Lingzhu Xiang

h-index7
4papers
195citations

4 Papers

43.4AIJul 15
RxBrain: Embodied Cognition Foundation Model with Joint Language-Visual Reasoning and Imagination

Haotian Liang, Mingkang Chen, Yufei Huang et al.

Embodied cognition requires agents to connect high-level task reasoning with the physical states to be achieved. We introduce Hy-Embodied-RxBrain, an embodied cognition foundation model with joint language-visual reasoning and imagination. Unlike vision-language models that emphasize scene understanding and textual decision making, or generative world models that mainly predict future visual states, RxBrain represents embodied plans in a single planning sequence where language and visual imagination play complementary roles. Language provides the abstract structure of a plan, including task decomposition, planning primitives, constraints, temporal order, and decision logic, while visual imagination grounds this structure through world state prediction and joint subgoal planning, associating each planning step with intermediate and final physical states. RxBrain adopts a unified multimodal Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that supports language, image, and video understanding and generation within one model. To train this capability, we build an automatic pipeline that converts embodied videos into joint text-visual planning supervision by decomposing videos into planning steps and aligning them with visual state transitions. We further introduce RxBrain-Bench to evaluate whether models can represent embodied plans through joint textual and visual components rather than separate understanding or generation. Experiments show that RxBrain maintains embodied understanding and generation abilities, and produces plans with coupled textual reasoning, world state prediction, and joint subgoal planning. We also extend RxBrain to continuous robot action generation, where it shows promising real-robot performance without large-scale action-data pretraining. These results provide an initial step toward foundation models for embodied cognition.

20.8ROAug 29, 2023
Lifelike Agility and Play in Quadrupedal Robots using Reinforcement Learning and Generative Pre-trained Models

Lei Han, Qingxu Zhu, Jiapeng Sheng et al.

Knowledge from animals and humans inspires robotic innovations. Numerous efforts have been made to achieve agile locomotion in quadrupedal robots through classical controllers or reinforcement learning approaches. These methods usually rely on physical models or handcrafted rewards to accurately describe the specific system, rather than on a generalized understanding like animals do. Here we propose a hierarchical framework to construct primitive-, environmental- and strategic-level knowledge that are all pre-trainable, reusable and enrichable for legged robots. The primitive module summarizes knowledge from animal motion data, where, inspired by large pre-trained models in language and image understanding, we introduce deep generative models to produce motor control signals stimulating legged robots to act like real animals. Then, we shape various traversing capabilities at a higher level to align with the environment by reusing the primitive module. Finally, a strategic module is trained focusing on complex downstream tasks by reusing the knowledge from previous levels. We apply the trained hierarchical controllers to the MAX robot, a quadrupedal robot developed in-house, to mimic animals, traverse complex obstacles and play in a designed challenging multi-agent chase tag game, where lifelike agility and strategy emerge in the robots.

5.8ROMay 2
SixthSense: Task-Agnostic Proprioception-Only Whole-Body Wrench Estimation for Humanoids

Xingzhou Chen, Xiayan Xu, Yan Ning et al.

Humanoid robots are entering our physical world at scale, yet as oversized toys--good at singing and dancing, but short on force-interaction capabilities for practical tasks. Bridging this gap necessitates prioritizing reliable contact perception as a fundamental requirement. Estimating external wrenches in humanoids is complicated by floating-base dynamics and indeterminate contact locations. Existing analytical frameworks require idealistic assumptions and hard-to-obtain measurements, which are often unavailable in practice. To bridge this gap, we propose SixthSense, a task-agnostic approach that infers whole-body contact timing, location, and wrenches from proprioception and IMU data alone. To capture the multi-modal dynamics between unstructured contact inputs and the uncertain motion outputs, we employ conditional flow matching to tokenize proprioceptive histories and estimate a spatiotemporally sparse contact-event flow. SixthSense serves as a plug-and-play perception module for applications including collision detection, physical human-robot interaction, and force-feedback teleoperation. Experiments across standing, walking, and whole-body motion-tracking policies showcased unprecedented performance in diverse behaviors.

12.2ROJun 12
Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

He Zhang, Lingzhu Xiang, Haitao Lin et al.

In this report, we present Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA, abbreviated as HyVLA-0.5, an end-to-end system that spans the full robot learning stack: data collection, model design, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, RL post-training, and real-world deployment. Each component serves a distinct role in this stack.