Baoping Cheng

Yongsheng Zhao, Lei Zhao, Baoping Cheng et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in robotics, with the action chunk playing a dominant role in these advances. Given the real-time and continuous nature of robotic motion control, the strategies for fusing a queue of successive action chunks have a profound impact on the overall performance of VLA models. Existing methods suffer from jitter, stalling, or even pauses in robotic action execution, which not only limits the achievable execution speed but also reduces the overall success rate of task completion. This paper introduces VLA-RAIL (A Real-Time Asynchronous Inference Linker), a novel framework designed to address these issues by conducting model inference and robot motion control asynchronously and guaranteeing smooth, continuous, and high-speed action execution. The core contributions of the paper are two fold: a Trajectory Smoother that effectively filters out the noise and jitter in the trajectory of one action chunk using polynomial fitting and a Chunk Fuser that seamlessly align the current executing trajectory and the newly arrived chunk, ensuring position, velocity, and acceleration continuity between two successive action chunks. We validate the effectiveness of VLA-RAIL on a benchmark of dynamic simulation tasks and several real-world manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that VLA-RAIL significantly reduces motion jitter, enhances execution speed, and improves task success rates, which will become a key infrastructure for the large-scale deployment of VLA models.

Yixiang Zhuang, Baoping Cheng, Yao Cheng et al.

Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

Baoping Cheng, Yukun Zhang, Liming Wang et al.

With the continuous increase in the number and resolution of video surveillance cameras, the burden of transmitting and storing surveillance video is growing. Traditional communication methods based on Shannon's theory are facing optimization bottlenecks. Semantic communication, as an emerging communication method, is expected to break through this bottleneck and reduce the storage and transmission consumption of video. Existing semantic decoding methods often require many samples to train the neural network for each scene, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, a semantic encoding and decoding method for surveillance video is proposed. First, the sketch was extracted as semantic information, and a sketch compression method was proposed to reduce the bit rate of semantic information. Then, an image translation network was proposed to translate the sketch into a video frame with a reference frame. Finally, a few-shot sketch decoding network was proposed to reconstruct video from sketch. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved significantly better video reconstruction performance than baseline methods. The sketch compression method could effectively reduce the storage and transmission consumption of semantic information with little compromise on video quality. The proposed method provides a novel semantic encoding and decoding method that only needs a few training samples for each surveillance scene, thus improving the practicality of the semantic communication system.