Hao Dong

Shihan Peng, Hanyu Zhou, Hao Dong et al.

Conventional frame camera is the mainstream sensor of the autonomous driving scene perception, while it is limited in adverse conditions, such as low light. Event camera with high dynamic range has been applied in assisting frame camera for the multimodal fusion, which relies heavily on the pixel-level spatial alignment between various modalities. Typically, existing multimodal datasets mainly place event and frame cameras in parallel and directly align them spatially via warping operation. However, this parallel strategy is less effective for multimodal fusion, since the large disparity exacerbates spatial misalignment due to the large event-frame baseline. We argue that baseline minimization can reduce alignment error between event and frame cameras. In this work, we introduce hybrid coaxial event-frame devices to build the multimodal system, and propose a coaxial stereo event camera (CoSEC) dataset for autonomous driving. As for the multimodal system, we first utilize the microcontroller to achieve time synchronization, and then spatially calibrate different sensors, where we perform intra- and inter-calibration of stereo coaxial devices. As for the multimodal dataset, we filter LiDAR point clouds to generate depth and optical flow labels using reference depth, which is further improved by fusing aligned event and frame data in nighttime conditions. With the help of the coaxial device, the proposed dataset can promote the all-day pixel-level multimodal fusion. Moreover, we also conduct experiments to demonstrate that the proposed dataset can improve the performance and generalization of the multimodal fusion.

Jia Zeng, Qingwen Bu, Bangjun Wang et al.

Representation learning approaches for robotic manipulation have boomed in recent years. Due to the scarcity of in-domain robot data, prevailing methodologies tend to leverage large-scale human video datasets to extract generalizable features for visuomotor policy learning. Despite the progress achieved, prior endeavors disregard the interactive dynamics that capture behavior patterns and physical interaction during the manipulation process, resulting in an inadequate understanding of the relationship between objects and the environment. To this end, we propose a general pre-training pipeline that learns Manipulation by Predicting the Interaction (MPI) and enhances the visual representation.Given a pair of keyframes representing the initial and final states, along with language instructions, our algorithm predicts the transition frame and detects the interaction object, respectively. These two learning objectives achieve superior comprehension towards "how-to-interact" and "where-to-interact". We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several challenging robotic tasks.The experimental results demonstrate that MPI exhibits remarkable improvement by 10% to 64% compared with previous state-of-the-art in real-world robot platforms as well as simulation environments. Code and checkpoints are publicly shared at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/MPI.

Yuanfei Wang, Xiaojie Zhang, Ruihai Wu et al.

Articulated object manipulation is a critical capability for robots to perform various tasks in real-world scenarios. Composed of multiple parts connected by joints, articulated objects are endowed with diverse functional mechanisms through complex relative motions. For example, a safe consists of a door, a handle, and a lock, where the door can only be opened when the latch is unlocked. The internal structure, such as the state of a lock or joint angle constraints, cannot be directly observed from visual observation. Consequently, successful manipulation of these objects requires adaptive adjustment based on trial and error rather than a one-time visual inference. However, previous datasets and simulation environments for articulated objects have primarily focused on simple manipulation mechanisms where the complete manipulation process can be inferred from the object's appearance. To enhance the diversity and complexity of adaptive manipulation mechanisms, we build a novel articulated object manipulation environment and equip it with 9 categories of objects. Based on the environment and objects, we further propose an adaptive demonstration collection and 3D visual diffusion-based imitation learning pipeline that learns the adaptive manipulation policy. The effectiveness of our designs and proposed method is validated through both simulation and real-world experiments. Our project page is available at: https://adamanip.github.io

Kairui Ding, Boyuan Chen, Ruihai Wu et al. · tsinghua

Robotic manipulation with two-finger grippers is challenged by objects lacking distinct graspable features. Traditional pre-grasping methods, which typically involve repositioning objects or utilizing external aids like table edges, are limited in their adaptability across different object categories and environments. To overcome these limitations, we introduce PreAfford, a novel pre-grasping planning framework incorporating a point-level affordance representation and a relay training approach. Our method significantly improves adaptability, allowing effective manipulation across a wide range of environments and object types. When evaluated on the ShapeNet-v2 dataset, PreAfford not only enhances grasping success rates by 69% but also demonstrates its practicality through successful real-world experiments. These improvements highlight PreAfford's potential to redefine standards for robotic handling of complex manipulation tasks in diverse settings.

Hanyu Zhou, Zhiwei Shi, Hao Dong et al.

Event-based moving object detection is a challenging task, where static background and moving object are mixed together. Typically, existing methods mainly align the background events to the same spatial coordinate system via motion compensation to distinguish the moving object. However, they neglect the potential spatial tailing effect of moving object events caused by excessive motion, which may affect the structure integrity of the extracted moving object. We discover that the moving object has a complete columnar structure in the point cloud composed of motion-compensated events along the timestamp. Motivated by this, we propose a novel joint spatio-temporal reasoning method for event-based moving object detection. Specifically, we first compensate the motion of background events using inertial measurement unit. In spatial reasoning stage, we project the compensated events into the same image coordinate, discretize the timestamp of events to obtain a time image that can reflect the motion confidence, and further segment the moving object through adaptive threshold on the time image. In temporal reasoning stage, we construct the events into a point cloud along timestamp, and use RANSAC algorithm to extract the columnar shape in the cloud for peeling off the background. Finally, we fuse the results from the two reasoning stages to extract the final moving object region. This joint spatio-temporal reasoning framework can effectively detect the moving object from motion confidence and geometric structure. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments on various datasets to verify that the proposed method can improve the moving object detection accuracy by 13\%.

Xiaojie Zhang, Yuanfei Wang, Ruihai Wu et al.

Articulated objects pose diverse manipulation challenges for robots. Since their internal structures are not directly observable, robots must adaptively explore and refine actions to generate successful manipulation trajectories. While existing works have attempted cross-category generalization in adaptive articulated object manipulation, two major challenges persist: (1) the geometric diversity of real-world articulated objects complicates visual perception and understanding, and (2) variations in object functions and mechanisms hinder the development of a unified adaptive manipulation strategy. To address these challenges, we propose AdaRPG, a novel framework that leverages foundation models to extract object parts, which exhibit greater local geometric similarity than entire objects, thereby enhancing visual affordance generalization for functional primitive skills. To support this, we construct a part-level affordance annotation dataset to train the affordance model. Additionally, AdaRPG utilizes the common knowledge embedded in foundation models to reason about complex mechanisms and generate high-level control codes that invoke primitive skill functions based on part affordance inference. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate AdaRPG's strong generalization ability across novel articulated object categories.

Ruihai Wu, Ziyu Zhu, Yuran Wang et al.

Cluttered garments manipulation poses significant challenges due to the complex, deformable nature of garments and intricate garment relations. Unlike single-garment manipulation, cluttered scenarios require managing complex garment entanglements and interactions, while maintaining garment cleanliness and manipulation stability. To address these demands, we propose to learn point-level affordance, the dense representation modeling the complex space and multi-modal manipulation candidates, while being aware of garment geometry, structure, and inter-object relations. Additionally, as it is difficult to directly retrieve a garment in some extremely entangled clutters, we introduce an adaptation module, guided by learned affordance, to reorganize highly-entangled garments into states plausible for manipulation. Our framework demonstrates effectiveness over environments featuring diverse garment types and pile configurations in both simulation and the real world. Project page: https://garmentpile.github.io/.

Haolin Yang, Yuxing Long, Zhuoyuan Yu et al.

Instruction-following navigation is a key step toward embodied intelligence. Prior benchmarks mainly focus on semantic understanding but overlook systematically evaluating navigation agents' spatial perception and reasoning capabilities. In this work, we introduce the NavSpace benchmark, which contains six task categories and 1,228 trajectory-instruction pairs designed to probe the spatial intelligence of navigation agents. On this benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate 22 navigation agents, including state-of-the-art navigation models and multimodal large language models. The evaluation results lift the veil on spatial intelligence in embodied navigation. Furthermore, we propose SNav, a new spatially intelligent navigation model. SNav outperforms existing navigation agents on NavSpace and real robot tests, establishing a strong baseline for future work.

Hao Dong, Ziyue Qiao, Zhiyuan Ning et al.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs), as an extension of static Knowledge Graphs (KGs), incorporate the temporal feature to express the transience of knowledge by describing when facts occur. TKG extrapolation aims to infer possible future facts based on known history, which has garnered significant attention in recent years. Some existing methods treat TKG as a sequence of independent subgraphs to model temporal evolution patterns, demonstrating impressive reasoning performance. However, they still have limitations: 1) In modeling subgraph semantic evolution, they usually neglect the internal structural interactions between subgraphs, which are actually crucial for encoding TKGs. 2) They overlook the potential smooth features that do not lead to semantic changes, which should be distinguished from the semantic evolution process. Therefore, we propose a novel Disentangled Multi-span Evolutionary Network (DiMNet) for TKG reasoning. Specifically, we design a multi-span evolution strategy that captures local neighbor features while perceiving historical neighbor semantic information, thus enabling internal interactions between subgraphs during the evolution process. To maximize the capture of semantic change patterns, we design a disentangle component that adaptively separates nodes' active and stable features, used to dynamically control the influence of historical semantics on future evolution. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world TKG datasets show that DiMNet demonstrates substantial performance in TKG reasoning, and outperforms the state-of-the-art up to 22.7% in MRR.

Yicheng Zhou, Pengfei Wang, Hao Dong et al.

Urban traffic speed prediction aims to estimate the future traffic speed for improving urban transportation services. Enormous efforts have been made to exploit Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for modeling spatial correlations and temporal dependencies of traffic speed evolving patterns, regularized by graph topology.While achieving promising results, current traffic speed prediction methods still suffer from ignoring topology-free patterns, which cannot be captured by GNNs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a generic model for enabling the current GNN-based methods to preserve topology-free patterns. Specifically, we first develop a Dual Cross-Scale Transformer (DCST) architecture, including a Spatial Transformer and a Temporal Transformer, to preserve the cross-scale topology-free patterns and associated dynamics, respectively. Then, to further integrate both topology-regularized/-free patterns, we propose a distillation-style learning framework, in which the existing GNN-based methods are considered as the teacher model, and the proposed DCST architecture is considered as the student model. The teacher model would inject the learned topology-regularized patterns into the student model for integrating topology-free patterns. The extensive experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods.

Chuyan Xiong, Chengyu Shen, Xiaoqi Li et al.

The ability to reflect on and correct failures is crucial for robotic systems to interact stably with real-life objects.Observing the generalization and reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), previous approaches have aimed to utilize these models to enhance robotic systems accordingly.However, these methods typically focus on high-level planning corrections using an additional MLLM, with limited utilization of failed samples to correct low-level contact poses which is particularly prone to occur during articulated object manipulation.To address this gap, we propose an Autonomous Interactive Correction (AIC) MLLM, which makes use of previous low-level interaction experiences to correct SE(3) pose predictions for articulated object. Specifically, AIC MLLM is initially fine-tuned to acquire both pose prediction and feedback prompt comprehension abilities.We design two types of prompt instructions for interactions with objects: 1) visual masks to highlight unmovable parts for position correction, and 2) textual descriptions to indicate potential directions for rotation correction. During inference, a Feedback Information Extraction module is introduced to recognize the failure cause, allowing AIC MLLM to adaptively correct the pose prediction using the corresponding prompts.To further enhance manipulation stability, we devise a Test Time Adaptation strategy that enables AIC MLLM to better adapt to the current scene configuration.Finally, extensive experiments are conducted in both simulated and real-world environments to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our AIC MLLM can efficiently correct failure samples by leveraging interaction experience prompts.Our project website is https://sites.google.com/view/aic-mllm.

Jiyao Zhang, Weiyao Huang, Bo Peng et al.

6D Object Pose Estimation is a crucial yet challenging task in computer vision, suffering from a significant lack of large-scale datasets. This scarcity impedes comprehensive evaluation of model performance, limiting research advancements. Furthermore, the restricted number of available instances or categories curtails its applications. To address these issues, this paper introduces Omni6DPose, a substantial dataset characterized by its diversity in object categories, large scale, and variety in object materials. Omni6DPose is divided into three main components: ROPE (Real 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset), which includes 332K images annotated with over 1.5M annotations across 581 instances in 149 categories; SOPE(Simulated 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset), consisting of 475K images created in a mixed reality setting with depth simulation, annotated with over 5M annotations across 4162 instances in the same 149 categories; and the manually aligned real scanned objects used in both ROPE and SOPE. Omni6DPose is inherently challenging due to the substantial variations and ambiguities. To address this challenge, we introduce GenPose++, an enhanced version of the SOTA category-level pose estimation framework, incorporating two pivotal improvements: Semantic-aware feature extraction and Clustering-based aggregation. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive benchmarking analysis to evaluate the performance of previous methods on this large-scale dataset in the realms of 6D object pose estimation and pose tracking.

Hao Dong, Shuai Li, Dongchang Xu et al.

The training of Deep Neural Networks usually needs tremendous computing resources. Therefore many deep models are trained in large cluster instead of single machine or GPU. Though major researchs at present try to run whole model on all machines by using asynchronous asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), we present a new approach to train deep model parallely -- split the model and then seperately train different parts of it in different speed.