#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Edge-Assisted Crowdsensing for Explainable Cyclist Safety Perception
Hongsen Cao, Chia-Yen Chiang, Mona Jaber and 2 more
Cyclist fatality rates remain high despite policy support for active travel, and autonomous vehicles add complexity to mixed traffic. Neither crash statistics nor multi-model detection pipelines scale to continuous monitoring of perceived safety along a route. We present an edge-assisted crowdsensing system: handlebar cameras supply street-level frames, a vision-language model (VLM) turns each frame into structured traffic attributes through a single prompt, and an explainable boosting machine (EBM) combines them with OpenStreetMap road infrastructure and on-bike kinematics to predict a crowdsourced 1-9 safety score. Extraction belongs at the network edge: the fastest self-hosted model needs 2.49 s per frame and scoring takes 0.4 ms on a CPU. On 1,362 annotated frames from two London routes, the EBM regressor reaches 72.2 percent binary accuracy and a mean absolute error of 1.011 under five-fold cross-validation. It is within one accuracy point of black-box ensembles. Its per-feature shape functions give exact attribution: physical lane separation is worth +0.97 rating points, a painted lane +0.70 and a construction site -0.65. Planners can therefore price an infrastructure change in rating points, and the results enter cost-benefit analysis directly. We also report inter-annotator agreement (alpha = 0.4695), an attribute audit, and a sensitivity analysis linking attribute error to accuracy. With re-encoding, a 20 s sampling interval serves 1,000 riders at 54 Mbit/s at a cost of 1.4 accuracy points, making continuous monitoring practical.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
VisionSIM: Beyond Idealized Sensors - A Multi-Modal Simulator for Robot Perception
Sacha Jungerman, Kaustubh Sadekar, Avery Gump and 6 more
Robotic perception increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensor suites combining cameras with emerging modalities (event, SPAD, iToF/dToF, and thermal). Yet existing simulators idealize these sensors, hiding critical modality-specific failure modes that limit real-world deployment. We present VisionSIM, a unified, physically grounded simulation platform that elevates sensor realism to a first-class concern by modeling the raw physical measurement process for diverse conventional and emerging modalities. We expose fine-grained control over physical sensor parameters, reproducing failure modes overlooked by general-purpose simulators: pileup and glare for LiDAR; phase wrapping, saturation, and motion artifacts for iToF; refractory drops for event cameras; and history-dependent emission for thermal cameras. This enables principled cross-modality comparison on identical scenes and trajectories. We release the platform and a large indoor dataset with synchronized raw measurements and rich ground-truth annotations.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Hierarchical Incremental Beta Splatting for Online Reconstruction
Linus Franke
Online 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs a scene during capture: each keyframe spawns primitives once and refines them for only a few dozen iterations, leaving little chance to fix poor initialization or missing detail. Gaussians are also inherently soft, needing many overlaps for solid surfaces. We present Hierarchical Incremental Beta Splatting (HIBS), which brings beta kernels to incremental reconstruction. Their shape parameter interpolates between a soft, Gaussian-like profile and a flat-topped, near-opaque surfel, acting as a confidence dial for geometry. Our confidence-aware spawning uses geometric observability and multi-view depth agreement to initialize both opacity and shape, producing solid primitives where geometry is verifiable and soft, correctable primitives where it is not. As online densification, error-driven relocation recycles stale primitives into photometric-error hotspots. Bounded beta kernel support enables exact tile culling and faster rasterization, and a closed-form, shape-preserving merging formulation provides a level-of-detail (LOD) hierarchy for fast optimization and real-time rendering. On Mip-NeRF 360 in the on-the-fly protocol, HIBS improves PSNR by up to 0.8 dB while reducing optimization time by up to 40%. Project page: https://linus-franke.com/hibs/
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
La-JEPA: Compact Robot Policies with Latent World Modeling
Mateo Clémente, George Z. Xue, Amin Abyaneh and 5 more
World-action models adapt pretrained video generators, and vision-language-action models build on pretrained vision-language backbones; both tie policy architecture and inference cost to large transformers designed for generation rather than control. It remains unclear how much these generation-oriented choices affect control. In this work, we introduce Latent Action JEPA (La-JEPA), a compact world-action model whose policy transformer is trained from scratch in the feature space of a pretrained V-JEPA 2.1 encoder. Following Fast-WAM, La-JEPA learns to predict future features jointly with actions during training and generates only actions at inference. Among policies without embodied pretraining, La-JEPA achieves state-of-the-art performance in clean and randomized RoboTwin 2.0 scenes and on LIBERO-Plus with correct instructions, while using far fewer parameters than the strongest competing policies. It runs substantially faster than Fast-WAM at comparable performance and outperforms the closest JEPA-based methods, LeapBot-WA and JEPA-WAM, on LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0 without their pretrained policy backbones. On four real-robot tasks, its average success is comparable to pi0.5 and above non-embodied-pretrained baselines. Through a design study of the choices behind La-JEPA, we show that JEPA features outperform video VAE latents, most clearly out of distribution, and that training-time future prediction choices significantly impact the policy even when future prediction is skipped at inference. We correct the LIBERO-Plus instructions, as the officially released evaluator corrupts them for most variants, and re-evaluate several strong open baselines. Without a generative pretrained policy backbone, La-JEPA is better and faster than far larger policies, suggesting that robot foundation models may benefit from architectures designed for control rather than inherited from generation.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
InstantHand: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Animatable Hand Avatar Reconstruction from a Single Image
Chanho Kim, Muhammad Salman Ali, Kyeonghwan Gwak and 4 more
Hand avatar reconstruction typically relies on multi-view capture or per-subject optimization, limiting its scalability. We introduce InstantHand, a feed-forward framework that constructs an animatable 3D Gaussian hand avatar from a single image using off-the-shelf MANO, camera, and mask estimates, without test-time optimization. Image-averaged losses provide insufficient supervision for alpha leakage, which thickens thin finger contours. To address this issue, we propose a Soft Alpha Band regularizer that concentrates supervision on silhouette boundaries. Furthermore, colors regressed from image features can drift toward a learned prior even in observed regions. Our Reliability-gated Appearance Transfer preserves observed appearance by transferring source colors according to each Gaussian's rendering contribution, while completing unobserved regions using the learned prior conditioned on global source identity. InstantHand constructs an avatar in 2.84 seconds and renders at 161 FPS, matching per-subject-optimized baselines on InterHand2.6M and remaining competitive in zero-shot evaluation on HanCo.