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 non-Markovian settings, critical decision cues lie in object histories rather than the current scene. Without persistent memory of prior interactions (what was used, where it was placed, or how it 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 policies.

We introduce a theoretical framework for diffusion-based image editing by formulating it as a reverse-time bridge modeling problem. This approach modifies the backward process of a pretrained diffusion model to construct a bridge that converges to an implicit distribution associated with the editing target at time 0. Building on this frame-work, we propose h-Edit, a novel editing method that utilizes Doob’s h-transform and Langevin Monte Carlo to decompose the update of an intermediate edited sample into two components: a "reconstruction" term and an "editing" term. This decomposition provides flexibility, allowing the reconstruction term to be computed via existing inversion techniques and enabling the combination of multiple editing terms to handle complex editing tasks. To our knowledge, h-Edit is the first training-free method capable of performing simultaneous text-guided and reward-model-based editing. Extensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, show that h-Edit outperforms state-of-the-art base-lines in terms of editing effectiveness and faithfulness.

Diffusion bridges have shown potential in paired image-to-image (I2I) translation tasks. However, existing methods are limited by their unidirectional nature, requiring separate models for forward and reverse translations. This not only doubles the computational cost but also restricts their practicality. In this work, we introduce the Bidirectional Diffusion Bridge Model (BDBM), a scalable approach that facilitates bidirectional translation between two coupled distributions using a single network. BDBM leverages the Chapman-Kolmogorov Equation for bridges, enabling it to model data distribution shifts across timesteps in both forward and backward directions by exploiting the interchangeability of the initial and target timesteps within this framework. Notably, when the marginal distribution given endpoints is Gaussian, BDBM's transition kernels in both directions possess analytical forms, allowing for efficient learning with a single network. We demonstrate the connection between BDBM and existing bridge methods, such as Doob's h-transform and variational approaches, and highlight its advantages. Extensive experiments on high-resolution I2I translation tasks demonstrate that BDBM not only enables bidirectional translation with minimal additional cost but also outperforms state-of-the-art bridge models. Our source code is available at https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM.

Affordance detection and pose estimation are of great importance in many robotic applications. Their combination helps the robot gain an enhanced manipulation capability, in which the generated pose can facilitate the corresponding affordance task. Previous methods for affodance-pose joint learning are limited to a predefined set of affordances, thus limiting the adaptability of robots in real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a new method for language-conditioned affordance-pose joint learning in 3D point clouds. Given a 3D point cloud object, our method detects the affordance region and generates appropriate 6-DoF poses for any unconstrained affordance label. Our method consists of an open-vocabulary affordance detection branch and a language-guided diffusion model that generates 6-DoF poses based on the affordance text. We also introduce a new high-quality dataset for the task of language-driven affordance-pose joint learning. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method works effectively on a wide range of open-vocabulary affordances and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. In addition, we illustrate the usefulness of our method in real-world robotic applications. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://3DAPNet.github.io.

Affordance detection presents intricate challenges and has a wide range of robotic applications. Previous works have faced limitations such as the complexities of 3D object shapes, the wide range of potential affordances on real-world objects, and the lack of open-vocabulary support for affordance understanding. In this paper, we introduce a new open-vocabulary affordance detection method in 3D point clouds, leveraging knowledge distillation and text-point correlation. Our approach employs pre-trained 3D models through knowledge distillation to enhance feature extraction and semantic understanding in 3D point clouds. We further introduce a new text-point correlation method to learn the semantic links between point cloud features and open-vocabulary labels. The intensive experiments show that our approach outperforms previous works and adapts to new affordance labels and unseen objects. Notably, our method achieves the improvement of 7.96% mIOU score compared to the baselines. Furthermore, it offers real-time inference which is well-suitable for robotic manipulation applications.

Visual navigation, a foundational aspect of Embodied AI (E-AI) and robotics has been extensively studied in the past few years. While many 3D simulators have been introduced for the visual navigation tasks, scarcely works have combined human dynamics, creating the gap between simulation and real-world applications. Furthermore, current 3D simulators incorporating human dynamics have several limitations, particularly in terms of computational efficiency, which is a promise of modern simulators. To overcome these issues, we introduce HabiCrowd, the new standard benchmark for crowd-aware visual navigation that includes a crowd dynamics model with diverse human settings into photorealistic environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposed human dynamics model achieves state-of-the-art performance in collision avoidance while exhibiting superior computational efficiency compared to its counterparts. We leverage HabiCrowd to conduct several comprehensive studies on crowd-aware visual navigation tasks and human-robot interactions. The source code and data can be found at https://habicrowd.github.io/.

We propose a novel approach for domain generalisation (DG) leveraging risk distributions to characterise domains, thereby achieving domain invariance. In our findings, risk distributions effectively highlight differences between training domains and reveal their inherent complexities. In testing, we may observe similar, or potentially intensifying in magnitude, divergences between risk distributions. Hence, we propose a compelling proposition: Minimising the divergences between risk distributions across training domains leads to robust invariance for DG. The key rationale behind this concept is that a model, trained on domain-invariant or stable features, may consistently produce similar risk distributions across various domains. Building upon this idea, we propose Risk Distribution Matching (RDM). Using the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance, RDM aims to minimise the variance of risk distributions across training domains. However, when the number of domains increases, the direct optimisation of variance leads to linear growth in MMD computations, resulting in inefficiency. Instead, we propose an approximation that requires only one MMD computation, by aligning just two distributions: that of the worst-case domain and the aggregated distribution from all domains. Notably, this method empirically outperforms optimising distributional variance while being computationally more efficient. Unlike conventional DG matching algorithms, RDM stands out for its enhanced efficacy by concentrating on scalar risk distributions, sidestepping the pitfalls of high-dimensional challenges seen in feature or gradient matching. Our extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that RDM shows superior generalisation capability over state-of-the-art DG methods.

In Class-Incremental Learning (Class-IL), deep neural networks often fail to learn a sequence of classes incrementally due to catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon arising from the absence of exposure to old knowledge. To alleviate this issue, conventional rehearsal methods , such as experience replay, store a limited number of old exemplars and then interleave with the current data for joint learning and rehearsal. However, the networks following this training scheme might not successfully reduce forgetting due to the lack of direct consideration of relations between samples of previously learned and new classes. Drawing inspiration from how humans learn by noticing the similarities and differences between classes, we propose a novel Class-IL framework called Relational Replay (RR). RR learns and recalls relations between images across all classes over time. To ensure these relations remain intrinsic and robust to forgetting, we incorporate causal reasoning to RR, resulting in Causal Relational Replay (CRR). CRR analyzes these relations using a causality perspective, aiming to identify intrinsic relations rooted in the images’ semantic features, serving as the cause of these relations. Our proposed method shows a competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art rehearsal methods in Class-IL with clear and consistent improvements in the majority of settings on standard benchmark datasets.

Affordance detection is a challenging problem with a wide variety of robotic applications. Traditional affordance detection methods are limited to a predefined set of affordance labels, hence potentially restricting the adaptability of intelligent robots in complex and dynamic environments. In this paper, we present the Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection (OpenAD) method, which is capable of detecting an unbounded number of affordances in 3D point clouds. By simultaneously learning the affordance text and the point feature, OpenAD successfully exploits the semantic relationships between affordances. Therefore, our proposed method enables zero-shot detection and can be able to detect previously unseen affordances without a single annotation example. Intensive experimental results show that OpenAD works effectively on a wide range of affordance detection setups and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we demonstrate the practicality of the proposed OpenAD in real-world robotic applications with a fast inference speed. Our project is available at https://openad2023.github.io.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation aims to build a model that can generalise well on an unseen target domain using knowledge from multiple source domains. To this end, the model should seek the causal dependence between inputs and labels, which may be determined by the semantics of inputs and remain invariant across domains. However, statistical or non-causal methods often cannot capture this dependence and perform poorly due to not considering spurious correlations learnt from model training via unobserved confounders. A well-known existing causal inference method like back-door adjustment cannot be applied to remove spurious correlations as it requires the observation of confounders. In this paper, we propose a novel method that effectively deals with hidden confounders by successfully implementing front-door adjustment (FA). FA requires the choice of a mediator, which we regard as the semantic information of images that helps access the causal mechanism without the need for observing confounders. Further, we propose to estimate the combination of the mediator with other observed images in the front-door formula via style transfer algorithms. Our use of style transfer to estimate FA is novel and sensible for OOD generalisation, which we justify by extensive experimental results on widely used benchmark datasets.

Scene synthesis is a challenging problem with several industrial applications. Recently, substantial efforts have been directed to synthesize the scene using human motions, room layouts, or spatial graphs as the input. However, few studies have addressed this problem from multiple modalities, especially combining text prompts. In this paper, we propose a language-driven scene synthesis task, which is a new task that integrates text prompts, human motion, and existing objects for scene synthesis. Unlike other single-condition synthesis tasks, our problem involves multiple conditions and requires a strategy for processing and encoding them into a unified space. To address the challenge, we present a multi-conditional diffusion model, which differs from the implicit unification approach of other diffusion literature by explicitly predicting the guiding points for the original data distribution. We demonstrate that our approach is theoretically supportive. The intensive experiment results illustrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks and enables natural scene editing applications. The source code and dataset can be accessed at https://lang-scene-synth.github.io/.