Dingcheng Huang

Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Zewei Pan et al.

Low-resource target-language generation is often limited by scarce parallel data, while high-resource source-language monolingual data is abundant but difficult to use with standard supervised fine-tuning. We propose Source-Grounded Semantic Reinforcement Learning (SG-SRL), a resource-utilization framework that converts source-language monolingual data into cross-lingual semantic supervision for target-language generation. SG-SRL performs reference-free reinforcement learning (RL) on source-language data using a cross-lingual semantic reward model, instantiated by a cross-lingual reranker that scores the semantic relevance between the source input and the target-language generation. While this induces severe verbosity-based reward hacking, a lightweight recovery stage using a small parallel corpus restores fluency, conciseness, and task format while preserving the semantic gains. Experiments on Chinese-to-Thai generation show that SG-SRL improves semantic grounding and factual coverage over cold-start SFT. Additional analyses on long-form transfer and Tibetan embedding-based rewards clarify the generalization behavior of SG-SRL and show that an encoder-based semantic reward can substitute for an LLM-based reranker in a realistic low-resource language setting.

Xiaotong Zhang, Dingcheng Huang, Kamal Youcef-Toumi

Human brain possesses the ability to effectively focus on important environmental components, which enhances perception, learning, reasoning, and decision-making. Inspired by this cognitive mechanism, we introduced a novel concept termed relevance for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Relevance is a dimensionality reduction process that incorporates a continuously operating perception module, evaluates cue sufficiency within the scene, and applies a flexible formulation and computation framework. In this paper, we present an enhanced two-loop framework that integrates real-time and asynchronous processing to quantify relevance and leverage it for safer and more efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC). The two-loop framework integrates an asynchronous loop, which leverages LLM world knowledge to quantify relevance, and a real-time loop, which performs scene understanding, human intent prediction, and decision-making based on relevance. HRC decision-making is enhanced by a relevance-based task allocation method, as well as a motion generation and collision avoidance approach that incorporates human trajectory prediction. Simulations and experiments show that our methodology for relevance quantification can accurately and robustly predict the human objective and relevance, with an average accuracy of up to 0.90 for objective prediction and up to 0.96 for relevance prediction. Moreover, our motion generation methodology reduces collision cases by 63.76% and collision frames by 44.74% when compared with a state-of-the-art (SOTA) collision avoidance method. Our framework and methodologies, with relevance, guide the robot on how to best assist humans and generate safer and more efficient actions for HRC.

Daren Zhong, Dingcheng Huang, Clayton Greenberg

Chess, a deterministic game with perfect information, has long served as a benchmark for studying strategic decision-making and artificial intelligence. Traditional chess engines or tools for analysis primarily focus on calculating optimal moves, often neglecting the variability inherent in human chess playing, particularly across different skill levels. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel and computationally efficient move prediction framework that approaches chess move prediction as a behavioral analysis task. The framework employs n-gram language models to capture move patterns characteristic of specific player skill levels. By dividing players into seven distinct skill groups, from novice to expert, we trained separate models using data from the open-source chess platform Lichess. The framework dynamically selects the most suitable model for prediction tasks and generates player moves based on preceding sequences. Evaluation on real-world game data demonstrates that the model selector module within the framework can classify skill levels with an accuracy of up to 31.7\% when utilizing early game information (16 half-moves). The move prediction framework also shows substantial accuracy improvements, with our Selector Assisted Accuracy being up to 39.1\% more accurate than our benchmark accuracy. The computational efficiency of the framework further enhances its suitability for real-time chess analysis.

Dingcheng Huang, Xiaotong Zhang, Kamal Youcef-Toumi

In modern human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications, multiple perception modules jointly extract visual, auditory, and contextual cues to achieve comprehensive scene understanding, enabling the robot to provide appropriate assistance to human agents intelligently. While executing multiple perception modules on a frame-by-frame basis enhances perception quality in offline settings, it inevitably accumulates latency, leading to a substantial decline in system performance in streaming perception scenarios. Recent work in scene understanding, termed Relevance, has established a solid foundation for developing efficient methodologies in HRC. However, modern perception pipelines still face challenges related to information redundancy and suboptimal allocation of computational resources. Drawing inspiration from the Relevance concept and the information sparsity in HRC events, we propose a novel lightweight perception scheduling framework that efficiently leverages output from previous frames to estimate and schedule necessary perception modules in real-time based on scene context. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed perception scheduling framework effectively reduces computational latency by up to 27.52% compared to conventional parallel perception pipelines, while also achieving a 72.73% improvement in MMPose activation recall. Additionally, the framework demonstrates high keyframe accuracy, achieving rates of up to 98%. The results validate the framework's capability to enhance real-time perception efficiency without significantly compromising accuracy. The framework shows potential as a scalable and systematic solution for multimodal streaming perception systems in HRC.

Changyu Li, Dingcheng Huang, Kexuan Yao et al.

Reliability-centered prognostics for rotating machinery requires early warning signals that remain accurate under nonstationary operating conditions, domain shifts across speed/load/sensors, and severe class imbalance, while keeping the false-alarm rate small and predictable. We propose the Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT), a compact tri-branch encoder tailored for online condition monitoring. A depthwise-separable convolutional stem captures micro-transients, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch models near-linear long-range dynamics, and a lightweight local Transformer encodes cross-channel resonances. We derive an analytic temporal-to-spectral mapping that ties the model's attention spectrum to classical bearing fault-order bands, yielding a band-alignment score that quantifies physical plausibility and provides physics-grounded explanations. To ensure decision reliability, healthy-score exceedances are modeled with extreme-value theory (EVT), which yields an on-threshold achieving a target false-alarm intensity (events/hour); a dual-threshold hysteresis with a minimum hold time further suppresses chatter. Under a leakage-free streaming protocol with right-censoring of missed detections on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot, PG-TMT attains higher precision-recall AUC (primary under imbalance), competitive or better ROC AUC, and shorter mean time-to-detect at matched false-alarm intensity, together with strong cross-domain transfer. By coupling physics-aligned representations with EVT-calibrated decision rules, PG-TMT delivers calibrated, interpretable, and deployment-ready early warnings for reliability-centric prognostics and health management.