Zilang Chen

Linrui Shou, Zilang Chen, Wenjia Xu et al.

We present a zero-shot deformation reconstruction framework for soft robots that operates without any visual supervision at inference time. In this work, zero-shot deformation reconstruction is defined as the ability to infer object-wide deformations on previously unseen soft robots without collecting object-specific deformation data or performing any retraining during deployment. Our method assumes access to a static geometric proxy of the undeformed object, which can be obtained from a STL model. During operation, the system relies exclusively on tactile sensing, enabling camera-free deformation inference. The proposed framework integrates a flexible piezoresistive sensor array with a geometry-aware, cage-based 3D Gaussian deformation model. Local tactile measurements are mapped to low-dimensional cage control signals and propagated to dense Gaussian primitives to generate globally consistent shape deformations. A graph attention network regresses cage displacements from tactile input, enforcing spatial smoothness and structural continuity via boundary-aware propagation. Given only a nominal geometric proxy and real-time tactile signals, the system performs zero-shot deformation reconstruction of unseen soft robots in bending and twisting motions, while rendering photorealistic RGB in real time. It achieves 0.67 IoU, 0.65 SSIM, and 3.48 mm Chamfer distance, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization through explicit coupling of tactile sensing and structured geometric deformation.

Zilang Chen

Accurate and reproducible wine-quality assessment is critical for production control yet remains dominated by subjective, labour-intensive tasting panels. We present the first unified benchmark of five ensemble learners (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost) on the canonical Vinho Verde red- and white-wine datasets (1,599 and 4,898 instances, 11 physicochemical attributes). Our leakage-free workflow employs an 80:20 stratified train-test split, five-fold StratifiedGroupKFold within the training set, per-fold standardisation, SMOTE-Tomek resampling, inverse-frequency cost weighting, Optuna hyper-parameter search (120-200 trials per model) and a two-stage feature-selection refit. Final scores on untouched test sets are reported with weighted F1 as the headline metric. Gradient Boosting achieves the highest accuracy (weighted F1 0.693 +/- 0.028 for red and 0.664 +/- 0.016 for white), followed within three percentage points by Random Forest and XGBoost. Limiting each model to its five top-ranked variables lowers dimensionality by 55 percent while reducing weighted F1 by only 2.6 percentage points for red and 3.0 percentage points for white, indicating that alcohol, volatile acidity, sulphates, free SO2 and chlorides capture most predictive signal. Runtime profiling on an EPYC 9K84/H20 node reveals a steep efficiency gradient: Gradient Boosting averages 12 h per five-fold study, XGBoost and LightGBM require 2-3 h, CatBoost 1 h, and Random Forest under 50 min. We therefore recommend Random Forest as the most cost-effective production model, XGBoost and LightGBM as GPU-efficient alternatives, and Gradient Boosting as the accuracy ceiling for offline benchmarking. The fully documented pipeline and metric set provide a reproducible baseline for future work on imbalanced multi-class wine-quality prediction.