Yanbaihui Liu

Yanbaihui Liu, Erica Babusci, Claudia K. Gunsch et al.

While robotic perception has advanced rapidly in vision and touch, enabling robots to reason about indoor fungal contamination from weak, diffusion-dominated chemical signals remains an open challenge. We introduce Scensory, a learning-based robotic olfaction framework that simultaneously identifies fungal species and localizes their source from short time series measured by affordable, cross-sensitive VOC sensor arrays. Temporal VOC dynamics encode both chemical and spatial signatures, which we decode through neural networks trained on robot-automated data collection with spatial supervision. Across five fungal species, Scensory achieves up to 89.85% species accuracy and 87.31% source localization accuracy under ambient conditions with 3-7s sensor inputs. These results demonstrate real-time, spatially grounded perception from diffusion-dominated chemical signals, enabling scalable and low-cost source localization for robotic indoor environmental monitoring.

Pingcheng Jian, Xiao Wei, Yanbaihui Liu et al.

We introduce Large Language Model-Assisted Preference Prediction (LAPP), a novel framework for robot learning that enables efficient, customizable, and expressive behavior acquisition with minimum human effort. Unlike prior approaches that rely heavily on reward engineering, human demonstrations, motion capture, or expensive pairwise preference labels, LAPP leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate preference labels from raw state-action trajectories collected during reinforcement learning (RL). These labels are used to train an online preference predictor, which in turn guides the policy optimization process toward satisfying high-level behavioral specifications provided by humans. Our key technical contribution is the integration of LLMs into the RL feedback loop through trajectory-level preference prediction, enabling robots to acquire complex skills including subtle control over gait patterns and rhythmic timing. We evaluate LAPP on a diverse set of quadruped locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks and show that it achieves efficient learning, higher final performance, faster adaptation, and precise control of high-level behaviors. Notably, LAPP enables robots to master highly dynamic and expressive tasks such as quadruped backflips, which remain out of reach for standard LLM-generated or handcrafted rewards. Our results highlight LAPP as a promising direction for scalable preference-driven robot learning.