Xinshuang Liu

Runfa Blark Li, Kuang-Ting Tu, Nikola Raicevic et al.

Bimanual dexterous tool use remains challenging for robots due to high-dimensional hand configurations and complex hand-tool-object dynamics and contact. Most existing control policies depend on future configuration references provided from demonstrations, while future action-conditioned world models require slow online planning over high-dimensional action sequences. A significant challenge is generating a dynamically consistent future reference trajectory without relying on privileged states from demonstrations or slow counterfactual planning. We propose DexFuture, a hierarchical system that couples a high-level Future-State Visuomotor Target Predictor with a low-level Target-Conditioned Structured Dexterous Policy. Conditioned on egocentric RGB, proprioceptive and geometric history, the high-level predictor constructs structured hand-tool-object visuomotor embeddings and uses a horizon-conditioned transformer to generate a multi-step future target trajectory. Then, the low-level policy tracks them with a target-conditioned per-link transformer. This hierarchy decouples coarse future reference generation from fine-grained action control, and slow long-horizon semantic prediction from high-frequency execution. On OakInk2 bimanual tool-use tasks, DexFuture achieves 90% of the privileged-oracle performance, compared to 7% for a no-reference policy. DexFuture operates at 60 Hz, approximately 250 times faster than DexWM-style Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) planning with a future action-conditioned world model.

Zeyuan Zhang, Tanmay Laud, Zihang He et al.

We present a new Python toolkit called RecWizard for Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS). RecWizard offers support for development of models and interactive user interface, drawing from the best practices of the Huggingface ecosystems. CRS with RecWizard are modular, portable, interactive and Large Language Models (LLMs)-friendly, to streamline the learning process and reduce the additional effort for CRS research. For more comprehensive information about RecWizard, please check our GitHub https://github.com/McAuley-Lab/RecWizard.

Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Truong Nguyen

Text-to-video generation is expensive, so only a few samples are typically produced per prompt. In this low-sample regime, maximizing the value of each batch requires high cross-video diversity. Recent methods improve diversity for image generation, but for videos they often degrade within-video temporal consistency and require costly backpropagation through a video decoder. We propose a joint-sampling framework for flow-matching video generators that improves batch diversity while preserving temporal consistency. Our approach applies diversity-driven updates and then removes only the components that would decrease a temporal-consistency objective. To avoid image-space gradients, we compute both objectives with lightweight latent-space models, avoiding video decoding and decoder backpropagation. Experiments on a state-of-the-art text-to-video flow-matching model show diversity comparable to strong joint-sampling baselines while substantially improving temporal consistency and color naturalness. Code will be released.

Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Keito Suzuki et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has attracted considerable attention for enabling high-quality real-time rendering. Although 3DGS compression methods have been proposed for deployment on storage-constrained devices, two limitations hinder archival use: (1) they compress medium-scale scenes only to the megabyte range, which remains impractical for large-scale scenes or extensive scene collections; and (2) they lack mechanisms to accommodate scene changes after long-term archival. To address these limitations, we propose an Image-Conditioned Gaussian Splat Quantizer (ICGS-Quantizer) that substantially enhances compression efficiency and provides adaptability to scene changes after archiving. ICGS-Quantizer improves quantization efficiency by jointly exploiting inter-Gaussian and inter-attribute correlations and by using shared codebooks across all training scenes, which are then fixed and applied to previously unseen test scenes, eliminating the overhead of per-scene codebooks. This approach effectively reduces the storage requirements for 3DGS to the kilobyte range while preserving visual fidelity. To enable adaptability to post-archival scene changes, ICGS-Quantizer conditions scene decoding on images captured at decoding time. The encoding, quantization, and decoding processes are trained jointly, ensuring that the codes, which are quantized representations of the scene, are effective for conditional decoding. We evaluate ICGS-Quantizer on 3D scene compression and 3D scene updating. Experimental results show that ICGS-Quantizer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in compression efficiency and adaptability to scene changes. Our code, model, and data will be publicly available on GitHub.

Xinshuang Liu, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong

In whiteboard-based remote communication, the seamless integration of drawn content and hand-screen interactions is essential for an immersive user experience. Previous methods either require bulky device setups for capturing hand gestures or fail to accurately track the hand poses from capacitive images. In this paper, we present a real-time method for precise tracking 3D poses of both hands from capacitive video frames. To this end, we develop a deep neural network to identify hands and infer hand joint positions from capacitive frames, and then recover 3D hand poses from the hand-joint positions via a constrained inverse kinematic solver. Additionally, we design a device setup for capturing high-quality hand-screen interaction data and obtained a more accurate synchronized capacitive video and hand pose dataset. Our method improves the accuracy and stability of 3D hand tracking for capacitive frames while maintaining a compact device setup for remote communication. We validate our scheme design and its superior performance on 3D hand pose tracking and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in whiteboard-based remote communication. Our code, model, and dataset are available at https://V-Hands.github.io.

Runfa Blark Li, Mahdi Shaghaghi, Keito Suzuki et al.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the most important environment-perception and navigation algorithms for computer vision, robotics, and autonomous cars/drones. Hence, high quality and fast mapping becomes a fundamental problem. With the advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as an explicit representation with excellent rendering quality and speed, state-of-the-art (SOTA) works introduce GS to SLAM. Compared to classical pointcloud-SLAM, GS-SLAM generates photometric information by learning from input camera views and synthesize unseen views with high-quality textures. However, these GS-SLAM fail when moving objects occupy the scene that violate the static assumption of bundle adjustment. The failed updates of moving GS affects the static GS and contaminates the full map over long frames. Although some efforts have been made by concurrent works to consider moving objects for GS-SLAM, they simply detect and remove the moving regions from GS rendering ("anti'' dynamic GS-SLAM), where only the static background could benefit from GS. To this end, we propose the first real-time GS-SLAM, "DynaGSLAM'', that achieves high-quality online GS rendering, tracking, motion predictions of moving objects in dynamic scenes while jointly estimating accurate ego motion. Our DynaGSLAM outperforms SOTA static & "Anti'' dynamic GS-SLAM on three dynamic real datasets, while keeping speed and memory efficiency in practice.

Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Shaoxiu Wei et al.

Flow matching models effectively represent complex distributions, yet estimating expectations of functions of their outputs remains challenging under limited sampling budgets. Independent sampling often yields high-variance estimates, especially when rare but high-impact outcomes dominate the expectation. We propose a non-IID sampling framework that jointly draws multiple samples to cover diverse, salient regions of a flow matching model's generative distribution. To balance diversity and quality, we introduce a score-based regularization for the diversity mechanism (SR), which uses the score function, i.e., the gradient of the log probability, to ensure samples are pushed apart within high-density regions of the data manifold, mitigating off-manifold drift. To enable unbiased estimation when desired, we further develop an approach for importance weighting of non-IID flow samples by learning a residual velocity field that reproduces the marginal distribution of the non-IID samples and by evolving importance weights along trajectories. Empirically, our method produces diverse, high-quality samples and accurate estimates of both importance weights and expectations, advancing the reliable characterization of flow matching model outputs. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.

Chuan Guo, Xinxin Zuo, Sen Wang et al.

We aim to tackle the interesting yet challenging problem of generating videos of diverse and natural human motions from prescribed action categories. The key issue lies in the ability to synthesize multiple distinct motion sequences that are realistic in their visual appearances. It is achieved in this paper by a two-step process that maintains internal 3D pose and shape representations, action2motion and motion2video. Action2motion stochastically generates plausible 3D pose sequences of a prescribed action category, which are processed and rendered by motion2video to form 2D videos. Specifically, the Lie algebraic theory is engaged in representing natural human motions following the physical law of human kinematics; a temporal variational auto-encoder (VAE) is developed that encourages diversity of output motions. Moreover, given an additional input image of a clothed human character, an entire pipeline is proposed to extract his/her 3D detailed shape, and to render in videos the plausible motions from different views. This is realized by improving existing methods to extract 3D human shapes and textures from single 2D images, rigging, animating, and rendering to form 2D videos of human motions. It also necessitates the curation and reannotation of 3D human motion datasets for training purpose. Thorough empirical experiments including ablation study, qualitative and quantitative evaluations manifest the applicability of our approach, and demonstrate its competitiveness in addressing related tasks, where components of our approach are compared favorably to the state-of-the-arts.