Mingle Zhao

Yi Gu, Yukang Gao, Yangchen Zhou et al.

Pose and motion priors play a crucial role in humanoid robotics. Although such priors have been widely studied in human motion recovery (HMR) domain with a range of models, their adoption for humanoid robots remains limited, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality humanoid motion data. In this work, we introduce Pose Distance Fields for Humanoid Robots (PDF-HR), a lightweight prior that represents the robot pose distribution as a continuous and differentiable manifold. Given an arbitrary pose, PDF-HR predicts its distance to a large corpus of retargeted robot poses, yielding a smooth measure of pose plausibility that is well suited for optimization and control. PDF-HR can be integrated as a reward shaping term, a regularizer, or a standalone plausibility scorer across diverse pipelines. We evaluate PDF-HR on various humanoid tasks, including single-trajectory motion tracking, general motion tracking, style-based motion mimicry, and general motion retargeting. Experiments show that this plug-and-play prior consistently and substantially strengthens strong baselines. Code and models will be released.

Yi Gu, Zhaorui Wang, Jiahang Cao et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient training and fast novel view synthesis in static environments. To address challenges posed by transient objects, distractor-free 3DGS methods have emerged and shown promising results when dense image captures are available. However, their performance degrades significantly under sparse input conditions. This limitation primarily stems from the reliance on the color residual heuristics to guide the training, which becomes unreliable with limited observations. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance distractor-free 3DGS under sparse-view conditions by incorporating rich prior information. Specifically, we first adopt the geometry foundation model VGGT to estimate camera parameters and generate a dense set of initial 3D points. Then, we harness the attention maps from VGGT for efficient and accurate semantic entity matching. Additionally, we utilize Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to further identify and preserve the large static regions in the scene. We also demonstrate how these priors can be seamlessly integrated into existing distractor-free 3DGS methods. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in mitigating transient distractors for sparse-view 3DGS training.