Yanxin Zhou

Wenhui Huang, Yanxin Zhou, Xiangkun He et al.

Despite some successful applications of goal-driven navigation, existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches notoriously suffers from poor data efficiency issue. One of the reasons is that the goal information is decoupled from the perception module and directly introduced as a condition of decision-making, resulting in the goal-irrelevant features of the scene representation playing an adversary role during the learning process. In light of this, we present a novel Goal-guided Transformer-enabled reinforcement learning (GTRL) approach by considering the physical goal states as an input of the scene encoder for guiding the scene representation to couple with the goal information and realizing efficient autonomous navigation. More specifically, we propose a novel variant of the Vision Transformer as the backbone of the perception system, namely Goal-guided Transformer (GoT), and pre-train it with expert priors to boost the data efficiency. Subsequently, a reinforcement learning algorithm is instantiated for the decision-making system, taking the goal-oriented scene representation from the GoT as the input and generating decision commands. As a result, our approach motivates the scene representation to concentrate mainly on goal-relevant features, which substantially enhances the data efficiency of the DRL learning process, leading to superior navigation performance. Both simulation and real-world experimental results manifest the superiority of our approach in terms of data efficiency, performance, robustness, and sim-to-real generalization, compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. The demonstration video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqJCHcsj4w0) and the source code (https://github.com/OscarHuangWind/DRL-Transformer-SimtoReal-Navigation) are also provided.

Bo-Wen Zhang, Liangdong Wang, Ye Yuan et al.

In recent years, with the rapid application of large language models across various fields, the scale of these models has gradually increased, and the resources required for their pre-training have grown exponentially. Training an LLM from scratch will cost a lot of computation resources while scaling up from a smaller model is a more efficient approach and has thus attracted significant attention. In this paper, we present AquilaMoE, a cutting-edge bilingual 8*16B Mixture of Experts (MoE) language model that has 8 experts with 16 billion parameters each and is developed using an innovative training methodology called EfficientScale. This approach optimizes performance while minimizing data requirements through a two-stage process. The first stage, termed Scale-Up, initializes the larger model with weights from a pre-trained smaller model, enabling substantial knowledge transfer and continuous pretraining with significantly less data. The second stage, Scale-Out, uses a pre-trained dense model to initialize the MoE experts, further enhancing knowledge transfer and performance. Extensive validation experiments on 1.8B and 7B models compared various initialization schemes, achieving models that maintain and reduce loss during continuous pretraining. Utilizing the optimal scheme, we successfully trained a 16B model and subsequently the 8*16B AquilaMoE model, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and training efficiency.

Lin Yang, Anirvan Dutta, Yuan Ji et al.

Achieving human-level dexterity in contact-rich, tool-mediated manipulation remains a significant challenge due to visual occlusion and the underdetermined nature of haptic sensing. This paper introduces a parameterized Equilibrium Manifold (EM) as a unified representation for tool-mediated interaction, and develops a closed-loop framework that integrates haptic estimation, online planning, and adaptive stiffness control. We establish a physical-geometric duality using an adaptive manipulation potential incorporating a differentiable contact model, which induces the manifold's geometric structure and ensures that complex physical interactions are encapsulated as continuous operations on the EM. Within this framework, we reformulate haptic estimation as a manifold parameter estimation problem. Specifically, a hybrid inference strategy (haptic SLAM) is employed in which discrete object shapes are classified via particle filtering, while the continuous object pose is estimated using analytical gradients for efficient optimization. By continuously updating the parameters of the manipulation potential, the framework dynamically reshapes the induced EM to guide online trajectory replanning and implement uncertainty-aware impedance control, thereby closing the perception-action loop. The system is validated through simulation and over 260 real-world screw-loosening trials. Experimental results demonstrate robust identification and manipulation success in standard scenarios while maintaining accurate tracking. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that haptic SLAM and uncertainty-aware stiffness modulation outperform fixed impedance baselines, effectively preventing jamming during tight tolerance interactions.

Hao Luo, Pichao Wang, Yi Xu et al.

Transformer-based supervised pre-training achieves great performance in person re-identification (ReID). However, due to the domain gap between ImageNet and ReID datasets, it usually needs a larger pre-training dataset (e.g. ImageNet-21K) to boost the performance because of the strong data fitting ability of the transformer. To address this challenge, this work targets to mitigate the gap between the pre-training and ReID datasets from the perspective of data and model structure, respectively. We first investigate self-supervised learning (SSL) methods with Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained on unlabelled person images (the LUPerson dataset), and empirically find it significantly surpasses ImageNet supervised pre-training models on ReID tasks. To further reduce the domain gap and accelerate the pre-training, the Catastrophic Forgetting Score (CFS) is proposed to evaluate the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning data. Based on CFS, a subset is selected via sampling relevant data close to the down-stream ReID data and filtering irrelevant data from the pre-training dataset. For the model structure, a ReID-specific module named IBN-based convolution stem (ICS) is proposed to bridge the domain gap by learning more invariant features. Extensive experiments have been conducted to fine-tune the pre-training models under supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), and unsupervised learning (USL) settings. We successfully downscale the LUPerson dataset to 50% with no performance degradation. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on Market-1501 and MSMT17. For example, our ViT-S/16 achieves 91.3%/89.9%/89.6% mAP accuracy on Market1501 for supervised/UDA/USL ReID. Codes and models will be released to https://github.com/michuanhaohao/TransReID-SSL.