Boan Zhu

RO
h-index11
3papers
25citations
Novelty62%
AI Score47

3 Papers

RODec 29, 2025
RoboMirror: Understand Before You Imitate for Video to Humanoid Locomotion

Zhe Li, Cheng Chi, Boan Zhu et al.

Humans learn locomotion through visual observation, interpreting visual content first before imitating actions. However, state-of-the-art humanoid locomotion systems rely on either curated motion capture trajectories or sparse text commands, leaving a critical gap between visual understanding and control. Text-to-motion methods suffer from semantic sparsity and staged pipeline errors, while video-based approaches only perform mechanical pose mimicry without genuine visual understanding. We propose RoboMirror, the first retargeting-free video-to-locomotion framework embodying "understand before you imitate". Leveraging VLMs, it distills raw egocentric/third-person videos into visual motion intents, which directly condition a diffusion-based policy to generate physically plausible, semantically aligned locomotion without explicit pose reconstruction or retargeting. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RoboMirror, it enables telepresence via egocentric videos, drastically reduces third-person control latency by 80%, and achieves a 3.7% higher task success rate than baselines. By reframing humanoid control around video understanding, we bridge the visual understanding and action gap.

CVMar 15
Expanding mmWave Datasets for Human Pose Estimation with Unlabeled Data and LiDAR Datasets

Zhuoxuan Peng, Boan Zhu, Xingjian Zhang et al.

Current mmWave datasets for human pose estimation (HPE) are scarce and lack diversity in both point cloud (PC) attributes and human poses, severely hampering the generalization ability of their trained models. On the other hand, unlabeled mmWave HPE data and diverse LiDAR HPE datasets are readily available. We propose EMDUL, a novel approach to expand the volume and diversity of an existing mmWave dataset using unlabeled mmWave data and a LiDAR dataset. EMDUL trains a pseudo-label estimator to annotate the unlabeled mmWave data and is able to convert, or translate, a given annotated LiDAR PC to its mmWave counterpart. Expanded with both LiDAR-converted and pseudo-labeled mmWave PCs, our mmWave dataset significantly boosts the performance and generalization ability of all our HPE models, with substantial 15.1% and 18.9% error reductions for in-domain and out-of-domain settings, respectively.

ROOct 16, 2025
From Language to Locomotion: Retargeting-free Humanoid Control via Motion Latent Guidance

Zhe Li, Cheng Chi, Yangyang Wei et al.

Natural language offers a natural interface for humanoid robots, but existing language-guided humanoid locomotion pipelines remain cumbersome and untrustworthy. They typically decode human motion, retarget it to robot morphology, and then track it with a physics-based controller. However, this multi-stage process is prone to cumulative errors, introduces high latency, and yields weak coupling between semantics and control. These limitations call for a more direct pathway from language to action, one that eliminates fragile intermediate stages. Therefore, we present RoboGhost, a retargeting-free framework that directly conditions humanoid policies on language-grounded motion latents. By bypassing explicit motion decoding and retargeting, RoboGhost enables a diffusion-based policy to denoise executable actions directly from noise, preserving semantic intent and supporting fast, reactive control. A hybrid causal transformer-diffusion motion generator further ensures long-horizon consistency while maintaining stability and diversity, yielding rich latent representations for precise humanoid behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboGhost substantially reduces deployment latency, improves success rates and tracking precision, and produces smooth, semantically aligned locomotion on real humanoids. Beyond text, the framework naturally extends to other modalities such as images, audio, and music, providing a universal foundation for vision-language-action humanoid systems.