#01Aug 3, 2026
cs.RO
TravKAN: Fast and Interpretable Nonlinear Traversability Analysis with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Daniel Fusaro, Simone Mosco, Wanmeng Li and 1 more
Traversability analysis is a fundamental capability for autonomous mobile robots operating in unstructured environments. While modern machine learning approaches such as deep neural networks and gradient-boosted trees achieve strong predictive performance, they lack interpretability and provide limited insight into the underlying terrain-robot interaction dynamics. In this paper, we propose TravKAN, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-based framework for fast, scalable, and interpretable traversability estimation. TravKAN represents multivariate decision functions through compositions of learnable univariate functions, enabling compact architectures and symbolic extraction of analytic expressions after training. In addition, we introduce a novel set of handcrafted features derived from the reflectivity channel of LiDAR sensors. To the best of our knowledge, reflectivity has not been systematically exploited for handcrafted traversability descriptors, despite its potential to capture material and surface properties complementary to geometric cues. We evaluate TravKAN on public, real-world urban and off-road datasets and compare it against strong baselines. TravKAN achieves strong performance across all metrics, outperforming conventional deep models and approaching the performance of XGBoost. TravKAN-Lite, i.e., TravKAN's symbolic representation, reveals meaningful nonlinear feature interactions and provides a compact, deployment-friendly, and fast analytic model. Ablation studies further show the robustness of our method to architectural variations and quantify the contribution of the proposed reflectivity-based features. These properties make TravKAN attractive for robotic systems requiring transparency, real-time computational efficiency, and interpretability in safety-critical decision-making.
#02Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Fermat Active Laplace Learning for Semi-Supervised Hyperspectral Image Classification
Vutichart Buranasiri, James M. Murphy
Two active learning algorithms for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification are proposed that combine density-aware Fermat distances with Poisson-reweighted harmonic label propagation. Our methods actively query points using an uncertainty-based acquisition function, extending Poisson ReWeighted Laplace Learning (PWLL). Our first algorithm, Fermat Active Laplace Learning (FALL), builds an affinity matrix using Fermat distances between all data points. Then, PWLL is run with a diagonal perturbation using the minimum-norm acquisition function. In contrast, Approximate FALL (A-FALL) computes Fermat distances between each data point and landmark pixels selected via farthest-point sampling and constructs the affinity matrix using landmark multidimensional scaling. After several query rounds, A-FALL selects the Fermat exponent $p$ using a leave-one-out cross-validation variant. FALL and A-FALL leverage Fermat distances and subsequent harmonic label propagation to provide a density-aware estimation of the data manifold, improving labeling accuracy. Experiments on Salinas A and Pavia show the effectiveness of FALL and the scalability of A-FALL to large HSI scenes.
#03Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Learning to Tessellate: Point Cloud Generation via Recursive Spectral Partitioning
Monan Sun, Bangzhen Liu, Huaidong Zhang and 1 more
Autoregressive models have emerged as an effective paradigm for point cloud generation. However, most existing approaches rely on heuristic tokenization strategies, such as spatial sorting or stochastic downsampling, which often disrupt intrinsic point cloud topology and weaken the structural coherence of the generated shapes. In this paper, we present PointRSP, an autoregressive framework that reformulates point cloud generation as a topology-preserving tessellation process via recursive spectral partitioning. Instead of constructing token sequences heuristically, we introduce a topology-aware partitioning autoencoder that decomposes an unstructured point cloud into a non-balanced binary tree through a hybrid recursive spectral partitioning strategy. This hierarchical representation provides a deterministic geometric blueprint that preserves topological relationships while capturing multiscale structural dependencies within a quantized latent space. To synthesize shapes in this space, we propose a dual-stream cascaded generator that jointly models structural evolution and feature synthesis. In addition, we design a geometry-calibrated positional encoding mechanism that anchors latent embeddings using multi-scale structural centers, which stabilizes cascaded generation during the early stages of structural formation. Extensive experiments show that PointRSP achieves state-of-the-art performance in generation quality and diversity, demonstrating strong generalization across complex 3D topologies.
#04Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Action-grounded tissue affordance enables anticipatory auto-framing that lowers surgeon cognitive workload during laparoscopic surgery
Jiayu Gu, Yiwei Wang, Jie Zhang and 14 more
Computational attention models could help surgeons manage the visual demands of laparoscopy, but they require dense spatial labels that are difficult to obtain because surgical intent is highly specialized and tacit. Here, we introduce DiffeoAfford, an action-grounded tissue affordance framework that retrospectively derives visual attention supervision from completed surgical procedures. By combining diffeomorphism-constrained tissue tracking with instrument trajectory analysis, DiffeoAfford generates affordance hotspot labels without manual per-frame annotation. A real-time prediction model trained on these labels anticipates relevant surgical regions and enables AffordView, an assistive auto-framing system for laparoscopic visualization. The proposed framework aligns with expert annotations and intraoperative surgeon gaze, and reduces surgeon cognitive workload during real-world evaluations using subjective, physiological, and behavioral measures.
#05Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Context-Aware Mixture of Domain Experts for Bodily Expression of Emotion in the Wild
Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi, David Masip
The same body posture can convey entirely different emotions depending on its surrounding context, yet most methods for recognising bodily emotions treat scene and object cues as auxiliary feature augmentations rather than as structured priors over the plausibility of emotions. We introduce the Context-Aware Mixture of Domain Experts (CA-MoDE) for bodily emotion recognition. CA-MoDE incorporates dedicated scene and object experts to generate soft distributions over emotion categories conditioned on their respective domains. These domain-conditioned soft predictions serve as structured contextual priors that modulate the body expert's predictions at the distributional level rather than at the feature level. To fuse these multi-domain signals, we propose a task-tailored max-endorsement gating strategy that selects the strongest contextual signal across experts for each emotion dimension. Our gating strategy mitigates the signal dilution that typically occurs when conflicting or uninformative context distributions are averaged. CA-MoDE achieves an Emotion Recognition Score of 0.3269 on the Body Language Database. By outperforming existing temporal models using only single still images, our framework demonstrates that explicitly modelling structured spatial context can serve as a complementary discriminative proxy for the behavioural dynamics typically captured by video.