Xiaomeng Xu

RO
h-index50
8papers
113citations
Novelty54%
AI Score49

8 Papers

CVOct 8, 2022Code
Enhancing Generalizable 6D Pose Tracking of an In-Hand Object with Tactile Sensing

Yun Liu, Xiaomeng Xu, Weihang Chen et al.

When manipulating an object to accomplish complex tasks, humans rely on both vision and touch to keep track of the object's 6D pose. However, most existing object pose tracking systems in robotics rely exclusively on visual signals, which hinder a robot's ability to manipulate objects effectively. To address this limitation, we introduce TEG-Track, a tactile-enhanced 6D pose tracking system that can track previously unseen objects held in hand. From consecutive tactile signals, TEG-Track optimizes object velocities from marker flows when slippage does not occur, or regresses velocities using a slippage estimation network when slippage is detected. The estimated object velocities are integrated into a geometric-kinematic optimization scheme to enhance existing visual pose trackers. To evaluate our method and to facilitate future research, we construct a real-world dataset for visual-tactile in-hand object pose tracking. Experimental results demonstrate that TEG-Track consistently enhances state-of-the-art generalizable 6D pose trackers in synthetic and real-world scenarios. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/leolyliu/TEG-Track.

CVApr 1, 2023
JacobiNeRF: NeRF Shaping with Mutual Information Gradients

Xiaomeng Xu, Yanchao Yang, Kaichun Mo et al.

We propose a method that trains a neural radiance field (NeRF) to encode not only the appearance of the scene but also semantic correlations between scene points, regions, or entities -- aiming to capture their mutual co-variation patterns. In contrast to the traditional first-order photometric reconstruction objective, our method explicitly regularizes the learning dynamics to align the Jacobians of highly-correlated entities, which proves to maximize the mutual information between them under random scene perturbations. By paying attention to this second-order information, we can shape a NeRF to express semantically meaningful synergies when the network weights are changed by a delta along the gradient of a single entity, region, or even a point. To demonstrate the merit of this mutual information modeling, we leverage the coordinated behavior of scene entities that emerges from our shaping to perform label propagation for semantic and instance segmentation. Our experiments show that a JacobiNeRF is more efficient in propagating annotations among 2D pixels and 3D points compared to NeRFs without mutual information shaping, especially in extremely sparse label regimes -- thus reducing annotation burden. The same machinery can further be used for entity selection or scene modifications.

CVMar 13, 2022
AutoGPart: Intermediate Supervision Search for Generalizable 3D Part Segmentation

Xueyi Liu, Xiaomeng Xu, Anyi Rao et al.

Training a generalizable 3D part segmentation network is quite challenging but of great importance in real-world applications. To tackle this problem, some works design task-specific solutions by translating human understanding of the task to machine's learning process, which faces the risk of missing the optimal strategy since machines do not necessarily understand in the exact human way. Others try to use conventional task-agnostic approaches designed for domain generalization problems with no task prior knowledge considered. To solve the above issues, we propose AutoGPart, a generic method enabling training generalizable 3D part segmentation networks with the task prior considered. AutoGPart builds a supervision space with geometric prior knowledge encoded, and lets the machine to search for the optimal supervisions from the space for a specific segmentation task automatically. Extensive experiments on three generalizable 3D part segmentation tasks are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of AutoGPart. We demonstrate that the performance of segmentation networks using simple backbones can be significantly improved when trained with supervisions searched by our method.

ROApr 8
EgoVerse: An Egocentric Human Dataset for Robot Learning from Around the World

Ryan Punamiya, Simar Kareer, Zeyi Liu et al.

Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer with experiments replicated across multiple labs, tasks, and robot embodiments under shared protocols. We find that policy performance generally improves with increased human data, but that effective scaling depends on alignment between human data and robot learning objectives. Together, the dataset, platform, and study establish a foundation for reproducible progress in human data-driven robot learning. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egoverse.ai/

ROMay 14
HoMMI: Learning Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation from Human Demonstrations

Xiaomeng Xu, Jisang Park, Han Zhang et al.

We present Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation Interface (HoMMI), a data collection and policy learning framework that learns whole-body mobile manipulation directly from robot-free human demonstrations. We augment UMI interfaces with egocentric sensing to capture the global context required for mobile manipulation, enabling portable, robot-free, and scalable data collection. However, naively incorporating egocentric sensing introduces a larger human-to-robot embodiment gap in both observation and action spaces, making policy transfer difficult. We explicitly bridge this gap with a cross-embodiment hand-eye policy design, including an embodiment agnostic visual representation; a relaxed head action representation; and a whole-body controller that realizes hand-eye trajectories through coordinated whole-body motion under robot-specific physical constraints. Together, these enable long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks requiring bimanual and whole-body coordination, navigation, and active perception. Results are best viewed on: https://hommi-robot.github.io

CLApr 19, 2024
MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of GPT-generated Hotel Reviews

Oana Ignat, Xiaomeng Xu, Rada Mihalcea

Deceptive reviews are becoming increasingly common, especially given the increase in performance and the prevalence of LLMs. While work to date has addressed the development of models to differentiate between truthful and deceptive human reviews, much less is known about the distinction between real reviews and AI-authored fake reviews. Moreover, most of the research so far has focused primarily on English, with very little work dedicated to other languages. In this paper, we compile and make publicly available the MAiDE-up dataset, consisting of 10,000 real and 10,000 AI-generated fake hotel reviews, balanced across ten languages. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive linguistic analyses to (1) compare the AI fake hotel reviews to real hotel reviews, and (2) identify the factors that influence the deception detection model performance. We explore the effectiveness of several models for deception detection in hotel reviews across three main dimensions: sentiment, location, and language. We find that these dimensions influence how well we can detect AI-generated fake reviews.

ROFeb 23, 2024
Dynamics-Guided Diffusion Model for Sensor-less Robot Manipulator Design

Xiaomeng Xu, Huy Ha, Shuran Song

We present Dynamics-Guided Diffusion Model (DGDM), a data-driven framework for generating task-specific manipulator designs without task-specific training. Given object shapes and task specifications, DGDM generates sensor-less manipulator designs that can blindly manipulate objects towards desired motions and poses using an open-loop parallel motion. This framework 1) flexibly represents manipulation tasks as interaction profiles, 2) represents the design space using a geometric diffusion model, and 3) efficiently searches this design space using the gradients provided by a dynamics network trained without any task information. We evaluate DGDM on various manipulation tasks ranging from shifting/rotating objects to converging objects to a specific pose. Our generated designs outperform optimization-based and unguided diffusion baselines relatively by 31.5% and 45.3% on average success rate. With the ability to generate a new design within 0.8s, DGDM facilitates rapid design iteration and enhances the adoption of data-driven approaches for robot mechanism design. Qualitative results are best viewed on our project website https://dgdm-robot.github.io/.

ROJun 20, 2025
Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections

Xiaomeng Xu, Yifan Hou, Zeyi Liu et al.

We address key challenges in Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) for real-world contact-rich manipulation: how to collect informative human correction data and how to effectively update policies with this new data. We introduce Compliant Residual DAgger (CR-DAgger), which contains two novel components: 1) a Compliant Intervention Interface that leverages compliance control, allowing humans to provide gentle, accurate delta action corrections without interrupting the ongoing robot policy execution; and 2) a Compliant Residual Policy formulation that learns from human corrections while incorporating force feedback and force control. Our system significantly enhances performance on precise contact-rich manipulation tasks using minimal correction data, improving base policy success rates by over 50\% on two challenging tasks (book flipping and belt assembly) while outperforming both retraining-from-scratch and finetuning approaches. Through extensive real-world experiments, we provide practical guidance for implementing effective DAgger in real-world robot learning tasks. Result videos are available at: https://compliant-residual-dagger.github.io/