Yao Mu

Yao Lai, Yao Mu, Ping Luo · tsinghua

Placement is an essential task in modern chip design, aiming at placing millions of circuit modules on a 2D chip canvas. Unlike the human-centric solution, which requires months of intense effort by hardware engineers to produce a layout to minimize delay and energy consumption, deep reinforcement learning has become an emerging autonomous tool. However, the learning-centric method is still in its early stage, impeded by a massive design space of size ten to the order of a few thousand. This work presents MaskPlace to automatically generate a valid chip layout design within a few hours, whose performance can be superior or comparable to recent advanced approaches. It has several appealing benefits that prior arts do not have. Firstly, MaskPlace recasts placement as a problem of learning pixel-level visual representation to comprehensively describe millions of modules on a chip, enabling placement in a high-resolution canvas and a large action space. It outperforms recent methods that represent a chip as a hypergraph. Secondly, it enables training the policy network by an intuitive reward function with dense reward, rather than a complicated reward function with sparse reward from previous methods. Thirdly, extensive experiments on many public benchmarks show that MaskPlace outperforms existing RL approaches in all key performance metrics, including wirelength, congestion, and density. For example, it achieves 60%-90% wirelength reduction and guarantees zero overlaps. We believe MaskPlace can improve AI-assisted chip layout design. The deliverables are released at https://laiyao1.github.io/maskplace.

Mingxiao Huo, Mingyu Ding, Chenfeng Xu et al. · berkeley

Humans inherently possess generalizable visual representations that empower them to efficiently explore and interact with the environments in manipulation tasks. We advocate that such a representation automatically arises from simultaneously learning about multiple simple perceptual skills that are critical for everyday scenarios (e.g., hand detection, state estimate, etc.) and is better suited for learning robot manipulation policies compared to current state-of-the-art visual representations purely based on self-supervised objectives. We formalize this idea through the lens of human-oriented multi-task fine-tuning on top of pre-trained visual encoders, where each task is a perceptual skill tied to human-environment interactions. We introduce Task Fusion Decoder as a plug-and-play embedding translator that utilizes the underlying relationships among these perceptual skills to guide the representation learning towards encoding meaningful structure for what's important for all perceptual skills, ultimately empowering learning of downstream robotic manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments across a range of robotic tasks and embodiments, in both simulations and real-world environments, show that our Task Fusion Decoder consistently improves the representation of three state-of-the-art visual encoders including R3M, MVP, and EgoVLP, for downstream manipulation policy-learning. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/human-oriented-robot-learning

Zhixuan Liang, Yao Mu, Mingyu Ding et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated their powerful generative capability in many tasks, with great potential to serve as a paradigm for offline reinforcement learning. However, the quality of the diffusion model is limited by the insufficient diversity of training data, which hinders the performance of planning and the generalizability to new tasks. This paper introduces AdaptDiffuser, an evolutionary planning method with diffusion that can self-evolve to improve the diffusion model hence a better planner, not only for seen tasks but can also adapt to unseen tasks. AdaptDiffuser enables the generation of rich synthetic expert data for goal-conditioned tasks using guidance from reward gradients. It then selects high-quality data via a discriminator to finetune the diffusion model, which improves the generalization ability to unseen tasks. Empirical experiments on two benchmark environments and two carefully designed unseen tasks in KUKA industrial robot arm and Maze2D environments demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaptDiffuser. For example, AdaptDiffuser not only outperforms the previous art Diffuser by 20.8% on Maze2D and 7.5% on MuJoCo locomotion, but also adapts better to new tasks, e.g., KUKA pick-and-place, by 27.9% without requiring additional expert data. More visualization results and demo videos could be found on our project page.

Hao Sha, Yao Mu, Yuxuan Jiang et al.

Existing learning-based autonomous driving (AD) systems face challenges in comprehending high-level information, generalizing to rare events, and providing interpretability. To address these problems, this work employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as a decision-making component for complex AD scenarios that require human commonsense understanding. We devise cognitive pathways to enable comprehensive reasoning with LLMs, and develop algorithms for translating LLM decisions into actionable driving commands. Through this approach, LLM decisions are seamlessly integrated with low-level controllers by guided parameter matrix adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method not only consistently surpasses baseline approaches in single-vehicle tasks, but also helps handle complex driving behaviors even multi-vehicle coordination, thanks to the commonsense reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This paper presents an initial step toward leveraging LLMs as effective decision-makers for intricate AD scenarios in terms of safety, efficiency, generalizability, and interoperability. We aspire for it to serve as inspiration for future research in this field. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/llm-mpc

Qiushan Guo, Yao Mu, Jianyu Chen et al.

Recent Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) methods are mainly based on self-training, i.e., generating hard pseudo-labels by a teacher model on unlabeled data as supervisory signals. Although they achieved certain success, the limited labeled data in semi-supervised learning scales up the challenges of object detection. We analyze the challenges these methods meet with the empirical experiment results. We find that the massive False Negative samples and inferior localization precision lack consideration. Besides, the large variance of object sizes and class imbalance (i.e., the extreme ratio between background and object) hinder the performance of prior arts. Further, we overcome these challenges by introducing a novel approach, Scale-Equivalent Distillation (SED), which is a simple yet effective end-to-end knowledge distillation framework robust to large object size variance and class imbalance. SED has several appealing benefits compared to the previous works. (1) SED imposes a consistency regularization to handle the large scale variance problem. (2) SED alleviates the noise problem from the False Negative samples and inferior localization precision. (3) A re-weighting strategy can implicitly screen the potential foreground regions of the unlabeled data to reduce the effect of class imbalance. Extensive experiments show that SED consistently outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods on different datasets with significant margins. For example, it surpasses the supervised counterpart by more than 10 mAP when using 5% and 10% labeled data on MS-COCO.

Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Ping Luo et al.

Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a principled and generic framework to model real world sequential decision making processes but yet remains unsolved, especially for high dimensional continuous space and unknown models. The main challenge lies in how to accurately obtain the belief state, which is the probability distribution over the unobservable environment states given historical information. Accurately calculating this belief state is a precondition for obtaining an optimal policy of POMDPs. Recent advances in deep learning techniques show great potential to learn good belief states. However, existing methods can only learn approximated distribution with limited flexibility. In this paper, we introduce the \textbf{F}l\textbf{O}w-based \textbf{R}ecurrent \textbf{BE}lief \textbf{S}tate model (FORBES), which incorporates normalizing flows into the variational inference to learn general continuous belief states for POMDPs. Furthermore, we show that the learned belief states can be plugged into downstream RL algorithms to improve performance. In experiments, we show that our methods successfully capture the complex belief states that enable multi-modal predictions as well as high quality reconstructions, and results on challenging visual-motor control tasks show that our method achieves superior performance and sample efficiency.

Runjian Chen, Yao Mu, Runsen Xu et al.

Unsupervised contrastive learning for indoor-scene point clouds has achieved great successes. However, unsupervised learning point clouds in outdoor scenes remains challenging because previous methods need to reconstruct the whole scene and capture partial views for the contrastive objective. This is infeasible in outdoor scenes with moving objects, obstacles, and sensors. In this paper, we propose CO^3, namely Cooperative Contrastive Learning and Contextual Shape Prediction, to learn 3D representation for outdoor-scene point clouds in an unsupervised manner. CO^3 has several merits compared to existing methods. (1) It utilizes LiDAR point clouds from vehicle-side and infrastructure-side to build views that differ enough but meanwhile maintain common semantic information for contrastive learning, which are more appropriate than views built by previous methods. (2) Alongside the contrastive objective, shape context prediction is proposed as pre-training goal and brings more task-relevant information for unsupervised 3D point cloud representation learning, which are beneficial when transferring the learned representation to downstream detection tasks. (3) As compared to previous methods, representation learned by CO^3 is able to be transferred to different outdoor scene dataset collected by different type of LiDAR sensors. (4) CO^3 improves current state-of-the-art methods on both Once and KITTI datasets by up to 2.58 mAP. We believe CO^3 will facilitate understanding LiDAR point clouds in outdoor scene.

Zhiqian Lan, Yuxuan Jiang, Yao Mu et al.

Motion prediction is crucial for autonomous vehicles to operate safely in complex traffic environments. Extracting effective spatiotemporal relationships among traffic elements is key to accurate forecasting. Inspired by the successful practice of pretrained large language models, this paper presents SEPT, a modeling framework that leverages self-supervised learning to develop powerful spatiotemporal understanding for complex traffic scenes. Specifically, our approach involves three masking-reconstruction modeling tasks on scene inputs including agents' trajectories and road network, pretraining the scene encoder to capture kinematics within trajectory, spatial structure of road network, and interactions among roads and agents. The pretrained encoder is then finetuned on the downstream forecasting task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEPT, without elaborate architectural design or manual feature engineering, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 1 and Argoverse 2 motion forecasting benchmarks, outperforming previous methods on all main metrics by a large margin.

Zeyu Gao, Yao Mu, Chen Chen et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving provides a feasible way to automatically maximize overall driving system performance by directly mapping the raw pixels from a front-facing camera to control signals. Recent advanced methods construct a latent world model to map the high dimensional observations into compact latent space. However, the latent states embedded by the world model proposed in previous works may contain a large amount of task-irrelevant information, resulting in low sampling efficiency and poor robustness to input perturbations. Meanwhile, the training data distribution is usually unbalanced, and the learned policy is challenging to cope with the corner cases during the driving process. To solve the above challenges, we present a SEMantic Masked recurrent world model (SEM2), which introduces a semantic filter to extract key driving-relevant features and make decisions via the filtered features, and is trained with a multi-source data sampler, which aggregates common data and multiple corner case data in a single batch, to balance the data distribution. Extensive experiments on CARLA show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of sample efficiency and robustness to input permutations.

Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao, Fei Ni et al.

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) poses a promising paradigm to learn useful behaviors in a task-agnostic environment without the guidance of extrinsic rewards to facilitate the fast adaptation of various downstream tasks. Previous works focused on the pre-training in a model-free manner while lacking the study of transition dynamics modeling that leaves a large space for the improvement of sample efficiency in downstream tasks. To this end, we propose an Efficient Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Framework with Multi-choice Dynamics model (EUCLID), which introduces a novel model-fused paradigm to jointly pre-train the dynamics model and unsupervised exploration policy in the pre-training phase, thus better leveraging the environmental samples and improving the downstream task sampling efficiency. However, constructing a generalizable model which captures the local dynamics under different behaviors remains a challenging problem. We introduce the multi-choice dynamics model that covers different local dynamics under different behaviors concurrently, which uses different heads to learn the state transition under different behaviors during unsupervised pre-training and selects the most appropriate head for prediction in the downstream task. Experimental results in the manipulation and locomotion domains demonstrate that EUCLID achieves state-of-the-art performance with high sample efficiency, basically solving the state-based URLB benchmark and reaching a mean normalized score of 104.0$\pm$1.2$\%$ in downstream tasks with 100k fine-tuning steps, which is equivalent to DDPG's performance at 2M interactive steps with 20x more data.

Yao Mu, Shunyu Yao, Mingyu Ding et al.

Embodied control requires agents to leverage multi-modal pre-training to quickly learn how to act in new environments, where video demonstrations contain visual and motion details needed for low-level perception and control, and language instructions support generalization with abstract, symbolic structures. While recent approaches apply contrastive learning to force alignment between the two modalities, we hypothesize better modeling their complementary differences can lead to more holistic representations for downstream adaption. To this end, we propose Emergent Communication for Embodied Control (EC^2), a novel scheme to pre-train video-language representations for few-shot embodied control. The key idea is to learn an unsupervised "language" of videos via emergent communication, which bridges the semantics of video details and structures of natural language. We learn embodied representations of video trajectories, emergent language, and natural language using a language model, which is then used to finetune a lightweight policy network for downstream control. Through extensive experiments in Metaworld and Franka Kitchen embodied benchmarks, EC^2 is shown to consistently outperform previous contrastive learning methods for both videos and texts as task inputs. Further ablations confirm the importance of the emergent language, which is beneficial for both video and language learning, and significantly superior to using pre-trained video captions. We also present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the emergent language and discuss future directions toward better understanding and leveraging emergent communication in embodied tasks.

Yao Mu, Yuzheng Zhuang, Fei Ni et al.

Adapting to the changes in transition dynamics is essential in robotic applications. By learning a conditional policy with a compact context, context-aware meta-reinforcement learning provides a flexible way to adjust behavior according to dynamics changes. However, in real-world applications, the agent may encounter complex dynamics changes. Multiple confounders can influence the transition dynamics, making it challenging to infer accurate context for decision-making. This paper addresses such a challenge by Decomposed Mutual INformation Optimization (DOMINO) for context learning, which explicitly learns a disentangled context to maximize the mutual information between the context and historical trajectories, while minimizing the state transition prediction error. Our theoretical analysis shows that DOMINO can overcome the underestimation of the mutual information caused by multi-confounded challenges via learning disentangled context and reduce the demand for the number of samples collected in various environments. Extensive experiments show that the context learned by DOMINO benefits both model-based and model-free reinforcement learning algorithms for dynamics generalization in terms of sample efficiency and performance in unseen environments.

Junjie Wang, Yao Mu, Dong Li et al.

The latent world model provides a promising way to learn policies in a compact latent space for tasks with high-dimensional observations, however, its generalization across diverse environments with unseen dynamics remains challenging. Although the recurrent structure utilized in current advances helps to capture local dynamics, modeling only state transitions without an explicit understanding of environmental context limits the generalization ability of the dynamics model. To address this issue, we propose a Prototypical Context-Aware Dynamics (ProtoCAD) model, which captures the local dynamics by time consistent latent context and enables dynamics generalization in high-dimensional control tasks. ProtoCAD extracts useful contextual information with the help of the prototypes clustered over batch and benefits model-based RL in two folds: 1) It utilizes a temporally consistent prototypical regularizer that encourages the prototype assignments produced for different time parts of the same latent trajectory to be temporally consistent instead of comparing the features; 2) A context representation is designed which combines both the projection embedding of latent states and aggregated prototypes and can significantly improve the dynamics generalization ability. Extensive experiments show that ProtoCAD surpasses existing methods in terms of dynamics generalization. Compared with the recurrent-based model RSSM, ProtoCAD delivers 13.2% and 26.7% better mean and median performance across all dynamics generalization tasks.

Zibin Dong, Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao et al.

Aligning agent behaviors with diverse human preferences remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL), owing to the inherent abstractness and mutability of human preferences. To address these issues, we propose AlignDiff, a novel framework that leverages RL from Human Feedback (RLHF) to quantify human preferences, covering abstractness, and utilizes them to guide diffusion planning for zero-shot behavior customizing, covering mutability. AlignDiff can accurately match user-customized behaviors and efficiently switch from one to another. To build the framework, we first establish the multi-perspective human feedback datasets, which contain comparisons for the attributes of diverse behaviors, and then train an attribute strength model to predict quantified relative strengths. After relabeling behavioral datasets with relative strengths, we proceed to train an attribute-conditioned diffusion model, which serves as a planner with the attribute strength model as a director for preference aligning at the inference phase. We evaluate AlignDiff on various locomotion tasks and demonstrate its superior performance on preference matching, switching, and covering compared to other baselines. Its capability of completing unseen downstream tasks under human instructions also showcases the promising potential for human-AI collaboration. More visualization videos are released on https://aligndiff.github.io/.

Yao Mu, Shoufa Chen, Mingyu Ding et al.

Transformer has achieved great successes in learning vision and language representation, which is general across various downstream tasks. In visual control, learning transferable state representation that can transfer between different control tasks is important to reduce the training sample size. However, porting Transformer to sample-efficient visual control remains a challenging and unsolved problem. To this end, we propose a novel Control Transformer (CtrlFormer), possessing many appealing benefits that prior arts do not have. Firstly, CtrlFormer jointly learns self-attention mechanisms between visual tokens and policy tokens among different control tasks, where multitask representation can be learned and transferred without catastrophic forgetting. Secondly, we carefully design a contrastive reinforcement learning paradigm to train CtrlFormer, enabling it to achieve high sample efficiency, which is important in control problems. For example, in the DMControl benchmark, unlike recent advanced methods that failed by producing a zero score in the "Cartpole" task after transfer learning with 100k samples, CtrlFormer can achieve a state-of-the-art score with only 100k samples while maintaining the performance of previous tasks. The code and models are released in our project homepage.

Xi Wang, Tianxing Chen, Qiaojun Yu et al.

Articulated object manipulation requires precise object interaction, where the object's axis must be carefully considered. Previous research employed interactive perception for manipulating articulated objects, but typically, open-loop approaches often suffer from overlooking the interaction dynamics. To address this limitation, we present a closed-loop pipeline integrating interactive perception with online axis estimation from segmented 3D point clouds. Our method leverages any interactive perception technique as a foundation for interactive perception, inducing slight object movement to generate point cloud frames of the evolving dynamic scene. These point clouds are then segmented using Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), after which the moving part of the object is masked for accurate motion online axis estimation, guiding subsequent robotic actions. Our approach significantly enhances the precision and efficiency of manipulation tasks involving articulated objects. Experiments in simulated environments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches, especially in tasks that demand precise axis-based control. Project Page: https://hytidel.github.io/video-tracking-for-axis-estimation/.

Yao Mu, Tianxing Chen, Zanxin Chen et al.

In the rapidly advancing field of robotics, dual-arm coordination and complex object manipulation are essential capabilities for developing advanced autonomous systems. However, the scarcity of diverse, high-quality demonstration data and real-world-aligned evaluation benchmarks severely limits such development. To address this, we introduce RoboTwin, a generative digital twin framework that uses 3D generative foundation models and large language models to produce diverse expert datasets and provide a real-world-aligned evaluation platform for dual-arm robotic tasks. Specifically, RoboTwin creates varied digital twins of objects from single 2D images, generating realistic and interactive scenarios. It also introduces a spatial relation-aware code generation framework that combines object annotations with large language models to break down tasks, determine spatial constraints, and generate precise robotic movement code. Our framework offers a comprehensive benchmark with both simulated and real-world data, enabling standardized evaluation and better alignment between simulated training and real-world performance. We validated our approach using the open-source COBOT Magic Robot platform. Policies pre-trained on RoboTwin-generated data and fine-tuned with limited real-world samples demonstrate significant potential for enhancing dual-arm robotic manipulation systems by improving success rates by over 70% for single-arm tasks and over 40% for dual-arm tasks compared to models trained solely on real-world data.

Junting Chen, Yao Mu, Qiaojun Yu et al.

Rapid progress in high-level task planning and code generation for open-world robot manipulation has been witnessed in Embodied AI. However, previous studies put much effort into general common sense reasoning and task planning capabilities of large-scale language or multi-modal models, relatively little effort on ensuring the deployability of generated code on real robots, and other fundamental components of autonomous robot systems including robot perception, motion planning, and control. To bridge this ``ideal-to-real'' gap, this paper presents \textbf{RobotScript}, a platform for 1) a deployable robot manipulation pipeline powered by code generation; and 2) a code generation benchmark for robot manipulation tasks in free-form natural language. The RobotScript platform addresses this gap by emphasizing the unified interface with both simulation and real robots, based on abstraction from the Robot Operating System (ROS), ensuring syntax compliance and simulation validation with Gazebo. We demonstrate the adaptability of our code generation framework across multiple robot embodiments, including the Franka and UR5 robot arms, and multiple grippers. Additionally, our benchmark assesses reasoning abilities for physical space and constraints, highlighting the differences between GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Gemini in handling complex physical interactions. Finally, we present a thorough evaluation on the whole system, exploring how each module in the pipeline: code generation, perception, motion planning, and even object geometric properties, impact the overall performance of the system.

Qiaojun Yu, Ce Hao, Junbo Wang et al.

Robotic manipulation in everyday scenarios, especially in unstructured environments, requires skills in pose-aware object manipulation (POM), which adapts robots' grasping and handling according to an object's 6D pose. Recognizing an object's position and orientation is crucial for effective manipulation. For example, if a mug is lying on its side, it's more effective to grasp it by the rim rather than the handle. Despite its importance, research in POM skills remains limited, because learning manipulation skills requires pose-varying simulation environments and datasets. This paper introduces ManiPose, a pioneering benchmark designed to advance the study of pose-varying manipulation tasks. ManiPose encompasses: 1) Simulation environments for POM feature tasks ranging from 6D pose-specific pick-and-place of single objects to cluttered scenes, further including interactions with articulated objects. 2) A comprehensive dataset featuring geometrically consistent and manipulation-oriented 6D pose labels for 2936 real-world scanned rigid objects and 100 articulated objects across 59 categories. 3) A baseline for POM, leveraging the inferencing abilities of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) to analyze the relationship between 6D pose and task-specific requirements, offers enhanced pose-aware grasp prediction and motion planning capabilities. Our benchmark demonstrates notable advancements in pose estimation, pose-aware manipulation, and real-robot skill transfer, setting new standards for POM research. We will open-source the ManiPose benchmark with the final version paper, inviting the community to engage with our resources, available at our website:https://sites.google.com/view/manipose.

Xinyi Chen, Yilun Chen, Yanwei Fu et al.

We introduce InternVLA-M1, a unified framework for spatial grounding and robot control that advances instruction-following robots toward scalable, general-purpose intelligence. Its core idea is spatially guided vision-language-action training, where spatial grounding serves as the critical link between instructions and robot actions. InternVLA-M1 employs a two-stage pipeline: (i) spatial grounding pre-training on over 2.3M spatial reasoning data to determine ``where to act'' by aligning instructions with visual, embodiment-agnostic positions, and (ii) spatially guided action post-training to decide ``how to act'' by generating embodiment-aware actions through plug-and-play spatial prompting. This spatially guided training recipe yields consistent gains: InternVLA-M1 outperforms its variant without spatial guidance by +14.6% on SimplerEnv Google Robot, +17% on WidowX, and +4.3% on LIBERO Franka, while demonstrating stronger spatial reasoning capability in box, point, and trace prediction. To further scale instruction following, we built a simulation engine to collect 244K generalizable pick-and-place episodes, enabling a 6.2% average improvement across 200 tasks and 3K+ objects. In real-world clustered pick-and-place, InternVLA-M1 improved by 7.3%, and with synthetic co-training, achieved +20.6% on unseen objects and novel configurations. Moreover, in long-horizon reasoning-intensive scenarios, it surpassed existing works by over 10%. These results highlight spatially guided training as a unifying principle for scalable and resilient generalist robots. Code and models are available at https://github.com/InternRobotics/InternVLA-M1.

Zhixuan Liang, Yao Mu, Hengbo Ma et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential for robotic trajectory planning. However, generating coherent trajectories from high-level instructions remains challenging, especially for long-range composition tasks requiring multiple sequential skills. We propose SkillDiffuser, an end-to-end hierarchical planning framework integrating interpretable skill learning with conditional diffusion planning to address this problem. At the higher level, the skill abstraction module learns discrete, human-understandable skill representations from visual observations and language instructions. These learned skill embeddings are then used to condition the diffusion model to generate customized latent trajectories aligned with the skills. This allows generating diverse state trajectories that adhere to the learnable skills. By integrating skill learning with conditional trajectory generation, SkillDiffuser produces coherent behavior following abstract instructions across diverse tasks. Experiments on multi-task robotic manipulation benchmarks like Meta-World and LOReL demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and human-interpretable skill representations from SkillDiffuser. More visualization results and information could be found on our website.

Pengying Wu, Yao Mu, Bingxian Wu et al.

In the realm of household robotics, the Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task empowers agents to adeptly traverse unfamiliar environments and locate objects from novel categories without prior explicit training. This paper introduces VoroNav, a novel semantic exploration framework that proposes the Reduced Voronoi Graph to extract exploratory paths and planning nodes from a semantic map constructed in real time. By harnessing topological and semantic information, VoroNav designs text-based descriptions of paths and images that are readily interpretable by a large language model (LLM). In particular, our approach presents a synergy of path and farsight descriptions to represent the environmental context, enabling LLM to apply commonsense reasoning to ascertain waypoints for navigation. Extensive evaluation on HM3D and HSSD validates VoroNav surpasses existing benchmarks in both success rate and exploration efficiency (absolute improvement: +2.8% Success and +3.7% SPL on HM3D, +2.6% Success and +3.8% SPL on HSSD). Additionally introduced metrics that evaluate obstacle avoidance proficiency and perceptual efficiency further corroborate the enhancements achieved by our method in ZSON planning. Project page: https://voro-nav.github.io

Yao Mu, Junting Chen, Qinglong Zhang et al.

Robotic behavior synthesis, the problem of understanding multimodal inputs and generating precise physical control for robots, is an important part of Embodied AI. Despite successes in applying multimodal large language models for high-level understanding, it remains challenging to translate these conceptual understandings into detailed robotic actions while achieving generalization across various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a tree-structured multimodal code generation framework for generalized robotic behavior synthesis, termed RoboCodeX. RoboCodeX decomposes high-level human instructions into multiple object-centric manipulation units consisting of physical preferences such as affordance and safety constraints, and applies code generation to introduce generalization ability across various robotics platforms. To further enhance the capability to map conceptual and perceptual understanding into control commands, a specialized multimodal reasoning dataset is collected for pre-training and an iterative self-updating methodology is introduced for supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboCodeX achieves state-of-the-art performance in both simulators and real robots on four different kinds of manipulation tasks and one navigation task.

Tianxing Chen, Yao Mu, Zhixuan Liang et al.

Recent advances in imitation learning for 3D robotic manipulation have shown promising results with diffusion-based policies. However, achieving human-level dexterity requires seamless integration of geometric precision and semantic understanding. We present G3Flow, a novel framework that constructs real-time semantic flow, a dynamic, object-centric 3D semantic representation by leveraging foundation models. Our approach uniquely combines 3D generative models for digital twin creation, vision foundation models for semantic feature extraction, and robust pose tracking for continuous semantic flow updates. This integration enables complete semantic understanding even under occlusions while eliminating manual annotation requirements. By incorporating semantic flow into diffusion policies, we demonstrate significant improvements in both terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization. Extensive experiments across five simulation tasks show that G3Flow consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to 68.3% and 50.1% average success rates on terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization tasks respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of G3Flow in enhancing real-time dynamic semantic feature understanding for robotic manipulation policies.

Zhiyuan Zhou, Heye Huang, Boqi Li et al.

Recent advancements in autonomous vehicles (AVs) use Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform well in normal driving scenarios. However, ensuring safety in dynamic, high-risk environments and managing safety-critical long-tail events remain significant challenges. To address these issues, we propose SafeDrive, a knowledge- and data-driven risk-sensitive decision-making framework to enhance AV safety and adaptability. The proposed framework introduces a modular system comprising: (1) a Risk Module for quantifying multi-factor coupled risks involving driver, vehicle, and road interactions; (2) a Memory Module for storing and retrieving typical scenarios to improve adaptability; (3) a LLM-powered Reasoning Module for context-aware safety decision-making; and (4) a Reflection Module for refining decisions through iterative learning. By integrating knowledge-driven insights with adaptive learning mechanisms, the framework ensures robust decision-making under uncertain conditions. Extensive evaluations on real-world traffic datasets, including highways (HighD), intersections (InD), and roundabouts (RounD), validate the framework's ability to enhance decision-making safety (achieving a 100% safety rate), replicate human-like driving behaviors (with decision alignment exceeding 85%), and adapt effectively to unpredictable scenarios. SafeDrive establishes a novel paradigm for integrating knowledge- and data-driven methods, highlighting significant potential to improve safety and adaptability of autonomous driving in high-risk traffic scenarios. Project Page: https://mezzi33.github.io/SafeDrive/

Ji Ma, Hongming Dai, Yao Mu et al.

Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) requires agents to autonomously locate and approach unseen objects in unfamiliar environments and has emerged as a particularly challenging task within the domain of Embodied AI. Existing datasets for developing ZSON algorithms lack consideration of dynamic obstacles, object attribute diversity, and scene texts, thus exhibiting noticeable discrepancies from real-world situations. To address these issues, we propose a Dataset for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Object Navigation in Dynamic Environments (DOZE) that comprises ten high-fidelity 3D scenes with over 18k tasks, aiming to mimic complex, dynamic real-world scenarios. Specifically, DOZE scenes feature multiple moving humanoid obstacles, a wide array of open-vocabulary objects, diverse distinct-attribute objects, and valuable textual hints. Besides, different from existing datasets that only provide collision checking between the agent and static obstacles, we enhance DOZE by integrating capabilities for detecting collisions between the agent and moving obstacles. This novel functionality enables the evaluation of the agents' collision avoidance abilities in dynamic environments. We test four representative ZSON methods on DOZE, revealing substantial room for improvement in existing approaches concerning navigation efficiency, safety, and object recognition accuracy. Our dataset can be found at https://DOZE-Dataset.github.io/.

Wenhao Wang, Kehe Ye, Xinyu Zhou et al.

Large-scale and diverse datasets are vital for training robust robotic manipulation policies, yet existing data collection methods struggle to balance scale, diversity, and quality. Simulation offers scalability but suffers from sim-to-real gaps, while teleoperation yields high-quality demonstrations with limited diversity and high labor cost. We introduce FieldGen, a field-guided data generation framework that enables scalable, diverse, and high-quality real-world data collection with minimal human supervision. FieldGen decomposes manipulation into two stages: a pre-manipulation phase, allowing trajectory diversity, and a fine manipulation phase requiring expert precision. Human demonstrations capture key contact and pose information, after which an attraction field automatically generates diverse trajectories converging to successful configurations. This decoupled design combines scalable trajectory diversity with precise supervision. Moreover, FieldGen-Reward augments generated data with reward annotations to further enhance policy learning. Experiments demonstrate that policies trained with FieldGen achieve higher success rates and improved stability compared to teleoperation-based baselines, while significantly reducing human effort in long-term real-world data collection. Webpage is available at https://fieldgen.github.io/.

Zhihao Zhu, Yifan Zheng, Siyu Pan et al.

The fragmentation between high-level task semantics and low-level geometric features remains a persistent challenge in robotic manipulation. While vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in generating affordance-aware visual representations, the lack of semantic grounding in canonical spaces and reliance on manual annotations severely limit their ability to capture dynamic semantic-affordance relationships. To address these, we propose Primitive-Aware Semantic Grounding (PASG), a closed-loop framework that introduces: (1) Automatic primitive extraction through geometric feature aggregation, enabling cross-category detection of keypoints and axes; (2) VLM-driven semantic anchoring that dynamically couples geometric primitives with functional affordances and task-relevant description; (3) A spatial-semantic reasoning benchmark and a fine-tuned VLM (Qwen2.5VL-PA). We demonstrate PASG's effectiveness in practical robotic manipulation tasks across diverse scenarios, achieving performance comparable to manual annotations. PASG achieves a finer-grained semantic-affordance understanding of objects, establishing a unified paradigm for bridging geometric primitives with task semantics in robotic manipulation.

Yuanyuan Wei, Yucheng Wu, Fuyang Qu et al.

Accurate molecular quantification is essential for advancing research and diagnostics in fields such as infectious diseases, cancer biology, and genetic disorders. Droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) has emerged as a gold standard for achieving absolute quantification. While computational ddPCR technologies have advanced significantly, achieving automatic interpretation and consistent adaptability across diverse operational environments remains a challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce the intelligent interpretable droplet digital PCR (I2ddPCR) assay, a comprehensive framework integrating front-end predictive models (for droplet segmentation and classification) with GPT-4o multimodal large language model (MLLM, for context-aware explanations and recommendations) to automate and enhance ddPCR image analysis. This approach surpasses the state-of-the-art models, affording 99.05% accuracy in processing complex ddPCR images containing over 300 droplets per image with varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). By combining specialized neural networks and large language models, the I2ddPCR assay offers a robust and adaptable solution for absolute molecular quantification, achieving a sensitivity capable of detecting low-abundance targets as low as 90.32 copies/μL. Furthermore, it improves model's transparency through detailed explanation and troubleshooting guidance, empowering users to make informed decisions. This innovative framework has the potential to benefit molecular diagnostics, disease research, and clinical applications, especially in resource-constrained settings.

Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Yao Mu et al.

Recently, diffusion model shines as a promising backbone for the sequence modeling paradigm in offline reinforcement learning(RL). However, these works mostly lack the generalization ability across tasks with reward or dynamics change. To tackle this challenge, in this paper we propose a task-oriented conditioned diffusion planner for offline meta-RL(MetaDiffuser), which considers the generalization problem as conditional trajectory generation task with contextual representation. The key is to learn a context conditioned diffusion model which can generate task-oriented trajectories for planning across diverse tasks. To enhance the dynamics consistency of the generated trajectories while encouraging trajectories to achieve high returns, we further design a dual-guided module in the sampling process of the diffusion model. The proposed framework enjoys the robustness to the quality of collected warm-start data from the testing task and the flexibility to incorporate with different task representation method. The experiment results on MuJoCo benchmarks show that MetaDiffuser outperforms other strong offline meta-RL baselines, demonstrating the outstanding conditional generation ability of diffusion architecture.

Yao Mu, Qinglong Zhang, Mengkang Hu et al.

Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments. In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning. (ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering. Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.

Zhecheng Yuan, Guozheng Ma, Yao Mu et al.

One of the key challenges in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is to learn policies that can generalize to unseen environments. Recently, data augmentation techniques aiming at enhancing data diversity have demonstrated proven performance in improving the generalization ability of learned policies. However, due to the sensitivity of RL training, naively applying data augmentation, which transforms each pixel in a task-agnostic manner, may suffer from instability and damage the sample efficiency, thus further exacerbating the generalization performance. At the heart of this phenomenon is the diverged action distribution and high-variance value estimation in the face of augmented images. To alleviate this issue, we propose Task-aware Lipschitz Data Augmentation (TLDA) for visual RL, which explicitly identifies the task-correlated pixels with large Lipschitz constants, and only augments the task-irrelevant pixels. To verify the effectiveness of TLDA, we conduct extensive experiments on DeepMind Control suite, CARLA and DeepMind Manipulation tasks, showing that TLDA improves both sample efficiency in training time and generalization in test time. It outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across the 3 different visual control benchmarks.

Baiyu Peng, Jingliang Duan, Jianyu Chen et al.

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in the real world. Adding chance constraints (or probabilistic constraints) is a suitable way to enhance RL safety under uncertainty. Existing chance-constrained RL methods like the penalty methods and the Lagrangian methods either exhibit periodic oscillations or learn an over-conservative or unsafe policy. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing a separated proportional-integral Lagrangian (SPIL) algorithm. We first review the constrained policy optimization process from a feedback control perspective, which regards the penalty weight as the control input and the safe probability as the control output. Based on this, the penalty method is formulated as a proportional controller, and the Lagrangian method is formulated as an integral controller. We then unify them and present a proportional-integral Lagrangian method to get both their merits, with an integral separation technique to limit the integral value in a reasonable range. To accelerate training, the gradient of safe probability is computed in a model-based manner. We demonstrate our method can reduce the oscillations and conservatism of RL policy in a car-following simulation. To prove its practicality, we also apply our method to a real-world mobile robot navigation task, where our robot successfully avoids a moving obstacle with highly uncertain or even aggressive behaviors.

Yuhang Zhang, Yao Mu, Yujie Yang et al.

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in developing high-level autonomous driving. However, for high-dimensional tasks, current RL methods suffer from low data efficiency and oscillation in the training process. This paper proposes an algorithm called Learn to drive with Virtual Memory (LVM) to overcome these problems. LVM compresses the high-dimensional information into compact latent states and learns a latent dynamic model to summarize the agent's experience. Various imagined latent trajectories are generated as virtual memory by the latent dynamic model. The policy is learned by propagating gradient through the learned latent model with the imagined latent trajectories and thus leads to high data efficiency. Furthermore, a double critic structure is designed to reduce the oscillation during the training process. The effectiveness of LVM is demonstrated by an image-input autonomous driving task, in which LVM outperforms the existing method in terms of data efficiency, learning stability, and control performance.