Ruirui Zhang

Maria Emilia Mazzolenis, Ruirui Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems but often struggle with long, conditional workflows that involve external tool calls and depend on user-specific information. We present Workflow Adherence via Runtime Parallel Personalization, or WARPP, a training-free, modular framework that combines multi-agent orchestration with runtime personalization to improve workflow adherence in LLM-based systems. By dynamically pruning conditional branches based on user attributes, the framework reduces reasoning overhead and narrows tool selection at runtime. WARPP deploys a parallelized architecture where a dedicated Personalizer agent operates alongside modular, domain-specific agents to dynamically tailor execution paths in real time. The framework is evaluated across five representative user intents of varying complexity within three domains: banking, flights, and healthcare. Our evaluation leverages synthetic datasets and LLM-powered simulated users to test scenarios with conditional dependencies. Our results demonstrate that WARPP outperforms both the non-personalized method and the ReAct baseline, achieving increasingly larger gains in parameter fidelity and tool accuracy as intent complexity grows, while also reducing average token usage, without any additional training.

Guang Gao, Jianan Wang, Jinbo Zuo et al.

Building general-purpose intelligent robots has long been a fundamental goal of robotics. A promising approach is to mirror the evolutionary trajectory of humans: learning through continuous interaction with the environment, with early progress driven by the imitation of human behaviors. Achieving this goal presents three core challenges: (1) designing safe robotic hardware with human-level physical capabilities; (2) developing an intuitive and scalable whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection; and (3) creating algorithms capable of learning whole-body visuomotor policies from human demonstrations. To address these challenges in a unified framework, we propose Astribot Suite, a robot learning suite for whole-body manipulation aimed at general daily tasks across diverse environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on a wide range of activities that require whole-body coordination, extensive reachability, human-level dexterity, and agility. Our results show that Astribot's cohesive integration of embodiment, teleoperation interface, and learning pipeline marks a significant step towards real-world, general-purpose whole-body robotic manipulation, laying the groundwork for the next generation of intelligent robots.

Zhenyu Li, Tianyi Shang, Pengjie Xu et al.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) in dynamic and perceptually aliased environments remains a fundamental challenge for long-term localization. Existing deep learning-based solutions predominantly focus on single-frame embeddings, neglecting the temporal coherence present in image sequences. This paper presents OptiCorNet, a novel sequence modeling framework that unifies spatial feature extraction and temporal differencing into a differentiable, end-to-end trainable module. Central to our approach is a lightweight 1D convolutional encoder combined with a learnable differential temporal operator, termed Differentiable Sequence Delta (DSD), which jointly captures short-term spatial context and long-range temporal transitions. The DSD module models directional differences across sequences via a fixed-weight differencing kernel, followed by an LSTM-based refinement and optional residual projection, yielding compact, discriminative descriptors robust to viewpoint and appearance shifts. To further enhance inter-class separability, we incorporate a quadruplet loss that optimizes both positive alignment and multi-negative divergence within each batch. Unlike prior VPR methods that treat temporal aggregation as post-processing, OptiCorNet learns sequence-level embeddings directly, enabling more effective end-to-end place recognition. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under challenging seasonal and viewpoint variations.

Ruirui Zhang, Xingze Wu, Yifei Zou et al.

The paper studies a fundamental federated learning (FL) problem involving multiple clients with heterogeneous constrained resources. Compared with the numerous training parameters, the computing and communication resources of clients are insufficient for fast local training and real-time knowledge sharing. Besides, training on clients with heterogeneous resources may result in the straggler problem. To address these issues, we propose Fed-RAA: a Resource-Adaptive Asynchronous Federated learning algorithm. Different from vanilla FL methods, where all parameters are trained by each participating client regardless of resource diversity, Fed-RAA adaptively allocates fragments of the global model to clients based on their computing and communication capabilities. Each client then individually trains its assigned model fragment and asynchronously uploads the updated result. Theoretical analysis confirms the convergence of our approach. Additionally, we design an online greedy-based algorithm for fragment allocation in Fed-RAA, achieving fairness comparable to an offline strategy. We present numerical results on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, along with necessary comparisons and ablation studies, demonstrating the advantages of our work. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first resource-adaptive asynchronous method for fragment-based FL with guaranteed theoretical convergence.