Guowei Zou

Guowei Zou, Haitao Wang, Beiwen Zhang et al.

Generative models have emerged as a major paradigm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but existing approaches require many iterative sampling steps. Recent few-step accelerations either distill a joint teacher into independent students or apply averaged velocities independently per agent, suggesting that few-step inference requires sacrificing inter-agent coordination. We show this trade-off is not necessary: single-pass multi-agent generation can preserve coordination when the velocity field is natively joint-coupled. We propose Coordinated few-step Flow (CoFlow), an architecture that combines Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) with Adaptive Coordination Gating. A finite-difference consistency surrogate further replaces memory-prohibitive Jacobian-vector product backpropagation through the averaged velocity field with two stop-gradient forward passes. Across 60 configurations spanning MPE, MA-MuJoCo, and SMAC, CoFlow matches or surpasses Gaussian / value-based, transformer, diffusion, and prior flow baselines on episodic return. Three independent coordination probes confirm that the gains flow through inter-agent coordination rather than per-agent capacity. A denoising-step sweep shows that single-pass inference suffices on every configuration. CoFlow reaches state-of-the-art coordination quality in 1-3 denoising steps under both centralized and decentralized execution. Project page: https://github.com/Guowei-Zou/coflow.

Zhiquan Chen, Haitao Wang, Guowei Zou et al.

Medical image segmentation remains challenging in low-data regimes, where scarce annotations often yield poor generalization and ambiguous boundaries with missing fine structures. Recent self-supervised pretraining has improved transferability, but it often exhibits a texture bias. In contrast, accurate segmentation is inherently geometry-aware and depends on both topological consistency and precise boundary preservation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework that couples structure-aware encoder pretraining with boundary-oriented decoding. In Stage-1, we aim to learn structure-aware representations for downstream segmentation in low-data regimes. To this end, we propose Mixed-Domain MeanFlow Pretraining, which aligns images and binary masks in a shared latent space through latent transport regression, where masks act as conditional structural guidance rather than prediction targets, making the pretraining task-agnostic. To further improve training stability under scarce supervision, we incorporate a lightweight Dispersive Loss to prevent representation collapse. In Stage-2, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder with a lightweight decoder that combines Direct Attentional Fusion for adaptive cross-scale gating and Frequency-Directional Dynamic Convolution for high-frequency boundary refinement under appearance variation. Experiments on ISIC-2016, Kvasir-SEG, and GlaS demonstrate consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods, with improved robustness in low-data settings and sharper boundary delineation.

Zhiquan Chen, Haitao Wang, Guowei Zou et al.

Accurate medical image segmentation is fundamental to precision medicine, yet robust delineation remains challenging under heterogeneous appearances, ambiguous boundaries, and large anatomical variability. Similar intensity and texture patterns between targets and surrounding tissues often lead to blurred activations and unreliable separation. We attribute these failures to representation collapse during encoding and insufficient fine grained multi scale decoding. To address these issues, we propose Med DisSeg, a dispersion driven medical image segmentation framework that jointly improves representation learning and anatomical delineation. Med DisSeg combines a lightweight Dispersive Loss with adaptive attention for fine grained structure segmentation. The Dispersive Loss enlarges inter sample margins by treating in batch hidden representations as negative pairs, producing well dispersed and boundary aware embeddings with negligible overhead. Based on these enhanced representations, the encoder strengthens structure sensitive responses, while the decoder performs adaptive multi scale calibration to preserve complementary local texture and global shape information. Extensive experiments on five datasets spanning three imaging modalities demonstrate consistent state of the art performance. Moreover, Med DisSeg achieves competitive results on multi organ CT segmentation, supporting its robustness and cross task applicability.

Guowei Zou, Haitao Wang, Hejun Wu et al.

The ability to learn multi-modal action distributions is indispensable for robotic manipulation policies to perform precise and robust control. Flow-based generative models have recently emerged as a promising solution to learning distributions of actions, offering one-step action generation and thus achieving much higher sampling efficiency compared to diffusion-based methods. However, existing flow-based policies suffer from representation collapse, the inability to distinguish similar visual representations, leading to failures in precise manipulation tasks. We propose DM1 (MeanFlow with Dispersive Regularization for One-Step Robotic Manipulation), a novel flow matching framework that integrates dispersive regularization into MeanFlow to prevent collapse while maintaining one-step efficiency. DM1 employs multiple dispersive regularization variants across different intermediate embedding layers, encouraging diverse representations across training batches without introducing additional network modules or specialized training procedures. Experiments on RoboMimic benchmarks show that DM1 achieves 20-40 times faster inference (0.07s vs. 2-3.5s) and improves success rates by 10-20 percentage points, with the Lift task reaching 99% success over 85% of the baseline. Real-robot deployment on a Franka Panda further validates that DM1 transfers effectively from simulation to the physical world. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage representation regularization to enable flow-based policies to achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation, establishing a simple yet powerful approach for efficient and robust manipulation.

Guowei Zou, Weibing Li, Hejun Wu et al.

Diffusion policies excel at robotic manipulation by naturally modeling multimodal action distributions in high-dimensional spaces. Nevertheless, diffusion policies suffer from diffusion representation collapse: semantically similar observations are mapped to indistinguishable features, ultimately impairing their ability to handle subtle but critical variations required for complex robotic manipulation. To address this problem, we propose D2PPO (Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss). D2PPO introduces dispersive loss regularization that combats representation collapse by treating all hidden representations within each batch as negative pairs. D2PPO compels the network to learn discriminative representations of similar observations, thereby enabling the policy to identify subtle yet crucial differences necessary for precise manipulation. In evaluation, we find that early-layer regularization benefits simple tasks, while late-layer regularization sharply enhances performance on complex manipulation tasks. On RoboMimic benchmarks, D2PPO achieves an average improvement of 22.7% in pre-training and 26.1% after fine-tuning, setting new SOTA results. In comparison with SOTA, results of real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda robot show the excitingly high success rate of our method. The superiority of our method is especially evident in complex tasks. Project page: https://guowei-zou.github.io/d2ppo/