment interaction. We ask whether language-model priors can reduce costly interaction by leveraging prior knowledge, and introduce Pinductor (POMDP-inductor): an LLM proposes candidate POMDP models from a few observation-action trajectories and iteratively refines them to optimize a belief-based likelihood score. Despite using strictly less information, Pinductor matches the performance and sample efficiency of LLM-based POMDP learning methods that assume privileged access to the hidden state, while significantly surpassing the sample efficiency of tabular POMDP baselines. Further results show that performance scales with LLM capability and degrades gracefully as semantic information about the environment is withheld. Together, these results position language-model priors as a practical tool for sample-efficient world-model learning under partial observability, and a step toward generalist agents in real-world environments. Code is available at https://github.com/atomresearch/pinductor.

We consider learning to play multiplayer imperfect-information games with simultaneous moves and large state-action spaces. Previous attempts to tackle such challenging games have largely focused on model-free learning methods, often requiring hundreds of years of experience to produce competitive agents. Our approach is based on model-based planning. We tackle the problem of partial observability by first building an (oracle) planner that has access to the full state of the environment and then distilling the knowledge of the oracle to a (follower) agent which is trained to play the imperfect-information game by imitating the oracle's choices. We experimentally show that planning with naive Monte Carlo tree search does not perform very well in large combinatorial action spaces. We therefore propose planning with a fixed-depth tree search and decoupled Thompson sampling for action selection. We show that the planner is able to discover efficient playing strategies in the games of Clash Royale and Pommerman and the follower policy successfully learns to implement them by training on a few hundred battles.

We address the task of predicting what parts of an object can open and how they move when they do so. The input is a single image of an object, and as output we detect what parts of the object can open, and the motion parameters describing the articulation of each openable part. To tackle this task, we create two datasets of 3D objects: OPDSynth based on existing synthetic objects, and OPDReal based on RGBD reconstructions of real objects. We then design OPDRCNN, a neural architecture that detects openable parts and predicts their motion parameters. Our experiments show that this is a challenging task especially when considering generalization across object categories, and the limited amount of information in a single image. Our architecture outperforms baselines and prior work especially for RGB image inputs. Short video summary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P85iCaD0rfc

This paper addresses the critical challenges of sparsity and occlusion in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Current methods often rely on supplementary modules or specific architectural designs, potentially limiting their applicability to new and evolving architectures. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a versatile technique that seamlessly integrates into any existing framework for 3D Object Detection, marking the first instance of Weak-to-Strong generalization in 3D computer vision. We introduce a novel framework, X-Ray Distillation with Object-Complete Frames, suitable for both supervised and semi-supervised settings, that leverages the temporal aspect of point cloud sequences. This method extracts crucial information from both previous and subsequent LiDAR frames, creating Object-Complete frames that represent objects from multiple viewpoints, thus addressing occlusion and sparsity. Given the limitation of not being able to generate Object-Complete frames during online inference, we utilize Knowledge Distillation within a Teacher-Student framework. This technique encourages the strong Student model to emulate the behavior of the weaker Teacher, which processes simple and informative Object-Complete frames, effectively offering a comprehensive view of objects as if seen through X-ray vision. Our proposed methods surpass state-of-the-art in semi-supervised learning by 1-1.5 mAP and enhance the performance of five established supervised models by 1-2 mAP on standard autonomous driving datasets, even with default hyperparameters. Code for Object-Complete frames is available here: https://github.com/sakharok13/X-Ray-Teacher-Patching-Tools.

For computer vision systems to operate in dynamic situations, they need to be able to represent and reason about object permanence. We introduce a framework for learning to estimate 4D visual representations from monocular RGB-D, which is able to persist objects, even once they become obstructed by occlusions. Unlike traditional video representations, we encode point clouds into a continuous representation, which permits the model to attend across the spatiotemporal context to resolve occlusions. On two large video datasets that we release along with this paper, our experiments show that the representation is able to successfully reveal occlusions for several tasks, without any architectural changes. Visualizations show that the attention mechanism automatically learns to follow occluded objects. Since our approach can be trained end-to-end and is easily adaptable, we believe it will be useful for handling occlusions in many video understanding tasks. Data, code, and models are available at https://occlusions.cs.columbia.edu/.

A robot's instantaneous sensory observations do not always reveal task-relevant state information. Under such partial observability, optimal behavior typically involves explicitly acting to gain the missing information. Today's standard robot learning techniques struggle to produce such active perception behaviors. We propose a simple real-world robot learning recipe to efficiently train active perception policies. Our approach, asymmetric advantage weighted regression (AAWR), exploits access to "privileged" extra sensors at training time. The privileged sensors enable training high-quality privileged value functions that aid in estimating the advantage of the target policy. Bootstrapping from a small number of potentially suboptimal demonstrations and an easy-to-obtain coarse policy initialization, AAWR quickly acquires active perception behaviors and boosts task performance. In evaluations on 8 manipulation tasks on 3 robots spanning varying degrees of partial observability, AAWR synthesizes reliable active perception behaviors that outperform all prior approaches. When initialized with a "generalist" robot policy that struggles with active perception tasks, AAWR efficiently generates information-gathering behaviors that allow it to operate under severe partial observability for manipulation tasks. Website: https://penn-pal-lab.github.io/aawr/

Video world models must preserve the visual state of the world over time, but existing evaluation protocols often rely on generated histories, video reference, or selected revisit viewpoints that can confound the assessment of a model's true memory capability. To address this, we introduce OPIS, an input-grounded benchmark that strictly anchors the assessment to a fixed set of object instances from the initial observation for evaluating multi-object memory in video world models. The OPIS dataset comprises 500 cases across real-world, embodied-robotic, and game-world domains, providing dense object-level annotations for 12,672 rigid, articulated, and deformable instances. Our object-centric evaluator combines association and explicit visibility reasoning to hierarchically measure Object (O) Presence (P), Identity (I), and Structure (S), utilizing static or dynamic evaluation tracks based on object kinematics. Across eight image-to-video or camera-conditioned world models, our proposed OPIS scores range from 48.65 to 56.01. As the reference inventory grows from less than 20 to more than 40 objects, the Presence, Identity, and Structure scores show an overall decline, with the average Identity score falling from 40.22 to 23.11. The results demonstrate that preserving the particular object instances in the input is considerably harder than generating plausible visual elements.

Recent developments in the field of model-based RL have proven successful in a range of environments, especially ones where planning is essential. However, such successes have been limited to deterministic fully-observed environments. We present a new approach that handles stochastic and partially-observable environments. Our key insight is to use discrete autoencoders to capture the multiple possible effects of an action in a stochastic environment. We use a stochastic variant of Monte Carlo tree search to plan over both the agent's actions and the discrete latent variables representing the environment's response. Our approach significantly outperforms an offline version of MuZero on a stochastic interpretation of chess where the opponent is considered part of the environment. We also show that our approach scales to DeepMind Lab, a first-person 3D environment with large visual observations and partial observability.

Openable part detection is the task of detecting the openable parts of an object in a single-view image, and predicting corresponding motion parameters. Prior work investigated the unrealistic setting where all input images only contain a single openable object. We generalize this task to scenes with multiple objects each potentially possessing openable parts, and create a corresponding dataset based on real-world scenes. We then address this more challenging scenario with OPDFormer: a part-aware transformer architecture. Our experiments show that the OPDFormer architecture significantly outperforms prior work. The more realistic multiple-object scenarios we investigated remain challenging for all methods, indicating opportunities for future work.

Image-to-3D models can generate visually compelling 3D assets from a single RGB image, but their geometry is often only loosely constrained by the available observations, limiting their use in applications that require geometric fidelity. In many real-world settings, however, partial geometric observations of the object may be available at test time. We introduce a training-free framework for incorporating such evidence into pretrained image-to-3D generative models without retraining or finetuning. To do this, we guide generation using a ray-consistent observation likelihood defined over the model's occupancy representation, combining surface occupancy and free-space evidence. Applied to SAM 3D and its multi-view extension, our approach substantially improves geometric fidelity across different levels of observability, as well as visual quality. Our results demonstrate that pretrained image-to-3D models can effectively integrate partial geometric observations through explicit test-time guidance, complementing their learned generative priors without modifying the underlying model.

Large multimodal foundation models, particularly in the domains of language and vision, have significantly advanced various tasks, including robotics, autonomous driving, information retrieval, and grounding. However, many of these models perceive objects as indivisible, overlooking the components that constitute them. Understanding these components and their associated affordances provides valuable insights into an object's functionality, which is fundamental for performing a wide range of tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel real-world benchmark, InstructPart, comprising hand-labeled part segmentation annotations and task-oriented instructions to evaluate the performance of current models in understanding and executing part-level tasks within everyday contexts. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that task-oriented part segmentation remains a challenging problem, even for state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In addition to our benchmark, we introduce a simple baseline that achieves a twofold performance improvement through fine-tuning with our dataset. With our dataset and benchmark, we aim to facilitate research on task-oriented part segmentation and enhance the applicability of VLMs across various domains, including robotics, virtual reality, information retrieval, and other related fields. Project website: https://zifuwan.github.io/InstructPart/.

Autonomous high-fidelity object reconstruction is fundamental for creating digital assets and bridging the simulation-to-reality gap in robotics. We present ObjSplat, an active reconstruction framework that leverages Gaussian surfels as a unified representation to progressively reconstruct unknown objects with both photorealistic appearance and accurate geometry. Addressing the limitations of conventional opacity or depth-based cues, we introduce a geometry-aware viewpoint evaluation pipeline that explicitly models back-face visibility and occlusion-aware multi-view covisibility, reliably identifying under-reconstructed regions even on geometrically complex objects. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of greedy planning strategies, ObjSplat employs a next-best-path (NBP) planner that performs multi-step lookahead on a dynamically constructed spatial graph. By jointly optimizing information gain and movement cost, this planner generates globally efficient trajectories. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real-world cultural artifacts demonstrate that ObjSplat produces physically consistent models within minutes, achieving superior reconstruction fidelity and surface completeness while significantly reducing scan time and path length compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://li-yuetao.github.io/ObjSplat-page/ .

We introduce an object-aware decoder for improving the performance of spatio-temporal representations on ego-centric videos. The key idea is to enhance object-awareness during training by tasking the model to predict hand positions, object positions, and the semantic label of the objects using paired captions when available. At inference time the model only requires RGB frames as inputs, and is able to track and ground objects (although it has not been trained explicitly for this). We demonstrate the performance of the object-aware representations learnt by our model, by: (i) evaluating it for strong transfer, i.e. through zero-shot testing, on a number of downstream video-text retrieval and classification benchmarks; and (ii) by using the representations learned as input for long-term video understanding tasks (e.g. Episodic Memory in Ego4D). In all cases the performance improves over the state of the art -- even compared to networks trained with far larger batch sizes. We also show that by using noisy image-level detection as pseudo-labels in training, the model learns to provide better bounding boxes using video consistency, as well as grounding the words in the associated text descriptions. Overall, we show that the model can act as a drop-in replacement for an ego-centric video model to improve performance through visual-text grounding.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments, where they must act while inferring and tracking a complex environment state over many steps. This leads to two challenges: partial observability requires maintaining uncertainty over unobserved world attributes, and long interaction history causes context to grow without bound, diluting task-relevant information. A principled solution to both challenges is a belief state: a posterior distribution over environment states given past observations and actions, which compactly encodes history for decision making regardless of episode length. In LLM agents, however, the open-ended nature of text makes it unclear how to represent such a distribution. Therefore, we introduce Agent-BRACE: Agent Belief state Representation via Abstraction and Confidence Estimation, a method that decouples an LLM agent into a belief state model and a policy model, jointly optimized via reinforcement learning. The belief state model produces a structured approximation of the belief distribution: a set of atomic natural language claims about the environment, each annotated with an ordinal verbalized certainty label ranging from certain to unknown. The policy model conditions on this compact, structured approximate belief rather than the full history, learning to select actions under explicit uncertainty. Across long-horizon, partially observable embodied language environments, Agent-BRACE achieves an average absolute improvement of +14.5% (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct) and +5.3% (Qwen3-4B-Instruct), outperforming strong RL baselines while maintaining a near-constant context window independent of episode length. Further analysis shows that the learned belief becomes increasingly calibrated over the course of an episode as evidence accumulates.

A vision model with general-purpose object-level 3D understanding should be capable of inferring both 2D (e.g., class name and bounding box) and 3D information (e.g., 3D location and 3D viewpoint) for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images. This is a challenging task, as it involves inferring 3D information from 2D signals and most importantly, generalizing to rigid objects from unseen categories. However, existing datasets with object-level 3D annotations are often limited by the number of categories or the quality of annotations. Models developed on these datasets become specialists for certain categories or domains, and fail to generalize. In this work, we present ImageNet3D, a large dataset for general-purpose object-level 3D understanding. ImageNet3D augments 200 categories from the ImageNet dataset with 2D bounding box, 3D pose, 3D location annotations, and image captions interleaved with 3D information. With the new annotations available in ImageNet3D, we could (i) analyze the object-level 3D awareness of visual foundation models, and (ii) study and develop general-purpose models that infer both 2D and 3D information for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images, and (iii) integrate unified 3D models with large language models for 3D-related reasoning.. We consider two new tasks, probing of object-level 3D awareness and open vocabulary pose estimation, besides standard classification and pose estimation. Experimental results on ImageNet3D demonstrate the potential of our dataset in building vision models with stronger general-purpose object-level 3D understanding.

Segmentation based on language has been a popular topic in computer vision. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have endowed segmentation systems with reasoning capabilities, these efforts remain confined by the frozen internal knowledge of MLLMs, which limits their potential for real-world scenarios that involve up-to-date information or domain-specific concepts. In this work, we propose Seg-ReSearch, a novel segmentation paradigm that overcomes the knowledge bottleneck of existing approaches. By enabling interleaved reasoning and external search, Seg-ReSearch empowers segmentation systems to handle dynamic, open-world queries that extend beyond the frozen knowledge of MLLMs. To effectively train this capability, we introduce a hierarchical reward design that harmonizes initial guidance with progressive incentives, mitigating the dilemma between sparse outcome signals and rigid step-wise supervision. For evaluation, we construct OK-VOS, a challenging benchmark that explicitly requires outside knowledge for video object segmentation. Experiments on OK-VOS and two existing reasoning segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our Seg-ReSearch improves state-of-the-art approaches by a substantial margin. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/Seg-ReSearch.

We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition to its own loss, the learner also gets to observe losses of some other actions. The revealed losses depend on the learner's action and a directed observation system chosen by the environment. For this setting, we propose the first algorithm that enjoys near-optimal regret guarantees without having to know the observation system before selecting its actions. Along similar lines, we also define a new partial information setting that models online combinatorial optimization problems where the feedback received by the learner is between semi-bandit and full feedback. As the predictions of our first algorithm cannot be always computed efficiently in this setting, we propose another algorithm with similar properties and with the benefit of always being computationally efficient, at the price of a slightly more complicated tuning mechanism. Both algorithms rely on a novel exploration strategy called implicit exploration, which is shown to be more efficient both computationally and information-theoretically than previously studied exploration strategies for the problem.

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is a crucial ability in applications spanning various computer vision and robotic tasks. While significant progress has been made in object-level Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), i.e., segmenting objects with arbitrary text, the corresponding part-level research poses additional challenges. Firstly, part segmentation inherently involves intricate boundaries, while limited annotated data compounds the challenge. Secondly, part segmentation introduces an open granularity challenge due to the diverse and often ambiguous definitions of parts in the open world. Furthermore, the large-scale vision and language models, which play a key role in the open vocabulary setting, struggle to recognize parts as effectively as objects. To comprehensively investigate and tackle these challenges, we propose an Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (OV-PARTS) benchmark. OV-PARTS includes refined versions of two publicly available datasets: Pascal-Part-116 and ADE20K-Part-234. And it covers three specific tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Part Segmentation, Cross-Dataset Part Segmentation, and Few-Shot Part Segmentation, providing insights into analogical reasoning, open granularity and few-shot adapting abilities of models. Moreover, we analyze and adapt two prevailing paradigms of existing object-level OVSS methods for OV-PARTS. Extensive experimental analysis is conducted to inspire future research in leveraging foundational models for OV-PARTS. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/OV_PARTS.

As interest grows in world models that predict future states from current observations and actions, accurately modeling part-level dynamics has become increasingly relevant for various applications. Existing approaches, such as Puppet-Master, rely on fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained video diffusion models, which are impractical for real-world use due to the limitations of 2D video representation and slow processing times. To overcome these challenges, we present PartRM, a novel 4D reconstruction framework that simultaneously models appearance, geometry, and part-level motion from multi-view images of a static object. PartRM builds upon large 3D Gaussian reconstruction models, leveraging their extensive knowledge of appearance and geometry in static objects. To address data scarcity in 4D, we introduce the PartDrag-4D dataset, providing multi-view observations of part-level dynamics across over 20,000 states. We enhance the model's understanding of interaction conditions with a multi-scale drag embedding module that captures dynamics at varying granularities. To prevent catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning, we implement a two-stage training process that focuses sequentially on motion and appearance learning. Experimental results show that PartRM establishes a new state-of-the-art in part-level motion learning and can be applied in manipulation tasks in robotics. Our code, data, and models are publicly available to facilitate future research.

Representing a scene and its constituent objects from raw sensory data is a core ability for enabling robots to interact with their environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for scene understanding, leveraging a hierarchical object-centric generative model that enables an agent to infer object category and pose in an allocentric reference frame using active inference, a neuro-inspired framework for action and perception. For evaluating the behavior of an active vision agent, we also propose a new benchmark where, given a target viewpoint of a particular object, the agent needs to find the best matching viewpoint given a workspace with randomly positioned objects in 3D. We demonstrate that our active inference agent is able to balance epistemic foraging and goal-driven behavior, and outperforms both supervised and reinforcement learning baselines by a large margin.

Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires a detector to recognize known categories, discover unnamed objects from unseen categories, and incrementally learn newly annotated classes. PROB improves unknown discovery by modeling class-agnostic probabilistic objectness in the decoder-query space. However, visual objectness alone cannot determine whether an object-like query corresponds to a hard known instance, an unseen-category object, or background clutter, resulting in an ambiguous known-unknown decision boundary. We propose MSPO, a lightweight semantic calibration framework that augments PROB with task-aware known-category language priors while preserving its detector architecture and incremental learning protocol. For each currently known category, MSPO constructs an extended text description covering category attributes, visual appearance, typical scenes, and functional usage, and encodes it using a frozen CLIP text encoder. Decoder query features are projected into the same semantic space to estimate their support from the current known-category semantics. This semantic evidence is fused with PROB's visual objectness to calibrate known and unknown predictions without turning OWOD into open-vocabulary classification. Importantly, MSPO never uses future-category names, and all unseen categories remain unnamed during evaluation. Experiments on M-OWODB and S-OWODB show that MSPO improves the strong PROB baseline on the main aggregate metrics while retaining competitive unknown recall. It also improves early unknown-confusion metrics and raises PASCAL VOC final mAP by up to 2.7 points. These results demonstrate that known-category language semantics provide an effective calibration signal for probabilistic objectness under the standard OWOD setting.

Prior methods that tackle the problem of generalizable object pose estimation highly rely on having dense views of the unseen object. By contrast, we address the scenario where only a single reference view of the object is available. Our goal then is to estimate the relative object pose between this reference view and a query image that depicts the object in a different pose. In this scenario, robust generalization is imperative due to the presence of unseen objects during testing and the large-scale object pose variation between the reference and the query. To this end, we present a new hypothesis-and-verification framework, in which we generate and evaluate multiple pose hypotheses, ultimately selecting the most reliable one as the relative object pose. To measure reliability, we introduce a 3D-aware verification that explicitly applies 3D transformations to the 3D object representations learned from the two input images. Our comprehensive experiments on the Objaverse, LINEMOD, and CO3D datasets evidence the superior accuracy of our approach in relative pose estimation and its robustness in large-scale pose variations, when dealing with unseen objects.

Learning dexterous manipulation skills presents significant challenges due to complex nonlinear dynamics that underlie the interactions between objects and multi-fingered hands. Koopman operators have emerged as a robust method for modeling such nonlinear dynamics within a linear framework. However, current methods rely on runtime access to ground-truth (GT) object states, making them unsuitable for vision-based practical applications. Unlike image-to-action policies that implicitly learn visual features for control, we use a dynamics model, specifically the Koopman operator, to learn visually interpretable object features critical for robotic manipulation within a scene. We construct a Koopman operator using object features predicted by a feature extractor and utilize it to auto-regressively advance system states. We train the feature extractor to embed scene information into object features, thereby enabling the accurate propagation of robot trajectories. We evaluate our approach on simulated and real-world robot tasks, with results showing that it outperformed the model-based imitation learning NDP by 1.08times and the image-to-action Diffusion Policy by 1.16times. The results suggest that our method maintains task success rates with learned features and extends applicability to real-world manipulation without GT object states.

This paper studies category-level RGB-D object pose estimation, which recovers an object's 3D rotation and translation without instance-specific CAD models or reference views. This task is highly ambiguous due to intra-class variations, symmetries, and partial observations. Current solutions struggle to balance reliability and efficiency: methods based on intermediate structures are prone to error propagation, while diffusion models suffer from high inference latency and complex post-hoc candidate extraction. To address this, we present F2G-Pose, a real-time direct, single-pass framework that predicts category-level pose, metric size, and camera-frame completed shape from a single RGB-D observation in one feed-forward pass. F2G-Pose lifts dense visual foundation features to partial point clouds, encodes local geometry with DGCNN tokenization, and integrates object-level structure with a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer. Joint size prediction and camera-frame shape completion encourage metric consistency through dense geometric supervision. With its task-specific network trained only on pose-annotated synthetic SOPE data and its frozen RADIO backbone externally pretrained, F2G-Pose achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SOPE and ROPE while running at 28 FPS for pose-only inference, and further demonstrates strong camera-frame geometry on HouseCat6D and real-object transfer on HANDAL. Analyses of latency, robustness, shape completion, and GenPose++ candidate behavior further demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of F2G-Pose, with real-world manipulation experiments demonstrating deployment potential under segmented RGB-D inputs. The project page, code, and pretrained models are made available at https://jrryzh.github.io/F2G-Pose/.

Understanding a dynamical world calls for more than a latent state that summarizes its observations: the state should also be organized into the factors that stay shared across related observations and the factors that vary between them. For example, a robot pushing a cube to a goal should take the same action when the camera shifts or the lights dim, since nothing in the scene has moved. Existing approaches to this decomposition commonly obtain it through reconstruction, so the latent variables must first explain the entire observational world before their organization can be trusted. Joint embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) model the latent state directly and never reconstruct, yet no existing result recovers the invariant and variant parts of the state they learn. How to learn the invariant-variant structure of the latent world without paying for its reconstruction therefore remains open. To close this gap, we introduce SplitJEPA, a JEPA that jointly recovers the latent state and its invariant and variant organization directly in representation space, without any reconstruction. We prove that, under stationary Gaussian predictive dynamics and a full-rank variation condition, SplitJEPA identifies the invariant and variant subspaces up to independent block-wise isometries, without introducing an observation decoder. Since the guarantee needs no decoder, the result extends reconstruction-free latent recovery to invariant-variant block identification. Experiments on synthetic nonlinear systems and robotic manipulation tasks support the theoretical results and show their practical value for both robustness and efficiency.

This paper presents a generalizable RGB-based approach for object pose estimation, specifically designed to address challenges in sparse-view settings. While existing methods can estimate the poses of unseen objects, their generalization ability remains limited in scenarios involving occlusions and sparse reference views, restricting their real-world applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce corner points of the object bounding box as an intermediate representation of the object pose. The 3D object corners can be reliably recovered from sparse input views, while the 2D corner points in the target view are estimated through a novel reference-based point synthesizer, which works well even in scenarios involving occlusions. As object semantic points, object corners naturally establish 2D-3D correspondences for object pose estimation with a PnP algorithm. Extensive experiments on the YCB-Video and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed representation and significantly enhancing the generalization capabilities of object pose estimation, which is crucial for real-world applications.

Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/

The availability of challenging benchmarks has played a key role in the recent progress of machine learning. In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) has become a popular testbed for centralised training with decentralised execution. However, after years of sustained improvement on SMAC, algorithms now achieve near-perfect performance. In this work, we conduct new analysis demonstrating that SMAC lacks the stochasticity and partial observability to require complex *closed-loop* policies. In particular, we show that an *open-loop* policy conditioned only on the timestep can achieve non-trivial win rates for many SMAC scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce SMACv2, a new version of the benchmark where scenarios are procedurally generated and require agents to generalise to previously unseen settings (from the same distribution) during evaluation. We also introduce the extended partial observability challenge (EPO), which augments SMACv2 to ensure meaningful partial observability. We show that these changes ensure the benchmark requires the use of *closed-loop* policies. We evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms on SMACv2 and show that it presents significant challenges not present in the original benchmark. Our analysis illustrates that SMACv2 addresses the discovered deficiencies of SMAC and can help benchmark the next generation of MARL methods. Videos of training are available at https://sites.google.com/view/smacv2.

We study the task of establishing object-level visual correspondence across different viewpoints in videos, focusing on the challenging egocentric-to-exocentric and exocentric-to-egocentric scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective framework based on conditional binary segmentation, where an object query mask is encoded into a latent representation to guide the localization of the corresponding object in a target video. To encourage robust, view-invariant representations, we introduce a cycle-consistency training objective: the predicted mask in the target view is projected back to the source view to reconstruct the original query mask. This bidirectional constraint provides a strong self-supervisory signal without requiring ground-truth annotations and enables test-time training (TTT) at inference. Experiments on the Ego-Exo4D and HANDAL-X benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our optimization objective and TTT strategy, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/shannany0606/CCMP.

We address the problem of discovering part segmentations of articulated objects without supervision. In contrast to keypoints, part segmentations provide information about part localizations on the level of individual pixels. Capturing both locations and semantics, they are an attractive target for supervised learning approaches. However, large annotation costs limit the scalability of supervised algorithms to other object categories than humans. Unsupervised approaches potentially allow to use much more data at a lower cost. Most existing unsupervised approaches focus on learning abstract representations to be refined with supervision into the final representation. Our approach leverages a generative model consisting of two disentangled representations for an object's shape and appearance and a latent variable for the part segmentation. From a single image, the trained model infers a semantic part segmentation map. In experiments, we compare our approach to previous state-of-the-art approaches and observe significant gains in segmentation accuracy and shape consistency. Our work demonstrates the feasibility to discover semantic part segmentations without supervision.

Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) has advanced with recent vision-language models (VLMs), enabling segmentation beyond predefined categories through various learning schemes. Notably, training-free methods offer scalable, easily deployable solutions for handling unseen data, a key goal of OVSS. Yet, a critical issue persists: lack of object-level context consideration when segmenting complex objects in the challenging environment of OVSS based on arbitrary query prompts. This oversight limits models' ability to group semantically consistent elements within object and map them precisely to user-defined arbitrary classes. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that overcomes this limitation by incorporating object-level contextual knowledge within images. Specifically, our model enhances intra-object consistency by distilling spectral-driven features from vision foundation models into the attention mechanism of the visual encoder, enabling semantically coherent components to form a single object mask. Additionally, we refine the text embeddings with zero-shot object presence likelihood to ensure accurate alignment with the specific objects represented in the images. By leveraging object-level contextual knowledge, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with strong generalizability across diverse datasets.

Contrastive self-supervised learning has largely narrowed the gap to supervised pre-training on ImageNet. However, its success highly relies on the object-centric priors of ImageNet, i.e., different augmented views of the same image correspond to the same object. Such a heavily curated constraint becomes immediately infeasible when pre-trained on more complex scene images with many objects. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Object-level Representation Learning (ORL), a new self-supervised learning framework towards scene images. Our key insight is to leverage image-level self-supervised pre-training as the prior to discover object-level semantic correspondence, thus realizing object-level representation learning from scene images. Extensive experiments on COCO show that ORL significantly improves the performance of self-supervised learning on scene images, even surpassing supervised ImageNet pre-training on several downstream tasks. Furthermore, ORL improves the downstream performance when more unlabeled scene images are available, demonstrating its great potential of harnessing unlabeled data in the wild. We hope our approach can motivate future research on more general-purpose unsupervised representation learning from scene data.

3D Gaussian Splatting is renowned for its high-fidelity reconstructions and real-time novel view synthesis, yet its lack of semantic understanding limits object-level perception. In this work, we propose ObjectGS, an object-aware framework that unifies 3D scene reconstruction with semantic understanding. Instead of treating the scene as a unified whole, ObjectGS models individual objects as local anchors that generate neural Gaussians and share object IDs, enabling precise object-level reconstruction. During training, we dynamically grow or prune these anchors and optimize their features, while a one-hot ID encoding with a classification loss enforces clear semantic constraints. We show through extensive experiments that ObjectGS not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary and panoptic segmentation tasks, but also integrates seamlessly with applications like mesh extraction and scene editing. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/ObjectGS_page

Localizing objects in an unsupervised manner poses significant challenges due to the absence of key visual information such as the appearance, type and number of objects, as well as the lack of labeled object classes typically available in supervised settings. While recent approaches to unsupervised object localization have demonstrated significant progress by leveraging self-supervised visual representations, they often require computationally intensive training processes, resulting in high resource demands in terms of computation, learnable parameters, and data. They also lack explicit modeling of visual context, potentially limiting their accuracy in object localization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a single-stage learning framework, dubbed PEEKABOO, for unsupervised object localization by learning context-based representations at both the pixel- and shape-level of the localized objects through image masking. The key idea is to selectively hide parts of an image and leverage the remaining image information to infer the location of objects without explicit supervision. The experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, across various benchmark datasets, demonstrate the simplicity, effectiveness and competitive performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods in both single object discovery and unsupervised salient object detection tasks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hasibzunair/peekaboo

Humans can infer complete shapes and appearances of objects from limited visual cues, relying on extensive prior knowledge of the physical world. However, completing partially observable objects while ensuring consistency across video frames remains challenging for existing models, especially for unstructured, in-the-wild videos. This paper tackles the task of Video Amodal Completion (VAC), which aims to generate the complete object consistently throughout the video given a visual prompt specifying the object of interest. Leveraging the rich, consistent manifolds learned by pre-trained video diffusion models, we propose a conditional diffusion model, TACO, that repurposes these manifolds for VAC. To enable its effective and robust generalization to challenging in-the-wild scenarios, we curate a large-scale synthetic dataset with multiple difficulty levels by systematically imposing occlusions onto un-occluded videos. Building on this, we devise a progressive fine-tuning paradigm that starts with simpler recovery tasks and gradually advances to more complex ones. We demonstrate TACO's versatility on a wide range of in-the-wild videos from Internet, as well as on diverse, unseen datasets commonly used in autonomous driving, robotic manipulation, and scene understanding. Moreover, we show that TACO can be effectively applied to various downstream tasks like object reconstruction and pose estimation, highlighting its potential to facilitate physical world understanding and reasoning. Our project page is available at https://jason-aplp.github.io/TACO.

Model-based reinforcement learning agents utilizing transformers have shown improved sample efficiency due to their ability to model extended context, resulting in more accurate world models. However, for complex reasoning and planning tasks, these methods primarily rely on continuous representations. This complicates modeling of discrete properties of the real world such as disjoint object classes between which interpolation is not plausible. In this work, we introduce discrete abstract representations for transformer-based learning (DART), a sample-efficient method utilizing discrete representations for modeling both the world and learning behavior. We incorporate a transformer-decoder for auto-regressive world modeling and a transformer-encoder for learning behavior by attending to task-relevant cues in the discrete representation of the world model. For handling partial observability, we aggregate information from past time steps as memory tokens. DART outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods that do not use look-ahead search on the Atari 100k sample efficiency benchmark with a median human-normalized score of 0.790 and beats humans in 9 out of 26 games. We release our code at https://pranaval.github.io/DART/.

We introduce J-ORA, a novel multimodal dataset that bridges the gap in robot perception by providing detailed object attribute annotations within Japanese human-robot dialogue scenarios. J-ORA is designed to support three critical perception tasks, object identification, reference resolution, and next-action prediction, by leveraging a comprehensive template of attributes (e.g., category, color, shape, size, material, and spatial relations). Extensive evaluations with both proprietary and open-source Vision Language Models (VLMs) reveal that incorporating detailed object attributes substantially improves multimodal perception performance compared to without object attributes. Despite the improvement, we find that there still exists a gap between proprietary and open-source VLMs. In addition, our analysis of object affordances demonstrates varying abilities in understanding object functionality and contextual relationships across different VLMs. These findings underscore the importance of rich, context-sensitive attribute annotations in advancing robot perception in dynamic environments. See project page at https://jatuhurrra.github.io/J-ORA/.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically align visual features from an encoder with a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). However, this makes the visual perception module a bottleneck, which constrains the overall capabilities of LVLMs. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, while rich in visual semantics, often contain unavoidable local shortcuts that can lead to an overestimation of models' perceptual abilities. Here, we introduce TopoPerception, a benchmark that leverages topological properties to rigorously evaluate the global visual perception capabilities of LVLMs across various granularities. Since topology depends on the global structure of an image and is invariant to local features, TopoPerception enables a shortcut-free assessment of global perception, fundamentally distinguishing it from semantically rich tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on TopoPerception and find that even at the coarsest perceptual granularity, all models perform no better than random chance, indicating a profound inability to perceive global visual features. Notably, a consistent trend emerge within model families: more powerful models with stronger reasoning capabilities exhibit lower accuracy. This suggests that merely scaling up models is insufficient to address this deficit and may even exacerbate it. Progress may require new training paradigms or architectures. TopoPerception not only exposes a critical bottleneck in current LVLMs but also offers a lens and direction for improving their global visual perception. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Wenhao-Zhou/TopoPerception.

Humans can effortlessly anticipate how objects might move or change through interaction--imagining a cup being lifted, a knife slicing, or a lid being closed. We aim to endow computational systems with a similar ability to predict plausible future object motions directly from passive visual observation. We introduce ObjectForesight, a 3D object-centric dynamics model that predicts future 6-DoF poses and trajectories of rigid objects from short egocentric video sequences. Unlike conventional world or dynamics models that operate in pixel or latent space, ObjectForesight represents the world explicitly in 3D at the object level, enabling geometrically grounded and temporally coherent predictions that capture object affordances and trajectories. To train such a model at scale, we leverage recent advances in segmentation, mesh reconstruction, and 3D pose estimation to curate a dataset of 2 million plus short clips with pseudo-ground-truth 3D object trajectories. Through extensive experiments, we show that ObjectForesight achieves significant gains in accuracy, geometric consistency, and generalization to unseen objects and scenes, establishing a scalable framework for learning physically grounded, object-centric dynamics models directly from observation. objectforesight.github.io

We investigate the internal representations of vision-language models (VLMs) to address hallucinations, a persistent challenge despite advances in model size and training. We project VLMs' internal image representations to their language vocabulary and observe more confident output probabilities on real objects than hallucinated objects. We additionally use these output probabilities to spatially localize real objects. Building on this approach, we introduce a knowledge erasure algorithm that removes hallucinations by linearly orthogonalizing image features with respect to hallucinated object features. We show that targeted edits to a model's latent representations can reduce hallucinations by up to 25.7% on the COCO2014 dataset while preserving performance. Our findings demonstrate how a deeper understanding of VLMs' latent representations can enhance reliability and enable novel capabilities, such as zero-shot segmentation.

Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.

Vision benefits from grouping pixels into objects and understanding their spatial relationships, both laterally and in depth. We capture this with a scene representation comprising an occlusion-ordered stack of "object layers," each containing an isolated and amodally-completed object. To infer this representation from an image, we introduce a diffusion-based architecture named Concurrent Object Layers (CObL). CObL generates a stack of object layers in parallel, using Stable Diffusion as a prior for natural objects and inference-time guidance to ensure the inferred layers composite back to the input image. We train CObL using a few thousand synthetically-generated images of multi-object tabletop scenes, and we find that it zero-shot generalizes to photographs of real-world tabletops with varying numbers of novel objects. In contrast to recent models for amodal object completion, CObL reconstructs multiple occluded objects without user prompting and without knowing the number of objects beforehand. Unlike previous models for unsupervised object-centric representation learning, CObL is not limited to the world it was trained in.

General scene perception has progressed from object recognition toward open-vocabulary grounding, part localization, and affordance prediction. Yet these capabilities are often realized as isolated predictions that localize objects, parts, or interaction points without capturing the structured dependencies needed for interaction-oriented scene understanding. To address this gap, we introduce Hierarchical Scene Parsing, an interaction-oriented parsing task that represents physical scenes as explicit scene -> object -> part -> affordance hierarchies with cross-level bindings. We instantiate this task with SceneParser, a VLM-based parser trained for unified hierarchical generation with structural-completion pseudo labels and curriculum learning. To support training and evaluation, we construct SceneParser-Bench, a large-scale benchmark built with a scalable hierarchical data engine, containing 110K training images, a 5K validation split, 777K objects, 1.14M parts, 1.74M affordance annotations, and 1.74M valid object-part-affordance chain instances. We further introduce Level-1 to Level-3 conditional metrics and ParseRate to evaluate localization, cross-level binding, and hierarchical completeness. Experiments show that existing MLLMs and perception-stitching pipelines struggle with hierarchical parsing on our SceneParser-Bench, while SceneParser achieves stronger structure-aware performance. Besides, ablations, evaluations on COCO and AGD20K, and a downstream planning probe demonstrate that our SceneParser is compatible with conventional tasks and provides an actionable representation for visual understanding.

Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM{here}.

Object-centric (OC) representations, which represent the state of a visual scene by modeling it as a composition of objects, have the potential to be used in various downstream tasks to achieve systematic compositional generalization and facilitate reasoning. However, these claims have not been thoroughly analyzed yet. Recently, foundation models have demonstrated unparalleled capabilities across diverse domains from language to computer vision, marking them as a potential cornerstone of future research for a multitude of computational tasks. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical study on representation learning for downstream Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires an accurate compositional understanding of the scene. We thoroughly investigate the benefits and trade-offs of OC models and alternative approaches including large pre-trained foundation models on both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate a viable way to achieve the best of both worlds. The extensiveness of our study, encompassing over 600 downstream VQA models and 15 different types of upstream representations, also provides several additional insights that we believe will be of interest to the community at large.

Accurate 6D object pose estimation is vital for robotics, augmented reality, and scene understanding. For seen objects, high accuracy is often attainable via per-object fine-tuning but generalizing to unseen objects remains a challenge. To address this problem, past arts assume access to CAD models at test time and typically follow a multi-stage pipeline to estimate poses: detect and segment the object, propose an initial pose, and then refine it. Under occlusion, however, the early-stage of such pipelines are prone to errors, which can propagate through the sequential processing, and consequently degrade the performance. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose four novel extensions to model-based 6D pose estimation methods: (i) a dynamic non-uniform dense sampling strategy that focuses computation on visible regions, reducing occlusion-induced errors; (ii) a multi-hypothesis inference mechanism that retains several confidence-ranked pose candidates, mitigating brittle single-path failures; (iii) iterative refinement to progressively improve pose accuracy; and (iv) series of occlusion-focused training augmentations that strengthen robustness and generalization. Furthermore, we propose a new weighted by visibility metric for evaluation under occlusion to minimize the bias in the existing protocols. Via extensive empirical evaluations, we show that our proposed approach achieves more than 5% improvement in accuracy on ICBIN and more than 2% on BOP dataset benchmarks, while achieving approximately 3 times faster inference.

Our method studies the complex task of object-centric 3D understanding from a single RGB-D observation. As it is an ill-posed problem, existing methods suffer from low performance for both 3D shape and 6D pose and size estimation in complex multi-object scenarios with occlusions. We present ShAPO, a method for joint multi-object detection, 3D textured reconstruction, 6D object pose and size estimation. Key to ShAPO is a single-shot pipeline to regress shape, appearance and pose latent codes along with the masks of each object instance, which is then further refined in a sparse-to-dense fashion. A novel disentangled shape and appearance database of priors is first learned to embed objects in their respective shape and appearance space. We also propose a novel, octree-based differentiable optimization step, allowing us to further improve object shape, pose and appearance simultaneously under the learned latent space, in an analysis-by-synthesis fashion. Our novel joint implicit textured object representation allows us to accurately identify and reconstruct novel unseen objects without having access to their 3D meshes. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method, trained on simulated indoor scenes, accurately regresses the shape, appearance and pose of novel objects in the real-world with minimal fine-tuning. Our method significantly out-performs all baselines on the NOCS dataset with an 8% absolute improvement in mAP for 6D pose estimation. Project page: https://zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/ShAPO.html

Recent advances in robot learning have enabled manipulation policies to perform increasingly diverse tasks and generalize across environments. However, reliable execution often depends on hidden task states that cannot be determined from current observations alone, making interaction history essential. We introduce HIDE, a benchmark for evaluating manipulation memory under partial observability. HIDE comprises 15 tasks covering repetition counting, historical-state recall, and execution-progress tracking, with randomized initial configurations and decision points where similar observations require different actions depending on prior events. We further propose SEEK, a framework combining three complementary memory mechanisms to retain historical evidence and track execution state. Evaluations reveal substantial limitations in existing policies on HIDE, while memory augmentation improves task success in both simulation and real-world experiments. Individual mechanisms benefit some tasks but can degrade others; their combination achieves the highest average success rate on HIDE among the evaluated configurations. These findings highlight the importance of maintaining internal representations of hidden task states and matching memory design to task-specific information requirements.

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. Our core innovation lies in leveraging a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior to narrowing the matching scope, effectively filtering out irrelevant clutter to prevent it from degrading pose estimation. Firstly, we introduce an object-centric disentanglement preprocessing to isolate the semantic target from environmental noise. Secondly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning. Finally, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that directly process RGB inputs for tasks like 3D localization and navigation have shown remarkable potential. However, we argue that these RGB-only approaches are fundamentally flawed in their ability to generalize across cameras. By ignoring camera parameters, they entangle an object's physical properties with the camera's perspective, creating an irresolvable ambiguity. We show this leads MLLMs to overfit to the training camera distribution, rather than learning true and generalizable 3D geometric principles. To address this, we propose Camera-Aware MLLM framework for spatial MLLMs. It learns generalizable spatial reasoning by: (i) injecting camera intrinsics via a dense embedding that conditions each visual token; (ii) introducing a camera-aware data augmentation strategy that synthetically varies camera parameters, forcing the model to disentangle camera properties from scene content; and (iii) distilling geometric priors from a 3D vision foundation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that camera-aware MLLMs substantially outperform their naive counterparts, particularly in cross-camera generalization tests on spatially-grounded tasks, indicating that camera-awareness is not only beneficial but also a prerequisite for robust and generalizable spatial intelligence in MLLMs.

We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

Generating motion-controlled videos--where user-specified actions drive physically plausible scene dynamics under freely chosen viewpoints--demands two capabilities: (1) disentangled motion control, allowing users to separately control the object motion and adjust camera viewpoint; and (2) motion causality, ensuring that user-driven actions trigger coherent reactions from other objects rather than merely displacing pixels. Existing methods fall short on both fronts: they entangle camera and object motion into a single tracking signal and treat motion as kinematic displacement without modeling causal relationships between object motion. We introduce MoRight, a unified framework that addresses both limitations through disentangled motion modeling. Object motion is specified in a canonical static-view and transferred to an arbitrary target camera viewpoint via temporal cross-view attention, enabling disentangled camera and object control. We further decompose motion into active (user-driven) and passive (consequence) components, training the model to learn motion causality from data. At inference, users can either supply active motion and MoRight predicts consequences (forward reasoning), or specify desired passive outcomes and MoRight recovers plausible driving actions (inverse reasoning), all while freely adjusting the camera viewpoint. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in generation quality, motion controllability, and interaction awareness.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) ground whole objects well from free-form language queries, but they struggle when the query names a part rather than the object. We trace this to a missing object-part hierarchy, since parts are localized in the same single step used for objects. We propose Object-Part Hierarchical Reflective Grounding (OP-HRG), a coarse-to-fine reasoning-guided grounding strategy that first localizes the parent object and then the part within it. A self-check then reflects on the result, with an extension to re-encode the predicted crop to inspect the region it is correcting. We introduce a part-aware GRPO framework to train our pipeline with stage-wise rewards. A 4B model trained this way outperforms 7B grounding LLMs and SAM3 across PascalPart, PartImageNet, and InstructPart, and transfers to reasoning segmentation.

Amodal perception, the ability to comprehend complete object structures from partial visibility, is a fundamental skill, even for infants. Its significance extends to applications like autonomous driving, where a clear understanding of heavily occluded objects is essential. However, modern detection and tracking algorithms often overlook this critical capability, perhaps due to the prevalence of modal annotations in most datasets. To address the scarcity of amodal data, we introduce the TAO-Amodal benchmark, featuring 880 diverse categories in thousands of video sequences. Our dataset includes amodal and modal bounding boxes for visible and occluded objects, including objects that are partially out-of-frame. To enhance amodal tracking with object permanence, we leverage a lightweight plug-in module, the amodal expander, to transform standard, modal trackers into amodal ones through fine-tuning on a few hundred video sequences with data augmentation. We achieve a 3.3\% and 1.6\% improvement on the detection and tracking of occluded objects on TAO-Amodal. When evaluated on people, our method produces dramatic improvements of 2x compared to state-of-the-art modal baselines.

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects from a single image requires jointly inferring object geometry, part structure, and motion parameters from limited visual evidence. A key difficulty lies in the entanglement between motion cues and object structure, which makes direct articulation regression unstable. Existing methods address this challenge through multi-view supervision, retrieval-based assembly, or auxiliary video generation, often sacrificing scalability or efficiency. We present MonoArt, a unified framework grounded in progressive structural reasoning. Rather than predicting articulation directly from image features, MonoArt progressively transforms visual observations into canonical geometry, structured part representations, and motion-aware embeddings within a single architecture. This structured reasoning process enables stable and interpretable articulation inference without external motion templates or multi-stage pipelines. Extensive experiments on PartNet-Mobility demonstrate that OM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction accuracy and inference speed. The framework further generalizes to robotic manipulation and articulated scene reconstruction.

Object-centric scene understanding is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing approaches often rely on multi-stage pipelines that first apply pre-trained segmentors to extract individual objects, followed by per-object 3D reconstruction. Such methods are computationally expensive, fragile to segmentation errors, and scale poorly with scene complexity. We introduce OCH3R, a unified framework for Object-Centric Holistic 3D Reconstruction from a single RGB image. OCH3R performs one forward pass to simultaneously predict all object instances with their 6D poses and detailed 3D reconstructions. The key idea is a transformer architecture that predicts per-pixel attributes, including CLIP-based category embeddings, metric depth, normalized object coordinates (NOCS), and a fixed number of 3D Gaussians representing each object. To supervise these Gaussian reconstructions, we transform them into canonical space using the predicted 6D poses and align them with pre-rendered canonical ground truth, avoiding costly per-image Gaussian label generation. On standard indoor benchmarks, OCH3R achieves state-of-the-art performance across monocular depth estimation, open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, and RGB-only category-level 6D pose estimation, while producing high-fidelity, editable per-object reconstructions. Crucially, inference is fully feed-forward and scales independently of the number of objects, offering orders-of-magnitude speedups over conventional multi-stage pipelines in cluttered scenes.

Unsupervised 3D instance segmentation aims to segment objects from a 3D point cloud without any annotations. Existing methods face the challenge of either too loose or too tight clustering, leading to under-segmentation or over-segmentation. To address this issue, we propose Part2Object, hierarchical clustering with object guidance. Part2Object employs multi-layer clustering from points to object parts and objects, allowing objects to manifest at any layer. Additionally, it extracts and utilizes 3D objectness priors from temporally consecutive 2D RGB frames to guide the clustering process. Moreover, we propose Hi-Mask3D to support hierarchical 3D object part and instance segmentation. By training Hi-Mask3D on the objects and object parts extracted from Part2Object, we achieve consistent and superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models in various settings, including unsupervised instance segmentation, data-efficient fine-tuning, and cross-dataset generalization. Code is release at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Part2Object

This paper is on human pose estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks. Our main contribution is a CNN cascaded architecture specifically designed for learning part relationships and spatial context, and robustly inferring pose even for the case of severe part occlusions. To this end, we propose a detection-followed-by-regression CNN cascade. The first part of our cascade outputs part detection heatmaps and the second part performs regression on these heatmaps. The benefits of the proposed architecture are multi-fold: It guides the network where to focus in the image and effectively encodes part constraints and context. More importantly, it can effectively cope with occlusions because part detection heatmaps for occluded parts provide low confidence scores which subsequently guide the regression part of our network to rely on contextual information in order to predict the location of these parts. Additionally, we show that the proposed cascade is flexible enough to readily allow the integration of various CNN architectures for both detection and regression, including recent ones based on residual learning. Finally, we illustrate that our cascade achieves top performance on the MPII and LSP data sets. Code can be downloaded from http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~psxab5/

Facilitating an entity's interaction with objects requires accurately identifying parts that afford specific actions. Weakly supervised affordance grounding (WSAG) seeks to imitate human learning from third-person demonstrations, where humans intuitively grasp functional parts without needing pixel-level annotations. To achieve this, grounding is typically learned using a shared classifier across images from different perspectives, along with distillation strategies incorporating part discovery process. However, since affordance-relevant parts are not always easily distinguishable, models primarily rely on classification, often focusing on common class-specific patterns that are unrelated to affordance. To address this limitation, we move beyond isolated part-level learning by introducing selective prototypical and pixel contrastive objectives that adaptively learn affordance-relevant cues at both the part and object levels, depending on the granularity of the available information. Initially, we find the action-associated objects in both egocentric (object-focused) and exocentric (third-person example) images by leveraging CLIP. Then, by cross-referencing the discovered objects of complementary views, we excavate the precise part-level affordance clues in each perspective. By consistently learning to distinguish affordance-relevant regions from affordance-irrelevant background context, our approach effectively shifts activation from irrelevant areas toward meaningful affordance cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at github.com/hynnsk/SelectiveCL.

Monocular 3D reconstruction for categorical objects heavily relies on accurately perceiving each object's pose. While gradient-based optimization in a NeRF framework updates the initial pose, this paper highlights that scale-depth ambiguity in monocular object reconstruction causes failures when the initial pose deviates moderately from the true pose. Consequently, existing methods often depend on a third-party 3D object to provide an initial object pose, leading to increased complexity and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we present SUP-NeRF, a Streamlined Unification of object Pose estimation and NeRF-based object reconstruction. SUP-NeRF decouples the object's dimension estimation and pose refinement to resolve the scale-depth ambiguity, and introduces a camera-invariant projected-box representation that generalizes cross different domains. While using a dedicated pose estimator that smoothly integrates into an object-centric NeRF, SUP-NeRF is free from external 3D detectors. SUP-NeRF achieves state-of-the-art results in both reconstruction and pose estimation tasks on the nuScenes dataset. Furthermore, SUP-NeRF exhibits exceptional cross-dataset generalization on the KITTI and Waymo datasets, surpassing prior methods with up to 50\% reduction in rotation and translation error.

We present a method for estimating neural scenes representations of objects given only a single image. The core of our method is the estimation of a geometric scaffold for the object and its use as a guide for the reconstruction of the underlying radiance field. Our formulation is based on a generative process that first maps a latent code to a voxelized shape, and then renders it to an image, with the object appearance being controlled by a second latent code. During inference, we optimize both the latent codes and the networks to fit a test image of a new object. The explicit disentanglement of shape and appearance allows our model to be fine-tuned given a single image. We can then render new views in a geometrically consistent manner and they represent faithfully the input object. Additionally, our method is able to generalize to images outside of the training domain (more realistic renderings and even real photographs). Finally, the inferred geometric scaffold is itself an accurate estimate of the object's 3D shape. We demonstrate in several experiments the effectiveness of our approach in both synthetic and real images.

Humans possess the remarkable skill of Visual Perception, the ability to see and understand the seen, helping them make sense of the visual world and, in turn, reason. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have recently achieved impressive performance on vision-language tasks ranging from visual question-answering and image captioning to visual reasoning and image generation. However, when prompted to identify or count (perceive) the entities in a given image, existing MLLM systems fail. Working towards developing an accurate MLLM system for perception and reasoning, we propose using Versatile vision enCoders (VCoder) as perception eyes for Multimodal LLMs. We feed the VCoder with perception modalities such as segmentation or depth maps, improving the MLLM's perception abilities. Secondly, we leverage the images from COCO and outputs from off-the-shelf vision perception models to create our COCO Segmentation Text (COST) dataset for training and evaluating MLLMs on the object perception task. Thirdly, we introduce metrics to assess the object perception abilities in MLLMs on our COST dataset. Lastly, we provide extensive experimental evidence proving the VCoder's improved object-level perception skills over existing Multimodal LLMs, including GPT-4V. We open-source our dataset, code, and models to promote research. We open-source our code at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/VCoder

Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, which are widely conjectured to enable compositional generalization. Yet, it remains unclear when this conjecture will be true, as a principled theoretical or empirical understanding of compositional generalization is lacking. In this work, we investigate when compositional generalization is guaranteed for object-centric representations through the lens of identifiability theory. We show that autoencoders that satisfy structural assumptions on the decoder and enforce encoder-decoder consistency will learn object-centric representations that provably generalize compositionally. We validate our theoretical result and highlight the practical relevance of our assumptions through experiments on synthetic image data.

How do we tell a world model what information to preserve? We study this question through the lens of spectral representation learning. We introduce SpecWM, a JEPA framework that explicitly specifies desired relationships between observations through a target similarity kernel and trains the encoder to reproduce those relationships in its embedding geometry. Different kernels provide different supervision, ranging from physical state information to a fully self-supervised temporal kernel requiring only the ordering of observations within trajectories. We characterize the global optima of the objective, establish conditions for linear recoverability and invariance to nuisance information, and connect temporal-kernel similarity to the behavioral successor measure under an idealized setting. Empirically, the choice of kernel strongly controls which physical quantities are recoverable from the representation. More importantly, temporal spectral alignment improves CEM planning success over LeWorldModel from 52% to 68% on OGBench Cube, 49% to 77% on OGBench Scene, and 29% to 51% on CALVIN. These results suggest that explicitly specifying representation geometry provides a simple way to steer what latent world models preserve for control.

We consider the problem of weakly supervised object detection, where the training samples are annotated using only image-level labels that indicate the presence or absence of an object category. In order to model the uncertainty in the location of the objects, we employ a dissimilarity coefficient based probabilistic learning objective. The learning objective minimizes the difference between an annotation agnostic prediction distribution and an annotation aware conditional distribution. The main computational challenge is the complex nature of the conditional distribution, which consists of terms over hundreds or thousands of variables. The complexity of the conditional distribution rules out the possibility of explicitly modeling it. Instead, we exploit the fact that deep learning frameworks rely on stochastic optimization. This allows us to use a state of the art discrete generative model that can provide annotation consistent samples from the conditional distribution. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 data sets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach.

There is a gap in the understanding of occluded objects in existing large-scale visual language multi-modal models. Current state-of-the-art multi-modal models fail to provide satisfactory results in describing occluded objects through universal visual encoders and supervised learning strategies. Therefore, we introduce a multi-modal large language framework and corresponding self-supervised learning strategy with support of 3D generation. We start our experiments comparing with the state-of-the-art models in the evaluation of a large-scale dataset SOMVideo [18]. The initial results demonstrate the improvement of 16.92% in comparison with the state-of-the-art VLM models.

Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a new and challenging computer vision task that bridges the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and object detection in the real world. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/labeled objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect novel/unknown objects - which can be classified and incrementally learned. In standard OD, object proposals not overlapping with a labeled object are automatically classified as background. Therefore, simply applying OD methods to OWOD fails as unknown objects would be predicted as background. The challenge of detecting unknown objects stems from the lack of supervision in distinguishing unknown objects and background object proposals. Previous OWOD methods have attempted to overcome this issue by generating supervision using pseudo-labeling - however, unknown object detection has remained low. Probabilistic/generative models may provide a solution for this challenge. Herein, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework for objectness estimation, where we alternate between probability distribution estimation and objectness likelihood maximization of known objects in the embedded feature space - ultimately allowing us to estimate the objectness probability of different proposals. The resulting Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector, PROB, integrates our framework into traditional object detection models, adapting them for the open-world setting. Comprehensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks show that PROB outperforms all existing OWOD methods in both unknown object detection (sim 2times unknown recall) and known object detection (sim 10% mAP). Our code will be made available upon publication at https://github.com/orrzohar/PROB.

Given a pair of partially overlapping source and target images and a keypoint in the source image, the keypoint's correspondent in the target image can be either visible, occluded or outside the field of view. Local feature matching methods are only able to identify the correspondent's location when it is visible, while humans can also hallucinate its location when it is occluded or outside the field of view through geometric reasoning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by training a network to output a peaked probability distribution over the correspondent's location, regardless of this correspondent being visible, occluded, or outside the field of view. We experimentally demonstrate that this network is indeed able to hallucinate correspondences on pairs of images captured in scenes that were not seen at training-time. We also apply this network to an absolute camera pose estimation problem and find it is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art local feature matching-based competitors.

Accurately recovering the full 9-DoF pose of unseen instances within specific categories from a single RGB image remains a core challenge for robotics and automation. Most existing solutions still rely on pseudo-depth, CAD models, or multi-stage cascades that separate 2D detection from pose estimation. Motivated by the need for a simpler, RGB-only alternative that learns directly at the category level, we revisit a longstanding question: Can object detection and 9-DoF pose estimation be unified with high performance, without any additional data? We show that they can with our method, YOPO, a single-stage, query-based framework that treats category-level 9-DoF estimation as a natural extension of 2D detection. YOPO augments a transformer detector with a lightweight pose head, a bounding-box-conditioned translation module, and a 6D-aware Hungarian matching cost. The model is trained end-to-end only with RGB images and category-level pose labels. Despite its minimalist design, YOPO sets a new state of the art on three benchmarks. On the REAL275 dataset, it achieves 79.6% IoU_{50} and 54.1% under the 10^circ10{cm} metric, surpassing prior RGB-only methods and closing much of the gap to RGB-D systems. The code, models, and additional qualitative results can be found on our project.

Visual navigation is a fundamental problem in embodied AI, yet practical deployments demand long-horizon planning capabilities to address multi-objective tasks. A major bottleneck is data scarcity: policies learned from limited data often overfit and fail to generalize OOD. Existing neural network-based agents typically increase architectural complexity that paradoxically become counterproductive in the small-sample regime. This paper introduce NeuRO, a integrated learning-to-optimize framework that tightly couples perception networks with downstream task-level robust optimization. Specifically, NeuRO addresses core difficulties in this integration: (i) it transforms noisy visual predictions under data scarcity into convex uncertainty sets using Partially Input Convex Neural Networks (PICNNs) with conformal calibration, which directly parameterize the optimization constraints; and (ii) it reformulates planning under partial observability as a robust optimization problem, enabling uncertainty-aware policies that transfer across environments. Extensive experiments on both unordered and sequential multi-object navigation tasks demonstrate that NeuRO establishes SoTA performance, particularly in generalization to unseen environments. Our work thus presents a significant advancement for developing robust, generalizable autonomous agents.

To endow machines with the ability to perceive the real-world in a three dimensional representation as we do as humans is a fundamental and long-standing topic in Artificial Intelligence. Given different types of visual inputs such as images or point clouds acquired by 2D/3D sensors, one important goal is to understand the geometric structure and semantics of the 3D environment. Traditional approaches usually leverage hand-crafted features to estimate the shape and semantics of objects or scenes. However, they are difficult to generalize to novel objects and scenarios, and struggle to overcome critical issues caused by visual occlusions. By contrast, we aim to understand scenes and the objects within them by learning general and robust representations using deep neural networks, trained on large-scale real-world 3D data. To achieve these aims, this thesis makes three core contributions from object-level 3D shape estimation from single or multiple views to scene-level semantic understanding.

Despite their stellar performance on a wide range of tasks, including in-context tasks only revealed during inference, vanilla transformers and variants trained for next-token predictions (a) do not learn an explicit world model of their environment which can be flexibly queried and (b) cannot be used for planning or navigation. In this paper, we consider partially observed environments (POEs), where an agent receives perceptually aliased observations as it navigates, which makes path planning hard. We introduce a transformer with (multiple) discrete bottleneck(s), TDB, whose latent codes learn a compressed representation of the history of observations and actions. After training a TDB to predict the future observation(s) given the history, we extract interpretable cognitive maps of the environment from its active bottleneck(s) indices. These maps are then paired with an external solver to solve (constrained) path planning problems. First, we show that a TDB trained on POEs (a) retains the near perfect predictive performance of a vanilla transformer or an LSTM while (b) solving shortest path problems exponentially faster. Second, a TDB extracts interpretable representations from text datasets, while reaching higher in-context accuracy than vanilla sequence models. Finally, in new POEs, a TDB (a) reaches near-perfect in-context accuracy, (b) learns accurate in-context cognitive maps (c) solves in-context path planning problems.

Although fully-supervised oriented object detection has made significant progress in multimodal remote sensing image understanding, it comes at the cost of labor-intensive annotation. Recent studies have explored weakly and semi-supervised learning to alleviate this burden. However, these methods overlook the difficulties posed by dense annotations in complex remote sensing scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel setting called sparsely annotated oriented object detection (SAOOD), which only labels partial instances, and propose a solution to address its challenges. Specifically, we focus on two key issues in the setting: (1) sparse labeling leading to overfitting on limited foreground representations, and (2) unlabeled objects (false negatives) confusing feature learning. To this end, we propose the S^2Teacher, a novel method that progressively mines pseudo-labels for unlabeled objects, from easy to hard, to enhance foreground representations. Additionally, it reweights the loss of unlabeled objects to mitigate their impact during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S^2Teacher not only significantly improves detector performance across different sparse annotation levels but also achieves near-fully-supervised performance on the DOTA dataset with only 10% annotation instances, effectively balancing detection accuracy with annotation efficiency. The code will be public.

Every day, humans perceive objects and communicate these perceptions through various channels. In this paper, we present a computational model designed to track and simulate the perception of objects, as well as their representations as conveyed in communication. We delineate two fundamental components of our internal representation, termed "observed" and "seen", which we correlate with established concepts in computer vision, namely encoding and decoding. These components are integrated into semiotic networks, which simulate perceptual inference of object perception and human communication. Our model of object perception by a person allows us to define object perception by {\em a network}. We demonstrate this with an example of an image baseline classifier by constructing a new network that includes the baseline classifier and an additional layer. This layer produces the images "perceived" by the entire network, transforming it into a perceptualized image classifier. This facilitates visualization of the acquired network. Within our network, the image representations become more efficient for classification tasks when they are assembled and randomized. In our experiments, the perceptualized network outperformed the baseline classifier on MNIST training databases consisting of a restricted number of images. Our model is not limited to persons and can be applied to any system featuring a loop involving the processing from "internal" to "external" representations.

Perceiving visual scenes as objects and background -- like humans do -- Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aggregates image or video feature maps into object-level feature vectors, termed slots. OCL's self-supervision of reconstructing the input from these aggregated slots struggles with complex object textures, thus Vision Foundation Model (VFM) representations are used as the aggregation input and reconstruction target. However, existing methods leverage VFM representations in diverse ways and often fail to fully exploit their potential. In response, we propose a clean architecture -- Vector-Quantized VFMs for OCL (VQ-VFM-OCL, or VVO) -- that unifies mainstream OCL methods. The key to our unification is simple yet effective, just shared quantizing the same VFM representation as the reconstruction target. Through mathematical modeling and statistical verification, we further analyze why VFM representations facilitate OCL aggregation and how their shared quantization as reconstruction targets strengthens OCL supervision. Experiments show that across different VFMs, aggregators and decoders, our VVO consistently outperforms baselines in object discovery and recognition, as well as downstream visual prediction and reasoning. The source code is available in supplemental files.

Real-world robotic agents must act under partial observability and long horizons, where key cues may appear long before they affect decision making. However, most modern approaches rely solely on instantaneous information, without incorporating insights from the past. Standard recurrent or transformer models struggle with retaining and leveraging long-term dependencies: context windows truncate history, while naive memory extensions fail under scale and sparsity. We propose ELMUR (External Layer Memory with Update/Rewrite), a transformer architecture with structured external memory. Each layer maintains memory embeddings, interacts with them via bidirectional cross-attention, and updates them through an Least Recently Used (LRU) memory module using replacement or convex blending. ELMUR extends effective horizons up to 100,000 times beyond the attention window and achieves a 100% success rate on a synthetic T-Maze task with corridors up to one million steps. In POPGym, it outperforms baselines on more than half of the tasks. On MIKASA-Robo sparse-reward manipulation tasks with visual observations, it nearly doubles the performance of strong baselines. These results demonstrate that structured, layer-local external memory offers a simple and scalable approach to decision making under partial observability.

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are used to model environments where the full state cannot be perceived by an agent. As such the agent needs to reason taking into account the past observations and actions. However, simply remembering the full history is generally intractable due to the exponential growth in the history space. Maintaining a probability distribution that models the belief over what the true state is can be used as a sufficient statistic of the history, but its computation requires access to the model of the environment and is often intractable. While SOTA algorithms use Recurrent Neural Networks to compress the observation-action history aiming to learn a sufficient statistic, they lack guarantees of success and can lead to sub-optimal policies. To overcome this, we propose the Wasserstein Belief Updater, an RL algorithm that learns a latent model of the POMDP and an approximation of the belief update. Our approach comes with theoretical guarantees on the quality of our approximation ensuring that our outputted beliefs allow for learning the optimal value function.

We study how the choice of visual perspective affects learning and generalization in the context of physical manipulation from raw sensor observations. Compared with the more commonly used global third-person perspective, a hand-centric (eye-in-hand) perspective affords reduced observability, but we find that it consistently improves training efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization. These benefits hold across a variety of learning algorithms, experimental settings, and distribution shifts, and for both simulated and real robot apparatuses. However, this is only the case when hand-centric observability is sufficient; otherwise, including a third-person perspective is necessary for learning, but also harms out-of-distribution generalization. To mitigate this, we propose to regularize the third-person information stream via a variational information bottleneck. On six representative manipulation tasks with varying hand-centric observability adapted from the Meta-World benchmark, this results in a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agent operating from both perspectives improving its out-of-distribution generalization on every task. While some practitioners have long put cameras in the hands of robots, our work systematically analyzes the benefits of doing so and provides simple and broadly applicable insights for improving end-to-end learned vision-based robotic manipulation.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in multi-image, multi-turn agentic settings where decisions depend on visual changes. However, in existing open-weight VLMs, visual comparisons happen only inside the language model, while the visual encoder itself remains stateless: each image is encoded independently, without access to the prior visual context. As a result, small but task-critical changes may be attenuated before the language model has a chance to compare them, especially when those changes do not affect the high-level semantics of the scene. We introduce a Stateful Visual Encoder, which conditions each visual representation on prior visual features. Under supervised finetuning, VLMs equipped with stateful encoders achieve consistent improvements on controlled tasks involving cross-image spatial aggregation, multi-object visual differencing, and visual trajectory behavior cloning. These improvements are consistent across input resolutions, language model sizes, and VLM backbones. Finally, we validate our model on real-world tasks, including longitudinal radiology, fine-grained image comparison, and remote sensing, where stateful encoders consistently improve generalist VLM baselines and can match or surpass specialized models in selected domains. Project page: https://statefulvisualencoders.github.io/

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of open-world instance segmentation. Existing works have shown that vanilla visual networks are biased toward learning appearance information, \eg texture, to recognize objects. This implicit bias causes the model to fail in detecting novel objects with unseen textures in the open-world setting. To address this challenge, we propose a learning framework, called view-Consistent LeaRning (v-CLR), which aims to enforce the model to learn appearance-invariant representations for robust instance segmentation. In v-CLR, we first introduce additional views for each image, where the texture undergoes significant alterations while preserving the image's underlying structure. We then encourage the model to learn the appearance-invariant representation by enforcing the consistency between object features across different views, for which we obtain class-agnostic object proposals using off-the-shelf unsupervised models that possess strong object-awareness. These proposals enable cross-view object feature matching, greatly reducing the appearance dependency while enhancing the object-awareness. We thoroughly evaluate our method on public benchmarks under both cross-class and cross-dataset settings, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vclr

The goal of this paper is to estimate the 6D pose and dimensions of unseen object instances in an RGB-D image. Contrary to "instance-level" 6D pose estimation tasks, our problem assumes that no exact object CAD models are available during either training or testing time. To handle different and unseen object instances in a given category, we introduce a Normalized Object Coordinate Space (NOCS)---a shared canonical representation for all possible object instances within a category. Our region-based neural network is then trained to directly infer the correspondence from observed pixels to this shared object representation (NOCS) along with other object information such as class label and instance mask. These predictions can be combined with the depth map to jointly estimate the metric 6D pose and dimensions of multiple objects in a cluttered scene. To train our network, we present a new context-aware technique to generate large amounts of fully annotated mixed reality data. To further improve our model and evaluate its performance on real data, we also provide a fully annotated real-world dataset with large environment and instance variation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to robustly estimate the pose and size of unseen object instances in real environments while also achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard 6D pose estimation benchmarks.

Vision-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D object detection has advanced significantly in autonomous driving by offering cost-effectiveness and rich contextual information. However, existing methods often construct BEV representations by collapsing extracted object features, neglecting intrinsic environmental contexts, such as roads and pavements. This hinders detectors from comprehensively perceiving the characteristics of the physical world. To alleviate this, we introduce a multi-task learning framework, Collaborative Perceiver (CoP), that leverages spatial occupancy as auxiliary information to mine consistent structural and conceptual similarities shared between 3D object detection and occupancy prediction tasks, bridging gaps in spatial representations and feature refinement. To this end, we first propose a pipeline to generate dense occupancy ground truths incorporating local density information (LDO) for reconstructing detailed environmental information. Next, we employ a voxel-height-guided sampling (VHS) strategy to distill fine-grained local features according to distinct object properties. Furthermore, we develop a global-local collaborative feature fusion (CFF) module that seamlessly integrates complementary knowledge between both tasks, thus composing more robust BEV representations. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that CoP outperforms existing vision-based frameworks, achieving 49.5\% mAP and 59.2\% NDS on the test set. Code and supplementary materials are available at this link https://github.com/jichengyuan/Collaborative-Perceiver.

Multi-View Representation Learning (MVRL) aims to derive a unified representation from multi-view data by leveraging shared and complementary information across views. However, when views are irregularly missing, the incomplete data can lead to representations that lack sufficiency and consistency. To address this, we propose Multi-View Permutation of Variational Auto-Encoders (MVP), which excavates invariant relationships between views in incomplete data. MVP establishes inter-view correspondences in the latent space of Variational Auto-Encoders, enabling the inference of missing views and the aggregation of more sufficient information. To derive a valid Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) for learning, we apply permutations to randomly reorder variables for cross-view generation and then partition them by views to maintain invariant meanings under permutations. Additionally, we enhance consistency by introducing an informational prior with cyclic permutations of posteriors, which turns the regularization term into a similarity measure across distributions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on seven diverse datasets with varying missing ratios, achieving superior performance in multi-view clustering and generation tasks.

We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring cross-category level 6D pose estimation.

Segmenting 3D objects into parts is a long-standing challenge in computer vision. To overcome taxonomy constraints and generalize to unseen 3D objects, recent works turn to open-world part segmentation. These approaches typically transfer supervision from 2D foundation models, such as SAM, by lifting multi-view masks into 3D. However, this indirect paradigm fails to capture intrinsic geometry, leading to surface-only understanding, uncontrolled decomposition, and limited generalization. We present PartSAM, the first promptable part segmentation model trained natively on large-scale 3D data. Following the design philosophy of SAM, PartSAM employs an encoder-decoder architecture in which a triplane-based dual-branch encoder produces spatially structured tokens for scalable part-aware representation learning. To enable large-scale supervision, we further introduce a model-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that curates over five million 3D shape-part pairs from online assets, providing diverse and fine-grained labels. This combination of scalable architecture and diverse 3D data yields emergent open-world capabilities: with a single prompt, PartSAM achieves highly accurate part identification, and in a Segment-Every-Part mode, it automatically decomposes shapes into both surface and internal structures. Extensive experiments show that PartSAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins across multiple benchmarks, marking a decisive step toward foundation models for 3D part understanding.

Segments in computer vision are often defined by semantic considerations and are highly dependent on category-specific conventions. In contrast, developmental psychology suggests that humans perceive the world in terms of Spelke objects--groupings of physical things that reliably move together when acted on by physical forces. Spelke objects thus operate on category-agnostic causal motion relationships which potentially better support tasks like manipulation and planning. In this paper, we first benchmark the Spelke object concept, introducing the SpelkeBench dataset that contains a wide variety of well-defined Spelke segments in natural images. Next, to extract Spelke segments from images algorithmically, we build SpelkeNet, a class of visual world models trained to predict distributions over future motions. SpelkeNet supports estimation of two key concepts for Spelke object discovery: (1) the motion affordance map, identifying regions likely to move under a poke, and (2) the expected-displacement map, capturing how the rest of the scene will move. These concepts are used for "statistical counterfactual probing", where diverse "virtual pokes" are applied on regions of high motion-affordance, and the resultant expected displacement maps are used define Spelke segments as statistical aggregates of correlated motion statistics. We find that SpelkeNet outperforms supervised baselines like SegmentAnything (SAM) on SpelkeBench. Finally, we show that the Spelke concept is practically useful for downstream applications, yielding superior performance on the 3DEditBench benchmark for physical object manipulation when used in a variety of off-the-shelf object manipulation models.

We introduce an unsupervised feature learning approach that embeds 3D shape information into a single-view image representation. The main idea is a self-supervised training objective that, given only a single 2D image, requires all unseen views of the object to be predictable from learned features. We implement this idea as an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network. The network maps an input image of an unknown category and unknown viewpoint to a latent space, from which a deconvolutional decoder can best "lift" the image to its complete viewgrid showing the object from all viewing angles. Our class-agnostic training procedure encourages the representation to capture fundamental shape primitives and semantic regularities in a data-driven manner---without manual semantic labels. Our results on two widely-used shape datasets show 1) our approach successfully learns to perform "mental rotation" even for objects unseen during training, and 2) the learned latent space is a powerful representation for object recognition, outperforming several existing unsupervised feature learning methods.

Text-agent environments are typically modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), assuming that the simulator's latent state and transition dynamics are hidden from the agent. Yet little work has examined whether executable code can be induced to serve as a world model for prediction and planning under partial observability. We introduce PatchWorld, a gradient-free framework that turns offline trajectories into executable Python world models through counterexample-guided code repair. Instead of predicting the next observation with a black-box model, PatchWorld induces symbolic belief-state programs whose action updates can be inspected, replayed, and locally patched. Across seven AgentGym environments, PatchWorld-Simple achieves the highest code-based planning score among evaluated methods, reaching 76.4\% macro success in live one-step lookahead while invoking no LLM calls inside the world-model prediction module itself. We further find that a human-specified residual-memory bias improves surface observation fidelity but weakens decision utility. This exposes a tradeoff in executable world models, since improving observation fidelity can come at the expense of action-discriminative dynamics, and vice versa. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/PatchWorld.

POMDPs capture a broad class of decision making problems, but hardness results suggest that learning is intractable even in simple settings due to the inherent partial observability. However, in many realistic problems, more information is either revealed or can be computed during some point of the learning process. Motivated by diverse applications ranging from robotics to data center scheduling, we formulate a Hindsight Observable Markov Decision Process (HOMDP) as a POMDP where the latent states are revealed to the learner in hindsight and only during training. We introduce new algorithms for the tabular and function approximation settings that are provably sample-efficient with hindsight observability, even in POMDPs that would otherwise be statistically intractable. We give a lower bound showing that the tabular algorithm is optimal in its dependence on latent state and observation cardinalities.

Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) are fundamental to modern robotics, yet their optimal configuration remains unclear. Through systematic evaluation, we find that while DINO and iBOT outperform MAE across visuomotor control and perception tasks, they struggle when trained on non-(single-)object-centric (NOC) data--a limitation strongly correlated with their diminished ability to learn object-centric representations. This investigation indicates that the ability to form object-centric representations from the non-object-centric robotics dataset is the key to success for PVMs. Motivated by this discovery, we designed SlotMIM, a method that induces object-centric representations by introducing a semantic bottleneck to reduce the number of prototypes to encourage the emergence of objectness as well as cross-view consistency regularization for encouraging multiview invariance. Our experiments encompass pre-training on object-centric, scene-centric, web-crawled, and ego-centric data. Across all settings, our approach learns transferrable representations and achieves significant improvements over prior work in image recognition, scene understanding, and robot learning evaluations. When scaled up with million-scale datasets, our method also demonstrates superior data efficiency and scalability. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SlotMIM.

Object-centric representations promise a key property for few-shot learning: Rather than treating a scene as a single unit, a model can decompose it into individual object-level parts that can be matched and compared across different concepts. In practice, this potential is rarely realized. Continual learners either collapse scenes into global embeddings, or train with part-level matching objectives that tie representations too closely to seen patterns, leaving them unable to generalize to truly novel concepts. In this paper, we identify this fundamental structural conflict and pioneer a new paradigm that strictly decouples representation learning from compositional inference. Leveraging the inherent patch-level semantic geometry of self-supervised Vision Transformers (ViTs), our framework employs a dual-phase strategy. During training, slot representations are optimized entirely toward holistic class identity, preserving highly generalizable, object-level geometries. At inference, preserved slots are dynamically composed to match novel scenes. We demonstrate that this paradigm offers dual structural benefits: The frozen backbone naturally prevents representation drift, while our lightweight, holistic optimization preserves the features' capacity for novel-concept transfer. Extensive experiments validate this approach, achieving state-of-the-art unseen-concept generalization and minimal forgetting across standard continual learning benchmarks.

Applications in the field of augmented reality or robotics often require joint localisation and 6D pose estimation of multiple objects. However, most algorithms need one network per object class to be trained in order to provide the best results. Analysing all visible objects demands multiple inferences, which is memory and time-consuming. We present a new single-stage architecture called CASAPose that determines 2D-3D correspondences for pose estimation of multiple different objects in RGB images in one pass. It is fast and memory efficient, and achieves high accuracy for multiple objects by exploiting the output of a semantic segmentation decoder as control input to a keypoint recognition decoder via local class-adaptive normalisation. Our new differentiable regression of keypoint locations significantly contributes to a faster closing of the domain gap between real test and synthetic training data. We apply segmentation-aware convolutions and upsampling operations to increase the focus inside the object mask and to reduce mutual interference of occluding objects. For each inserted object, the network grows by only one output segmentation map and a negligible number of parameters. We outperform state-of-the-art approaches in challenging multi-object scenes with inter-object occlusion and synthetic training.

3D Reconstruction of moving articulated objects without additional information about object structure is a challenging problem. Current methods overcome such challenges by employing category-specific skeletal models. Consequently, they do not generalize well to articulated objects in the wild. We treat an articulated object as an unknown, semi-rigid skeletal structure surrounded by nonrigid material (e.g., skin). Our method simultaneously estimates the visible (explicit) representation (3D shapes, colors, camera parameters) and the implicit skeletal representation, from motion cues in the object video without 3D supervision. Our implicit representation consists of four parts. (1) Skeleton, which specifies how semi-rigid parts are connected. (2) black{Skinning Weights}, which associates each surface vertex with semi-rigid parts with probability. (3) Rigidity Coefficients, specifying the articulation of the local surface. (4) Time-Varying Transformations, which specify the skeletal motion and surface deformation parameters. We introduce an algorithm that uses physical constraints as regularization terms and iteratively estimates both implicit and explicit representations. Our method is category-agnostic, thus eliminating the need for category-specific skeletons, we show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art across standard video datasets.

A closed-set detector for autonomous driving must assign every object one of a fixed set of labels. On an object outside that set (a horse-drawn carriage, road debris, livestock on a rural road) it can only force a confident but wrong specific label or drop the object. Prior work in this series replaced the flat label set with a hierarchical taxonomy and a runtime abstraction rule, but evaluated it only on the boxes a closed detector already produces. This paper takes the layer open-world: we place taxonomic abstraction on top of class-agnostic region proposals so objects the closed detector never boxes can still be classified or flagged; we report a feasibility study of three open-world signals (class-agnostic segmentation, appearance-based out-of-distribution scoring, monocular depth) that shows why no single 2D cue suffices and how they compose; and we run the evaluation the earlier papers could not, a ground-truth leave-classes-out benchmark on real annotated objects. Holding out seven COCO classes and classifying their 235 ground-truth crops, a flat closed head emits a confident wrong specific label 100% of the time (37% of them in the wrong super-category, e.g. an animal named as a vehicle), whereas the hierarchical layer emits zero confident wrong specific labels and safely handles 94% of the objects (a correct super-category, or an explicit UNKNOWN OBSTACLE). We are explicit that this is a safety result, not a specificity one: the correct super-category is recovered only 26% of the time and the remaining 69% are conservatively flagged unknown. The contribution is an open-world perception layer that never makes a confident categorical mistake on an out-of-vocabulary object, together with an honest account of its cost.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have revolutionized the reconstruction of static scenes and objects in 3D, offering unprecedented quality. However, extending NeRFs to model dynamic objects or object articulations remains a challenging problem. Previous works have tackled this issue by focusing on part-level reconstruction and motion estimation for objects, but they often rely on heuristics regarding the number of moving parts or object categories, which can limit their practical use. In this work, we introduce LEIA, a novel approach for representing dynamic 3D objects. Our method involves observing the object at distinct time steps or "states" and conditioning a hypernetwork on the current state, using this to parameterize our NeRF. This approach allows us to learn a view-invariant latent representation for each state. We further demonstrate that by interpolating between these states, we can generate novel articulation configurations in 3D space that were previously unseen. Our experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our method in articulating objects in a manner that is independent of the viewing angle and joint configuration. Notably, our approach outperforms previous methods that rely on motion information for articulation registration.

Object hallucination has been an Achilles' heel which hinders the broader applications of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Object hallucination refers to the phenomenon that the LVLMs claim non-existent objects in the image. To mitigate the object hallucinations, instruction tuning and external model-based detection methods have been proposed, which either require large-scare computational resources or depend on the detection result of external models. However, there remains an under-explored field to utilize the LVLM itself to alleviate object hallucinations. In this work, we adopt the intuition that the LVLM tends to respond logically consistently for existent objects but inconsistently for hallucinated objects. Therefore, we propose a Logical Closed Loop-based framework for Object Hallucination Detection and Mitigation, namely LogicCheckGPT. In specific, we devise logical consistency probing to raise questions with logical correlations, inquiring about attributes from objects and vice versa. Whether their responses can form a logical closed loop serves as an indicator of object hallucination. As a plug-and-play method, it can be seamlessly applied to all existing LVLMs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks across four LVLMs have demonstrated significant improvements brought by our method, indicating its effectiveness and generality.