Tracking-Aware Deformation Field Estimation for Non-rigid 3D Reconstruction in Robotic Surgeries

Minimally invasive procedures have been advanced rapidly by the robotic laparoscopic surgery. The latter greatly assists surgeons in sophisticated and precise operations with reduced invasiveness. Nevertheless, it is still safety critical to be aware of even the least tissue deformation during instrument-tissue interactions, especially in 3D space. To address this, recent works rely on NeRF to render 2D videos from different perspectives and eliminate occlusions. However, most of the methods fail to predict the accurate 3D shapes and associated deformation estimates robustly. Differently, we propose Tracking-Aware Deformation Field (TADF), a novel framework which reconstructs the 3D mesh along with the 3D tissue deformation simultaneously. It first tracks the key points of soft tissue by a foundation vision model, providing an accurate 2D deformation field. Then, the 2D deformation field is smoothly incorporated with a neural implicit reconstruction network to obtain tissue deformation in the 3D space. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed method provides more accurate deformation estimation compared with other 3D neural reconstruction methods in two public datasets.

Diffusion Stabilizer Policy for Automated Surgical Robot Manipulations

Intelligent surgical robots have the potential to revolutionize clinical practice by enabling more precise and automated surgical procedures. However, the automation of such robot for surgical tasks remains under-explored compared to recent advancements in solving household manipulation tasks. These successes have been largely driven by (1) advanced models, such as transformers and diffusion models, and (2) large-scale data utilization. Aiming to extend these successes to the domain of surgical robotics, we propose a diffusion-based policy learning framework, called Diffusion Stabilizer Policy (DSP), which enables training with imperfect or even failed trajectories. Our approach consists of two stages: first, we train the diffusion stabilizer policy using only clean data. Then, the policy is continuously updated using a mixture of clean and perturbed data, with filtering based on the prediction error on actions. Comprehensive experiments conducted in various surgical environments demonstrate the superior performance of our method in perturbation-free settings and its robustness when handling perturbed demonstrations.

ASAP: Learning Generalizable Online Bin Packing via Adaptive Selection After Pruning

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved promising results in solving online 3D Bin Packing Problems (3D-BPP). However, these DRL-based policies may perform poorly on new instances due to distribution shift. Besides generalization, we also consider adaptation, completely overlooked by previous work, which aims at rapidly finetuning these policies to a new test distribution. To tackle both generalization and adaptation issues, we propose Adaptive Selection After Pruning (ASAP), which decomposes a solver's decision-making into two policies, one for pruning and one for selection. The role of the pruning policy is to remove inherently bad actions, which allows the selection policy to choose among the remaining most valuable actions. To learn these policies, we propose a training scheme based on a meta-learning phase of both policies followed by a finetuning phase of the sole selection policy to rapidly adapt it to a test distribution. Our experiments demonstrate that ASAP exhibits excellent generalization and adaptation capabilities on in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances under both discrete and continuous setup.

Is Segment Anything Model 2 All You Need for Surgery Video Segmentation? A Systematic Evaluation

Surgery video segmentation is an important topic in the surgical AI field. It allows the AI model to understand the spatial information of a surgical scene. Meanwhile, due to the lack of annotated surgical data, surgery segmentation models suffer from limited performance. With the emergence of SAM2 model, a large foundation model for video segmentation trained on natural videos, zero-shot surgical video segmentation became more realistic but meanwhile remains to be explored. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the performance of SAM2 model in zero-shot surgery video segmentation task. We conducted experiments under different configurations, including different prompting strategies, robustness, etc. Moreover, we conducted an empirical evaluation over the performance, including 9 datasets with 17 different types of surgeries.

Surgical Scene Segmentation by Transformer With Asymmetric Feature Enhancement

Surgical scene segmentation is a fundamental task for robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery understanding. It often contains various anatomical structures and surgical instruments, where similar local textures and fine-grained structures make the segmentation a difficult task. Vision-specific transformer method is a promising way for surgical scene understanding. However, there are still two main challenges. Firstly, the absence of inner-patch information fusion leads to poor segmentation performance. Secondly, the specific characteristics of anatomy and instruments are not specifically modeled. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel Transformer-based framework with an Asymmetric Feature Enhancement module (TAFE), which enhances local information and then actively fuses the improved feature pyramid into the embeddings from transformer encoders by a multi-scale interaction attention strategy. The proposed method outperforms the SOTA methods in several different surgical segmentation tasks and additionally proves its ability of fine-grained structure recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/cyuan-sjtu/ViT-asym.

State-Novelty Guided Action Persistence in Deep Reinforcement Learning

While a powerful and promising approach, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) still suffers from sample inefficiency, which can be notably improved by resorting to more sophisticated techniques to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. One such technique relies on action persistence (i.e., repeating an action over multiple steps). However, previous work exploiting action persistence either applies a fixed strategy or learns additional value functions (or policy) for selecting the repetition number. In this paper, we propose a novel method to dynamically adjust the action persistence based on the current exploration status of the state space. In such a way, our method does not require training of additional value functions or policy. Moreover, the use of a smooth scheduling of the repeat probability allows a more effective balance between exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, our method can be seamlessly integrated into various basic exploration strategies to incorporate temporal persistence. Finally, extensive experiments on different DMControl tasks demonstrate that our state-novelty guided action persistence method significantly improves the sample efficiency.

INViT: A Generalizable Routing Problem Solver with Invariant Nested View Transformer

Recently, deep reinforcement learning has shown promising results for learning fast heuristics to solve routing problems. Meanwhile, most of the solvers suffer from generalizing to an unseen distribution or distributions with different scales. To address this issue, we propose a novel architecture, called Invariant Nested View Transformer (INViT), which is designed to enforce a nested design together with invariant views inside the encoders to promote the generalizability of the learned solver. It applies a modified policy gradient algorithm enhanced with data augmentations. We demonstrate that the proposed INViT achieves a dominant generalization performance on both TSP and CVRP problems with various distributions and different problem scales.

Hypergraph-Transformer (HGT) for Interactive Event Prediction in Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgery

Understanding and anticipating intraoperative events and actions is critical for intraoperative assistance and decision-making during minimally invasive surgery. Automated prediction of events, actions, and the following consequences is addressed through various computational approaches with the objective of augmenting surgeons' perception and decision-making capabilities. We propose a predictive neural network that is capable of understanding and predicting critical interactive aspects of surgical workflow from intra-abdominal video, while flexibly leveraging surgical knowledge graphs. The approach incorporates a hypergraph-transformer (HGT) structure that encodes expert knowledge into the network design and predicts the hidden embedding of the graph. We verify our approach on established surgical datasets and applications, including the detection and prediction of action triplets, and the achievement of the Critical View of Safety (CVS). Moreover, we address specific, safety-related tasks, such as predicting the clipping of cystic duct or artery without prior achievement of the CVS. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to unstructured alternatives.

Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models

As autonomous driving technology matures, end-to-end methodologies have emerged as a leading strategy, promising seamless integration from perception to control via deep learning. However, existing systems grapple with challenges such as unexpected open set environments and the complexity of black-box models. At the same time, the evolution of deep learning introduces larger, multimodal foundational models, offering multi-modal visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we harness these multimodal foundation models to enhance the robustness and adaptability of autonomous driving systems, enabling out-of-distribution, end-to-end, multimodal, and more explainable autonomy. Specifically, we present an approach to apply end-to-end open-set (any environment/scene) autonomous driving that is capable of providing driving decisions from representations queryable by image and text. To do so, we introduce a method to extract nuanced spatial (pixel/patch-aligned) features from transformers to enable the encapsulation of both spatial and semantic features. Our approach (i) demonstrates unparalleled results in diverse tests while achieving significantly greater robustness in out-of-distribution situations, and (ii) allows the incorporation of latent space simulation (via text) for improved training (data augmentation via text) and policy debugging. We encourage the reader to check our explainer video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-DJf8vXxo&feature=youtu.be and to view the code and demos on our project webpage at https://drive-anywhere.github.io/.

Infrastructure-based End-to-End Learning and Prevention of Driver Failure

Intelligent intersection managers can improve safety by detecting dangerous drivers or failure modes in autonomous vehicles, warning oncoming vehicles as they approach an intersection. In this work, we present FailureNet, a recurrent neural network trained end-to-end on trajectories of both nominal and reckless drivers in a scaled miniature city. FailureNet observes the poses of vehicles as they approach an intersection and detects whether a failure is present in the autonomy stack, warning cross-traffic of potentially dangerous drivers. FailureNet can accurately identify control failures, upstream perception errors, and speeding drivers, distinguishing them from nominal driving. The network is trained and deployed with autonomous vehicles in the MiniCity. Compared to speed or frequency-based predictors, FailureNet's recurrent neural network structure provides improved predictive power, yielding upwards of 84% accuracy when deployed on hardware.