Tianhai Liang

Bingyang Zhou, Haoyu Zhou, Tianhai Liang et al.

We present ClothesNet: a large-scale dataset of 3D clothes objects with information-rich annotations. Our dataset consists of around 4400 models covering 11 categories annotated with clothes features, boundary lines, and keypoints. ClothesNet can be used to facilitate a variety of computer vision and robot interaction tasks. Using our dataset, we establish benchmark tasks for clothes perception, including classification, boundary line segmentation, and keypoint detection, and develop simulated clothes environments for robotic interaction tasks, including rearranging, folding, hanging, and dressing. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our ClothesNet in real-world experiments. Supplemental materials and dataset are available on our project webpage.

Chongkai Gao, Zhengrong Xue, Shuying Deng et al.

We present RiEMann, an end-to-end near Real-time SE(3)-Equivariant Robot Manipulation imitation learning framework from scene point cloud input. Compared to previous methods that rely on descriptor field matching, RiEMann directly predicts the target poses of objects for manipulation without any object segmentation. RiEMann learns a manipulation task from scratch with 5 to 10 demonstrations, generalizes to unseen SE(3) transformations and instances of target objects, resists visual interference of distracting objects, and follows the near real-time pose change of the target object. The scalable action space of RiEMann facilitates the addition of custom equivariant actions such as the direction of turning the faucet, which makes articulated object manipulation possible for RiEMann. In simulation and real-world 6-DOF robot manipulation experiments, we test RiEMann on 5 categories of manipulation tasks with a total of 25 variants and show that RiEMann outperforms baselines in both task success rates and SE(3) geodesic distance errors on predicted poses (reduced by 68.6%), and achieves a 5.4 frames per second (FPS) network inference speed. Code and video results are available at https://riemann-web.github.io/.

Suning Huang, Zheyu Zhang, Tianhai Liang et al. · tsinghua

Visual deep reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to acquire skills from visual input for unstructured tasks. However, current algorithms suffer from low sample efficiency, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we present MENTOR, a method that improves both the architecture and optimization of RL agents. Specifically, MENTOR replaces the standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with a mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone and introduces a task-oriented perturbation mechanism. MENTOR outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three simulation benchmarks and achieves an average of 83% success rate on three challenging real-world robotic manipulation tasks, significantly surpassing the 32% success rate of the strongest existing model-free visual RL algorithm. These results underscore the importance of sample efficiency in advancing visual RL for real-world robotics. Experimental videos are available at https://suninghuang19.github.io/mentor_page/.