Xi Huang

Jay Lee, Hanqi Su, Marco Macchi et al.

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is reshaping smart manufacturing by providing new capabilities for efficiency, adaptability, and autonomy across industrial value chains. However, the deployment of AI and ML in industrial settings still faces critical challenges, including the complexity of industrial big data, effective data management, integration with heterogeneous sensing and control systems, and the demand for trustworthy, explainable, and reliable operation in high-stakes industrial environments. In this roadmap, we present a comprehensive perspective on the foundations, applications, and emerging directions of AI and ML in smart manufacturing. It is structured in three parts. The first highlights the foundations and trends that frame the evolution of AI in smart manufacturing. The second focuses on key topics where AI is already enabling advances, including industrial big data analytics, advanced sensing and perception, autonomous systems, additive and laser-based manufacturing, digital twins, robotics, supply chain and logistics optimization, and sustainable manufacturing. The third section explores non-traditional ML approaches that are opening new frontiers, such as physics-informed AI, generative AI, semantic AI, advanced digital twins, explainable AI, RAMS, data-centric metrology, LLMs, and foundation models for highly connected and complex manufacturing systems. By identifying both opportunities and remaining barriers across these areas, this roadmap outlines the advances needed in methods, integration strategies, and industrial adoption. We hope this roadmap will serve as a guide for researchers, engineers, and practitioners to accelerate innovation, align academic and industrial priorities, and ensure that AI-driven smart manufacturing delivers reliable, sustainable, and scalable impact for the future of manufacturing ecosystems.

Xiaogang Jia, Atalay Donat, Xi Huang et al.

Designing modern imitation learning (IL) policies requires making numerous decisions, including the selection of feature encoding, architecture, policy representation, and more. As the field rapidly advances, the range of available options continues to grow, creating a vast and largely unexplored design space for IL policies. In this work, we present X-IL, an accessible open-source framework designed to systematically explore this design space. The framework's modular design enables seamless swapping of policy components, such as backbones (e.g., Transformer, Mamba, xLSTM) and policy optimization techniques (e.g., Score-matching, Flow-matching). This flexibility facilitates comprehensive experimentation and has led to the discovery of novel policy configurations that outperform existing methods on recent robot learning benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate not only significant performance gains but also provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of various design choices. This study serves as both a practical reference for practitioners and a foundation for guiding future research in imitation learning.

Atalay Donat, Xiaogang Jia, Xi Huang et al.

Learning for manipulation requires using policies that have access to rich sensory information such as point clouds or RGB images. Point clouds efficiently capture geometric structures, making them essential for manipulation tasks in imitation learning. In contrast, RGB images provide rich texture and semantic information that can be crucial for certain tasks. Existing approaches for fusing both modalities assign 2D image features to point clouds. However, such approaches often lose global contextual information from the original images. In this work, we propose FPV-Net, a novel imitation learning method that effectively combines the strengths of both point cloud and RGB modalities. Our method conditions the point-cloud encoder on global and local image tokens using adaptive layer norm conditioning, leveraging the beneficial properties of both modalities. Through extensive experiments on the challenging RoboCasa benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of relying on either modality alone and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.

Xi Huang, Hongyi Zhou, Ge Li et al.

We propose MoRe-ERL, a framework that combines Episodic Reinforcement Learning (ERL) and residual learning, which refines preplanned reference trajectories into safe, feasible, and efficient task-specific trajectories. This framework is general enough to incorporate into arbitrary ERL methods and motion generators seamlessly. MoRe-ERL identifies trajectory segments requiring modification while preserving critical task-related maneuvers. Then it generates smooth residual adjustments using B-Spline-based movement primitives to ensure adaptability to dynamic task contexts and smoothness in trajectory refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that residual learning significantly outperforms training from scratch using ERL methods, achieving superior sample efficiency and task performance. Hardware evaluations further validate the framework, showing that policies trained in simulation can be directly deployed in real-world systems, exhibiting a minimal sim-to-real gap.

Xiaogang Jia, Qian Wang, Anrui Wang et al.

Robotic manipulation systems benefit from complementary sensing modalities, where each provides unique environmental information. Point clouds capture detailed geometric structure, while RGB images provide rich semantic context. Current point cloud methods struggle to capture fine-grained detail, especially for complex tasks, which RGB methods lack geometric awareness, which hinders their precision and generalization. We introduce PointMapPolicy, a novel approach that conditions diffusion policies on structured grids of points without downsampling. The resulting data type makes it easier to extract shape and spatial relationships from observations, and can be transformed between reference frames. Yet due to their structure in a regular grid, we enable the use of established computer vision techniques directly to 3D data. Using xLSTM as a backbone, our model efficiently fuses the point maps with RGB data for enhanced multi-modal perception. Through extensive experiments on the RoboCasa and CALVIN benchmarks and real robot evaluations, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse manipulation tasks. The overview and demos are available on our project page: https://point-map.github.io/Point-Map/

Mingyu Liu, Zian Mao, Zhu Liu et al.

Automated experimentation with real time data analysis in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) often require end-to-end framework. The four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) with high-throughput data acquisition has been constrained by the critical bottleneck results from data preprocessing. Pervasive noise, beam center drift, and elliptical distortions during high-throughput acquisition inevitably corrupt diffraction patterns, systematically biasing quantitative measurements. Yet, conventional correction algorithms are often material-specific and fail to provide a robust, generalizable solution. In this work, we present 4D-PreNet, an end-to-end deep-learning pipeline that integrates attention-enhanced U-Net and ResNet architectures to simultaneously perform denoising, center correction, and elliptical distortion calibration. The network is trained on large, simulated datasets encompassing a wide range of noise levels, drift magnitudes, and distortion types, enabling it to generalize effectively to experimental data acquired under varying conditions. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our pipeline reduces mean squared error by up to 50% during denoising and achieves sub-pixel center localization in the center detection task, with average errors below 0.04 pixels. The outputs are bench-marked against traditional algorithms, highlighting improvements in both noise suppression and restoration of diffraction patterns, thereby facilitating high-throughput, reliable 4D-STEM real-time analysis for automated characterization.

Zifei Wang, Zian Mao, Xiaoya He et al.

While electron microscopy offers crucial atomic-resolution insights into structure-property relationships, radiation damage severely limits its use on beam-sensitive materials like proteins and 2D materials. To overcome this challenge, we push beyond the electron dose limits of conventional electron microscopy by adapting principles from multi-image super-resolution (MISR) that have been widely used in remote sensing. Our method fuses multiple low-resolution, sub-pixel-shifted views and enhances the reconstruction with a convolutional neural network (CNN) that integrates features from synthetic, multi-angle observations. We developed a dual-path, attention-guided network for 4D-STEM that achieves atomic-scale super-resolution from ultra-low-dose data. This provides robust atomic-scale visualization across amorphous, semi-crystalline, and crystalline beam-sensitive specimens. Systematic evaluations on representative materials demonstrate comparable spatial resolution to conventional ptychography under ultra-low-dose conditions. Our work expands the capabilities of 4D-STEM, offering a new and generalizable method for the structural analysis of radiation-vulnerable materials.

Yicheng Duan, Xi Huang, Duo Chen

The rapid growth of video content demands efficient and precise retrieval systems. While vision-language models (VLMs) excel in representation learning, they often struggle with adaptive, time-sensitive video retrieval. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines vector similarity search with graph-based data structures. By leveraging VLM embeddings for initial retrieval and modeling contextual relationships among video segments, our approach enables adaptive query refinement and improves retrieval accuracy. Experiments demonstrate its precision, scalability, and robustness, offering an effective solution for interactive video retrieval in dynamic environments.

Ye Zheng, Ruoran Huang, Chuanqi Han et al.

Zero-shot detection (ZSD) is crucial to large-scale object detection with the aim of simultaneously localizing and recognizing unseen objects. There remain several challenges for ZSD, including reducing the ambiguity between background and unseen objects as well as improving the alignment between visual and semantic concept. In this work, we propose a novel framework named Background Learnable Cascade (BLC) to improve ZSD performance. The major contributions for BLC are as follows: (i) we propose a multi-stage cascade structure named Cascade Semantic R-CNN to progressively refine the alignment between visual and semantic of ZSD; (ii) we develop the semantic information flow structure and directly add it between each stage in Cascade Semantic RCNN to further improve the semantic feature learning; (iii) we propose the background learnable region proposal network (BLRPN) to learn an appropriate word vector for background class and use this learned vector in Cascade Semantic R CNN, this design makes \Background Learnable" and reduces the confusion between background and unseen classes. Our extensive experiments show BLC obtains significantly performance improvements for MS-COCO over state-of-the-art methods.

Simeng Bian, Xi Huang, Ziyu Shao et al.

For state-of-the-art network function virtualization (NFV) systems, it remains a key challenge to conduct effective service chain composition for different network services (NSs) with ultra-low request latencies and minimum network congestion. To this end, existing solutions often require full knowledge of the network state, while ignoring the privacy issues and overlooking the non-cooperative behaviors of users. What is more, they may fall short in the face of unexpected failures such as user unavailability and virtual machine breakdown. In this paper, we formulate the problem of service chain composition in NFV systems with failures as a non-cooperative game. By showing that such a game is a weighted potential game and exploiting the unique problem structure, we propose two effective distributed schemes that guide the service chain compositions of different NSs towards the Nash equilibrium (NE) state with both near-optimal latencies and minimum congestion. Besides, we develop two novel learning-aided schemes as comparisons, which are based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) techniques, respectively. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes, as well as the adaptivity when faced with failures.

Simeng Bian, Xi Huang, Ziyu Shao

In fog computing systems, one key challenge is online task scheduling, i.e., to decide the resource allocation for tasks that are continuously generated from end devices. The design is challenging because of various uncertainties manifested in fog computing systems; e.g., tasks' resource demands remain unknown before their actual arrivals. Recent works have applied deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques to conduct online task scheduling and improve various objectives. However, they overlook the multi-resource fairness for different tasks, which is key to achieving fair resource sharing among tasks but in general non-trivial to achieve. Thusly, it is still an open problem to design an online task scheduling scheme with multi-resource fairness. In this paper, we address the above challenges. Particularly, by leveraging DRL techniques and adopting the idea of dominant resource fairness (DRF), we propose FairTS, an online task scheduling scheme that learns directly from experience to effectively shorten average task slowdown while ensuring multi-resource fairness among tasks. Simulation results show that FairTS outperforms state-of-the-art schemes with an ultra-low task slowdown and better resource fairness.

Xin Gao, Xi Huang, Ziyu Shao et al.

In fog-assisted IoT systems, it is a common practice to offload tasks from IoT devices to their nearby fog nodes to reduce task processing latencies and energy consumptions. However, the design of online energy-efficient scheme is still an open problem because of various uncertainties in system dynamics such as processing capacities and transmission rates. Moreover, the decision-making process is constrained by resource limits on fog nodes and IoT devices, making the design even more complicated. In this paper, we formulate such a task offloading problem with unknown system dynamics as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem with long-term constraints on time-averaged energy consumptions. Through an effective integration of online learning and online control, we propose a \textit{Learning-Aided Green Offloading} (LAGO) scheme. In LAGO, we employ bandit learning methods to handle the exploitation-exploration tradeoff and utilize virtual queue techniques to deal with the long-term constraints. Our theoretical analysis shows that LAGO can reduce the average task latency with a tunable sublinear regret bound over a finite time horizon and satisfy the long-term time-averaged energy constraints. We conduct extensive simulations to verify such theoretical results.

Nana Wang, Li Cui, Xi Huang et al.

The precise diagnosis is of great significance in developing precise treatment plans to restore neck function and reduce the burden posed by the cervical spondylosis (CS). However, the current available neck function assessment method are subjective and coarse-grained. In this paper, based on the relationship among CS, cervical structure, cervical vertebra function, and surface electromyography (sEMG), we seek to develop a clustering algorithms on the sEMG data set collected from the clinical environment and implement the division. We proposed and developed the framework EasiCS, which consists of dimension reduction, clustering algorithm EasiSOM, spectral clustering algorithm EasiSC. The EasiCS outperform the commonly used seven algorithms overall.

Nana Wang, Li Cui, Xi Huang et al.

Cervical spondylosis (CS) is a common chronic disease that affects up to two-thirds of the population and poses a serious burden on individuals and society. The early identification has significant value in improving cure rate and reducing costs. However, the pathology is complex, and the mild symptoms increase the difficulty of the diagnosis, especially in the early stage. Besides, the time-consuming and costliness of hospital medical service reduces the attention to the CS identification. Thus, a convenient, low-cost intelligent CS identification method is imperious demanded. In this paper, we present an intelligent method based on the deep learning to identify CS, using the surface electromyography (sEMG) signal. Faced with the complex, high dimensionality and weak usability of the sEMG signal, we proposed and developed a multi-channel EasiCSDeep algorithm based on the convolutional neural network, which consists of the feature extraction, spatial relationship representation and classification algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this EasiCSDeep is the first effort to employ the deep learning and the sEMG data to identify CS. Compared with previous state-of-the-art algorithm, our algorithm achieves a significant improvement.

Xiaohu Ge, Xi Huang, Yuming Wang et al.

It is widely recognized that besides the quality of service (QoS), the energy efficiency is also a key parameter in designing and evaluating mobile multimedia communication systems, which has catalyzed great interest in recent literature. In this paper, an energy efficiency model is first proposed for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) mobile multimedia communication systems with statistical QoS constraints. Employing the channel matrix singular-value-decomposition (SVD) method, all subchannels are classified by their channel characteristics. Furthermore, the multi-channel joint optimization problem in conventional MIMO-OFDM communication systems is transformed into a multi-target single channel optimization problem by grouping all subchannels. Therefore, a closed-form solution of the energy efficiency optimization is derived for MIMO-OFDM mobile mlutimedia communication systems. As a consequence, an energy-efficiency optimized power allocation (EEOPA) algorithm is proposed to improve the energy efficiency of MIMO-OFDM mobile multimedia communication systems. Simulation comparisons validate that the proposed EEOPA algorithm can guarantee the required QoS with high energy efficiency in MIMO-OFDM mobile multimedia communication systems.