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Sebastian Houben

11 accepted papers

2026

From Language to Action: Can LLM-Based Agents Be Used for Embodied Robot Cognition?

ICRA 2026poster

In order to flexibly act in an everyday environment, a robotic agent needs a variety of cognitive capabilities that enable it to reason about plans and perform execution recovery. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to demonstrate emergent cognitive aspects, such as reasoning and language u…

2026

Reliable Robotic Task Execution in the Face of Anomalies

RA-L 2026

Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying policies without the ability to recognise and react to failures ma

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2026

Reliable Robotic Task Execution in the Face of Anomalies

ICRA 2026poster

Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying policies without the ability to recognise and react to failures ma…

2026

Scaling Laws for Conditional Emergence of Multilingual Image Captioning via Generalization from Translation

AAAI 2026technical

Cross-lingual, cross-task transfer is challenged by task-specific data scarcity, which becomes more severe as language support grows and is further amplified in vision-language models (VLMs). We investigate multilingual generalization in encoder-decoder transformer VLMs to enable zero-shot image cap

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

GO-VMP: Global Optimization for View Motion Planning in Fruit Mapping

IROS 2025

Automating labor-intensive tasks such as crop monitoring with robots is essential for enhancing production and conserving resources. However, autonomously monitoring horticulture crops remains challenging due to their complex structures, which often result in fruit occlusions. Existing view planning

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2025

Robustness Evaluation of the German Extractive Question Answering Task

COLING 2025main

To ensure reliable performance of Question Answering (QA) systems, evaluation of robustness is crucial. Common evaluation benchmarks commonly only include performance metrics, such as Exact Match (EM) and the F1 score. However, these benchmarks overlook critical factors for the deployment of QA syst…

2024

Robust Entropy Search for Safe Efficient Bayesian Optimization

UAI 2024poster

The practical use of Bayesian Optimization (BO) in engineering applications imposes special requirements: high sampling efficiency on the one hand and finding a robust solution on the other hand. We address the case of adversarial robustness, where all parameters are controllable during the optimiza…

2018

Fast Autonomous Flight in Warehouses for Inventory Applications

RA-L 2018

The past years have shown a remarkable growth in use-cases for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Conceivable indoor applications require highly robust environment perception, fast reaction to changing situations, and stable navigation, but reliable sources of absolute positioning such as global navigati

Cited by 93SourceScholar
2018

Keyframe-Based Photometric Online Calibration and Color Correction

IROS 2018poster

Finding the parameters of a vignetting function for a camera currently involves the acquisition of several images in a given scene under very controlled lighting conditions, a cumbersome and error-prone task where the end result can only be confirmed visually. Many computer vision algorithms assume…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2017

Online depth calibration for RGB-D cameras using visual SLAM

IROS 2017poster

Modern consumer RGB-D cameras are affordable and provide dense depth estimates at high frame rates. Hence, they are popular for building dense environment representations. Yet, the sensors often do not provide accurate depth estimates since the factory calibration exhibits a static deformation. We p…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2016

Efficient multi-camera visual-inertial SLAM for micro aerial vehicles

IROS 2016poster

Visual SLAM is an area of vivid research and bears countless applications for moving robots. In particular, micro aerial vehicles benefit from visual sensors due to their low weight. Their motion is, however, often faster and more complex than that of ground-based robots which is why systems with mu…

Cited by 49SourceScholar