Wenjun Wu

Xin Yu, Rongye Shi, Pu Feng et al. · cmu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved promising results in recent years. However, most existing reinforcement learning methods require a large amount of data for model training. In addition, data-efficient reinforcement learning requires the construction of strong inductive biases, which are ignored in the current MARL approaches. Inspired by the symmetry phenomenon in multi-agent systems, this paper proposes a framework for exploiting prior knowledge by integrating data augmentation and a well-designed consistency loss into the existing MARL methods. In addition, the proposed framework is model-agnostic and can be applied to most of the current MARL algorithms. Experimental tests on multiple challenging tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Moreover, the proposed framework is applied to a physical multi-robot testbed to show its superiority.

Yanghong Mei, Yirong Yang, Longteng Guo et al.

Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or off-street environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.

Li Wang, Changhao Zhang, Zengqi Xiu et al.

Despite recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), improving the reasoning ability of Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., $\leq$ 1.5B) remains challenging. A key obstacle lies in the complexity and variability of natural language: essentially equivalent problems often appear in diverse surface forms, often obscured by redundant or distracting details. This imposes a dual burden on SLMs: they must first extract the core problem from complex linguistic input, and then perform reasoning based on that understanding. The resulting vast and noisy problem space hinders optimization, particularly for models with limited capacity. To address this, we propose a new framework that decouples understanding from reasoning by mapping natural language problems into a canonical problem space-a semantically simplified yet expressive domain. This enables SLMs to focus on reasoning over standardized inputs, free from linguistic variability. Within this framework, we introduce DURIT (Decoupled Understanding from Reasoning via Iterative Training), a three-step algorithm that iteratively: (1) mapping natural language problems via reinforcement learning, (2) aligns reasoning trajectories through self-distillation, and (3) trains reasoning policies in the problem space. The mapper and reasoner are co-trained in an alternating loop throughout this process. Experiments show that DURIT substantially improves SLMs' performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Beyond improving reasoning capabilities, DURIT also improves the robustness of reasoning, validating decoupling understanding from reasoning as an effective strategy for strengthening SLMs.

Xuetao Lin, Tianhao Peng, Peihong Dai et al.

EEG-based emotion recognition plays an important role in developing adaptive brain-computer communication systems, yet faces two fundamental challenges in practical implementations: (1) effective integration of non-stationary spatial-temporal neural patterns, (2) robust adaptation to dynamic emotional intensity variations in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes SST-CL, a novel framework integrating spatial-temporal transformers with curriculum learning. Our method introduces two core components: a spatial encoder that models inter-channel relationships and a temporal encoder that captures multi-scale dependencies through windowed attention mechanisms, enabling simultaneous extraction of spatial correlations and temporal dynamics from EEG signals. Complementing this architecture, an intensity-aware curriculum learning strategy progressively guides training from high-intensity to low-intensity emotional states through dynamic sample scheduling based on a dual difficulty assessment. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across various emotional intensity levels, with ablation studies confirming the necessity of both architectural components and the curriculum learning mechanism.

Ming Meng, Qi Dong, Jiajie Li et al.

Virtual try-on technology has become increasingly important in the fashion and retail industries, enabling the generation of high-fidelity garment images that adapt seamlessly to target human models. While existing methods have achieved notable progress, they still face significant challenges in maintaining consistency across different poses. Specifically, geometric distortions lead to a lack of spatial consistency, mismatches in garment structure and texture across poses result in semantic inconsistency, and the loss or distortion of fine-grained details diminishes visual fidelity. To address these challenges, we propose HF-VTON, a novel framework that ensures high-fidelity virtual try-on performance across diverse poses. HF-VTON consists of three key modules: (1) the Appearance-Preserving Warp Alignment Module (APWAM), which aligns garments to human poses, addressing geometric deformations and ensuring spatial consistency; (2) the Semantic Representation and Comprehension Module (SRCM), which captures fine-grained garment attributes and multi-pose data to enhance semantic representation, maintaining structural, textural, and pattern consistency; and (3) the Multimodal Prior-Guided Appearance Generation Module (MPAGM), which integrates multimodal features and prior knowledge from pre-trained models to optimize appearance generation, ensuring both semantic and geometric consistency. Additionally, to overcome data limitations in existing benchmarks, we introduce the SAMP-VTONS dataset, featuring multi-pose pairs and rich textual annotations for a more comprehensive evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that HF-VTON outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both VITON-HD and SAMP-VTONS, excelling in visual fidelity, semantic consistency, and detail preservation.

Li Wang, Xin Yu, Xuxin Lv et al.

With the rapid advancement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and missile technologies, perimeter-defense game between attackers and defenders for the protection of critical regions have become increasingly complex and strategically significant across a wide range of domains. However, existing studies predominantly focus on small-scale, simplified two-dimensional scenarios, often overlooking realistic environmental perturbations, motion dynamics, and inherent heterogeneity--factors that pose substantial challenges to real-world applicability. To bridge this gap, we investigate large-scale heterogeneous perimeter-defense game in a three-dimensional setting, incorporating realistic elements such as motion dynamics and wind fields. We derive the Nash equilibrium strategies for both attackers and defenders, characterize the victory regions, and validate our theoretical findings through extensive simulations. To tackle large-scale heterogeneous control challenges in defense strategies, we propose an Embedded Mean-Field Actor-Critic (EMFAC) framework. EMFAC leverages representation learning to enable high-level action aggregation in a mean-field manner, supporting scalable coordination among defenders. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight agent-level attention mechanism based on reward representation, which selectively filters observations and mean-field information to enhance decision-making efficiency and accelerate convergence in large-scale tasks. Extensive simulations across varying scales demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of EMFAC, which outperforms established baselines in both convergence speed and overall performance. To further validate practicality, we test EMFAC in small-scale real-world experiments and conduct detailed analyses, offering deeper insights into the framework's effectiveness in complex scenarios.