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Oct 26

Rendering-Free Lookahead for Question-Guided Active Vision

Active robot vision requires controlling the camera to reveal task-relevant information that is hidden from the current viewpoint. For example, determining what is inside a box may require raising the camera and looking down into it. For viewpoint-dependent question answering, the challenge is to select camera motions that expose the visual evidence needed to answer the question. Although vision-language models (VLMs) can interpret observed images, selecting such motions requires anticipating the usefulness of unseen views. We quantify this usefulness as answerability, a VLM's estimate that a view suffices to answer the question, and present Rendering-Free Lookahead (RFL), a viewpoint-selection policy that ranks candidate camera motions by predicted future answerability. RFL transfers visual lookahead from deployment to offline training. At training, a privileged teacher renders candidate future views in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes and uses a frozen VLM to compute one- and two-step answerability targets. Through two-stage distillation, a student learns to predict these action values from the question, recent visual observations, and a candidate camera motion. At deployment, RFL uses these predicted values to select camera motions without rendering future views. On 377 E3VS-Bench test episodes in unseen environments, RFL improves the mean judge score by 43\% over a direct-action baseline using the same VLM. These results support learning camera-control policies from privileged visual lookahead for viewpoint-dependent question answering.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7

Embodied Agents Take Control: Minimal-Interface Zero-Shot Agents Rival Industrial-Scale Policies in Vision-and-Language Navigation

Autonomous embodied agents must sustain a long decision-making loop that involves perceiving, acting, verifying, and self-correcting over many steps. Current systems sustain this loop through task-specific workflows or embodied policies. However, these fixed workflows and policies offer limited flexibility across environments and often lack effective recovery strategies when execution goes wrong. We find that a general-purpose agent can instead sustain the loop on its own. We term this organization agentic embodied control: the reasoning model directly steers every action, keeping reasoning and control aligned. Using zero-shot navigation as a controlled testbed, we equip three coding-agent harnesses with only a monocular RGB camera and discrete actions. At default effort, replicated opus-5 runs average 70.7pm3.5% success, while fable-5 reaches 78% at maximum effort. When a trained waypoint tool is offered alongside primitives, the hybrid fable-5 agent reaches 76.7pm0.6% at default effort, using half the environment steps and under a quarter of the wall time. Across the ablations, model choice dominates performance variation. Observed harness differences are modest, and forced waypoints help weaker models but can hinder stronger ones. Although longer horizons, latency, and context growth remain barriers to sustained autonomy, these results show that a general-purpose model can already achieve competitive embodied control without a navigation policy.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 28

Probing into Camera Control of Video Models

Video is a rich and scalable source of 3D/4D visual observations, and camera control is a key capability for video generation models to produce geometrically meaningful content. Existing approaches typically learn a mapping from camera motion to video using additional camera modules and paired data. However, such datasets are often limited in scale, diversity, and scene dynamics, which can bias the model toward a narrow output distribution and compromise the strong prior learned by the base model. These limitations motivate a different perspective on camera control. In this paper, we show that camera control need not be modeled as an implicit mapping problem, but can instead be treated as a form of geometric guidance that induces displacements across frames. Specifically, we reformulate camera control into a set of displacement fields and apply them via differentiable resampling of latent features during denoising. Our simple approach achieves effective camera control with minimal degradation across diverse quality metrics compared to fine-tuned baselines. Since our method is applicable to most video diffusion models without training, it can also serve as a probe to study the camera control capabilities of base models. Using this probe, we identify universal biases shared by representative video models, as well as disparities in their responses to camera control. Finally, we benchmark their performance in multi-view generation, offering insights into their potential for 3D/4D tasks.

  • 2 authors
·
May 13

LIFT: Layout-In-Future Video Generation under Large Viewpoint Change via On-Policy Self-Distillation

We introduce LIFT, a unified image-to-video generation framework that complements camera control with Layout-In-FuTure control, enabling users to specify what should appear in a future view and where it should appear. This addresses a practical need in controllable video generation: given an initial image, users often care not only about how the camera moves, but also about what the scene should look like at key future moments, especially the final frame. Existing camera controls specify viewpoint trajectories, while text prompts provide only coarse semantic guidance; neither precisely determines the content and spatial layout of future views. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced under large viewpoint changes, where the camera reveals regions that are not visible in the first frame. LIFT therefore uses the last-frame layout as an explicit control signal for the desired future scene. Since learning from such sparse layout guidance is substantially more challenging than conditioning on dense per-frame layouts, we introduce on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) to transfer the control capability of a dense-layout teacher to a last-frame-layout student. We further curate LIFT-Vista, a dataset featuring large viewpoint changes with camera and temporally consistent layout annotations. Experiments show that LIFT improves video quality, future-layout controllability, and camera controllability over other methods.

GHIL-Glue: Hierarchical Control with Filtered Subgoal Images

Image and video generative models that are pre-trained on Internet-scale data can greatly increase the generalization capacity of robot learning systems. These models can function as high-level planners, generating intermediate subgoals for low-level goal-conditioned policies to reach. However, the performance of these systems can be greatly bottlenecked by the interface between generative models and low-level controllers. For example, generative models may predict photorealistic yet physically infeasible frames that confuse low-level policies. Low-level policies may also be sensitive to subtle visual artifacts in generated goal images. This paper addresses these two facets of generalization, providing an interface to effectively "glue together" language-conditioned image or video prediction models with low-level goal-conditioned policies. Our method, Generative Hierarchical Imitation Learning-Glue (GHIL-Glue), filters out subgoals that do not lead to task progress and improves the robustness of goal-conditioned policies to generated subgoals with harmful visual artifacts. We find in extensive experiments in both simulated and real environments that GHIL-Glue achieves a 25% improvement across several hierarchical models that leverage generative subgoals, achieving a new state-of-the-art on the CALVIN simulation benchmark for policies using observations from a single RGB camera. GHIL-Glue also outperforms other generalist robot policies across 3/4 language-conditioned manipulation tasks testing zero-shot generalization in physical experiments.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 25, 2024

Learning to Act under Visual Interruptions with Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, but they are typically developed and evaluated with all camera streams available throughout task execution. When a camera stops delivering frames during task execution, the policy must continue acting without access to subsequent observations from the missing view. Despite its practical importance, how such interruptions affect closed-loop manipulation remains insufficiently understood. To investigate this problem, we introduce MAIL-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates visual interruptions with VLA models. By interrupting different cameras at multiple stages of each policy's successful reference trajectory, MAIL-Bench measures how well policies retain their capabilities when visual inputs become unavailable. Building on this benchmark, we propose MINT, which first trains VLA policies to remain functional under missing visual inputs. At inference time, MINT selectively supplements missing observations using optical-flow extrapolation or an action-conditioned world model, and withdraws predicted views when they become unreliable. Experiments on π_{0.5} and GR00T N1.5 show that MINT significantly improves task success under camera loss over the original models. Experiments on AgiBot G2 further demonstrate the real-robot deployment under camera loss. The benchmark is available at https://minglejiang.github.io/Mail-Bench/

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 27

Thinking with Cameras: Active Visual Reasoning via Dynamic Viewpoint Control for Surveillance Video Understanding

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in general-purpose video understanding. However, their application to real-world surveillance remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale domain-specific datasets and the limitation of passive observation from fixed viewpoints. In surveillance scenarios, critical visual evidence can be easily missed when targets are distant, small, occluded, or move beyond the current camera view. In this work, we introduce CamVLM, a new framework for Thinking with Cameras, which enables LVLMs to actively acquire visual evidence in real-world surveillance by continuously controlling camera viewpoints. We first construct CCTV-Anomaly, a large-scale surveillance video understanding dataset containing 14,133 videos across 10 anomaly categories, with detailed captions and event annotations. We further formulate viewpoint control as an active visual perception problem and build CamTrack-53K, an object-centric viewpoint trajectory dataset for learning camera actions. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning based viewpoint policy optimization framework, which models camera control as a sequential decision-making process and learns long-horizon observation strategies beyond supervised trajectory imitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CamVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance under both passive observation and dynamic viewpoint settings, validating the effectiveness of active camera-based reasoning for surveillance video understanding. Our datasets, model, and code will be available at https://github.com/xiaozhang79/CamVLM.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24

ShotDirector: Directorially Controllable Multi-Shot Video Generation with Cinematographic Transitions

Shot transitions play a pivotal role in multi-shot video generation, as they determine the overall narrative expression and the directorial design of visual storytelling. However, recent progress has primarily focused on low-level visual consistency across shots, neglecting how transitions are designed and how cinematographic language contributes to coherent narrative expression. This often leads to mere sequential shot changes without intentional film-editing patterns. To address this limitation, we propose ShotDirector, an efficient framework that integrates parameter-level camera control and hierarchical editing-pattern-aware prompting. Specifically, we adopt a camera control module that incorporates 6-DoF poses and intrinsic settings to enable precise camera information injection. In addition, a shot-aware mask mechanism is employed to introduce hierarchical prompts aware of professional editing patterns, allowing fine-grained control over shot content. Through this design, our framework effectively combines parameter-level conditions with high-level semantic guidance, achieving film-like controllable shot transitions. To facilitate training and evaluation, we construct ShotWeaver40K, a dataset that captures the priors of film-like editing patterns, and develop a set of evaluation metrics for controllable multi-shot video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

ReCamMaster: Camera-Controlled Generative Rendering from A Single Video

Camera control has been actively studied in text or image conditioned video generation tasks. However, altering camera trajectories of a given video remains under-explored, despite its importance in the field of video creation. It is non-trivial due to the extra constraints of maintaining multiple-frame appearance and dynamic synchronization. To address this, we present ReCamMaster, a camera-controlled generative video re-rendering framework that reproduces the dynamic scene of an input video at novel camera trajectories. The core innovation lies in harnessing the generative capabilities of pre-trained text-to-video models through a simple yet powerful video conditioning mechanism -- its capability often overlooked in current research. To overcome the scarcity of qualified training data, we construct a comprehensive multi-camera synchronized video dataset using Unreal Engine 5, which is carefully curated to follow real-world filming characteristics, covering diverse scenes and camera movements. It helps the model generalize to in-the-wild videos. Lastly, we further improve the robustness to diverse inputs through a meticulously designed training strategy. Extensive experiments tell that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches and strong baselines. Our method also finds promising applications in video stabilization, super-resolution, and outpainting. Project page: https://jianhongbai.github.io/ReCamMaster/

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025 6

Beyond Inpainting: Unleash 3D Understanding for Precise Camera-Controlled Video Generation

Camera control has been extensively studied in conditioned video generation; however, performing precisely altering the camera trajectories while faithfully preserving the video content remains a challenging task. The mainstream approach to achieving precise camera control is warping a 3D representation according to the target trajectory. However, such methods fail to fully leverage the 3D priors of video diffusion models (VDMs) and often fall into the Inpainting Trap, resulting in subject inconsistency and degraded generation quality. To address this problem, we propose DepthDirector, a video re-rendering framework with precise camera controllability. By leveraging the depth video from explicit 3D representation as camera-control guidance, our method can faithfully reproduce the dynamic scene of an input video under novel camera trajectories. Specifically, we design a View-Content Dual-Stream Condition mechanism that injects both the source video and the warped depth sequence rendered under the target viewpoint into the pretrained video generation model. This geometric guidance signal enables VDMs to comprehend camera movements and leverage their 3D understanding capabilities, thereby facilitating precise camera control and consistent content generation. Next, we introduce a lightweight LoRA-based video diffusion adapter to train our framework, fully preserving the knowledge priors of VDMs. Additionally, we construct a large-scale multi-camera synchronized dataset named MultiCam-WarpData using Unreal Engine 5, containing 8K videos across 1K dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that DepthDirector outperforms existing methods in both camera controllability and visual quality. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 15

DriveCamSim: Generalizable Camera Simulation via Explicit Camera Modeling for Autonomous Driving

Camera sensor simulation serves as a critical role for autonomous driving (AD), e.g. evaluating vision-based AD algorithms. While existing approaches have leveraged generative models for controllable image/video generation, they remain constrained to generating multi-view video sequences with fixed camera viewpoints and video frequency, significantly limiting their downstream applications. To address this, we present a generalizable camera simulation framework DriveCamSim, whose core innovation lies in the proposed Explicit Camera Modeling (ECM) mechanism. Instead of implicit interaction through vanilla attention, ECM establishes explicit pixel-wise correspondences across multi-view and multi-frame dimensions, decoupling the model from overfitting to the specific camera configurations (intrinsic/extrinsic parameters, number of views) and temporal sampling rates presented in the training data. For controllable generation, we identify the issue of information loss inherent in existing conditional encoding and injection pipelines, proposing an information-preserving control mechanism. This control mechanism not only improves conditional controllability, but also can be extended to be identity-aware to enhance temporal consistency in foreground object rendering. With above designs, our model demonstrates superior performance in both visual quality and controllability, as well as generalization capability across spatial-level (camera parameters variations) and temporal-level (video frame rate variations), enabling flexible user-customizable camera simulation tailored to diverse application scenarios. Code will be avaliable at https://github.com/swc-17/DriveCamSim for facilitating future research.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Training-free Camera Control for Video Generation

We propose a training-free and robust solution to offer camera movement control for off-the-shelf video diffusion models. Unlike previous work, our method does not require any supervised finetuning on camera-annotated datasets or self-supervised training via data augmentation. Instead, it can be plugged and played with most pretrained video diffusion models and generate camera controllable videos with a single image or text prompt as input. The inspiration of our work comes from the layout prior that intermediate latents hold towards generated results, thus rearranging noisy pixels in them will make output content reallocated as well. As camera move could also be seen as a kind of pixel rearrangement caused by perspective change, videos could be reorganized following specific camera motion if their noisy latents change accordingly. Established on this, we propose our method CamTrol, which enables robust camera control for video diffusion models. It is achieved by a two-stage process. First, we model image layout rearrangement through explicit camera movement in 3D point cloud space. Second, we generate videos with camera motion using layout prior of noisy latents formed by a series of rearranged images. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the robustness our method holds in controlling camera motion of generated videos. Furthermore, we show that our method can produce impressive results in generating 3D rotation videos with dynamic content. Project page at https://lifedecoder.github.io/CamTrol/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024 2

UniGeo: Unifying Geometric Guidance for Camera-Controllable Image Editing via Video Models

Camera-controllable image editing aims to synthesize novel views of a given scene under varying camera poses while strictly preserving cross-view geometric consistency. However, existing methods typically rely on fragmented geometric guidance, such as only injecting point clouds at the representation level despite models containing multiple levels, and are mainly based on image diffusion models that operate on discrete view mappings. These two limitations jointly lead to geometric drift and structural degradation under continuous camera motion. We observe that while leveraging video models provides continuous viewpoint priors for camera-controllable image editing, they still struggle to form stable geometric understanding if geometric guidance remains fragmented. To systematically address this, we inject unified geometric guidance across three levels that jointly determine the generative output: representation, architecture, and loss function. To this end, we propose UniGeo, a novel camera-controllable editing framework. Specifically, at the representation level, UniGeo incorporates a frame-decoupled geometric reference injection mechanism to provide robust cross-view geometry context. At the architecture level, it introduces geometric anchor attention to align multi-view features. At the loss function level, it proposes a trajectory-endpoint geometric supervision strategy to explicitly reinforce the structural fidelity of target views. Comprehensive experiments across multiple public benchmarks, encompassing both extensive and limited camera motion settings, demonstrate that UniGeo significantly outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and geometric consistency.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 18 2

VERTIGO: Visual Preference Optimization for Cinematic Camera Trajectory Generation

Cinematic camera control relies on a tight feedback loop between director and cinematographer, where camera motion and framing are continuously reviewed and refined. Recent generative camera systems can produce diverse, text-conditioned trajectories, but they lack this "director in the loop" and have no explicit supervision of whether a shot is visually desirable. This results in in-distribution camera motion but poor framing, off-screen characters, and undesirable visual aesthetics. In this paper, we introduce VERTIGO, the first framework for visual preference optimization of camera trajectory generators. Our framework leverages a real-time graphics engine (Unity) to render 2D visual previews from generated camera motion. A cinematically fine-tuned vision-language model then scores these previews using our proposed cyclic semantic similarity mechanism, which aligns renders with text prompts. This process provides the visual preference signals for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) post-training. Both quantitative evaluations and user studies on Unity renders and diffusion-based Camera-to-Video pipelines show consistent gains in condition adherence, framing quality, and perceptual realism. Notably, VERTIGO reduces the character off-screen rate from 38% to nearly 0% while preserving the geometric fidelity of camera motion. User study participants further prefer VERTIGO over baselines across composition, consistency, prompt adherence, and aesthetic quality, confirming the perceptual benefits of our visual preference post-training.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 26

CamI2V: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Diffusion Model

Recent advancements have integrated camera pose as a user-friendly and physics-informed condition in video diffusion models, enabling precise camera control. In this paper, we identify one of the key challenges as effectively modeling noisy cross-frame interactions to enhance geometry consistency and camera controllability. We innovatively associate the quality of a condition with its ability to reduce uncertainty and interpret noisy cross-frame features as a form of noisy condition. Recognizing that noisy conditions provide deterministic information while also introducing randomness and potential misguidance due to added noise, we propose applying epipolar attention to only aggregate features along corresponding epipolar lines, thereby accessing an optimal amount of noisy conditions. Additionally, we address scenarios where epipolar lines disappear, commonly caused by rapid camera movements, dynamic objects, or occlusions, ensuring robust performance in diverse environments. Furthermore, we develop a more robust and reproducible evaluation pipeline to address the inaccuracies and instabilities of existing camera control metrics. Our method achieves a 25.64% improvement in camera controllability on the RealEstate10K dataset without compromising dynamics or generation quality and demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-domain images. Training and inference require only 24GB and 12GB of memory, respectively, for 16-frame sequences at 256x256 resolution. We will release all checkpoints, along with training and evaluation code. Dynamic videos are best viewed at https://zgctroy.github.io/CamI2V.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Tri-Prompting: Video Diffusion with Unified Control over Scene, Subject, and Motion

Recent video diffusion models have made remarkable strides in visual quality, yet precise, fine-grained control remains a key bottleneck that limits practical customizability for content creation. For AI video creators, three forms of control are crucial: (i) scene composition, (ii) multi-view consistent subject customization, and (iii) camera-pose or object-motion adjustment. Existing methods typically handle these dimensions in isolation, with limited support for multi-view subject synthesis and identity preservation under arbitrary pose changes. This lack of a unified architecture makes it difficult to support versatile, jointly controllable video. We introduce Tri-Prompting, a unified framework and two-stage training paradigm that integrates scene composition, multi-view subject consistency, and motion control. Our approach leverages a dual-condition motion module driven by 3D tracking points for background scenes and downsampled RGB cues for foreground subjects. To ensure a balance between controllability and visual realism, we further propose an inference ControlNet scale schedule. Tri-Prompting supports novel workflows, including 3D-aware subject insertion into any scenes and manipulation of existing subjects in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that Tri-Prompting significantly outperforms specialized baselines such as Phantom and DaS in multi-view subject identity, 3D consistency, and motion accuracy.

MotionMaster: Training-free Camera Motion Transfer For Video Generation

The emergence of diffusion models has greatly propelled the progress in image and video generation. Recently, some efforts have been made in controllable video generation, including text-to-video generation and video motion control, among which camera motion control is an important topic. However, existing camera motion control methods rely on training a temporal camera module, and necessitate substantial computation resources due to the large amount of parameters in video generation models. Moreover, existing methods pre-define camera motion types during training, which limits their flexibility in camera control. Therefore, to reduce training costs and achieve flexible camera control, we propose COMD, a novel training-free video motion transfer model, which disentangles camera motions and object motions in source videos and transfers the extracted camera motions to new videos. We first propose a one-shot camera motion disentanglement method to extract camera motion from a single source video, which separates the moving objects from the background and estimates the camera motion in the moving objects region based on the motion in the background by solving a Poisson equation. Furthermore, we propose a few-shot camera motion disentanglement method to extract the common camera motion from multiple videos with similar camera motions, which employs a window-based clustering technique to extract the common features in temporal attention maps of multiple videos. Finally, we propose a motion combination method to combine different types of camera motions together, enabling our model a more controllable and flexible camera control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free approach can effectively decouple camera-object motion and apply the decoupled camera motion to a wide range of controllable video generation tasks, achieving flexible and diverse camera motion control.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 24, 2024 1

AC3D: Analyzing and Improving 3D Camera Control in Video Diffusion Transformers

Numerous works have recently integrated 3D camera control into foundational text-to-video models, but the resulting camera control is often imprecise, and video generation quality suffers. In this work, we analyze camera motion from a first principles perspective, uncovering insights that enable precise 3D camera manipulation without compromising synthesis quality. First, we determine that motion induced by camera movements in videos is low-frequency in nature. This motivates us to adjust train and test pose conditioning schedules, accelerating training convergence while improving visual and motion quality. Then, by probing the representations of an unconditional video diffusion transformer, we observe that they implicitly perform camera pose estimation under the hood, and only a sub-portion of their layers contain the camera information. This suggested us to limit the injection of camera conditioning to a subset of the architecture to prevent interference with other video features, leading to 4x reduction of training parameters, improved training speed and 10% higher visual quality. Finally, we complement the typical dataset for camera control learning with a curated dataset of 20K diverse dynamic videos with stationary cameras. This helps the model disambiguate the difference between camera and scene motion, and improves the dynamics of generated pose-conditioned videos. We compound these findings to design the Advanced 3D Camera Control (AC3D) architecture, the new state-of-the-art model for generative video modeling with camera control.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024 2

GenDoP: Auto-regressive Camera Trajectory Generation as a Director of Photography

Camera trajectory design plays a crucial role in video production, serving as a fundamental tool for conveying directorial intent and enhancing visual storytelling. In cinematography, Directors of Photography meticulously craft camera movements to achieve expressive and intentional framing. However, existing methods for camera trajectory generation remain limited: Traditional approaches rely on geometric optimization or handcrafted procedural systems, while recent learning-based methods often inherit structural biases or lack textual alignment, constraining creative synthesis. In this work, we introduce an auto-regressive model inspired by the expertise of Directors of Photography to generate artistic and expressive camera trajectories. We first introduce DataDoP, a large-scale multi-modal dataset containing 29K real-world shots with free-moving camera trajectories, depth maps, and detailed captions in specific movements, interaction with the scene, and directorial intent. Thanks to the comprehensive and diverse database, we further train an auto-regressive, decoder-only Transformer for high-quality, context-aware camera movement generation based on text guidance and RGBD inputs, named GenDoP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to existing methods, GenDoP offers better controllability, finer-grained trajectory adjustments, and higher motion stability. We believe our approach establishes a new standard for learning-based cinematography, paving the way for future advancements in camera control and filmmaking. Our project website: https://kszpxxzmc.github.io/GenDoP/.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9, 2025 2

Refined Policy Distillation: From VLA Generalists to RL Experts

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup changes. In this work, we introduce Refined Policy Distillation (RPD), a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based policy refinement method that bridges this performance gap through a combination of on-policy RL with behavioral cloning. The core idea of RPD is to distill and refine VLAs into compact, high-performing expert policies by guiding the student policy during RL exploration using the actions of a teacher VLA, resulting in increased sample efficiency and faster convergence. We complement our method by fine-tuned versions of Octo and OpenVLA for ManiSkill3 to evaluate RPD in simulation. While this is a key requirement for applying RL, it also yields new insights beyond existing studies on VLA performance in real-world settings. Our experimental results across various manipulation tasks show that RPD enables the RL student to learn expert policies that outperform the VLA teacher in both dense and sparse reward settings, while also achieving faster convergence than the RL baseline. Our approach is even robust to changes in camera perspective and can generalize to task variations that the underlying VLA cannot solve. Our code, dataset, VLA checkpoints, and videos are available at https://refined-policy-distillation.github.io

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

ActCam: Zero-Shot Joint Camera and 3D Motion Control for Video Generation

For artistic applications, video generation requires fine-grained control over both performance and cinematography, i.e., the actor's motion and the camera trajectory. We present ActCam, a zero-shot method for video generation that jointly transfers character motion from a driving video into a new scene and enables per-frame control of intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. ActCam builds on any pretrained image-to-video diffusion model that accepts conditioning in terms of scene depth and character pose. Given a source video with a moving character and a target camera motion, ActCam generates pose and depth conditions that remain geometrically consistent across frames. We then run a single sampling process with a two-phase conditioning schedule: early denoising steps condition on both pose and sparse depth to enforce scene structure, after which depth is dropped and pose-only guidance refines high-frequency details without over-constraining the generation. We evaluate ActCam on multiple benchmarks spanning diverse character motions and challenging viewpoint changes. We find that, compared to pose-only control and other pose and camera methods, ActCam improves camera adherence and motion fidelity, and is preferred in human evaluations, especially under large viewpoint changes. Our results highlight that careful camera-consistent conditioning and staged guidance can enable strong joint camera and motion control without training. Project page: https://elkhomar.github.io/actcam/.

  • 9 authors
·
May 6

ReRoPE: Repurposing RoPE for Relative Camera Control

Video generation with controllable camera viewpoints is essential for applications such as interactive content creation, gaming, and simulation. Existing methods typically adapt pre-trained video models using camera poses relative to a fixed reference, e.g., the first frame. However, these encodings lack shift-invariance, often leading to poor generalization and accumulated drift. While relative camera pose embeddings defined between arbitrary view pairs offer a more robust alternative, integrating them into pre-trained video diffusion models without prohibitive training costs or architectural changes remains challenging. We introduce ReRoPE, a plug-and-play framework that incorporates relative camera information into pre-trained video diffusion models without compromising their generation capability. Our approach is based on the insight that Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) in existing models underutilize their full spectral bandwidth, particularly in the low-frequency components. By seamlessly injecting relative camera pose information into these underutilized bands, ReRoPE achieves precise control while preserving strong pre-trained generative priors. We evaluate our method on both image-to-video (I2V) and video-to-video (V2V) tasks in terms of camera control accuracy and visual fidelity. Our results demonstrate that ReRoPE offers a training-efficient path toward controllable, high-fidelity video generation. See project page for more results: https://sisyphe-lee.github.io/ReRoPE/

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 8

PolicyShiftGuard: Benchmarking and Improving Policy-Adaptive Image Guardrails

Image guardrails are typically trained and evaluated under a fixed safety policy, implicitly treating safety as an intrinsic property of an image. Real deployments are different: the same image may be allowed in one product, restricted in another, and newly disallowed when a policy boundary changes. We study policy-adaptive image guardrailing, where a model must decide whether an image violates the currently supplied policy and generalize to held-out policy definitions. We introduce PolicyShiftBench, a comprehensive benchmark with 2,000 policy-discriminative instances over 265 images, where each image is paired with 7.55 policy-conditioned prompts on average to test whether models adapt to the active policy rather than relying on image-level safety priors. We then propose PolicyShiftGuard, a compact policy-conditioned guardrail trained with a two-stage training recipe that combines Randomized Policy SFT (RP-SFT) with Boundary-Pair Policy Adaptation (BP-Adapt). BP-Adapt trains matched prompts for the same image and risk category using standard label supervision and a pairwise comparison loss that separates blocking policies from passing policies. Experiments show that existing VLMs and specialized guardrails remain brittle under policy shifts, while PolicyShiftGuard substantially improves policy-sensitive performance. The 7B model achieves SOTA performance of 76.9 Avg. F1 and 72.1 Avg. PSS on PolicyShiftBench, transfers well to UnSafeBench and SafeEditBench, and improves the latency-performance trade-off with a concise output format. Ablations confirm that matched pass/block boundary pairs are essential for stable policy adaptation.

GimbalDiffusion: Gravity-Aware Camera Control for Video Generation

Recent progress in text-to-video generation has achieved remarkable realism, yet fine-grained control over camera motion and orientation remains elusive. Existing approaches typically encode camera trajectories through relative or ambiguous representations, limiting explicit geometric control. We introduce GimbalDiffusion, a framework that enables camera control grounded in physical-world coordinates, using gravity as a global reference. Instead of describing motion relative to previous frames, our method defines camera trajectories in an absolute coordinate system, allowing precise and interpretable control over camera parameters without requiring an initial reference frame. We leverage panoramic 360-degree videos to construct a wide variety of camera trajectories, well beyond the predominantly straight, forward-facing trajectories seen in conventional video data. To further enhance camera guidance, we introduce null-pitch conditioning, an annotation strategy that reduces the model's reliance on text content when conflicting with camera specifications (e.g., generating grass while the camera points towards the sky). Finally, we establish a benchmark for camera-aware video generation by rebalancing SpatialVID-HQ for comprehensive evaluation under wide camera pitch variation. Together, these contributions advance the controllability and robustness of text-to-video models, enabling precise, gravity-aligned camera manipulation within generative frameworks.

adobe Adobe
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Dec 9, 2025 3

Towards Policy-Adaptive Image Guardrail: Benchmark and Method

Accurate rejection of sensitive or harmful visual content, i.e., harmful image guardrail, is critical in many application scenarios. This task must continuously adapt to the evolving safety policies and content across various domains and over time. However, traditional classifiers, confined to fixed categories, require frequent retraining when new policies are introduced. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a more adaptable and generalizable foundation for dynamic safety guardrails. Despite this potential, existing VLM-based safeguarding methods are typically trained and evaluated under only a fixed safety policy. We find that these models are heavily overfitted to the seen policy, fail to generalize to unseen policies, and even lose the basic instruction-following ability and general knowledge. To address this issue, in this paper we make two key contributions. First, we benchmark the cross-policy generalization performance of existing VLMs with SafeEditBench, a new evaluation suite. SafeEditBench leverages image-editing models to convert unsafe images into safe counterparts, producing policy-aligned datasets where each safe-unsafe image pair remains visually similar except for localized regions violating specific safety rules. Human annotators then provide accurate safe/unsafe labels under five distinct policies, enabling fine-grained assessment of policy-aware generalization. Second, we introduce SafeGuard-VL, a reinforcement learning-based method with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for robust unsafe-image guardrails. Instead of relying solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) under fixed policies, SafeGuard-VL explicitly optimizes the model with policy-grounded rewards, promoting verifiable adaptation across evolving policies. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method for unsafe image guardrails across various policies.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 1

MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation

Motions in a video primarily consist of camera motion, induced by camera movement, and object motion, resulting from object movement. Accurate control of both camera and object motion is essential for video generation. However, existing works either mainly focus on one type of motion or do not clearly distinguish between the two, limiting their control capabilities and diversity. Therefore, this paper presents MotionCtrl, a unified and flexible motion controller for video generation designed to effectively and independently control camera and object motion. The architecture and training strategy of MotionCtrl are carefully devised, taking into account the inherent properties of camera motion, object motion, and imperfect training data. Compared to previous methods, MotionCtrl offers three main advantages: 1) It effectively and independently controls camera motion and object motion, enabling more fine-grained motion control and facilitating flexible and diverse combinations of both types of motion. 2) Its motion conditions are determined by camera poses and trajectories, which are appearance-free and minimally impact the appearance or shape of objects in generated videos. 3) It is a relatively generalizable model that can adapt to a wide array of camera poses and trajectories once trained. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of MotionCtrl over existing methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023 2

Learning Camera Movement Control from Real-World Drone Videos

This study seeks to automate camera movement control for filming existing subjects into attractive videos, contrasting with the creation of non-existent content by directly generating the pixels. We select drone videos as our test case due to their rich and challenging motion patterns, distinctive viewing angles, and precise controls. Existing AI videography methods struggle with limited appearance diversity in simulation training, high costs of recording expert operations, and difficulties in designing heuristic-based goals to cover all scenarios. To avoid these issues, we propose a scalable method that involves collecting real-world training data to improve diversity, extracting camera trajectories automatically to minimize annotation costs, and training an effective architecture that does not rely on heuristics. Specifically, we collect 99k high-quality trajectories by running 3D reconstruction on online videos, connecting camera poses from consecutive frames to formulate 3D camera paths, and using Kalman filter to identify and remove low-quality data. Moreover, we introduce DVGFormer, an auto-regressive transformer that leverages the camera path and images from all past frames to predict camera movement in the next frame. We evaluate our system across 38 synthetic natural scenes and 7 real city 3D scans. We show that our system effectively learns to perform challenging camera movements such as navigating through obstacles, maintaining low altitude to increase perceived speed, and orbiting towers and buildings, which are very useful for recording high-quality videos. Data and code are available at dvgformer.github.io.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024 1

Unified Camera Positional Encoding for Controlled Video Generation

Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in three-dimensional space. However, existing camera encoding methods often rely on simplified pinhole assumptions, restricting generalization across the diverse intrinsics and lens distortions in real-world cameras. We introduce Relative Ray Encoding, a geometry-consistent representation that unifies complete camera information, including 6-DoF poses, intrinsics, and lens distortions. To evaluate its capability under diverse controllability demands, we adopt camera-controlled text-to-video generation as a testbed task. Within this setting, we further identify pitch and roll as two components effective for Absolute Orientation Encoding, enabling full control over the initial camera orientation. Together, these designs form UCPE (Unified Camera Positional Encoding), which integrates into a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer through a lightweight spatial attention adapter, adding less than 1% trainable parameters while achieving state-of-the-art camera controllability and visual fidelity. To facilitate systematic training and evaluation, we construct a large video dataset covering a wide range of camera motions and lens types. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCPE in camera-controllable video generation and highlight its potential as a general camera representation for Transformers across future multi-view, video, and 3D tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

Active Vision Might Be All You Need: Exploring Active Vision in Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Imitation learning has demonstrated significant potential in performing high-precision manipulation tasks using visual feedback. However, it is common practice in imitation learning for cameras to be fixed in place, resulting in issues like occlusion and limited field of view. Furthermore, cameras are often placed in broad, general locations, without an effective viewpoint specific to the robot's task. In this work, we investigate the utility of active vision (AV) for imitation learning and manipulation, in which, in addition to the manipulation policy, the robot learns an AV policy from human demonstrations to dynamically change the robot's camera viewpoint to obtain better information about its environment and the given task. We introduce AV-ALOHA, a new bimanual teleoperation robot system with AV, an extension of the ALOHA 2 robot system, incorporating an additional 7-DoF robot arm that only carries a stereo camera and is solely tasked with finding the best viewpoint. This camera streams stereo video to an operator wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset, allowing the operator to control the camera pose using head and body movements. The system provides an immersive teleoperation experience, with bimanual first-person control, enabling the operator to dynamically explore and search the scene and simultaneously interact with the environment. We conduct imitation learning experiments of our system both in real-world and in simulation, across a variety of tasks that emphasize viewpoint planning. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-guided AV for imitation learning, showing significant improvements over fixed cameras in tasks with limited visibility. Project website: https://soltanilara.github.io/av-aloha/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivity

Controllable video generation models are increasingly being developed as world models. Accordingly, evaluating them in this role extends beyond the apparent appearance of generated videos to the inherent reactivity of the worlds they depict: the ability to infer from the scene state how the world should react and to generate plausible consequences not explicitly described in the input. Yet existing benchmarks mainly assess visual quality or explicit instruction fulfillment by checking whether requested actions and interaction outcomes are realized, leaving inherent reactivity underexamined. We introduce WorldExam, a hierarchical diagnostic benchmark spanning four levels: Visual Quality, Control Adherence, Spatial Consistency, and World Reactivity. It comprises 1,474 cases across eight dedicated tasks and supports unified evaluation of camera-, action-, and language-driven model paradigms. The World Reactivity level evaluates scene-conditioned reactions and goal-directed behaviors beyond what is explicitly specified in the input. Evaluation of 20 representative models reveals a clear capability split. Camera-driven models excel at camera control, but their interfaces do not support dynamic interaction; action-driven models control subjects more precisely but often leave the world unresponsive; and language-driven models perform better on interaction but follow complex controls less faithfully. No model combines broad task coverage with consistently strong performance, showing that high visual quality and explicit instruction fulfillment do not guarantee inherent reactivity.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 2 3

RealCam-I2V: Real-World Image-to-Video Generation with Interactive Complex Camera Control

Recent advancements in camera-trajectory-guided image-to-video generation offer higher precision and better support for complex camera control compared to text-based approaches. However, they also introduce significant usability challenges, as users often struggle to provide precise camera parameters when working with arbitrary real-world images without knowledge of their depth nor scene scale. To address these real-world application issues, we propose RealCam-I2V, a novel diffusion-based video generation framework that integrates monocular metric depth estimation to establish 3D scene reconstruction in a preprocessing step. During training, the reconstructed 3D scene enables scaling camera parameters from relative to absolute values, ensuring compatibility and scale consistency across diverse real-world images. In inference, RealCam-I2V offers an intuitive interface where users can precisely draw camera trajectories by dragging within the 3D scene. To further enhance precise camera control and scene consistency, we propose scene-constrained noise shaping, which shapes high-level noise and also allows the framework to maintain dynamic, coherent video generation in lower noise stages. RealCam-I2V achieves significant improvements in controllability and video quality on the RealEstate10K and out-of-domain images. We further enables applications like camera-controlled looping video generation and generative frame interpolation. We will release our absolute-scale annotation, codes, and all checkpoints. Please see dynamic results in https://zgctroy.github.io/RealCam-I2V.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 14, 2025

WorldForge V2: Eliciting Camera-Trajectory Alignment in Video Diffusion Models

Video diffusion models have learned rich 3D/4D priors, making them promising for scene generation and video re-rendering. However, their use in spatial tasks is limited by imprecise camera control, spatial and temporal inconsistencies, and entangled camera motion with scene dynamics. Existing approaches, such as task-specific fine-tuning and post-process warping, often introduce visual artifacts, generalize poorly, or incur high computational costs. We propose WorldForge V2 to achieve accurate camera control while preserving the generative capabilities of pretrained video models. We first develop a training-free guidance framework using warped references to iteratively refine generation along a target camera path. Optical-flow analysis identifies motion-related latent channels for selective guidance, helping separate motion control from appearance. A dual-path strategy further compares guided and unguided predictions to correct artifacts from imperfect references. Together, these components guide viewpoint changes while preserving scene appearance and object motion. To reduce refinement costs, v-cache approximates the correction using the preceding denoising prediction, avoiding an additional model evaluation. We further extend motion localization from latent channels to network blocks and introduce Trajectory LoRA, which concentrates adaptation on blocks most responsive to trajectory guidance. A two-stage training strategy teaches these adapters to denoise the states encountered during guided generation, using limited supervision effectively. This enables reliable camera control with very little training data, with a single training scene already supporting generalization to unseen scenes. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and trajectory accuracy in camera-controlled video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 21

Goal Images Are Control Targets: Spatially-Grounded Goal-Image Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation

Goal-conditioned manipulation policies are steered by a goal image, a picture of the desired post-manipulation scene synthesized from the current observation and a language instruction. The prevailing assumption is that better image-editing quality yields better goals, so goal generators are built and compared using general image-editing metrics. We show this assumption is false. Across two independent goal-conditioned policies on CALVIN, the image editors that top aggregate editing-quality leaderboards (Gemini 3 Pro Image and GPT Image 1.5) produce worse control targets than our proposed far smaller finetuned open models, and the gap widens sharply for the multi-step (long-horizon) tasks robots actually face. A per-dimension analysis explains why. Downstream policy success is governed almost entirely by manipulation adherence (selecting the right object and the right final state; Spearman ρapprox 0.9 with success), while photorealism and aesthetic fidelity, precisely where large proprietary editors excel, are uncorrelated with success (ρapprox 0). This dissociation holds on both CALVIN and the real-world-aligned SIMPLER-Bridge benchmark. We then present SGE-Goal, a spatially-grounded decomposed editing framework that predicts initial and final 2D edit-region masks before goal-image synthesis. SGE-Goal turns open base models (FLUX.1 Kontext, FLUX.2 klein) into the strongest goal generators we evaluate on CALVIN, and second only to Gemini 3 Pro Image on SIMPLER-Bridge. Base models fine-tuned with SGE-Goal also hold up under chaining far better than the best proprietary editor, sustaining roughly seven times the success rate at the longest (five-step) chains. We release code, datasets, checkpoints, and a human-aligned diagnostic evaluator. Our results argue that goal generators must be selected by downstream utility, not by editing-quality leaderboards.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 16

Modular-Cam: Modular Dynamic Camera-view Video Generation with LLM

Text-to-Video generation, which utilizes the provided text prompt to generate high-quality videos, has drawn increasing attention and achieved great success due to the development of diffusion models recently. Existing methods mainly rely on a pre-trained text encoder to capture the semantic information and perform cross attention with the encoded text prompt to guide the generation of video. However, when it comes to complex prompts that contain dynamic scenes and multiple camera-view transformations, these methods can not decompose the overall information into separate scenes, as well as fail to smoothly change scenes based on the corresponding camera-views. To solve these problems, we propose a novel method, i.e., Modular-Cam. Specifically, to better understand a given complex prompt, we utilize a large language model to analyze user instructions and decouple them into multiple scenes together with transition actions. To generate a video containing dynamic scenes that match the given camera-views, we incorporate the widely-used temporal transformer into the diffusion model to ensure continuity within a single scene and propose CamOperator, a modular network based module that well controls the camera movements. Moreover, we propose AdaControlNet, which utilizes ControlNet to ensure consistency across scenes and adaptively adjusts the color tone of the generated video. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments prove our proposed Modular-Cam's strong capability of generating multi-scene videos together with its ability to achieve fine-grained control of camera movements. Generated results are available at https://modular-cam.github.io.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025

Enhancing Visual Place Recognition via Fast and Slow Adaptive Biasing in Event Cameras

Event cameras are increasingly popular in robotics due to beneficial features such as low latency, energy efficiency, and high dynamic range. Nevertheless, their downstream task performance is greatly influenced by the optimization of bias parameters. These parameters, for instance, regulate the necessary change in light intensity to trigger an event, which in turn depends on factors such as the environment lighting and camera motion. This paper introduces feedback control algorithms that automatically tune the bias parameters through two interacting methods: 1) An immediate, on-the-fly fast adaptation of the refractory period, which sets the minimum interval between consecutive events, and 2) if the event rate exceeds the specified bounds even after changing the refractory period repeatedly, the controller adapts the pixel bandwidth and event thresholds, which stabilizes after a short period of noise events across all pixels (slow adaptation). Our evaluation focuses on the visual place recognition task, where incoming query images are compared to a given reference database. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of our algorithms' adaptive feedback control in real-time. To do so, we collected the QCR-Fast-and-Slow dataset that contains DAVIS346 event camera streams from 366 repeated traversals of a Scout Mini robot navigating through a 100 meter long indoor lab setting (totaling over 35km distance traveled) in varying brightness conditions with ground truth location information. Our proposed feedback controllers result in superior performance when compared to the standard bias settings and prior feedback control methods. Our findings also detail the impact of bias adjustments on task performance and feature ablation studies on the fast and slow adaptation mechanisms.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

Pixel-to-4D: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Generation with Dynamic 3D Gaussians

Humans excel at forecasting the future dynamics of a scene given just a single image. Video generation models that can mimic this ability are an essential component for intelligent systems. Recent approaches have improved temporal coherence and 3D consistency in single-image-conditioned video generation. However, these methods often lack robust user controllability, such as modifying the camera path, limiting their applicability in real-world applications. Most existing camera-controlled image-to-video models struggle with accurately modeling camera motion, maintaining temporal consistency, and preserving geometric integrity. Leveraging explicit intermediate 3D representations offers a promising solution by enabling coherent video generation aligned with a given camera trajectory. Although these methods often use 3D point clouds to render scenes and introduce object motion in a later stage, this two-step process still falls short in achieving full temporal consistency, despite allowing precise control over camera movement. We propose a novel framework that constructs a 3D Gaussian scene representation and samples plausible object motion, given a single image in a single forward pass. This enables fast, camera-guided video generation without the need for iterative denoising to inject object motion into render frames. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo, RealEstate10K and DL3DV-10K datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art video quality and inference efficiency. The project page is available at https://melonienimasha.github.io/Pixel-to-4D-Website.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 2

Generative Cinematographer: Composing Camera and Object Motion in 3D

Current controllable video generation systems often rely on 2D motion trajectories or sparse drag signals for object motion. These controls are ambiguous because the same 2D trajectory can correspond to different 3D motions, especially when the camera and objects move simultaneously. We present Generative Cinematographer (GenCine), a system that lifts a single image into an editable 3D scene scaffold where artists jointly author camera and foreground motion. Artists specify a camera path and move selected foreground regions using local 3D motion handles. Several handles can move different parts of a subject independently, providing a piecewise-rigid approximation to non-rigid motion without a physics simulator or category-specific prior. To communicate these controls to a pretrained video model, we project them into guidance maps. These maps record where the controlled regions appear in each frame, assign each handle a fixed color across frames and encode the current 3D positions of its controlled points in the same world coordinate system as the background. This lets us describe object motion relative to the scene even as the camera moves. For training, we recover controls from the motion observed in real videos and use ground-truth geometry and trajectories from synthetic videos. We train a lightweight guidance branch and LoRA adapters on a pretrained Wan model to follow these controls. Our experiments show consistent camera-relative motion, improved geometric consistency under viewpoint changes, and strong controllability across diverse real-world scenes.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30

3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations

Diffusion policies are conditional diffusion models that learn robot action distributions conditioned on the robot and environment state. They have recently shown to outperform both deterministic and alternative action distribution learning formulations. 3D robot policies use 3D scene feature representations aggregated from a single or multiple camera views using sensed depth. They have shown to generalize better than their 2D counterparts across camera viewpoints. We unify these two lines of work and present 3D Diffuser Actor, a neural policy equipped with a novel 3D denoising transformer that fuses information from the 3D visual scene, a language instruction and proprioception to predict the noise in noised 3D robot pose trajectories. 3D Diffuser Actor sets a new state-of-the-art on RLBench with an absolute performance gain of 18.1% over the current SOTA on a multi-view setup and an absolute gain of 13.1% on a single-view setup. On the CALVIN benchmark, it improves over the current SOTA by a 9% relative increase. It also learns to control a robot manipulator in the real world from a handful of demonstrations. Through thorough comparisons with the current SOTA policies and ablations of our model, we show 3D Diffuser Actor's design choices dramatically outperform 2D representations, regression and classification objectives, absolute attentions, and holistic non-tokenized 3D scene embeddings.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024

EPiC: Efficient Video Camera Control Learning with Precise Anchor-Video Guidance

Recent approaches on 3D camera control in video diffusion models (VDMs) often create anchor videos to guide diffusion models as a structured prior by rendering from estimated point clouds following annotated camera trajectories. However, errors inherent in point cloud estimation often lead to inaccurate anchor videos. Moreover, the requirement for extensive camera trajectory annotations further increases resource demands. To address these limitations, we introduce EPiC, an efficient and precise camera control learning framework that automatically constructs high-quality anchor videos without expensive camera trajectory annotations. Concretely, we create highly precise anchor videos for training by masking source videos based on first-frame visibility. This approach ensures high alignment, eliminates the need for camera trajectory annotations, and thus can be readily applied to any in-the-wild video to generate image-to-video (I2V) training pairs. Furthermore, we introduce Anchor-ControlNet, a lightweight conditioning module that integrates anchor video guidance in visible regions to pretrained VDMs, with less than 1% of backbone model parameters. By combining the proposed anchor video data and ControlNet module, EPiC achieves efficient training with substantially fewer parameters, training steps, and less data, without requiring modifications to the diffusion model backbone typically needed to mitigate rendering misalignments. Although being trained on masking-based anchor videos, our method generalizes robustly to anchor videos made with point clouds during inference, enabling precise 3D-informed camera control. EPiC achieves SOTA performance on RealEstate10K and MiraData for I2V camera control task, demonstrating precise and robust camera control ability both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, EPiC also exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to video-to-video scenarios.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motion

Recent text-to-video diffusion models have achieved impressive progress. In practice, users often desire the ability to control object motion and camera movement independently for customized video creation. However, current methods lack the focus on separately controlling object motion and camera movement in a decoupled manner, which limits the controllability and flexibility of text-to-video models. In this paper, we introduce Direct-a-Video, a system that allows users to independently specify motions for one or multiple objects and/or camera movements, as if directing a video. We propose a simple yet effective strategy for the decoupled control of object motion and camera movement. Object motion is controlled through spatial cross-attention modulation using the model's inherent priors, requiring no additional optimization. For camera movement, we introduce new temporal cross-attention layers to interpret quantitative camera movement parameters. We further employ an augmentation-based approach to train these layers in a self-supervised manner on a small-scale dataset, eliminating the need for explicit motion annotation. Both components operate independently, allowing individual or combined control, and can generalize to open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Project page: https://direct-a-video.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024 1

Factorizing Diffusion Policies for Observation Modality Prioritization

Diffusion models have been extensively leveraged for learning robot skills from demonstrations. These policies are conditioned on several observational modalities such as proprioception, vision and tactile. However, observational modalities have varying levels of influence for different tasks that diffusion polices fail to capture. In this work, we propose 'Factorized Diffusion Policies' abbreviated as FDP, a novel policy formulation that enables observational modalities to have differing influence on the action diffusion process by design. This results in learning policies where certain observations modalities can be prioritized over the others such as vision>tactile or proprioception>vision. FDP achieves modality prioritization by factorizing the observational conditioning for diffusion process, resulting in more performant and robust policies. Our factored approach shows strong performance improvements in low-data regimes with 15% absolute improvement in success rate on several simulated benchmarks when compared to a standard diffusion policy that jointly conditions on all input modalities. Moreover, our benchmark and real-world experiments show that factored policies are naturally more robust with 40% higher absolute success rate across several visuomotor tasks under distribution shifts such as visual distractors or camera occlusions, where existing diffusion policies fail catastrophically. FDP thus offers a safer and more robust alternative to standard diffusion policies for real-world deployment. Videos are available at https://fdp-policy.github.io/fdp-policy/ .

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 19, 2025

Warp-as-History: Generalizable Camera-Controlled Video Generation from One Training Video

Camera-controlled video generation has made substantial progress, enabling generated videos to follow prescribed viewpoint trajectories. However, existing methods usually learn camera-specific conditioning through camera encoders, control branches, or attention and positional-encoding modifications, which often require post-training on large-scale camera-annotated videos. Training-free alternatives avoid such post-training, but often shift the cost to test-time optimization or extra denoising-time guidance. We propose Warp-as-History, a simple interface that turns camera-induced warps into camera-warped pseudo-history with target-frame positional alignment and visible-token selection. Given a target camera trajectory, we construct camera-warped pseudo-history from past observations and feed it through the model's visual-history pathway. Crucially, we align its positional encoding with the target frames being denoised and remove warped-history tokens without valid source observations. Without any training, architectural modification, or test-time optimization, this interface reveals a non-trivial zero-shot capability of a frozen video generation model to follow camera trajectories. Moreover, lightweight offline LoRA finetuning on only one camera-annotated video further improves this capability and generalizes to unseen videos, improving camera adherence, visual quality, and motion dynamics without test-time optimization or target-video adaptation. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets confirm the effectiveness of our method.

  • 2 authors
·
May 13 2

ObjCtrl-2.5D: Training-free Object Control with Camera Poses

This study aims to achieve more precise and versatile object control in image-to-video (I2V) generation. Current methods typically represent the spatial movement of target objects with 2D trajectories, which often fail to capture user intention and frequently produce unnatural results. To enhance control, we present ObjCtrl-2.5D, a training-free object control approach that uses a 3D trajectory, extended from a 2D trajectory with depth information, as a control signal. By modeling object movement as camera movement, ObjCtrl-2.5D represents the 3D trajectory as a sequence of camera poses, enabling object motion control using an existing camera motion control I2V generation model (CMC-I2V) without training. To adapt the CMC-I2V model originally designed for global motion control to handle local object motion, we introduce a module to isolate the target object from the background, enabling independent local control. In addition, we devise an effective way to achieve more accurate object control by sharing low-frequency warped latent within the object's region across frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ObjCtrl-2.5D significantly improves object control accuracy compared to training-free methods and offers more diverse control capabilities than training-based approaches using 2D trajectories, enabling complex effects like object rotation. Code and results are available at https://wzhouxiff.github.io/projects/ObjCtrl-2.5D/.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024 2

Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety Moderator: A Compact Multimodal, Multilingual, and Reasoning Enabled Content Safety Moderator

Safety moderation for deployed AI applications is moving beyond text-only prompts: systems increasingly need to judge images, documents, screenshots, and generated responses under policies that vary across domains. Existing guardrails usually cover only part of this setting, making it difficult to combine broad coverage, custom policy control, and low compute cost. We present Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety Moderator, also referred to as Nemotron 3.5 CS in this paper for brevity, a compact 4B vision-language safety moderator that jointly classifies user prompts, images, and assistant responses across 12 languages. Nemotron 3.5 CS returns safety labels for latency-sensitive moderation and can additionally produce concise reasoning traces that apply supplied custom policies and identify violated categories when reasoning is requested. We also release a multimodal and multilingual safety dataset for guard training, spanning human-labeled real-image moderation, benign vision-language and document tasks, synthetic rare-risk and jailbreak cases, and custom-policy examples. Across evaluations spanning multimodal safety, text moderation, multilingual robustness, custom-policy following, benign false positives, and latency, Nemotron 3.5 CS demonstrates a practical coverage tradeoff: it adds image-conditioned and policy-conditioned moderation while remaining broadly competitive with specialized guard models. These results suggest that compact vision-language moderators can serve as deployable front-line safety components, with reasoning used selectively for audit and policy review.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 26

MoRight: Motion Control Done Right

Generating motion-controlled videos--where user-specified actions drive physically plausible scene dynamics under freely chosen viewpoints--demands two capabilities: (1) disentangled motion control, allowing users to separately control the object motion and adjust camera viewpoint; and (2) motion causality, ensuring that user-driven actions trigger coherent reactions from other objects rather than merely displacing pixels. Existing methods fall short on both fronts: they entangle camera and object motion into a single tracking signal and treat motion as kinematic displacement without modeling causal relationships between object motion. We introduce MoRight, a unified framework that addresses both limitations through disentangled motion modeling. Object motion is specified in a canonical static-view and transferred to an arbitrary target camera viewpoint via temporal cross-view attention, enabling disentangled camera and object control. We further decompose motion into active (user-driven) and passive (consequence) components, training the model to learn motion causality from data. At inference, users can either supply active motion and MoRight predicts consequences (forward reasoning), or specify desired passive outcomes and MoRight recovers plausible driving actions (inverse reasoning), all while freely adjusting the camera viewpoint. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in generation quality, motion controllability, and interaction awareness.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Apr 7 1

WorldCraft: From Camera Navigation to Object Manipulation in Interactive Video World Models

Recent video-based world models have made pixel-space environments interactive at the camera level: users can navigate viewpoints while the model generates coherent visual continuations. Yet their action spaces remain incomplete: users can move the camera, but cannot act on individual objects. Since real-world interaction is inherently object-centric, such models remain closer to passive scene observers than truly manipulable environments. We present WorldCraft, a framework that expands interactive video world models from camera navigation to object-level trajectory actions. Given a user click and a sketched path, WorldCraft generates future frames in which the selected object follows the prescribed trajectory while the camera continues to navigate the scene. WorldCraft achieves this through a trajectory-centric control pipeline: First, Normalized World Trajectory (NWT) represents user-drawn motion in a camera-invariant world coordinate system and dynamically re-projects it under the current camera pose, separating object motion from camera-induced screen-space displacement; Spatial-Pathway LoRA (SP-LoRA) then injects this world-space signal through the model's spatial-control pathway, adding object manipulation capability while preserving the pretrained camera controller; finally, Trajectory-Anchored State Persistence (TASP) treats the world trajectory as a persistent spatial state and refreshes autoregressive memory after trajectory-conditioned generation, allowing moved objects to reappear at their updated positions after leaving the camera view. Experiments show that WorldCraft enables accurate object control, preserves the video-based world model's camera fidelity under camera-only evaluation, and maintains object state across long autoregressive rollouts with off-camera excursions.

tencent Tencent
·
May 23 2

Infinite-Homography as Robust Conditioning for Camera-Controlled Video Generation

Recent progress in video diffusion models has spurred growing interest in camera-controlled novel-view video generation for dynamic scenes, aiming to provide creators with cinematic camera control capabilities in post-production. A key challenge in camera-controlled video generation is ensuring fidelity to the specified camera pose, while maintaining view consistency and reasoning about occluded geometry from limited observations. To address this, existing methods either train trajectory-conditioned video generation model on trajectory-video pair dataset, or estimate depth from the input video to reproject it along a target trajectory and generate the unprojected regions. Nevertheless, existing methods struggle to generate camera-pose-faithful, high-quality videos for two main reasons: (1) reprojection-based approaches are highly susceptible to errors caused by inaccurate depth estimation; and (2) the limited diversity of camera trajectories in existing datasets restricts learned models. To address these limitations, we present InfCam, a depth-free, camera-controlled video-to-video generation framework with high pose fidelity. The framework integrates two key components: (1) infinite homography warping, which encodes 3D camera rotations directly within the 2D latent space of a video diffusion model. Conditioning on this noise-free rotational information, the residual parallax term is predicted through end-to-end training to achieve high camera-pose fidelity; and (2) a data augmentation pipeline that transforms existing synthetic multiview datasets into sequences with diverse trajectories and focal lengths. Experimental results demonstrate that InfCam outperforms baseline methods in camera-pose accuracy and visual fidelity, generalizing well from synthetic to real-world data. Link to our project page:https://emjay73.github.io/InfCam/

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
Dec 18, 2025 5

HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 3

SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of 0.929 and MMRV of 0.119, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.

  • 12 authors
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Jun 16

AVA-Encoder: Towards Agent-Native Video Representation Learning

Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding. AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its hierarchy and state nodes store structured text, while a linked asset layer holds generated images, audio, and video. Typed edges preserve the relations between these text descriptions and assets in a form that agents can easily understand, query, and edit. The video reconstruction differences drive a textual-gradient optimization framework, which expresses evaluation feedback as natural-language update directions for Data-Independent Encoding Policy Pseudo-Training in the outer loop and optional Data-Dependent KG Representation Refinement in the test-time inner loop. Extensive experiments show that AVA-Encoder improves by 20.7 percentage points over the strongest external baseline. In the controlled policy-only setting, its pseudo-trained shot-level Agentic Video Encoder policy also outperforms a carefully human-tuned policy while using 74.3% fewer system-prompt tokens. We release the complete AVA-Encoder framework, a reliable agentic video reconstruction benchmark, and the first dataset of high-quality film KG representations.

Controllable Video Generation: A Survey

With the rapid development of AI-generated content (AIGC), video generation has emerged as one of its most dynamic and impactful subfields. In particular, the advancement of video generation foundation models has led to growing demand for controllable video generation methods that can more accurately reflect user intent. Most existing foundation models are designed for text-to-video generation, where text prompts alone are often insufficient to express complex, multi-modal, and fine-grained user requirements. This limitation makes it challenging for users to generate videos with precise control using current models. To address this issue, recent research has explored the integration of additional non-textual conditions, such as camera motion, depth maps, and human pose, to extend pretrained video generation models and enable more controllable video synthesis. These approaches aim to enhance the flexibility and practical applicability of AIGC-driven video generation systems. In this survey, we provide a systematic review of controllable video generation, covering both theoretical foundations and recent advances in the field. We begin by introducing the key concepts and commonly used open-source video generation models. We then focus on control mechanisms in video diffusion models, analyzing how different types of conditions can be incorporated into the denoising process to guide generation. Finally, we categorize existing methods based on the types of control signals they leverage, including single-condition generation, multi-condition generation, and universal controllable generation. For a complete list of the literature on controllable video generation reviewed, please visit our curated repository at https://github.com/mayuelala/Awesome-Controllable-Video-Generation.

  • 17 authors
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Jul 22, 2025

PerturBot: Breaking Shortcut Priors in Vision-Language-Action Models with Perturbative Training

A vision--language--action (VLA) policy can complete complex tasks while ignoring the evidence that should determine its actions. An object held near the wrist camera can displace the instructed target. Language and action show the same pattern: a familiar noun can trigger the operation it was paired with in training even after the verb changes, and a gripper that closed on nothing may lift anyway. We call these dependencies modality shortcuts: regularities in successful demonstrations make visual, lexical, or motor cues sufficient to predict expert actions without the task evidence needed for the underlying decision. More demonstrations of the same kind can raise task success while leaving these shortcuts intact. We propose Perturbot which makes task-relevant evidence easier to use and shortcuts insufficient on their own: it applies task-preserving wrist-view perturbations, enriches instructions with decision-relevant captions, and adds random and failed trajectory segments relabeled with the behavior they contain. It complements scaling by changing what is scaled, and leaves inference unchanged. Moreover, we propose GroundingFscore, an offline score that diagnoses how severely a policy relies on modality shortcuts. Task success rate shows whether a policy improves, while GroundingFscore reveals whether the policy scales healthily, relying on task evidence rather than shortcuts. Together, Perturbot and GroundingFscore provide a training-and-evaluation framework for disentangling VLA decisions from shortcut priors while preserving responsiveness to task-relevant evidence.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 2 2

Customize Multi-modal RAI Guardrails with Precedent-based predictions

A multi-modal guardrail must effectively filter image content based on user-defined policies, identifying material that may be hateful, reinforce harmful stereotypes, contain explicit material, or spread misinformation. Deploying such guardrails in real-world applications, however, poses significant challenges. Users often require varied and highly customizable policies and typically cannot provide abundant examples for each custom policy. Consequently, an ideal guardrail should be scalable to the multiple policies and adaptable to evolving user standards with minimal retraining. Existing fine-tuning methods typically condition predictions on pre-defined policies, restricting their generalizability to new policies or necessitating extensive retraining to adapt. Conversely, training-free methods struggle with limited context lengths, making it difficult to incorporate all the policies comprehensively. To overcome these limitations, we propose to condition model's judgment on "precedents", which are the reasoning processes of prior data points similar to the given input. By leveraging precedents instead of fixed policies, our approach greatly enhances the flexibility and adaptability of the guardrail. In this paper, we introduce a critique-revise mechanism for collecting high-quality precedents and two strategies that utilize precedents for robust prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods across both few-shot and full-dataset scenarios and exhibits superior generalization to novel policies.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 27, 2025

Auteur: Language-Driven Cinematographic Framing for Human-Centric Video Generation

Generative video models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity and temporal coherence, yet intentional camera control remains elusive. Existing frameworks treat camera motion as a byproduct of pixel synthesis, producing trajectories that are stochastic, spatially inconsistent, and indifferent to the human subject driving the scene. In this work, we present Auteur, a method for language-driven, human-centric camera framing in generative video. Our core insight is that professional filmmakers conceive shots not as world-space trajectories but as framings defined relative to the actor, encoding shot size, angle, and composition as functions of human pose and motion. We formalize this intuition as a human-centric camera parameterization and introduce a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that is convertible to standard 6-DoF camera parameters. A fine-tuned multimodal large language model then acts as a virtual director, mapping natural language descriptions and coarse human motion to sparse DSL keyframes that are deterministically interpolated into continuous camera trajectories, which are then provided as input to video generators. We train and evaluate Auteur on a new dataset of 34K aligned text, human motion, and DSL-annotated camera trajectories drawn from procedural synthesis and real-world movie footage from the CondensedMovies dataset. Auteur enables cinematographic framing of human-centered scenes, a capability largely absent in prior generative models. To assess this behavior, we propose new framing-focused metrics, and our experiments show that Auteur consistently outperforms existing methods. Project page is https://cyberiada.github.io/Auteur/

  • 7 authors
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Jun 12

CameraMaster: Unified Camera Semantic-Parameter Control for Photography Retouching

Text-guided diffusion models have greatly advanced image editing and generation. However, achieving physically consistent image retouching with precise parameter control (e.g., exposure, white balance, zoom) remains challenging. Existing methods either rely solely on ambiguous and entangled text prompts, which hinders precise camera control, or train separate heads/weights for parameter adjustment, which compromises scalability, multi-parameter composition, and sensitivity to subtle variations. To address these limitations, we propose CameraMaster, a unified camera-aware framework for image retouching. The key idea is to explicitly decouple the camera directive and then coherently integrate two critical information streams: a directive representation that captures the photographer's intent, and a parameter embedding that encodes precise camera settings. CameraMaster first uses the camera parameter embedding to modulate both the camera directive and the content semantics. The modulated directive is then injected into the content features via cross-attention, yielding a strongly camera-sensitive semantic context. In addition, the directive and camera embeddings are injected as conditioning and gating signals into the time embedding, enabling unified, layer-wise modulation throughout the denoising process and enforcing tight semantic-parameter alignment. To train and evaluate CameraMaster, we construct a large-scale dataset of 78K image-prompt pairs annotated with camera parameters. Extensive experiments show that CameraMaster produces monotonic and near-linear responses to parameter variations, supports seamless multi-parameter composition, and significantly outperforms existing methods.

  • 8 authors
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Nov 25, 2025

ShotVerse: Advancing Cinematic Camera Control for Text-Driven Multi-Shot Video Creation

Text-driven video generation has democratized film creation, but camera control in cinematic multi-shot scenarios remains a significant block. Implicit textual prompts lack precision, while explicit trajectory conditioning imposes prohibitive manual overhead and often triggers execution failures in current models. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a data-centric paradigm shift, positing that aligned (Caption, Trajectory, Video) triplets form an inherent joint distribution that can connect automated plotting and precise execution. Guided by this insight, we present ShotVerse, a "Plan-then-Control" framework that decouples generation into two collaborative agents: a VLM (Vision-Language Model)-based Planner that leverages spatial priors to obtain cinematic, globally aligned trajectories from text, and a Controller that renders these trajectories into multi-shot video content via a camera adapter. Central to our approach is the construction of a data foundation: we design an automated multi-shot camera calibration pipeline aligns disjoint single-shot trajectories into a unified global coordinate system. This facilitates the curation of ShotVerse-Bench, a high-fidelity cinematic dataset with a three-track evaluation protocol that serves as the bedrock for our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotVerse effectively bridges the gap between unreliable textual control and labor-intensive manual plotting, achieving superior cinematic aesthetics and generating multi-shot videos that are both camera-accurate and cross-shot consistent.

tencent Tencent
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Mar 11 2

SERL: A Software Suite for Sample-Efficient Robotic Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of robotic reinforcement learning (RL), enabling methods that handle complex image observations, train in the real world, and incorporate auxiliary data, such as demonstrations and prior experience. However, despite these advances, robotic RL remains hard to use. It is acknowledged among practitioners that the particular implementation details of these algorithms are often just as important (if not more so) for performance as the choice of algorithm. We posit that a significant challenge to widespread adoption of robotic RL, as well as further development of robotic RL methods, is the comparative inaccessibility of such methods. To address this challenge, we developed a carefully implemented library containing a sample efficient off-policy deep RL method, together with methods for computing rewards and resetting the environment, a high-quality controller for a widely-adopted robot, and a number of challenging example tasks. We provide this library as a resource for the community, describe its design choices, and present experimental results. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that our implementation can achieve very efficient learning, acquiring policies for PCB board assembly, cable routing, and object relocation between 25 to 50 minutes of training per policy on average, improving over state-of-the-art results reported for similar tasks in the literature. These policies achieve perfect or near-perfect success rates, extreme robustness even under perturbations, and exhibit emergent recovery and correction behaviors. We hope that these promising results and our high-quality open-source implementation will provide a tool for the robotics community to facilitate further developments in robotic RL. Our code, documentation, and videos can be found at https://serl-robot.github.io/

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 1

Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation

Generalist robot policies can now perform a wide range of manipulation skills, but evaluating and improving their ability with unfamiliar objects and instructions remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation requires a large number of real-world rollouts, while systematic improvement demands additional corrective data with expert labels. Both of these processes are slow, costly, and difficult to scale. World models offer a promising, scalable alternative by enabling policies to rollout within imagination space. However, a key challenge is building a controllable world model that can handle multi-step interactions with generalist robot policies. This requires a world model compatible with modern generalist policies by supporting multi-view prediction, fine-grained action control, and consistent long-horizon interactions, which is not achieved by previous works. In this paper, we make a step forward by introducing a controllable multi-view world model that can be used to evaluate and improve the instruction-following ability of generalist robot policies. Our model maintains long-horizon consistency with a pose-conditioned memory retrieval mechanism and achieves precise action control through frame-level action conditioning. Trained on the DROID dataset (95k trajectories, 564 scenes), our model generates spatially and temporally consistent trajectories under novel scenarios and new camera placements for over 20 seconds. We show that our method can accurately rank policy performance without real-world robot rollouts. Moreover, by synthesizing successful trajectories in imagination and using them for supervised fine-tuning, our approach can improve policy success by 44.7\%.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2025 1

Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive experimental results in image classification, but can surprisingly be unstable with respect to adversarial perturbations, that is, minimal changes to the input image that cause the network to misclassify it. With potential applications including perception modules and end-to-end controllers for self-driving cars, this raises concerns about their safety. We develop a novel automated verification framework for feed-forward multi-layer neural networks based on Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT). We focus on safety of image classification decisions with respect to image manipulations, such as scratches or changes to camera angle or lighting conditions that would result in the same class being assigned by a human, and define safety for an individual decision in terms of invariance of the classification within a small neighbourhood of the original image. We enable exhaustive search of the region by employing discretisation, and propagate the analysis layer by layer. Our method works directly with the network code and, in contrast to existing methods, can guarantee that adversarial examples, if they exist, are found for the given region and family of manipulations. If found, adversarial examples can be shown to human testers and/or used to fine-tune the network. We implement the techniques using Z3 and evaluate them on state-of-the-art networks, including regularised and deep learning networks. We also compare against existing techniques to search for adversarial examples and estimate network robustness.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 21, 2016