Teng Xue

Teng Xue, Yan Zhang, Amirreza Razmjoo et al.

Many robotic tasks, such as inverse kinematics, motion planning, and contact-rich manipulation, can be formulated as optimization problems. Solving these problems requires addressing inherent nonlinear kinematics, complex contact dynamics, long-horizon correlations, and multi-modal optimization landscapes, each posing distinct challenges for state-of-the-art optimizers. While existing methods tackle these issues through problem-specific strategies, such specialization inherently limits cross-task generalization, requires heavy engineering effort in problem reformulation, and hinders multi-task autonomy. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) offers a compelling framework that generalizes across diverse robotic tasks via strategic exploration of the solution space. However, it typically suffers from combinatorial complexity when applied naively, resulting in slow convergence and excessive storage space in high-dimensional domains. To address this limitation, we propose Tensor Train Tree Search (TTTS), which leverages tensor factorization to exploit implicit correlations among different branches within the decision tree. By utilizing the resulting compact, linear-complexity representation, TTTS significantly reduces both computation and storage overhead, thereby enabling highly efficient global decision making. Experimental results across inverse kinematics, motion planning around obstacles, legged robot manipulation, multi-stage motion planning, and bimanual whole-body manipulation demonstrate the efficiency of TTTS for generalized robot optimization over a diverse set of tasks.

Peng Dai, Xue Teng, Frank Rudzicz et al.

Compared with automatic speech recognition (ASR), the human auditory system is more adept at handling noise-adverse situations, including environmental noise and channel distortion. To mimic this adeptness, auditory models have been widely incorporated in ASR systems to improve their robustness. This paper proposes a novel auditory model which incorporates psychoacoustics and otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) into ASR. In particular, we successfully implement the frequency-dependent property of psychoacoustic models and effectively improve resulting system performance. We also present a novel double-transform spectrum-analysis technique, which can qualitatively predict ASR performance for different noise types. Detailed theoretical analysis is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experiments are carried out on the AURORA2 database and show that the word recognition rate using our proposed feature extraction method is significantly increased over the baseline. Given models trained with clean speech, our proposed method achieves up to 85.39% word recognition accuracy on noisy data.