Towards Ambiguity-Free Spatial Foundation Model: Rethinking and Decoupling Depth Ambiguity

Depth ambiguity is a fundamental challenge in spatial scene understanding, especially in transparent scenes where single-depth estimates fail to capture full 3D structure. Existing models, limited to deterministic predictions, overlook real-world multi-layer depth. To address this, we introduce a paradigm shift from single-prediction to multi-hypothesis spatial foundation models. We first present \texttt{MD-3k}, a benchmark exposing depth biases in expert and foundational models through multi-layer spatial relationship labels and new metrics. To resolve depth ambiguity, we propose Laplacian Visual Prompting (LVP), a training-free spectral prompting technique that extracts hidden depth from pre-trained models via Laplacian-transformed RGB inputs. By integrating LVP-inferred depth with standard RGB-based estimates, our approach elicits multi-layer depth without model retraining. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of LVP in zero-shot multi-layer depth estimation, unlocking more robust and comprehensive geometry-conditioned visual generation, 3D-grounded spatial reasoning, and temporally consistent video-level depth inference. Our benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/Xiaohao-Xu/Ambiguity-in-Space.

Towards Visual Discrimination and Reasoning of Real-World Physical Dynamics: Physics-Grounded Anomaly Detection

Humans detect real-world object anomalies by perceiving, interacting, and reasoning based on object-conditioned physical knowledge. The long-term goal of Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is to enable machines to autonomously replicate this skill. However, current IAD algorithms are largely developed and tested on static, semantically simple datasets, which diverge from real-world scenarios where physical understanding and reasoning are essential. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Detection (Phys-AD) dataset, the first large-scale, real-world, physics-grounded video dataset for industrial anomaly detection. Collected using a real robot arm and motor, Phys-AD provides a diverse set of dynamic, semantically rich scenarios. The dataset includes more than 6400 videos across 22 real-world object categories, interacting with robot arms and motors, and exhibits 47 types of anomalies. Anomaly detection in Phys-AD requires visual reasoning, combining both physical knowledge and video content to determine object abnormality. We benchmark state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods under three settings: unsupervised AD, weakly-supervised AD, and video-understanding AD, highlighting their limitations in handling physics-grounded anomalies. Additionally, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Explanation (PAEval) metric, designed to assess the ability of visual-language foundation models to not only detect anomalies but also provide accurate explanations for their underlying physical causes. Our dataset and benchmark will be publicly available.

RGBSQGrasp: Inferring Local Superquadric Primitives from Single RGB Image for Graspability-Aware Bin Picking

Bin picking is a challenging robotic task due to occlusions and physical constraints that limit visual information for object recognition and grasping. Existing approaches often rely on known CAD models or prior object geometries, restricting generalization to novel or unknown objects. Other methods directly regress grasp poses from RGB-D data without object priors, but the inherent noise in depth sensing and the lack of object understanding make grasp synthesis and evaluation more difficult. Superquadrics (SQ) offer a compact, interpretable shape representation that captures the physical and graspability understanding of objects. However, recovering them from limited viewpoints is challenging, as existing methods rely on multiple perspectives for near-complete point cloud reconstruction, limiting their effectiveness in bin-picking. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{RGBSQGrasp}, a grasping framework that leverages superquadric shape primitives and foundation metric depth estimation models to infer grasp poses from a monocular RGB camera -- eliminating the need for depth sensors. Our framework integrates a universal, cross-platform dataset generation pipeline, a foundation model-based object point cloud estimation module, a global-local superquadric fitting network, and an SQ-guided grasp pose sampling module. By integrating these components, RGBSQGrasp reliably infers grasp poses through geometric reasoning, enhancing grasp stability and adaptability to unseen objects. Real-world robotic experiments demonstrate a 92\% grasp success rate, highlighting the effectiveness of RGBSQGrasp in packed bin-picking environments.

Large Language Models as Natural Selector for Embodied Soft Robot Design

Designing soft robots is a complex and iterative process that demands cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, mechanics, and control, often relying on intuition and extensive experimentation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, their capacity to learn and apply embodied design principles--crucial for creating functional robotic systems--remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces RoboCrafter-QA, a novel benchmark to evaluate whether LLMs can learn representations of soft robot designs that effectively bridge the gap between high-level task descriptions and low-level morphological and material choices. RoboCrafter-QA leverages the EvoGym simulator to generate a diverse set of soft robot design challenges, spanning robotic locomotion, manipulation, and balancing tasks. Our experiments with state-of-the-art multi-modal LLMs reveal that while these models exhibit promising capabilities in learning design representations, they struggle with fine-grained distinctions between designs with subtle performance differences. We further demonstrate the practical utility of LLMs for robot design initialization. Our code and benchmark will be available to encourage the community to foster this exciting research direction.

Impact-resistant, autonomous robots inspired by tensegrity architecture

Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities expected of rigid robots. Inspired by tensegrity architecture, we introduce a tensegrity robot -- a hybrid robot made from rigid struts and elastic tendons -- that demonstrates the advantages of compliance and the autonomy necessary for task performance. This robot boasts impact resistance and autonomy in a field environment and additional advances in the state of the art, including surviving harsh impacts from drops (at least 5.7 m), accurately reconstructing its shape and orientation using on-board sensors, achieving high locomotion speeds (18 bar lengths per minute), and climbing the steepest incline of any tensegrity robot (28 degrees). We characterize the robot's locomotion on unstructured terrain, showcase its autonomous capabilities in navigation tasks, and demonstrate its robustness by rolling it off a cliff.

Scalable Benchmarking and Robust Learning for Noise-Free Ego-Motion and 3D Reconstruction from Noisy Video

We aim to redefine robust ego-motion estimation and photorealistic 3D reconstruction by addressing a critical limitation: the reliance on noise-free data in existing models. While such sanitized conditions simplify evaluation, they fail to capture the unpredictable, noisy complexities of real-world environments. Dynamic motion, sensor imperfections, and synchronization perturbations lead to sharp performance declines when these models are deployed in practice, revealing an urgent need for frameworks that embrace and excel under real-world noise. To bridge this gap, we tackle three core challenges: scalable data generation, comprehensive benchmarking, and model robustness enhancement. First, we introduce a scalable noisy data synthesis pipeline that generates diverse datasets simulating complex motion, sensor imperfections, and synchronization errors. Second, we leverage this pipeline to create Robust-Ego3D, a benchmark rigorously designed to expose noise-induced performance degradation, highlighting the limitations of current learning-based methods in ego-motion accuracy and 3D reconstruction quality. Third, we propose Correspondence-guided Gaussian Splatting (CorrGS), a novel test-time adaptation method that progressively refines an internal clean 3D representation by aligning noisy observations with rendered RGB-D frames from clean 3D map, enhancing geometric alignment and appearance restoration through visual correspondence. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that CorrGS consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios involving rapid motion and dynamic illumination.

Multi-Sensor Object Anomaly Detection: Unifying Appearance, Geometry, and Internal Properties

Object anomaly detection is essential for industrial quality inspection, yet traditional single-sensor methods face critical limitations. They fail to capture the wide range of anomaly types, as single sensors are often constrained to either external appearance, geometric structure, or internal properties. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MulSen-AD, the first high-resolution, multi-sensor anomaly detection dataset tailored for industrial applications. MulSen-AD unifies data from RGB cameras, laser scanners, and lock-in infrared thermography, effectively capturing external appearance, geometric deformations, and internal defects. The dataset spans 15 industrial products with diverse, real-world anomalies. We also present MulSen-AD Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate multi-sensor methods, and propose MulSen-TripleAD, a decision-level fusion algorithm that integrates these three modalities for robust, unsupervised object anomaly detection. Our experiments demonstrate that multi-sensor fusion substantially outperforms single-sensor approaches, achieving 96.1% AUROC in object-level detection accuracy. These results highlight the importance of integrating multi-sensor data for comprehensive industrial anomaly detection.

MAC-Ego3D: Multi-Agent Gaussian Consensus for Real-Time Collaborative Ego-Motion and Photorealistic 3D Reconstruction

Real-time multi-agent collaboration for ego-motion estimation and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction is vital for scalable spatial intelligence. However, traditional methods produce sparse, low-detail maps, while recent dense mapping approaches struggle with high latency. To overcome these challenges, we present MAC-Ego3D, a novel framework for real-time collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction via Multi-Agent Gaussian Consensus. MAC-Ego3D enables agents to independently construct, align, and iteratively refine local maps using a unified Gaussian splat representation. Through Intra-Agent Gaussian Consensus, it enforces spatial coherence among neighboring Gaussian splats within an agent. For global alignment, parallelized Inter-Agent Gaussian Consensus, which asynchronously aligns and optimizes local maps by regularizing multi-agent Gaussian splats, seamlessly integrates them into a high-fidelity 3D model. Leveraging Gaussian primitives, MAC-Ego3D supports efficient RGB-D rendering, enabling rapid inter-agent Gaussian association and alignment. MAC-Ego3D bridges local precision and global coherence, delivering higher efficiency, largely reducing localization error, and improving mapping fidelity. It establishes a new SOTA on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, achieving a 15x increase in inference speed, order-of-magnitude reductions in ego-motion estimation error for partial cases, and RGB PSNR gains of 4 to 10 dB. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Xiaohao-Xu/MAC-Ego3D .

Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity

How can we enable models to comprehend video anomalies occurring over varying temporal scales and contexts? Traditional Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) methods focus on frame-level anomaly prediction, often missing the interpretability of complex and diverse real-world anomalies. Recent multimodal approaches leverage visual and textual data but lack hierarchical annotations that capture both short-term and long-term anomalies. To address this challenge, we introduce HIVAU-70k, a large-scale benchmark for hierarchical video anomaly understanding across any granularity. We develop a semi-automated annotation engine that efficiently scales high-quality annotations by combining manual video segmentation with recursive free-text annotation using large language models (LLMs). This results in over 70,000 multi-granular annotations organized at clip-level, event-level, and video-level segments. For efficient anomaly detection in long videos, we propose the Anomaly-focused Temporal Sampler (ATS). ATS integrates an anomaly scorer with a density-aware sampler to adaptively select frames based on anomaly scores, ensuring that the multimodal LLM concentrates on anomaly-rich regions, which significantly enhances both efficiency and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our hierarchical instruction data markedly improves anomaly comprehension. The integrated ATS and visual-language model outperform traditional methods in processing long videos. Our benchmark and model are publicly available at https://github.com/pipixin321/HolmesVAU.

Tensegrity Robot Proprioceptive State Estimation with Geometric Constraints

Tensegrity robots, characterized by a synergistic assembly of rigid rods and elastic cables, form robust structures that are resistant to impacts. However, this design introduces complexities in kinematics and dynamics, complicating control and state estimation. This work presents a novel proprioceptive state estimator for tensegrity robots. The estimator initially uses the geometric constraints of 3-bar prism tensegrity structures, combined with IMU and motor encoder measurements, to reconstruct the robot's shape and orientation. It then employs a contact-aided invariant extended Kalman filter with forward kinematics to estimate the global position and orientation of the tensegrity robot. The state estimator's accuracy is assessed against ground truth data in both simulated environments and real-world tensegrity robot applications. It achieves an average drift percentage of 4.2%, comparable to the state estimation performance of traditional rigid robots. This state estimator advances the state of the art in tensegrity robot state estimation and has the potential to run in real-time using onboard sensors, paving the way for full autonomy of tensegrity robots in unstructured environments.