Hongjie Cao

RO
h-index22
3papers
1citation
Novelty57%
AI Score41

3 Papers

36.3ROJun 3
Potential-Guided Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Policy Improvement

Yunpeng Mei, Jiakai He, Hongjie Cao et al.

Large vision-language-action (VLA) policies are increasingly trained as conditional generative models over action chunks. Yet deployment produces mixed-quality experience-successful demonstrations, partial completions, recoverable mistakes, and failures-that is difficult to use with standard imitation. Full behavior cloning (BC) imitates failures, filtered BC discards useful sub-trajectories, and offline reinforcement learning adds a large critic. We introduce ForesightFlow, a self-guided flow-matching policy that augments each generated action chunk with a learned success-potential trajectory. The same flow proposes and scores candidate actions, enabling best-of-$K$ inference without an external critic. The key issue is that policy improvement and value calibration require different supervision: advantage weighting should emphasize high-quality actions, but applying the same weights to potential coordinates suppresses failure gradients and creates overconfident scores. We address this with decoupled advantage-weighted flow matching, applying exponentiated advantage weights only to action velocities while training potential velocities uniformly. We further derive a one-step boundary estimator for conditional flow matching, allowing advantage computation with a single stop-gradient forward pass. Across five BEHAVIOR-1K simulation tasks and five real-world bimanual tasks, ForesightFlow improves over imitation baselines, matches the strongest separate-critic baseline in simulation success, improves real-world success, and reduces training compute by $38\%$. Ablations show that decoupling prevents value hallucination, the one-step estimator preserves candidate-ranking fidelity, and self-guided sampling improves long-horizon execution.

ROAug 28, 2025
SPGrasp: Spatiotemporal Prompt-driven Grasp Synthesis in Dynamic Scenes

Yunpeng Mei, Hongjie Cao, Yinqiu Xia et al.

Real-time interactive grasp synthesis for dynamic objects remains challenging as existing methods fail to achieve low-latency inference while maintaining promptability. To bridge this gap, we propose SPGrasp (spatiotemporal prompt-driven dynamic grasp synthesis), a novel framework extending segment anything model v2 (SAMv2) for video stream grasp estimation. Our core innovation integrates user prompts with spatiotemporal context, enabling real-time interaction with end-to-end latency as low as 59 ms while ensuring temporal consistency for dynamic objects. In benchmark evaluations, SPGrasp achieves instance-level grasp accuracies of 90.6% on OCID and 93.8% on Jacquard. On the challenging GraspNet-1Billion dataset under continuous tracking, SPGrasp achieves 92.0% accuracy with 73.1 ms per-frame latency, representing a 58.5% reduction compared to the prior state-of-the-art promptable method RoG-SAM while maintaining competitive accuracy. Real-world experiments involving 13 moving objects demonstrate a 94.8% success rate in interactive grasping scenarios. These results confirm SPGrasp effectively resolves the latency-interactivity trade-off in dynamic grasp synthesis.

ROMar 28, 2025
Robust Offline Imitation Learning Through State-level Trajectory Stitching

Shuze Wang, Yunpeng Mei, Hongjie Cao et al.

Imitation learning (IL) has proven effective for enabling robots to acquire visuomotor skills through expert demonstrations. However, traditional IL methods are limited by their reliance on high-quality, often scarce, expert data, and suffer from covariate shift. To address these challenges, recent advances in offline IL have incorporated suboptimal, unlabeled datasets into the training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance policy learning from mixed-quality offline datasets by leveraging task-relevant trajectory fragments and rich environmental dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a state-based search framework that stitches state-action pairs from imperfect demonstrations, generating more diverse and informative training trajectories. Experimental results on standard IL benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks showcase that our proposed method significantly improves both generalization and performance.