Yukai Yang

Yukai Yang, Chenxi Qin, Jungang Li et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient paradigm for visual recognition. We present SpikingMoE, which integrates a spike-driven Transformer with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for dynamic computation. Inspired by the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a spike-driven prompt (SDprompt) enables input-dependent expert routing in a biologically plausible manner. By replacing standard MLPs with spike-compatible expert modules and enforcing binary spike communication, SpikingMoE is designed for neuromorphic hardware. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 achieve 94.09% and 74.54% top-1 accuracy, showing that modular expert routing can be incorporated while retaining reasonable performance. To our knowledge, SpikingMoE is the first open-source SNN framework that integrates MoE into a spike-driven Transformer with LGN-inspired routing.

Daniel R. Jiang, Jalaj Bhandari, Yukai Yang et al.

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn conversational outcomes remains a significant challenge, especially in goal-oriented settings like AI marketing or sales agents who facilitate transactions via messaging platforms. The difficulty stems from sparse, long-horizon rewards and the discrepancy between response-level planning and token-level generation. In this technical note, we propose a formal reduction of the multi-turn RL problem into a sequence of single-turn RLHF-style problems. This is achieved by setting a learned multi-turn Q-function as the reward model for the single-turn problem. We demonstrate and prove a key insight: solving this single-turn RL problem with standard token-level PPO is equivalent to a policy improvement step within the multi-turn problem. This insight naturally leads to Iterative PPO, a batch online policy iteration algorithm that alternates between fitting Q-functions from logged conversation trajectories and improving the policy. A major practical advantage is that Iterative PPO directly leverages stable, off-the-shelf single-turn RLHF tools, making it straightforward to implement. Our method occupies a middle ground between fully online and fully offline approaches, retaining the adaptability of online updates while gaining the stability benefits of offline training.

Xingyi Li, Han Zhang, Ziliang Wang et al.

Point cloud registration is a key step in robotic perception tasks, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). It is especially challenging in conditions with sparse points and heavy noise. Traditional registration methods, such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and Normal Distributions Transform (NDT), often have difficulties in achieving a robust and accurate alignment under these conditions. In this paper, we propose a registration framework based on moment matching. In particular, the point clouds are regarded as i.i.d. samples drawn from the same distribution observed in the source and target frames. We then match the generalized Gaussian Radial Basis moments calculated from the point clouds to estimate the rigid transformation between two frames. Moreover, such method does not require explicit point-to-point correspondences among the point clouds. We further show the consistency of the proposed method. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach achieves higher accuracy and robustness than existing methods. In addition, we integrate our framework into a 4D Radar SLAM system. The proposed method significantly improves the localization performance and achieves results comparable to LiDAR-based systems. These findings demonstrate the potential of moment matching technique for robust point cloud registration in sparse and noisy scenarios.

Weiyun Jiang, Yukai Yang, Yogananda Isukapalli

Elephant-human conflict (EHC) is one of the major problems in most African and Asian countries. As humans overutilize natural resources for their development, elephants' living area continues to decrease; this leads elephants to invade the human living area and raid crops more frequently, costing millions of dollars annually. To mitigate EHC, in this paper, we propose an original solution that comprises of three parts: a compact custom low-power GPS tag that is installed on the elephants, a receiver stationed in the human living area that detects the elephants' presence near a farm, and an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system that tracks and herds the elephants away from the farms. By utilizing proportional-integral-derivative controller and machine learning algorithms, we obtain accurate tracking trajectories at a real-time processing speed of 32 FPS. Our proposed autonomous system can save over 68 % cost compared with human-controlled UAVs in mitigating EHC.