Daily Papers

Generalization remains the central challenge for interactive 3D scene generation. Existing learning-based approaches ground spatial understanding in limited scene dataset, restricting generalization to new layouts. We instead reprogram a pre-trained 3D instance generator to act as a scene level learner, replacing dataset-bounded supervision with model-centric spatial supervision. This reprogramming unlocks the generator transferable spatial knowledge, enabling generalization to unseen layouts and novel object compositions. Remarkably, spatial reasoning still emerges even when the training scenes are randomly composed objects. This demonstrates that the generator's transferable scene prior provides a rich learning signal for inferring proximity, support, and symmetry from purely geometric cues. Replacing widely used canonical space, we instantiate this insight with a view-centric formulation of the scene space, yielding a fully feed-forward, generalizable scene generator that learns spatial relations directly from the instance model. Quantitative and qualitative results show that a 3D instance generator is an implicit spatial learner and reasoner, pointing toward foundation models for interactive 3D scene understanding and generation. Project page: https://luling06.github.io/I-Scene-project/

Spatial intelligence spans a rich suite of abilities, including visualising and transforming shapes, mentally rotating objects, judging relational positions and containment, and estimating numerosity. However, it still remains a critical unresolved challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).To fill this gap, we propose to treat Euclidean geometry problem-solving as a surrogate task. Specifically, we meticulously constructed a curated multimodal dataset, called Euclid30K, comprising approximately 30K plane and solid geometry problems. To enable the model to acquire and apply Euclidean principles from these geometry problems, we employed Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to finetune the Qwen2.5VL family and RoboBrain2.0 family, inspiring the models to identify shapes, count, and relate entities, and perform multi-step deductive reasoning using Euclidean principles. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting models achieve substantial zero-shot gains across four spatial reasoning benchmarks (Super-CLEVR, Omni3DBench, VSI-Bench, and MindCube) without any task-specific adaptations. Notably, after training on the Euclid30K, the mean VSI-Bench accuracy of all evaluated models rose from 34.5% to 40.5%, improving by 5.5 percentage points. Among them, RoboBrain2.0-Euclid-7B achieves 49.6\% accuracy, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art model, Spatial-MLLM.To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study showing that geometry-centric fine-tuning can confer vision-language models with broadly transferable spatial skills. Code and Euclid30K dataset can be found in https://zgca-ai4edu.github.io/Euclids_Gift.

Accurate real-time traffic forecast is critical for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and it serves as the cornerstone of various smart mobility applications. Though this research area is dominated by deep learning, recent studies indicate that the accuracy improvement by developing new model structures is becoming marginal. Instead, we envision that the improvement can be achieved by transferring the "forecasting-related knowledge" across cities with different data distributions and network topologies. To this end, this paper aims to propose a novel transferable traffic forecasting framework: Domain Adversarial Spatial-Temporal Network (DASTNet). DASTNet is pre-trained on multiple source networks and fine-tuned with the target network's traffic data. Specifically, we leverage the graph representation learning and adversarial domain adaptation techniques to learn the domain-invariant node embeddings, which are further incorporated to model the temporal traffic data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ adversarial multi-domain adaptation for network-wide traffic forecasting problems. DASTNet consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art baseline methods on three benchmark datasets. The trained DASTNet is applied to Hong Kong's new traffic detectors, and accurate traffic predictions can be delivered immediately (within one day) when the detector is available. Overall, this study suggests an alternative to enhance the traffic forecasting methods and provides practical implications for cities lacking historical traffic data.

Humans can perform complex tasks with long-term objectives by planning, reasoning, and forecasting outcomes of actions. For embodied agents to achieve similar capabilities, they must gain knowledge of the environment transferable to novel scenarios with a limited budget of additional trial and error. Learning-based approaches, such as deep RL, can discover and take advantage of inherent regularities and characteristics of the application domain from data, and continuously improve their performances, however at a cost of large amounts of training data. This thesis explores the development of data-driven techniques for spatial reasoning and planning tasks, focusing on enhancing learning efficiency, interpretability, and transferability across novel scenarios. Four key contributions are made. 1) CALVIN, a differential planner that learns interpretable models of the world for long-term planning. It successfully navigated partially observable 3D environments, such as mazes and indoor rooms, by learning the rewards and state transitions from expert demonstrations. 2) SOAP, an RL algorithm that discovers options unsupervised for long-horizon tasks. Options segment a task into subtasks and enable consistent execution of the subtask. SOAP showed robust performances on history-conditional corridor tasks as well as classical benchmarks such as Atari. 3) LangProp, a code optimisation framework using LLMs to solve embodied agent problems that require reasoning by treating code as learnable policies. The framework successfully generated interpretable code with comparable or superior performance to human-written experts in the CARLA autonomous driving benchmark. 4) Voggite, an embodied agent with a vision-to-action transformer backend that solves complex tasks in Minecraft. It achieved third place in the MineRL BASALT Competition by identifying action triggers to segment tasks into multiple stages.

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.