Related papers: Hierarchical Spatial Proximity Reasoning for Visio…

Humans have a natural ability to perform semantic associations with the surrounding objects in the environment. This allows them to create a mental map of the environment, allowing them to navigate on-demand when given linguistic…

One recent promising approach to the Visual Place Recognition (VPR) problem has been to fuse the place recognition estimates of multiple complementary VPR techniques using methods such as SRAL and multi-process fusion. These approaches come…

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a core component in computer vision, typically formulated as an image retrieval task for localization, mapping, and navigation. In this work, we instead study VPR as an image pair retrieval front-end for…

With the development of smart cities, the demand for continuous pedestrian navigation in large-scale urban environments has significantly increased. While global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) provide low-cost and reliable positioning…

Robot planning in partially observable domains is difficult, because a robot needs to estimate the current state and plan actions at the same time. When the domain includes many objects, reasoning about the objects and their relationships…

In recent years, robots and autonomous systems have become increasingly integral to our daily lives, offering solutions to complex problems across various domains. Their application in search and rescue (SAR) operations, however, presents…

Localization is an essential capability for mobile robots. A rapidly growing field of research in this area is Visual Place Recognition (VPR), which is the ability to recognize previously seen places in the world based solely on images.…

Low-overhead visual place recognition (VPR) is a highly active research topic. Mobile robotics applications often operate under low-end hardware, and even more hardware capable systems can still benefit from freeing up onboard system…

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task where agents must decide how to move through a 3D environment to reach a goal by grounding natural language instructions to the visual surroundings. One of the problems of the VLN task is data…

Discovery and learning of an underlying spatiotemporal hierarchy in sequential data is an important topic for machine learning. Despite this, little work has been done to explore hierarchical generative models that can flexibly adapt their…

The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has introduced new paradigms for global image geo-localization through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning-driven inference. However, RAG methods are constrained by retrieval…

In this work, we propose a modular approach for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task by decomposing the problem into four sub-modules that use state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in a…

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a realistic but challenging task that requires an agent to locate the target region using verbal and visual cues. While significant advancements have been achieved recently, there are still two broad…

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in semantic tasks, they frequently lack the "spatial sense" essential for sophisticated geometric reasoning. Current models typically suffer from exorbitant modality-alignment costs and…

Reliable spatial reasoning remains a core bottleneck for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing mainstream training paradigms for spatial reasoning largely rely on outcome alignment or process imitation, lacking explicit constraints on the…

A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon.…

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large…

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable agents to navigate to a target location based on language instructions. Traditional VLN often follows a close-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same style of the input…

In this work, we propose HE-VPR, a visual place recognition (VPR) framework that incorporates height estimation. Our system decouples height inference from place recognition, allowing both modules to share a frozen DINOv2 backbone. Two…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is vital for applications such as disaster response, logistics delivery, and urban inspection. However, existing methods often struggle with insufficient multimodal fusion,…