#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Occlusion for Free: Detecting Occlusion from the Disagreement Between Two Monocular Distance Cues
Chibueze Praise Onyenweaku, Toyibat Adele, Sikirulahi Opeyemi Abdulkareem and 1 more
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
From Pixels to Actions - Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies
Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Penghao Wu and 14 more
Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths. This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it. More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation. Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control. Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Perceptive Humanoid Motion from Simulation
Siyuan Hu, Abulikemu Abuduweili, Yue Meng and 5 more
Humanoid robots have the potential to automate a wide range of physical tasks. Progress toward generalist humanoid autonomy, however, remains constrained by a data bottleneck: mapping pixels and free-form language to low-level joint commands requires paired supervision, and no corpus of such data exists at sufficiently large scale. Some approaches rely on human teleoperation and wearable capture devices, which require at least an hour of human time to produce an hour of data. We present HALO, a humanoid autonomy system powered by a pipeline that synthesizes vision-language-motion data across a thousand procedurally generated homes. The corpus scales with compute rather than human labor. HALO acquires a repertoire of physical skills, including sitting on chairs, navigating to named objects, stepping sideways through half-open doors, crouching and crawling beneath tables, and pushing boxes. It orchestrates these skills to solve composite, long-horizon tasks. Without ever seeing a real home during training, HALO transfers zero-shot to the physical world, achieving a 91% success rate across 360 trials in six unmapped real-world environments. See https://apple-aiml-research.github.io/ml-halo/ for code and videos.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation
Ji Pei
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Trainspotting: Learning Object-Centric 3D Reconstruction from Found Photos
Hanyu Chen, Noah Snavely
State-of-the-art feedforward reconstruction models perform poorly on in-the-wild object-centric photo collections. They are trained largely on single-session object captures whose images vary in viewpoint while the object and its environment remain nearly fixed. Public photo archives contain a different form of multi-view data. They hold found photos of the same object or design: photos taken independently by many people across years, environments, cameras, and sometimes physical units. In this work, we introduce Trainspotting, a dataset of 12,068 objects and 311,886 photos from Wikimedia Commons. We reconstruct each object to recover camera poses, multi-view stereo depth, and object masks. We categorize the objects into three regimes: objects fixed at one site, objects that move between sites, and designs shared by many physical units. Evaluating recent feedforward reconstruction models on Trainspotting shows that they fail most severely in the last two regimes. Fine-tuning VGGT-$Ω$ on Trainspotting significantly improves camera pose, depth, and 3D geometry on held-out objects. We observe similar improvements on the independent NAVI in-the-wild benchmark, which contains photos of each object in different environments. Performance on conventional benchmarks remains largely unchanged.