Y. Lawrence Yao

Delin Qu, Haoming Song, Qizhi Chen et al.

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

Haoming Song, Delin Qu, Yuanqi Yao et al.

Humans practice slow thinking before performing actual actions when handling complex tasks in the physical world. This thinking paradigm, recently, has achieved remarkable advancement in boosting Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks in digital domains. However, the potential of slow thinking remains largely unexplored for robotic foundation models interacting with the physical world. In this work, we propose Hume: a dual-system Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with value-guided System-2 thinking and cascaded action denoising, exploring human-like thinking capabilities of Vision-Language-Action models for dexterous robot control. System 2 of Hume implements value-Guided thinking by extending a Vision-Language-Action Model backbone with a novel value-query head to estimate the state-action value of predicted actions. The value-guided thinking is conducted by repeat sampling multiple action candidates and selecting one according to state-action value. System 1 of Hume is a lightweight reactive visuomotor policy that takes System 2 selected action and performs cascaded action denoising for dexterous robot control. At deployment time, System 2 performs value-guided thinking at a low frequency while System 1 asynchronously receives the System 2 selected action candidate and predicts fluid actions in real time. We show that Hume outperforms the existing state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action models across multiple simulation benchmark and real-robot deployments.

Yuanqi Yao, Siao Liu, Haoming Song et al.

Building a lifelong robot that can effectively leverage prior knowledge for continuous skill acquisition remains significantly challenging. Despite the success of experience replay and parameter-efficient methods in alleviating catastrophic forgetting problem, naively applying these methods causes a failure to leverage the shared primitives between skills. To tackle these issues, we propose Primitive Prompt Learning (PPL), to achieve lifelong robot manipulation via reusable and extensible primitives. Within our two stage learning scheme, we first learn a set of primitive prompts to represent shared primitives through multi-skills pre-training stage, where motion-aware prompts are learned to capture semantic and motion shared primitives across different skills. Secondly, when acquiring new skills in lifelong span, new prompts are appended and optimized with frozen pretrained prompts, boosting the learning via knowledge transfer from old skills to new ones. For evaluation, we construct a large-scale skill dataset and conduct extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world tasks, demonstrating PPL's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

BoCheng Li, WenJuan Zhang, Bing Zhang et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS) achieves impressive results in novel view synthesis for small, single-object scenes through Gaussian ellipsoid initialization and adaptive density control. However, when applied to large-scale remote sensing scenes, 3D GS faces challenges: the point clouds generated by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) are often sparse, and the inherent smoothing behavior of 3D GS leads to over-reconstruction in high-frequency regions, where have detailed textures and color variations. This results in the generation of large, opaque Gaussian ellipsoids that cause gradient artifacts. Moreover, the simultaneous optimization of both geometry and texture may lead to densification of Gaussian ellipsoids at incorrect geometric locations, resulting in artifacts in other views. To address these issues, we propose PSRGS, a progressive optimization scheme based on spectral residual maps. Specifically, we create a spectral residual significance map to separate low-frequency and high-frequency regions. In the low-frequency region, we apply depth-aware and depth-smooth losses to initialize the scene geometry with low threshold. For the high-frequency region, we use gradient features with higher threshold to split and clone ellipsoids, refining the scene. The sampling rate is determined by feature responses and gradient loss. Finally, we introduce a pre-trained network that jointly computes perceptual loss from multiple views, ensuring accurate restoration of high-frequency details in both Gaussian ellipsoids geometry and color. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets to assess the effectiveness of our method, which demonstrates competitive rendering quality, especially in recovering texture details in high-frequency regions.