Zhi Gao

Yixue Zhang, Kun Wu, Zhi Gao et al.

The pursuit of general-purpose robotic manipulation is hindered by the scarcity of diverse, real-world interaction data. Unlike data collection from web in vision or language, robotic data collection is an active process incurring prohibitive physical costs. Consequently, automated task curation to maximize data value remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. Existing manual methods are unscalable and biased toward common tasks, while off-the-shelf foundation models often hallucinate physically infeasible instructions. To address this, we introduce RoboGene, an agentic framework designed to automate the generation of diverse, physically plausible manipulation tasks across single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile robots. RoboGene integrates three core components: diversity-driven sampling for broad task coverage, self-reflection mechanisms to enforce physical constraints, and human-in-the-loop refinement for continuous improvement. We conduct extensive quantitative analysis and large-scale real-world experiments, collecting datasets of 18k trajectories and introducing novel metrics to assess task quality, feasibility, and diversity. Results demonstrate that RoboGene significantly outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro). Furthermore, real-world experiments show that VLA models pre-trained with RoboGene achieve higher success rates and superior generalization, underscoring the importance of high-quality task generation. Our project is available at https://robogene-boost-vla.github.io.

Zhi Gao, Yuntao Du, Xintong Zhang et al.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) to compose off-the-shelf visual tools represents a promising avenue of research for developing robust visual assistants capable of addressing diverse visual tasks. However, these methods often overlook the potential for continual learning, typically by freezing the utilized tools, thus limiting their adaptation to environments requiring new knowledge. To tackle this challenge, we propose CLOVA, a Closed-Loop Visual Assistant, which operates within a framework encompassing inference, reflection, and learning phases. During the inference phase, LLMs generate programs and execute corresponding tools to complete assigned tasks. In the reflection phase, a multimodal global-local reflection scheme analyzes human feedback to determine which tools require updating. Lastly, the learning phase employs three flexible approaches to automatically gather training data and introduces a novel prompt tuning scheme to update the tools, allowing CLOVA to efficiently acquire new knowledge. Experimental findings demonstrate that CLOVA surpasses existing tool-usage methods by 5% in visual question answering and multiple-image reasoning, by 10% in knowledge tagging, and by 20% in image editing. These results underscore the significance of the continual learning capability in general visual assistants.

Peilin Yu, Yuwei Wu, Zhi Gao et al.

Riemannian meta-optimization provides a promising approach to solving non-linear constrained optimization problems, which trains neural networks as optimizers to perform optimization on Riemannian manifolds. However, existing Riemannian meta-optimization methods take up huge memory footprints in large-scale optimization settings, as the learned optimizer can only adapt gradients of a fixed size and thus cannot be shared across different Riemannian parameters. In this paper, we propose an efficient Riemannian meta-optimization method that significantly reduces the memory burden for large-scale optimization via a subspace adaptation scheme. Our method trains neural networks to individually adapt the row and column subspaces of Riemannian gradients, instead of directly adapting the full gradient matrices in existing Riemannian meta-optimization methods. In this case, our learned optimizer can be shared across Riemannian parameters with different sizes. Our method reduces the model memory consumption by six orders of magnitude when optimizing an orthogonal mainstream deep neural network (e.g., ResNet50). Experiments on multiple Riemannian tasks show that our method can not only reduce the memory consumption but also improve the performance of Riemannian meta-optimization.

Zhi Gao, Yuwei Wu, Xingyuan Bu et al.

Recent studies have shown that aggregating convolutional features of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can obtain impressive performance for a variety of visual tasks. The symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix becomes a powerful tool due to its remarkable ability to learn an appropriate statistic representation to characterize the underlying structure of visual features. In this paper, we propose to aggregate deep convolutional features into an SPD matrix representation through the SPD generation and the SPD transformation under an end-to-end deep network. To this end, several new layers are introduced in our network, including a nonlinear kernel aggregation layer, an SPD matrix transformation layer, and a vectorization layer. The nonlinear kernel aggregation layer is employed to aggregate the convolutional features into a real SPD matrix directly. The SPD matrix transformation layer is designed to construct a more compact and discriminative SPD representation. The vectorization and normalization operations are performed in the vectorization layer for reducing the redundancy and accelerating the convergence. The SPD matrix in our network can be considered as a mid-level representation bridging convolutional features and high-level semantic features. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on visual classification. Experiment results show that our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art methods.