#01Oct 27, 2026
cs.RO
Pushing Dexterity and Safety for In-Hand Object Pose Reaching That Works Remarkably Well
Ian Chuang, Hiya Shah, Vamsi Chilamkur and 2 more
Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is the next frontier of robotics, yet learned hand skills remain limited to simple grasps or basic repeated motions, such as rotating an object. As robots attempt more demanding in-hand maneuvers, safety, such as not dropping the object, becomes critical, yet it is rarely measured. We study in-hand object pose reaching, a task that demands diverse and difficult grasps: moving an object to almost any position and orientation within reach of the fingers, at any wrist orientation, through long sequences of consecutive goals. We present a recipe for training such policies for a LEAP hand in simulation without human data, built on a range of insights, from diverse resets and goals via generated grasp datasets to an adaptive friction curriculum. With careful system identification, the policies transfer zero-shot to the real hand, using either motion capture or a single wrist-mounted depth camera, and prove remarkably capable and robust. On top of the task policy, we add a learned residual safety filter with adjustable conservativeness, letting us tune the balance between performance and safety and greatly reduce object drops. In 13.3 hours of real-robot evaluation over 4,800 unseen goals across 4 objects and diverse wrist orientations, the state-based policy reaches 95.2% of goals within 2 cm and 0.4 rad, and the filter cuts its drops by 75% while still reaching 91.5% of goals. The policies can also spin a lightbulb held in an arbitrary pose, reach out-of-distribution goals, withstand fast arm motion and perturbations, and, needing only a wrist camera, serve as portable skills such as screwing in a lightbulb. We release the full recipe as a platform for studying performance, reliability, and safety in high-dimensional dexterous systems. Videos and more are available at https://ian-chuang.github.io/dexsafe/.
#02Oct 27, 2026
cs.LG
Pneuma: A Large-Scale Real-World Time Series Benchmark for Commercial Aircraft Predictive Maintenance
Jiafeng Lin, Yutian Zhang, Huan Zhang and 5 more
Predictive maintenance is vital for commercial aviation, yet progress remains hindered by the lack of public, large-scale real-world datasets. As a result, most methods are developed and evaluated on proprietary data, limiting reproducibility. We introduce Pneuma, the first publicly available large-scale benchmark for predictive maintenance using onboard time series from in-service commercial aircraft. Built around bleed air systems, Pneuma contains over 920 million multivariate time steps across four aircraft types and 9 verified fault scenarios, directly aligned with real maintenance logs. The dataset exhibits key real-world challenges, including substantial class imbalance, subtle fault evolution patterns, and significant variance across aircraft configurations. We structure the benchmark around three tasks: multivariate forecasting, supervised fault classification, and unsupervised anomaly detection, with labels derived from actual maintenance records. Under unified settings, we evaluate over 25 models from four methodological families on 9 carefully curated subsets. The results reveal that even strong contemporary models struggle with subtle fault signatures. Further analyses show consistent gains from additional in-context examples and multivariate inference, while forecasting quality is strongly associated with anomaly detection performance. Together, these findings provide practical insights into effectively modeling complex real-world aviation time series. We hope Pneuma will serve as a rigorous and reproducible foundation for advancing data-driven predictive maintenance toward real-world deployment in commercial aviation.
#03Oct 27, 2026
cs.CV
A note on data-efficient finetuning of vision foundation models
Niclas Hergenröther, Antonio Orvieto
Adapting foundation models to a new task within or beyond the training domain is the de facto standard for building specialized machine learning models. Recently, Visual Prompting (VP) has emerged as a promising technique for efficient knowledge transfer. As new foundation model families~(like Mamba) get introduced and VP pipelines such as AutoVP reach greater maturity, we find a growing need for a systematic evaluation of current approaches. In this work, we assess the performance of the latest models, comparing them to earlier architectures and alternative fine-tuning methods, to better understand the progress, challenges and opportunities in the field of efficient fine-tuning under resource limitations. Towards this goal, this paper provides a concise empirical overview of the interactions among foundation model families (Attention-, Convolution-, and Mamba-based) and transfer paradigms: VP, Linear Probing (LP), Full Fine-tuning (FFT) and Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our work builds up on previous findings by broadening the selection of evaluated models and techniques while tuning hyperparameters. In the interest of delivering practical guidelines for the user, we also explore application of prevalent regularization techniques to boost performance in the context of VP.
#04Oct 27, 2026
cs.CV
Zero-Shot Multimodal Event Spotting in Soccer Broadcasts
Sadia Kamal, Mahmudul Hasan, Tony Braskich
Automatic soccer event spotting supports highlight generation, video indexing, and sports analytics, but existing methods depend on large annotated datasets and soccer-specific training. We present a zero-shot framework that detects, classifies, and temporally localizes events in full-length soccer broadcasts without task-specific parameter training. Each match is segmented into overlapping clips represented by a compact visual storyboard and the aligned commentary transcript, which a general-purpose multimodal model processes jointly. On three manually annotated matches containing 130 events, the best configuration achieves 72.0% F1@5s and outperforms SoccerNet-trained CALF and NetVLAD++ in a cross-dataset setting, while the storyboard representation reduces inference cost by 72% compared with individual frames. We further analyze the effects of model family, input representation, and prompt optimization, and introduce an evidence-grounded excitement-scoring stage that ranks detected events with natural-language explanations for highlight selection.
#05Oct 27, 2026
cs.LG
EnvSched: Environment-Aware Scheduling for Rollout-Efficient Agent Reinforcement Learning
Sihan Yang, Weichen Bai, Ruichuan An and 9 more
As executable environments for language agents scale, generating and verifying their rollouts becomes increasingly expensive. Under finite rollout budgets, this raises an important question: can data management at the environment level make agentic reinforcement learning (RL) more efficient by organizing, evaluating, and scheduling task instances together with the environments that determine their tools, states, transitions, and verification? To address this question, we introduce EnvSched (Environment-aware Scheduling), an online scheduler that learns from rollout history. EnvSched assigns scheduling value through two complementary modeling choices: exploitation prioritizes tasks likely to provide informative reward differences, while coverage spreads each batch across underobserved environments and interaction patterns. EnvSched organizes environment--task pairs as nodes in a dual-relation graph, with within-environment edges capturing task semantics and shared tool, state, and verifier structure, and cross-environment edges capturing abstract execution and reward topology. By propagating historical rollout statistics along both edge types, it predicts within-task reward variance. These predictions guide a scheduler that allocates each batch to tasks with high predicted reward variance and underobserved environments and tasks. Environment quotas and a similarity penalty further limit concentration and redundancy, yielding informative and diverse batches without additional pilot rollouts. In RL on Qwen3-8B, EnvSched achieves an average score of 48.81 across BFCL-v3, tau-Bench, and ACEBench-Agent after 40 training steps, exceeding the highest score attained by random task selection after 120 steps. It also improves downstream performance across model sizes at the same training budget.