Gen Li

2papers

2 Papers

29.9AIJun 29
DOPD: Dual On-policy Distillation

Xinlei Yu, Gen Li, Qingyi Si et al.

On-policy distillation (OPD) offers superior capacity transfer by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level signals. To furnish high-quality supervision sources and thereby elevate the performance frontier of distillation, an intuitive direction is to infuse privileged information to either teacher or student itself. However, this additional input induces a potential failure mode we dub privilege illusion: a pattern that conflates the transferable capability gap that students are meant to close, and the information asymmetry gap that can only be mimicked but never replicated. This issue is further amplified by the inherent non-uniformity of token-level supervision, where only a small subset of tokens carries pivotal capability-bearing signals. To this end, we propose DOPD, an advantage-aware dual distillation paradigm that dynamically routes token-level supervision between privileged teacher and privileged student policies based on their advantage gap and relative probabilities. Each token receives supervision of different strength, objective, and strategy from either teacher or student itself, which transfers credible capability while simultaneously receiving auxiliary signals, to alleviate privilege illusion. Extensive experiments on both large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) settings demonstrate that DOPD consistently outperforms Vanilla OPD and other counterparts. Further results on stability, robustness, continual learning, and out-of-distribution tasks validate its superiority.

5.9ROJun 29
ActiveVital: Geometry-Aware Embodied Vital Signs Monitoring for Home Healthcare Robots

Yuxuan Hu, Shihao Li, Yang Xiao et al.

Home robots require reliable vital signs monitoring to support long-term companionship and safety in daily environments, yet obtaining respiration and heart rate without physical contact remains challenging in unconstrained home settings. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar offers a promising solution due to its phase sensitivity to sub-millimeter motions. However, mmWave measurements are fundamentally constrained by observation geometry, since only the radial component of motion is observable. Consequently, arbitrary robot-human orientations often introduce angular misalignment that destabilizes vital signs estimation. To address this limitation, we reformulate vital signs monitoring from passive signal recovery to active geometric regulation. We propose ActiveVital, a vision-guided sensing framework that treats sensing geometry as an explicit control variable for robots. It localizes the chest anchor via visual keypoints and converts alignment errors into control commands. This steers the robot-mounted radar toward near-normal incidence to the thoracic surface, maximizing radial observability within a perception-action loop. A differential phase enhancement module further stabilizes signal extraction under motion. Experiments show that ActiveVital reduces respiration interval error from 0.87 s to 0.14 s and heart rate error from 13.59 bpm to 2.22 bpm, achieving accuracy comparable to controlled static sensing while remaining robust under unconstrained robot-human configurations.