Tianyu Wang

Tianyu Wang, Haitao Lin, Junqiu Yu et al.

This paper investigates the task of the open-ended interactive robotic manipulation on table-top scenarios. While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) enhance robots' comprehension of user instructions, their lack of visual grounding constrains their ability to physically interact with the environment. This is because the robot needs to locate the target object for manipulation within the physical workspace. To this end, we introduce an interactive robotic manipulation framework called Polaris, which integrates perception and interaction by utilizing GPT-4 alongside grounded vision models. For precise manipulation, it is essential that such grounded vision models produce detailed object pose for the target object, rather than merely identifying pixels belonging to them in the image. Consequently, we propose a novel Synthetic-to-Real (Syn2Real) pose estimation pipeline. This pipeline utilizes rendered synthetic data for training and is then transferred to real-world manipulation tasks. The real-world performance demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed pipeline and underscores its potential for extension to more general categories. Moreover, real-robot experiments have showcased the impressive performance of our framework in grasping and executing multiple manipulation tasks. This indicates its potential to generalize to scenarios beyond the tabletop. More information and video results are available here: https://star-uu-wang.github.io/Polaris/

Harvey McGuinness, Tianyu Wang, Carey E. Priebe et al.

Alignment is a social phenomenon wherein individuals share a common goal or perspective. Mirroring, or mimicking the behaviors and opinions of another individual, is one mechanism by which individuals can become aligned. Large scale investigations of the effect of mirroring on alignment have been limited due to the scalability of traditional experimental designs in sociology. In this paper, we introduce a simple computational framework that enables studying the effect of mirroring behavior on alignment in multi-agent systems. We simulate systems of interacting large language models in this framework and characterize overall system behavior and alignment with quantitative measures of agent dynamics. We find that system behavior is strongly influenced by the range of communication of each agent and that these effects are exacerbated by increased rates of mirroring. We discuss the observed simulated system behavior in the context of known human social dynamics.

Tianyu Wang, Jianming Zhang, Haitian Zheng et al.

Shadows are often under-considered or even ignored in image editing applications, limiting the realism of the edited results. In this paper, we introduce MetaShadow, a three-in-one versatile framework that enables detection, removal, and controllable synthesis of shadows in natural images in an object-centered fashion. MetaShadow combines the strengths of two cooperative components: Shadow Analyzer, for object-centered shadow detection and removal, and Shadow Synthesizer, for reference-based controllable shadow synthesis. Notably, we optimize the learning of the intermediate features from Shadow Analyzer to guide Shadow Synthesizer to generate more realistic shadows that blend seamlessly with the scene. Extensive evaluations on multiple shadow benchmark datasets show significant improvements of MetaShadow over the existing state-of-the-art methods on object-centered shadow detection, removal, and synthesis. MetaShadow excels in image-editing tasks such as object removal, relocation, and insertion, pushing the boundaries of object-centered image editing.