Yizhi Chen

RO
h-index12
7papers
5citations
Novelty43%
AI Score50

7 Papers

89.5ROMay 28Code
A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms

Yufei Jia, Zhanxiang Cao, Mingrui Yu et al.

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.

95.8ROJun 2
GeoAlign: Beyond Semantics with State-Guided Spatial Alignment in VLA Models

Yizhi Chen, Zhanxiang Cao, Xinyi Peng et al.

Current Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models often optimize for semantic grounding, whereas executable manipulation requires geometry-aware spatial alignment and dynamic affordance selection. We introduce GeoAlign, a state-guided spatial alignment architecture for VLA policy learning. GeoAlign post-trains an RGB geometry branch with robot-domain RGB-D supervision, yielding RGB-derived Geometry-Enhanced Post-Trained (GEP) features for policy rollout. The robot's proprioceptive state queries the GEP feature grid, producing compact, phase-dependent geometry tokens for action prediction. GeoAlign achieves 99.0% on LIBERO, 85.3% across three SimplerEnv-Fractal tasks, and 78.8% on eight geometry-critical real-world ALOHA tasks, with ablations confirming the value of geometry post-training and proprioceptive-state-guided querying.

80.8ROMay 30
Global-Local Attention Decomposition for Terrain Encoding in Humanoid Perceptive Locomotion

Shengcheng Fu, Yang Zhang, Zhanxiang Cao et al.

Although reinforcement learning has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion, perceptive policies still struggle on sparse-foothold terrain and constrained environments. Success in these scenarios requires both broad terrain awareness and precise foothold selection, two perceptual roles that conventional encoders often entangle. To address this challenge, we propose Global-Local Attention Decomposition (GLAD) for terrain encoding in humanoid locomotion. Realized by a coarse-to-fine encoder over a robot-centric elevation map, GLAD explicitly separates these objectives: a global attention branch utilizes attention pooling to summarize the surrounding terrain context, while a state-conditioned local attention branch sparsifies and encodes precise foothold-relevant geometry. This explicit attention decomposition prevents the dilution of fine-grained spatial cues while reducing training overhead. Experiments demonstrate that GLAD enables reliable locomotion over challenging gaps, stepping stones, and stairs. Furthermore, the learned policy exhibits emergent terrain-responsive behaviors, autonomously following narrow paths and avoiding obstacles under simple velocity commands without explicit navigation planners. In real-world deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot using onboard LiDAR, the proposed method achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across diverse sparse-foothold and obstacle-rich domains.

ARJan 20
'1'-bit Count-based Sorting Unit to Reduce Link Power in DNN Accelerators

Ruichi Han, Yizhi Chen, Tong Lei et al.

Interconnect power consumption remains a bottleneck in Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerators. While ordering data based on '1'-bit counts can mitigate this via reduced switching activity, practical hardware sorting implementations remain underexplored. This work proposes the hardware implementation of a comparison-free sorting unit optimized for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). By leveraging approximate computing to group population counts into coarse-grained buckets, our design achieves hardware area reductions while preserving the link power benefits of data reordering. Our approximate sorting unit achieves up to 35.4% area reduction while maintaining 19.50\% BT reduction compared to 20.42% of precise implementation.

LGJan 14
Late Breaking Results: Quamba-SE: Soft-edge Quantizer for Activations in State Space Models

Yizhi Chen, Ahmed Hemani

We propose Quamba-SE, a soft-edge quantizer for State Space Model (SSM) activation quantization. Unlike existing methods, using standard INT8 operation, Quamba-SE employs three adaptive scales: high-precision for small values, standard scale for normal values, and low-precision for outliers. This preserves outlier information instead of hard clipping, while maintaining precision for other values. We evaluate on Mamba- 130M across 6 zero-shot benchmarks. Results show that Quamba- SE consistently outperforms Quamba, achieving up to +2.68% on individual benchmarks and up to +0.83% improvement in the average accuracy of 6 datasets.

LGFeb 12, 2025
LLM4GNAS: A Large Language Model Based Toolkit for Graph Neural Architecture Search

Yang Gao, Hong Yang, Yizhi Chen et al.

Graph Neural Architecture Search (GNAS) facilitates the automatic design of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) tailored to specific downstream graph learning tasks. However, existing GNAS approaches often require manual adaptation to new graph search spaces, necessitating substantial code optimization and domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, we present LLM4GNAS, a toolkit for GNAS that leverages the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLM4GNAS includes an algorithm library for graph neural architecture search algorithms based on LLMs, enabling the adaptation of GNAS methods to new search spaces through the modification of LLM prompts. This approach reduces the need for manual intervention in algorithm adaptation and code modification. The LLM4GNAS toolkit is extensible and robust, incorporating LLM-enhanced graph feature engineering, LLM-enhanced graph neural architecture search, and LLM-enhanced hyperparameter optimization. Experimental results indicate that LLM4GNAS outperforms existing GNAS methods on tasks involving both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.

MED-PHFeb 26, 2024
An Overview of the Development of Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy

Yanqi Zong, Zhengrong Cui, Luqi Lin et al.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) refers to focusing high-energy rays in three-dimensional space on the tumor lesion area, reducing the dose received by surrounding normal tissues, which can effectively improve the local control rate of the tumor and reduce the probability of complications. With the comprehensive development of medical imaging, radiation biology and other disciplines, this less-fractional, high-dose radiotherapy method has been increasingly developed and applied in clinical practice. The background, radio-biological basis, key technologies and main equipment of SBRT are discussed, and its future development direction is prospected.