Modeling and Control Framework for Autonomous Space Manipulator Handover Operations

Autonomous space robotics is poised to play a vital role in future space missions, particularly for In-space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM). A key capability in such missions is the Robot-to-Robot (R2R) handover of mission-critical objects. This work presents a dynamic model of a dual-arm space manipulator system and compares various tracking control laws. The key contributions of this work are the development of a cooperative manipulator dynamic model and the comparative analysis of control laws to support autonomous R2R handovers in ISAM scenarios.

Adapting Biological Reflexes for Dynamic Reorientation in Space Manipulator Systems

Robotic arms mounted on spacecraft, known as space manipulator systems (SMSs), are critical for enabling on-orbit assembly, satellite servicing, and debris removal. However, controlling these systems in microgravity remains a significant challenge due to the dynamic coupling between the manipulator and the spacecraft base. This study explores the potential of using biological inspiration to address this issue, focusing on animals, particularly lizards, that exhibit mid-air righting reflexes. Based on similarities between SMSs and these animals in terms of behavior, morphology, and environment, their air-righting motion trajectories are extracted from high-speed video recordings using computer vision techniques. These trajectories are analyzed within a multi-objective optimization framework to identify the key behavioral goals and assess their relative importance. The resulting motion profiles are then applied as reference trajectories for SMS control, with baseline controllers used to track them. The findings provide a step toward translating evolved animal behaviors into interpretable, adaptive control strategies for space robotics, with implications for improving maneuverability and robustness in future missions.

Visually Guided Decoding: Gradient-Free Hard Prompt Inversion with Language Models

Text-to-image generative models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have revolutionized visual content creation across various applications, including advertising, personalized media, and design prototyping. However, crafting effective textual prompts to guide these models remains challenging, often requiring extensive trial and error. Existing prompt inversion approaches, such as soft and hard prompt techniques, are not so effective due to the limited interpretability and incoherent prompt generation. To address these issues, we propose Visually Guided Decoding (VGD), a gradient-free approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) and CLIP-based guidance to generate coherent and semantically aligned prompts. In essence, VGD utilizes the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce human-readable prompts. Further, by employing CLIP scores to ensure alignment with user-specified visual concepts, VGD enhances the interpretability, generalization, and flexibility of prompt generation without the need for additional training. Our experiments demonstrate that VGD outperforms existing prompt inversion techniques in generating understandable and contextually relevant prompts, facilitating more intuitive and controllable interactions with text-to-image models.

Study on Real-Time Road Surface Reconstruction Using Stereo Vision

Road surface reconstruction plays a crucial role in autonomous driving, providing essential information for safe and smooth navigation. This paper enhances the RoadBEV [1] framework for real-time inference on edge devices by optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. To achieve this, we proposed to apply Isomorphic Global Structured Pruning to the stereo feature extraction backbone, reducing network complexity while maintaining performance. Additionally, the head network is redesigned with an optimized hourglass structure, dynamic attention heads, reduced feature channels, mixed precision inference, and efficient probability volume computation. Our approach improves inference speed while achieving lower reconstruction error, making it well-suited for real-time road surface reconstruction in autonomous driving.

Deep Learning-Based Prediction of PET Amyloid Status Using Multi-Contrast MRI

Identifying amyloid-beta positive patients is crucial for determining eligibility for Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical trials and new disease-modifying treatments, but currently requires PET or CSF sampling. Previous MRI-based deep learning models for predicting amyloid positivity, using only T1w sequences, have shown moderate performance. We trained deep learning models to predict amyloid PET positivity and evaluated whether multi-contrast inputs improve performance. A total of 4,058 exams with multi-contrast MRI and PET-based quantitative amyloid deposition were obtained from three public datasets: the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies 3 (OASIS3), and the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease (A4). Two separate EfficientNet models were trained for amyloid positivity prediction: one with only T1w images and the other with both T1w and T2-FLAIR images as network inputs. The area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were determined using an internal held-out test set. The trained models were further evaluated using an external test set. In the held-out test sets, the T1w and T1w+T2FLAIR models demonstrated AUCs of 0.62 (95% CI: 0.60, 0.64) and 0.67 (95% CI: 0.64, 0.70) (p = 0.006); accuracies were 61% (95% CI: 60%, 63%) and 64% (95% CI: 62%, 66%) (p = 0.008); sensitivities were 0.88 and 0.71; and specificities were 0.23 and 0.53, respectively. The trained models showed similar performance in the external test set. Performance of the current model on both test sets exceeded that of the publicly available model. In conclusion, the use of multi-contrast MRI, specifically incorporating T2-FLAIR in addition to T1w images, significantly improved the predictive accuracy of PET-determined amyloid status from MRI scans using a deep learning approach.

Preserving Pre-trained Representation Space: On Effectiveness of Prefix-tuning for Large Multi-modal Models

Recently, we have observed that Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) are revolutionizing the way machines interact with the world, unlocking new possibilities across various multi-modal applications. To adapt LMMs for downstream tasks, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) which only trains additional prefix tokens or modules, has gained popularity. Nevertheless, there has been little analysis of how PEFT works in LMMs. In this paper, we delve into the strengths and weaknesses of each tuning strategy, shifting the focus from the efficiency typically associated with these approaches. We first discover that model parameter tuning methods such as LoRA and Adapters distort the feature representation space learned during pre-training and limit the full utilization of pre-trained knowledge. We also demonstrate that prefix-tuning excels at preserving the representation space, despite its lower performance on downstream tasks. These findings suggest a simple two-step PEFT strategy called Prefix-Tuned PEFT (PT-PEFT), which successively performs prefix-tuning and then PEFT (i.e., Adapter, LoRA), combines the benefits of both. Experimental results show that PT-PEFT not only improves performance in image captioning and visual question answering compared to vanilla PEFT methods but also helps preserve the representation space of the four pre-trained models.

Offline Policy Learning via Skill-step Abstraction for Long-horizon Goal-Conditioned Tasks

Goal-conditioned (GC) policy learning often faces a challenge arising from the sparsity of rewards, when confronting long-horizon goals. To address the challenge, we explore skill-based GC policy learning in offline settings, where skills are acquired from existing data and long-horizon goals are decomposed into sequences of near-term goals that align with these skills. Specifically, we present an `offline GC policy learning via skill-step abstraction' framework (GLvSA) tailored for tackling long-horizon GC tasks affected by goal distribution shifts. In the framework, a GC policy is progressively learned offline in conjunction with the incremental modeling of skill-step abstractions on the data. We also devise a GC policy hierarchy that not only accelerates GC policy learning within the framework but also allows for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of the policy. Through experiments with the maze and Franka kitchen environments, we demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our GLvSA framework in adapting GC policies to a wide range of long-horizon goals. The framework achieves competitive zero-shot and few-shot adaptation performance, outperforming existing GC policy learning and skill-based methods.

Role of Sensing and Computer Vision in 6G Wireless Communications

Recently, we are witnessing the remarkable progress and widespread adoption of sensing technologies in autonomous driving, robotics, and metaverse. Considering the rapid advancement of computer vision (CV) technology to analyze the sensing information, we anticipate a proliferation of wireless applications exploiting the sensing and CV technologies in 6G. In this article, we provide a holistic overview of the sensing and CV-aided wireless communications (SVWC) framework for 6G. By analyzing the high-resolution sensing information through the powerful CV techniques, SVWC can quickly and accurately understand the wireless environments and then perform the wireless tasks. To demonstrate the efficacy of SVWC, we design the whole process of SVWC including the sensing dataset collection, DL model training, and execution of realistic wireless tasks. From the numerical evaluations on 6G communication scenarios, we show that SVWC achieves considerable performance gains over the conventional 5G systems in terms of positioning accuracy, data rate, and access latency.