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Panpan Cai

18 accepted papers

2026

Hi-Drive: Hierarchical POMDP Planning for Safe Autonomous Driving in Diverse Urban Environments

ICRA 2026poster

Uncertainties in dynamic road environments pose significant challenges for behavior and trajectory planning in autonomous driving. This paper introduces Hi-Drive, a hierarchical planning algorithm addressing uncertainties at both behavior and trajectory levels using a hierarchical Partially Observab…

2026

Vec-QMDP: Vectorized POMDP Planning on CPUs for Real-Time Autonomous Driving

RSS 2026poster

Planning under uncertainty for real-world robotics tasks, such as autonomous driving, requires reasoning in enormous high-dimensional belief spaces, rendering the problem computationally intensive. While parallelization offers scalability, existing hybrid CPU-GPU solvers face critical bottlenecks du…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncert…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hi-Drive: Hierarchical POMDP Planning for Safe Autonomous Driving in Diverse Urban Environments

RA-L 2025

Uncertainties in dynamic road environments pose significant challenges for behavior and trajectory planning in autonomous driving. This paper introduces Hi-Drive, a hierarchical planning algorithm addressing uncertainties at both behavior and trajectory levels using a hierarchical Partially Observab

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2025

RI-MAE: Rotation-Invariant Masked AutoEncoders for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning

AAAI 2025technical

Masked point modeling methods have recently achieved great success in self-supervised learning for point cloud data. However, these methods are sensitive to rotations and often exhibit sharp performance drops when encountering rotational variations. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Invaria…

2025

Tru-POMDP: Task Planning Under Uncertainty via Tree of Hypotheses and Open-Ended POMDPs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Task planning under uncertainty is essential for home-service robots operating in the real world. Tasks involve ambiguous human instructions, hidden or unknown object locations, and open-vocabulary object types, leading to significant open-ended uncertainty and a boundlessly large planning space. To…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

UniDomain: Pretraining a Unified PDDL Domain from Real-World Demonstrations for Generalizable Robot Task Planning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Robotic task planning in real-world environments requires reasoning over implicit constraints from language and vision. While LLMs and VLMs offer strong priors, they struggle with long-horizon structure and symbolic grounding. Existing meth- ods that combine LLMs with symbolic planning often rely on…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

World Modeling Makes a Better Planner: Dual Preference Optimization for Embodied Task Planning

ACL 2025long

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown promise for embodied task planning, yet they struggle with fundamental challenges like dependency constraints and efficiency. Existing approaches either solely optimize action selection or directly leverage pre-trained models as worl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

What Truly Matters in Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving?

NeurIPS 2023poster

Trajectory prediction plays a vital role in the performance of autonomous driving systems, and prediction accuracy, such as average displacement error (ADE) or final displacement error (FDE), is widely used as a performance metric. However, a significant disparity exists between the accuracy of pred…

2022

LEADER: Learning Attention over Driving Behaviors for Planning under Uncertainty

CoRL 2022oral

Uncertainty in human behaviors poses a significant challenge to autonomous driving in crowded urban environments. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) offers a principled general framework for decision making under uncertainty and achieves real-time performance for complex tasks…

Cited by 12SourcecodeScholar
2019

Context and Intention Aware Planning for Urban Driving

IROS 2019poster

We present a novel autonomous driving system which uses the road contextual information and intentions of other road users for urban driving. Unlike highways, urban environments require the drivers to follow traffic signs and signals while using their best judgment for anomalous situations. In such…

Cited by 25SourceScholar
2019

LeTS-Drive: Driving in a Crowd by Learning from Tree Search

RSS 2019poster

Autonomous driving in a crowded environment, e.g., a busy traffic intersection, is an unsolved challenge for robotics. The robot vehicle must contend with a dynamic and partially observable environment, noisy sensors, and many agents. A principled approach is to formalize it as a Partially Observabl…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2018

HyP-DESPOT: A Hybrid Parallel Algorithm for Online Planning under Uncertainty

RSS 2018poster

Planning under uncertainty is critical for robust robot performance in uncertain, dynamic environments, but it incurs high computational cost. State-of-the-art online search algorithms, such as DESPOT, have vastly improved the computational efficiency of planning under uncertainty and made it a valu…

2018

PORCA: Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving Among Many Pedestrians

RA-L 2018

This letter presents a planning system for autonomous driving among many pedestrians. A key ingredient of our approach is Pedestrian Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance, a pedestrian motion prediction model that accounts for both a pedestrian's global navigation intention and local interactions w

Cited by 191SourceScholar