Shutong Chen

Yuejia Li, Ke He, Junheng Li et al.

Large language models can generate executable code for educational animations, but the resulting renders often exhibit visual defects, including element overlap, misalignment, and broken animation continuity. These defects cannot be reliably detected from the code alone and become apparent only after execution. We formalize this problem as render-feedback-aware constrained code generation: given a natural language specification, the model must generate executable code whose rendered output satisfies structured quality criteria that can be evaluated only after rendering. To address this problem, we introduce OmniManim, a render-feedback-aware educational animation generation framework built around a shared scene state, explicit visual planning, structured post-render diagnostics, and localized repair. Within OmniManim, the Vision Agent is a task-specific visual planning module: it predicts sparse keyframe layouts with coarse-to-fine bounding-box denoising and optimizes an interpolation-aware objective to reduce intermediate-frame failures induced by downstream animation interpolation. We further construct two datasets, ManimLayout-1K and EduRequire-500, and provide a reproducible evaluation protocol covering executability, instructional quality, visual quality, and efficiency. On EduRequire-500, OmniManim improves measured render quality over both single-model baselines and existing multi-agent frameworks. Systematic ablation studies further verify that explicit visual planning, especially its coarse spatial prior, bounding-box refinement, and interpolation-aware optimization, is central to these gains.

Wenchao Wu, Shutong Chen, Wenjie Liu et al.

Wirelessly-connected robotic system empowers robots with real-time intelligence by leveraging remote computing resources for decision-making. However, the data exchange between robots and base stations often overwhelms communication links, introducing latency that undermines real-time response. To tackle this, goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) has been introduced into wirelessly-connected robotic systems to extract and transmit only goal-relevant semantic representations, enhancing communication efficiency and task effectiveness. However, existing GSC approaches focused primarily on optimizing effectiveness metrics while overlooking safety requirements, which should be treated as the top priority in real-world robotic systems. To bridge this gap, we propose safety-guaranteed and goal-oriented semantic communication for wirelessly-connected robotic system, aiming to maximize the robotic task effectiveness subject to practical operational safety requirements. We first summarize the general safety requirements and effectiveness metrics across typical robotic tasks, including robot arm grasping, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted tasks, and multi-robot exploration. We then systematically analyze the unique safety and effectiveness challenges faced by wirelessly-connected robotic system in sensing, communication, and control. Based on these, we further present potential safety-guaranteed and goal-oriented sensing, communication, and control solutions. Finally, a UAV target tracking case study validates that our proposed GSC solutions can significantly improve safety rate and tracking success rate by more than 2 times and 4.5 times, respectively.

Shutong Chen, Qi Liao, Adnan Aijaz et al.

6G services are evolving toward goal-oriented and AI-native communication, which are expected to deliver transformative societal benefits across various industries and promote energy sustainability. Yet today's networking architectures, built on complete decoupling of the applications and the network, cannot expose or exploit high-level goals, limiting their ability to adapt intelligently to service needs. This work introduces Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking (GoAgentNet), a new architecture that elevates communication from data exchange to goal fulfilment. GoAgentNet enables applications and the network to collaborate by abstracting their functions into multiple collaborative agents, and jointly orchestrates multi-agent sensing, networking, computation, and control through semantic computation and cross-layer semantic networking, allowing the entire architecture to pursue unified application goals. We first outline the limitations of legacy network designs in supporting 6G services, based on which we highlight key enablers of our GoAgentNet design. Then, through three representative 6G usage scenarios, we demonstrate how GoAgentNet can unlock more efficient and intelligent services. We further identify unique challenges faced by GoAgentNet deployment and corresponding potential solutions. A case study on robotic fault detection and recovery shows that our GoAgentNet architecture improves energy efficiency by up to 99% and increases the task success rate by up to 72%, compared with the existing networking architectures without GoAgentNet, which underscores its potential to support scalable and sustainable 6G systems.

Shutong Chen, Tianyi Zhou, Guodong Long et al.

One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. While there has been advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited choices to clients so local finetuning is still indispensable. In this paper, we propose a novel ``FedMerge'' approach that can create a personalized model per client by simply merging multiple global models with automatically optimized and customized weights. In FedMerge, a few global models can serve many non-IID clients, even without further local finetuning. We formulate this problem as a joint optimization of global models and the merging weights for each client. Unlike existing FL approaches where the server broadcasts one or multiple global models to all clients, the server only needs to send a customized, merged model to each client. Moreover, instead of periodically interrupting the local training and re-initializing it to a global model, the merged model aligns better with each client's task and data distribution, smoothening the local-global gap between consecutive rounds caused by client drift. We evaluate FedMerge on three different non-IID settings applied to different domains with diverse tasks and data types, in which FedMerge consistently outperforms existing FL approaches, including clustering-based and mixture-of-experts (MoE) based methods.

Shutong Chen, Yang Li

Estimating an individual's potential response to continuously varied treatments is crucial for addressing causal questions across diverse domains, from healthcare to social sciences. However, existing methods are limited either to estimating causal effects of binary treatments, or scenarios where all confounding variables are measurable. In this work, we present ContiVAE, a novel framework for estimating causal effects of continuous treatments, measured by individual dose-response curves, considering the presence of unobserved confounders using observational data. Leveraging a variational auto-encoder with a Tilted Gaussian prior distribution, ContiVAE models the hidden confounders as latent variables, and is able to predict the potential outcome of any treatment level for each individual while effectively capture the heterogeneity among individuals. Experiments on semi-synthetic datasets show that ContiVAE outperforms existing methods by up to 62%, demonstrating its robustness and flexibility. Application on a real-world dataset illustrates its practical utility.